by Jeffrey Ford
“What are you doing?” says Emily and, even though she knows what he’s up to is dangerous, she finds it funny. Vincent reels backward, disoriented from the explosion of sweetness in his mouth.
“It’s awesome,” he says in between chewing. She doesn’t notice that he’s now been brought to his knees by the overwhelming delight of the white morsel, because she’s got the rose-colored bubble up to her eye and is staring inside, where she sees something swirling.
What moves like a miniature twister within the see-through boundary is the tale once told but never heard. She puts the bubble to her ear but can hear nothing. She shakes it, taps it, and rolls it from palm to palm. Then she simply drops it, and I watch as it falls, slowly spinning in its descent. After an eternity, it explodes against the rock floor and scatters a fiery revelation, like a bird of flame careening off the walls within the grotto of my skull.
Once there was a yin/yang wizard who could perform great feats of magic that drew power from the balanced forces of the universe. Sometimes he worked for the sake of good, and when that enjoyed too great an abundance he worked for the sake of evil. Swinging like a pendulum between the two extreme states of human nature, he spent his years conjuring and casting spells. His methods were always the same. A pilgrim would travel into the desert and visit his cave. That individual would ask him for assistance with some life problem. If the wizard decided to help, he would turn to a great fire that roared at the back of his cave and call for his ghostly assistants to bring him his blowpipe. Turning whatever spell he was performing into a story, he’d speak it, so that none could hear it, into the glass blowing tube. In this way, when he was finished, the tale of his magic would be trapped within a rose-colored bubble. He didn’t use ordinary glass, but instead his raw material was enchanted ice, crystal tears, and diamonds fallen from the moon. The pilgrim requesting the service would then have a spell cast in his or her behalf, which would invariably work, and would then be given the glass bubble containing the story of their spell, which they were expected to hide in a safe place. If anything happened to that globe, the spell would be broken. One thing remained: the pilgrim never knew if the spell cast by the wizard was one of a positive or a negative nature.
It was to this very wizard that Cassius Cake came in the twenty-third year of his life. He had traveled the world, searching for release from the pain of an unrequited love. From Paris to Istanbul to Peking, he wandered the globe trying to outrun his sorrow, searching for some method or elixir by which he might again be able to feel anything but heartache. Nothing was able to help him. It seems that he had fallen in love with a young woman, Judith Sochell, who worked in the kitchen on his father’s estate. She was stunningly beautiful, and he greatly admired the delicate little creatures and people she was capable of creating from folded paper. Judith also had feelings for Cassius, but when Cake’s mother noticed him spending an inordinate amount of time in the kitchen and eventually caught wind of the budding romance, she bribed the girl to tell her son she did not love him. Judith dared not lose her job as too many at home depended upon her salary, so she complied with the old woman’s plot. On the very day she gave Cassius the brush-off, he fled home and booked passage on a steamship.
Two years of anguish had passed for Cake before he finally came to the cave in the desert. He begged for a cure, and the yin/ yang wizard called for his blowpipe. The spell he cast upon Cake was one in which he took the young man’s soul and placed it within a many-colored bird of beautiful plumage. Instantly Cake’s heartache dissipated, and for the first time in years he had a clear thought. In fact, his thinking processes were many times clearer now, for with the relief of his anguish also had come the negation of his emotions. He left the cave with the remarkable bird in a cage and the rose-colored bubble in his pocket. On his travels back home, he encountered the world with an exponentially increased intellect, and it was then that he learned that war was coming and that drugs for use on the battlefield would be worth a fortune.
He invented Orixadoll, a mixture of the narcotics he himself had tried during the two-year-long international quest to ease his pain. His special elixir helped many soldiers to survive, even though they returned home horribly addicted. Black market sales of Orixadoll on the streets of his own country far outweighed what he made from sales to the military. He became wealthier than his father ever was. And, because it was a time period when the respectable needed to be married in order to move in certain circles of high society, he wed. Letti Mane had not always been a self-interested windbag, but after the ceremony it soon became clear to her that Cassius didn’t love her; she was merely a decoration. He obviously cared more for the strange bird that was the sole inhabitant of an enormous aviary he’d had constructed on the grounds of his estate.
Cake was not happy, but happiness did not enter his mind. What filled his thoughts were new methods for increasing profit. This he did exceptionally well until one day when he found in the top drawer of an old dresser amid useless keys, stopped watches, and foreign coins a tiny, delicate woman made of yellow paper. The sight of this nudged his memory. It wasn’t an emotion he felt, just a dull, distant pain, like the ghost of a toothache from a long-missing false tooth. Later that month, he tracked down Judith Sochell, who was by this time married with one child, Emily’s mother. He sent her large sums of cash in exchange for origami. He would send a note as to what he wanted, she would create it, send it back, and he would forward her a stack of money.
Emily blinks and the bird of fire she momentarily believes she sees emanating from the broken glass bubble vanishes into mist. She rubs her eyes and takes a few deep breaths. Then she helps Vincent to his feet and leads him out of the dragon’s mouth grotto and back into the tunnel. As she makes her way carefully up the dark passageway, with him stumbling behind, he tells her he’s had a dream. “What was it?” she asks. “About my old man,” he says. “In it we leave him and he goes away on a journey. He’s gone a long time and he travels far until one day he comes to a cave in the desert where there’s a man with a long mustache, smoking a cigarette, surrounded by ghosts. By the light of a huge fire that burns wildly at the back of the cave, this weird guy does magic on my father. With his bare hand he reaches through my old man’s chest and removes a large turquoise feather from inside. ‘Now there’s room for your heart to grow back,’ he says. My old man smiles and…that’s all I remember.”
At the end of the underground tunnel, they crawl back up into the mausoleum, and as they do, Emily notices that the marble lid to Cake’s tomb has cracked and fallen in two large pieces onto the floor. The friends lean over and peer inside. Emily says, “Like your dream,” and points into the remains at a feather, trapped by the rib cage where the heart is meant to be.
Vincent, who has begun to come around, nods and says, “Look here,” and reaches into the tomb to grab a skeletal wrist. As he lifts it, the bony fingers open, and a handful of creatures and figures made of folded paper fall out—a bird, a woman, a mushroom, a boy with a bow and arrow, a ship, and finally one of a yin/yang wizard, who spoke this story into glass.
PRESENT FROM THE PAST
After my mother finally quit drinking, she entered a brief epoch of peace in her life. Gone were the paranoia, the accusations, the belittlements, the bitter rage of judgment, the look of fear. For years, nearly every day a lost weekend, she had been possessed by the dark amber ghast of gag-sweet Taylor Cream Sherry. Living with her back then had been like living with a vampire whose bite drained but never conferred immortality. What eventually brought about her unexpected exorcism, I can now only guess, but when she re-surfaced she was quiet and ready to laugh. She was watching and listening.
One day in the spring of her new self, she asked my father to go out and buy lumber for her. She told him that she wanted to do some woodcarving. My father purchased the planks she requested along with chisels, rasps, and other necessary tools. She set about her task, working on the picnic table beneath the cherry tree in the backyard,
laying the boards flat and gouging away at them. She told me over the phone that her subject was the stations of the cross—Christ’s fourteen-part journey to his own crucifixion. Each of the planks would bear a different tableau.
“When I’m done with the boards, I’m going to have your father make them into a bus shelter with a little bench attached inside,” she said.
“Yeah, what are you going to do with it?” I asked.
“Sit in it and drink my coffee in the evening,” she said.
A couple months later, Lynn and the boys and I drove to Long Island to visit my parents. From the kitchen window, I saw the bus shelter assembled beneath the giant oak at the back of their property. That evening, while Lynn took our two boys for a walk down to the school field, I sat with my mother inside her creation. We smoked and drank coffee, while my father sat facing us in a lawn chair.
The small structure had a slanted roof and its walls were painted the same redwood stain as the picnic table. The hand-carved figures that lined the inside were more crudely rendered than I had imagined they would be. They had no faces, just ovals, dug out and painted white. However, the folds of Christ’s flowing garments were more detailed, as was the grain of the cross and the Roman soldiers’ armor and helmets. In painting them, she’d used very bright colors—sunflower yellow, neon lime, sky blue, hot pink—that appeared resilient against the redwood stain. I had to duck slightly to fit inside and the bench held room for only two.
“You should have been here the day we finished putting that thing together,” said my father. “A couple of weekends ago. It was a bright day but the wind was really blowing strong. Branches all over the streets. I finished nailing the roof and stood it upright in the middle of the yard. We stepped back to look at it, and then this enormous gust of wind came, got under it, and lifted it about ten feet in the air.” My father’s eyes were wide behind his glasses and he was looking up, his hands apart in front of him, one holding his coffee, one a cigarette. “Remarkable,” he said.
My mother was staring off toward the clothesline, smiling. “It landed here,” she said.
“Right on this spot,” said my father, “so I anchored it down.”
“That’s some wind,” I said.
“It was a strong wind,” said my father. He took a drag of his cigarette. “This thing’s nothing but a big wooden envelope and the wood is pretty thin. But it still surprised the shit out of me when it happened.”
Throughout the remainder of that spring, my mother wrote a film script on the old manual typewriter in the room she called her office at the back of the house. In June she bought a used Super 8 camera and some film. By early July she had learned how to use it and began casting parts for her production.
“It’s about a bullfighter,” she said. She had called to see if I wanted a part. “It’s got a Spanish theme.”
I was unable to make the trip the Saturday of the filming, and didn’t get to see the finished movie until September. We all sat in the dining room on the braided rug, facing a movie screen my father had found at the curb somewhere on trash day. Of course, since it was made with a Super 8 camera, the film was silent, but it was in color. For background music, my mother had taken the opening from the Motown hit, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and somehow created, on audio tape, an endless loop of just those jaunty, slightly sinister, first bars.
The film was shot right outside the back door of my parents’ house on Pine Avenue, and nearly every family member had a part. Along the wall where the garage extends was hung a hand-painted backdrop of hundreds of faces in a stadium. Onto the screen walked Don Diego, portrayed by my portly brother, Jim, wearing a matador’s costume and a penciled-in twirl of a mustache. Each of my two brothers-in-law played one end of the bull. After the great Don Diego slew the bull in the arena, he went to the fortuneteller—my grandmother Nan—first glimpsed through a blazing fire. She wore a mantilla, a black shawl, and laughed wickedly. As she read the tarot deck for the bullfighter, she turned over the Death card. This caused Don Diego to lose all self-confidence, and a rival matador—my sister Dolores, dressed as a man—vied for the top spot in the arena and for the heart of Don Diego’s mistress—my sister-in-law Patty—who clenched a long-stemmed red rose in her teeth. My brother’s oldest boy, Jimmy, played a wooden religious statue that came to life; my father did a turn on the dance floor, wearing a gaucho hat with dingle balls; the bull returned from the dead for one last duel in the sun; and Don Diego regained his courage in the melodramatically protracted moment of his death just before the film ran out and slapped the projector.
That evening, on the very barbecue grill that had held the fortuneteller’s veiling flame, my father created his meal of many meats—sausage, steak, chicken, hamburgers, and hot dogs. We all stood, sons and daughters, spouses and grandchildren, in the cool September twilight, holding grease-smeared paper plates, assiduously chewing. Nan sat in her lawn swing, smiling, a glass of wine tipped in her wobbly grip, threatening to spill. My mother played “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” on her guitar, and my father told stories about Kentucky, when he was stationed at Fort Knox, especially of the crumbling mansion that held a library.
“The place had four floors of bookshelves,” he said. “And the librarians were these two ancient sisters, both blind, who knew where every book was.”
One night after dinner, in November of the same year, my mother had a difficult time catching her breath. She admitted to my father that she had been experiencing this for a month or two but never quite as bad. He immediately called an ambulance. At the hospital, they found a tumor like a tree branch growing up out of her lungs and blocking her breathing passage. After the operation to remove the tumor, my mother began a series of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The prognosis, however, was terminal. The initial treatments almost killed her, but she managed to survive them and fight back for almost two years.
Throughout this new struggle, I visited as often as I could, but I lived quite a distance away in South Jersey. Lynn and I both worked and we had the two young boys to look after. So I called my mother on the phone every day. Sometimes she didn’t have much to say while other days we would talk for more than an hour. She often told me how tired she was and, occasionally, she told me her dreams, unsettling scenarios like the one in which she walked with the spirits up Pine Avenue in the rain. For a brief period of a couple months, she fumed with anger, trying to pick fights with me over everything from politics to parenting. I managed to “keep it light,” as my father would say.
During one of her frequent stays in the hospital, well after it was obvious she wasn’t going to make it, I went to visit her. It was the middle of the day, and the ward she was on was particularly quiet. She was sleeping when I arrived, so I sat down in the chair next to her bed. For a long time I stared out the window, watching the breeze in the leaves of the birches that lined the bay road. At the end of the road was a dock where I had once kept my clam boat years earlier before I had gone to college. I remembered the flats across the bay, the red-winged blackbirds, the cattails, and the sun on the water.
When I turned back toward her, she was awake and quietly watching me. She looked very frail. I took her hand, and she told me, “I’m not afraid of dying.” We sat in silence for quite a while. Then I told her everything I could remember about my days clamming on the Great South Bay. She lay there smiling as I recounted those days, all of it except the one about the Trentino boy who had drowned scratch-raking in the flats. He had stepped in a sink hole, gotten stuck, and then the weather had turned bad, the tide had come up. My mother knew that story, though, and when I fell silent I wondered if, by my omission, I had caused her to remember it.
“You remind me of your father, right now,” she said.
There were instances when I found myself detached from my emotions and could almost marvel at the complexity of her disease, as if the slow-motion process of her organic demise might offer some elusive truth. This variety of cancer, o
at cell it was called, usually spreads from the lungs to the brain. The brain feels nothing, though. Once in the brain the cancer does its work painlessly, methodically shutting down the controls of the vital organs. What amazed me was that it was slow to scramble my mother’s reasoning. She was conscious and could talk, with some effort, for quite a while.
My father brought her home and set up her hospital bed in the back room that had once been her office where she wrote her stories and painted. She was weak and slept much of the time, but when she was awake, propped up on pillows and accepting visitors, she exuded a strange contentment. She laughed a good deal and her silence drew honesty from those who came to see her. But the aperture of clarity through which she communicated closed a little more each week, until finally she could only take your hand and mumble a phrase that made no sense. One afternoon while I was there she told my sister, Mary, “You’re bad at bad,” and a while later told us both, “Chihuahua Mexicawa.”