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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.
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Talk, laugh, carry, lift; the clear flow of animating water. Once she had flown to New York for a photo shoot and had posed against a brick wall at golden hour wearing a large black garbage bag, but when the photographer showed her the pictures on the monitor, she was embarrassed to see that her hands were dead in every shot. The garbage bag she was swathed in had more line, more purpose—she looked like she was disappearing from a Polaroid because her parents had failed to kiss in the past. “No one knows what to do with their hands the first time,” the photographer had reassured her, but now, the tension in every finger as she maneuvered the baby up the stairs; the cramps she felt in her wrists after supporting the head for an hour.
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Some people were etched, transparent, lovely in their grief. But whenever she caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror behind the couch, she looked like she was trying to poop after a three-week course of Vicodin. Her stomach at all times roiled, like the comments section under a story about pillow angels.
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No vehicle ever invented for the transmission of information—not the portal, not broadcast radio, not the printed word itself—was as quick, complete, or crackling as the blue koosh ball that the baby kept tucked against her chin as she slept, her small mouth open to say oh my answers. Her other hand she kept twisted in a bright red pom-pom, believing it was her mother’s hair.
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“Nobody else likes those toys,” the hospice nurses told them, interested—for they, too, were gathering the pinpricks of facts that would be added to the sum total of stars in the sky. “It’s too much input.”
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“Can she meet a dog?” she had been asking pathetically, back to the time the baby was born. “When will it be OK for her to finally meet a dog?” At last, at last, the baby got to meet a dog. It was a little white poodle, and as soon as he was set down on the couch he began to lick her all over, arms, legs, face, as if she were his long-lost owner.
“He’s not allowed to be an official service dog,” his trainer explained, “because the test is that you have to walk past a bucket of fried chicken and ignore it, and that was never gonna happen.” The baby squealed and called for more. The dog ate her fingers one by one—strange, how everything in the entire world wanted to do that to a baby.