Mother and Child

by Carole Maso

  NO ONE KNEW why the South American doctor had appeared in the Valley and was sitting on a twirling seat at the diner next to the mother and child unless it was to deliver his soliloquy, which he now did. He was one of those Doctors without Borders doctors, and he did not know what he would do now that he had seen what he had seen in the borderless world.

  The Doctor without Borders on the swivel seat in the diner seemed to be spinning faster and faster when the mother finally looked up from her teacup and said, look, slow down. He seemed more hyperactive child than doctor, and she imagined after all he had been through that he was probably going mad. Clearly he had spent a long time in the various denizens of disease throughout the world. He could not look at this child without seeing the other children, the ones with hallucinations and deliriums and fevers and tremors, wide fluctuations of pulse and blood pressure—everywhere he saw their seizures, their delusions: their fear of water and their fear of air. The ones said to be possessed by demons, the ones bitten by bats. She heard a kind of falsetto coming from somewhere deep within the tin of the diner and then a whooshing sound.

  The Age of Funnels arrives in many guises. The anti-cyclones have come! he shrieks. Already whole villages have been swept away. One hundred thousand people at a clip! And with that the doctor spins away.

  Demented, spacey, he calls out from what was once Burma, Can-You-Still-Hear-Me? His swivel seat still madly spinning next to the mother and the child who is stirring her chocolate milk. Yes-We-Can, the child calls through a paper megaphone.

  CASPER THE BABY, along with Igor the Giant, appeared one evening at the Spiegelpalais. Casper was sleeping and Igor was dispensing leaflets and singing a gentle song. Igor’s heart, the leaflet said, weighed a full pound and a third. When he saw the child, he showed her the baby and then gently cooed. Why is it giants are always gentle? the child wondered, but The Guinness Book of World Records had nothing to say about the gentleness of Igor. They cared only about his height, and his girth, and the size of his hands and his feet and his head. The mother, who kept a record of such things, said she prized Gentleness above all.

  OKAY BUNNY BOY, the mother says, making little strangling motions as he runs triumphantly in. Do not ask what he carries in his mouth. It is always something different. PUT THAT DOWN, she yells, or I’ll throttle you.

  THE WARRIOR CHILDREN from suburbia’s darkest heart were coming to the country day school to display their expertise in Tae Kwon Do, an ancient art of war.

  The children looked a little sickly, the mother thought. They seemed to move through a chemical haze of performance-enhancing drugs and pesticides that were the minimum requirements for life in their excellent, leafy, perfectly serene wonder world.

  There is something wrong with children from America’s very own heart of darkness coming to the Valley in busloads and putting on shows, the mother thought. There is something wrong with children saying Yes Master, No Master on a stage. Prowess in combat is not something one should display. Public censure should rise up at these sorts of shows.

  A Black Belt means that you have become impervious to darkness and fear. In the upside-down and backward world where they all live now, the warrior children who excel at unarmed destruction styles from three rival Korean villages are raised up on the shoulders of the others and praised. It should be remembered that Tae means to destroy with the foot, Kwon means to strike or smack with the hand, and Do means an art or a way of life. Tae Kwon Do: the art of destroying with the foot or the fist.

  Where, she wonders, have all the Scholar-Fathers gone? And the Scholar-Artists? As always she has an insatiable hunger for the Scholar-Artists. Even one Scholar-Artist, amidst all these fists, in a time like this, would go a long way. There is something obscene, the mother thinks, about a display of this sort of prowess, especially when the country is at war.

  At the end of the Tae Kwon Do show, the mother felt the need to make a small speech. She made her way to the stage. Couldn’t these children find something better to do with their time? she wondered. It made the child remember the other time the mother had felt compelled to stand up. It was in church after the singing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic at the end of the Mass on the Fourth of July. Didn’t they know there was a war being fought at that very moment that they were singing their fool heads off?

  When the mother spoke like this, people often turned away. She had a very special way of saying: shame on your heads. The mother spoke for something she called pacifism, and after that, the other people looked at her like someone they could no longer understand. They shunned her. She was not the person they thought they knew. She had made hot cross buns, and in winter she made soup for the poor. She sang at the top of her lungs. Regardless of what they thought, she continued every Sunday to sit in the front pew with the child, and the war song was never sung again, probably because they did not want to see the mother stand up anymore.

  When they were done, the corps of child warriors returned to their shiny wonder world carrying the mark the mother had made on their heads, and although it could not be seen, it was there, and they would have to bear it for a long time. It was not so bad because with all the technologies—the electronic whirring and beeping and instant messaging they were occupied with on the ride home—the children did not have to notice it so much.

  A while back, when the Girl Scouts had come to town in a bus, the child had learned how to send smoke signals. Inefficient as it was, so far from the suburban warriors’ ways of doing things as it was, the child loved this way of sending messages. Falling asleep that night, the child was glad not to have the mark of the mother on her head. The wind blew and the fire burned and the smoke rose high up over the Valley. Are you there? was the message she sent. Would you like to be friends? And she waited for a response.

  There is a deer wading in the pond, she wrote in smoke. I enjoy beading, do you?

  Like this, the child is not so lonely.

  At night in dreams, the suburban warriors return, texting and emailing as they come. The show begins. Gracefully, with upgraded combat methods, they toss enriched uranium and plutonium atoms back and forth to one another in a kind of slow motion.

  There is much applause.

  20

  SEE HOW THE flies begin to gather around the still-mobile Bunny Boy, detecting the sweetness of his decline, eventual expiration, and demise. But this is still some years off, the mother assures the child, and she scoops up the cat, who had wandered onto the Aging Stage. For now Bunny Boy’s end has not arrived, it is just something the mother sees before her like a photograph; she does not know why.

  The mother hated photographs, especially the class photos the child brought home from school. The child had heard the mother say that a little school picture to her was like a little death. The French philosopher had lectured about the intense immobility of the photograph, and for once, the mother’s protestations about the child’s school pictures had fallen on sympathetic, albeit dead French philosopher ears.

  Nevertheless, the child would like to order little wallet-sized photos to trade with her friends, and perhaps an 8×10 or at the very least a 5×7 to send to Uncle Lars and Uncle Ingmar, and Uncle Sven and Aunt Inga, and to Uncle Anders, who had never met the child even once, and of course to the Grandmother from the North Pole.

  She doubts they will see the claustrophobic jail the mother speaks of when she speaks of a photo. If the mother ever gets a friend again, the child thinks they might try to make a photo exchange. She might put the picture of the friend in the tiny window space in the wallet meant for that, and she might look at the photograph and feel happy. After that, she might look at the little school photo of the child in the next wallet window, and smile too.

  AT BACK TO School Night, the mother sits in the classroom as a variety of science experiments are staged by the children. Rows of mothers sit silently and watch, applauding at the appropriate intervals.

  One of the Horsey Mothers stands up and peers into the bottle wher
e a tiny funnel has been conjured, and in the swirl of the water she remembers something she had not remembered before. On the flatlands, when she was small and her aunt was big, they would stand in the funnel’s path until the very last moment. Then her aunt, laughing wildly, would guide the child to the underground shelter.

  The next time the teacher shook the bottle, the girl and her aunt were still small inside the funnel, but before the little girl knew it, they were in her uncle August’s basement where there were live minks and dead minks, and the little girl was afraid. Her aunt was laughing with her uncle August and they were drinking elixirs, as her aunt called them, out of miniature crystal glasses. If you looked closer, you could also see chinchillas in cages at Uncle August’s, and beavers, and muskrats. And along with live minks, chinchillas, beavers, and muskrats in cages and the dead minks hanging from the rafters, there were jars lined up along the walls filled with a rose-colored liquid. What the liquid was was anyone’s guess.

  GLAZED SOLDIERS PASS with jars of rose liquid looking for the Burning Field, and the mother puts her hand on their shoulders, soldier after soldier after soldier, and turns them around and points them in the right direction.

  FOR THREE DAYS the Fathers had labored building the mute man of wood. It was nearly the solstice, and they had finished early, and so they sat around watching the man they had made and they waited. The man stood nearly fifty hands high. It was a magnificent sight, and the Fathers felt pride. Soon the Burners would arrive; word was they had made it as far as the glen. Months before they had set out on their journey here. It was a transfiguration and a purification as well as a penance, of that she was sure.

  The Burners had dreamt of the man for many months and suddenly, at last, there he was before them. All praised the fifty-hand man. How mighty, how noble, they said, and then they took out a long-stemmed match. In the moment before he was set aflame, the mute man seemed about to say something, the mother thought. At last he caught fire. He is the most beautiful Burning Man of all, someone could be heard bellowing. Praise him as he goes!

  Fire illuminated the Valley, and there was nowhere one could look and not see it. Inside the fire was another fire, and inside that one, another, and so on. The Burning Man held a multitude of fires within, and all recalled their own origins, and the history of the fires they carried inside, and in not such a long time the man, once fifty hands, was reduced to ash.

  Part of the Burning Man Creed was to leave no trace behind, and the Burners stayed until the Burning Man was done, and then they buried the ashes. After the ashes were buried, the Cooling Man Committee arrived to calculate the Burning Man’s contribution to Global Warming, and they exacted their fee. Meanwhile the Burners waited for a clue as to where the Fathers might build the next mute man of wood and straw. Ash graves mottled the Valley, and the Fathers and the Burners alike lay down side by side and waited for a sign. The mother stepped over the prostrate men who appeared to be asleep.

  Earlier that day, the mother and child had gone in search of the lost spring, the place where they would burn the next man, something the mother and child knew in advance, because Wise Jean had seen it in a dream. Liquid water graces our planet. The place was named “the reed shelter protecting the little water-place spring,” or Poughkeepsie, by its Indians long ago. There, a clear water spring had been issuing up longer than recorded history. The child took the mother’s hand.

  Some time from now after the Burners have vanished, leaving without a trace, the mother will envision the last of the Burning Men, and she will carry that silhouette behind her eyes a very long time. How beautiful you are, Burning Man, the mother will whisper. The child knew there was nothing she could do—a part of the mother had already left to meet him, had always been walking to him, the last Burning Man at the end of the world. And the fire.

  OTHER EFFIGIES APPEARED along the route. Four men in bird suits called Operation Migration had arrived at the Spiegelpalais. The four birdmen brought four gliders equipped with four silent propellers. It’s so nice to see you fellows again, the people of the Valley said. The four men nodded, and smiled through their beaks, but they did not speak.

  The men, dressed as birds, were to teach the Whooping Crane babies first how to eat and then how to fly, and eventually how to migrate. Operation Rescue promised all the basics because there were not enough actual adult Whooping Cranes to perform these tasks anymore. The four men in bird suits with the four gliders would be their substitutes. Day after day they wore the bird suits and silently slipped a crane-head puppet on so as to teach the chicks how to peck and forage.

  Because there were no adult birds to sing lullabies to the Whooping Crane eggs, the eggs were played recordings of the glider-propeller song, and when they were old enough to migrate, they would follow that sound, with the four silent, suited men that had taught them how to eat and fly leading the way.

  There’s no hope for the Whooping Crane in the long term, the birdmen say later, lifting their bird masks after their mission is accomplished. There are just no Whooping Crane habitats left to live in anymore.

  Still. . . .

  In the off-season, Operation Migration has been sighted on a faraway river, where they ferry salmon on barges past a dam’s hydroelectric turbines so that the salmon can spawn. Though the salmon suits are not required, Operation Migration likes to wear them anyway.

  ONCE A YEAR, on the night of the Autumnal Equinox, the mother gets out the Glove and places it on the Etiquette Bed. Along with the Glove, there is a dome, a snow globe that says Paris, and a gold locket shaped like a heart. All are assembled for the child to see. It is a night unlike any other night, a night without fear or reproach: the anniversary of the night the child was conceived.

  On this night, everything is perfect in the world. The hours are equally divided between night and day, dark and light, and most remarkably, that is the kind of child she has become: perfectly balanced, astrologically prefigured. The child feels dizzy and weak in the presence of these things. The heart stops, but then begins to spin again. Everything at this moment is at the mercy of the mother, and the collection of objects, and the night.

  IN THE NIGHT, the mother could hear the beautiful night music passing through the left ventricle. After a while, in an attempt to rest, she would put on the television and watch the screen’s deep blues which she found beautiful too.

  She couldn’t seem to absorb the complex sentences being spoken on the television news anymore though. They came at her in such a way that she became disoriented and incapable of comprehending exactly what was being said. After a time, she learned how to slow the words down and listen in more manageable clauses. It was a pretty good trick. At warped-clause speed, it was a little bit easier. It went something like this when the mother listened in her partitioned way:

  Late word

  that a body

  has been recovered

  from the water.

  A girl

  twenty months old

  and her mother

  who was five months pregnant

  remain missing

  along with six others.

  The mother shut off the TV and ran into the room where the child slept. The child was still wearing her pumpkin stem hat, and in her small hand she clutched her wand of cornstalks. She had been a harvest dancer the day before in the school pageant.

  The mother sat on the bed next to the breathing, sleeping child and looked at her a long time, and it seemed to her as if she sat in the very Court of Miracles.

  DOES IN HEAT were leaping hither and thither, and the glen was filled with merriment. Estrus was upon them. In the feverish, leaping world they seemed impervious—nothing could harm them, flush as they were with life and love. Testosterone was high and days were short. The desire to replicate was all, and the splendor of the desire filled up the mother until she thought she might burst. The energy of the days and nights made the world glisten. Who can weather this? the mother wondered.

  How she love
d the swellings of the season. Foreheads and antlers pressed onto small trees left a scent from the preorbital glands in the forehead or the mouth. The velvet that was being shed from antlers attached itself to the night. In the night, these nocturnal longings come to the mother with full force. Bucks danced by with cornstalks and stars caught in their antlers. Finally the antlers shed, and the mother, walking through the glen, picked them up.

  EACH YEAR AT the time of the rut, the mother was reminded that the child would not be with her forever. The rut served as a reminder that soon indeed the child would be gone. The transformation was already in motion: one child would soon exit, and another would take her place. Soon her body would break into night and song. For now the child was still held in the Fawn Enclosure, but she could not be held there forever.

  Fire ants are a problem for the fawns, the child will report, and if the fawns make it past the fire ants and the predators, they still must continually find food and cover. During the Rut, does abandon their young and run around as if lost. This leaves only the child to care for the fawns, and she collects fire ants in a jar.

  Troubles indeed abound. In the headiness and distraction of the season, the hunters move in to stalk their delirious prey, taking utmost advantage of the situation and paying no mind to the gleaming spectacle before them.

  With the child safely tucked away, the mother in a black dress moves toward the hunters now. They are excited—and weird beyond belief. They break out their rattle bags meant to emulate sparring bucks looking for a match, and indeed bucks are often drawn to the sound, raring to compete. If the mother were a shooter, she would certainly consider shooting now. No bucks have responded to the rattling and grunting yet, but as in most things, patience is a virtue. The hunter in her sights throws in some snorts and wheezes and high-pitched grunts for good measure. During the rut, the hunters sometimes wear false eyelashes and don other glamour indicators and make doe eyes in the attempt to attract a buck.