The baby is still screaming. She picks him up and holds him and opens the door.
• • •
Once, Odelia and Miles went hiking in the mountains outlying Tangier. Well, more than once, many times. But this once, this once, it was a blazing afternoon, the sky so bright it was almost white, the air salty, the pale green line of the sea visible from the mountains. Miles had been reading an Alan Watts book titled The Joyous Cosmology. They were walking and talking about the sublime harmony of the natural world. Miles told her that this was the joyous cosmology.
There was Miles, sun-browned and bare-chested in the sand-colored mountains of Morocco, stretching his lean arms out heroically, as if welcoming the embrace of the universe. The sky, the sea, the land. What a beautiful place. What a beautiful day.
“Look around you! Look! It’s the joyous cosmology!”
They made love right there in the sand under the open sky in the middle of the day. His sweat smelled like truffles. She licked it off his neck.
She asked him to recite the Queen Mab speech for her. She lay smiling on the sand with their clothes bunched under her head for a pillow and felt the sun’s heat on her bare stomach and watched Miles’s lean, dirty, darkly tanned naked body twisting in the desert as he began, “Oh, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you . . .”—and he rocked and tumbled through the speech, shouting it at the mountains. When he came to its end, he ran to a different place and assumed a different voice, and said Romeo’s line:
“Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! Thou talk’st of nothing.”
Then he ran back to Mercutio’s place and answered Romeo’s interruption:
“True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy.”
They put their clothes back on and continued hiking. They met a shepherd who was switching his flock along the trail: the dust cloud, the flies, the racket of wooden bells knocking at their necks and desultory bleating. They offered to smoke their hashish with him and he greedily accepted. They sat with him under a creaking desert palm tree and smoked the hashish. There weren’t six words of language common between them, but they seemed to understand each other well enough. His brown skin was withered, weather-beaten to the texture of a crumpled brown paper sack. He had so few teeth she could count them, and his tongue was black. He got up to go.
They kept walking. A little while later they saw a stray sheep. The sheep was bashing its head against a rock. Over and over. There was a skinny boy who looked about ten years old sitting nearby on a log, watching. He was doodling in the dirt with a stick. They could tell by his face that he was the shepherd’s son. The sheep kept bashing its head into the rock, over and over. Blood ran down the side of the rock and curdled in the sand. A shard of the sheep’s skull had cracked open, like a little door, and a string of brains dangled out of the sheep’s head.
The boy saw Miles and Odelia, and he pointed at the sheep, shrugged his shoulders.
That was before they met Tessa, and before she came to live with them, before the man in the gray suit and the gray hat started following Odelia everywhere she went, before Miles ripped the phone out of the wall and threw it in the fire, and before Abraxas was born.
• • •
The woman in purple was standing outside the lavatory door, with her pearl earrings and her brown hair piled on top of her head like a loaf of bread. She put her hand on Odelia’s arm. Odelia flinched at her touch. The woman said:
“Oh dear. Did you have the fish?”
• • •
Abraxas screamed for the remaining duration of the flight. The airplane dove into Miami-Dade, and as it roared down the runway, Odelia turned to Miles and told him she had to take Abraxas to a hospital.
“He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine,” said Miles. “You can take him to a doctor in Mexico if you want. But he’ll be fine. We can’t lose you. You’re never gonna be able to get back to us.”
“I’m not taking him to a Mexican hospital,” said Odelia. “I want to be in America. I want to be in a place where people understand what I’m saying.”
“You won’t be safer. You’ll get caught. They’ll figure you out.”
“I’m scared to death. Miles, I’m scared to death.”
• • •
Abraxas wasn’t screaming anymore. He was too tired to scream. He’d settled into a persistent tearful whimper. She held him, she tried to make him understand that she was there and that she loved him, but she knew that inside himself he was completely alone.
She kissed the top of his head, blew her warm breath on his skin, and said, incanting it, again and again: “I will keep you from harm. I will keep you from harm. I will keep you from harm.”
Even though she knew he couldn’t understand her, she felt like she was telling a lie.
• • •
It was light out when they descended the airstair onto the tarmac, roughly the same time here in Miami as when they’d boarded the plane in Paris. The air was oozing with humidity. Odelia left Miles and Tessa at the connecting plane. They didn’t kiss good-bye. They didn’t even hug. They just sort of stood there and looked at each other. Odelia was crying. Miles gave her some money. A hundred dollars. She had nothing else with her except for Abraxas. Miles and Tessa got on the plane to Mexico.
• • •
The sky was pink, the air jungly with moisture. The heat was sickening. A row of thick-trunked palm trees skirted the runway and the leaves of their brittle fronds clicked together in a slight breeze that did nothing more refreshing than blow the heat around. The tarmac was chaotic with crisscrossing streams of traffic, pedestrian and vehicular. Men in blue jumpsuits and caps walked around with bright orange batons and drove baggage trains that scuttled like grumbling, beeping caterpillars across the concrete, and all the passengers who had just deplaned from the international flights funneled into the doors of the airport in a blizzard of languages, snapping at their children and grunting miserably under the weight of their luggage. Odelia joined the crush and was carried by the crowd through the doors. With her fingers Odelia smeared tears out of her eyes, which she was sure were bloodshot and swollen-lidded from crying. Inside the airport the crowd tapered into a line that was corralled into a maze of switchbacks cordoned off with red ropes looping through rows of metal stands that looked like silver chess pawns. The floor of the large room was covered with thin gray carpet. Outside the maze of ropes men in green-and-brown military fatigues stood by with German shepherds on leashes. Several of the men in fatigues were sitting in a circle of folding chairs, drinking bottles of Coke and smoking cigarettes and watching a TV that was bolted to the wall in the corner of the ceiling. A lazily revolving metal ceiling fan whipped the rising smoke into a rapidly vanishing eddy. They were watching the commentators bicker back and forth about McGovern dumping Thomas Eagleton from the Democratic ticket. Eagleton had frail nerves. He’d undergone electroshock therapy and had troubles with drinking.
Men and women in crisp airport uniforms trawled along the line, distributing stubby pencils and customs declaration forms.
Odelia had no plan and nowhere to go. There was the question of how she was going to make it through customs, which was coming closer and closer as she shuffled toward the front of the line. There was the question of money, or rather the question of having almost no money. She thought about how she might be able to get back to her parents in Troy, New York. Maybe she could take a train or a bus. It was August 1972. She was twenty-four years old and she hadn’t seen or spoken to her parents in four years. She wanted to see her parents. They did not know they had a grandson. She was going to change her son’s name. A smiling young woman in a blue airport uniform handed her a customs declaration form and a stubby pencil.
“Welcome to the United States,” she chirped, and moved up the line.
The baby whimpered and looked up at her, exhausted, his eyelashes caked with dried tears. Emily looked at the rectangle of starchy white paper the woman had
given her. It was a hieroglyphic scramble of small print and dotted lines and boxes. Was she carrying any meats, animals, or animal products? Disease agents, cell cultures, or snails? Awkwardly balancing the baby against her shoulder with her arm and holding the form, she began to try to fill it in with the stubby pencil.
She had no legitimate identification with her. Passport, driver’s license—all of that was gone, and she could not remember if they had been lost or deliberately destroyed. She only had her forged Canadian passport. Her baby did not have a social security number, and she could not even remember hers past the first three digits. She was afraid she was going to cry again. She looked around her for someone to ask for help. The people in front of her were speaking in French and the people behind her were speaking in a language she could not even guess at. Instead of filling in the customs form, she turned the card over and with the stubby pencil wrote on the back:
MY NAME IS EMILY BARROW.
I AM AN AMERICAN.
I AM A WANTED CRIMINAL.
MY CHILD IS SICK.
I AM TURNING MYSELF IN.
I WILL TELL YOU ANYTHING I KNOW
ABOUT ANYONE.
PLEASE HELP ME.
She underlined the last sentence. When she made it to the front of the line she was made to stand and wait until one of the customs officers’ desks opened up. When there was a place for her the uniformed man at the head of the line unhooked a red rope from a stand and allowed her to pass through.
A thin, bored-looking bald man with glasses and a white mustache sitting at one of the high desks beckoned to her. He wore a black suit with a red-and-blue-striped tie and silver cuff links on his wrists. Emily stood in front of the desk and waited for him to speak. He was scratching at something on his desk with a fountain pen. Without looking up from the desk, the man held out a hand for her customs form and passport, and said:
“Do you have anything to declare?”
“Yes,” she said, and handed him the card.
In November 1998 the Iridium Communications company launched sixty-six satellites into orbit. The company had ultimately intended to launch seventy-seven of these satellites to complete the network; the name Iridium was derived from the element with the atomic weight of seventy-seven. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999, the result of internal mismanagement coupled with an insufficient demand for its satellite phones. Although the Iridium global satellite communications network provided constant worldwide coverage, the phones were unwieldy and expensive, and were quickly pushed out of the market by the advent of roaming contracts between terrestrially based cellular providers who offered smaller phones with cheaper coverage plans. The Iridium network was dormant, and plans to de-orbit the satellites were drawn in 2000. However, the satellites were rescued by the company’s most powerful customer, the Pentagon, which saw potential for defense applications. The sixty-six satellites remain in orbit, and today are used extensively by military intelligence. These sixty-six satellites were designed with massive panel-shaped antennae, and the mirrorlike reflectivity of their material causes intense satellite flares. If the geometry between the satellite, the sun, and the terrestrial observer aligns just right, a brilliant flare of light appears, lasting several seconds. This flare appears as a dim dot of light moving slowly across the sky, becoming brighter as the satellite moves into alignment with the observer and peaking in a flash of about –9.5 in apparent magnitudeI before quickly fading away. The phenomena of Iridium satellite flares occur often, due to the large number of satellites, and, due to the regularity of the satellites’ patterns of orbit, at rigidly predictable times. These satellite flares will continue until the satellites are decommissioned, or until orbital decay eventually drags them back down to Earth.
• • •
There was something Caleb Quinn used to do every afternoon, when they were the only two kids who got off the school bus at their stop. Maggie was seven and Caleb Quinn was nine, and two years’ difference was nearly a third of a lifetime then. When the school bus had gone, engine grumbling, gaskets hissing, a cloud of diesel vapors left behind and a hundred hands fluttering from the half-open windows, just Caleb and Maggie standing alone on the grass at three thirty in the afternoon, Caleb would tackle her, effortlessly, pin her wrists to the ground, sit on her chest, and spit on her face.
He would dredge up a glob of snot from the back of his throat with these exaggerated sucking noises, mix it with his spit, let it dribble out, coil it onto her face in a long string. He liked to get it in her eyes and her hair. He spat on her until there was a thick sparkling sheen all over her face. Sometimes he’d drink a can of Hawaiian Punch on the way home so his spit would be pink, sticky, viscous. Maggie lashed her head from side to side, shrieked, struggled under him. He would only get bored and stop when Maggie quit struggling and resigned herself to being spat on. Eventually, he realized that just the anticipation of the first drop of spit was the worst part of it for her—that’s when she squirmed the most. After that, the daily torture changed: First, he would tackle her, pin her wrists to the ground, and sit on her chest; then he’d summon up a frothy mouthful of spit in his cheeks and just let it ooze out between his lips, slowly extending it farther and farther down without letting go of it, and then, when the head of the strand dangled a half inch above her cheek and Maggie was wincing, burying her head into the ground trying to wiggle away from it, he would slurp it back up like a yo-yo, chew on it some more, swish it around in his cheeks, and repeat; back and forth, closer and closer, until he could no longer abstain from the pleasure of seeing it slopped on her face. Maggie began to carry a hand towel in her backpack to clean herself up with before he let her walk home, so her mother wouldn’t see her like this when she got home from school.
• • •
Much later, in high school, Maggie fell in love with Caleb. They moved in together, much happened, and a year later she left him. A year after that, Maggie married Kelly Callahan, and soon after she gave birth to their son, Gabriel. One night, when Kelly was at work, Caleb Quinn came over.
• • •
Johanna was eighty-four years old and still lived in the tall, narrow house her late husband had built when they married and moved to Colorado sixty years earlier. He was a good builder but an amateur designer, and his do-it-yourself approach resulted in some strange architectural quirks. The double doors at the end of the second-story hallway opened onto a twenty-foot drop where he’d intended to build an upper deck. The second floor was accessible not by a staircase, but by a pneumatic, pedal-operated, wrought-iron elevator, which is why Johanna kept a rope ladder upstairs, in case it ever broke and she got stuck up there. The ghosts of her late husband’s hands were all over everything. Most of the people Johanna had known well in her life were dead.
Johanna was having problems with language. Words were leaving her. Simple verbs and nouns mysteriously vanishing from her vocabulary. They were moving out of her brain and leaving their empty shapes behind, like the pale outlines of pieces of furniture that have been sold or given away. She occasionally found herself wondering how to communicate actions like “listen,” “eat,” “give,” or grasping to recall the words for objects like tables, spoons, or garbage cans, as if these things were so unremarkable that people had never bothered to waste time thinking of names for them. She was losing information. It was as if her brain was a wall from which every day someone was carefully removing a few bricks, slowly weakening the integrity of the structure.
She was alone in her house, situated at the intersection of two unpaved county roads, by a lake, a power plant, a line of railroad tracks, and an empty field of brown grass. An aluminum Christmas tree stood in the living room year round. A few years before he died, her husband had bought a telescope, which he had set up on a tripod inside the glass doors to nowhere at the end of the second-story hallway. Her phone rang routinely once a week on Sunday afternoons when her son called from Houston. The call usually came at about three o’clock, som
etimes up to fifteen minutes past or fifteen minutes before the hour. She would wait until the middle of the third or fourth ring to answer it and say: “Hello?” And she would be answered by the disembodied voice of her son in the receiver, tunneling through wires or quivering along a system of strings or tubes or however it got from there to here, and she’d have a conversation with it.
Her son, who lived in Houston, would usually visit twice a year. She still drove herself to the grocery store in town and cooked her own meals.
There was also an oak grandfather clock with a brass pendulum, and it still kept time. Johanna’s hearing was still good enough to predict when the clock would strike, from anywhere in the house, by the subtle ratcheting noise it made when it reared itself to bong out the count of the hour. There was a lot of silence in the house.
She read the Bible. One day, reading the Book of Ezekiel, she began to think about the following passage:
I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. . . . In the midst of the living creatures there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches moving to and fro among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning. And the living creatures darted back and forth like flashes of lightning. Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel upon the earth beside each living creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each had the appearance of a wheel inside a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and their rims were full of eyes all around.
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 3