No One Is Talking About This (37)
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On Christmas Eve she took a sharp right turn and drove past the farmhouse where her great-grandmother had kept her son chained to a stake in the front yard. The shutters were a flat funeral black, like widow’s weeds. The window was a merciless glass rectangle. She saw her history there as she passed, saw the circle of dead and pounded grass that was the radius of his freedom, and where he sat for hours doing the only thing he could do: see what he could see.
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Movement was now completely impossible—they could no longer even take the baby in the car. Her sister’s freedom had been snatched from her, neat and complete. She did not sleep or shower. Her heartbeat was the beep of the monitors. She was tied to the baby, who nevertheless had turned out to be the leafiest shade on earth, towering high above her and almost to the heavens, stirring with little birds.
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To watch her sister was not like watching a saint; it was like watching the clear flowing stream the saint was filled with, water that talked, laughed, carried, lifted, and never once uttered an impatient sound. “How?” she asked her sister once, and her sister stared at her like water and said, “Perfect happiness.”
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God, we sound like cult members, she thought. Of course they sounded like cult members! When astrology, and crystals, and Jesus hair on dudes came back, when the apocalypse began bringing with it unbelievable sunsets, when synths appeared on the soundtrack like new kinds of hearts that might make it, when the flame leaped higher in human faces as if a gust had just come through the door, then, then! Then it was time for cults as well.
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“Have you heard?” her husband cried on the phone, rattling a newspaper in the background. “Have you heard that they can now shoot a word into someone’s head using a microwave ray?”
“What word?”
“Any word.”
“How long does the word last?”
“We don’t know yet,” he told her, dropping his voice to the nightmare range. “Could be forever.”
Maybe that’s what happened, she thought. Maybe someone had shot the child’s name into her, into some deep bull’s-eye at the center of her body, maybe she would never be able to think of anything else again. Or not the name, even. Just: Love. Love. Love.
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As the baby struggled to breathe, as it became clear that her airway was collapsing, as her head grew too heavy to even turn from side to side, it slowly dawned on them that she was experiencing an enlightenment, a golden age. She grasped beads and rattles; she answered with sweet gurgling near-giggles when you talked to her. When they played the game called Little Touch, her eyes traveled to all the places they kissed her, one by one. Against all wisdom, and in the face of her bleak gray pictures, she was learning, she could learn.
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“I know when she’s about to have a fit because she’ll look up at something that no one else can see,” a woman wrote of her daughter’s epilepsy in the portal. “The other thing that will happen before her episodes—but also during and after—are her premonitions. She’ll tell us something that will come true, or she’ll know something she has no way of knowing.” The girl had an IQ of 48, watched no television, didn’t use the computer, and according to her mother could not lie.
“Epilepsy is a strange thing and I wouldn’t wish it upon another person, ever. But it’s made us realize that there’s something special that lies in the brain. We aren’t religious but it’s made us believe in something unexplainable. In a way, we’re grateful that some of the friends we’ve lost—people who couldn’t cope being around it—because it’s meant we’ve been able to have uninterrupted time with her to observe things like this.” On the one hand, people who could not be around it. On the other hand, things like this.
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On New Year’s Eve, she leaned over the baby with a glass of champagne and sang “Bali Ha’i” right next to her ear and the baby’s eyes flew wide, she went to the island. She sang “Do Re Mi” and the baby followed up and down the stairs; she sang “Over the Rainbow” and the rainbow went round. She sang “If I Were a Bell” and that really did it; the baby pedaled her legs with excitement, she gripped her fingers with both hands, she cooed and she cooed on the same pitch, she pushed her oxygen mask away and then clutched it to her face; if I were a bell I’d go ding dong ding dong ding.
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Why not, she thought, and began to read the baby Marlon Brando’s Wikipedia entry. Maybe it was the champagne, but it suddenly struck her as a democratic principle, that everyone should get to know about Marlon Brando: how he looked like a wet knife in a T-shirt, the cotton ball in each cheek when he talked, rumors of him wearing diapers on the set of Apocalypse Now. Nothing useful, but one of the fine spendthrift privileges of being alive—wasting a cubic inch of mind and memory on the vital statistics of Marlon Brando.