Wow, you say. And here I thought I just liked the music.
The world thereby transforms into a narrative about nearing the thing you can never reach, the thing that’s always-already retreating.
Always-already retreating? says Andi.
So what I want to do is collect all these samples from America’s soul and burn them onto a CD in such a way that the listener can really control them: their speed, their sequence, their volume, their mix, whatever. Create-A-Chorale, like.
The illusion of the illusion of the control they can’t ever actually possess, you mean.
I’m not kidding. Your students would adore you. Adulation isn’t too strong a word for what they’d feel in your presence. Isn’t adulation a great word? I think I like the second syllable best. Exactly: the illusion of the illusion. Thereby totally revealing their complicity in the process of…
He stops in mid-utterance as you pass by a store whose entrance is a bank of televisions tuned to the same local news channel.
On the screens is the image of the faithful lining up before the plate-glass window set into the wall of Anya Sanchez’s bedroom in her house near Wenatchee, Washington.
Anya, a reporter who looks full like a Bulgarian weightlifter in a brown suit is saying, fell into her swimming pool when she was three and suffered brain damage. Twelve years later she lies semicomatose, green eyes partially open and glossy, maple-sugar hair reaching below her waist, on a mattress messy with crucifixes, censers, rosaries, votive candles, and prayer shawls.
Believers tell stories about the day stigmata appeared on Anya’s hands and forehead, oil began dripping down the walls around her, the little bald boy with leukemia went into spontaneous remission after touching her feet.
Her parents, Marissa and Juan, charge visitors ten dollars for a two-minute look. Even so, the waiting list is three years long. To make Anya available to a wider audience, they have decided to hold a mass in her honor at a nearby high-school gym for the reduced fee of three dollars and thirty-three cents per person, or nine dollars and ninety-nine cents per family.
This is extraordinary, Jared says, watching. I mean, I can feel my lungs contracting in my ribcage. It’s like…
He reflects.
Nadie, you notice, is entranced by the flittering light on the screens, the sweet marionette on the mattress.
It’s like the Disneyland of the spiritual world, Jared says.
You let him absorb this insight, then cough into your fist and say:
Um, listen. Can I… can I ask you kind of a personal question?
Mia cabeza es suya cabeza, he answers without turning away from the television bulwark. Shoot.
Okay. Well. If it’s not too personal or anything… how do you, you know, do it?
You snag his attention fleetingly: his eyes sweep toward yours but, unable to stop attending the televised spectacle, sweep back to Anya beneath the cluttered golden silk sheets again.
Do what? he asks.
Raise a child. I’m just curious, is all. I mean, we’re standing here in this mall, okay, with all these kids shouting and playing and giggling and beating on each other, and the only thing I can think, over and over, is: how can somebody do such a thing? How can someone get it even approximately right?
Shouldn’t all these children become serial killers some day? Andi asks.
The image of Anya fades into a commercial for a sports utility vehicle that looks gruesomely military and can apparently climb ninety-degrees straight up an Arizona mesa.
You see Jared mouth the words: Like a rock.
When he faces you he says:
It’s not that hard. Seriously.
Seriously? says Andi, nonplussed.
I mean… look around you.
Oh, come on.
No. Look. Pretty much anyone can do it. Hell. Pretty much anyone is doing it. This is the same conversation we had over dinner. It’s like… what’s it like? It’s like para-sailing, okay, to give you a picture. You’re standing on the back of this speedboat in your harness thinking No way am I ever going to do this thing, it’s crazy, and then your feet kick out from under you and you’re shooting higher and higher and the speedboat below you is the size of like a surfboard, the size of your foot, and you start realizing it’s totally not as bad as it seems at sea level.
No way, Andi says.
Way, Jared says.
You’ve been para-sailing? you ask.
Never. But you do it because, well. You do it because you find yourself doing it. You worry less than you think you might worry. If you worried as much as you worry you should worry you’d become like so paralyzed with terror that you wouldn’t be able to budge and your child would go hungry. But biology prevents such things from occurring by making you just start… doing stuff. Which probably sounds uncomfortably mystical, but really isn’t, except to some people born between, say, 1949 and 1961. It’s just that through trial and error you start learning these… guidelines.
Guidelines?
You lean into it. You follow through.
Kind of like golf.
Golf has rules. Parenting has guidelines.
So it’s more like water-skiing?
Exactly, yeah, except without the skis. See, the thing is, the guidelines are really simple to understand once you know them, but really hard to figure out in the first place. To give you a picture: when little Ernie is being a pain in the butt, instead of yelling at him, okay, which your whole body is telling you to do, all you need to do is ask yourself: Why is little Ernie squirming around and not sitting still? And all you do is fix the situation for little Ernie so he doesn’t feel like being such a royal pain in the butt.
Come on, Andi says.
Here’s another. This is one nobody seems to get in the beginning: always talk with kids at their own height. Stoop, kneel, sit… whatever it takes to be on an eye-to-eye level with them. Otherwise they feel like grownups are looming over them like the monsters kids always suspect we are.
You’re brilliant, says Andi.
You know the idiot baby-talk stuff?
The high-pitched voice? The exaggerated facial expressions?
Shoot yourself before you employ them. I’m serious. Take yourself out into a field and just fire away. I mean, how would you feel if some freak loomed over you and began talking like Betty Boop?
You’re a genius, Andi says.
And patience. Patience is totally the key. Patience and adjusting your height. Kids can’t think fast. They can’t talk fast. You need to give them time for the electrical impulses to move through them. It just makes sense.
He’s a genius, Andi tells you.
And, whatever you do, don’t fake it.
Don’t fake it?
If you don’t have a clue what your kid is trying to say?
Yeah?
Don’t do that annoying thing some grownups do and pretend you understand, while standing there daydreaming about something else. God, I hate that. You can see it happening a mile away. Kids hate being out of control. It scares the crap out of them. And not being able to say what they want is a form of being out of control. So you need to remain calm. Be honest. Reassure them. Ask follow-up questions so they understand you care.
How do you know all this?
You totally pick it up. I swear. It’s just what the species is manufactured to do.
You study him.
Andi studies him.
You’re amazing, you say at last.
I’m not. Really. Ninety-nine parents out of a hundred will tell you exactly the same thing. It’s just… Look at that, he says, checking his watch. Shame on me. I’ve gotta run.