by Dara Horn
The girl baby who had beckoned to him before now crawled in front of him. She glanced at the turtles around her, then selected a book from one of their backs. While Daniel watched, the boy baby helped her lift it and open it. Daniel stared at them as they flipped through the pages many times, burbling to each other as they turned the book’s heavy leaves. At first Daniel thought they were just enjoying the movement of the pages, treating the book as a toy. But soon it became clear that they were looking for something specific. As they paged through the book together, Daniel hoisted himself up on his elbows and tried to see what it was. But he couldn’t. At last the babies, working in tandem as if they had done this many times, turned the heavy book around to face him. He squinted at the block letters and saw that the book was in Yiddish. As he jolted backward, nearly slipping off his elbows onto the turtle-tiled floor, he caught himself and looked again. It wasn’t just a Yiddish book, but one that he had read before, many years ago, with Rosalie. He gasped. The book was opened to a story by one of the old master storytellers, the “Tale of the Seven Beggars.” An inked baby’s handprint marked the corner of the page.
Daniel stared at the page in wonder, then looked up at the babies, glancing at both of their quiet pairs of eyes. How did they choose this book? He looked again at the page, at the careful baby handprint in the corner, and silently began to read. He was about to turn the page when the boy baby grabbed his finger, wrapping his tiny clutched fist around Daniel’s thumb in a relentless baby grip. Soon the other baby had grabbed another of his fingers until he was trapped, blood choked from his hand by ten tiny baby fingers. He looked at their desperate faces, their toothless mouths puckered into almost-wails as the girl baby cried aloud. He glanced around the room again, at all the hundreds of turtles with their hundreds of books, and wondered if it was a dungeon. To be surrounded by books without knowing how to read!
“Do you want me to read to you?” he asked.
Smiles spread across the babies’ faces. Slowly the two tiny fists released Daniel’s fingers. The two babies moved around the book and raised it up together, propping it just below Daniel’s face, and Daniel took it. Then they stared at him, their loose thumbs lodged between their toothless gums as they hovered over the book with him, drooling on the ancient page. Again Daniel noticed something familiar about them, an odd presence in the room. But the babies were silent, and waited.
Daniel looked at the text. The dark patches of ink slowly resolved themselves into letters before his eyes, like paint taking form on canvas. “‘I will now recount for you,’” he read aloud, “‘how people once were happy.’”
It was a story with many stories inside it, he remembered now, stories within stories within stories. He and Rosalie had struggled with it, gathering the pieces together into a story that made sense. But the book the babies held before him was blotted and stained, with pages torn and missing, and the light was dim. Daniel read what he could make out and tried to remember what he couldn’t, reciting the story from the bottom of the abyss.
Two children were once abandoned in a forest, a boy and a girl. A blind beggar found them there, but he could not lead them out of the forest. Instead he gave them bread. The children took it, and the beggar offered them a blessing: that they should be like him.
The next day, the lost children were hungry again. A deaf beggar offered them bread. He, too, left them with the blessing that they should be like him. By the seventh day, seven beggars had found and fed them: first the blind one and the deaf one, then a stutterer, then one with a crooked neck, then a hunchback, then one with missing hands, and finally one with a missing leg. Each of them offered the same blessing: that the children should be like them.
Years passed, and the children grew up. They found a path to a town and joined a roving group of beggars, “going over the houses,” begging for alms. When the children were finally old enough, the beggars decided that they should marry each other, and the children agreed. So the beggars prepared the wedding hall in the forest.
“‘They dug out a large grave,’” Daniel read aloud, “‘and covered it up with wood and earth, and they all went down inside it and made a wedding there for the two children.’”
Suddenly he stopped reading, afraid. He glanced up from the book and saw the girl baby staring at him. He looked at her face, at her large eyes and the light glowing on her trembling lower lip, and then at the baby boy’s thin smile, and suddenly he knew who they were. “I can’t read anymore,” he stammered, and started to cry.
The babies watched him for a moment, and he was ashamed in front of them. Then the boy made a baby fist, and thumped it against the book until Daniel bit his lips, drew in his breath, and continued reading.
During the seven days of the wedding feast, the children wanted to see the seven beggars who had helped them when they were abandoned in the forest. On each day, they asked for one of the beggars, and on each day, one of the beggars appeared. Each one denied his handicap and told them many stories, giving the children the wedding gift of becoming just like him.
On the first day, the blind beggar arrived at the wedding feast.
“Do you think I’m blind?” the blind beggar asked. “I’m not blind at all. It’s just that all of eternity is nothing more than an eyeblink to me.” He then told them that he was once in a shipwreck, and he and the other survivors decided to tell each other stories—the oldest experiences they could think of, their very earliest memories of life. The others told many stories, but the blind beggar told the oldest one of all: he remembered nothingness, the place before stories. And he gave the children his gift: a long life.
On the second day, the deaf beggar arrived.
“Do you think I’m deaf?” the deaf beggar asked. “I’m not deaf at all. It’s just that it isn’t worth hearing a whole world full of people complaining about what they lack.” He told the story of a wealthy country where people believed they were living “the good life.” The country had a garden of riches, of so many sights and smells and sounds that the people in the country literally lost their senses, spoiled by everything they had already seen and heard and smelled and tasted and touched, until the deaf beggar taught them how to use their senses again. And he gave the children his gift: a good life.
On the third day, the stuttering beggar arrived.
“Do you think I’m a stutterer?” the stuttering beggar asked. “I’m not a stutterer at all. It’s just that all the words of the world that aren’t praise will never be worth saying.” He told a story of a mountain with a spring emerging from a rock, and the heart of the world—because everything, the stutterer said, has a heart, including the world—which stood thousands of miles away. The heart and the spring yearned for each other constantly, but the spring could only live through the time the heart gave it, the days the heart created by singing songs and riddles to the spring. And the beggar gave the children his gift: songs and riddles, to use to create time.
And so the crippled beggars continued appearing at the wedding, one after another each day. Nothing was what it seemed. Each of their defects turned out to be strange gifts, talents for finding the true world behind the imaginary one and for picking up the pieces of a broken world. Daniel found himself reading faster, both eager and afraid to find out what the seventh beggar with the missing leg would bring them. He approached the last page, where the handless beggar gave the newlyweds his gift, and his mangled leg shook as he held his breath.
And there the story stopped.
Daniel stared at the book, flipping pages, puzzled, but there was nothing more to read. A large white space filled the page below the story’s last line. “What about the seventh beggar—the one with the missing leg?” he asked. He didn’t remember the missing ending from when he had read it with Rosalie. Had the author died before finishing the story?
Daniel looked up. The babies were smiling at him, their eyes flitting between his face and the story’s last page. The boy started laughing, little baby laughs that bubbled
in the room’s warm air. Suddenly Daniel remembered Tim, and Rob and Wayne and the carnage outside, and his role in causing it—how he had trusted, believed, imagined, instead of seeing what was right before his eyes. Oh, to be a baby, unborn, immortal! He looked at the babies and wanted nothing more than to stay in this little room forever, reading to the babies and holding their hands. His torn leg twisted behind him, a wrenching pain that yanked at his gut, but he swallowed his moans. He didn’t want to upset them.
“What happens to the beggar with the missing leg?” Daniel asked again.
But the babies were laughing so much now that he wondered if it was some sort of joke, if they had hidden the last page of the story somewhere among the little scrolls on the floor. For a moment he thought he was right. The boy, squirming with laughter, had crawled away, reaching with his baby hand for a little scroll on the back of one of the turtles on the floor. There it is, Daniel thought. The last page. The baby crawled back toward Daniel, clutching the scroll in his tight baby fist. The girl baby watched, drooling with glee, as the boy baby offered Daniel the scroll.
Daniel rolled it open, ready to find out what would happen to the beggar with the missing leg. But the parchment was blank except for three spare words, in English this time:
GO FIND OUT.
Go find out?
Daniel was still staring at the paper, bewildered, when he heard a noise behind him. He twisted around to see the door creaking open, pushed by turtles with their helmetlike shells. As he turned again to face the babies, he saw that they had started to move away from him, waving their little baby hands in farewell. The floor rumbled beneath him, the turtles shifting under his missing leg. And then the army of turtles started to carry him away. The babies had turned away from him completely now, the backs of their fuzzy baby heads bobbing up and down, laughing with each other as if he weren’t there.
“Please, don’t make me go!” Daniel begged them, but they refused to turn around. The turtles carried him through the door and then back into the tunnel, up toward the cave. When Daniel saw where they were taking him, he became so frightened that he started to scream.
This time a scream came out, the loudest scream Daniel had ever screamed. He screamed and screamed and screamed, and didn’t stop screaming until he saw a light appear, and saw the turtles who had been carrying him changing, slowly, into the helmets of soldiers, soldiers who were now hoisting him up and bringing him out into daylight, fumbling at his neck, reading his tags, calling his name.
“Corporal Ziskind?”
10
BEN HAD once written a category’s worth of questions for American Genius about pregnancy, to which the answers were all zygotes and blastulas and fetuses with gills. The people at the studio had joked that he knew more about pregnancy than most women did. But now that Sara was pregnant, he found it almost impossible to understand. What did it mean? he wondered as he looked around at strangers on the train and then the subway. Was it a person? A thing? An idea? Part of his sister? Or something else? And, strangest of all, wasn’t this how he and Sara had first met?
Twins. When they were little, he hadn’t ever imagined having a life apart from Sara—or, more precisely, he had never imagined Sara having a life apart from him. Until their father died, they had done everything together. They sat next to each other in school every day, divided their homework between them, spoke Yiddish to each other when they didn’t want the other kids to listen, spent their afternoons together building elaborate cities out of blocks. Ben, slightly older and slightly smarter, was always the supervisor of their games together; Sara simply listened to his orders and obeyed. Every year the school tried to separate them by putting them in different classes, and every year their parents would call the school to ensure that they wouldn’t be apart. But when the tumor in their father’s lung metastasized two months before fifth grade began, no one remembered to make the call. And after their father died, something stranger happened: Sara got taller while Ben got shorter; Sara’s body grew loose and lithe and beautiful while Ben’s fought to grow in the confines of plastic and steel. And then Sara’s imagination unfurled in paint on canvas, reaching out into the world and bringing it in, while Ben’s curled tighter and tighter into his coiled brain. Now they were thirty years old, and Sara was having a baby, while Ben was still waiting for a future that might never arrive.
Looking at the pregnant woman sitting across from him on the train (why, all of a sudden, did everyone seem to be pregnant?), Ben remembered something horrible. When his father died, his mother told him and his sister that their father had a new job. Instead of being an engineer like he was before, their mother said, he was now drafted into service as an engineer of souls, interceding in the next world on the twins’ behalf. He would build their futures the way he used to build roads. Ben was eleven years old, and the idea enraged him so much that he went out to the backyard with one of his father’s cigarette lighters and attempted to ignite an entire can of aerosol bathroom cleaner into horrifying balls of flame.
It was a test. If his father really was building his future, Ben thought, then he would like to see how his father planned to intercede once Ben decided to burn the house down. He lit the first flame gently, pushing down on the aerosol can’s button and igniting a small fireball in the air, a wavy warp of flame that quickly died. The second time the fireball was bigger, and his father still failed to stop him. The third time, Ben created a long, fantastic arc of flame that flared up in terrifying splendor along the wooden back wall of the house. When the bridge of fire slid closer to the wall, Ben held back, frightened, and released the button. The flame died, and Ben breathed with relief. But then he wondered if he had held back because his father had made him, if his father had slyly engineered his soul. No, he couldn’t have. Ben was sure of it. Ben had a scientific brain, and he would prove it. Soon Ben was bearing down with full force on the button, spraying a massive fountain of chemicals right onto the house’s wooden wall. If his father cared so much about his future, surely he would stop Ben from torching the house. And if he didn’t, well, who needed the house? Ben thought angrily. It was the only house in the neighborhood that had just one floor, and the only reason they lived there was because of his father’s leg. Maybe now that his father was dead, Ben’s eleven-year-old brain imagined, they could move to a better house: a vertical house with dozens of floors and hundreds of steps, with rooms high up in towers and deep down in dungeons, with steep, spiraling, never-ending staircases leading up into the sky and down into the center of the earth. “Let’s see you stop me!” Ben screamed to the skies, spraying more of the bathroom cleaner into the air. “If you’re really there, you’ll stop me! Let’s see you stop me!” He bore down hard on the button, dousing the wall of the house. The smell was intoxicating. He breathed in, feeling giddy. It was the lightest he had felt since his father died. He watched the fan of watery chemicals as it came out of the can, waiting until he couldn’t wait anymore, and then stopped waiting. “You didn’t stop me!” he screamed, triumphant. He was about to ignite the spray when his mother grabbed him from behind, wrestling him to the ground and forcing his father’s last cigarette lighter out of his hand.
But now he thought of Sara and remembered all the biology facts he had gathered for American Genius, the DNA and RNA and chromosomal combinations and matching nucleotides and Punnett squares and probabilities and genetic futures. Tiny secret blueprints of their parents were floating within her, growing, invisible and silent, engineering a soul. Every pregnant woman was carrying the dead.
BEN HAD RETURNED to his parents’ house over the weekend to search for anything he could find about the painting. If he was caught, he at least wanted to have a case, something to lighten his crime. The results were not pleasant. He had barely entered his parents’ old studio when he saw the murals Sara had made as a child and felt an enormous hole open up in the floor at his feet. After spending all day flipping through piles of papers—his mother’s illustration contracts for
future works, his own spinal X-rays, records from a military hospital about his father’s amputation, incoherent stories in Sara’s grade-school handwriting, deeds to his parents’ burial plots—all he had found about the painting was a one-page letter from an art dealership. The letter was so disturbing that he called Sara immediately, but when he tried to describe it on the phone, he choked. Just come by tonight and I’ll show you, he had told her, and hung up before she could respond.
Afraid to look at it again, he had folded the letter over and over until it became a little arc of hard paper like a block of pulp (pieces of paper, Ben knew, can never be folded in half more than seven times; facts can only be reduced so much), and then stuffed it into his pocket, twiddling it with his fingers again and again on the train and the subway and then as he walked along his darkened street and at last stepped down from the sidewalk into the little sunken entryway to his building. How would he tell Sara? Just thinking about it made him sweat, though the summer night was cool. As he stepped down toward his building, he removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. Without his glasses, the world looked to Ben like an abstract painting, all vague shapes and blotches of color. He sometimes wondered which was real—the world with his glasses, or the one without them. Lately he had stopped believing in what he saw. In the days before she left him, he had too often looked at Nina with his glasses off, imagining that she was smiling.
Now, in the blur before his eyes, he could just make out the shape of a person—a woman, when he squinted—in a dark red skirt (or pants? no, a skirt) and a shirt that left her arms bare, standing between the garbage cans and the door, waiting for someone. The blur of her was lovely in the evening shadows, and for a moment he wished she were waiting for him. Better to ignore her, though. He hated acknowledging the presence of strangers. He put his glasses back on and was reaching for his key, admiring her out of the corner of his eye, when he suddenly recognized her. It was Erica Frank.