Dawn Raffel - Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

“Mom,” Jerome says — a word that means anything and everything and nothing, a holder of space, Elaina thinks, a consonant receptacle. Who said I was scared?”

“Ala mode,” the server says.

Jerome has dessert. He has crackers in wrappers after dessert.

The windshield is salted with droppings and grit.

“I am not afraid,” Jerome says. Things are underfoot again, despite her imprecations — rigid, articulated figures with what would appear to be lethal capability. Blade upon glass. “Rain, rain, go away.” Jerome, at least, is singing. The pterodactyl jacket: She gave him that, didn’t she?

They’re entering an artery, a heart of a city.

Elaina is singing along: “…away.”

He is looking, she is thinking, at a woman getting drenched. “Why not go home?” Jerome says.

“Don’t touch,” she says. She is teaching him something. Showing him something: a woman who lived.

He is bunching her dress. So chilly in the gallery! Pulling her handbag, he leaves an impression: Jelly on a palm.

“The artist is famous for painting,” she says. “But see how he sculpted, molded out of metal.” The dancers’ arms are open, uncorrodable. The mutinous body is captured, whole.

“Careful,” the guard says.

“Drafty in the dressing rooms,” Elaina says, “a life of no comfort, no money, disease — and yet,” she says, “the beauty.”

Fingers to anatomy. A glare in the eye. You, you, you: The guard’s eyes hold accusation, she thinks. “Miss,” he says. “Missus.”

Jerome is spinning, in a flighty pirouette.

“Watch he doesn’t hurt himself.”

“What do you say we dash?” she says.

She is alert, alert, aroil in the night, and in the morning again, in fact, and still, and in need of a tonic or another cup of hot.

“Five, six, pick up sticks… ” She taught him that. “Seven, eight…” She taught him that. “Little robin redbreast flew up to a wall…” “Five, six, seven, eight…” And why can’t she concentrate?

Elaina tucks him in again.

So many things she cannot be shut of, or not so fast, at least not yet.

There once was a lady who swallowed a substance, or lived in a shoe, or did not know what to do.

She looks at him. “Perhaps,” she says, believing he’s sleeping, “the bird will do anything to get at something sweet.”

“Here is where you rest your chin. Hold still,” she tells him. A long line of children synthetically dressed is stretched out behind them.

Science and industry. Science and technology. Hands-on, the flyer said, but everything is virtual, incorporeal, here. There is a fast game of ball in which there is no ball. No net in the court. No messy abandon.

Here is a landscape: a digital myth, or a world made of light.

You can channel the future, for a fee. A snap of your offspring years from now — inevitable jowl, grayer teeth, a mole. Reliable, certainly: the weight that comes of living, with margin for error, or possibly grief.

“See how Jerome will look as a man!” Elaina says, prodding. So long they have stood here!

“Mom, I don’t want to.” She feels the body stiffen, changeable as that.

“Now,” she says, “or never.”

“Please,” she says.

Then, “As you wish. Maybe there’s a gift shop.”

“What if they left it open?” he says.

Twin beds turned down, a drip in the tap. “Left what?” Elaina says. “What if who left what?”

“All of them,” Jerome says. “They could open the windows all over the world.”

He lies alongside her. “Happy,” he says. So high the boy’s voice! She narrows her eyes the better to see him — palpable body, the face as it is — and all she says is, “Wait.” She says, “Wait.”

The kids were in the water. At least, she thought they were. Beneath the umbrella — a sturdy, unlovely, brick-and-black affair — the weather undid her. A gift, this. It was not of her choosing. Somebody — who? — with a practical inkling had given them this, a present for the marriage, dependably wrapped. Up it went. A shadow on the belly in the middle of the day. And in the hand, from a chest, ice.

She willed herself upright. “Do you, by any chance, see them?” she said, put a chip to the breast.

Soaked trunks, a flounce at a haunch, sweet navels of girls, a careless bravado in the curve of the back, strapped toe. The moment of near-recognition lost.

Her hair, in a headband, frizzed with heat.

“What did you say?” He was curling the page.

“Do you see them, I said. I don’t see them, I said. Look. Just look. Please look. Do you think I should worry? Do you?” she said.

He looked at her — she felt he did — as if he were trying to reach a decision. In his hand the book went limp.

The lake appeared swollen.

Somebody called out the name of a fellow — a famous explorer — and splashed, and jumped. A boy the size (more or less, give or take — roughly) of hers. Skinny in the wing bones, and nevertheless obstructing the view. His shoulders were burning, already beginning to pinken in the sun. He would blister for sure, need an unguent at night.

Two syllables — an offering. A ball in the air.

Heat shrilled the voice, or else the limits of breath, the lack of power in her.

I think your mother is calling.

Look! At play on the water, thwackers of plastic, diggers of holes — see here, a passage! — a castle in the silt, or an attempt at least — no fortress to speak of — lacking form, the overly wishful industry of children. “Look!” she said.

They looked at her avoidingly. The others — she saw them. A glare on the current, deviled eggs. Somebody’s mother but hardly theirs.

Eyes in the back of the head — not her.

“In the water, they were. Just a minute ago.”

He stood there and stood there.

“Both of them, the two of them, how could they?” she said. “But could they?” she said. She summoned their faces, receding from her. What were they wearing, either of them? A birthmark, moles.

The smell of them. (She loved the smell of them asleep.)

Now, what was the height of them, the weight of them — facts — which a person in authority would rightly request?

Her knowledge was approximate if not lackadaisical. She knew them — hers! her children — mainly only obliquely, it seemed, by unarticulated sense, or the objects they’d touched, too close for description.

“Polo!”

She flushed. She felt herself flushing, ever self-conscious.

“Weren’t you watching at all?” he said.

She was frightened of wind.

This is what she watched at night, or rather, what she minded: the breathing — quick, too entirely quick — and flushing, the rising of the ribs. There was always a little light at a curtain, a street awake. She looked in rooms. She was frightened of heat when there was no breeze. The house seemed to vibrate, irregular, beating, a clock in the bedroom (master), built-in, ticking, slow: a lost minute in the day.

Things glowed at night. Appliances. So much she had been given (a shower for her!). And still in mint condition, sort of. The flame in the furnace was bluish in winter — she saw it, she did — in a child-sized window, an opening, a necessary menace, a toy. There was a voice she intended to find and disable. Press to quit. In the bosom, an almost mechanical compression. And in summer, a fan about to tumble, a bulb the wrong wattage, and close, too close, to a delicate shade.