This essay was first published in pacificReview 2019: A West Coast Arts Review Annual
In 2016, during a fateful American election season, there was a great clown panic. This was the year of the summer Olympics in Rio, the terrorist bombing in Brussels, and the deaths of Muhammed Ali, David Bowie, Prince, Umberto Eco, Nancy Reagan, Harper Lee, and Leonard Cohen, who had famously sung his Hallelujah to millions worldwide, who joined him in the voice of the speaker of one of over eighty verses, penned over fifteen years, incanting, Your faith was strong but you needed proof.
Also that year, UN officials identified six million displaced persons within war-ravaged Syria, and about five million outside the country. These disparate people, the collective subject of an international refugee crisis, had a simple fact in common: their homes had been destroyed, they were attempting to live anyway, and they were looking for a place to stay.
Also in that year: our first separation, ordered by the court of a judge doing his declared best to be fair and partial in a “he said/ she said” situation where the extant decade of violence prior to his ruling was, as far as he could ascertain, “a matter of speculation.” The verdict: fifty-fifty, the ratio of together-apart, and the price of the safety I had sought for us: our separation. This was only fair, the judge decreed, given that your father, after losing his job during our pregnancy, had stayed home with you while I worked. I had cried every morning I left you, soaking my face and the front of my blouse until I learned to wear pads to keep the milk from leaking through my bra. By the time you were weaned, I had learned to hold my tears.
The other day, I learned that my mother used to write poetry. I never knew; my aunt told me. Once I dreamed of a story that did not end.
Once, before I held you, I looked at the sonogram photo and tried to will the muscles of your tiny heart to keep going. I’d look and breathe and listen for a beat beneath my own. Sometimes, thinking I had found it, I would whisper to you, Stay.
Also in October of 2016, an emergency room in Coos Bay, Oregon was placed in quarantine after five people began to demonstrate unusual and parallel symptoms of no discernible origin. What happened was this: the woman called reporting that her car was being vandalized — twice. Both times, police came out. Both times, nothing.
Now as I wait in this limbo that never seems to grow familiar no matter how often I am compelled to practice inside it, I issue reminders to myself about how to remain here, in the place where you are away, and I wait.
Reminder, in the middle of the afternoon: groceries.
Make a list: More fruits and vegetables. Don’t forget the wine.
Reminder, before bed: get up early. Notice the sunrise.
Reminder, over coffee: get back to the Psalms.
Today’s reading: Lead me to the rock higher than this.
Walk early. Left, right, forward
— and everywhere, daughter: you.
Later, the woman, the two officers, and several hospital workers in Coos Bay all reported symptoms of nausea, lightheadedness, and euphoria. The HazMat unit was called out and the ER was placed under quarantine. Authorities believed that symptoms were spread through touch.
Of course it was touch.
The thing about touch and what spreads through it, is that it might stop at any moment. With the first baby, we had bibs. Purple said I love Mommy, Green said I love Daddy. We buried them in a box in the backyard under a butterfly stone, beside a medal of St. Michael, who killed demons with his sword.
I held a whisper between my breath and the place where I imagined you might be and I prayed inside it. Soon, I said, because in the beginning you were only a heartbeat on a monitor and a black-and-white photo of a promise, and the words I said to both of us then were You are Coming.
In 1983, 943 Palestinian girls — mostly teenagers, some soldiers — fainted on the West Bank. Palestinian officials accused Israel of using chemical weapons to sterilize West Bank women, and IDF sources alleged deployment of toxic chemicals by Palestinian militants. Health officials pronounced the incident psychosomatic.
You called and I missed it. I called you right back. You did not answer. Last time, your voice was strained tight, squeaking like the surface a balloon about to burst.
After we buried the box of the other baby beneath the butterfly stone, he took to drinking. Once he fell asleep in late August and I lay awake listening to the sound of artillery booming from the base, and the bedroom glowed with the blue light of an infomercial for Slap Chop. From the screen, a tall man with an angular face and spiky hair declared the wonders of the latest low-budget kitchen appliance before his television audience.
“You’re gonna be slapping your troubles away!” he enthused, and then, “Watch! Look at these almonds. You’re gonna love my nuts!”
In 1962, there was an epidemic of laughter at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha, Tanzania. After the school was forced to close, the outbreak spread to neighboring villages.
I took to silence, and started wearing a rosary under my tank top, so that I could touch it through my shirt as I went throughout the day. It reminded me of my grandmother, because it had a pendant at the center containing holy water from Lourdes, where Bernadette saw the woman in blue and white, standing in the grotto near the rose bushes as she was wading through a stream. The woman told her to drink the water and heal. Bernadette fell to her knees.
Bernadette was just a girl — poor, and in ill health, and she was only visiting with other children, equally poor. What did they know, of what they saw? Bernadette only knew she would return.
Someone on the radio the other day was speaking about another saint — I think it was Joan of Arc — in terms of how what made her remarkable was not so much the divine order she received, but that she listened.
In the middle ages, a nun in a French convent began to meow like a cat, which led to the meowing of other nuns, and the sisters could be heard beyond the convent walls, meowing in unison during certain mid-afternoon hours each day, until the police threatened whipping.
The French have a great term for it: Folie à deux, the madness of two.
One night, not long after he woke up in the blue light of the television screen with news of the troop surge in Iraq and empty 32 oz. beer cans by his side of the bed, he pulled his Glock .9 mm from the nightstand and held it in my mouth. I looked at him and wondered, “Will you?” and then he put it against his temple, and then in his own mouth. He held it there for several breaths or maybe an hour, and then he set it down and wept. When he fell asleep, I checked that the safety was on and I put it away in a dresser drawer, beneath his underwear, away from the bed.
In July of 1518, the dancing plague hit the Alsace region of the Holy Roman Empire, and people went for days without rest until they dropped, some to their deaths.
Another time, not long after the night with the Glock, he was in front of the screen again, his wet face glowing with reflected blue light, he did not turn when I entered the room. Instead, he whispered when I entered, “I can’t hear them anymore.”
I wondered what, but didn’t ask.
“Angels,” he said.
Then, of course, there was Salem. Abigail Williams, Betty Parris, Ann Putnam, Jr., and Elizabeth Hubbard began having fits, and a series of public hangings the following year meant the death of twenty citizens accused of witchcraft. Most were women. This at a time when local unrest between native peoples and settlers was great enough to mean that the wholesale massacre of entire families, be they native or newly arrived, was not beyond the realm of reasonable expectations, any given day of the week. Understandably, tensions were high. Various accounts — few of which made it into public record, such as it was, reported that wife beating, a common symptom of escalating fear among men, was on the rise.
Not long after the night of waiting for the missing angels, another positive pregnancy test. Again, the waiting rooms of medical offices, the routine screenings and regular checkups, except this time there was a heartbeat every time, and this time it did not stop.
Not long after that, you arrived. I bowed my head into your neck and smelled your smell and held your body against this heart, whispering, Stay.
The Great Fear that came at the dawn of the French Revolution seemed to be caused at least in part by the consumption of ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus, among peasants. In years when the crop was better, the affected portion of the harvest would have been discarded, but there was reason to worry, that year, about running out of food needed to make it through the winter.
Remember the fever dreams of childhood illness? The terrors they held were not real, said the adults in their attempts to reassure. “Not real,” heard the children waking from them, but what was? At temperatures above normal, a body’s cells begin to denature.
In 2007, near Chalco, a working class suburb of Mexico City, over six-hundred adolescent girls reported nausea, fever, and difficulty walking.
When empathy is too much to bear, intuition too suffocating, foresight too heavy, we call it by other names. And what is the name for this pulsing ache, I wonder, inside these hours of waiting?
In Vinton, Virginia, in 2007, there was an outbreak of twitching, headaches and dizziness. On April 16 of that year, Seung-Hui Cho shot forty-nine people on the Virginia Tech campus. He used two semi-automatic pistols and then he shot himself. Authorities reported that Cho had previously been diagnosed with an “anxiety disorder.”
Consider Simone Weil’s reminder that the highest existential discipline is to “make use of the sufferings that chance inflicts upon us.” George Bernard Shaw recognized that suffering is the supreme conduit to empathy. Le Guin said, “If you can get through it, if you can endure it all the way, the reality of pain is not pain.”
The other day I saw an image from the Hubble telescope, of the Butterfly Nebula. What it looks like couldn’t be closer to its name. The caption said the wings were “roiling cauldrons of gas,” and I thought how inseparable the word “cauldron” is from the image of Macbeth’s witches, foretelling events to come, shaping fate. The gas, the caption proclaimed, was “tearing” across the canvas of space at over 600,000 miles an hour. I have no way to imagine this speed. I can imagine, in an abstract sense, how a dying star was at the center. And I can also imagine how it might be that the wings of its body stretch half the distance of the sun to the nearest star.
In Malaysia, in the 70s and 80s, school age girls and young women working in factories experienced attacks of what locals described as spirit-possession.
Once — before the other baby, before you, before he lost his job and before he even left a single mark or broke a single plate above my head, we had stood in the Anza Borrego desert beside a fire, drinking beer and looking at the stars. I can’t remember who pointed it out, but the fact of the hour was this: some of the lights we were seeing were those of stars that had already gone extinct, and some of the places that looked dark were places where new stars were blooming, only the light hadn’t reached us yet.
Much later, it was clearly time to leave — and later still, it was time to leave again, but always I could see your father as he had stood once beneath those stars, the ones we thought we were seeing and the ones that might yet appear and I would dream this memory again and whisper, Stay.
In 1988, the US Navy evacuated six-hundred men from barracks with complaints that they were struggling to breathe.
There was a den of coyotes to the North of our campsite, and they howled through the
night.
Elsewhere in the same desert, there is said to be a lost pearling ship about the size of one of Columbus’ caravels, which went aground somewhere in the sand hills west of El Centro. According to legend, it was sailing north through the Gulf of California when it was carried over a strait by a tidal swell and deposited into Lake Cahuilla, which was in the process of drying. The last reported sighting of this seventeenth-century vessel was in 1970, the same year NASAs inaugural satellite, the Explorer 1, reentered Earth’s atmosphere after twelve years in orbit; the same year the US military sunk 418 containers of nerve gas into the gulf stream near the Bahamas; the same year President Nixon televised a proposed cease-fire in South Vietnam; the same year of your father’s conception in Naval housing outside metro Manila; the same year of the birth of Aleksandar Vučić, president of Serbia during the years of thee Syrian war, who declared at a 2018 gathering of Serbs in Kosovo, that Milošević had been a great leader; the same year as the death of physicist Max Born, whose work was instrumental in the development of the theory of relativity.
In 1990, in Kosovo, 4000 students, mostly ethnic Albanians, were admitted for treatment of poisoning symptoms. Also that year, astronomers documented a higher level of solar activity, as measured by sunspots, flares, and other solar events, than almost any other year in recent centuries.
As the nineties came to a close, I learned — I can’t remember how — that there is a diagnostic term for the state of mind in which an observer sees connections between seemingly unrelated events. I would worry about this for well over a decade before deciding — around the time of your birth, I think — that the applicable term was irrelevant so long as the subject in question was human, because what else do we do? Only connect.
Afghan officials blamed the Taliban for using poison gas at girls’ schools from 2009 onward, as reports came in of dizziness, fainting, and vomiting among the students. Taliban officials laughed. By that point, the idea of using gas seemed rather redundant.
You are born in the year of these reports, two years after Bush announced the troop surge in Iraq, which was part of a series of revised strategies outlined under the working title “The New Way Forward.” You are born in the year of the reports of poison gas in the girls’ schools in Afghanistan, a few months after a female suicide bomber kills thirty-five Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad.
The victims, mostly women and children, had been traveling in an annual procession to the holy city of Karbala to commemorate the conclusion of a time of mourning.
Also in this year of your birth, there is much laughter and joy over the faces you make, and the way you learn to hold a finger tight in your grip, at the way you seem to be seeing visions above you when you sit on the ground in your carseat; about the way you kick your feet when you are reaching for something, and also about the size of you — the feet, hands, the tiny head with the soft spot still at its crown. Also in this year, some nights while you sleep, I am turned on my side with your mouth around the nipple of my left breast after you have fallen asleep in the crook of my arm, aiming to keep my breathing still and my thoughts calm lest you feel them, while he pounds against my right side with his fists until he is spent, and I wait until he is snoring before looking for the remote to turn off the TV, before sleep. The bruises he left would draw the usual stares from early morning gym members later in the week, but by then I was well-practiced enough to avoid eye contact completely.
Years later, he would break, with my skull, the ceramic cross of a family prayer that I had purchased online in the year of your birth. I had chosen it because the ceramic upon which the prayer was engraved was cast in such a manner as to resemble an ancient stone. It cracked when he slammed the back of my head against the wall where it had been hanging precariously across from the front door of the apartment we moved into the year after your birth. It broke in pieces behind my heels when it fell, and that is when I heard you cry out from the hallway behind me, and that is when I knew that you were not asleep, and that is when I knew it was time.
In 2018, thousands of children trying to sleep in the US complained of cold, of loud banging in the night and of the sounds of other children wailing from behind bars, as thousands of mothers walked around with the glazed expressions of the undead. Both groups suffered symptoms of dizziness, weeping, and loss of appetite. Authorities at the border assured the press that these reports were vastly overblown.
“I am holding you when you are not here,” I remind you in the minutes before you leave, while wiping traces of vomit from the edges of your mouth.
Each time you return, I ask, “Could you feel it?”
Each time you return, you bite down a smile and insist, “No!”
In the year of first separation, you say, “Look, Mom!” at your first-grade open house and show me the construction-paper cutout of a butterfly, with a tiny photograph of your face in the butterfly’s head. The trunk of your body is the thorax, and on either side, in place of arms and legs, are wings made of tissue paper fragments mounted into the construction-paper frame.
Later, you are allowed to take it home, inside a portfolio of your first-grade art projects, and I stick the butterfly you on the cork board above the calendar. Other designs frame the window of our bedroom: here a bird, there a monkey; once a giraffe, now a tree.
I place these in our new home so that everywhere I look, there you are, but the butterfly goes above the calendar, mounted at eye level by the door, so that every time I come or go, wondering how long, I may press the tips of my fingers lightly against one or both of your outstretched wings.
On Christmas Eve, the body of a seven year old Guatemalan girl who died while in custody of the US border patrol, was shipped home to her family, adorned in a white communion gown and a diadem, in a small white coffin, to an awaiting crowd of mourners, including her mother who could only moan as her legs weakened with grief.
Baby!
No, not mine, not mine.
Wait, I am coming.
Wait, you are coming.
How many days? I touch your wings.
Here, feel this: my blood to your heart, 4000 beats per hour.
Take every measure. Above this rhythm, here now, hear me now: let us
— sing.
Reports of a winter evening about two millennia prior to this moment hold that there was a collective vision recounted among shepherds in the fields somewhere on the southern portion of the Judean Mountains, approximately fifty miles or so northeast of Gaza City and the Mediterranean Sea, at an elevation of about half a mile above sea level. Rarely, even in scriptural accounts, did multiple angels appear to anyone, so the considerable fear on the part of these alleged witnesses was justified. The shepherds — all men of lowly station, to be sure — were allegedly told that a liberator was being born nearby, and they went to bear witness. They could find the child nowhere except in a stable, among livestock, in a makeshift hay bed. The parents had tried for better, but at every way station, every seeming place of refuge, they were turned away by one of the keepers who claimed with authority that there was absolutely no room. It is said that when the shepherds found the family among the animals, they fell to their knees.
The judge cited “a question of credibility” regarding the alleged broken bones, and the nose, and the night with the Glock in my mouth and against his head, and his waiting for angels, and the bruises that I hid beneath long sleeves and the plates and the cross with family prayer that I had swept into dustbins so that the horror of their fracture would be out of our line of vision. So who could blame him, from where he stood, arbiter of all things documented and reported, and us trying to reach him from the world of the unseen?
It was decided, then: you would be away for half of every year, breaking every week and every holiday into pieces. At the end of every separation, you would return.
Each time you left, you would call or not call, depending on what was safe, and you would remain out of reach, and I would make lists for the groceries while sitting in a room where everywhere I look, there you are, and who was it that said, by way of reminder (to poets, perhaps?): Here is the place where you are; you must treat it like a powerful stranger[1], and I meant to learn to live inside its strangeness, but here I am anyway, less comfortable than ever, the world still spinning and me beneath it, mouth agape before all the stars I cannot yet name, visible and invisible, extinct and waiting to be born.
So now comes the end of the year and a time when people gather against the chill in groups of various sizes worldwide — and many alone, to sing with faces upturned, into vast expanses of mostly invisible wonders, of a silent night over a little town where long lay the world, in all its error, pining.
Stay, child. I am coming soon.
***
[1] Paraphrased from David Wagoner’s “Lost”