The disease, the accident that brings them to her is just the tip of a spiked pithing stick lifetimes longer than the few years these victims have been given. She has brought children back from the point of despair, returned them to whole except for a refusal to urinate, or an uncontrollable need to pee around the clock. Or eat until unconscious, or starve into airy nothingness. Or scream at certain colors and pitches, or buckle over from imaginary pains. Or refuse to talk, or lose all ability to stop. She has seen a child pinch off his finger in a folding bed rather than let himself be discharged back home.
What medicine can she possibly slip them, during the few weeks when the state will pick up the tab? She needs the psychic analog of antimalarial paste from thirteen buttercups. Brown sugar and beets for whooping cough. Bandages of spider webs, cobwebs, puffballs, for binding up wounds. Powwows for burns and bleeding. Nothing less than immigrant folk remedies will help. Leaping cures for those abandoned to a newfound land.
A single checklist informs her every therapy. If their legs jitter, she takes them jogging. Longer and longer circuits, through the wards, up and down the emergency stairwells, around the parking lot, in neighborhood runs swelling incrementally until they are off, no turning back, gone. If their voices catch or slur, then it’s amateur forensics, debating gowns scissored from surgical scrubs, the stage curtain stenciled with the hospital logo. A season of speech, and they begin throwing off the podium yoke, exiting into the imaginary wings in search of more in situ material. If they still scream in their sleep over torched apartment blocks, then she assigns them to a design team busy drawing up an entire utopian city from the fireplugs up. Those who have fallen out of perfect pitch she recruits to carol the geriatrics, and if their “First Noel” comes out more sinuous mariachi or reedy street Arabic than Eurodiatonic, then it’s that much more medicinal for the chorus.
Reading out loud helps as much as anything. Hardly among her official requirements; not included in what they ever-so-modestly pay her for. It’s strictly volunteer, candy-striper activity at best. But nothing can touch it for building collateral trust. When the parents go home (yes, she repeatedly tells the slumming doctors, even welfare mothers notice when one of their dozen is missing), after her own official rounds are over, Linda sneaks back into the sick bay, setting off shouted requests. Box scores, pop lyrics, soap opera synopses, fanzines, miscellanies, believe-it-or-nots, books of video game clues: they demand any printed word whatsoever from the outside world.
The reading therapy is as much for her as for them. It restores her to prepragmatics, when she still believed she might somehow make a living out of the communal pleasure of words. At eighteen, the mystery unfolding around her like a convoluted orchid, the erotics of social prosody suggested for a semester that English lit might be a legitimate, maybe even a responsible major. In those days the fate of the West at its pivotal, wavering moment seemed to depend on what the word “still” meant in the line “Thou still unravished bride of quietness.” She hears it again now, out loud—poetry, antique verse so strange and illegally alien in this place that it holds even hardened and dying children spellbound for the scope of a few stanzas.
Read-alouds, the oldest recorded remedy, older than the earliest folk salves: these are her only way to trick her patients into downing, in concentrated oral doses, the whole regimen of blessed, bourgeois, fictive closure they have missed. Tales are the only available inoculations against the life they keep vomiting up for want of antigens. She reads them things she herself would have grimaced at at eight, knowing that without at least a taste of that outrageous fable of return in their deficiency-distended stomachs, they will never survive their own recovery. Children already lost to inherited addictions sit in a rapt half-circle, listening to their moonlighting occupational therapist reading from a book she has found in the ward library, a volume rescued from God knows what improbable secondhand shop of anomalous trinkets fetching absurd designer prices for hysterical campiness—tea trays emblazoned with saluting fifties hostesses or wall lamps made from the front ends of fatuous Chevy sedans. She plows through the spine, ticking off, one by one, the tales from that anthology, A Country a Day for a Year.
Tonight’s story is from the distant North. How is it—the primary mystery for students of children’s literature—that in all eras, the richest hints of hidden destination derive from the North? The differential is wider than the gap between brocade and flax. She has her private answer: the South insists on the child as embryonic adult, while the North has always known that the adult is just a displaced child. Is it freezing climate that crystallizes imagination, or is there some Southern Andersen or Grimm that her anthology has not yet discovered? She reads to them tonight about an innkeeper’s wife on the North Sea, who dreams of unspendable treasure to be found outside the bourse of the big city. There, at the bourse, a broker laughs at her gullibility. “Why, I myself have dreamed of a fortune under the bed in an inn on the North Sea.” The woman rushes home, tears up her floorboards, and finds her kingdom. This is the key to narrative therapy, the cure of interlocking dreams.
That surgeon she has foolishly flirted with comes into the ward on autopilot, stands and examines her. She feels herself a girl in this moment, reading. The anachronistic tableau fades as he watches, a freak five-point snowflake melting in the hand. She keeps her cadence up for half a story before he withdraws, thinking himself unseen. Outside the hospital window, even in the failing light, every listening child can see it is still East Angel City, a neighborhood a year or two away from setting itself on fire, exploding again under the pressure of daily unanswered need, routinely violated due process, random strip-search and seizure. They need only shift their eyes to see a skyline rushing to void all the clauses of the social contract it has but acquiesced to until now. Each thing she reads them tells in code how they are rudderless, at the mercy of their own unchecked unfolding, racing to event’s end.
Story Hour is strictly giveaway. Tax wars in a country that considers public payment to be an infringement on private liberty guarantee that all costs remain hidden, shunted off on revolving credit until the unpayable lump sum comes due. Linda never got around to economics in school. Perhaps that’s why she, almost alone, sees that society’s every advance up to this minute has been paid for by liquidating principal, mortgaging the unborn. It takes no special macroeconomic smarts to see where the curves of expenditure and cost will intersect. She reads them another tale, one where life exists entirely off wishes and interest.
Where necessity goes unpaid, she must donate her time, extending physical medicine until she becomes half teacher, half trainer, half director, half coach, half psychologist. When she reads out loud to too many, too long into the night, when the story safeguarding her listeners against actual awfulness is too Northern and icy in its enchantments, when the sense of its foretold ending grows too immediate and real, she begins to draw up, by story’s end, a report card for the entire delinquent human project, a teacherly evaluation of this global little handgun victim, curled up invalid in front of her for the evening:
MATH AND SCIENCE: A. Student possesses enormous aptitude. Advancing rapidly on all fronts now . . .
LANGUAGE ARTS: B–. Although gifted here, student remains undisciplined. Lapses into fits of inarticulateness when excited. Penmanship a joke.
SOCIAL STUDIES: C. Disappointing. Despite every opportunity of late, fails to rise above provincialism. Shows little sensitivity to foreign affairs . . .
ECONOMICS: C–. Extremely uneven. Impressive progress in some areas, at the expense of others. Has not yet figured out the basic principles . . .
CIVICS AND POLY SCI: D. Don’t even ask. Pleads no contest on final exams.
MUSIC AND ART: B +. Student constantly surprises. Varied and restless. Creativity really coming to the fore. A big overhaul may lie in wait.
HISTORY: Incomplete.
HEALTH AND PERSONAL HYGIENE: F. Five million children dead each year of diarrhea, for God’s sake.
With such mixed grades, can the creature ever dream of graduating? Could any tutoring, any therapy at all work at this hour? Radical surgery, her new perhaps-beau might whisper to her. No program short of total slash-and-burn has any chance in hell of helping.
Fortunately, she’s never been one to worry about the odds. One reaches an age when being realistic just isn’t practical anymore. The work she does all life long may save no one. Even for the limb-clipped, organ-stripped preschooler with the IV walker, she may do nothing but cake-makeup a scar that the crippled child will never walk away from whole. She may at best only delay the night of full payment, the helpless screaming fit of fear laid down in personality’s pede ward, in the so-called formative years. But whatever she gives them will be more than they arrived with.
And if she shares her professional conviction—say with this new man, at thirty-three already too worn down by fact ever to follow her, this jaded practitioner of a career she should know better than to mix with, a man who clearly prefers that she not learn the first thing about him—if she shows him the clinical trials for this secret healing charm, would he get it? Might she make even her new surgeon see that to pretend, to live as if life might yet lead all the way to unexpected deliverance, is the best way to keep from dying in midfable? Could she get him to sit in with her circle of stricken, listening children and take part in the promise of fiction, the pleasure, our one moral obligation?
He is no older, no more decimated than the worst of her children. And she has only this, this cobbled, worn ministration, to show any of those stubborn enough to remember how they have been dropped down in the middle of a plot that is only waiting for them to follow the lead. You are going somewhere. You are going somewhere. Sound it out, exercise the phonetics, the rhyme, the muscular spasm, the shape of the storied curve—beginning, development, complication, end. It is the point of being, the thing bones were built for, broken by, the land all leaps aim at, the link, the hovering conclusion, her whole-body therapy, the reading cure. A tale at night. A country a day for a year.
(Night 57, Japan.)
This is how the world begins. At first, the All was no more than a blurry egg, full of seeds and shaken together. After a time beyond telling, the heavier parts began to sink down and the lighter floated upon them, forming the plain of high heaven. On this plain, three gods were born of no one, lived out an eternity, and then vanished back into nothing.
How you gonna be born of no one? Everybody got . . .
Shh. Come on. It’s a makeup; that’s how it opens. Next there came about, on their own, a few pairs of gods who lived in the drifting middle of nowhere. The youngest couple among them were called Izanami and Izanagi, or She-the-Inviter and He-the-Inviter. She and He were ordered by their elders to collect a solid world from out of the shapeless, muddy waters that flowed beneath the high plain of heaven. They stood on the bridge of the sky and dipped a jeweled spear into the sandy broth below them, stirring it slowly. They pulled their spear out of the waters. A drop of brine sticking to the shaft fell off to form Onogoro, the first island.
She-the-Inviter and He-the-Inviter climbed down onto the island and began exploring it. They circled slowly around one another at the pillar at the center of the solid world. Slowly, they discovered each other, and learned that they wanted one another.
Uh-oh. They in trouble now. When my daddy found my big brother and me . . .
No, sweetheart; it wasn’t like that. Remember, these two gods had no parents. Slowly, by experiment and chance, She-the-Inviter and He-the-Inviter learned how to make a baby. But their first child was born with something wrong with it. Because She did not yet know the rules of courtship she accidentally broke them. So the first infant who laid eyes on the world was born deformed.
Heh. Like me, you mean?
Yes, Chuck, my man. A little like you. She and He named their boy Hiruko, the Leech Child. They didn’t know what they were supposed to do with him, so they built him a boat of reeds and set the boy adrift on the open sea. So you see, the very first child ever was abandoned. As soon as the Leech Child drifted out of sight, his parents began making other babies, more deities to cover every walk of creation.
Among their new children were the eight main islands of the world. She-the-Inviter was burned to death while giving birth to her last child, Fire. Gods spilled out of her dying body. Other gods arose from the tears of her husband’s eyes. In a rage, He-the-Inviter swung his great blade and cut off the head of Fire, his son. From out of the bleeding neck of Fire there sprang Thunder, with several more gods.
The soul of She-the-Inviter went down into Yomi, the land of darkness, where He-the-Inviter madly followed. He wanted to find her and bring her back to life. But his wife had already eaten food cooked in the land of darkness, so she could not come back. The dead She warned her husband not to look upon her. But he disobeyed her command. He looked at her face, and saw something horrible. His wife was rotting. Maggots covered her. Shh! Yes, like the ones in old garbage. He-the-Inviter ran back up into the world in terror. She was hurt and angry, and She sent a pack of Furies to chase after her husband.
When He reached the surface once again, He sealed up the entrance to the land of darkness with an enormous rock. His wife became furious. She threatened to kill a thousand of their children every day that He kept her trapped. But He just sneered at her. He said that He would father fifteen hundred new children for every thousand that She killed. She and He knew they had come to an end.
To purify himself, He bathed in the waters. As He washed, more gods sprang from him. From the water sprinkling from his left eye was born the Sun, and from his right the Moon. Out of his nose there came Susanoo, the God of the Wind and Storm.
His nose? Gross. But what about the boy in the boat? The Leech?
It doesn’t say. He must have floated for a long, long time. Reeds can be very watertight in these stories. But the ocean can be pretty big too. The Leech Child probably drifted in the current for years, farther and farther away, into places where land was completely unheard of.
Maybe the boat was held together by little metal clasps. That’s it; I once read something like this. He pulled one of these metal strands loose and fashioned a bit of tinsel from it, which he dangled in the water just to amuse himself, because it looked pretty. And that’s how, by accident, he learned that fish will bite at a hook. And he figured out that by eating fish, he could live pretty much as long as he needed.
Yeah? Well, all right. It’s possible. Read us another one.
(Night 139, central Italy. Twin infant sons of a vestal virgin and the God of War are sentenced by the king to be drowned in the Tiber. Miraculously, the cask they are put in floats. They are found and suckled by a wolf more loving than human parents. The foundlings grow up to invent the West.)
Go on. We want more.
(Night 21, the Near East. Another terrified tyrant orders all the male offspring of a certain tribe to be drowned to death. The mother makes a little reed ark for the boy, and lays him in the rushes on the riverbank. The tyrant’s daughter finds the infant, and hires the boy’s own mother to nurse him. The boy grows up to bring God’s law to . . .)
Why drowning? Why water all the time? Why little boats?
Yes, that’s odd, isn’t it? Happens all over the place. Look at this: Night 308, the Mississippi. Night 145, Norway. Night 98, Kashmir. Night 114, Zimbabwe.
(Across the planet, attempted drownings, tiny bound bodies thrown deliberately back into the sea. All through the time line, vanishing into the current, carried along by the undertow. Every other story in any anthology—children sealed up, locked in casks, keelhauled, strapped on rafts, sucked down by the departing tide. A few miraculously saved, for future purposes.)
And some mom and dad always want to kill them.
Yes, true! Notice how the stories always blame some evil step-something, or foster fathers, or kings? Guilty conscience, I’ll bet you anything. These cats have something to hide, I’m here to
tell you. If they’re not putting the kids out to drown in chests, then they’re leaving them on church steps or by a roadside out of town. Or here, look: dropped off deep in the woods, bricked up into cornerstones, rolled over on in the parents’ shared bed . . .
( . . . swaddled too tightly, delivered with a club to the skull or butterfly slit in the trachea, wrung with a bit of old cloth, or, for maximum efficiency–Night 3, Greece—eaten.)
Awesome. Any that stuff really happen?
(Night Before Last, Pacific Islands: two thirds of offspring. West Africa: any twins. Sarawak: boys strung up from trees. China: daughters given instant turnaround chance to return as sons. Germany, Italy, France: 1.8 “live birth” males to one female. SE England: “Three drowned in pond, two in well, five buried, two suffocated by pillow, two left in ditch, one thrown on dung heap, one slammed against bedpost, two twisted necks . . .” Chicago; Houston; Portland, OR: discreet suburban fatalities, malign neglect, everyday police roundups dribbling out of radio speakers in the dark, on all-night talk stations turned down low, between choruses of that old folk tune, I am no stranger to your town.)
Why?
(Tales 101 and 343: postpartum birth control. Done because we are too many. Tales 45, 83, 162: quick cures for deprivation, illegitimacy, incest. That historical run in the 200s: merciful assists of nature, stifling the half-lunged, leaving the acephalic to starve. All but the hardiest arctic infants turned onto open pack ice. Mass infanticide—the simple extension of the battering and abuse cases right here in this listening ring. Folder 219: “She wouldn’t love me, the little four-year-old slut. So I burned her feet with a cigarette.” One step further, now. A last-ditch, or oven, or well, or pillowcase effort to extirpate the thing that will always remain a heartbeat outside control. Children are evil creatures. A devil lives in them. You can recognize changelings by the way they cry. A child needs both bread and blows. We must terrify them into being good. It was going to outlive me, so I killed it.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 10