THE MOTHER IS leaving behind a gesture of her time here. The way she moved through space. A gesture of utmost care and protection, a repetitive one, her hand moving through the child’s hair (that streaming and gleam) and what comes from it, this engagement with time and this one human life. The mother’s hand running through the smooth of the daughter’s dark hair. Is it not like silk as the darkness pours down, pours and pours, and the mother’s gesture reverberates through time and space, leaving no visible trace, but leaving a trace nonetheless. These were the records left beneath the official records. Undocumented, incapable of being caught by a camera or any other means. Beneath the story of the mother on a tablet, or a book, or a grave, is the gesture. The fingers starting at the forehead move through her hair, gently raking it back, and then in a circular motion, curling it around the right ear.
How mesmerizing is this single, simple act of love and concern and protection. There’s a feeling that no harm can come, though harm is everywhere around them. How mysterious they are, and how light, as if they were made only of wind and of dust. How buoyant. The way this singular but not uncommon gesture, left to the child, will live on. As the child runs her own hand through her own child’s hair one day, a shadow mother accompanies her. The smaller gesture asleep in the memory of the child, dormant, but waiting. The child’s hair, that gorgeous cascade of darkness, shrouding her face, and then the hand coming seemingly out of nowhere to comfort, to help, to arrange—and the tenderness of the mother, which is more, some days, than the child can bear. And that is what the child recoils from, when she recoils—from the tenderness. Sloughing off the mother, for how otherwise is a child supposed to grow and live?
Long after, the child will regret that shielding—what did she think she was protecting herself from? Long after, sitting by the river, the child will still wonder whether the mother died with the recoiling that day in her mind’s eye, as she tried to push the hair gently away from the child’s face, and the child veering slightly away—No, she had pulled away, as if from a demon. This makes the dead mother smile. Children always believed themselves to be the center of each and every instant of their particular adult’s life. The mother closes her eyes. A velvet curtain closes before her.
And even now, the mother cannot be sentimental. She had watched the child vanish over and over into another phase of being, and it had hardened her, and it taught her never to get too attached to any person, especially a child. Attachments were not what the world suggested. The world tended toward change and suggested it was the changing, the metamorphosis, that was important. It was one of the most useful and most difficult things she had ever learned while on earth. From here she floated and watched the child grow and grow and change, and change again, vanishing so many times until she, the child herself, had become an old woman like the Grandmother from the North Pole, who is eternal.
SHE CONCENTRATED ON the moth—its pale green wings against the screen. She put her hand to it. In winter, she would remember that simple gesture—her desire, the silence.
THE MOTHER THINKS it is sad that after she is dead, the child, who will be a grown woman, will have no way of knowing that this day ever occurred. No one will remember this afternoon—the child so young, the moment so ordinary, so easily forgotten. She will have no recollection of it whatsoever. That they made a collage, that they made paste from flour and water and sometimes they spread it with a paintbrush. They buried little figures inside their Playdough cakes. Grumpy or Sleepy. We make our appearance here. Forgetfulness closes up over us from both ends of the life cycle. In a hundred years the mother and child will be forgotten. The mother called in her orders to the Rose Bakery, and the child filled them. I would like a wedding cake with blue roses, and five loaves of heart-shaped breads, and three dozen hot cross buns.
No one will remember this afternoon—the child so young, the moment so ordinary, so easily forgotten.
AND ON ANOTHER afternoon: when the mother and child played Vet, there was often a problem with Bunny Boy’s purr box, and they had to wrap him in scarves. Bunny Boy, a reluctant patient, wriggling out of his clothes, remained unamused. There is nothing wrong with my purr box, he said.
SLOWLY THE MOTHER and child emerge from the amorphous world of marble, though it is so difficult, and the mother appears half immersed in it, until the last minute, and were it not for the child urging her out, she would sink back into the silence and gorgeousness, and be subsumed. One cannot help but think of the great artist liberating the figures imprisoned in the stone. Come to me, the child beckons to her mother, who is half in earth and half emerged, and for an agonizing moment, the mother is petrified there. The mother has a mind of stone, but the child with her touch calls the mother forth, releasing her from oblivion’s pull.
AND WHEN THE mother gets tangled or trussed in the Cat’s Cradle, the child sets the strings smooth again.
OUTSIDE THE SPIEGELPALAIS, a little impromptu play was being staged. Bits of dialog were carried out on the breeze. Nothing was heard in its entirety, and yet nothing was missed. The play came together remarkably: complete, whole in its fragments. There was a smattering of applause. Though no one could agree on its content.
It’s a history of the Valley; it’s a story of the river; it’s a pageant; it’s actually rather more a pastiche, the last remaining professor in the Valley said; but whatever it was, all seemed unruffled, and all seemed pleased, and there was a lilting quality to the day. It was all there this time right before them, spoken above the breeze. No one seemed worried that it was not entirely accessible.
Where the Spiegelpalais had come from, something that had once troubled them, long ago had fallen away, and they could not remember anymore a time when the Spiegelpalais had not been here.
Once they might have wished the play to be something more solid, more continuous, less troubling, more legible, and that there might be something they could take away from the experience and put neatly somewhere, some insight, some truth. Once they might have hoped for a meaning—that it had all actually meant something. So often the assumption had been that there was a message, waiting to be excavated, decoded. Once they had yearned for a truth that might be absolute, but all that had passed—they could not explain how. The Spiegelpalais had worked its strange magic.
When the play was over, the mother felt sure she knew something she had not known before. There was something of a recognition; there was no way beyond that to articulate what she felt or knew except that the play had made certain longings emphatic and would allow, she suspected, for other feelings on other evenings to come to the fore. The Palatines who had come to the Valley named everything for the Rhine, which they missed with all their hearts. It’s a history of our desires. Memories of the breathing and billowy world.
And what we thought was central turns out to be peripheral. And what we thought was solid dissolves. Gone, the emphatic orb of afternoon. Dusk had arrived.
SOMEHOW SHE KNEW infinite grace was available to them. The key to happiness was in trying to understand how to receive it. The Rite of Ascending should be the right of every human alive, she reasoned. She herself was a soul waiting for purification. The bat had said as much. The bat had come and set into animation what had been still and lay dormant in them. The bat had made all the rest possible and available to them, of this the mother seemed somehow certain.
The tree had split in two, and from it had emanated an extraordinary light, like the light now in the pit where the towers had once been. The thousands of distressed souls that had blackened the day now gave way to an extraordinary void, flooded with light. It was the only place in the city that opened up like a suture—a vast cavern, but also a plain.
How strange is the present, with all that past streaming in, and all that future seeping through. It was something exhilarating, the present—open, fluid, malleable—and it both pleased and frightened her. Moments of the past invading the present from one direction, and from the other direction, the future. All was in coexistence—there was really no way around it.
THE BAT, AS a last gift, had made it possible to see the velvet backdrop so that one could glean information from the twilight, and from the night. Like the bat drinking the night, the mother drinks the night, as it comes on now. Like the mother and the bat, the wolf laps up the night as well and waits for the child. The mother smiles. The night magnifies and makes possible what seemed unimaginable in the day. She goes to the Mothering Place and prays.
ON CERTAIN NIGHTS while the mother slept, an antler would sprout from the center of her forehead. The antler was soft to the touch and covered with moss, and all night the mother roamed through forest and starlight to places she had never been before. In the morning when the mother awoke and discovered the antler, she panicked, as she did not want to frighten the child, and she would, as quickly as she could, saw it off and slip it into the night table drawer. After that, many nights would often pass without incident, until the mother came slowly to forget about the antler almost entirely, and that is when another antler would appear.
And it would go on like that: sleep and dream, sleep and dream and saw, sleep, and dream, sleep and dream and saw, and sleep . . .
The mother and child laughed and time passed, and after a while, the mother somehow grew more capable of keeping the antler in check inside her lavish green night-roaming dream. Now and then a nub would appear, but nothing more. And in the night table drawer only, a little stardust and antler dust remained.
From time to time now, the child would put the wrist of her hand to her forehead and then wave her fingers in the semblance of an antler, and the mother would look at her and smile sweetly.
One night while the mother slept, the child huddled next to her on the bed and watched as the antler slowly began to grow from her mother’s forehead. The child had never touched anything like it before. It was something like a tree branch but not exactly—it was at once more solid and more hollow, a horn of sorts, covered with an indescribably soft moss, and it had the most extraordinary hue.
At the end of the night but before the mother awoke, the child removed the antler. Gently she slipped her finger under the mossy soft base, and it felt as if she were releasing the air from beneath the pad of a suction cup. She removed it with ease, and without the least violence.
Then the child wandered out the door and into the dawn. Maybe she will happen on the bobwhite. To build their homes, bobwhites find an impression on the ground, line the impression with grasses, and weave an arch over the cup in a tussock of grass. Carrying the antler, the child walked out into the morning and gathered reeds and dawn grasses and cattails, which she wove together into a kind of glimmering harness, and she placed her mother’s antler in it. She then went to her mother’s room, and though the mother was still sleeping, in sleep she seemed to bow her head toward the child as if she might nuzzle, and the child in one simple motion attached the antler back to the mother’s head and climbed into bed next to her.
THE GREEN CHAPEL was a triumph of the intangible, and it was the place toward which the mother and child now walked. It was a masterpiece of luminescence, and they marveled at how the walls seemed to disappear, leaving only windows that looked out onto the flickering green world. In the distance, at last, the mother sees the transparency to complete the one in her, a shape to meet her shape. Together, the mother and child will fold themselves up into the gleaming. From a distance, the galaxy was a greeny blue. They were filled with a serene feeling. Soon they would become the next thing.