THE GAP IN the life expectancy was widening according to the morbidity table. It was another part of the National Nightmare. Socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in the mortality rate. The child did not quite understand what this meant. She always thought of tandem and bicycles as going together.
There was an island that allowed only bicycle traffic on it. The child sent away for a brochure. She and her mother might ride in tandem on a bicycle and breathe in the sea air. What could be better than a bicycle built for two? A bicycle was a good thing except that sometimes you saw things you did not want to, along the route. Poor people who were hungry and without houses, Witnesses of God with butterfly nets, or psychics with their useless bits of free-floating information about your past lives. They always wanted to tell you that you were once a peasant in Russia or a soldier in the Civil War, or that you had perished in the South Tower.
The mother was hoping that she and the child might live a long time together. When they pass the soothsayer in the bushes, the mother snarls, I was not a little girl in a babushka two centuries ago. Past lives are no comfort to her. I have this one little life, and the morbidity table, and the sea, and the sky, and the breeze, and the birds, and the bicycle, and the trees, and she opens her arms wide. Luckily the child is in the back to steer.
A SEA BREEZE blows and light pours through the chambers of the heart. Aunt Inga falls asleep.
THERE HAD BEEN a time once when the mother had a friend. Implausible as it seemed, they would go out to the bar on Ladies Night and have drinks with salt lining the rim in shapely glasses. Aside from these times with the friend, the mother had never drunk this drink, or any other. The friend had a small son, and she would bring him along to Ladies Night with her, and the mother would bring the child, and the children would play while the two mothers chatted and laughed and licked the salt and drank the drinks.
One night, the friend told the mother that even though she was only thirty-two, she had been diagnosed with a serious illness and that there was probably a gene from thousands of years ago that could be traced back to a small European village that was responsible for it. The mother, who had been a nurse before the child was born, had an inkling of what the gene might be, and she went home and prayed. Then she called her friend on the phone.
The mother apparently did not understand other people well, even the friend. The mother, without realizing it, had activated a peculiar mechanism in the friend, and by the time she hung up, she realized that there would be no more room for friendship. Never again would they go out to the bar for drinks and laugh and chat.
The mother thinks there are not enough human tears for certain kinds of sadness. When the mother sees the friend now, they wave to each other from a distance, but they are unable to cross the circle of salt each has drawn around the other.
From her memory bank now, she remembers the laugh that once came out of one of the ladies’ mouth at the next table at Ladies Night. The laugh was coming out of the lady’s mouth, but the mouth was taut and unmoving, and it seemed like it must be some sort of trick mouth or artificial mouth, but still sound came out of it, and words. When the mother asked her friend, the friend said casually that this was a result of the Plastic Surgery. She was very matter-of-fact about it, and the mother had liked that. You never knew what you might hear or see, she thought to herself. This was the very reason that the mother and child did not often go out to a restaurant or a bar. But it was different when she was with the friend. With the friend she felt protected.
LITTLE VORTICES BECAME big vortices, and the forward-going band of soldiers on horses began to turn in circles, faster and faster, and were carried up by the high and whirling winds into the sky where, frightened, they cried out for their mothers.
CECIL PETER CAME in breathlessly and announced that the New Age of Funnels had definitively arrived, there could be no doubt. He drew mad spirals with chalk on the path and shouted as if otherwise he would not be heard. It frightened the mother to see Cecil Peter like this. How many able-bodied men had been taken and how many were yet to be taken? he bellowed. He pointed to the flame perched on the mother’s shoulder, which he could not brush away no matter how hard he tried. Watch out with that thing! Cecil Peter said. The mother looked around her. For now, though Cecil Peter carried on like mad, all seemed calm and bright.
EVEN THOUGH THE winds were all around, and near her ankles little vortices whirled, the mother went in search of a piano for the child. There was a simplicity and directness to the task that she liked very much. It was obvious to the mother that if you didn’t learn to play the piano, your life would be less complete and your world diminished. She closed her eyes and began to envision the piano. She did not worry so much about its elegiac qualities: the dark mahogany or the ivory. Besides, hardly any keys were made of ivory anymore.
Before long, a piano became available in the town of Kinderhook, and the mother made her way to it. When the woman with the piano opened the door and saw the mother, it was as if she knew her, and she hurried her into the drawing room with scarcely a word. Drawing room is short for withdrawing room, and it was a place where ladies once went after dinner while the men retired elsewhere. In the drawing room, the woman played the nocturne now.
Later she explained that she had had a son once who loved the piano, but that he had lost his hands in the war. The keys had been refurbished with his finger bones, which the war had sent home in a box. His wedding ring was kept in a saucer on the piano top. The mother braced herself for the rest of the story, which had been foretold in the nocturne.
Eventually, the woman said, a world where her son could not play the piano became a world impossible for him to live in, and he left this life.
She began again to play.
A keyboard of bone makes a sound like no other.
IN THE AGE of Funnels, the Vortex Man ruled, and the mother felt a certain awe when she thought of him there at the center of the whirling world. Though she could not exactly see him, she liked to think of him as a large fellow, wearing a crown and seated on a throne at the core of the Vortex. Conversant with danger and the depths, but a ballast, nonetheless, a guide in dizzying times.
No matter what wind whipped around them, or what the spinning suggested, the Vortex Man remained calm, fixed, solid, jolly even. Such was the mystery of the Vortex, that while all whirled with unfathomable energy, at the center it was still and mild.
She loved him: part wizard, part professor, choreographer, director, smoke artist, misanthrope, a monster, some said. Now the mother was hearing things: Destroyed will be our remembrance from the earth, he bellowed. It was night. Hello, she called, but who could hear her?
Sometimes, she thought his face must seem patient, impassive, serene, in waiting. Sometimes she imagined it as condescending, bemused, intolerant, or worse. Other times, it was possible to see strength and wisdom. More and more, people attempted to make their way to him through high winds and treacherous terrain, braving tornadoes, hurricanes, sunspots, cyclones, black holes, and even ether, the fifth element, to be by his side.
NOW BEFORE HER in the seductive wind-ridden night, the wolf stood in dazzling moonlight. Its silver fur, its sleek, streamlined body. Its snout. The glowing head. If it was an apparition, it was a sly one—and masqueraded as real, and suggested only solidity and magnificence. There was an unearthly quiet. She stood in a thicket of emotion, blinded by its beauty. Something wild moved through her and she shuddered. She remembered when it had turned her long ago from a child into a woman overnight and carried her over the threshold. The wolf darted away now. If the child had been present, she might have named it Jet.
How remarkable is the world, and all its creatures, and the magnitude of the feeling. The force of arrival, and the force of departure. And the way the space, made radiant by the wolf, retained something of that charged, majestic quality, long after the wolf had passed.