Joints creaking, I sit in the brown chair, well away from her. It has been a long time since I have done this at all, and never by request of the intended recipient. I have also never performed for an audience, like a stage magician, nor did I ever anticipate circumstances under which I would consider such a thing.
I have also never documented the process aloud. Doing so will alter it. I cannot think where to start.
“Don’t you have to touch me?”
“No.”
“Oh. I thought you would have to touch me.”
“No.”
“Is it just words, then? Like a spell?”
“No. It comes out of silence.” After so long away from me, after all this time without her and all the harm she has done me and my children, who is she to ask for, even to know about, my single talent, the seed and fruit of who I am?
She nods and shifts in her seat. “I’ll be quiet then.”
I want to talk to her. I want to leave her. I want her to die, here and now, frightened and untouched by me. I want to take her in my arms, die with her, open her up and pour into her everything I have and everything I can imagine in whatever time is left to us. I am not strong enough for this. I must be. Out of love for Eva Marie and devotion to the world, I must be strong enough. This has always been my way, my scourge and my salvation.
The deepening of ordinary quiet into and beyond stillness requires considerably longer than it once did, and is far more painful. Eva Marie appears to be the one in a trance, while my restless mind continues to notice and internally comment upon the external environment: dust in the air of Vaughn’s undusted house, pale gold light steadily brightening through the window un-curtained except by dirt and vine, Eva Marie’s powdery rose perfume.
Reaching the place I need to reach is an act not of will but of surrender; I remember this in principle before I remember how to do it. Surrender has never come naturally to me, and now I am long out of practice. The difficulty of it, the pain it causes me, assures me of its value and truth.
Every time I have given to someone else—forced into someone else—an undeveloped part of myself, I personally have been diminished in order to enrich the world at large. Giving to Eva Marie the acceptance of death I have long seen on the horizon of my soul, as it were, but never been able to approach for myself, might well be my undoing. And the sacrifice is the meaning of my life.
PROTOCOL
1. SENDER FILLS CONSCIOUSNESS AND SENSORIUM WITH THAT WHICH REQUIRES INTERVENTION: PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED, VOID TO BE FILLED, SITUATION TO BE RECTIFIED, QUALITY OR CHARACTERISTIC TO BE IMPARTED (HEREINAFTER REFERRED TO AS “MENTAL SUBSTANCE”).
When the intent was for Vaughn to create music, I had first to be filled with music and the need to create it. In order to infuse Will with the compulsion to garden, it was necessary to be infused myself with the sight, sound, smell, feel, taste of things grown in the garden, and with the compulsion to grow them. Parental devotion, social and political activism, adventurousness, determination to forge and maintain deep connections with other living things, creativity and talent—I was both able and required to achieve these states in what might be called my imagination though that term is pallid and hardly does it justice.
For the sake of accuracy, it must be acknowledged that this part of the procedure was by no means unpleasant. In point of fact, it was ecstatic. Dangerously so. The pain, the profound self-inflicted wound, came from extracting each fully felt passion out of my own heart and passing it into someone else’s.
Now, death enters my awareness like a creature in a room. I will die. Everyone I know will die. Despite primal terror, I do not turn away.
“Talk to me, Alex. What are you doing?”
My voice catches in my throat. I cough, swallow, try again. “I am taking in death. I am taking in your death.”
She cries out, “No!” but also does not flee, stays where she is, her body rigid in the chair, her mind still available to me.
“No!” I too cry out, perhaps aloud, and only by casting it as a gift to Eva Marie and to humanity am I able to keep my own mind available, my own body from collapsing under the weight, my own heart and brain from seizing up.
I will die. Eva Marie will die. Everyone I know will die. This most intimate of certainties fills me like napalm. I do not turn away, though I desperately want and need to. I stay with it. This is my act of love.
But it is not the experience of death that Eva Marie wants from me. It is the acceptance of the experience of death. This requires another step in the process, another level of commitment, a further effort of both will and will-lessness.
“Nothing’s happening. Should I be feeling something? Alex?”
Bella emits a harsh, prolonged gurgle. I haven’t heard that sound from her before, or from any baby, and the acoustics of the cave make it even more startling. Waves of horror wash over me.
I don’t want to stop reading the handbook, for fear its spell will be broken and I’ll lose my chance to get into it. I’m not likely to be able to figure out what’s wrong with the baby at this particular moment, much less what to do about it. But I can’t ignore her.
Laying the handbook face-up and open on the ground, I kneel beside Bella. Her eyes are wide open, bulging. White flecks have formed in the corners of her mouth. At awkward angles beside her ears, her fists are opening and closing in what looks like agitation, and inside the swaddling blanket her feet and knees flail weakly like kittens in a sack.
I’m afraid to touch her, afraid not to. “What’s wrong, little girl?” I coo, pointlessly. “Bella, sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
Mostly what I want at this moment is for her to stop—stop making that awful noise, stop contorting, stop needing some impossible thing from me. Or, I realize, to be able to pour directly into her brain and heart some magic healing essence that will make it easier for her to live or easier for her to die—one or the other or both.
When I try to pick her up, she stiffens and I’m afraid I’ll drop her. When I hastily lay her back down, she wails as if in anguish. I stroke her back. She flinches away from me. I sit on my haunches without touching her and just watch, not knowing what I’m watching for or to what I’m bearing witness, trying just to be here.
After a while the noise and movement stop as abruptly as they began, and Bella is quiet, eyes still wide open, fists still at her ears but limp now and still. She’s not asleep, or dead, but it doesn’t seem to me that she’s actually conscious, either.
Knees creaking, I ease myself back to the handbook, trying not to disturb her, having no idea what in this world disturbs or pleases her or enters into her awareness at all. After a while, I resume reading.
PROTOCOL
2. SENDER ALLOWS MENTAL SUBSTANCE TO GATHER INTO PURE AND HIGHLY PRESSURIZED CONCENTRATE.
“Alex?”
Dimly I am aware of my name being spoken, but there is no need to respond, no response to be made. The ecstasy I have not experienced in many, many years is now suffusing me: apprehension of how it would be to accept mortality, one’s own personal mortality, my own, is transcendent joy. I yearn to keep it for myself. But I will not. My purpose in this life is to give the most important things to others, at the greatest possible cost to myself.
I must wait, however, for the exact moment when the excruciating pressure has built to the very verge of explosion, until the essence of the thing is as pure and concentrated as I am able to tolerate and the danger is poised at its most intense level. I am old and frail and out of practice, but somehow I must wait, despite the shaking and nausea, despite the pain and panic and terrible yearning. I must wait.
Bella is moaning. The small eerie sound doesn’t come close to filling the cave. Holding her may not be the right thing, but it’s all I know to do. It occurs to me that I can probably hold her and read the handbook at the same time. Very gently, although I don’t know how I could possibly hurt her now
, I lay her across my lap and the handbook open on her torso. When the cover flops over her face I hastily adjust it, but there’s no alteration in the sound she’s making, and I bend close, put my ear and then my lips to her distorted rosebud mouth, to assure myself that it’s really coming from her. Even then, I’m not entirely sure.
For a while, though, I don’t read. I just wait. I’m just still. The baby’s moans are hollow, like tiny drumbeats. I can’t escape them. I can’t get enough of them. They pulse and ache, pulse and ache, pulse.
PROTOCOL
3. SENDER GATHERS MENTAL SUBSTANCE INTO THIN, FLEXIBLE, CYLINDRICAL FORM SUITABLE FOR TRANSFER AND INFUSION.
Moaning emanates from one or both of us, Eva Marie and myself, giving voice to the pressure that will surely tear us both apart if it goes on one second too long, but that will cause this entire enterprise to fail if released one second too soon. So focused am I on the gathering that I am hardly aware of being focused, hardly aware at all, until the mental substance begins as if of its own will to take the wire-like form that will allow its transfer from me to the other, from me to Eva Marie. There is the sensation of deep internal burning. I stay with it.
PROTOCOL
4. SENDER TRANSFERS MENTAL SUBSTANCE INTO RECIPIENT. IF RESISTANCE IS ENCOUNTERED, HEAT AND FORCE ARE INCREMENTALLY INCREASED. CARE MUST BE TAKEN TO FILL RECEIVING VESSEL TO CAPACITY BUT NOT BEYOND.
No shit. This is why I left him and stayed away for so long. I was afraid he would fill me with his plans for my life, his determination of what and who I should be, beyond my capacity to contain it, until I, the “vessel,” would just blow apart.
And he knew it. Here is evidence that all along he knew the danger he was putting me in.
Something is swelling in me. I recognize it. As a child, I often had this ballooning, pressurized sensation, the feeling of being expanded and carried to a chosen place. Later, I would frame it as doing what life expected of me, often for no reason other than that I could. Finding relatives in the Old Country because I knew they were there to be found, though it took years. Keeping in touch with old friends because not to do so would have been stupid and morally wrong. Profoundly loving Martin because I was able to.
Sometimes it has been nothing short of a calling. Adopting my kids was like that; mothering them is, too, never mind that frequently it’s also a pain in the ass. Writing used to be like that; it would drive me to the computer in the middle of the night possessed by a story to be told, a character to be developed, a word not to be lost.
Something is growing in me now. It’s happening again. Bella is fighting for breath. Her eyes roll back in her head, then roll forward and dart from side to side, focusing on no one thing, taking in everything or nothing through her baby-fine skin.
Is she dying? Am I to help her die? Or is she fighting for life and I am being called to assist?
Daddy, you fucking old wizard, tell me what I’m supposed to do.
Eva Marie gasps, “I can’t!” but we are not yet quite at that point. Full, rich, solid acceptance of death is streaming out of me into her, and there is more of it, more space in her for it to fill, more space in me to be emptied.
Indeed, something may be wrong, something for which I am not prepared may be taking place, for Eva Marie’s receptive capacity is considerably greater than I would have predicted. The mental substance flows and flows, and she is moaning as if in erotic ecstasy, and now I cannot stop it, now one of us may well implode or explode, now it is beyond me and I fear it is going too far.
Eva Marie and I are in each other’s arms.
PROTOCOL
5. AT THE PRECISE MOMENT OF FULL BUT NOT OVER-CAPACITY, SENDER STOPS THE FLOW OF MENTAL SUBSTANCE. TRANSFER COMPLETE. RECIPIENT NOW POSSESSES ALL OF THE MENTAL SUBSTANCE IN QUESTION, SENDER NONE.
Whatever it is that I thought was flowing into me must in fact be flowing through me, because I can feel its entrance and exit wounds. It’s a stream, a semi-liquid snake hissing and swiftly slithering. It hurts.
Bending over the handbook and the baby, I feel a change in Bella.
The flow stops when it is done. I am emptied, Eva Marie trembles and struggles for air, but neither of us is destroyed. I have done what I can do, and it is good.
Eva Marie whispers, “Thank you, Alex.”
I can’t do this.
I won’t do this. Fuck you, Daddy. “No!” I shout to him. “No!”
“Yes!”
“Alex?”
“Goddamn it, yes!”
I am not, after all, emptied. Eva Marie has taken all she can hold, but Alexandra—somewhere, Alexandra—must be given more. As always, always, she asks too much of me.
The substance that has been flowing through me has stopped. Gratified that I have enough self-determination to say no to my father, at the same time I panic at the prospect of refusing the call.
Bella’s gurgling becomes a prolonged shriek and her back arches wildly, snapping her head. I put her down and she writhes and screams. I put my hands on either side of her rigid little body and she flails, bellows, contorts.
I pull myself away from Eva Marie, who does not want to let me go, and curl into a foetal position on the floor. “Do it! Alexandra, you can do this! Now, now, you must do it!”
Abruptly the baby goes still.
Forcing my face as close to hers as possible without actually touching, I can see she is alive. Her blue eyes flicker, and for an instant they seem to focus on mine. From her grotesque rosebud of a mouth comes breath. The longing to feel her heartbeat in my fingers is almost overpowering.
I struggle to my hands and knees and crawl until I am at the entrance to my father’s cursed laboratory, on the very verge of escape into and, with any luck, through the yellow wood, when something pierces me. I crouch there. Bella lies still and awake on the dirt floor. Awkwardly I move to her. I kneel over her and she is lightly swaddled in my shadow.
A hot, viscous substance floods into me—from my father; I know it’s from my father—and through me and into her. What am I giving her? What am I allowing him to give to her? It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing I can do to stop it now.
Together, a two-part ragged harmony, Bella and I begin to keen.
“Yes!”
“Sandi?”
Chapter 15
The Koves have gathered to see me off. I’m going home today.
There’s a slant to the light and crispness to the air, abruptly, from one day to the next. It’s the first morning of autumn, no matter what the calendar says. Just the words “autumn” and “morning” set off both homesickness sharp as cider and the rich deep comfort of knowing I’ll soon be home.
That place, home, isn’t yellow. In a few weeks it will be, yellow and red and orange, the oak leaves lobed burgundy. But there that’s a brief season, not a state of being.
Bella’s and my suitcases, laptop, briefcase, diaper bag are in the back of Will’s pick-up. Bella herself is in the Snugli on my chest, where I can see and smell and touch her. I’m sitting on Emily’s deck surrounded by family. I miss them already, and I can hardly wait to get out of here. We’re having a barbecue, of course.
Daddy, though, isn’t here. Mom isn’t here, either; she’s gone back to her husband, which is as it should be. Whether I’ll keep in touch with her from now on remains to be seen. Daddy’s absence means something, though as usual I don’t know what. Vaughn told me he refused to come. He hasn’t spoken to me since he found out I was leaving and taking the baby with me. I don’t know what his problem is. I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. Regardless, it’s what I’m doing.
“Will you take her?” Emily asked me that afternoon when we’d made our way back from our father’s cave to his house. We’d gotten ourselves and Bella to the couch, the same red couch where Emily and I used to sit and play checkers or dolls or cars, to watch Star Trek and Gunsmoke and clandestine cartoon
s Daddy had banned because they would damage our minds, later to make out with our boyfriends on the rare occasions when we had them and at the same time.
Emily had made no move to take her daughter when I’d offered her, so I was holding her. Bella had stopped flailing and making alarming sounds. Her eyes had stopped that awful darting and rolling, too, and I was thinking they might even have lit on me. Certainly she was not responding at all to her mother, who was not responding at all to her.
“Take her?” I echoed. “You mean raise her?”
My sister gave a bitter laugh. “Oh, come on, Sandi, you know she won’t live long enough to raise.”
I couldn’t believe I wasn’t just flat-out refusing. “Em, she’s your child,” I tried. But I heard in my own voice how much I wanted this baby, now that she’d mentioned it, and I was sure she heard it, too.
Again, I held Bella out to her. A look of horror came over her face, and she actually recoiled, which triggered in me a fierce protective instinct. As I gathered the baby back into a snug embrace, her mother said, “I’m pregnant.”
I stared at her. “How did that happen?”
“How do you think?”
“But you’ve been hiding in your room, staying away from everybody. Earl was worried—”
“I went to him. Three times, just to be sure.”
“You did this on purpose.”
“Sure. Having babies is what I do.” A shadow passed over her already shadowed face. “As long as I can. I don’t know what happens after that.”
“You already have a baby to take care of.”
“I can’t take care of an infant like this—” she gestured toward the baby without looking at her—“and another at the same time. And I can’t do it while I’m pregnant, either. Being pregnant isn’t as easy as it used to be.”
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