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Where was that house, where did we go on and on in the long word dwell? In the portal, a call for Joseph Merrick’s bones to be finally laid to rest, though his family had given him wholly to science.
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In the portal, a picture of Joseph Merrick’s skull, where on the right side the bone grew fractally, like cave or crystal or ivy, hand over hand and almost flowing. It did not look strange. It looked, when all was said and done, like what a skull wanted to do.
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The minor physical adjustments she had once habitually made—lifting her breasts toward her collarbone whenever she looked in the bathroom mirror, snipping the ends off stray curls before she went to parties—had flown from her, had perhaps gone wherever the baby had gone. She now took perverse pleasure in the fact that the last time she had looked nice was on the leather couch at that Disney World hotel, basking in a clarified light, every laugh line visible, cradling the darling’s head between two breasts that felt like clouds. And sun running through her, sun, wonderful sun.
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“I would have done it for a million years,” her sister said, toneless. “I would have gotten up every morning and given her thirteen medicines. There is no relief. I would have done it for all time.” Then told of a bill she had received for $61,000. Then sent a picture of a vial of snow a nurse had gathered from that night, clear liquid asterisks, her snow.
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Her sister’s husband went to a garage sale one afternoon and purchased like fifty Beanie Babies. This, too, was one of the remedies for grief. Someone had sat them on little stools in their display cases, so they would not get tired—of what?—of the long direct daylight of being Beanie Babies. Someone had cared for them. Perhaps everyone was a god with their eye on some small sparrow. Perhaps everyone was the collector of some soft rare commemorative, stitched with a visible heart and worth millions on millions in the mind.
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At a meeting to discuss the autopsy results, the doctor took a bite of bagel and shaped with his mouth the great word why. “When Jesus met the blind man, his disciples asked him why—was it the man’s sin, was it the sin of his parents? And Jesus said it was no one’s sin, that it happened so that God might move us forward, through and with and in that man.” Tears stood without falling in the doctor’s blue eyes; that is the medicine, she thought. “If I can do anything . . .” he said chokingly, with a slight amount of cream cheese in his mustache, which increased her love for the human race, which moved her forward through, with, in him, which was also for the glory of mankind.
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“Why was she able to do what she could do?” they asked the doctors. “How could she breathe on her own, breastfeed, answer when we talked to her?” The doctors did not know. They spoke of the brain’s enormous plasticity. Yes, she felt that, she held it in her hand. She remembered pressing warm Silly Putty against newspaper until it picked up a whole paragraph of what was happening, clear enough to read. Then folding and folding it to blankness again.
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“Can ghosts learn new technology?” her sister asked, thinking of what must come next, the endless conveyor of progress to which a whole human history’s worth of spirits must adapt. The two of them were silent for a minute, and then images came crowding in: an elevator ghost pressing every button, feeling its stomach drop out through the bottom of the world; a ghost unzipping its message across long black telegraph wires; ghosts in the portal, reading forever, tenderly holding down hearts. In the group text where they sent her videos back and forth late at night, that’s what they said—thank God, can you believe, that we had the technology.
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What if that teenage boy had put her in the portal? It was hard to imagine a time when that would have made her angry. She would be so grateful, now, to have people meet the baby in the broad electric stream of things—to know a picture of her, blurred, in motion, was living its own life far from actual fate, in the place where images dwelled and dwelled.
* * *
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“Her grass looks great,” her sister said, sending a picture of the rampantly growing grave—the green real park they had walked through day by day while she was with them, for there are people in this life we are assigned to watch over. Her sister snipped blades of it and mailed them to her, to carry with her on her travels. She saw a wild undomestic blanket of it growing in profusion over abandoned suburbs and cities, over the places where we all used to live.