Any vulnerability, the mother reasoned, might drive a bat to one’s side.
False gods flew above their heads and were everywhere before them. The mother had dreamt her whole life of becoming something winged, but she didn’t know how. That night, medical workers seen from above, drenched in light, waited for casualties, but no casualties came. The mother remembers the hover, a state of suspension that she carries inside her to this day.
At the moment of the American tenor’s death, the room flooded with song, and the mother and the child looked up.
THE VIRGIN HAS awoken. The child pulls at the mother’s sleeve and directs her attention back to their game of Hangman, and at last from the jumble of alphabet, the mother can read the child’s message. I AM SCARED.
I AM SCARED. Her body is changing. They notice it there on the hospital bed as they wait for the vaccination.
You can see now, the mother says, where the wings will fit.
The Virgin beckons for them to come forward.
What do you want of us? the mother asks.
3
THE FOX HAS its den and the Ovenbird its nest, but the mother and the child have no place to rest their heads. Come with me, the Virgin says.
Revelers, mourners, pilgrims, and seekers were on their way to the Spiegelpalais. From the smallest of embers, the Great Wind had ignited fires that burned on the horizon and fell on the heads of the sojourners, granting them wisdom and direction, and though they did not speak the same language, when they at last arrived at the place, each miraculously was able to understand the other.
Many in the Valley stood outside the Spiegelpalais and wondered why pilgrims were arriving from all points on earth, but after the initial flurry of inquiries, such questions passed and did not return again. A mass hypnosis seemed to settle over the Valley, and soon no one remembered a time the Spiegelpalais had not been there, or could imagine a future in which it was not included. Many stood outside and waited, but few gained admittance, so when the mother and child were issued in easily, under the Virgin’s auspices, the mother felt vaguely worried, as if it were some sort of trick.
FROM THE OUTSIDE it had seemed a dream arena: ephemeral, unmoored, a ghost ship festooned with banners and flags; but inside, the Spiegelpalais felt more solid, immovable, real. An endless series of rooms and vaults seemed to open in every direction. Some rooms were linked by corridors, some by canals, some by woodland paths, and there was a central atrium where there burned a small live fire.
Soul cakes, someone sang around the fire where a mourning party huddled. Soul cakes were being roasted and a glass orchestra played.
Darkened passages, leading to rabbits and rabbit holes or woodchucks in their dens and collapsible floors were everywhere. Rooms as if in a dream, inviting, irresistible, moss-laden, called to them.
Off stage right, cordoned off, flowed the Rhine. People gathered at its banks and wept. The mother and child felt their own river, just outside the door, like a silk swathe move through them. Boxes of fog were opened.
All was in motion. There were elevators that rose and fell, trap-doors, ropes and pulleys, dumbwaiters, escape hatches. There were sliding stages. The sky became a canyon, the canyon filled with water and became an Italian lake draped in crepe de chine, the lake froze and a tundra opened before them. They walked through a snow garden, a garden of concrete deities, a children’s garden, a fox’s garden, a cinder garden where children played, and the glen. In the glen a boy played an irresistible tune on a panpipe. A deer appeared in a clearing — but before the child could reach it, it was gone, vanished in the dark wood.
AN ENORMOUS TURNTABLE filled an airplane hangar at the back of the Spiegelpalais upon which elaborate tableaux were in the process of being constructed. A maple tree was being assembled, a mute man made of straw, a Flagship, a child’s truck enlarged to life size, a seed crib. Freed from their burden of narrative, these objects seemed all the more mysterious, and everyone marveled at their inscrutable beauty. A pupa, a papyrus raft, a rose-laden boat.
Out of nothing an entire world had begun to materialize before the mother and child. An array of scene painters and seamstresses and carpenters and artisans of all sorts were busy at work constructing skyscrapers and churches and clock towers and other facades. Pastoral scenes had been rendered with great feeling, a beautiful grotto had been made one rock at a time, and cityscapes were depicted under heartbreakingly blue skies.
Look! the child said. There, and she tugged at her mother’s sleeve; on a painted ocean was Uncle Sven — whimsically portrayed.
PARADED BEFORE THEM was all of life. Enigmatic emblems streamed past as the mother and child walked, but they were not afraid. In the place called the Night Archive, inventory of some kind was being taken, and things were being summed up, accounted for, tallied. Piled to the ceilings were logbooks and ledgers and bibles: the Hair Bible, the Bird Atlas, the Red Book of Existence.
When they came to the place called the Aging Stage, the mother and child were stopped. On the Aging Stage, a voice explained, a few steps forward and you are a baby again, a few steps back — an old woman. The mother watched her siblings. What were they doing here?
Five giant steps were taken forward, and suddenly Lars, Ingmar, Anders, Sven, and baby Inga have not yet been born. It frightened the mother. Only the empty black perambulator, funereal, waited stage left for the babies to come.
Back in place and four steps in the other direction, and they were no more.
AN OPEN CALL for extras sounded throughout the Spiegelpalais. We need Human Pollinators, we need totem animals of every sort, we need a steady stream of beekeepers, we need pilgrims for the Concrete Rabbit. Had anyone seen Oscar the Death Cat? Had anyone heard from The Headless Horseman Fife and Drum Corps? An amplified voice spoke with urgency. Soldiers were needed, and before you knew it, they came in endless corridors walking in a continuous column toward the mother and the child, and then away, where they disappeared into the fog. Lost to the Phosphorous, the director murmured. Then more would come, and then go, and always more and more were called.
SOON ENOUGH THE pageant would commence. Various players were being fitted for costumes: Operation Rescue was being measured for bird suits, the President for his evening coat. Pierrot lugged out the Costume Bible. Junot thumbed through the Hair Bible to find where the hair for the Grandmother Wig had been purchased — ah yes — at auction in Sweden for ninety-five dollars an ounce in 1933. There were prop rooms filled with wigs, and wolf suits, and beekeeping paraphernalia.
Out tumbled a hat with antlers, a fish with a face, an ermine head, a mesh dress, a wig of matted hair.
Standing far up on a scaffold, men were assembling what appeared to be a human child, several stories high. Three schoolchildren with backpacks standing under a Scholar Tree looked on. When they saw the mother and child, they ran to them and laughed and pulled at them and asked if they might stay and play and read to them awhile, but the mother demurred and stepped away.
EVERYWHERE REHEARSALS WERE going on in the wings. Actors were running their lines: Flittermouse, Flittermouse. . a haunting falsetto could be heard. The little pope practiced carrying his glass globe. The glass pyramid was rolled out. Now and then you could pick out a word: wind or tooth or chrysalis or flame, and the mother thought, how strange.