Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

The boys bent over the wreckage and worked at it with unbounded passion until even the entrails of King George were no more. The mother knew that soon enough, the boys too would be gone without a trace.

NEWS TRAVELED FAST of the teenager’s drowning in the Palatine Lake at the edge of the village. No one knew why a healthy young man on a clear summer day should have drowned in a lake.

Hundreds of years before, the Palatines had come to this place to build boats, but they discovered that the wood was too heavy and their boats would not float.

The Great-Grandfathers in the Valley recalled the ice harvests. Next winter, a church will be built on the ice at the very place the boy bobbed up, and all will lift a crystal glass to him. The boy will not come back. He sank — no one knows why — like the Palatine’s wood.

Wunderbar , the Palatines will exclaim, looking at the magnificent glittering monument to their drowned son, but after that, an irrepressible gloom will enter them, and their hearts will grow heavy and sink. They had not realized how much they missed the Rhine.

Come summer, the palace melted, they will wish they too could go home, but there is no way back. The lake where the boy drowned will seem to have closed up around him, but that is not exactly the case. The water will retain the information of the boy’s body for a long, long time. And next to that memory, the people will stay.

THE ASTRONOMERS FOUND a new planet; it was situated in the Goldilocks Zone, they said. The Goldilocks Zone is a small, hospitable zone of possibility in the vast burning and freezing cosmos where life might actually be sustained. It is not too cold there; it is not too hot — it is just right.

The astronomers could barely contain their excitement for their new planet, and they named it Gliese, which sounded to the child like glissade , and she dreamt of water, the origin of life, and rock, and sandy beach, and a thousand streaming living organisms.

Water is so important — we can’t survive without it, even for a few days. The mother thought of the world of thirst, and the work of human hands, and the miracle of water and desire.

THE CHILD DREAMT of a beautiful lake, and the mother dreamt right along with her. It’s very blue and deep, the child said. It’s fed by warm and cool springs. At night it is as smooth as silk, and no bats skim the surface.

There is a beach, and on the beach there are many children, and they always invite the child to play the circle game, or the game where they would say again and again the name of Marco Polo, the Venetian explorer who traveled the Silk Road.

The mother kept the child tethered to her by a silk strand of the most remarkable resiliency. There was a special gland in the mother’s abdomen. The silk the mother produced was not only flexible, but it stretched to accommodate the farthest places the child would ever want to go. It was extremely durable, and as long as the child was alive, it would be there for her: smooth and strong, and with a lot of give.

Every night the child would spend a few seconds of dreamtime sharpening her teeth in preparation for the day when the silk tether would have to be severed. Only at the very end of the child’s life would her teeth be sharp enough to break it, and by then it would be almost painless. For now, the mother reeled the child in, but gently, almost imperceptibly.

Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road and reached farther than any of his predecessors — venturing even beyond Mongolia into China. He passed through Armenia, Persia, and Afghanistan over the Pamirs and all along the Silk Road to China. He was the first traveler to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after kingdom.

The airport in Venice was named after Marco Polo, and one day, after the mother had died, the child would go there. On the outskirts of Venice is the Lago di Garda. It is said to be one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.

GLIESE’S STAR WAS cooler and smaller than the earth’s sun, but it was also much closer. A year passed there in thirteen days. In the paper there was a drawing of a child standing on Gliese, and behind the child was an enormous sun setting. It is only 120 trillion miles away, the astronomers say, which is not really so far.

THE ANGELS OF Death flew over the boy’s head. Three girls with their backpacks sat near his bed and took turns holding his hand. Surely, surely, he thought, if there was anyone out there, he would have heard, and it was by far the worst part of his short time on the planet that he had not made contact with those in other galaxies. Yes, he was only nine, and perhaps he would if he could only live a little bit longer. A number of distant civilizations could have developed and perished while flooding the cosmos with signals which have long since passed, or will never arrive in time.

Give me a sign, the boy says, and waits — and in the distance Gliese shines.

SEVEN ASTRONAUTS SLIPPED into unconsciousness — so said the report, and their bodies were whipped around in seats whose restraints had failed. The astronauts had continued to work as parts of the shuttle, including its wings, were falling off. Multiple failures of the smallest and largest sort had been set into motion. Helmets meant to protect them battered their skulls, but neither helmets nor spacesuits mattered in the end, for the crew had been subjected to five separate lethal events.

The breakup of the module and the crew’s subsequent exposure to hypersonic entry conditions were not survivable. The mother thought of that word, “survivable,” for a long time, and it filled her with awe.

Yes, the Gliese dreaming boy thought, there would be winds, shock waves, and other extreme conditions in the upper atmosphere. The craft went on a nauseating flat spin. Surely, the boy thought, the loss of cabin pressure had asphyxiated them within seconds.

THE PRODIGIOUS PUPPET-GOD and his Puppet Circus had come with its radical Utopian Vision in cardboard and cloth. There would be workshops, the poster said. At the workshops one might learn how to make effigies, father figures, giants for rallies, table heads for families, etc. Their mission: International Understanding through the Art of Puppetry. Their second mission: to honor all the disappearance when and where it occurred with small puppet actions. Tonight the Divine Reality Comedy was scheduled — and next week, the Everyday Domestic Resurrection Pageant. A smattering of applause could already be heard.

THE MOTHER BAKED an Appreciation Cake for Cecil Peter and his wife Wise Jean, who had saved the house once more, snuffing the flaming Swedish candelabra in the hall that she had left burning brightly while she went to the art exhibit at the child’s school.

The child had done a drawing of an angel and had wrapped it in red cellophane, and in a certain light, it looked to the mother as if the angel were catching fire.

Angels can be weird , the child wrote under her picture, but they have beauty inside.

The mother did not particularly like to bake, but the cake for Cecil Peter and Wise Jean turned out to be exceptional. It took up the entire kitchen, having risen so high and grown so large, she told the child, because it had been made in gratitude, and its enormity surprised even the mother who, whenever possible, tried to keep her emotions in check. It grew so large that by the time Cecil Peter and Wise Jean and all their relations arrived, they had to cut themselves an entrance out of cake to get in, and all then understood well the importance of Cecil Peter and Wise Jean to the mother, for there is something definitive about an entrance made of cake.

The mother hugged Cecil Peter’s wife Wise Jean, who, having dozed off in her chair, had seen the fire in a dream. When she woke, startled, she whispered to Cecil Peter to check on the house up the hill right away. Wise Jean, who was a volunteer firefighter, was blessed with extra vision, and Cecil Peter, who could always be counted on, nodded and was there in a flash.