2
THAT NIGHT WHEN they were back at home at last, it appeared to them like an apparition, separating the dark, parting it long enough to make itself visible and say, I am here. It had come in with the tree, but in the day it had folded itself up and waited.
Chittering came from the winged one’s mouth, and the child cowered and the mother ran to get the broom and the umbrella. It was an Annunciation clearly, but of what the mother had no idea.
Behold, the creature said, swooping down on them, and then all was gibberish. Its wingspan in the small room, enormous.
What do you want of us? the mother asked. Her ears grew long and pointed, best for sound detection, and her eyes grew shining and focused as she tried to detect what shapes its mouth took. In an instant her teeth grew sharp in case she needed to chew the child away from it.
Now it was definitive: she was sutured to the wild world and the wild world to her.
What do you want, the mother asked, and it screeched as if to say, I was there with you last night in the wind and the dark. I was with you there. The mother tried to decipher the chitter but could not. I was here and I did sup a bit from one of you.
How vulnerable are the dwellings we humans make for ourselves to inhabit, the mother thought later. When the child dwelled in the mother, the mother had passed oxygen and nutrients to the child through the placenta. She thought of the permeable world and all that was porous and of the insistence of the fetus that had knitted itself within her womb.
It’s a bat, the child said. A bat!
The mother trembled, fearful of the ferocity of the world and all the things she was at the mercy of — and for the child, who had been fearfully made — and she opened all the windows so that the creature might find its way back to the night.
THE MOTHER REMEMBERED when the time of the Pentecost was fulfilled, they were in one place together, and suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were.
In the Book of Wisdom it is asked, who can know the bat’s counsel or conceive what the bat intends? For the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are their plans. The corruptible body burdens the soul, and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns. And scarcely do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp, we find with great difficulty.
THE MOTHER KNEW the vampire bat extracted blood from large, slumbering, terrestrial mammals. There were bats that aimed for the warm breastplates of birds. She knew there were those who stalked blood bearers on land.
A white-winged vampire bat moves so softly and lovingly, toward the hen, that the hen allows it into its fold. The cozy bat administers, along with its bite, a natural blood clot buster to ensure a steady flow. Some bats consume half their body weight in blood each night. Woe, the mother thought, to the Blue-Footed Booby, a bat’s delicacy.
Sometimes the child felt that the mother knew too many things. Still, the mother and child, despite the night and the bat and the Blue-Footed Booby, grew sleepy and before too long were asleep.
WITH LANTERNS THEY approached the Spiegelpalais. A red velvet curtain rose before them on the forest path, and the audience began to applaud. There was a cacophony of wings — yes, some sort of rubied rabble, there could be no doubt.
Against a white scrim, a shadow figure on a trapeze could be seen swinging and singing in a high voice. Flittermouse, Flittermouse, what are you doing in the child’s house?
WHEN THE BAT appeared flying low above her head, the mother realized that they had been exposed to something that could not be reversed. The bat had appeared as a messenger, and she was afraid. The child put her hands up against it in protection. A bat, the mother knew, could rest lightly on the neck without you even knowing it and make a puncture with its hatpin teeth in your skin no larger than an insect’s — its wings spread like a paper fan, with the weight of a bird, and no one would know. She looked at the child. What did it want? Take these words, it screeched. But what were the words? And bind them to your wrist as a sign. Observe, it screeched, all the statues and decrees that are set before you.
The mother woke with a start. Before the child was born, the mother had been a nurse. She used to love the clean, blinding surfaces — and the white hat.
At night, the mother explained to the child, a bat can land on the face like a fan, then close up, taking your life.
The mother reassured the child that the vaccines against the bat would not be so bad, but that they would need to go to the hospital.
The child could not remember ever having been in a hospital before. The child asked if she could bring her lamb.
WHILE THE MOTHER and the child waited in the Emergency Room for the serum — thick, cloudy, viscous — the child asked if they might play a game of Hangman and the mother complied. Now carrying the recollection of the bat’s gibberish in them, the mother and child embraced the babble. A jumbled alphabet poured from them, as the mother tried to decipher the word concealed before her. It’s three words actually, the child said. Look. And the mother began to guess the letters of the phrase the child had chosen while slowly the little hanging man materialized.
CALAMITOUS IS THE day. The halls of the Emergency Room fill. The sleeping American tenor is wheeled in while the mother and child wait. The American tenor, destitute, has taken a box of tablets and now slumbers. Here he lies, whooshing past, sedate, supine; no one can revive him.
He is slumbering in the green hills near death; he will not wake again. How difficult suddenly it is to think of him once singing the role of the melancholy lovelorn poet Werther, someone says.
Werther is borrowing a pair of pistols from the husband of the woman he loves, only to shoot himself with them, in the last act, on Christmas Eve.
Angel face with flaxen hair, did you ever care?
The mother felt unsettled by the thought of all the men in the Valley who were disappearing, some destined to perish by their own hands, leaving behind the strangest and saddest relics: a Christmas cup, a piano, a treatise on whales, a vortex, a glove.
THE MOTHERS OF Sorrow traipse through the Emergency Room in anguish, following their faltering sons.
A boy who had fallen from a tree comes in. Three days earlier, the boy, who is five, got up and brushed himself off, and talked and walked, only now to fall into an irretrievable sleep. The doctors say the five-year-old had been afflicted with the malady they call Talk and Die.
Another boy dressed head-to-toe in camouflage spots has been wounded. An unspotted Mother of Sorrow follows the body.
A third boy, small and blue and filled with smoke, rescued from the top floor of a house, rushes by.
The mothers cry and beat their breasts and ask why, but no sound comes out, and it does not matter; no answer is forthcoming. The Mothers of Sorrow are getting sleepy, and as they walk they seem to close their eyes, and the Virgin in her grotto is falling asleep as well. Before she drifts off she is seen holding in one arm an infant, and in her other hand, a nail. The sleepiness in the Virgin is called the Virgin Dormition, and the sleepiness in the Mothers of Sorrow is called the Maiden Dormition. The fear is so great for some of the mothers in the Emergency Room that they fall into a kind of stupor and go back to the time before they had children and were maidens and could rest.
The world is so filled with sleep and silence. Once Mother Teresa began her work with the poor and dying in Calcutta, she never heard God’s voice again. For fifty years she continued without a word. It takes a special person to forge on anyway. An up-to-date candidate for sainthood would need to be able to bear that much silence and doubt, the mother thinks.