Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

The baby flame, enormous, licks the edges of the glass. Some days there is nothing more the mother would like than to be stored in a jar by the door, there for the child to feed from, if the situation becomes dire.

ONE OF THE school girls had a squished eye and had to have a series of eye operations to unsquish it. Back in GinGin where she was a baby, she lay in a bed, in a row of beds, in a room of beds filled with girls that they must have forgotten to touch or turn over. And because no one had remembered to touch or turn them over, their eyes had squished into the beds.

The GinGin astronauts were going to a new planet. Don’t forget to hold the girls when you get there, the child called after them. Don’t forget to turn the GinGin girls in their beds! Otherwise they will have squished eyes, and it is not so easy to unsquish them. She felt the air above her dense with stars and birdsong, and above that the lonely transit of planets, and the men starting over again.

On the new planet, the astronauts call back, we have no intention of holding the girls or turning them over. Not for all the tea in GinGin are we going to touch those girls.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER the screen went dark in the Spiegelpalais, the mother looked up to the skylight. Behold the bat, she cried! O winged wonder! The only mammal besides children able to fly. O faceted scapula. Behold the sternum, the rib cage, the robust clavicles. O Flying Fox. O Prodigy! Behold the tree chreub!

At dawn, the artist’s cardinal, emblazoned, alighted for a moment on a mulberry branch and then flew away.

THE RAINS CAME and many funnels swerved into them and the world was shaking, and they were afraid. Hold on to your hats! There was nothing the mother and child could do but take cover next to the giant screen in the cavernous, emptied space and wait. The screen flickered and gave no clues and then grew dark, and for a full twenty-four hours, nothing could be seen on the screen. Petitions were sent to the Vortex Man, and they must eventually have been heard, for at the Fortieth Hour, the screen at the Spiegelpalais at last filled with light.

EARTHQUAKE KILLS TENS of Thousands, Many of Them School-children, the screen reads. GinGin Grieves, Suspends Torch Relay.

The mother bows her head as if bludgeoned. She and the child fall to their knees.

DEAD SCHOOLCHILDREN ARE strewn across the debris. Many others are trapped. Everywhere there are fingers and feet, and mothers clawing the dirt. Crushed in the shoddily built schools. The earthquake struck at 2:30 when the children were still in class. A mother is screaming in the ruins. Her only child has vanished into the chaos, and she cannot find her. Textbooks and backpacks are everywhere.

The children are extinguished. The mother cowers as rescue workers search for survivors on the screen, and she puts her hands over the child’s eyes. It is the rule that a couple is allowed one, and only one, child each. A stack of only children in the rubble of the schoolhouses across GinGin Province. Maybe children are alive in the rubble, the child says. Maybe the parents will dig them out with their fingers.

Tie the mothers tightly together to calm them, an official is instructing. A distraught mother abruptly turns. She thinks she feels her child’s presence like a wind at her back.

The mother and child stand helpless before the enormous screen. A large crane outfitted with floodlights arrives to lift massive slabs of concrete through the darkened, smoldering terrain, where the only children do not cry out any longer. Parents build makeshift shrines and place photos of their children at the death place. Some burn red candles or paper money to send their children into the Afterlife.

The screen at the Spiegelpalais says that the Torch will be revitalized after the proper term of mourning. It is promised one day that it will appear again in the City of Forests.

And with that the screen goes black.

THE MOTHER AND child hobble home as best they can, but they don’t get far before the earth opens up before them. In all that darkness they stand before a vast canyon of light, and for a moment, the ancient maple flashes before the mother’s eyes. Where are we? the child asks. But the mother says nothing in return. The canyon is filled with dump trucks and cement trucks and small fire engines and police cars performing their tasks — they look like toys from this vantage point, and they mesmerize the small boys who have materialized from the outlying gloom. The mother and child stand at the top and look into it for a long time.

What can be seen now, without the Slurry Wall, and what has been hidden for millennia underneath the great metropolis astonishes them. Look, the mother says and she takes the child’s hand, and gingerly they begin their climb down the steep ravine, hundreds of feet below the sea. They sense the dead are all around them, and they see what remains, as they pass archeologists sifting the debris. In the subterranean world, the workers hand them the remnants: a shoulder, an ankle, a few ribs. Maybe they should turn back, the mother thinks. Still, there is no question of turning back. The child points. She sees that piles are being made now: computer parts, electrical wire, carpet. Someone tries to hand her a bowl of two hundred bone fragments. Are we dead? the child asks.

Dread fills the mother, but still she is compelled forward. For a moment she hesitates, torn as to whether to bring the child further down into the canyon or to leave her near the anthropologists at the rock ledge and retrieve her on the way back, but by the time she formulates a plan, it is too late. The mother has no choice, as the child seems to have folded herself up and attached herself to the wall of the mother’s womb. Though she cannot see the child, she knows she is there, and the child’s little heartbeat gives her the courage and the momentum she needs. She takes a few more steps. As briefcases and cell phones and jewelry and dresses are being excavated, the mother bows her head. She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t look or look away. The child peers through the ruby scrim of her mother’s body as they continue their descent. They pass, along the way, battalions of vanishing men.

Who goes there? And the mother’s voice echoes in the space. Deep within the earth, plant material has been compressed for millions and millions of years into nuggets, and the men, who have gone to retrieve it, begin their way back up. They pass the mother and the child going in the opposite direction. Come with us, the men say, but the mother shakes her head no. They shrug and ascend, soot-covered, holding their illuminant — something from the center of the earth that glows. We could bring you back up, they offer once more, we know the way. The mother thinks there is a kindness to them. But she shakes her head once more. The vanishing men hand the mother an ember and are gone.

The mother continues her grave descent. They see extravagant rock striations from the last Ice Age and pause. The mother puts a hand to the gleaming boulders — so cold to the touch, so strange, and all memory of the Valley and the life above begins to fade. It’s beautiful here, don’t you think — irrefutable as it is, and so quiet, and so dark.