Mother and Child

by Carole Maso

  THE PEAK GROWTH is the combination of three mini-peaks. The first peak involves the lower limbs, the second involves the trunk, and the third involves the thorax. The first phase involving the limbs is called the ascending phase, which corresponds to the acceleration in the velocity of growth in girls.

  Chronological age is of no significance; everything depends on bone age. Girls’ Peak Growth velocity happens when girls are eleven in bone age. It is normal to feel the acceleration of bone growth during puberty. A not uncommon question among certain sorts might be, what do you think your bone age is?

  Also, different bones in a child age at different rates. A child may be said to be composed of bones in a Bone Age Mosaic.

  The Risser Sign is still zero and the Triradiate Cartilage is still open at the onset of puberty. When they found the femur in the shallow grave, they had suspected it was the missing preadolescent, because the bone had not yet fused. The mothers gravitate to the scene.

  After the closure of the Triradiate Cartilage, there is still a considerable amount of growing remaining. The descending phase of puberty is signified by significant growth of the thorax.

  IN THE TIME everything was accelerating, everything was moving so quickly and there seemed to be no conceivable way of stopping it, the Slow Lab entered the Spiegelpalais. The Grandmother was moving at hummingbird speed, but at the Spiegelpalais, the Slow Clock was being assembled. It was run by beads. One bead dropped every five minutes, and time seemed almost to stop.

  THE NORTH POLE Grandmother had bright white hair and light, light sparkling eyes. Wait up, the child called to her, and the Grandmother smiled, skittling along the ice. She was going full speed ahead with great deliberateness—she knew the way. What the child feared was that right out there before her, her grandmother would become lost. Everything is changing, the child thought, but she was not ready yet. She cast a glacial spell on their lives and fell for a minute headlong now into the ravishing, precious luxury of slowed-up time. She stopped the Grandmother’s skittle across the ice, the Great Amnesia, the Peak Growth Velocity, the folding up of the mother.

  THE SLOW LAB had moved into the Valley to quell the vertiginous passing of time. The World Institute of Slowness would hold a Symposium soon. The Slow Lab was run on the tenets of the Slow Food Movement—local, organic, responsible—it emphasized slowness in the creation and consumption of food. Now this idea was being applied to every aspect of life. There were even websites—SlowPlanet.com, LifeinSlowMotion.org—for all things slow: slow travel, slow shopping, slow life—a Credo of Slow.

  AS THE GRANDMOTHER neared eighty-three, the mother took her in her arms and refused to let go. In Italy there were Slow Cities, she told her, and they might get on a boat.

  WHITE PHOSPHOROUS OBSCURED the view for a moment. From the fog could be seen the figments of mothers. Fire came from the bodies of our children, they said, and they wept. My daughter melted away. The burn reached to the muscle and bone, the Doctor without Borders lamented. It is a war crime to use such a thing as white smoke on a civilian population, the mothers murmured, walking through white.

  THE MEN LEARNED to walk in slow motion while they slept. It was as if they were in a kind of coma. Only the notion of Grave Alice, and Laughing Allegra, and Edith with Golden Hair propelled them forward at all—the girls at the end of the war. But they moved more and more slowly, and no one knew anymore if they would ever get back.

  CAREFULLY IN HIS sleep, the Vortex Man lifts the eighty-year-old Yangtze Giant Soft-Shelled Turtle, the only female known to exist, and he places her on his back. Slowly, he carries her six hundred miles to the zoo in Suzho to meet the one-hundred-year-old male—the last known of its species. Good going, the Grandmother from the North Pole whispers, watching from afar, as the Vortex Man slowly moves across the continent of Asia, the turtle strapped to his back.

  MORE AND MORE now, the mother called Bunny Boy Bog Belly, as he seemed to carry the bog with him wherever he went. Each evening he would materialize from the mist. In the day now, no one knew where he went exactly, but he always came home in the evening, and he always carried the bog on his fur. When the mother reached out to him, he passed her, seeming not to see her, too fixated on the bog, even at night, at home, at the foot of her bed. It was the strangeness and slowness of cats that sustained her now.

  WHERE HAVE YOU been, Mr. Min?

  Slowly he pulls bat after white bat out of his hat at the Spiegelpalais.

  WHEN THE LAMB returns, it will be resplendent in a teal blue City Opera T-shirt, and its wool will gleam, and so will its eyes. When the lamb returns, he will be asked: where have you been? He will be asked: why have you been absent so long? And then the question that must be answered in order to continue: how, little lamb, will we know you will not be leaving us again?

  The lamb will smile, but, as he is stuffed, he will say nothing in return.

  MID-STEP, THE VORTEX Man puts down the turtle, and moves no more.

  You have engendered in us the desire for knowledge; you have awakened in us a desire we did not know we had, the travellers say at the gates of the Spiegelpalais. You cannot fall silent now. You have instilled in us an insatiable longing. You have provided balm. Answer the twelve questions you have posed, before you go. Reveal your face, just one time. Show us the way. Point us in the right direction. You offer boons. You work mighty deeds, we’ve heard. You have the gifts of healing; you speak in tongues. Speak to us.

  All is Illusory, the Vortex Man said and got up and passed through the midst of them and was gone.

  WHEN THE SOLDIERS realized they were walking in the exact opposite direction of Grave Alice and Laughing Allegra and Edith with the Golden Hair, their hearts filled with sand and their beings were drawn into the earth and it was as if they were being buried alive. The bat had advocated flight, but they could not stay aloft; they just kept sinking further and further into the earth.

  FORCE OF TIME, Ultimate Reality, Having Form and Yet Formless, the Divine Paradox, the Divine Smokescreen, Ruler of the Five Elements, and the Object of our Meditation. How can we stand here, how can we bear your Absence now? The End of Illusion. The Redeemer of the Universe, Sender of Bats, practicing austerity and renunciation. Time shall devour all, ineffable and inconceivable. He presides over the mysteries of both life and death.

  At the place of the Disillusion of All Things, the people wept.

  All Hail the Vortex Man, the People of the Valley said, and were afraid. All Hail the Vortex Man!

  She thought of a blazing fire and a gloomy darkness and a storm and a trumpet blast, and the countless angels in festal gathering. All gathered at the sensational head of the Vortex Man, along with the assembly of the firstborn and the spirits of the just made perfect, and the Hare, mediator of a new covenant and the sprinkled blood. A gleaming gun at the center, it seemed, was the cause of all the commotion.

  SHE HAD NOT known that at the time Lamby had disappeared, miles away, the Vortex Man with great violence had taken his life, and she now thought that perhaps this enigmatic force whom she had loved had pulled the little lamb with him into the massive vortex of his despair.

  HE HAD SURVIVED for millennia, inhuman, apart, source of wisdom and perfection, but there was a dark aspect to survival, and it pained her to think of what his existence had become. First his mind had faltered, he who had so many thoughts and had posed so many questions, and the Vortex Doctors opened his head to look, but he was never the same after that.

  She knows when the body is opened and flattened and exposed to the other world, it fears invasion from every side forever more.

  She knows that when cells in the brain become filled with the Stilled Wind, they release teardrop-shaped pearls called enzymes into the blood. The part of the brain affected by the Stilled Wind cannot grow back or be repaired, it is said.

  How unknowable is the world of the Vortex Man! His head streaming blood, his pearly eyes closed; the whole world can feel it, the mother thinks, in a kind of ecstasy. In
the manner that the mother has friends, the Vortex Man had been her friend. And she tried to absorb the shock of his absence.

  IT WAS THE gun in the broken glass case that had produced all the commotion: a single bullet to the head. But when she thinks of the Vortex Man she thinks there is something to be said for the end of questions, or the end of heartache, or the end of suffering, or rest.

  27

  transformation

  THE CAT CARRIED the bog on his fur. The universe was expanding into darkness. The Vortex Man was dead; everyone said it. Somewhere, the sleeping Aunt Inga lies; she cannot be revived.

  The child’s birth had coincided with the discovery of Dark Energy and had heralded the end of certainty, and Absolute Knowledge one more time was suspended. They had exchanged their postulates of linear laws for curved space. The universe will expand eternally. And when the last stars die out in ten trillion years, the universe will grow dark. Something is speeding up the expansion of the universe despite the Slow Lab, and despite every effort of the mother.

  Attempts at an explanation for the accelerating universe included many hypothetical models: Dark Energy, Phantom Energy, Cosmological Constant, Quintessence. As the universe expands, the density of Dark Matter declines more quickly than the density of Dark Energy, and eventually, Dark Energy dominates. An expanding universe means that density drops. She considered the implications. If acceleration continues indefinitely, the ultimate result will be that galaxies outside the local supercluster will move beyond the cosmic horizon; they will no longer be visible because their line-of-sight velocity becomes greater than the speed of light. The Earth, Milky Way, and the Virgo Supercluster will remain virtually undisturbed while the rest of the universe will recede.

  NOW, THE YOUNGEST Master Saddler in all of Wales came to give a demonstration at the Spiegelpalais. On a table she placed the tools of her trade: awls, an array of needles, threads, creasers, knives, stitch-markers, mashers, flocking, and filling. Next she unpacked a large bale of sheep’s wool and leather, all from traditional English tanneries, and placed them in a stack. The Valley’s Saddler did not know why this Saddler from Wales had come, and he felt a certain sadness. Still, he was fascinated to see how she could cut and dress and stain the leather all alone, and how she worked with both hands to create strong interlocking stitches.

  A cavalry of men rode up. How interesting, the Valley’s dimming infantry remarked.

  NOW A FIERCE wind began to blow. The mother felt besieged. Seven levels of sky and seven levels of earth pressed down on her. Where was the Vortex Man?

  She was growing pyramidal. She increased her base, the distance between her feet widening so that she might withstand more, become a sturdier structure for the assaults that seemed not to stop coming now. She turned in all directions at once, for she could not predict from which directions the next sorrow would come.

  She had turned herself into a pyramid: firm, and dark—the color of iron, anchored to the ground and with heft. She was squat, hardened, with a thick carapace as protection against the assaults, which were many—and the assaults had made her more obdurate. She wondered why it had to be this way. She wondered why the men had to disappear, some with great deliberateness and violence, others seemingly against their will, or on a whim.

  She thought of the Sleeping Man, and she thought of the American Tenor, and she thought of the Hanging Man, and the Blue Man, and the boy with the spots, and also of her friend who turned into a harp, and she thought of the others who had walked back to their offices, briefcases in hand, because they had been instructed to do so, high atop the burning world, and who burned and turned vaporous. And she thought of the war, and all who had perished and continued to perish. Each of these men called her now, and said, it is time to come; it is over. She turned her back on all of them.

  And she thought of the boys who ran in the apple orchards, years ago, and lived among the apple trees and reached through blue sky toward the blossoms, or the brightest fruit, and grew little by little, day by day, until they were grown and began losing their teeth, tooth by tooth by tooth, all the teeth in their heads, and then not long after, they were dead. It seemed a particular affliction in the Valley—the Apple Orchard Deaths.

  She wondered if there was some limit to heartbreak, or a way to become immune to it, as she grew larger and heavier and wider. In silence, people gathered and pointed to the horizon, that sorrowing landscape where the pyramid stood—immense, gray, heavy—a foreboding shape, next to the Spiegelpalais.

  THE NIGHTMARE INVOLVED the atrium, a corridor, rising heat, a kind of inferno, the baby motionless inside her capsule.

  AND THROUGH THE desert the beheaded soldiers walked in ghastly procession. And in ancient Fallujah, babies were being born with three heads, or an eye or a nose in the middle of the fontanelle. We should never have dispensed the fogs, the soldier said.

  SHE FEARED SHEETS, struts, and pinnacles of bone. She feared the life of bone, relentless, in motion, alive the way nothing else is quite alive. An ocean of bone moved toward the mother. She went to the child’s room and looked at her as she was growing in her sleep. She lifted each limb, knowing from the sleep spindles the child was emitting that at this moment, nothing could wake her. In the dream, the child grew enormous. The mother marveled at her appendages.

  THE MOTHER TELLS the child that a part of the child’s body remains in the mother long after the child is born. She says right now, she carries some of the child’s tissue in her clavicle. Eventually the child will dissolve inside the mother, but not for a long time. It takes many years for a child to dissolve into a mother. The child thinks about this for a long time. Is it only us? the child asks.

  Every mother carries a bit of her own child in her body. It’s Science, the mother says.

  This means, the child says gravely, that when the Girl with the Matted Hair’s mother died, part of the girl had been buried alive.

  The mother nods her head. What is also true, and it is the marvelous thing about mothers and children, is that the part of a child that stays inside the mother helps to heal the mother, rushes to assist the mother whenever she needs help; it’s a fact, the mother says.

  What about her friend then? What about Lula? The child insists on calling the Girl with the Matted Hair by her birth name. What about Lula’s mother? Why couldn’t Lula help her mother?

  Here is a story for you, the mother says, and she has a grave expression, the face of a teacher or the face of a nurse—a face the child loves.

  Are you listening? the mother says, and the child nods.

  A woman dies of a terrible disease. After her death, a specimen from the small intestine—the part of the woman’s body that failed, disintegrated, and eventually caused her death—is examined at the autopsy. What the examiner finds is that trillions of cells from both her daughter and her son had rushed to that very spot to try to save her. It was all there afterwards when they examined the tissue. If there is a more beautiful story, she said, I do not know of it.

  It is even more beautiful than the God who lived in the man or the way he flew up out of his dead body on the third day, the child says. The mother nods. Yes, even more beautiful than that. And the child, suddenly minute, is enthralled, breathless at the mother’s perfection. There is nothing she would not do to save her.

  THE CHILD GASPS. The mother has the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. She is more wondrous, more beautiful than anything else on this earth. She is a terrifying thing, a thing for a moment immortal: not human, lion-fronted, a goat in the middle, and a snake from behind, and inside, the remnants of a tiny child—a child who at a moment’s notice might rush to the brain or the liver or the heart. I will keep you healthy, the child vows—for who otherwise will instruct me? Who will provide for me? Who will take care of me, more exquisitely than you? Who will keep us here, alive, on this side of the divide, if not you?

  The lion-headed mother folds up. The Chimera closes like an umbrella. Yes, of
course, she says. I will.

  THE CODES BETWEEN mother and infant are so profound that artists and writers have often felt the need to replicate them in literature and art their whole lives. The mother wonders where her own mother is at that moment. She feels a pull and opens the window to see if she can detect her presence.

  She looks to the heavens.

  A small number of fetal cells stray across the placenta—a rash of stars in the bloodstream. A fluorescing protein derived from jellyfish makes the cells glow bright green. The mother closes her eyes. Outside the frogs and fireflies make the night alive.

  IF A MOTHER is in a car accident, her child will move toward the wreckage, arriving quickly at the ruin, while her body is medivaced and packed in ice. The child’s cells migrate to the wounds, becoming six times more concentrated in the area of damage. SOS signals from the mother are always heard.

  The child survives for decades in the mother’s skin, in the liver, in the bloodstream. No harm can come to her, the child says. Serenely, the child crosses the blood-brain barrier as if on a barge in summer. If the thyroid is damaged, the child turns into thyroid cells; if the liver is damaged, the child turns into liver cells; if the heart is damaged, the child turns into heart cells; if the brain is damaged, the child turns into brain cells. How amorphous and fluid, how ready to take any shape is the child!

  And the next day, the mother gets up from the accident as good as new.

  SHE’S VERY SMALL, and she hasn’t been seen for some time. For a while she had been sighted darting in and out of the bushes, small and sleek. She had become, the mother thought, like something hunted. But lately the Girl with the Matted Hair seemed to have disappeared completely. This made the child sad, as she missed her friend, unpleasant at times as the friend could be.