Pam grabbed a sponge, dipped it into Zenobia’s largest ocean, and began swabbing her northern hemisphere. Our child cooed and gurgled— and kept on cooing and gurgling as the nurse carried her across the room and set her on the scales.
“Nine pounds, six ounces,” Pam announced.
“Ah, a big one,” said Borealis, voice cracking. Zenobia, I could tell, had touched something deep inside him. His eyes were moist; the surgical lights twinkled in his tears. “Did you hear what a strong voice she has?” Now he worked on the placenta, carefully retrieving the soggy purple blob —it resembled a prop from one of those movies about zombie cannibals Asa was always renting from Jake’s Video—all the while studying it carefully, as if it might contain some clue to Zenobia’s peculiar anatomy. “You got her circumference yet?” he called.
The nurse gave him an oh-brother look and ran her tape measure around our baby’s equator. “Twenty-three and a half inches,” she announced. I was impressed with the way Zenobia’s oceans stayed on her surface instead of spilling onto the floor. I hadn’t realized anybody that small could have so much gravity.
Now came the big moment. Pam wrapped Zenobia in a pink receiving blanket and brought her over, and we got our first really good look. Zenobia glowed. She smelled like ozone. She was swaddled in weather—in a wispy coating of clouds and mist. And what lovely mountains we glimpsed through the gaps in her atmosphere, what lush valleys, wondrous deserts, splendid plateaus, radiant lakes.
“She’s beautiful,” said Polly.
“Beautiful,” Borealis echoed.
“She’s awfully blue,” I said. “She getting enough oxygen?”
“I suspect that’s normal,” said the doctor. “All those oceans…”
Instinctively Polly opened her gown and, grasping Zenobia by two opposite archipelagos, pressed the north pole against her flesh. “Eee-yyyowww, that’s cold,” she wailed as the ice cap ingulfed her. She pulled our biosphere away, colostrum dribbling from her nipple, her face fixed somewhere between a smile and a wince. “C-cold,” she said as she restored Zenobia to her breast. “Brrrr, brrrr…”
“She’s sucking?” asked Borealis excitedly. “She’s actually taking it?”
I’d never seen Polly look happier. “Of course she’s taking it. These are serious tits I’ve got. Brrrr…”
“This is shaping up to be an extremely weird day,” said the assistant surgeon.
“I believe I’m going to be sick,” the anesthesiologist announced.
* * * *
Thinking back, I’m awfully glad I rented an infant car seat from Boalsburg Memorial and took the baby home that night. Sticking Zenobia in the nursery would have been a total disaster, with every gossip monger and freak seeker in Centre County crowding around like she were a two-headed calf at the Grange Fair. And I’m convinced that the five days I spent alone with her while Polly mended back at the hospital was vital to our father-daughter bond. Such rosy recollections I have of sitting in the front parlor, Zenobia snuggled in the crook of my arm, my body wrapped in a lime-green canvas tarp so her oceans wouldn’t soak my shirt; how fondly I remember inserting the nipple of her plastic bottle into the mouthlike depression at her north pole and watching the Similac drain into her axis.
It was tough running the farm without Polly, but my parents pitched in, and even Asa stopped listening to The Apostolic Succession on his CD long enough to help us publish the April Down to Earth, the issue urging people to come out and pick their own asparagus. (“And remember, we add the rotenone only after the harvest has stopped, so there’s no pesticide residue on the spears themselves.”) In the lower right-hand corner we ran a message surrounded by a hot-pink border: WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE BIRTH OF OUR DAUGHTER, ZENOBIA, A BIOSPHERE, ON MARCH 10TH… 9 POUNDS, 6 OUNCES… 23 1/2 INCHES.
My parents, God bless them, pretended not to notice Zenobia was the way she was. I still have the patchwork comforter Mom made her, each square showing an exotic animal promoting a different letter of the alphabet: A is for Aardvark, B is for Bontebok, Z is for Zebu. As for Dad, he kept insisting that, when his granddaughter got a bit older, he’d take her fishing on Parson’s Pond, stringing her line from the peak of her highest mountain.
According to our child-rearing books, Asa should have been too mature for anything so crude and uncivil as sibling rivalry; after all, he and Zenobia were over a decade apart—eleven years, two months, and eight days, to be exact. No such luck. I’m thinking, for example, of the time Asa pried up one of Zenobia’s glaciers with a shoehorn and used it to cool his root beer. And the time he befouled her Arctic ocean with a can of 3-in-One Lubricating Oil. And, worst of all, the time he shaved off her largest pine barren with a Bic disposable razor. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I shrieked, full blast, which is not one of the responses recommended by Dr. Lionel Dubner in The Self-Actualized Parent “I hate her!” Asa yelled back, a line right out of Dr. Dubner’s chapter on Cain and Abel Syndrome. “I hate her, I hate her!”
Even when Zenobia wasn’t being abused by her brother, she made a lot of noise—sharp, jagged wails that shot from her fault lines like volcanic debris. Often she became so fussy that nothing would do but for my parents to baby-sit Asa while we took her on a long drive up Route 322 to the top of Mount Skyhook, a windy plateau featuring Jake’s Video, an acupuncture clinic, and a chiropodist on one side and the Milky Way Galaxy on the other.
“The minute our Landrover pulls within sight of the stars,” I wrote in Down to Earth, “Zenobia always grows calm. We unbuckle her from the car seat,” I told our readers, “and set her on the bluff, and immediately she begins rotating on her axis and making contented little clucking sounds, as if she somehow knows the stars are there—as if she senses them with her dark loamy skin.”
Years later, I learned to my bewilderment that virtually everyone on our mailing list regarded the Zenobia bulletins in Down to Earth as unmitigated put-ons. The customers never believed anything we wrote about our baby, not one word.
Our most memorable visit to Mount Skyhook began with a series of meteor showers. Over and over, bright heavenly droplets shot across the sky, as if old Canis Major had just been given a bath and was shaking himself dry. “Fantastic,” I said.
“Exquisite,” said Polly.
“Zow-eee,” said Zenobia.
My wife and I let out two perfectly synchronized gasps.
“Of course, it’s really just junk, isn’t it, Mommy?” our baby continued in a reedy and accelerated voice: the voice of an animated raccoon. “Trash from beyond the planets, hitting the air and burning up?”
“You can talk!” gushed Polly.
“I can talk,” Zenobia agreed.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I demanded.
Our baby spun, showing us the eastern face of her northern hemisphere. “When talking starts, things get… well, complicated, right? I prefer simplicity.” Zenobia sounded as if she were speaking through an electric fan. “Gosh, but I love it up here. See those stars, Daddy? They pull at me, know what I mean? They want me.”
At which point I noticed my daughter was airborne, floating two feet off the ground like an expiring helium balloon.
“Be careful,” I said. “You might…”
“What?”
“Fall into the sky.”
“You bet, Daddy. I’ll be careful.” Awash in moonlight, Zenobia’s clouds emitted a deep golden glow. Her voice grew soft and dreamy. “The universe, it’s a lonely place. It’s full of orphans. But the lucky ones find homes.” Our baby eased herself back onto the bluff. “I was a lucky one.”
“We were the lucky ones,” said Polly.
“Your mother and I think the world of you,” I said.
A sigh escaped from our baby’s north pole like water vapor whistling out of a teakettle. “I get so scared sometimes.”
“Don’t be scared,” I said, kicking a rock into the valley.
Zenobia swiveled her Africa equivalent toward Venus. “I keep thinking about…
history, it’s called. Moses’s parents, Amram and Jochebed. They took their baby, and they set him adrift.” She stopped spinning. Her glaciers sparkled in the moonlight. “I keep thinking about that, and how it was so necessary.”
“We’ll never set you adrift,” said Polly.
“Never,” I echoed.
“It was so necessary,” said Zenobia in her high, sad voice.
* * * *
On the evening of Asa’s twelfth birthday, Borealis telephoned wanting to know how the baby was doing. I told him she’d reached a circumference of thirty-one inches, but it soon became clear the man wasn’t out for an ordinary chat. He wanted to drop by with Hashigan, Croft, and Logos.
“What’ll they do to her?” I asked.
“They’ll look at her.”
“What else?”
“They’ll look, that’s all.”
I snorted and said, “You’ll be just in time for birthday cake,” though the fact was I didn’t want any of those big shots gawking at our baby, not for a minute.
As it turned out, only Borealis had a piece of Asa’s cake. His three pals were hyperserious types, entirely dismayed by the idea of eating from cardboard Apostolic Succession plates. They arrived brimming with tools —with stethoscopes and oscilloscopes, thermometers and spectrometers, with Geiger counters, brainwave monitors, syringes, tweezers, and scalpels. On first seeing Zenobia asleep in her crib, the four doctors gasped in four different registers, like a barbershop quartet experiencing an epiphany.
Hashigan told us Zenobia was “probably the most important find since the Taung fossil.” Croft praised us for keeping the National Enquirer and related media out of the picture. Logos insisted that, according to something called the Theory of Transcendental Mutation, a human-gestated biosphere was “bound to appear sooner or later.” There was an equation for it.
They poked and probed and prodded our baby; they biopsied her crust. They took water samples, oil specimens, jungle cuttings, and a half-dozen pinches of desert, sealing each trophy in an airtight canister.
“We need to make sure she’s not harboring any lethal pathogens,” Logos explained.
“She’s never even had roseola,” Polly replied defensively. “She’s never even had cradle cap.”
“Indeed,” said Logos, locking my baby’s exudations in his briefcase.
“All during this rude assault,” I wrote in the November Down to Earth, “Zenobia made no sound. I suspect she wants them to think she’s just a big dumb rock.”
* * * *
Now that such obviously important folks had shown an interest in our biosphere, Asa’s attitude began to change. Zenobia was no longer his grotesque little sister. Far from being a bothersome twit, she was potentially the greatest hobby since baseball cards.
All Asa wanted for Christmas was a Johnny Genius Microscope Kit and some theatrical floodlights, and we soon learned why. He suspended the lights over Zenobia’s crib, set up the microscope, and got to work, scrutinizing his baby sister with all the intensity of Louis Pasteur on the trail of rabies. He kept a detailed log of the changes he observed: the exuberant flowering of Zenobia’s rain forests, the languid waltz of her continental plates, the ebb and flow of her ice shelves—and, most astonishingly, the abrupt appearance of phosphorescent fish and strange aquatic lizards in her seas.
“She’s got fish!” Asa shrieked, running through the house. “Mom! Dad! Zenobia’s got lizards and fish!”
“Whether our baby’s life-forms have arisen spontaneously,” we told the readers of Down to Earth, “or through some agency outside her bounds, is a question we are not yet prepared to answer.”
Within a month our son had, in true scientific fashion, devised a hypothesis to account for Zenobia’s physiognomy. According to Asa, events on his sister were directly connected to the atmosphere around Garber Farm.
And he was right. Whenever Polly and I allowed one of our quarrels to degenerate into cold silence, Zenobia’s fish stopped flashing and her glaciers migrated toward her equator. Whenever our dicey finances plunged us into a dark mood, a cloak of moist, gray fog would enshroud Zenobia for hours. Angry words, such as Polly and I employed in persuading Asa to clean his room, made our baby’s oceans bubble and seethe like abandoned soup on a hot stove.
“For Zenobia’s sake, we’ve resolved to keep our household as tranquil as possible,” we wrote in Down to Earth. “We’ve promised to be nice to each other. It seems immoral, somehow, to bind a biosphere to anything so chancy as the emotional ups and downs of an American family.”
Although we should have interpreted our daughter’s fish and lizards as harbingers of things to come, the arrival of the dinosaurs still took us by surprise. But there they were, actual Jurassic dinosaurs, thousands of them, galumphing around on Zenobia like she was a remake of King Kong. How we loved to watch the primordial drama now unfolding at the far end of Asa’s microscope: fierce tyrannosaurs pouncing on their prey, flocks of pterodactyls floating through her troposphere like organic 747’s (though they were not truly dinosaurs, Asa explained), herds of amiable duckbills sauntering through our baby’s marshes. This was the supreme science project, the ultimate electric train set, a flea circus directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
“I’m worried about her,” Asa told me a month after Zenobia’s dinosaurs evolved. “The pH of her precipitation is 4.2 when it should be 5.6.”
“Huh?”
“It should be 5.6.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about acid rain, Dad. I’m talking about Zenobia’s lakes becoming as dead as the moon.”
“Acid rain?” I said. “How could that be? She doesn’t even have people.”
“I know, Dad, but we do.”
* * * *
“Sad news,” I wrote in Down to Earth. “Maybe if Asa hadn’t been away at Computer Camp, things would have gone differently.”
It was the Fourth of July. We’d invited a bunch of families over for a combination potluck supper and volleyball tournament in the north pasture, and the farm was soon swarming with bored, itchy children. I suspect that a gang of them wandered into the baby’s room and, mistaking her for some sort of strange toy, carried her outside. At this point, evidently, the children got an idea. A foolish, perverse, wicked idea.
They got the idea of bringing Zenobia into the basset barn.
The awful noise—a blend of kids laughing, hounds baying, and a biosphere screaming—brought Polly and me on the run. My first impression was of some bizarre and incomprehensible athletic event, a sport played in hell or in the fantasies of an opium eater. Then I saw the truth: the dogs had captured our daughter. Yes, there they were, five bitches and a dozen pups, clumsily batting her around the barn with their snouts, oaf-ishly pinning her under their paws. They scratched her ice caps, chewed on her islands, lapped up her oceans.
“Daddy, get them off me!” Zenobia cried, rolling amid the clouds of dust and straw. “Get them off!”
“Help her!” screamed Polly.
“Mommy! Daddy!”
I jumped into the drooling dogpile, punching the animals in their noses, knocking them aside with my knees. Somehow I got my hands around the baby’s equator, and with a sudden tug I freed her from the mass of soggy fur and slavering tongues. Pressing her against my chest, I ran blindly from the barn.
Tooth marks dotted Zenobia’s terrain like meteor craters. Her largest continent was fractured in five places. Her crust leaked crude oil, her mountains vomited lava.
But the worst of it was our daughter’s unshakable realization that a great loss had occurred. “Where are my dinosaurs?” she shrieked. “I can’t feel my dinosaurs!”
“There, there, Zenobia,” I said.
“They’ll be okay,” said Polly.
“They’re g-gone,” wailed Zenobia. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, they’re gone!”
I rushed the baby into the nursery and positioned her under Asa’s rig. An extinction: true, all horribly true. Zenobia’s sw
amps were empty; her savannas were bereft of prehistoric life; not a single vertebrate scurried through her forests.
She was inconsolable. “My brontosaurs,” she groaned. “Where are my brontosaurs? Where are they?”
Mowed down, pulverized, flung into space.
“There, there, darling,” said Polly. “There, there.”
“I want them back.”
“There, there,” said Polly.
“I miss them.”
“There, there.”
“Make them come back.”
* * * *
The night Asa returned from camp, Borealis and his buddy Logos dropped by, just in time for a slice of Garber Farm’s famous raspberry pie. Borealis looked sheepish and fretful. “My friend has something to tell you,” he said. “A kind of proposal.”
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