IN THE FACE of the Blue Madness, she thought of the mother she might have turned out to be in the great Midwest with an apron full of palm-of-the-hand babies and wee ones, and how when the funnels came up, she would just stand there with the whole clan until the very last moment. The funnel would be coming right toward them, and she’d open the trapdoor every time with only seconds to spare.
Despite the child and all the palm-of-the-hand babies, of which there are many, the mother’s solitude is cosmic: a force field, and everything is engulfed by it. She was hypnotized by the funnels, she’d say—all that swirling, and she would tilt the babies’ heads toward the green light, and she would hold the child’s hand tightly.
In the face of the whirling world, the mother, with resolve, thought maybe they could tack a few things down, or make categories, or make lists in order to better manage the chaos and the solitude, which were mounting, and this the child approved of, and the mother felt soothed. She closed her eyes and behind them a wall of rain began to fall.
The mother recalls the magnetic water city—but whether she had produced it with her tears, or it had produced her, she could not say for sure. For the weeks she was there, she never stopped weeping. She recalls water flooding the streets, water turning the girls round and round—and those extravagant fountains. If the insatiable city had produced her, a weeping woman, in a place reliant on weeping for its existence, so be it.
She thought of the painter Titian, and she thought of the painter Tintoretto, and she thought of the Lago di Garda. Perhaps she was part of a larger design she would never see or understand.
All she knew was that she shimmered.
Some days, the mother had the distinct feeling that she had been painted into this ravishing scene, thousands of years earlier, where she had been left to wait. Only today, in the small library, when the child turns the large beautiful pages of the art book, running her hand over the painting, and murmuring says, look! does the mother come to life.
The people who had assembled in the meadow gasped. The very letters that spelled Spiegelpalais above the mirrored tent seemed to have caught fire. The children climbed the fire truck’s ladder, rung by rung by rung.
At last the shark, suspended in a vitrine of formaldehyde, had arrived. It had made its way from across the ocean to the Valley and would remain at the Spiegelpalais for an undisclosed period of time. Many who flocked to the verdant Valley in summer came to view the shark suspended in liquid.
When you visit the shark, the paper had advised, visit it with an open mind. It was meant to be viewed as a work of art, and it was titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The mother and child walked gingerly into the tent. A blue light filled them. In the large tank, nothing moved. The child pressed her hand to the place of the shark’s mouth.
Everything in the world is a substitute for every other thing in the world. Today the mother was quite certain that whatever had once happened to her, whatever she had survived, whatever had brought her here to the Valley, whatever allowed for this—the Spiegelpalais, the child’s hand in hers, the other hand of the child in the shark’s mouth, the shark suspended in its glass case—she was inordinately lucky. Like the shark, she was floating too, outside time, outside space, at the mercy of a merciful universe.
The child thought this was by far the best art show she had ever been to.
A human skull encrusted with diamonds was promised at the Spiegelpalais next.
At the edge of the meadow, a battalion of small children carry a heavy fire hose and put out the fire that has unexpectedly begun in the left ventricle.
She wanted to order the man who was her friend a Divinity Basket, with flowers as white as the resurrection, but in all the Valley, there were no white flowers to be had.
Since when are there no white flowers in summer? she wanted to ask the florist on the phone. Since when is a town bereft of flowers in summer? Summer, he says, and even though he is a small businessman, his voice drifts, and he says summer as if it is a question. Yes it is summer, the mother states plainly.
All of the flowers the town possessed within its borders had already been used up on the man who had once shown her the drawing of the gallbladder, the florist tells her.
Now the season will not hold. The path she walks slips back into winter. Like those moving paths in the airport, she now seemed to be moving without taking a single step, toward the funeral home, a place she does not want to go in such a hurry. She worried that cold and flowerless, she would arrive too quickly now to her destination. With or without flowers, the family must arrive to greet the body first.
Standing outside in the chill, the mother thought maybe they should all let up on the flowers a little. Maybe he will suffocate under so many flowers. In the end he was as thin and light as a harp, and perhaps not able to withstand the weight of so many flowers. Had anyone thought of that?
Before she went blind at the Spiegelpalais, the artist had spent a good deal of time scouring the Valley, traversing both the hills and vales in search of a cardinal that had met its end. It was against the law to shoot or otherwise harm a songbird of any sort for any reason in the Valley, and as a result, each day the artist’s search had grown more and more desperate, as a cardinal was imperative to her next work of art. Though she had ordered hundreds of artificial cardinals over the Internet, not a single one of those cardinals as it turned out would do. She put out an announcement: if anyone in the Valley happens to find a dead cardinal on the path, et cetera.
Awhile back, Jean Audubon, having captured a Golden Eagle, tried to smoke it to death by setting a coal fire under it and putting it in a closet and covering it with a blanket, but four hours later when he checked, what he saw was an eagle glaring back at him, bonjour! The next day, he added sulfur to the rekindled fire, and still after many more hours, a glaring, living bird greeted him. Finally he had to resort to five stilettos through the heart, all the while being careful not to ruffle too many feathers.
Don’t forget that Audubon was French, and to look at a bird that hard, and to draw and paint it feather by feather by feather, was to remove five stilettos from its heart and bring it back to life five times over, the mother thought. If you are Audubon, the moral is that try as you may, you cannot kill a Golden Eagle. It is still there; it is always there, radiant and waiting when the mother and child open the book.
Imagine then that astounding red bouquet brought to the door by the artist’s aging feline, Birdy Boy. Incredulous, the artist’s assistant snatched it from the jaws of the cat before it became red pieces of bird. Still warm, it seemed to beat like a heart. What an astounding gift—that shock of red—the first thing the artist saw, upon waking that morning. Who can believe—it is not a dream—it is in the artist’s hand, this small, perfect, astounding red corpse.
The law, as you might imagine, prohibits the stuffing of songbirds in the Valley for any reason. It is quite simply against the law to bring a dead songbird into a taxidermist in the Valley to have it stuffed. If you happened to come upon a dead songbird, you will need to send it to another place altogether if you would like to have it stuffed. Before the artist went blind, she wrapped it carefully in white paper and placed it in a shoebox and sent it to Texas: that riot of red feathers and perfect cardinal beak and head. What a work of art it shall be, the artist cried with glee as she danced in her circular room and prepared herself to go to the Cabaret Rouge that evening at the Spiegelpalais.
The casket holding the harp was lowered slowly now into the silence. It had been laid out on a smooth, white satin pillow, and the people in the Valley shuffled past it and mourned the end of music.
Precisely a week after they watched the harp—all that was left of the man, lowered into the earth in a box—the small, sad entourage traipsed across the field to witness the unveiling of the new fire truck. It was noon and twelve bells sounded, and the chicken was cooked on the grill, and the living went about the things the living do. Wise Jean pointed to the new fire engine that lay covered under a black tarp—a large and jarring shape on the landscape—and the mother balanced a small flame quietly and waited.
At last something was said over the loudspeaker, the people drew close, and the great shroud was lifted with a drum roll. There it was before them: red, shiny, bright, several stories high. Everyone gasped. It was a wondrous sight: its tires the size of a human child; its body impervious and strong. For a long time no one moved. Then all of a sudden, the children ran to embrace it as best they could. They rubbed their hands along its smooth, gleaming surfaces. The chief rang the bell, and the truck, although stationary, seemed already in motion. How much we miss you, she thought she heard someone call out to the new fire truck. And the women wept. How strong you are, and how brave! The truck, she understood, was an obvious stand-in for the man.
Something inside the mother was burning. Today there was no way around it. She wondered if you dug a hole to the perfect center of the earth whether it would be possible to float.
The ladder is lowered and the children climb up one by one by one. They lift in unison the heavy yellow fire hose and point it as best they can at the towers in the distance, which are on fire.