The child could not imagine what the sparkling eyes of the Grandmother saw now as the snowflakes fell into their cereal bowls, but before very long, the grandmother said simply, I see white roses. Sometimes, though not often, she said, you see a thing as it really is.
After a few moments the Grandmother looked up and said, Dark matter really exists, but so does Luminous matter. And above the grandmother and child, the flying reindeer passed.
THE MOTHER WOKE early to bake the Epiphany Cake. As always, it was to be plain with a little bit of spice to commemorate the Magi’s gifts to the Christ child, and inside a little trinket or treasure was to be placed.
The mother plucked a fancy almond from the cupboard to place in the batter. She assumed the trinket was meant to be the Christ child. Whoever found it would be designated Queen of the Evening and be allowed to preside over the Night’s most exquisite mysteries. The mother and child thought that this sounded wonderful, to be Queen of the Mysterious Evening.
The mother made the drink called Lamb’s Wool, and she unwrapped the chalk from its purple vestment. The mother knew that, as usual, the child would find the treasure and she thought, yes, that is as it should be, and as usual, the child would get to write in chalk on the door as a welcome C M B, which stood for Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, who were the kings.
The mother now regretted that she hadn’t at the last minute, drawn a little face on the almond, or if not a face then at least a smile. There would be golden paper crowns, and candles. The Queen of the Mysterious Evening would wear a robe and carry a glittering staff and genuflect under the cold night sky.
All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the mother was overtaken by a desire so pressing she leapt from her chair. I should love to see the Snowy Owl, she said aloud, and she ran to the window which already framed the darkness though it was still afternoon. Its white feathers filled her sight. The dormouse took refuge. She thought of the single star slung above the house.
Meanwhile, the silent almond slept deep in the cake, and waited.
IN THIS COLD circle of stones, in the infinite darkness, a grieving mother walks barefoot through the snow. There are roses between her toes and she carries a lantern. It’s Mary, poor thing, the Virgin, holding her unending vigil. She’s waiting for her son to return.
The mother wishes that the Virgin might stop, and put down her lantern, and rest somewhere awhile — anywhere but here, any night but tonight.
THE WORLD IN its present form was passing away. So said Saint Paul to the Corinthians, and the mother had to agree.
The child and the Grandmother float by, clicking and whirring all aglow in the light of three laptops, five enormous fluorescent force fields, a stack of illuminated discs, headphones, iPod shuffles, glitter wands, shining pendants, voice mails, remnants of music and time, fragments of the world’s information trailing them.
A GALAXY IS a massive interstellar phenomenon with gasses and dust and stars and dark matter. One trillion stars might orbit a common center. The child thought of star clusters, star clouds, stellar oceans, and interstellar clouds. The word galaxy is from the Greek word that means milky. The child liked the idea of a storm of milk or a storm of stars.
It is said that Zeus placed his infant son Hercules, born of a mortal woman, on the sleeping goddess Hera’s breast so that the baby would drink her divine milk and become immortal. When Hera awoke and realized she was nursing an unknown baby, she pushed the baby away, and a jet of milk sprayed the night sky and became the Milky Way.
THE CHILD CLOSED her eyes and pictured the galaxy’s curving, dusty arm. There are probably 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. They drift through the elliptical cosmos. The child thinks of the Grandmother, fixes her in the moment so that she can never forget her. I feel in my body that you are due, the child says on the phone, trying to coax the Grandmother to them. And with that, the Grandmother from the North Pole fills the sky. She is 100,000 light-years in diameter, 1,000 light-years thick. She contains three hundred billion stars.
THE CHILD’S AUNT remembered the curving staircase and the winding corridors of the house in which she was born. The ventricle, like a shell, floods with seawater. The aunt enters a pre-human slumber. How beautiful is the heart!
NEURAL ACTIVITY SWEEPS across the fetal retinas as if the nervous system is rehearsing for vision by running test patterns across them. Rehearsing for life. You’ve got to hand it to babies, the Grandmother says with wonder.
There are death rehearsals as well, the Grandmother from the North Pole says, as the eye accustoms itself to the darkening, and the blur.
SOME COMETS HAVE long thin orbits. They may spend centuries away from the sun, frozen solid. When they at last come back, they come as strangers and in a new form. They have no memory of where they have come from, though they have been there for centuries, and they have no idea what is before them, or that it will last millennia. There is a pull and that is all.
SHE LOOKS OUT onto the white field and the word Sneemanden comes to her, and she sees in the distance a man made of snow with his back to her, wearing a sad hat. She has gone back to school, the mother reminds herself. It is the reasonable explanation. At three o’clock she will reappear.
THE BOY, UNCLE Ingmar says, is no longer held together by screws; he is held together by newly knitted bone. The long winter nights had been filled with bone knitting, and now the bone knitting was complete. When he takes out the screws, the doctor will give them to the boy in a jar, Uncle Ingmar says. When the boy returns home with his jar, he will dig a hole and he will place the jar in the snow.
Even though the bones had knitted themselves back together, still the winter had not passed.
QUIETLY, THE MOTHER paddles out to the Isle of the Dead while the child sleeps. There’s a little man there she sometimes visits in the night, and he tells her of the vaulted world.
What does he have to do with her? the mother wonders. And who are these people, weeping at the periphery?
She is a little lost among the intense traffic of souls, though it is true that she is not so lonely as usual. The souls create their own night with the quality of their dark light. Each night the mother dreams of the man put back into his flat photographic drawer in his mausoleum on William Street. At these times she feels not quite alive and not quite dead. When the mother tells the child the story of the man made of vapor and the pull of the drawer, the child protests and says that she does not like to think of the mother like that, though she suspects she is in part responsible for this twilight state the mother inhabits. The mother smiles and reassures her that nothing could be further from the truth.
The mother is in flames. Calmly she turns to the man in his vault and he soothes her. She opens the flat tray he is put away in every night. In his drawer, in the deep freeze, the mother cools down and is at peace. You’ve got to admit it’s lovely in the subzero numbers here on the darkest street in the world, she says, on the most narrow of streets in the world, did she mention that before? Dwarfed by enormous skyscrapers, pillars of black glass, domes — who has seen such darkness? A figure blindfolded holds a scale. There’s a large bull in the square. Men and women in their daylight suits, even at night, carrying torches. All moving in vain toward the atrium.
All those who toiled in those Towers are vaporous in the flat drawers now. A drawer opens, and she slips in smooth and quiet and flat. The night a porous, perforated surface.