by Carole Maso
If this is the Afterlife toward which she was being pulled with such magnetic force now, if this was the place that had been beckoning them from the very start, she wanted no part of it. Still—the colors . . . I wish you could see them, she says to the child. She was fearful of the void, fearful of the drop—and then suddenly not. If there is only meaninglessness in the end, only nothing, only welter and waste, she did not feel it.
She looks far, far up to the surface and sees now two shimmering ghost towers of glass, casting their twin shadows before her.
When she called for the child now, the child did not answer. She had dissolved back into the mother’s body entirely, and with this, the mother felt more able to face whatever it was that was here. She stood at the beginning of time, at the bottom of the canyon. She was being bombarded by light. She had not died here. She had lived. She had lived to give birth to the child. She would stay alive for her, and for all the children. She could see it plainly now. Never had anything been more clear. She had been summoned here to the depths of the earth, to the origins of the world, the beginning of time, to receive this message. She felt at the infinite mercy of the universe. Somehow she had survived. She closed her eyes.
17
the red book of existence
THE MOTHER WAS entranced with the large red book with the gold embossed letters, and from it she read out loud to the child thinking it might help soothe them a little. Though on the surface the child did not seem in need of consoling, the mother understood what the child could not.
In the book it said everything in the world is made of quarks and electrons, which are energy waves, and that these energy waves have the potential for taking form. Solidity, or the appearance of solidity, is something conjured by stimulating our sense receptors and ultimately creating an image in our brains. Each of these swarming particles exists as a shimmering wave of potential until its wave function collapses (caused by such things as the presence or absence of the observer). The mother leaves the room to get a biscuit and the child is desolate. She did not move her head too much so as not to disrupt the receptors, for what would she have if she does not have the mother?
It’s mind out there in front of them—it’s the only place the world and its images and tactile impressions exist.
That night the child thinks that when the mother leaves the room, she is no longer anywhere at all. That she no longer exists on any level. She can’t keep her mother together. And the child too has no color or form unless particles interact with the mother’s consciousness.
Tell me we exist, the child begs.
Silly girl, the mother whispers.
You should have never opened that red book with the gold letters, the child says.
Though it could be worse, the child supposes. Of course it could always be worse.
She will live with the appearance of solidity if that is what is asked of her—perhaps she was already doing it. They move through the enigmatic world to the hardware store at the edge of town. Everything is exactly the same as it was before they opened that book. She shall believe it: the five packages of nails on the shelf, the tower of light bulbs, the man behind the counter who holds a metal box with a lock on it, the Spiegelpalais in the distance, and in the middle distance three GinGin girls with backpacks, and now too close for comfort, the Toothless Wonder.
She didn’t want to be stranded on the wrong side of the stability divide.
The mother smiled.
That night, the mother sits at the end of the child’s bed. She looks at the child: shiny, bright, emitting photons, packets of electricity and magnetism. She concentrates hard not to take her eyes or mind from her, even for an instant.
IF ALL THE people in the world perished and the world returned to welter and waste, what she would remember best from that desolate place would be the Super Stop & Shop.
She liked going to the grocery store. She liked to go alone, but she liked it equally when the child accompanied her. The child loved making lists, and they would reach for things and put them in the carriage and check them off the list. It made the mother feel efficient and a definite part of things to do this. She liked driving the carriage, standing behind it, moving purposely down the numbered rows.
She also liked looking at what all the other people were doing. She liked the way they picked up certain cans or bottles or boxes, the way they would turn and examine them for dates and codes and counts. Sometimes she heard someone in an aisle talking on a telephone to someone at home to ask if there was enough butter. She thought it was a lovely question. And that there was someone there to answer it.
A riot of color and sound and sensation would stream toward and past the mother in waves. The abundance always made her a little woozy. If there were any one place in the world where the lecture about the starving children would make sense, it would be here, she thought. She had never seen so much of everything. In the vaporous frozen food aisle, she pauses.
No matter; today she is part of the give-and-take. The cat food quandaries, the price of coffee, the coupons, the two-for-ones. The child is not afraid of the disembodied voice checking them out, and so she will not be either. It is part of the human exchange now, and the computer voice intones in a friendly way, it is true. She notices that the Other Mothers enjoy turning the pages of the tabloids and so she tries it, and it’s not bad. It passes the time, while the voice checks them out, and she waits.
ALL THE MEN were vanishing in and out of wars. After a brief experiment in which women were allowed to go to war, the decision was reversed, and it was legislated that women, who were responsible for the replication of the species, would go to war no more. And so an edict was issued, and it came to pass in the Valley that for every man there were two hundred to three hundred women. Surely, the child reasoned, there would have to be a stepmother somewhere for her friend, the Girl with the Matted Hair.
THE SOLDIERS TALK about riding the wake. Some of the soldiers are crouching in a foxhole. Women are throwing bandages and roses at their heads. Some of the soldiers’ heads, they notice, are flowering red with abandon. Some of the soldiers are asleep. Others are turning to vapor.
INFANTS ARE CONVINCED that when their mothers leave the room that they have disappeared and are gone forever, never to return. When the child looked at her mother, she did everything in her power now to keep the outline of her solid and continuous and separate. She could not have her turning into birdsong or branches, or pond or stars or smoke.
What kept the mother together on many days was the child’s application of the Flicker Fusion Theory. In the theory her mother came together beautifully, fixed for extended moments at a time. She flickered, but then held, and then later would begin to flicker again. But it was the holding that was miraculous, and it brought both child and mother great joy. It was sad that the child had to resort to this, the Flickering Mother thought, and the child too thought that sometimes, and yet for those moments when the mother was held in perfect stability and presence, it felt like a supreme blessing. It was best to look on the bright side, the child always thought that. As a result of the Flicker Fusion, she and the mother possessed something that other mother-child states could never provide. As for the sadnesses—well, with the sadnesses they had made their amends.
There was always the Persistence of Vision Theory, the child reasoned when things got too difficult, the retina retaining the impression of the image even after her disappearance. This way, in long retinal waves the mother would remain for prolonged periods of time. Such were the ways the child would compensate for the times the mother would go off-again/on-again, off-again.
She knew never to take the solid world for granted because that, in the end, would be a source of much heartache. When the Disappearance Threshold had been reached, when the sense of absence seemed unbearable, when the Flicker-Off became more frequent and prolonged, the Persistence of Vision Theory was the natural theorem to apply. It pleased her to know what had to be done.
St
ill, the solitude of the night continued.
ON THE DAY the child came into language, she spoke elaborate sentences in an instant and the mother was afraid. No baby babbling or preliminary words had been heard, and there had been no practice or preparation on the child’s part. Just like that, one day, when the mother came into the room, she found the child speaking perfectly formed syntactic units, carrying their burden of meaning and desire.
The child said first how happy she was to be there. And the mother smiled sweetly. The very next words the toddler said were that she had come here from Heaven and that God was waiting for them. He could not wait much longer, she said, and they couldn’t live this way forever—between worlds, floating.
From time to time, the child went on, she would see God while sitting in her car seat in the car. The mother at these times would stop the car. She was not floating, and she didn’t care how long he waited; she was not going to budge.
Soon enough—not even a year had passed—and the child had forgotten all about what God had said in the car seat and about Heaven and about the hovering in-between world, but the mother never forgot it, and sometimes the child begged her to tell that first God story, which she had once overheard the mother whispering to Father Ted. The mother was not sure she wanted to be the repository for a story such as this, but after much badgering, the mother always relented. Still she longed sometimes for the days when the child was a wordless creature and did not ask the mother to hold such things for her.
Now they were exiles in language together and forced to make the best of it; now they would have to make small reductive signs for the oceanic ways they felt inside. Now they would have to sputter after the wolf and its majesty, and the river, and the fire. But beside this world there was another world that there were no words for.
The funnels would come quickly now—all the dark diminishments, the mother and child, caught in the high winds. The mother could not blame the child for learning to speak. The child was exhilarated and did not see or feel what the mother did. The child was enlarging and talking a blue streak. She could not blame the child for going forward: talking, walking, going to school. Bringing home the child with the Elephant Trunk, and the Girl with the Matted Hair, or telling the God story. It was not really her fault.
God was pulling at the child, asking her to bring the mother home. Instructing the mother to get on with it now.
Still, the mother implored the God to leave the child alone.
THE JACKAL LEADS the deceased before the scale. He weighs the heart (left tray) against the feather of Ma’at, the goddess of truth and justice (right tray). If the heart of the deceased outweighs the feather, then the deceased has a heart that has been made heavy by evil deeds. In that event, the god with the crocodile head and hippo legs will devour the heart, condemning the deceased to oblivion for eternity.
And that indeed, the mother says, is a long time. The War Crimes President is moved into the withdrawing room with a heavy heart. The jackal snatches the heart and puts it on the scale.
WOMEN IN VEILS moved through the Valley now. There had always been veiled women in the Valley, draped in black, and now as the vanishings increased, women mourned in greater and greater numbers—but these veiled women who moved through the Valley were new. The new women came from far away, though from where, the mother could not say.
One of the women in veils breaks from the group and walks down the path to the mother. She might have been a kind of beekeeper had there been bees. For the first time in a long while, the mother was being pulled against her will toward another human being. What do you want? she asked. Each night when the mother awoke, the veiled woman would be sitting at the edge of the bed, next to a chittering bat, beckoning.
THE CHILD WAS doing a report about a faraway land. The child asked the mother what she knew about it.
Music and singing and dancing are forbidden there. Write that down, the mother said. It’s something I know for sure.
I won’t. I won’t write that, the child said; it’s too sad.
LISTEN, THE MOTHER whispers. At the end of the corridor a dirge could be heard moving through the left ventricle. Give us the courage to enter the song, the mother said, and they fell now with grace and resolve and some fear into the darkest of dreams:
A young woman from Punjab and her baby trail the mother and child, and no matter what the mother does, she cannot completely shrug off their shadow. Even though she does not understand why this young woman and infant boy from a distant land must follow them, she tolerates it—they must be looking for something very important, she reasons. Or perhaps it is simpler—perhaps they have been drawn by the great silver river, like so many are drawn. The woman from Punjab mutters sometimes, sometimes sings in an incredibly lovely voice, sometimes wails, but all without sound, and the infant boy cries at times and sleeps the rest of the time.
Inevitably at some point in every day, the young woman from Punjab and the baby appear, though some days it is very late. Sometimes the mother goes to look for them and if she cannot find them, she goes back home and waits for them to come. She knows it must be a far place they journey from; her hunch is Punjab, though she cannot be sure.
She notices that more and more, the woman, when she arrives, is crying. The mother remembers how difficult it was when her own child was a baby, and she also understands how difficult it must be for them to be so far from home. If she could only verify their existence, then perhaps there would be a shift in their rapport, in their relationship to one another, in what could be communicated. The mother does not dare ask the child about them, as she is not prepared for the answer the child will give, and also she does not want to hear what it will sound like to ask the child casually, have you by any chance seen the woman and the baby from Punjab today? If the young woman and baby are invisible, it is not on the mother’s account. Some days she sees them everywhere she looks. The baby seems to know sign language, as so many babies seem to know these days, and the mother feels he is trying to tell her something urgent, but she does not know what.
And then they are gone. They do not come back again. A year passes, and the mother opens a newspaper and reads about a woman from Punjab who moved to New York when she was six, grew up, walked in the American summer, had a son, and one July morning, distraught, killed the baby and then herself. The mother is horrified when she reads this, but she is also a little bit relieved. She gets on her knees. She feels an inexplicable gratitude. Because of what the shadow mother from Punjab has done, this mother will not be required to.
She and the child will be spared.
THE CHILD IS running toward her with such velocity that she has broken the sound barrier. She is shouting something to the mother, but the mother can’t hear her. Her arms are open, and she is filled with joy. No one has taken them away. No one has asked them to leave or to die. Nothing else matters but she and this child running through the breathing world. The child does a little song and dance. She loves her Fippy. It was the favorite part of her body—perfectly pink, and a little slippery. The child does a Fippy Dance.
Dance, the mother says, for there is not one day that is promised to us.
THE CHILD TOLD her mother that she had been invited to a swimming party to celebrate the end of summer. The mother pictured the beautiful blue cavity and the children jumping into it again and again and again. When she closed her eyes she saw before her a continuum of jumping children. All the usual suspects would be there: the three schoolgirls, the Boy in the Glen, the Boy with the Elephant Trunk, the Girl with the Matted Hair.
The mother supposed they too could go. She much preferred children under the water than above it. The children looked to her like flowers underwater: graceful and silent, their tendrils elongated, undulating.
SHE TOOK THE child in her arms. She thought of a blue chalice that held time, floating, suspended overhead, protecting and holding them. For a moment in this radiant Valley, time seemed elongated, and everything stayed exactly the same
. She knew it would not last long—possibly only for as little as a fraction of a second. It was a strange feeling. They made their way up the hill for the last time of the season. The summer now was winding down. Soon the blueberries would be gone, and the apples would appear.
18
WHEN THE CHILDREN were small, they would often play their grave resurrection games back behind the prickle bushes at the Winter Bear Montessori School. Each day after graceful walking and practical life and blue line work, the two girls would venture out after snack to begin once again to concoct the Mother Potion from scratch. The potion, as the Girl with the Matted Hair said, would save once and for all the mothers who had died or were dying. Otherwise, the Girl with the Matted Hair said, they would die for good, and they would never come back. As it was, the Girl with the Matted Hair’s mother had died when she was a toddler, and ever since then, she had worked night and day to find the cure for that.
This sort of project enthralled the child, and every day at recess she and her friend collected and assembled a wide assortment of ingredients and charms: rose thorns and wishbones, robin’s eggshells and goose’s eggshells, scrunchies and ribbons, knee scabs and matted hair (for DNA, the child said), chestnut casings, glitter glue, butterfly wings, birchbark, and other forest charms. Ten dandelions—nine discarded, the last placed in a vial of rosewater; eight hairs from the tail of a black cat dipped in clay then burned to an ash. Chewed grass from the grave of the schoolmaster. They sewed a magnet into a mother’s dress and slipped fish lures into the hem. They obtained a dead wren and sent away a black lamb, for a little black lamb foretells mourning garments within the year. They tied mint around their wrists while skipping. They mixed chamomile and mud with salt and silt and tears into a poultice and stirred it with a Hawthorn branch. Spells and banishments were many. The child carried elf stones in a velvet pouch and waited for a four-footed beast to pass in order to animate the charm. Before the magic words were spoken into the well, they covered it with a wool shawl. Lavender plucked on a Sunday night they pounded with a stone that never was moved since the world began. When the child, who was gathering thistle, had her back turned, the Girl with the Matted Hair snuck up on her and sank her teeth into the child’s arm. There, she said, the blood of a child! The child screamed and drew a circle on the ground and said the magic words, and a fire rushed up from the earth and a flood of water, pure and bright, sprang from her side creating a mote, separating now the child from the ring of fire. It all occurred so fast that the Girl with the Matted Hair at first did not know what had happened. That was fantastic! She shouted and began to applaud. She had always suspected that the child carried the water charm inside her, and now it was verified.