Carole Maso: Mother and Child: A Novel

SOMEHOW SHE KNEW infinite grace was available to them. The key to happiness was in trying to understand how to receive it. The Rite of Ascending should be the right of every human alive, she reasoned. She herself was a soul waiting for purification. The bat had said as much. The bat had come and set into animation what had been still and lay dormant in them. The bat had made all the rest possible and available to them, of this the mother seemed somehow certain.

The tree had split in two, and from it had emanated an extraordinary light, like the light now in the pit where the towers had once been. The thousands of distressed souls that had blackened the day now gave way to an extraordinary void, flooded with light. It was the only place in the city that opened up like a suture — a vast cavern, but also a plain.

How strange is the present, with all that past streaming in, and all that future seeping through. It was something exhilarating, the present — open, fluid, malleable — and it both pleased and frightened her. Moments of the past invading the present from one direction, and from the other direction, the future. All was in coexistence — there was really no way around it.

THE BAT, AS a last gift, had made it possible to see the velvet backdrop so that one could glean information from the twilight, and from the night. Like the bat drinking the night, the mother drinks the night, as it comes on now. Like the mother and the bat, the wolf laps up the night as well and waits for the child. The mother smiles. The night magnifies and makes possible what seemed unimaginable in the day. She goes to the Mothering Place and prays.

ON CERTAIN NIGHTS while the mother slept, an antler would sprout from the center of her forehead. The antler was soft to the touch and covered with moss, and all night the mother roamed through forest and starlight to places she had never been before. In the morning when the mother awoke and discovered the antler, she panicked, as she did not want to frighten the child, and she would, as quickly as she could, saw it off and slip it into the night table drawer. After that, many nights would often pass without incident, until the mother came slowly to forget about the antler almost entirely, and that is when another antler would appear.

And it would go on like that: sleep and dream, sleep and dream and saw, sleep, and dream, sleep and dream and saw, and sleep. .

The mother and child laughed and time passed, and after a while, the mother somehow grew more capable of keeping the antler in check inside her lavish green night-roaming dream. Now and then a nub would appear, but nothing more. And in the night table drawer only, a little stardust and antler dust remained.

From time to time now, the child would put the wrist of her hand to her forehead and then wave her fingers in the semblance of an antler, and the mother would look at her and smile sweetly.

One night while the mother slept, the child huddled next to her on the bed and watched as the antler slowly began to grow from her mother’s forehead. The child had never touched anything like it before. It was something like a tree branch but not exactly — it was at once more solid and more hollow, a horn of sorts, covered with an indescribably soft moss, and it had the most extraordinary hue.

At the end of the night but before the mother awoke, the child removed the antler. Gently she slipped her finger under the mossy soft base, and it felt as if she were releasing the air from beneath the pad of a suction cup. She removed it with ease, and without the least violence.

Then the child wandered out the door and into the dawn. Maybe she will happen on the bobwhite. To build their homes, bobwhites find an impression on the ground, line the impression with grasses, and weave an arch over the cup in a tussock of grass. Carrying the antler, the child walked out into the morning and gathered reeds and dawn grasses and cattails, which she wove together into a kind of glimmering harness, and she placed her mother’s antler in it. She then went to her mother’s room, and though the mother was still sleeping, in sleep she seemed to bow her head toward the child as if she might nuzzle, and the child in one simple motion attached the antler back to the mother’s head and climbed into bed next to her.

THE GREEN CHAPEL was a triumph of the intangible, and it was the place toward which the mother and child now walked. It was a masterpiece of luminescence, and they marveled at how the walls seemed to disappear, leaving only windows that looked out onto the flickering green world. In the distance, at last, the mother sees the transparency to complete the one in her, a shape to meet her shape. Together, the mother and child will fold themselves up into the gleaming. From a distance, the galaxy was a greeny blue. They were filled with a serene feeling. Soon they would become the next thing.

SHE DREAMS OF a lake. It’s very blue and deep. It’s fed by springs. The mother kept the child tethered to her by a silk strand of the most remarkable resiliency. The silk was durable and flexible, and it stretched to accommodate the farthest places the child would ever want to go. The mother reeled out the tether now, and the child swam far.

The mother thinks she would like gently, gently to suggest to the child that it might be possible to sever the thread.

You have all your teeth now, she says.

SHE REMEMBERS THE way the South Tower seemed to buckle and bend, then blur and be gone. Perhaps it was true that where she stood on the 110th floor mesmerized, looking out onto the world, she stayed, when she might have descended the stairs. The nightmare involved the right atrium, a corridor, rising heat, a kind of inferno, a baby motionless inside her capsule. Smoke.

At the pond, they had harnessed the fog. In the night they had placed an almond inside a cake and waited. They had visited the Boy in the Glen and the child had danced. Had it all been a dream? Anything was possible, she supposed. But for the smoke — so dense, so dark — they might have jumped into that blue lake of sky and survived. It’s very deep. And no bats skim the surface. She looked to the child for a sign.

MAYBE THERE IS time to separate in advance, the mother to her fiery, already transacted fate, and the child to her own blue lake of sky, free to live out an entire life, unburned. Every child, the mother murmurs, deserves to grow up.

Perhaps it would be possible for the child to chew the tether now and jettison herself away—

Don’t be absurd! the Vortex Man bellows. And he is back, just like that, in full, lavish form.

But I thought you were dead, the mother says.

Don’t be absurd!

ON THE NORTH Pole of Mars, liquid water is being searched for tonight. Beneath the polar ice, well into the permafrost underground, deposits of water are believed to lie. From this distance, it certainly does seem as if those smooth, bluish areas on the crater floor could be ponds.

I can’t wait to get there, the Grandmother from the North Pole says. She thinks about the planet’s obliquity — the angle at which its Poles tilt toward the sun. Liquid water, she smiles, and she opens her mouth like a baby bird awaiting a droplet. I can almost taste it.

Still the crust is thicker and colder than previously thought, says the child. And the liquid water, if it exists at all, is a lot deeper below the surface than once thought.

You might as well stay here, the child says, a while longer.

IN A TRANCE she makes her way to the Flagship. She skittles across the frozen tundra to the vault where the world’s seeds are being laid to store. There, beneath the shining ice, seeds and sprouts from every plant on earth will slumber, protected until the end of time. No earthquake or nuclear catastrophe or funnel or any other heartache or sorrow, including the heartaches and sorrows yet to be invented, will harm this bank of seeds and nascent growing things. After the end of the world, there is another world.