* * *
■ ■ ■
At the wake, she and her sister held someone else’s newborn, and the little bundle was so light and uncomplicated that they kept resisting an urge to toss her up to the ceiling and catch her, for they knew she would always return to them. “She’s like another species,” her sister said softly, young and lovely in her hot pink dress, her arms weighed down by hardly more than a feather.
* * *
■ ■ ■
They came home and her brother-in-law knelt down and kissed it, the square of the couch where she had lived, where she had lain among machines, where they had discovered, almost too late, that they could play patty-cake with her.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The koosh ball was accidentally thrown away, and little did the landfill know what was coming: the blue bursting star of everything she knew, never smaller by one ray.
* * *
■ ■ ■
There began a period where she cried uncontrollably in cafés, taxis, grocery stores, bars; at commercials, at documentaries, at Ryan Reynolds movies; in public bathrooms, with her head on her knees, making animal noises that could not belong to her; when the FedEx woman called her sweetheart; when her sister said, “You were her mother too”; in the portal, where the entirety of human experience seemed to be represented, and never the shining difference of that face, those eyes, that hair.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Would it change her? Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be able to be nice to my mother, but she never ever was. After this I will be able to talk only about what matters, life and death and what comes after, but still she went on about the weather.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Night after night afterward, with her fingernails glowing in the dark, she dreamed that the baby was still doing a kind of tiny breathing that they had somehow overlooked. Someone always yelled, “HEY!” and the funeral was called off right in the middle. They lifted her from her casket and kissed her; they pelted pink carnations out the window of the car as they drove home; it had all been a mistake. They had only had to notice something smaller than before.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The doors of bland suburban houses now looked possible, outlined, pulsing—for behind any one of them could be hidden a bright and private glory. The woman who had once been called the voice of God, who had been absent from the stage for two decades, went on singing in her own home, her partner heard her. He felt sorry for the rest of the world, he said.
“I just had a lot of something—what was it?” the singer had once told an interviewer. “So much sun, I suppose, running through me. All this wonderful sun!” The doors of suburban houses might be shut up on that sun.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The doctors had asked for the brain, with so much hope that it was almost tender, as if they loved her too. “Do you think she would mind?” her sister had asked, and she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and saw rockets shoot across that internal black dome. “No, I don’t think she would mind at all,” she had responded, and now that the act was accomplished, it gave comfort: as long as people were looking at that mind, it was still active in the world, asking and answering, finding out about things, making small dear cries of discovery. It had, the doctors confirmed, only ever kept growing while she was alive.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Keep reading a little longer, not totally against your will.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“My battery is low and it is getting dark,” the Mars Rover said in the portal.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The film waited for her to watch it, glowing black and white at the center of her collection. One afternoon when her husband was away she put it on and saw Anthony Hopkins’ face shining in the dark as he beholds the Elephant Man for the first time, all beauty breaking in on him, his left eye askew like a dried violet. What she had not expected to feel was simple happiness, as she looked at the layers of makeup and the bulbous prosthetics, as if her extraordinary companion were back with her again and the room brimful of her breathing. When the Elephant Man finally speaks, it is like her dreams of the baby: he opens his mouth and the Bible comes out, Shakespeare, Milton, the poets. The doctors burst in on him just as he finishes the psalm. “All the days of my life,” he says, standing tall, “and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”