from beds of everlasting snow?
He looks to his daughter. It’s beautiful here, Bibi.
But what about the child, Father?
He shakes his head.
What about the child, she repeats.
You already know Bibi. You already know it was always too late.
And with that he lay back down, and once more froze again to death.
HERE FROSTY BOY, the mother whispers, and her voice echoes in the room. She looks at her father, sunken back into splendor.
THE NATIONAL SNOW and Ice Data Center’s ice expert says that the cap of floating sea ice on the Arctic Ocean is shrinking at an unprecedented rate. This year’s ice retreat is unmatched by anything in the previous century.
Even though the Grandmother from the North Pole is a strong swimmer, the mother was grateful that when the ice waters come to be the size of six Californias, the Grandmother from the North Pole would no longer be alive.
THE TIME IS running out. The world in its present form is passing away. What Saint Paul had said was as true now as it was then.
She was neither here nor there, and like the infants stranded in Limbo, she felt such discomfort, and it seemed to propel her — but whether up or down, whether back or forth, and whether she was asleep or awake, she did not know.
Even in sleep, the body was accelerating because the earth was in rotation. Even the coffins spun under the ground, with the spinning of the earth. All she knew was that the child was there again, at her side. And she smiled.
IT’S FRANCE, SOMEONE shouted, and the child jumped up and down with glee and pulled at her mother’s sleeve. France had come to the Spiegelpalais: A four-dolphined fountain was brought in, a glass pyramid, a grotto, and gargoyles. Fragments of the river Seine arrived — it glistened in the mirrored walls and kept the great American river company. The Little Sparrow sang.
BY MOONLIGHT THE mother works tirelessly. If she had made a bargain and had, as a result, been allotted so many years so as to watch her child be born and grow, she could not remember. All she knew was that she could feel the Great Fading, and along with the fade, the desire to make the child a safe place.
See how hard the mother is trying to fend off a catastrophe that has already happened. See how desperately she is trying to save them — and see in this last effort how beautiful they have become.
THE CHILD POINTED to the burning sky in fear.
Look! she cried.
The mother and she stood high, high atop the towers, which were in flames. From there it was clear to the child that the mother, who appeared very pregnant, could never have survived. It was almost ten years ago now that the towers had fallen, taking the three thousand souls. The child gasped, for she knew what it meant for them.
ON HER BACK she felt a searing heat. Maybe she was on fire. Instinctively she rolled on the floor to smolder the flames. Still she was not burning. There was no fire yet, only heat, and more and more smoke. People broke windows. The mother told herself to breathe. Maybe if she had a wet towel and could place it over her face.
One by one they were falling asleep.
She was falling into the smoke-filled Valley of Sleep. But for the baby, she might have succumbed. On her hands and knees she crawled over the sleepers in an effort to get closer to the window.
SHE WONDERED WHERE the Spiegelpalais had come from — why it had materialized, and why, in the end, it had gone away. One day it was just there, and she could not remember, after a time, having ever lived without it. It seemed always to have been in her presence. And just as it had appeared from nowhere, and out of nothing, so it had now disappeared, and she could no longer be sure that it had ever existed at all. All that remained was the longing for something: large, circular, luminous, very beautiful — but what? She wept, for soon she knew even the memory of the Spiegelpalais would vanish.
SEE THE INTENSE immobility of the mother. The mother had been put into a twilight state. She saw that the bat swooped around her head in shallow circles, but there was nothing she could do about it. The circumference of a circle in Romania is determined by the diameter of the arc made by those heat- and halo-seeking creatures. Saint Stanislav, patron saint of Poland, throws a discus or a Frisbee to them, lifts his hand as if in protection, and gives a benediction. The mother, in a twilight state, feels something like fear. She has no idea what part she is being asked to play. But it is a part, now hers, that she will not relinquish.
WITH SOME DREAD and some excitement, she stepped into the capsule. More than anything, she wanted to be a winged thing. She lowered her head and assumed the pose she had seen in the great science books of the Fathers. She tucked her head down to her chest. Slowly her eyes blackened and grew liquid. Her legs were pressed together, and her feet were crossed one over the other as is often depicted in the crucifixion.
She was wrapping herself in filaments, threads, gossamer, papery thin skins. Brown leaf-like strands were attaching themselves to her back. All was quiet. In a stillness, which seemed to signify a coming into being, and also the sloughing off of being, she was enclosing herself slowly in a firm case.
When the child came upon the mother, she was already wrapped in her mesh dress. Wrapped like a little mummy princess in papyrus and rags. Her gold-leafed head was elongated, her inky eyes had blackened, her appendages were immovable. She was gold-encrusted, sun-soaked, sessile, remote. Her pupa hung motionless and mute. Seeing her mother like this, the child, for the first time, begins to cry.
There is the mother like a mirage at the end of the Sphinx Road, and though the child walks toward her — the mother comes no closer. Now she was spinning more and more threads.
Moth pupae are usually dark in color and formed in underground cells, loose in the soil, their pupae contained in protective silk called a cocoon. Cocoons may be tough or soft, opaque or translucent, solid or webby, of various colors or of multiple layers. Insects that pupate in a cocoon must escape it.
PUPAE ARE IMMOBILE and have few defenses. Some species are capable of making sounds or vibrations to scare off potential predators, or sometimes just for communication. The child waited outside. She hoped her mother was the sort of species that made sounds.
She remembered now the mother singing, Tomorrow will be my dancing day, and it pained her to think of it. Her mother wrapped tightly in thousands of overlapping filaments.
NOT TO WORRY — if the world ends at this moment, the child said, God keeps track of where all the bodies are, the ones in the ocean, the ones scattered as ashes hither and thither, the ones entombed in silk and gold filaments, silent.
THE CHILD SITS quietly next to the little mother holding the shining pod in her hand. The mother seemed to be working very hard. The mother had assured her she would be back. The child smiled. She thought that she could see at last the place where her mother’s wings had finally begun to form.
Extreme darkness pours down on them, but they are not afraid anymore.
IN THE WOOD, a girl child is breathing like a beast. The mother is careful to stay very still. She recognizes the girl from a long time ago, but wonders how it is that this girl has not changed. She has remained exactly the same. The girl can hear her mother’s voice calling to her. She becomes a brindle color and light and gallops. It is the Grandmother from the North Pole who calls, but the Grandmother is young, and her yellow hair gleams. It was a mysterious life. Every night the girl thinks of the infinite forest that lay just beyond her door: immense, dense with totems and stars. She soothes herself by pulling the darkness and the cool around her like a cloak. The girl gets out of bed and goes to find her Bird Atlas, and her book of animal tracks. She cannot wait for morning to come.