LOOK HOW BLUE, the Bay of Fundy! The Grandmother from the North Pole tells the child that the Bay of Fundy is an extremely beautiful and environmentally fragile part of the coastline, and she brings it up on the screen. There, the Grandmother from the North Pole says, she has seen whales. Only four hundred right whales exist in the Northern Hemisphere, and that is where they congregate and she counts them.
Once, blue whales filled every ocean on earth, the Grandmother laments. Now there are only a few, and she awaits their blue visitation. They are so enormous that when they come, she will see them easily from her outpost at the North Pole.
Whales sing above the frequency of the human threshold for sound. Their song moves through the speed of water four times faster than in air. Yes Sven, once blue whales filled every ocean on earth. Now she puts her ear to the emptied ocean. A melancholy sound, a dirge can be heard if nothing else.
Uncle Sven tried his whole life to catch a whale to no avail. All his life he held 180 decibels next to his puny chest. What can withstand the navy’s sonar? Uncle Sven reasoned from his infinitesimal ship. He tried to make a noise that would stop the whale—Little Sven, you know better. All his life he tried. Sven, his one small soul suspended, laments. The muting effects of water. Little Sven, the Grandmother from the North Pole says, you know so much better than that.
The blue whale can accurately map the soul, though the soul of the sea is out of reach. Sven turns on his little sonar. It has been said that a blue whale can build in its mind’s eye a picture of the entire ocean simply by sending out a sound and registering its echo.
The Grandmother from the North Pole knows that the blue whales killed by whalers can never be weighed whole. The heart alone is over a thousand pounds. Extracted, it sings above the human threshold.
A BLUE MULTITUDE of children just back from the ocean huddle around the mother—Lars, Bibi, Ingmar, Anders, Sven, and baby Inga—and she sings to them a whale song and pats their heads.
It is believed to be the largest animal ever to have lived.
THE MOTHER THOUGHT it was one of the great unspoken strangenesses—the inaccessibility of the present—where the child ran toward her on the green grass. So coltish, that day on the lawn. The image indelible, but also vulnerable and porous, permeable, open to bruising or injury. And a medium girl here now, and at the same time a baby in her carriage under the same tree and a toddler toddling on the green grass and a teenager, suddenly sullen, and a grown woman now walking toward her mother who has not aged.
Everything was fluid, nothing was fixed, nothing was in the moment, in the instant—or by the time the instant was upon her, as it approached without notice, it was already gone, had in fact serenely passed by without pause or fanfare. How incidental and how momentous at the same time.
On the Aging Stage the child is a toddler, or the mother is a child, and the Grandmother from the North Pole is young again. Only to die. Even the future seems in memorial, taking on an eerie burnished quality as if it has already passed. Every moment frays and unravels. The child’s child running in the grass. The mother picks her up, but already her skull is covered with moss.
These errant visions. This striving on the Aging Stage after multiple girls in the grass, the Easter egg hunt, the croquet on the lawn, the time of the Communion, or the day not yet here, when the violinist will show up and open his case, shaped like a little lady, and play. Or the soft sutures, furrowing suddenly the grass where they will lay Bunny Boy to rest one day.
NOT SO FAST, Bunny Boy says. The concrete rabbit in purple garments plays a herald horn. Not quite so fast.
TO TAKE THE heart out and fix it, they had to break the child’s sternum. The heart taken from Uncle Lars floated above the mother’s head like a red balloon, and she followed it for the duration of the surgery, wherever it led her. She was just a girl, and she wandered over hill and vale and grassy slope.
How nice to see you, Mr. Min! What are you doing here? He too has been following the red balloon, he says, along with his son. But the mother must have gotten confused, for no Mr. Min was with Uncle Lars then when he was a boy in Minnesota, and Uncle Lars was all grown, and his heart had been put back a long time ago now.
HUMAN BREATH IS pressed through the valve—the origin of music. My Darkling, the mother whispers, petting the child’s head. Tears and seawater wash the valve clean.
BUT WHAT IF time was all around them and they were swimming immersed in it? What if the past hadn’t vanished and the future didn’t eradicate? And it swirled everywhere around them?
The Vortex Man lifted his head and seemed to smile.
What if Oblivion did not pull at them, did not summon them; what if it just stayed in its place, somewhere offstage, or waited in the wings of Uncle Ingmar’s shadow theater a little while longer?
UNCLE INGMAR PHONED to say that the other Ingmar—the great filmmaker—had died, and with that, a small essential light in Uncle Ingmar went out forever. He felt he was the director’s invention, the director’s confection, and now Uncle Ingmar wondered what was left for him. Film was more solid, Uncle Ingmar always said, and reality more remote.
A part of Uncle Ingmar was disappearing now, unable to sustain himself without the other Ingmar. And most fittingly, with that, Uncle Ingmar’s cell phone connection went dead. The mother was not concerned, for she knew Uncle Ingmar would turn up like every year—with the snow.
CECIL PETER SAID that the Age of Funnels always brought madness when it returned, and this time would be no exception. In the pastures the mad cows lowed, and in the rafters the bats chittered, and on the horizon the vanishing men increasingly lost their way and their teeth, and the women, dizzy, swooned a little, and small vortices followed them wherever they went.
The child too was losing teeth. The Toothless Wonder worked hard trying to get the teeth from the mouth of the child, but the mother no longer opened the door. The mother recalls when the child lost her first tooth, and that for a long time she carried it around with her everywhere in her pocket. It was something wonderful to hold: smooth and sure and white—a trinket extracted from the great whirling of time, which spun around her. In the increasingly remote place the mother inhabited, she could carry a tooth, and it served as a souvenir and a talisman and a way through.
More and more the mother found herself in an interim place. She could not get herself to cross over, but neither could she go back. On such days, the tooth was just the thing.
EVERYWHERE THE MOTHER went, she carried the first tooth in her pocket, but one day when she went to feel for it, the first tooth was gone. She was certain she had had it still in the blustery garden, and in the root cellar, and in the smokehouse, so she must have dropped it, she reasoned, in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop.
At night the mother went out into the supermarket parking lot and divided it methodically into quadrants, then took out her broom and carefully began to sweep, the child all the while asleep in her car seat.
The anguished mother, night after night, lights the lamp, sweeps the macadam, and weeps. Never again, she vows, shall she take a tooth, detached from the child’s head, out to the Super Stop & Shop.
IN THE BLUE Park, the Children of the Spectrum feared the sliding pond. They did not care that a box of sparkle awaited them at the bottom. Heights frightened them. The laws of gravity frightened them. They traversed an arc, a continuum that moved from cautious to more cautious to most cautious, from less fearful, to mildly fearful, to paralyzed with fear. Fear of the sliding pond can be attributed to the abnormality in chromosome 15, some members of the community speculate. Yes, and there is always the possibility of Fragile X Syndrome, the mother says.
Take care when walking between the frogs after the rain in spring. Take care when holding the too-soft hand of your grandmother. The Children of the Spectrum moved along a trajectory of carefulness. The mother thought it wouldn’t hurt for more children to be more cautious and less careless in all things.
Blue, removed, fearful of the sliding pond, the child didn’t mind; the child liked the Children of the Spectrum. She did not want to give them the Horse Cure or the Smiling Cure or the Chess Cure like others did. She would sit, if they came, a long time by their sides.