She could not help but notice now that the bats, broken against the snow, exactly looked like her black umbrella — the one she used to protect the child and herself from the summoning God and all the other beckoning forces, bats included, and she wondered why it had taken her until now to see the thing. She considered that perhaps the bat that had come to them, chittering in Pentecostal fervor from the felled tree, had been in fact an angeclass="underline" something to fear, yes, inspiring great terror, yes; but something also shot through with essential goodness. It had come to help her, to escort her, presaging change, offering the way.
One hundred million years ago, flowers appeared on the earth. Once the air was so loaded with bees it seemed to shimmer. And apple trees. An apple has ten ovules, each of which can produce a seed. In order to produce a seed, at least six ovules must be pollinated. And with that, the apple falls asleep.
She closes her eyes and dreams. The world without us will be a world gone finally back to bees and bats again.
WHEN A SWARM of bees suddenly quits the hive, the Toothless Wonder says, it is a sign that death is hovering near the house. Ask anyone, he says.
And the bats, the mother asks?
THE COLLAPSIBLE MOTHER and the child moved through the Collapsible World, and it comforted them to know that other people, not only they, were at the mercy of the great and terrible collapsing things. It heartened them to know they were not alone.
No one seemingly gave the concept of the Collapsible Mother a serious thought. No one could fathom the notion of a mother who collapsed the way other things collapsed. The notion was just not conceivable. A Collapsible Mother was not a mother who collapsed like many other things in the Collapsible World, but a mother who was flexible: folding and unfolding, accommodating and changing — that is what mothers did after all — like a paper fan, only sturdy, or a space probe, only warm. Mother: a soft-bodied insect, flexible, with a superhuman curiosity that is intelligence, intuition, passion, and charm, and graced with the gifts of critical thinking, deductive reasoning — both practical and grounded — and clairvoyance, immortal and dwelling always in approachable light. This meant you could approach the Collapsible Mother with any quandary and she would come up with a solution to the problem, be it large or small.
Even bats, she read in the newspaper, were collapsing, and though it should not, it made her inordinately sad. The world was amiss. Agents of extraordinary misfortune might appear at any time with their inscrutable tidings, or carry any of them away at any moment against their wills. Anything at all was possible. The child thought of Lamby. And the mother thought of the 4,000 dead soldiers.
She felt unnerved. War was everywhere and it was always wrong, that is what the mother said. All wars were equally barbarous and equally unnecessary. There was a divide, and they sat quietly and looked at it on the horizon, and you fell on one side of the divide or the other. For someone so flexible and pliant, the mother, when it came to the divide, would not give or bend. The mother then, more times than not, felt not flexible, but inflexible, not immortal, but dying.
The Collapsible Mother stayed aligned, and upright, flexible and generous and open-minded, and the child eyeing her felt proud and she loved her. Some called it the Tragic Sublime, others the Heroics of the Everyday. You were always hearing about the heroes on TV, and the heroes on TV always said the same thing: they were not heroes; they were just like other people. Four thousand soldiers from here, and who knew how many soldiers from there, and worst of all, how many thousands of ordinary people, children included, were now dead. All the world collapsing.
When the child was a baby, the mother would carry around one of those collapsible strollers that fit into the trunk of the black car. This came back to her now when she thought of the mystery of the multitudinous bats collapsing like little broken black umbrellas, dying in daylight when they should have been hibernating, falling and folding up on the bright white snow.
In the bright sun, in the snow, dressed in their white coats, radiant in the blood of the missing lamb, it’s too bright to see. Covered with a fungus, the wings close up.
SHE RECALLS HIS melancholy years in the Cold Lab through the fog. There in the deep freeze, pressed next to the abandoned embryos, the Grandfather from the North Pole once spent long hours studying the complex properties of snow. If you put a bowl of snow in the refrigerator and come back in an hour, the snow will have changed significantly. Snow, the Grandfather from the North Pole would say, is almost always in motion. And there’s nothing more beautiful than that.
The weak layers of snow are faceted, smooth, unbonded to one another, and so more likely to give way. Had the Grandfather stayed in his Cold Lab in his thermal lab coat with his multiplying theories concerning the metamorphosis of snow, he might have lived for something like forever — such was the makeup of his gene pool — but alas, avalanches were his passion. Besides, the Cold Lab was too sad, he said. The parents say they would like their embryos frozen for an eternity. They call them like this their snowflake children, and the Grandfather, passing them—how silent—always felt glum. Such a strange and terrible orphanage I’ve wandered here, he wrote in his log, right before he walked out the door, never to return.
In the mother’s mind, he’s always there, in the center of the glittering world. He’s so beloved — but he’s hard to see. In a small shack, he waits while his assistant sets off little two-pound explosions so that the snow buries him — notebook in hand.
Some say the most critical thing in surviving an avalanche is to create a pocket of air in front of your face so you can breathe while you wait for rescue. I would swim though, the Grandfather wrote. I would get prone in the snow and stay on top and skim the whitest surface. Too late, a balloon system for better avalanche-surviving was devised: a ripcord that would make balloons inflate and keep you afloat, just like he said, on top of the snow.
Imagine being bombarded by crystals! the Grandmother from the North Pole cries. When he was finally found, he was encased in glitter and wearing an amulet which held some of the world’s most ancient ice — half a million years old, it is said, and cored from a field three miles deep. What a sight! Around his neck an amulet, and in his hand a love note: the Grandfather from the North Pole, drowned in beauty — frozen, bright.
24. passage
THE LITTLE POPE, very old, holds a glass dome, and under it is a very tiny green tree. The Vatican, he explains, is the only sovereign state in the world that is carbon-neutral. The ancient buildings have been outfitted with solar panels, and someone, he says, has donated enough trees in a Hungarian forest to nullify all carbons emitted from the Holy See. The Pope, who oversees the Global Church, says that he is known now as the Green Pope. It is humanity’s responsibility to care for the planet. Time is short.
As of late, we have invented seven new sins, the Pope informs his audience. Number four is Polluting the Environment.
A little dim energy-saving lightbulb comes on as evening arrives. I am a steward to God’s creation. I shall protect the children, both born and unborn, from exposure to environmental poisons, especially the poor. And all of those who are most vulnerable. And the cats, born and unborn. The Pope loves cats. He has had, he says, a lifelong love of cats. He often chats to them in German at length, and they follow him around, fascinated by his gibberish. The Pope is lovable in his fondness for felines. The Pope says that cats are forbidden where he lives in the Apostolic Palace, and that it has been one of the biggest adjustments of all. You can see the Pope some days walking around the carbon-neutral grounds with a small ball of twine in case a cat should happen by. He meets up with them in the garden, feeds them, bandages their wounds.