SLOW DOWN, THE Grandmother says, when the child goes too quickly. Press Enter, the child says, and then she puts her hand over the hand that holds the cursor, and everything slows.
THE PEAK GROWTH is the combination of three mini-peaks. The first peak involves the lower limbs, the second involves the trunk, and the third involves the thorax. The first phase involving the limbs is called the ascending phase, which corresponds to the acceleration in the velocity of growth in girls.
Chronological age is of no significance; everything depends on bone age. Girls’ Peak Growth velocity happens when girls are eleven in bone age. It is normal to feel the acceleration of bone growth during puberty. A not uncommon question among certain sorts might be, what do you think your bone age is?
Also, different bones in a child age at different rates. A child may be said to be composed of bones in a Bone Age Mosaic.
The Risser Sign is still zero and the Triradiate Cartilage is still open at the onset of puberty. When they found the femur in the shallow grave, they had suspected it was the missing preadolescent, because the bone had not yet fused. The mothers gravitate to the scene.
After the closure of the Triradiate Cartilage, there is still a considerable amount of growing remaining. The descending phase of puberty is signified by significant growth of the thorax.
IN THE TIME everything was accelerating, everything was moving so quickly and there seemed to be no conceivable way of stopping it, the Slow Lab entered the Spiegelpalais. The Grandmother was moving at hummingbird speed, but at the Spiegelpalais, the Slow Clock was being assembled. It was run by beads. One bead dropped every five minutes, and time seemed almost to stop.
THE NORTH POLE Grandmother had bright white hair and light, light sparkling eyes. Wait up, the child called to her, and the Grandmother smiled, skittling along the ice. She was going full speed ahead with great deliberateness — she knew the way. What the child feared was that right out there before her, her grandmother would become lost. Everything is changing, the child thought, but she was not ready yet. She cast a glacial spell on their lives and fell for a minute headlong now into the ravishing, precious luxury of slowed-up time. She stopped the Grandmother’s skittle across the ice, the Great Amnesia, the Peak Growth Velocity, the folding up of the mother.
THE SLOW LAB had moved into the Valley to quell the vertiginous passing of time. The World Institute of Slowness would hold a Symposium soon. The Slow Lab was run on the tenets of the Slow Food Movement — local, organic, responsible — it emphasized slowness in the creation and consumption of food. Now this idea was being applied to every aspect of life. There were even websites — SlowPlanet.com, LifeinSlowMotion.org — for all things slow: slow travel, slow shopping, slow life — a Credo of Slow.
AS THE GRANDMOTHER neared eighty-three, the mother took her in her arms and refused to let go. In Italy there were Slow Cities, she told her, and they might get on a boat.
WHITE PHOSPHOROUS OBSCURED the view for a moment. From the fog could be seen the figments of mothers. Fire came from the bodies of our children, they said, and they wept. My daughter melted away. The burn reached to the muscle and bone, the Doctor without Borders lamented. It is a war crime to use such a thing as white smoke on a civilian population, the mothers murmured, walking through white.
THE MEN LEARNED to walk in slow motion while they slept. It was as if they were in a kind of coma. Only the notion of Grave Alice, and Laughing Allegra, and Edith with Golden Hair propelled them forward at all — the girls at the end of the war. But they moved more and more slowly, and no one knew anymore if they would ever get back.
CAREFULLY IN HIS sleep, the Vortex Man lifts the eighty-year-old Yangtze Giant Soft-Shelled Turtle, the only female known to exist, and he places her on his back. Slowly, he carries her six hundred miles to the zoo in Suzho to meet the one-hundred-year-old male — the last known of its species. Good going, the Grandmother from the North Pole whispers, watching from afar, as the Vortex Man slowly moves across the continent of Asia, the turtle strapped to his back.
MORE AND MORE now, the mother called Bunny Boy Bog Belly, as he seemed to carry the bog with him wherever he went. Each evening he would materialize from the mist. In the day now, no one knew where he went exactly, but he always came home in the evening, and he always carried the bog on his fur. When the mother reached out to him, he passed her, seeming not to see her, too fixated on the bog, even at night, at home, at the foot of her bed. It was the strangeness and slowness of cats that sustained her now.
WHERE HAVE YOU been, Mr. Min?
Slowly he pulls bat after white bat out of his hat at the Spiegelpalais.
WHEN THE LAMB returns, it will be resplendent in a teal blue City Opera T-shirt, and its wool will gleam, and so will its eyes. When the lamb returns, he will be asked: where have you been? He will be asked: why have you been absent so long? And then the question that must be answered in order to continue: how, little lamb, will we know you will not be leaving us again?
The lamb will smile, but, as he is stuffed, he will say nothing in return.
MID-STEP, THE VORTEX Man puts down the turtle, and moves no more.
You have engendered in us the desire for knowledge; you have awakened in us a desire we did not know we had, the travellers say at the gates of the Spiegelpalais. You cannot fall silent now. You have instilled in us an insatiable longing. You have provided balm. Answer the twelve questions you have posed, before you go. Reveal your face, just one time. Show us the way. Point us in the right direction. You offer boons. You work mighty deeds, we’ve heard. You have the gifts of healing; you speak in tongues. Speak to us.
All is Illusory, the Vortex Man said and got up and passed through the midst of them and was gone.
WHEN THE SOLDIERS realized they were walking in the exact opposite direction of Grave Alice and Laughing Allegra and Edith with the Golden Hair, their hearts filled with sand and their beings were drawn into the earth and it was as if they were being buried alive. The bat had advocated flight, but they could not stay aloft; they just kept sinking further and further into the earth.
FORCE OF TIME, Ultimate Reality, Having Form and Yet Formless, the Divine Paradox, the Divine Smokescreen, Ruler of the Five Elements, and the Object of our Meditation. How can we stand here, how can we bear your Absence now? The End of Illusion. The Redeemer of the Universe, Sender of Bats, practicing austerity and renunciation. Time shall devour all, ineffable and inconceivable. He presides over the mysteries of both life and death.
At the place of the Disillusion of All Things, the people wept.
All Hail the Vortex Man, the People of the Valley said, and were afraid. All Hail the Vortex Man!
She thought of a blazing fire and a gloomy darkness and a storm and a trumpet blast, and the countless angels in festal gathering. All gathered at the sensational head of the Vortex Man, along with the assembly of the firstborn and the spirits of the just made perfect, and the Hare, mediator of a new covenant and the sprinkled blood. A gleaming gun at the center, it seemed, was the cause of all the commotion.
SHE HAD NOT known that at the time Lamby had disappeared, miles away, the Vortex Man with great violence had taken his life, and she now thought that perhaps this enigmatic force whom she had loved had pulled the little lamb with him into the massive vortex of his despair.