THE FIRST WOMAN to be inducted into the National Society of Thatchers had come to the Valley and proceeded to thatch roofs for the stone houses that were being built. She was a small woman, the people thought, to be balancing such heavy bundles of straw on her shoulder and wielding that legget while going up and down to and from her perch on a biddle. She was always smiling, for she loved the green hazel smell and the rustle of the reed and straw and the connection she felt with all the other thatchers who had ever lived.
What a peculiar sight, the few remaining men in the Valley remarked.
THE MOTHER THOUGHT that when thinking about the lamb or the vanishing men or the bees and the bats, it was best to keep the larger picture in mind and to take the long view. In the furnace of the stars much had happened, and in everyday carbon molecules, there was stardust from the time the asteroids crashed on the planet millions of years ago. Best to think of all five of the earth’s Great Extinctions, or at the very least, the extinction paleontologists call the Great Dying. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, 90 percent of all living species perished.
Someone is finding an unusual chemical signal in an ancient layer of an Italian city. Irradium. So much has happened, and is happening, under the earth and in the oceans and above the earth and all around. The mother takes the child’s hand, and they make their descent. What are space and time to them?
At the K-T Boundary they pause.
At the Boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods they pause. They marvel at the tortoise. When the asteroid came, it killed everything within hundreds of miles. The animals that weren’t incinerated or gassed by fumes either froze or starved to death soon after when the dust stirred up by the impact blotted out the sun for more than a year.
They stand in a trance at the P-T Boundary. The place where the Permian and the Triassic meet. When thinking about extinction, it is best to have some context. History, the mother believes, even at its worst, always consoles. Today, mastodons and mammoths and giant sloths have no living counterpart remaining on earth, though some plants and animals that disappear, stay gone for millions of years and then return.
FOSSILS EXTRACTED FROM the fine-grained mudstone and limestone rocks near the Green River in Wyoming were said to be forty-seven million years old. She made a note to herself to place the Grandmother there, when the time comes.
A WOMAN WHO built stone walls had moved to the Valley. There she was, shifting, sorting, and shaping rocks. How does she manage it? the people remarked. She gathered rocks for the face of the wall, rocks for the heart of the wall, sand, and some stoppers that break up the pattern and create character. She loved doing this ancient work outside to birdsong, she said, as she watched the seasons day by day unfold. On her coffee breaks, she chatted with the passersby.
What an edifying sight, the few remaining men remarked to one another.
THE MOTHER WAS dreaming. If the heart of the deceased outweighs the feather, then the person has a heart made heavy by evil deeds. In that event, Ammit, the god with the croc head and hippo legs, will devour the heart, condemning the subject to oblivion for an eternity.
The Grandmother from the North Pole is certain that the heart of the President, soon to be the former president and a significant contributor to the vanishing world, would be gobbled up, though for the thousands and thousands of dead, this is little consolation.
The Grandmother adjusts her Doghead and walks with the child to the pageant, dragging the President’s heart. Anubis weighs the heart while the Ibis-Headed Thoth, the god of wisdom, records the verdict.
The child, having taken off her Ibis head, reveals malachite eyes.
WHEN THE GREAT Wind came and the electricity went out, and the tree fell on the house and bats poured from the tree and entered the house while the child bathed, the transformation had already begun. What the mother had neglected to say was that the bat had brought clairvoyance, and that she saw in an instant what she had not been able to see before: all that had happened and now all that was to come.
FROM HER PERCH atop the world, she sees a blue horse in the distance. It was a troubling vista, and it exhausted her. She thought of all the things that might appear out of nowhere, unbidden. Seen from afar, but utterly out of reach—its great forelegs rising into the air. It was not approachable; there was no way you could ever get to it, so that when travellers passed it as their plane accelerated, they caught a glimpse of an ominous blue blur as they rose, the last thing they would see. The boy with the toy jet reached for it nonetheless.
The September sky was so blue it hurt her to look at it. Something of the shape of the horse, flickering, fleeting, unable to be grasped entirely, remained in her for a moment and then was gone.
THE MOTHER DID not know why everything had to change—she just knew that it did. Things were changing even though they seemed not to be, and they would continue to change now at a faster and faster rate.
SHE HAD MADE the sparkling snow rabbit a crown of winterberry, which the catbird came to sup on. She put an orange in its paw and thought of the day the Baltimore Orioles would return. That migratory corridor of birds the mother and child were lucky enough to live along. The French called those birds les passereaux. Everything is passing, Saint Paul said.
EVERYTHING WAS CHANGING: the child, the Grandmother. Everything was melting. The child hoped more than anything that before too much longer they could play their Santa game again. She hoped that her grandmother would still remember it. The Book of Wonder, the child thought, would reveal what the reindeer did in the off season, or the stitch Mrs. Claus used to sew the large brown wooden buttons to Santa’s jacket, and what games the elves excelled at during the Winter Olympics. She looked at her twinkling grandmother. Her village at the top of the world seemed to come forward in the mist as the stories unfolded and then to recede again, back into white.
Do you remember when you were a baby and I took you to the top of the lighthouse in Maine? the Grandmother asks. No, the child shakes her head. I don’t remember that.
You were very small.
A BODY AT rest is still accelerating, the Grandmother from the North Pole tells the child. Isn’t that amazing? And she whooshes by on her dogsled. Wait up! the child calls. The child remembered how the mother had shaped the snow into a sparkling rabbit, hoping to call the Grandmother back to her side. Just a minute.
EVERYTHING WAS SPEEDING up now. Soon the child herself would be growing at Girls’ Peak Growth Velocity. They would have to hold on tighter than they had ever held on to anything before. Only the Virgin with her Infinite Patience was in no hurry.
SLOW DOWN, THE Grandmother says, when the child goes too quickly. Press Enter, the child says, and then she puts her hand over the hand that holds the cursor, and everything slows.
THE PEAK GROWTH is the combination of three mini-peaks. The first peak involves the lower limbs, the second involves the trunk, and the third involves the thorax. The first phase involving the limbs is called the ascending phase, which corresponds to the acceleration in the velocity of growth in girls.
Chronological age is of no significance; everything depends on bone age. Girls’ Peak Growth velocity happens when girls are eleven in bone age. It is normal to feel the acceleration of bone growth during puberty. A not uncommon question among certain sorts might be, what do you think your bone age is?
Also, different bones in a child age at different rates. A child may be said to be composed of bones in a Bone Age Mosaic.
The Risser Sign is still zero and the Triradiate Cartilage is still open at the onset of puberty. When they found the femur in the shallow grave, they had suspected it was the missing preadolescent, because the bone had not yet fused. The mothers gravitate to the scene.
After the closure of the Triradiate Cartilage, there is still a considerable amount of growing remaining. The descending phase of puberty is signified by significant growth of the thorax.
IN THE TIME everything was accelerating, everything was moving so quickly and there seemed to be no conceivable way of stopping it, the Slow Lab entered the Spiegelpalais. The Grandmother was moving at hummingbird speed, but at the Spiegelpalais, the Slow Clock was being assembled. It was run by beads. One bead dropped every five minutes, and time seemed almost to stop.
THE NORTH POLE Grandmother had bright white hair and light, light sparkling eyes. Wait up, the child called to her, and the Grandmother smiled, skittling along the ice. She was going full speed ahead with great deliberateness—she knew the way. What the child feared was that right out there before her, her grandmother would become lost. Everything is changing, the child thought, but she was not ready yet. She cast a glacial spell on their lives and fell for a minute headlong now into the ravishing, precious luxury of slowed-up time. She stopped the Grandmother’s skittle across the ice, the Great Amnesia, the Peak Growth Velocity, the folding up of the mother.
THE SLOW LAB had moved into the Valley to quell the vertiginous passing of time. The World Institute of Slowness would hold a Symposium soon. The Slow Lab was run on the tenets of the Slow Food Movement—local, organic, responsible—it emphasized slowness in the creation and consumption of food. Now this idea was being applied to every aspect of life. There were even websites—SlowPlanet.com, LifeinSlowMotion.org—for all things slow: slow travel, slow shopping, slow life—a Credo of Slow.
AS THE GRANDMOTHER neared eighty-three, the mother took her in her arms and refused to let go. In Italy there were Slow Cities, she told her, and they might get on a boat.
WHITE PHOSPHOROUS OBSCURED the view for a moment. From the fog could be seen the figments of mothers. Fire came from the bodies of our children, they said, and they wept. My daughter melted away. The burn reached to the muscle and bone, the Doctor without Borders lamented. It is a war crime to use such a thing as white smoke on a civilian population, the mothers murmured, walking through white.
THE MEN LEARNED to walk in slow motion while they slept. It was as if they were in a kind of coma. Only the notion of Grave Alice, and Laughing Allegra, and Edith with Golden Hair propelled them forward at all—the girls at the end of the war. But they moved more and more slowly, and no one knew anymore if they would ever get back.
CAREFULLY IN HIS sleep, the Vortex Man lifts the eighty-year-old Yangtze Giant Soft-Shelled Turtle, the only female known to exist, and he places her on his back. Slowly, he carries her six hundred miles to the zoo in Suzho to meet the one-hundred-year-old male—the last known of its species. Good going, the Grandmother from the North Pole whispers, watching from afar, as the Vortex Man slowly moves across the continent of Asia, the turtle strapped to his back.
MORE AND MORE now, the mother called Bunny Boy Bog Belly, as he seemed to carry the bog with him wherever he went. Each evening he would materialize from the mist. In the day now, no one knew where he went exactly, but he always came home in the evening, and he always carried the bog on his fur. When the mother reached out to him, he passed her, seeming not to see her, too fixated on the bog, even at night, at home, at the foot of her bed. It was the strangeness and slowness of cats that sustained her now.
WHERE HAVE YOU been, Mr. Min?
Slowly he pulls bat after white bat out of his hat at the Spiegelpalais.
WHEN THE LAMB returns, it will be resplendent in a teal blue City Opera T-shirt, and its wool will gleam, and so will its eyes. When the lamb returns, he will be asked: where have you been? He will be asked: why have you been absent so long? And then the question that must be answered in order to continue: how, little lamb, will we know you will not be leaving us again?
The lamb will smile, but, as he is stuffed, he will say nothing in return.
MID-STEP, THE VORTEX Man puts down the turtle, and moves no more.
You have engendered in us the desire for knowledge; you have awakened in us a desire we did not know we had, the travellers say at the gates of the Spiegelpalais. You cannot fall silent now. You have instilled in us an insatiable longing. You have provided balm. Answer the twelve questions you have posed, before you go. Reveal your face, just one time. Show us the way. Point us in the right direction. You offer boons. You work mighty deeds, we’ve heard. You have the gifts of healing; you speak in tongues. Speak to us.
All is Illusory, the Vortex Man said and got up and passed through the midst of them and was gone.
WHEN THE SOLDIERS realized they were walking in the exact opposite direction of Grave Alice and Laughing Allegra and Edith with the Golden Hair, their hearts filled with sand and their beings were drawn into the earth and it was as if they were being buried alive. The bat had advocated flight, but they could not stay aloft; they just kept sinking further and further into the earth.
FORCE OF TIME, Ultimate Reality, Having Form and Yet Formless, the Divine Paradox, the Divine Smokescreen, Ruler of the Five Elements, and the Object of our Meditation. How can we stand here, how can we bear your Absence now? The End of Illusion. The Redeemer of the Universe, Sender of Bats, practicing austerity and renunciation. Time shall devour all, ineffable and inconceivable. He presides over the mysteries of both life and death.
At the place of the Disillusion of All Things, the people wept.
All Hail the Vortex Man, the People of the Valley said, and were afraid. All Hail the Vortex Man!
She thought of a blazing fire and a gloomy darkness and a storm and a trumpet blast, and the countless angels in festal gathering. All gathered at the sensational head of the Vortex Man, along with the assembly of the firstborn and the spirits of the just made perfect, and the Hare, mediator of a new covenant and the sprinkled blood. A gleaming gun at the center, it seemed, was the cause of all the commotion.
SHE HAD NOT known that at the time Lamby had disappeared, miles away, the Vortex Man with great violence had taken his life, and she now thought that perhaps this enigmatic force whom she had loved had pulled the little lamb with him into the massive vortex of his despair.
HE HAD SURVIVED for millennia, inhuman, apart, source of wisdom and perfection, but there was a dark aspect to survival, and it pained her to think of what his existence had become. First his mind had faltered, he who had so many thoughts and had posed so many questions, and the Vortex Doctors opened his head to look, but he was never the same after that.
She knows when the body is opened and flattened and exposed to the other world, it fears invasion from every side forever more.
She knows that when cells in the brain become filled with the Stilled Wind, they release teardrop-shaped pearls called enzymes into the blood. The part of the brain affected by the Stilled Wind cannot grow back or be repaired, it is said.
How unknowable is the world of the Vortex Man! His head streaming blood, his pearly eyes closed; the whole world can feel it, the mother thinks, in a kind of ecstasy. In the manner that the mother has friends, the Vortex Man had been her friend. And she tried to absorb the shock of his absence.
IT WAS THE gun in the broken glass case that had produced all the commotion: a single bullet to the head. But when she thinks of the Vortex Man she thinks there is something to be said for the end of questions, or the end of heartache, or the end of suffering, or rest.