Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

The very phrase Sudden Infant Death gave Jacquie the heebie-jeebies. She remembered her own fears, especially when Jerry Jr. was born, back when SIDS seemed to be more talked about. (Perhaps it still was but if you didn’t have babies you wouldn’t hear about it.) It still seemed the stuff of folklore, like those Japanese ghost stories she read in college where red foxes came from the hills to carry off sleeping children. It was a freakish puzzling thing, like spontaneous combustion.

When the pastor explained to the hospital administrator their wishes — to have a portrait taken as a memento — he was given a compassionate response. Their request to take their son back to the house for the photo was denied, but the administrator said they could have use of a doctors lounge or the hospital chapel. They chose the chapel. After the session, they insisted Jacquie stay for supper. Their children were young and well-behaved, & the parents didn’t censor themselves. The mother complimented Jacquie on the portraits she took of Ginger and Daniel’s beloved; her cousin sent the images to her online. She said it was “God’s will and God’s way” that she saw those pictures because not in a million years would she even have thought of doing what they did today.

Toward the end of the meal, the three-year old said from his high-chair, “Is baby dead?”

. .

She took a 10PM flight home. In the darkness, she held the Hasselblad in her lap as she would a baby. It was new, a replacement for the one her daughter stole. She hoped it did right by her.

Jacquie scrolled through the nightlight of her iPad to the wikipage on SIDS that she loaded in the airport. Statistical pre-natal risks: Teenage mother. Mother doesn’t finish high school. Mother is unmarried. Exposure to nicotine. Absence of pre-natal care———————————

———————

a strong JOLT. (

She’d fallen asleep

) The tires hit the runway, just like how it sounds in the movies. Then the thrilling, thundering melodrama of domesticated engines roaring anew to slow the plane down, one last shout-out to show the world they were still wild.

. .

Jacquie kept her job at Sears. It grounded her. Albie liked having her around, & she liked being around Albie.

At home, she sequestered herself. She studied 19th-century postmortem photography with its daguerreotypes of moms&dads posing with the deceased: newborns, infants, toddlers. The poses of the living were as stiff as those of the dead. The departed wore heartbreaking outfits, miniature breeches, bespoke three-piece munchkin suits and white doily-hemmed cotton smocks resembling pillowcases altered for the occasion, each dead star clothed in awkwardly sublime get-ups — raiments sewn with infinite loving care for those extirpated creatures now impossible to fathom, for softened husks were all that now remained after untold empyreal explosions, supertransmundane stellar remnants of quarky matter that cradled all things, novas and supernovas, beginnings and endings, darkness and light, tiny celestial bodies illumined & decayed. With a final, storm-tossed exhalation (the undomesticated roar of tiny celestial engines) the dead rose to drift and dissolve into the ineffable, the Cloud of Unknowing, which the medievalists declared (the internet did tell her so) could never be witnessed, for how can one see the face of God unless through expired yet still half-open eyes? But there they were, served up on photographic plates: eternally unphotogenic, captured like big (little) game, their lonely hunters — all the sad, benumbed, peculiar, frontier-looking relative-folk — memorialized with their kill.

. .

She visited Woodlawn Cemetery because to do it all online—“research”—ultimately seemed cheap and disrespectful. The Internet seduced one into believing God was in the details, and nothing was more detailed than the Alexandrian archives of the web.

Mournful Shostakovich in the car to summon the mood. She loved the way cemeteries were always open, like churches used to be. Should she park close to the perimeter? Or go deeper in? — —she drove until she was in the heart of it. Left the car and strolled to an area of flat markers. The 1st stone said: MY DARLING BABY born August 3, 1962. That’s all that was written, a single date would apply to those stillborn, or those who never breathed for an entire day. Then: she was swimming in a sea of darling babies (all flat markers), many with birth- and death dates just a few days or few weeks apart. She saw an engraving that told her this part of the cemetery was called “Babyland.” It sounded like part of a cruel boardgame.

. .

She pondered her camera’s monstrance-eye, immersing herself in funerary ferrotypes & historical portraiture of the effigies of those who died before reaching the so-called age of reason. All such angelitos enter Paradise, unencumbered — in Mexico, the child’s godparents crowned the head with orange-blossoms while firecrackers announced the coronation of a new angel in Heaven. It interested her how popular belief held that if parents shed tears for their loss, the little one’s soul would never reach heaven. Both sets of parents Jacquie had encountered, both mothers , had that instinctive, preternatural calm, and perhaps this explained it. A calm transcending shock, alone.

That night, she read about a mother’s struggle to get a birth certificate for her stillborn. The woman became a lobbyist for stillborns’ right-of-dignity. (Such was her sad, sacred, postmortem activity — supplanting that of nursing her baby, cooing over it, watching as it slept with a mother’s beautiful, fierce-loved, penetrating gaze.) She called them “angelic records,” noting that such bureaucratic consecrations were the closest we might come to a divine census of souls. All she’d ever wanted was to be a mother, and now that she was —for chrissake, all you need to qualify was to have given birth! — they’d refused her, they’d defaced her motherhood, as womanness, her intangible mysteries. They seemed to be of hell-bent mind that the star she carried in her womb for 8½ months and nourished with her very blood had never existed . Apparently, she could apply for a fetal death certificate but nothing more. . the records of death took precedence over those of life! The woman was contemptuous of the consolation prize being offered: a non-legally binding “Memorial Certificate of Birth Resulting In Stillbirth.” She didn’t care about the controversies and debates — Pro-Choice feared that with the State’s sanctification Pro-Life would take the fetus-as-child football and run to the endzone — this gal didn’t care a whit . Because once she had been young, daydreaming of the children she’d have after marrying. How could she have fathomed God’s will, how could she ever have comprehended His plan, that her baby would rise into the Cloud of Unknowing at the beginning of its life, not the end?

. .

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. .

She got an email from Ginger.

“Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them”

. .

Pieter called.

Jacquie said, “Good Lord, what time is it there?”

“530AM. I’m on my way to the gym.”

“Jesus. California’s a bad influence on you.”

“Can you speak?”

“Yep. And I’ve got moveable parts.”

“Beth Rader wants to see the pictures.”

“Huh?”

“Beth Rader — I thought you knew her. Well she said she knew you, but I guess she meant your work.”