Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

The lion-headed mother folds up. The Chimera closes like an umbrella. Yes, of course, she says. I will.

THE CODES BETWEEN mother and infant are so profound that artists and writers have often felt the need to replicate them in literature and art their whole lives. The mother wonders where her own mother is at that moment. She feels a pull and opens the window to see if she can detect her presence.

She looks to the heavens.

A small number of fetal cells stray across the placenta — a rash of stars in the bloodstream. A fluorescing protein derived from jellyfish makes the cells glow bright green. The mother closes her eyes. Outside the frogs and fireflies make the night alive.

IF A MOTHER is in a car accident, her child will move toward the wreckage, arriving quickly at the ruin, while her body is medivaced and packed in ice. The child’s cells migrate to the wounds, becoming six times more concentrated in the area of damage. SOS signals from the mother are always heard.

The child survives for decades in the mother’s skin, in the liver, in the bloodstream. No harm can come to her, the child says. Serenely, the child crosses the blood-brain barrier as if on a barge in summer. If the thyroid is damaged, the child turns into thyroid cells; if the liver is damaged, the child turns into liver cells; if the heart is damaged, the child turns into heart cells; if the brain is damaged, the child turns into brain cells. How amorphous and fluid, how ready to take any shape is the child!

And the next day, the mother gets up from the accident as good as new.

SHE’S VERY SMALL, and she hasn’t been seen for some time. For a while she had been sighted darting in and out of the bushes, small and sleek. She had become, the mother thought, like something hunted. But lately the Girl with the Matted Hair seemed to have disappeared completely. This made the child sad, as she missed her friend, unpleasant at times as the friend could be.

THE CHILD PICTURED the Girl and her mother together. She hovered at the nape of her mother’s neck like a small marsupial. Something with a pouch, something with a marsupium. It was a beautiful sight.

Though neither the mother nor the child can actually see her, the Girl with the Matted Hair has retreated deep into the woods where she was beginning her first preparations for the Hamster Ball.

THE ICE WAS changing to water, the young to old. The Poles were dissolving. Infinitesimal bits of the child’s body carried by the mother slowly began to melt, and the North Pole Grandmother could only feel the barest trace of her own children anymore. Still it was wonderful, wasn’t it — lichen was collecting on the antlers of Santa’s reindeer. Wild night swirled all around them and the collisions of dark stars. Life was an adventure — whenever she was with the Grandmother she felt that.

When the Grandmother was a girl, she told the child, she liked to ice fish, and each year right before the Mistletoe Feast, they would fish for a fortnight. Sometimes the child called the Grandmother from the North Pole my Snowmere, and she would hug her, and she would say to her, remember that enormous snowman several stories high that we once saw together? Even in summer, Snowmere, she said to the Grandmother from the North Pole, you will never melt, and she hugged her shrinking grandmother hard.

THE MOTHER THINKS of the Grandmother from the North Pole, and she knows that inside the child resides the mother too, for the mother has never walked on this earth without the Grandmother from the North Pole; she has never walked with only her one body, but always with multiple bodies. She knows even now she still carries the Grandmother from the North Pole inside her. Otherwise, how to account for the blue lips, or the antlers, or the seal whiskers, or the night?

THE EXTERMINATOR HAD come to size up the situation. There were multiple problems, he said, quietly, descending the attic stairs. And this was not counting the wasps and the white hornets, the mice and chipmunks, the flying squirrels, or the solemn congregation of moths. Okay, the mother whispered. She had heard the great collision of flying foxes above her head thudding to the floor. There was that, yes. She knew that there were sick cows known as Downers making their way across the floor above her head. She already could tell they were not well by the way they lapsed and tripped across the ceiling, their odd syncoptic step. Yes, she knew about that. The exterminator shook his head.

It had been a wet springtime and now it was nearly summer. She heard a warped waltz coming from the rafters. Soon it would be prom night again, and the teenagers in the car in the dark in the rain would careen through the night. By dawn they too would join the others in the attic.

Inert objects were quietly being transformed into talismans of obtuse meaning and beauty. A car fender gleamed. Liquid glass and steel beams from the fallen towers were being fused into safety walls and fallout shelters, obdurate and durable. A pocket watch, a tattoo, a love letter, a birth certificate, a passport were all playing their parts. The everyday dreamers were reviving and reanimating the scene. Meanwhile, as they sat cataloging the inhabitants, an ominous announcement was made over the loudspeakers. A quarantine had been placed on the Valley. No one was to leave the attic.

The influenza had arrived.

Outside, birds dropped from the sky.

COMPELLED INTO THE dark forest after midnight, the mother, in a brown suede coat, went out in search of a buck in order to mate. In her mind it had seemed that she had ventured far into the night driven by desire, deep into the heart of the forest, though in reality, but a few moments had passed before she was shot dead through the heart.

That night long ago, the hunters ran to find their prize, but when they realized their mistake, they were sore afraid — what was a woman with a brown suede coat and hoofs doing out in the forest during the rut? they wondered, and horrified, they covered her body with leaves and fled.

Meanwhile, the deliriously hallucinating mother sees the enormous buck in the wood and she calls to it with lust’s strange call. The planet is suspended in darkness, and there is violence and mystery at the heart of existence. Sexual congress provides wild, new life — a life impervious to bullets or harm — and the mother gets up at last, and brushing off the dry leaves and moss and twigs, she makes her way home where the child, sitting at the window, waits.

The men who had covered her steaming body with leaves had fled the scene utterly, but their fleeing stayed in them, and many times they returned to the place where nothing was left but a light brown suede coat. There were no other earthly remains — not hair, not bones, not hoofs, and for the rest of eternity, the woman stalked the men and haunted them.

SHE OPENS HER arms as if for the first time. The artist, the magician, the cat have any number of lives, the mother sings, and so do I! Sparkle is surrounding us, she says. And glitter, and bits of paper — that is what I find so astonishing.

THE SPIEGELPALAIS IS flooded with bluish greenish light. Today they read if it were possible to see the universe from afar, it would appear pale green, somewhere between turquoise and aquamarine. What a beautiful thought that is, and they feel unaccountably serene. She drifts without fear. Someone has come to console them. The light of blue stars combines with the light of red stars, to produce aquamarine. We float in a vast — but vast cannot begin to describe it — infinity of bluish green.

THE MOTHER HAS turned into a boat and is travelling in a northerly direction downstream against the prevailing north wind. She is carrying the Grandmother from the North Pole, the child who is a baby, a package and a bower of roses. A beautiful conduit, a vessel, but nothing more. On the journey, the mother must transfer a package she has carried her whole life but has been forbidden to open. The package is off-limits to the mother — it is just something she must bear. This gift from the Grandmother is to be passed to the child through the mother’s body. Afloat, astounded, the infant opens the glowing box. She holds the gorgeous glowing braid of the genetic code, reserved just for her, in wonder. The Grandmother and child step onto the shore hand in hand, cradling the gift.