“Only cultures that have encouraged exploration, made it possible, have been great. If the United States were to decide to leave space exploration to private enterprise, within a generation, we’d be eclipsed by other cultures, their standards of living would rise at our expense. The same is true of individuals. Read Faulkner, experience his quirky characters. I encourage it. But if you don’t learn how science affects your life, you’ll limit your potential. You won’t live life to its fullest.”
After a few moments, Marcus said, “H.G. Wells said that history is a race between education and catastrophe. Ask Dr. Bell if she thinks that education applies only to literary fiction.”
“Okay,” said Charlotte Crow. “I’ll ask her.”
“Praise Jesus,” said Marcus. “Shall we talk about astronomy?” Hearing no objection, he pointed to other equations on the chalkboard.
“What do these prove?”
“That implosion is compulsory,” said Betty Mae.
“Which means what?” said Marcus.
“If a neutron star becomes too heavy, gravity will overwhelm the nuclear force that had stabilized the star and the star will implode, collapse into a black hole.”
“You look at those numbers and weird Greek letters and see neutron stars?” said Charlotte Crow. “How do you do that?”
“I don’t actually see them,” said Betty Mae. “But I want to. I want to see a neutron star implode into a black hole.”
Marcus chuckled. “That’s unlikely,” he said. “It’s been less than a decade since we first observed a neutron star.”
“Who cares?” said Charlotte Crow. “Is the lesson over?”
“This science,” said Marcus, “validates Einstein’s theory of relativity. One last problem and we’ll call it a day.” He turned to Charlotte Crow, pointed to other equations. “What do these suggest?” he said.
She hesitated, stuttered.
“Remember,” said Marcus, “our discussion of the controversy among theoretical physicists as to whether a singularity can exist outside of a black hole.”
“I know,” said Betty Mae, “the equations imply that implosion can never form a naked singularity.”
“Unless,” Sarah interrupted, “The Creator wills otherwise.”
Marcus said, “If He—”
“She,” said Sarah.
“. . . created a naked singularity, then these equations couldn’t be solved.”
“If The Creator willed a naked singularity,” Sarah said, “She’d change the equations.”
“That’s circularity, not science,” said Marcus.
“Science is a relatively insignificant subset of reality,” said Sarah.
“Quite!” Marcus said. “We’ve come a long way from science bringing us close to God.” Erasing equations on the chalkboard, speaking with his back to his wife, he said, “Have you another contribution?”
“Bolëk’s spirit says that Charlotte Crow’s baby must be born in the River of Grass.”
Marcus turned, his pudgy jowls oscillating like a pulsar. “God Lord! That’s? That’s insane!”
“I warned you,” Sarah said, stepping so close to him that her breath fogged his glasses. “A white pastor, a negro church.”
“We have white congregants,” Charlotte Crow said.
“Will you do as your grandfather says?” said Sarah.
A month later, their car parked on an embankment of Highway 41 forty miles east of the Gulf Coast, Sarah and Betty Mae paddled a canoe, taking Charlotte Crow to ancestral pools enclosed within hardwood hammocks sheltering a sacred tree, an ancient gnarled buttonwood, its hollow filled with water so clear that one could easily envision, if she couldn’t actually see, a passage to the Underworld in the far reaches of its depths. Sarah and Betty Mae helped Charlotte Crow out of her clothes and rubbed her abdomen with catnip balm as she squatted in the water. Sarah blew whistles and shook ceremonial rattles. Betty Mae chanted and beat the childbirth drum.
It was raining when the baby’s head emerged. Sarah slipped two fingers behind his shoulders, turned him, and with the next contraction eased him out.
“A boy,” said Betty Mae.
“Enoch,” said Charlotte Crow, exhaling. “His name is Enoch.”
Enoch was the son of Cain. Genesis says Enoch lived 365 years.
Sarah clamped the umbilical cord, cut it, and moved away from her daughters. “The afterbirth is coming,” Sarah said to Betty Mae. “Don’t let Charlotte Crow touch the cord.”
But Betty Mae followed her momma. Enoch – his arms and legs moving out and back as if swimming – was still submerged. Reaching for the infant, Betty Mae was blinded by a burning aura of indigo. A powerful swirl of water sucked her beneath the surface; a chokehold throttled her windpipe. Her arms flailed; she swallowed swamp water trying to scream.
With one hand holding Enoch underwater, Sarah Betty Mae to the surface with the other.
The stranglehold on Betty Mae loosened and then was extinguished as Enoch’s little body stopped moving. A bruise the color of Enoch’s evil aura darkened around Betty Mae’s neck. She breathed deeply in the rain.
Sarah’s hands were bleeding. “A cursed birth,” she said.
When Charlotte Crow, debilitated, but moving by apparent force of will, stumbling over roots, reached them, she said, “What happened, Momma? Where’s Enoch? Where’s my baby?”
Sarah, turning to face Charlotte Crow, holding the corpse, said, “He was stillborn.”
Charlotte Crow collapsed; Betty Mae held her and Sarah and her daughters cried.
Sarah said, “Everything that is, is alive.”
Back home, still in shock from Enoch’s death and her own near-death, Betty Mae wore scarfs to hide the bruises on her neck. She was silent and afraid. But Charlotte Crow told her poppa that following an ancient Seminole custom, Sarah had murdered Enoch because his father was white.
“Did you see him alive?” Marcus said.
“No,” Charlotte Crow had to admit. “But I know he was born alive.”
Sarah asked for an inquest. The medical examiner, finding no fluid in the infant’s lungs, finding no bruises on the child or internal damage, ruled that the birth was stillborn, as Sarah had said. A flood of relief cleansed the poisoned fabric of their family life, transforming it into a quilt stitched with love and grace.
Convinced that a person who hadn’t experienced Enoch’s homicidal malice could never comprehend the necessity of his murder, that it had been committed in self-defense, Betty Mae never spoke to anyone about Enoch’s birth or death.
In the Pontiac, in the silent aftermath of the collision with the alligator, Betty Mae knew that she had to rouse herself, get out of the car, help Estella to safety. Instead, unwillingly she struggled with the implications of infinite destinies, thoughts that should but wouldn’t wait because infinite destinies were a magnetic force disrupting the trustworthiness of her moral compass.
In Reason and Morals, Betty Mae had asked if a belief in immortality could coexist with life’s quintessential ethical decisions, conscious choices about right and wrong, good and evil, and had concluded, indubitably, that the consequence of belief in conscious life after death is the infliction of evil on the living.
Her investigation of this unfortunate phenomenon considered how Freud’s theory of wish fulfillment spotlighted fallacies in life-after-death beliefs by showing how such beliefs, fostered by the same yearnings that gave rise to every myth and religion, had spawned a plethora of gods, causing the incalculable devastation of wars ostensibly waged to prove whose side god was on and how the motivations of kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers were delusions self-evident to all but the participating fanatics.
Critically examining the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, the European-American genocide of Native Americans, other pogroms, holocausts, and edicts to kill blasphemers and unbelievers, Reason and Morals showed that accepting the promise of life after death as a reward for behaving ethically during life had invariably, inevitab
ly, and ironically led to the exploitation of the believers, their subjugation to the will of a few elites, who’d protected their monopoly on power by perpetuating inequality in the distribution of wealth, thereby diminishing the quality of life for all but themselves.
When fantasy was, as a physicist might say, removed from the equation, experience revealed that the myth of consciousness transcending death was a defense mechanism preventing a full examination of life.
Reason revealed, contrary to Kant’s reasoning, that stripped of the sentimentality of faith, consciousness could expire before the body did but not the other way around.
Belief in immortality soothed grief, gave respite from fear of death but if it did anything else of a positive nature, there was no objective, verifiable proof of it. The choice of whether to believe in life after death was among the most profound decisions a person could make. Thus Betty Mae regretted having proven that to reach a just and ethical result, a decision relating to right and wrong or good and evil had to be made with a firm conviction that mortality was absolute. Socrates’ argument that one had to behave justly to protect the soul was based upon fallacy; the promise of life after death had become Orwellian newspeak. And so when Betty Mae had made the decision to quickly terminate the life of her grandson, it was without regard to the consequences to her own soul.
But since fleeing Karl’s trailer, Betty Mae had witnessed a hologram of infinite destinies at the singularity of a black hole. Infinite destinies made everything and anything possible. One person’s consciousness could subsume another’s. A person could become an inanimate object and vice versa. And death could be defied. Infinite destinies made experience and reason irrelevant, undermined the foundations of rationality, and defeated certainty about absolute mortality because absolute mortality required that the destinies of the dead were far from infinite— they were complete, though, paradoxically, those who believed in absolute mortality and those who believed in life after death agreed by epistemological necessity on one thing: death extinguishes free will.
If Dante were right, and Betty Mae did murder her grandson, then upon her death, Minos would consign her immortal soul to the ninth circle, the bottom of the well of hell, where she’d suffer for eternity, frozen up to her neck. But it never had and never would be said of Betty Mae that she was a coward. Even if she had an immortal soul, a possibility considering infinite destinies, that could be imperiled by her determination to end evil on earth, she could and would not be deterred.
And in an echo of this conviction, Bolëk called to her, “You are a daughter of undefeated people! Get out of the Car!” He helped Estella to safety on the shore near the marsh, breathed life into Wind. He inflated the boat and stowed provisions. Then he danced, shook rattles and chanted. Before departing, he bent over Betty Mae and blew White Bear into the top of her head where her fontanel had been, and she fell asleep in Estella’s arms.
Estella yelled, “Momma, Momma, the baby’s coming.”
Celestial light filtered through livid dark-gray and deep-purple storm clouds pelting the earth with biting rain. Betty Mae, drenched, rainwater battering her face, obscuring her vision, sat on an embankment not far from her totaled Pontiac. Wind howled. Betty Mae beamed a swamp torch at her wolf-dog and saw her shake water from her dripping coat, run along the shore and jump into the boat, inflated, bobbing in swells. Branches of nearby bald cypress were bent by swirling forty-mile-per-hour winds that presaged the hurricane bearing down on them.
Betty Mae said, “What happened?”
“We hit an alligator,” Estella said.
“I remember that,” said Betty Mae.
“Between the contractions you inflated the boat, moved the gear out of the car.”
“No,” said Betty Mae, “That was your great-grandpapa, Bolëk—”
“No. Momma, you had a dream.”
A dream? Was that all it had been? The supernova, the black hole, the hologram of infinite destinies at its singularity had been— just a dream? She reached into her pocket for a reality check and pulled out the aquamarine philosopher’s egg that had been hurled into the interstellar medium by the exploding supergiant red star 160,000 years ago.
Betty Mae said, “Did Karl drive by?”
With labored breath, Estella said, “I poured sugar in his gas tank.”
Betty Mae shined light between Estella’s legs. Her rectum was open, her perineum stretched, but there was no appearance of the baby’s head.
Propelled by ferocious winds raging at their backs and guided by the hurricane’s own ominous light, Betty Mae used her boxwood-beavertail paddles to keep the inflated boat close to the shore and steered it back toward Ochopee where a culvert – five to six feet in diameter, tunneled beneath Highway 41 to allow Everglades’ water to maintain its natural flow from north to south – would provide shelter. There Wind would dispatch rodents and other vermin, and Betty Mae would shoot any alligator or other menacing animal she couldn’t chase away. Then, after clearing debris from the culvert, she’d hang a lantern from an overhead handrail and safe from the hurricane in two feet of water, Estella would give birth to a son who would never breathe.
Estella, spent and in danger of hypothermia, would rest in the boat swaddled in warm clothes, grieving the death of her stillborn son with Betty Mae by her side. In the morning, all would be better than it had been before.
Sarah and Marcus, bringing Anthurium, holding hands, came to the hospital.
Estella proudly showed them her baby, a boy, a preemie, a prune, ugly as sin. “Meet your great-grandson, Andrew,” she said. “I named him for the hurricane.”
“An auspicious name,” Marcus said.
“Eagle is his power animal,” Sarah said.
“Like Dante’s,” said Betty Mae.
“Like whose?” said Estella.
“A great shaman,” said Sarah.
“A poet and a pilgrim,” said Betty Mae.
When they were alone, Sarah said to Betty Mae, “Thank The Creator there was no curse.”
“There was, Momma,” said Betty Mae, “there was.”
Sarah said, “If that were so . . .”
Listening to her momma in part but mostly not, Betty Mae recalled the hurricane sweeping away animals and uprooting trees along the Tamiami Trail while she, Estella, and Wind were safely ensconced in the culvert. When the baby came, Betty Mae was whelmed within his purple aura, blinded when the steel tube protecting them from the cyclonic winds burst into a spectrum of burning violet hues. From underwater where the newborn lay, a vortex sucked Betty Mae beneath the surface. The howls of her wolf-dog that began with the baby’s birth and the roar of the hurricane crescendoed until the sound resolved into the primal note struck by a first violinist to tune an orchestra preparing to play a concert under the stars. In the baby’s eyes – bluer than Gabe’s, greener than Estella’s – she saw a multitude of births, each imbued with a curse, some puissant, some impotent, some faint, some profound.
Each curse—a virtual duality of waves and particles, a vacuum fluctuation with a positive or negative charge—was paired with an anti-curse to combine as a rainbow of curvilinear design, like a coil of DNA unzipping from the embrace of its double helix. The curses and the anti-curses spinning apart, sped through galaxies past red and blue supergiant stars, white dwarf stars, stars of every color of temperature on the main sequence, and neutron stars, through nebulae of supernovae and the horizon of a black hole, piercing the infinite densities and defying the absence of time at the singularity, where Betty Mae could no longer see them until, scattered elsewhere in disparate locales of the universe, the curses and anti-curses reappeared, continuing their journeys through the cosmos, enriched with the possibilities of infinite destinies.
The water in the culvert was rising fast; soon it would flood. Betty Mae thought quickly. She would put Estella in the boat with Wind and tent the tarps over them. She would move the boat out of the culvert, securing one end to a cypress tree and the other to a rung l
ike the one from which the lantern hung.
From the maelstrom of creation, destruction, and infinite other possibilities imbuing her grandson resting underwater in the eye of a hurricane of his own, of her own volition she lifted him into the air, clamped and then cut the umbilical cord, wrapped him in a blanket, and opened his mouth to deliver his first breath.
“. . . and so,” Sarah said, “you had to know that the boy isn’t cursed.”
Betty Mae said, “The truth is, Momma, with good and evil, the difference can be ineffable.”
“What’s that mean?” said Sarah.
“Verum ipsum factum,” said Betty Mae. “It means that we may never know.”
Charlotte Crow
Charlotte Crow Abiaka – shaman, clinical psychologist, terminally ill – perched in the stern of her cedar-carved canoe. She squinted toward the horizon in the east to see through the glare of an already unrelenting sun— a nuclear furnace that would blaze for billions of years after the extinction of life on earth, a diurnal reminder of her fragile mortality. Vapors of swamp water rose from the marsh like steam from a geothermal pool. Her six-year-old great-nephew, Andrew Good-Eagle Godfrey – a face of stone, his body a statue – sat in the bow. Thirty, forty, and then fifty minutes slipped by as she rhythmically dipped the blade of her paddle into the water, drew it back, then crossed it over and pulled on the opposite side with synchronous precision.
They glided through sawgrass, passing pelicans and blue herons, swamp lilies, bald cypress, slash pines, a palette of orchids, and the lavender flowers of the carnivorous butterwort, the marsh awash with an abundance of turtles, alligators, swamp darters, tadpoles, and blue gills. Dragonflies and damselflies swarmed, butterflies fluttered, and orange-and-red striped arachnids threaded the hot-moist air.
Drops of sweat glistening on her forehead, scrolled down her cheeks as would tears shed by a child trying not to cry. Her gray braids adorned with nacre and hawk feathers were gone, an aftereffect of the chemotherapy, but she felt them brushing over her brown neck as if she’d never lost her hair. A scarf of cotton-patchwork cloth covered her bald head. The odor of insect repellant was revolting. But she tolerated it for the sake of the boy.
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