No One Is Talking About This (31)
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There was a channel that played the baby in fuzzy black and white, looking like she was about to steal a pack of cigarettes from a convenience store. They tuned into it at night, all of them in their separate beds, and this is what she used to think the angels did, watch the channel that played her. If so much as a sock slipped off the baby, they could call, and God would move into frame from nowhere and put the sock back on.
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Her blue-and-vanilla guest room looked out on the street, and in the corner was a handle of potato vodka and every book she had ever given her sister for Christmas, back to the time they were teenagers. After she finished bursting into a mist, after she anxiously checked the channel that played the baby, she would slosh an inch of warm vodka into a water glass and begin reading, sliding lower and lower in the bed until the sentences undressed and slept, until it no longer frightened her that there was so much not set down in books.
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“I guess I’ll go home when the handle of vodka runs out,” she told herself, like the opposite of Cinderella, though still slipping into the glass that fit her perfectly.
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One of the books was a sex diary, which exerted the particular frontier charm of internet writing before 9/11. This sex diarist wore pigtails and had eyes like blue sequins and lacked inhibition entirely. She made New Hampshire sound like a place you wanted to go: an endless orifice among black ice, buzzing like an OPEN 24 HOURS sign. Cups of coffee in the morning, adrenaline-fueled emails in the afternoon, solitary preparations for threesomes at night.
This seemed her whole existence but was in fact only one room of it. In another was her son, Wolf, who had been born with a microdeletion in one of his chromosomes. In one of those unforgivable intimacies that the modern age allowed us, she looked up the woman and her son every few years, to find out—to find out what? Wolf was still alive, and the last time she checked he had become a Christian, painted marvelous self-portraits, and constantly monitored the weather. “It always makes me feel safe because . . . if I don’t listen to it, how will I know what’s going to happen?”
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She looked them up again; she couldn’t help it. “Tell me more about the apocalypse,” Wolf’s mother asked him in an interview.
“If people are worshipping the devil in the form of witchcraft and bad movies, then God would burn the earth when he comes here. But we would be safe in the gates of the Holy City. The weather is sunny there. And warm, but we wouldn’t feel it the way we do now because we wouldn’t be in the form our bodies are in now—no sickness and broken bones. We’d be flying through the warmth more than walking. We would still have our heart and soul, which would feel love and happiness but doesn’t touch things the same way, doesn’t feel hurt. Everyone would be vegetarians, so animals would be free. We’d have a new earth, all pure and sweet, and it would be only spring and summer. No air pollution.”
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A dream where she herself was pregnant, and was seized with panic when she realized that she had been drinking and smoking the whole time—a cigarette was unfolding like a paper crane between her fingertips, and ice cubes shook geologically in her glass. A flat red light came through her window then and illuminated her stomach so that she was see-through: and in a cushion of ocean inside her was the baby, with the larger head and the long froggy limbs facing upward, and the rose-of-the-world mouth asked her, nearly laughing, why are you doing this to us?
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That magnifying liquid at nighttime saved her, but at dawn she had to haul her own body out of the bed like a jailer, by the scruff of the neck and yelling, “Morning, sunshine!” For in order for life to continue, she had to get to the hospital as soon as possible, her right hand curled permanently around the close-to-burning cup of coffee, rushing through red lights side by side with her mother, hearing that cover of Toto’s “Africa” on the radio, trying not to join in but then breaking down and howling, “I BLESS THE RAINS!”
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What did a story mean to the baby? It meant a soft voice, reassurance that everything outside her still went on, still would go on. That the blood of continuity still pumped, that the day ran in its riverbed. Her blue eyes rolled when the voice of the story came, and sometimes she shook with what must have been excitement, trying in her tininess to be as large as what pressed in on her. In the dome of her head, the mercury of all things was trying to tremble together.
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“Seizures,” the doctor said, and administered phenobarbital, and she stared at him over her nose like a seagull, because if he wanted her to name a hundred saints and desert mystics who were epileptic, she could do it, starting with the letter A.
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Once when she was reading out loud, she came upon a chapter where a little girl died, and went up to Heaven, and “received all the news of the world from the birds.” It was not in her nature to skip, so she kept going in a tinier and tinier voice, until the sound grew so small even the birds could not carry it, but the baby never noticed a thing.