No One Is Talking About This (35)

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A proposed operation to stitch the baby’s eyelids closed, and they suffered because so much of her communication was when her eyes widened, they believed with wonder. But on the morning of the procedure the anesthesiologist shone a light into the dolphin-blue depths, listened to the dragging tides of her breathing, and said he wouldn’t, if it were his daughter he just wouldn’t do it.



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They dreamed, they all dreamed about her. In their dreams she crawled, ate grapes, sang nursery rhymes. In their dreams her overgrowth syndrome shot her past other people and made her powerful, and she moved among them with the use of ingenious wheels, extenders, whizbang devices. She held up her own head, she slept like other people. Above all she spoke to them, in a high-pitched otherworldly voice.

“I am a very advanced life-form,” she announced one night, “but soon I must return . . . to the Planet 9/11.”



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The time ripened inside gold watches. Pyramids of pumpkins and tubs of rusty orange flowers began to appear outside of grocery stores, and October issued its invitation for spirits to return to earth. In the hospital, back when they thought the baby would never leave it, her sister and her husband had gathered a pile of seasonal outfits for the baby to wear: a year in a day, winter summer spring fall.



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“Can I keep you?” a woman asked her son, as she changed his diaper on a public bench. The question was monogrammed for him alone, was soft as a blanket already with use. “Can I keep you? Just for a little while?”



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When it came out that we had only twelve real years left, there was a kind of urgent flowering, people everywhere felt it. Families began planning their summer trips to the Postcards, to every mountain, field, and forest on the fast-spinning rack. And novelists, in the portal, began to rise on a tide of peculiar energy. This was their moment. They were going to say goodbye to all that! They were going to say the final goodbye to all that!



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Meanwhile, on the earth of the baby, the climate grew hotter: icebergs melted, the seas rose, permafrost cracked to release prehistory, sections of the Great Barrier Reef blinked out whitely and one by one. Despite all this, on the earth of the baby, the thing that was people talked, touched, painted pictures, kept going.



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think if the ocean has a fever for years . . . lol

no sickness and broken bones

we’d be flying through the warmth more than walking



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When she was fourteen weeks old they took the baby to Disney World because this, in America, was something that you did. She moved among the unknown characters serenely, she abided the fireworks, she passed through the doorways that looked like doorways and into the houses that looked like houses, only pausing to express absolute ecstasy when the band 98 Degrees began to play on the main stage at Epcot and the baby heard, she heard, her father began to dance with her, her eyes went as wide as a documentary called Planet Earth, cameras diving into the blue, from outer space into the deepest reefs, she fucking loves 98 Degrees, her mother exclaimed, this was the music of their youth, when the heart was a red hope, they knew every single word, the band was named for the temperature of the human body, the baby danced, she was dancing in her father’s arms.



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The baby rode with equanimity through the darkness of the Haunted Mansion, regarding the proceedings with the same tolerant amusement she had shown at her baptism. Don’t worry, she seemed to reassure her mother and father, who balanced her like a child queen between them in their roller-coaster car: it won’t be like this, it won’t be anything like this at all. These are the forms, she told them earnestly, as the camera above took a picture of them in their “corruptible mortal state,” for everyone to laugh at together when the ride was over. But if you ever really need it, I will put on a white lace dress and come to you.



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A teenager on the nighttime ferry snuck his phone over her shoulder to take pictures of the baby in her special stroller, though by that time it seemed baffling, she didn’t look that different from other babies, did she? He was taking pictures because of her sweetness, her freshness—not because he was going to post them, right?



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“I just don’t want people to be scared of her,” her sister had said when they first received the diagnosis, but now that the baby was here the whole family had turned to a huge blue defiant stare that moved as a part through the waves, with the fear of the world curling tall on either side of them. They wanted—what?—to take the sun by the face and force it down: Look at her! Look! Shine on her! Shine! Shine!



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A round rainbow followed her on the plane ride home from Orlando. Every time she looked out the window it was there, traveling fleetly over clouds that had the same dense flocked pattern that had begun to appear on the baby’s skin, the soles of her feet and palms of her hands, so she seemed to have weather for finger and footprints. The round rainbow, her answers told her when she touched down, was actually called a Glory.