Fabian’s memory of a digestive track ties itself in knots, flight or fight, his bowels should empty now, but again like the crying, nothing of any substance occurs. He hugs his cherubic knees and in the little boy voice produced by his new set of vocal chords, whimpers “no, no” into the turf. Eventually he finds the courage to raise his head.
“Ghahhh!” he shrieks. The wrinkled muscular talons of a huge bird of prey, the claws black and gleaming, seize and puncture the turf just four feet from where he crouches. Above the legs, overlapping finely wrought feathers of grey rise over the proud barrel chest and lighten to white. The golden eyes of an immense eagle stare at him from below the glowering feathered brow, ear tufts sweep up alert and urgent. Fabian starts crawling backwards on his knees. He realizes the body and back legs of the creature are those of a tawny lion, tensed to spring, the fur terrible in its unearthly softness. Formidable eagle wings rise out of its back. The great hooked beak opens.
“Come little tadpole. Stop the cringing and moaning. Don’t you remember me? Perhaps last time we were together I was in another form. Just wait, how is this?”
Fabian rolls off his knees and onto his feet, his eyes glued to the creature while his body begins to pivot.
“To run would be futile. I am very large, and you are small, now watch. This may be preferable?” A sound of transference and shifting, and in a flurry of wings and fur the creature, Fabian realizes was a living mythical griffin, transforms into a monstrous wolf. Grey and long limbed, he fixes Fabian with the same golden kohl-rimmed eyes. One paw comes forward gingerly, the next one follows.
“The noble and loyal wolf,” it intones in that same voice. “The ancestor, the genetic font, the very source of ‘Man’s Best Friend’. You mustn’t fear me. Now reach out and feel my fur. How soft I am. Surely, once you owned a dog?”
“I’m no fool,” squeaks Fabian. “My mother read me ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Wolves are crafty and not to be trusted.” He persists in his incremental backwards creep.
The wolf sighs and sits down on his haunches. With his back leg he reaches forward and scratches vigorously at a deific flea biting his neck. When he finishes he stares at Fabian again. “You won’t give me a pat then?”
Fabian shakes his head and keeps backing up.
“Please stop with the creeping, I will have to go into stalk mode, and you won’t like that. Now, try to take a few deep breaths, to calm yourself, and I’ll show you the other option. There really are only three.” Again, the shredding merging sound, and the wolf melds from his horizontal form upward, the grey fur weaves this way and that until it falls in quiet folds. The feet are those of a man, although calloused and horny as a desert nomad’s. Fabian lets his eyes rise through the folds of drapery, like storm clouds. Big, knotted, but blessedly human hands. Up and up, Fabian’s eyes skim across a hominid face and then take in the mighty and stereotypical angelic wings. He exhales a deep sigh and sits down. He’d always longed to meet an angel. The face was long and serious; multiple wrinkles v’ing out from between the beetling grey brows. A furrow runs from inside each squinting golden eye to the corners of the somber slit of a mouth. A hooked nose. Grey hair sprouts away from a receding widow’s peak. Fabian stares perplexed. The angel’s demeanor reminds him of some hard bitten, smoky detective.
The filmy draperies and the wings are the only angelic accoutrements.
Bune plucks at his diaphanous robes. “Standard issue,” he says. “You are unknotting. That is good. We should introduce ourselves, I am called Bune, and your name on this, your seventh rupture of the Membrane, would be?”
“F-F-F-Fabian, Fabian Ma-Macomber.”
“I see. Oh, I forgot, there is one other option.” The angel snaps his fingers. Three heads instead of one now sprout from the shoulders of the being. Fabian screams and somersaults backwards. “You see, I can keep them all facing forward at once, or if you prefer, we can rotate them.” He clicks his fingers together again, and with each snap the three heads swivel around the neck, taking their turn at front and centre. “Griffon” croaks the eagle beak, “dog” growls the wolf head, “or man” intones the angel. “Forgive me, this is counterproductive. You have tightened up again. We’ll go back to option three. But all of these are necessary, and we will use them at one time or another.” Bune snaps his fingers and the two extra heads sink down into his shoulders and disappear. He waits for Fabian to calm down.
“How are you enjoying your new body?” he asks conversationally. “You are not very proportionate, a little heavy on the top and the bottom, and very young in the middle.” He takes a few steps back and squats down on his heels, his wings rustle and twitch behind him, and Fabian notices that the tips crimp out sideways where they meet the turf. He wonders if this is uncomfortable.
“It’s not an issue,” says Bune. “No feeling in the feathers. But they get very twitchy with the lack of exercise in Corridor Nine.” From his sitting position he stretches them up and out, leaning into their furthest possible extension. “The only way to get a decent stretch in here is when I’m sitting down!”
Shock and awe at the sight of Bune rubberize Fabian’s jaw muscles so that he can only mumble scraps of words.
“Wh-wh-where?” he finally manages to get out, and Bune responds as though he had spoken a whole paragraph.
“Do you not remember anything from your previous ruptures?” Fabian nods.
“When I came in, I remembered hitting the light wall, and I knew someone was waiting to catch me. That’s what I remembered. Has it always been you? I mean waiting every time I try to escape the system? You’ve always been the jailor?” he asks with bitterness.
“Well, no. They assigned me on your fifth rupture. I’m the last resort for acute truancies. But we will proceed more easily if you think of me as your guide, a teacher perhaps. This opportunity lies before us, you see, for the next little while, a holding period if you like, to work through various issues that hampered the success of your previous assignment. Your refusal to actually complete assignments is of course central to your lack of progress.” “What . . . ?”
“Assignments, lifetimes. You’ve given up so many now. This was your seventh rupture, your seventh suicide. It has become a habit for you, to ‘bail out’. One more truancy and you’ll no longer have access to Corridor Nine, or to me, of course.”
“What happens then?”
“Mulch. You’ll be sent down to the mulch pit, where the bonds of self are dissolved, and you become just building material, raw ingredients for other beings. Do you understand therefore, the urgency?” Fabian nods dumbly. His selfhood is more precious to him than anything. He does not want to be “mulched,” yet even now so dumb and tongue-tied, in the back of his mind he starts to plot a map. “You are here,” it begins, “in Corridor Nine.”
“So this isn’t all there is,” asks Fabian. “If this is the ‘ninth’ corridor, there are others. Why does it look this way, what shape is it, where does it stop?” He gestures towards the dark that recedes off to his right. Where the hell, he wants to ask, are they hiding Valhalla?
“A donut, it is shaped like a donut, and it encircles all the lifetimes of man. The dark extends for a long way radially all around, until you hit the outer wall. I know you are thinking of an exit, but I must guide you there. It would be impossible to find it on your own. Why don’t we walk now? Exercise aids relaxation, and you must become accustomed to me so that we can begin.” He rises from his squatting position and Fabian follows suit. His head comes to the angel’s hip bone and he remembers walking as a boy, holding his father’s index finger in his chubby child hand. But you can’t hold the hand of a supernatural being, besides he doesn’t want to. Resentment burns quietly in his chest. My jailor he thinks, my “guide.” Fabian stifles a snort.
Bune looks down at him from under his protuberant eyebrows. “Ready?” One gnarled foot steps forward, making the cloud gown fold and billow. Fabian extends his own pink paddle-shaped foot, his dimpled leg, an
d they start. The angel tries to walk at a slow and measured pace, and Fabian trots three steps to his one. Every fourth step he must add a quick skip to catch up. Bune walks closest to the receding dark, with Fabian on the inside near the Membrane. He turns his head and studies the shifting opalescence as they pass.
“What, why, I mean, how come Corridor Nine is like this? No food, or, or, or anything,” he finishes lamely.
“Corridor Nine facilitates the conditions most conducive to learning for distractible beings such as yourself. There is no need for food here. In your lifetimes you depended on a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in order to obtain energy and comfort. They fitted you with that myriad looped and twisting bacteria-containing tube, a messy and difficult technology.”
Fabian nods his head in agreement. “It was a real pain in the ass,” he says. “So, we need no sustenance then, of any kind, when we are here?”
“Sustenance and comfort are still necessary but here they are provided by the ground, this turf we walk on.” He stops and has Fabian kneel down. “Breathe in the ether of the turf,” instructs Bune. Fabian inhales. He smells fir trees, crushed juniper berries, waves of seed-laden grasses shooshing in the wind, bread and apples baking. A smile creeps over his sullen face and deep satisfaction fills him. Sated and replete, for a moment he almost trusts.
“Sleeping on the turf is of course extremely restorative. You’ve never had as good a sleep as you can get on Corridor Nine. It compensates somewhat for the limitations while I’m here.”
Fabian wonders where Bune normally lives, if angels or demons, he wasn’t sure which, require mundane things like homes. “So, if this place, Corridor Nine, is a holding place . . . ” a sudden thought strikes him, “Corridor Nine is purgatory?”
“I suppose, but that sounds so negative.” They were walking again, Fabian doing his four steps and a skip. “Why don’t you just extend your stride a bit?” asks the angel. “Small consistent leaps, there we go. You’ll find you won’t get tired.”
“How will walking relax me if I can never get tired. I miss getting tired,” grumbles Fabian. “What’s the point? And where do you live when you aren’t here keeping track of me? I want to see the big picture, the Master Plan,” he says flailing his baby arms, “Why are we always kept in the dark? We have to concoct those kooky religious theories on our own. Finally, I’d like some definitive answers!” He scowls up at Bune and stomps his small foot into the ground.
“How quickly you accommodate, tadpole,” murmurs Bune. “From terror and awe to entitled indignation in under an hour. Well yes, you will get some answers, that will be one of the lessons, ‘Overview of the Master Plan,’ but first we’ll do one full rotation around Corridor Nine.” “But you said Corridor Nine encircles all the lifetimes of man. We’ll never get all the way around!”
“The lifetimes of man are not so extensive, there are only so many essential variations. In Earth terms, circumnavigation is equal to a one-hour moderate jog, I think. Come on, we are already a quarter of the way around.”
Peter had gotten the twins up and left for work, and Bernie was working as fast as she could to beat the clock through her haze of exhaustion.
“You can’t expect me to eat that,” says Moira, staring at her fried egg. “You know eggs make me want to throw up.”
“For the love of God, we’re almost late! Please just for once, eat an egg!” Moira’s face crumples into an expression of abject nausea. “Okay then. Louis can you eat an extra egg?”
Louis stares at the computer screen mesmerized by The Magic School Bus. He opens his mouth to reply but before he can form a word the impetus dissipates. “Lou! Do you want Moira’s egg!” shouts Bernie. No response. She puts the fried egg in front of him and he picks up the fork and begins to shovel it into his mouth.
“So, what can I feed you then Mo?”
“Cheese toast?” asks Moira. Bernie looks at her watch. She has exactly eight minutes to get them all out the door, and the twins haven’t brushed their teeth or combed their hair and are sockless.
“Okay, cheese toast, but turn off the computer and go get brushed and find some socks. Louis, turn off the computer!”
“Just a sec,” mumbles Louis through the egg. Bernie walks to the computer and reaches behind to hit the power button, as she does so, both twins grab her wrist and try to pull her hand away. “It’s almost done, Mom, just wait, just wait. Today is a media day. You promised!”
“We have eight minutes to get into the car, does anyone understand that?” She is pulling their grappling and suctioning little fingers off her arm, but Louis starts pushing her backwards while Moira twists her wrist.
“Does anyone understand the issue of fucking time!” yells Bernie. She sweeps away Moira’s rolling chair with her leg and gets Louis’ interfering arm out of commission by bending it behind his back. With her other hand she can just reach the power button on the back of the screen with the tip of one finger, and The Magic School Bus fizzles to black. She wants to kill them. She wants to swear a blue streak for the remaining seven minutes. The twins stare at her with bruised and offended looks on their faces. She takes a deep breath and manages to tamp down the rage.
“Teeth, hair, socks. Go now!” and the twins shuffle down the hallway. “Lola, are you organized, did you pack your books for the science project?” Lola sits dressed, fed and ready in an armchair reading Tin Tin, her red-blonde curly hair artistically styled with a diagonal French braid. She looks up. “Yup,” she says, “I packed it.” Bernie turns on the broiler and sticks a piece of bread under the flame. She walks to the foot of the stair and yells, “Eben, are you ready? Have you eaten anything?” A faint mumble and the scraping of chair legs suggest he hears her. She goes back to the broiler, pulls the now toasted piece of bread out of the oven, scatters grated cheese on the untoasted side and slides it back under the heat. She looks at her watch. They have four minutes. Eben’s heavy flat-footed tread comes down the stairs and he stands behind her shoulder now, looking over her head at the remains of the food scattered on the counter.
“Where’s my breakfast?” he says. “You fed everyone else didn’t you. Why can’t you feed me breakfast anymore?”
“Christ, Eben! You’re fourteen years old. I told you that you and Lola were in charge of your own breakfasts; I even reminded you when I woke you up. It’s not so much to ask, is it?”
“Yeah, Eben,” says Lola piously from her armchair. “I made an omelet and I even squeezed my own orange juice. If you weren’t always playing video games — ”
“Be quiet Lola, this is none of your business,” says Bernie
“Yeah, shut your prissy little . . . ”
“Eben!” In the nick of time she pulls the slightly scorched cheese bread out of the oven, cuts it in two and puts it into a plastic bowl. She grabs her go-cup go cup of coffee from the counter.
“Well get something to eat quick, grab a power bar and an apple or something. Coats! Shoes! Backpacks! Let’s go! In the car now!” she bellows down the hall in the direction of the twins. “Where’s that damn dog? Angus come!” Angus trots cheerfully down the hall and when Bernie gets out the leash, he starts leaping around kids putting on their shoes and finding backpacks. Finally, she manages to hook him by the collar and clips on the leash, the tangle of them squeezes out the door and she pulls it shut behind them. Standing beside their oxidizing beige minivan she feels in her purse and realizes the keys aren’t there.
“God damn! God damn! I locked the keys in the house!” Bernie drops Angus’s leash and her go-cup on the lawn. She kicks the minivan in the tire, thumps her fist on the hood, and peers through the dirty window to see if the keys are still in the ignition. Turning around she shouts at her baffled children, “I just want to get in the fucking, goddamned, car!” and then she begins to cry.
They all stare at her; the low morning sun flames their hair into aureoles of light. Angus gyrates anxiously between the children’s legs. They look sideways at each other. Lola
and Eben step forward and each put an arm around Bernie as she continues to cry.
“Her dad dying from the heart attack, don’t you think?” she hears Eben say to Lola over her head, which makes her cry even harder.
“I thought people were sad, when someone dies, but Mom just seems angry all the time,” says Lola. They are both rubbing her back. She must pull herself together.
“Go get the spare key from the garage,” says Eben to the twins. Blearily she sees the two seven-year-olds run to the padlocked swing gate, but before Moira can manipulate all the numbers of the combination lock Louis has scaled it and jumped down on the other side. He sprints through the backyard, darts into the garage and comes out again waving the key. He vanishes into the back of the house but in a minute appears at the front door smiling and shaking Bernie’s big bunch of keys in the air.
“Here you go, Mom,” Louis says running up to her “it’s okay. Here are your keys. You can get in the fucking car now.”
Bernie sits staring blankly through the windscreen. The children have disappeared into the school fifteen minutes late. How much damage she wonders, had she done? How many times did she yell and swear, and here they were parenting her more than the other way around. What a wreck of a morning. Through her sleep-deprived fog she tells herself that every parent messes up now and then, the vast majority of the time she has been rational and decent. They have a solid foundation, don’t they? Little outbursts like this in the long run will create no lasting injury? The important part is to apologize and normalize the whole “incident” for them, and she had done that.
Whole she thinks, her overriding intention for all her children, and remembers the first day after Eben’s birth. Baby Eben’s head and back lie cradled on her thighs, his newborn feet reposing on her puffy post-delivery stomach. She and Peter and this new pivot point rest in the sunny quiet of their home. The hospital discharged her only an hour and a half ago. Apparently, she is capable of keeping a baby alive or they surely would not have let her take him home. “I just want to get him out whole,” she says to Peter, who is leaning over the back of the Ikea armchair watching the baby.
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