Dawn Raffel: Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

After the rains had come and gone, we went down by the reservoir. No one was watching, or so it looked to us.

The night was like to drown us.

Our voices were high — his, mine; soft, bright — and this was not the all of it (when is it ever?).

Damp in the palm, unauthorized, young: We would never be caught, let alone apprehended, one by the other.

“Orion, over there. ” He was misunderstood; that’s what the boy told me. “Only the belt. The body won’t show until winter,” he said. “Arms and such.”

Me, I could not find the belt, not to save my life, I said.

Flattened with want: “There is always another time,” he said.

He died, that boy. Light years! And here I am: a mother, witness, a raiser of a boy.

I could tell you his name.

I could and would not.

“Here’s where the world begins,” he said. I see him now — unbroken still; our naked eyes turning to legends, the dirt beneath us parched.

The woman is awake now. She opens her purse.

Toast, eggs.

The road over-easy, or easy enough. Fork. A knife. Elaina — her name, the fact of herself, is stuck in her with consciousness, a vengeance. Caffeine. “ Warm you up?” the server says. The cream is artificial.

Elaina, like any good mother, is fully and dutifully absorbed in a spill. “After a certain age,” she says.

“What age?” the child, who is all too abundantly clearly hers — her flesh and blood, etcetera — says. Licked cloth, a scabbed knee; a hair, black, genetically impertinent, a fait accompli: split-end in the eye.

“Jerome, look,” Elaina says. “Sometimes a bird flies into the glass.”

“What on earth?” Jerome says.

The server is waiting, obtrusively. A smear is on the window.

Aggressively ribby — the shirt Jerome wears. Wherever it came from, she did not buy it — a gift, perhaps, or hand-me-down. A shade of blue. So much he will own, will bear about his person, that she will not choose.

Jerome appears to be bigger to her than the last time she looked, as well as, quite possibly, thinner. He is opening sugar, ripping up packets and pouring the contents into his mouth.

“Stop it,” she says. Her stimulant is dripping. The car is on asphalt, gathering heat. She knows she doesn’t mean it. Let him, she thinks.

Money on the table, a mint in the hand. “You’ll rot your teeth.”

“What about the bird?” Jerome says.

“Completely exhausted, ” Elaina says. She is turning the wheel. The year is half over. Children in doorways, a bike in a yard — banana seat — rooms and rooms within each house. Somebody old is out on a lawn — a woman to judge by the shape of the body, but this is a guess. Elaina will not look like that! A wind is up. An orange ball has been abandoned in a driveway. Here is the world as driven past: a hospital, school.

“Will you stop asking questions?” Elaina says.

Jerome says, “What?”—which means, she thinks, “Now tell me something else.”

“The bird,” he says.

“Ah, yes,” she says. He is kicking the dashboard, unsafely in the front. “I ought to know better,” Elaina says.

Jerome is seven and a quarter or a third. Closer to a third. He is belted at least; at least there’s that. Elaina does not look her age, not all of the time, or some of the time, she tells herself, as if, she tells herself, this were a comfort, this time.

A house they pass is gingerbread. Hansel and the other one: Eat you up! She taught him that.

Lilacs are blooming. Here it is — Gretel! Another of her stories: His father groomed lilacs, and hasn’t he, Jerome, heard? She pinned them, or she thinks she did, coiled in her hair, a petal to a curl. She will have to cut her hair. Of course, there is also a tale about that. Rapunzel or Samson. Drive, she thinks.

A girl with a basket.

Nothing in the glove, a pill or three. Her child’s breath: Baby. A scent she is fond of.

“Mom?” he says. “Mom?”

It is somebody’s birthday, the road sign says, revisably, in plastic.

“Where is the freeway?” Elaina says.

The sign is on wheels. It is raining, a bit. There is bile in her throat.

“Happy…” he says.

She swallows, again.

“Get that up,” Elaina says. Spilt grape on vinyl. “Money on trees.” Last stop for miles and miles, forever. A Slurpee, no less.

She ought to teach manners, but who has time?

Tissue and napkins, so flimsy what she gives him — a kiss. Another kiss, pulled over to a shoulder.

She ought to enforce better hygiene, she thinks.

“Sorry,” he says.

A ruffle of hair, and reacceleration.

Jerome is reading the names on signs. “Menomonee.” She taught him that. “Oconomowoc.” “Ray-seen,” Elaina says. Midwesternized. Bastardized. Directions too, Jerome knows. “Over the river and through the woods… ” She taught him that. “South to Chicago.” “One, two, buckle my shoe…” she taught him that. “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly…”

Perhaps she’ll stop.

Two in the morning or four or worse. It’s a brilliant motel, though, at least on the outside.

Jerome is rightly sleeping. The room smells of breath, and of yesterday’s throw-offs. Where is that shirt, Elaina thinks. And why can’t she take charge of her possessions? She kisses him, her son, and walks away.

Back and forth and back and forth and back and back and back she goes, a sheet to the breast.

There’s a flicker in the bathroom.

The past never changes materially — visit and visit, Elaina thinks. Her head is in the basin. The dead are still dead. She splashes the water onto her face; she towels — absorption.

Slippers, a headache, ever so slight. The cells that must wriggle and wriggle and wriggle inside her. “One, two…”

A seed, a wretched pellet.

She smells Jerome’s skin as she lies down beside him, divided, awake, and wonders, will she miss him?

“What?” Jerome says.

They are in the museum regarding bones. Under a limb: Jerome says he’s thirsty. So much in the world! (“The Great Lake — look! Look, the Windy City!”) The body is always insisting on something. This, that; more, yes. Forever the expense of it!

Gum she has to quench his need, excuses, postponement. “See,” she says, “the size of this.” A knuckle. The room. The thrill of extinction.

“See how enormous,” Elaina says. “Consider the enormity.”

Jerome is not stupid, Elaina thinks.

Elaina says, “Weather.”

Toes to the counter. Chicken on a spit. The beef is “with awe juice,” the server says.

“I am lonely,” Jerome says.

Shake of the month. Precipitation in a tumbler. “Wipe your mouth,” Elaina says. “And how can you be lonely when I love you so much?”