Rivka Galchen - Little Labors

Books for young children rarely feature children. They feature animals, or monsters, or, occasionally, children behaving like animals or monsters. Books for adults almost invariably feature adults.

My mother tells me that people tell her, when she is out with the baby, that the baby is a crystal child. Some people ask for permission to touch the baby, because contact with crystal children is healing. “You should research what it is, crystal children,” my mother, who has a master’s degree in computer science and an undergraduate degree in mathematics, says more than once. From the moment my mother first met the baby, she found her to be an exceptional and superior creature; her ascribing of crystal child qualities to the baby is part of this ongoing story.

I finally go ahead and research crystal children. On the Web. I learn that, unlike rainbow children, crystal children have a difficult time because they believe they can change the way people think in order to heal the world; rainbow children by contrast understand that people cannot be changed, they can only be loved as they are; rainbow children are therefore less frustrated than crystal children. Crystal children were born, one site explains, mostly in the nineties, whereas rainbow children arrived, by and large, in the new millennium — prior to the generation of crystal children there was a generation of indigo children — and so maybe the puma is in fact a rainbow child, rather than a crystal child, or maybe she is part of an even newer generation, as yet uneponymized.

Maybe in the same way that children in the Middle Ages who were born with congenital hypothyroidism (as was common before salt was iodized because iodine is essential to thyroid development) had a certain look, and were mentally different from the mainstream, and were referred to as chrétiens —a term which unfortunately over time became cretins though all it meant at the time was Christians — crystal and rainbow and indigo children are terms used mostly if not prescriptively to refer to children who are unusual in ways most commonly associated with autism or Down’s syndrome.

Somehow I begin to believe in crystal children, and in the idea that my child has the special healing powers ascribed to crystal children. I start to believe this even though, unlike my mother, I don’t have a master’s degree in computer science, or an undergraduate degree in math. When I read one day that Isidor of Seville, back in the seventh century, was already saying that the world was round, he somehow knew so intuitively, I decide this is relevant.

But I still don’t understand why no one has ever stopped me on the street to talk about crystal children, why they have only stopped my mother. And I don’t understand why my mother, usually so suspicious of any comments made by “others,” is so open to these comments. Someone important to me says, “It sounds like a way to love and value children who are difficult.” Sure, I say, that sounds true. “Maybe your mother is telling you that she is a crystal child. Or that you are.”

In late August a baby was born, or, as it seemed to me, a puma moved into my apartment, a near-mute force, and then I noticed it was December, and a movie was coming out on what is sometimes called the day of the birth of our savior. If one was to accord respect to the tetraptych poster campaign, Forty-Seven Ronin featured one Keanu Reeves, one robot, one monster, and one young woman dressed in green and, for unclear reasons, upside-down. The poster I kept seeing was at the end of my block, below a dance studio, around the corner from a deli next door to a Japanese clothing shop that specializes in looks inspired by American streetwear, and across the street from a dollar-a-slice pizza place perennially playing Mexican pop music. I had melatonic madness at the time. Maybe for that reason the poster, as I passed it four or five times a day, always with the puma, began to seem to really mean something, something more than what was manifest. I felt this even though I knew the poster would soon enough be replaced by one for Vampire Academy or the newest remake of Robocop , and in fact it felt almost as if that randomness-revealing replacement had already happened, as if that was part of the poster’s message, that the accumulation of tomorrows was not — however lost to time I might be — going to cease producing its predictable melancholy. (However I, and I registered this as rare, I was myself at the time not melancholic. Not at all.) But the paradox was that as my life had become a day of unprecedented length, a day that I was calculating to now be almost three thousand hours long (in doing the math I realized that since the puma’s arrival I had not slept more than 2½ hours in a row) my thoughts had become unprecedentedly interrupted, as if every three minutes I had fallen asleep, curtailing any thought, morphing it into dream, which, when I woke, was lost altogether. What I mean to say is that I wasn’t working. This even though my plan had been to work. And to think. Even after the baby was born. I had imagined that I was going to meet, at birth, a very sophisticated form of plant life, a form that I would daily deliver to an offsite greenhouse; I would look forward to getting to know the life-form properly later, when she had moved into a sentient kingdom, maybe around age three. But instead, within hours of being born, the being — perhaps through chemicals the emotional-vision equivalent of smoke machines — appeared to me not like a plant at all, but instead like something much more powerfully moving than just another human being, she had appeared as an animal, a previously undiscovered old-world monkey, but one with whom I could communicate deeply: it was an unsettling, intoxicating, against-nature feeling. A feeling that felt like black magic. We were almost never apart.

I felt suddenly older, even as the puma also, in her effect on me, made me more like a very young human in one particular way, which was that all the banal (or not) objects and experiences around me were reenchanted. The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. Which is to say that the puma made me again more like a writer (or at least a certain kind of writer) precisely as she was making me into someone who was, enduringly, not writing.

And I really wanted to see the new forty-seven ronin movie. Even though I had no time for movies. And even though I knew there was an old version of the movie — maybe more than one old version — to which more than one person in my life had been devoted, and I always feel, and felt then, as most people do, some vague obligation to be faithful to the old, and disdainful toward the new, just as a general rule, a general rule to which I’m not deeply (or generally) opposed, even though it is stupid. But any disdain toward the new forty-seven ronin would have been superfluous anyway, since I can now tell you from this distance in time and space, that the movie that I was so ready to find meaningful was out of theaters before I ever got to see it, that it failed unambiguously in the United States and ignominiously in Japan where, despite its budget of $175 million and its popular Japanese cast and its wide release in 693 theaters — I was researching — and even its additional last-minute 3D effects and furthermore despite the fact that the base story was one which its native audience has been interested in hearing told again and again for nearly two centuries now — in Japan, the story of the forty-seven ronin is such a seminal one that there’s even a special term, chushingura , just to describe its tellings — the movie’s box office return in Japan substantially trailed that of its competitors, Lupin the 3rd vs Detective Conan and The Tale of Princess Kaguya: A Princess “Crime and Punishment.”