A certain amount of swaying and flexing must be built in. The future is a swaying motion. A tall girl who does not flex and sway might crack or collapse.
THE SOUTH TOWER was the second tower to be hit, but it was the first to fall. She watched it buckle and sway and warp. Firefighters who reached the crash zone before the building broke up described seeing two pockets of fire. This is what she knows: that buildings should be able to withstand disaster, that mothers once standing should continue to stand, that children should never perish. A plume of smoke appears behind the mother’s head.
OUTSIDE THE SCHOOLHOUSE amidst the rubble, a mother from GinGin Province was weeping. I hope God will give my daughter a chance to survive. I can lose anything in this world — except my daughter.
THE SCHOLAR CHONG Heng invented the first earthquake detector in the year 132. On a bronze vase, eight dragonheads and toads were arranged to work like a pendulum, and when the earth shook, a brass bell would pass from the mouths of the dragons to the mouths of the toads.
A mother sits next to the rubble of what once was her child’s school and waits. She refuses to move. Weeks pass, months.
In addition to the fortification of the children, the mothers’ hearts must be replaced next time with stainless steel hearts.
THE SOUL DOES not adhere to the bones of the deceased but flies up and is free, this the mother believes. The Egyptians thought the soul was placed in an eternal chamber, and a sheep was sent to guard it.
THE PRODIGY PLAYS a black cello made of carbon. In fact, all the instruments are carbon for the occasion, as carbon fares better in frigid temperatures and there is now the question of the unseasonable cold to consider. There are no flowers here today, only carbon and cold. A carbon cello has a flooding, deeper sound than a cello of wood.
GIRLS ARE GATHERED together and held for one more afternoon in the light of the schoolyard. The next time you see them, they will have disappeared, and young women will have taken their place. The girls ride their horses, talk their talk, giggle, sing loo-loo and la la la. This is the day when childhood becomes irretrievable, though no one will realize it until some time after. Though we could not have predicted the moment in advance — all had changed, as if in an instant.
Without a doubt, the bat had presaged change. Still we linger, keep them in sunshine skipping here awhile longer in this afternoon, though it is getting darker and cooler already now. We dally — relishing the moment that, unbeknownst to us, has already passed. How else to account for the sudden sadness, the melancholy as evening comes on? They are bathed in last light, and then they are gone.
AS CHILDHOOD COMES to an end, the Girl with the Matted Hair’s mother has already been dead for over ten years, and there is something unforgivable about that.
Her resurrection concoction left forgotten now in the far corner of the schoolyard. Her recipes — drain the blood of the toad, pet five sleeping sheep — tucked into the stone wall.
29
CAREFULLY THEY WALKED into the Spiegelpalais. Even from the periphery they could feel the great sleep pulling at them, and they were afraid. The atrium’s walls were lined this day with fifteen metallic medicine cabinets filled with medication. Thirty sheep slept floating in thirty formaldehyde tanks arranged in rows, and they half resembled schoolchildren nodding at their desks. Nodding and humming, this multiplication of sleep made the child yawn. The sheep beckoning were branded in red with stencil. What do they want of us? The child tugged at her mother’s arm.
Submerged in a twelve-foot tank slept two sides of beef, a chair, a row of linked sausages, an umbrella, and a birdcage housing a dead dove.
The sheep were branded in red with a stencil. The child, anesthetized, dreamt on the floor of the Spiegelpalais, and the mother had to pick her up and carry her over her shoulder as she did when the child was an infant. More and more, the mother remembered Infant Time. All heads, sleeping and not, slowly turned toward the mother and child. The somnambulant sheep seemed to nod in their direction and gesture with their cloven hoofs. Their eyes were open, but not seeing, glassy and smooth, and the lightest light blue — like the mother’s eyes.
THE CHILDREN GATHERED in the firefighting wing where many of the fire stories had been collected and preserved. Relics from the great incinerations were housed in glass. In one of the cases the children saw a scarlet bird, a glove, a briefcase, a burning bush, a rose the size of a human heart, a father suspended in liquid. No one was sure if the objects behind glass had done the saving, or were part of the saved. It did not really matter — the child thought the fire world was beautiful.
WONDER POURED DOWN on their heads. Sometimes the adventure of being alive felt too great. On these days, something began to fray in her. Smoke was filling the stairwell.
Oddly, as there would have been time, she might have said billowing while she looked out the window, which in turn sounded like pillow. . pillowing, as she grew sleepier and sleepier with each breath.
A PLATOON OF soldiers, enveloped in smoke, drift to the shore. Every one of them is dead. They have been snuffed out like wicks. They have nodded off and could be revived no more.
But should living soldiers ever return, should any war ever be over again, on that day the mother will eat the pasta called campanile — campanile is Italian for bells — and they will dance with a kind of joy reserved only for the most auspicious of occasions: the Great Resuscitation, or the return of the bees, or Easter.
LATER, WHEN THEY were back in the house and the fire was lit, the child would take out a piece of paper and draw an elaborate prismatic snowflake, and underneath it she would print: The way nobody is perfect and God is. For now, they kept walking. The moon shone and the coyotes turned into liquid light and spilled into luminous shapes on the night’s page, and the light in turn was devoured by great swooping night creatures, not bats — she knew not what — and the world in its wonder and violence entered her and she did not flinch. The birds appeared, and flying wild cats in the night in primordial splendor and chaos abounded, undeterred by whatever civilization may have tried to tame or diminish.
THE MOTHER YEARNED for the wolf, at once so dapper and so wild, who had escorted her across the threshold so many years ago now. Shiny, bright. She paged it in the night. She did not want it to leave the child behind. She wanted the child to grow up — immersed in world and in time; she wanted the child to thrive.
SHE CANNOT FATHOM the time that has elapsed since the galaxy was formed or the vastness that they are situated in. The oldest star in the galaxy is 13.2 billion years old, and the galaxy itself about 10 billion years old. The next arm of stars can be located about 7,000 light-years away. What is 7,000 light-years to her? She cannot imagine how infinitesimal they are; there is not a word that comes in her language to describe the quality of the smallness or the distance or the wonder or the fear. In the vast black cosmos, the planet floats. She thinks of their planet, beautiful beyond belief, swaddled in blue.
She looks to where the child now stands under the arbor in the Children’s Garden. It is the first time she has been allowed to use the sharp clippers to prune the roses. Light floods the entrance to the darkened garden.