The Changeling Read online

  But there was a rumble of panic underneath everything. And if it wasn’t the fear of death, what was it? She felt it always, the terror, even in the brightest moments. What was it then, when she didn’t even care?

  Pearl pulled away from him.

  She felt a pain of incompleteness and indecision. Her breasts hurt from nursing. With the hurt she woke into a terrible fright. She remembered a little stove her mother had made for her when she was a child. A packing crate with circles painted on top of it to indicate gas rings. She had played with it dutifully. Accepting the game and love’s deceit. When her father had taken her fishing, he had equipped her with a rod and line that had a big screw eye on the end instead of a hook. They had been protecting her. They had been afraid of accident. They had provided her with substitutions and she had lived safely in the brightness of false things.

  She feared that her mother and father had died, that they weren’t with her anymore. She said their names aloud.

  “It’s true,” Walker said soothingly. “It was years ago.”

  It was a terrible fear. It was terrible for her to worry so about the dead. Her heart pounded. There were car wrecks and diseases. The dead were in danger of dying. The fear was like a storm within her, a storm unalive and yet with a dreadful will for destruction . . .

  “You’re all alone,” Walker said. “You have no one but us.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Pearl said. “It doesn’t matter that I’m alone. And I’m not alone.”

  “Your mind is an amazing thing to hear working,” Walker said.

  “I have Sam.”

  “We have Sam,” Walker said. “Sam’s going to be wonderful.”

  “I don’t like you,” Pearl said, defeated.

  Walker grunted. “You used to like it,” he said.

  “‘It’ was you once.”

  “You should get out a little more, Pearl. You’ve become too self-obsessed. Get off the island a bit. Don’t go far. Go to Morgansport and have your hair done. Go to a movie. Go to the fairgrounds and ride the wooden horses.”

  Pearl remembered the wooden horses. The merry-go-round was the oldest in America. The horses had real teeth, and tails made of real hair. The children had taken her to see them once. The children had also taken her to see a movie at the firehouse which she would have sworn was pornographic. The children had taken her to a museum which consisted of Rimbaud’s suitcase and an Ethiopian assassin’s trigger finger in a glass jar.

  Pearl had been to Morgansport three times. She couldn’t imagine what she had been doing with her days. She had stayed on the island but what had she done? She had talked with the children or thought about the children or walked with the children outside between the stone walls that meandered everywhere. Walls which ended often in enclosures from which anything could escape. The walls everywhere, in the cleared land and the tangle, keeping things neither in nor out. The stones forever giving way and being rearranged in the children’s play.

  Walker was talking on the telephone. He was making arrangements. A cab was going to pick them up and take them to the airport.

  “I don’t want to have any more children, Walker.”

  “All right.”

  “A woman has only one child,” Pearl said. “All the rest are false ones.”

  “Poor Pearl,” Walker said. “We’ll be home around two AM.”

  Pearl wanted another drink. The room shuddered. It contracted and expanded. She watched the baby in the crib, churning his arms in the air, striking the crib slats with his sacked feet.

  “I like Sam,” Pearl said, waving her hand at him. “I don’t want him to grow up and be peculiar.”

  “It’s your behavior that seems peculiar, Pearl. It’s you who walk the streets looking both unhappy and unconvinced. The people of Miami will arrest you if you appear unhappy and unconvinced here. They do not respect sickness in Miami. This isn’t your sort of place.”

  Walker’s voice was often pleasant even when he was saying hurtful things. She wanted to put her arms around him, to topple with her arms around him off that moment’s brink and into nothingness.

  She looked at the baby. He gazed back, small chest heaving, his face stern. She unbuttoned her blouse and picked him up and put him to her breast. He made loud smacking noises. The nipple stood out long and wet. She kissed the top of his head. When he finished, she gave him to Walker. They went down into the lobby to wait for the cab.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The plane they were to take back north was about half full. There were several weary families with small children aboard. Pearl felt that she looked like any of the young mothers there, drawn, quiet, wanting to get on with it. The seats were three abreast. Pearl sat down wearily at the window. Walker buckled himself into the aisle seat. The baby lay on a pillow between them.

  “I’d like a martini, please,” she said.

  “They don’t serve drinks until we’re in the air.”

  “I am not an imaginative person, Walker, nor am I a suggestible person. But in a dream, if something was unpleasant, I would cover my eyes with my hands and I would just withdraw from that dream. I wouldn’t wake up but I would just go into another dream. I became so good at that, Walker. It was my one talent really. I wish I could do that in real life.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sakes,” Walker said, “‘real life.’”

  “I know I don’t express myself well, Walker, but I’m depressed.”

  “Yes, certainly,” Walker said.

  Pearl took a deep breath. She said, “The body is a corpse, Walker, just a corpse and it is only the soul that keeps it from putrefaction and I feel that my soul is gone now. That it has been gone for about a year now actually. I feel that all those children have it in some way.”

  “The children have their own souls, Pearl.”

  “I feel . . . ”

  “You just have the postpartum blues, Pearl. It’s nice to have children. Children make us eternal.”

  “That’s a Jewish conceit, isn’t it? Because they don’t believe in resurrection. No, no, that’s not what I’m saying at all, Walker.” She looked at him mournfully. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  Walker got up and stood in the aisle to let her pass.

  “Why don’t you sit over there,” she said, gesturing toward the window. “I don’t feel well, I might have to get up now and then.”

  Pearl made her way to the back of the plane. The aisle was congested with people stowing their possessions away. At the back of the plane was another baby, this one in the arms of a very old woman. Pearl stood beside them as she waited to get into the toilet. The old woman was opening her mouth and closing it at the baby. The baby was listening intently. They were obviously two individuals who understood each other. The woman was the oldest person Pearl had ever seen in her life. You would think that they’d refuse to transport a person in that condition through the air. Well, life is a mystery, Pearl thought. She looked at the old woman’s strong, bony skull visible through the thin hair. It certainly was odd that such an ancient woman would be in charge of such a tiny baby. Pearl stared at them. The baby slowly unfixed its eyes from the old woman and stared at Pearl. They were golden, gelid eyes. Pearl felt bewitched. She couldn’t help herself. Being a mommy made of her a loose species. She crooked her index finger and passed it softly, affectionately, over the baby’s mouth.

  The old woman slowly pulled the baby out of reach and wiped his face on the sleeve of her sweater.

  “I’m sorry,” Pearl said. Old people were particular about things. They worried about diseases. “I have a baby too. I . . .” She turned and walked back to her seat, not remembering why she had left it.

  “Feeling better?” Walker asked.

  Pearl said, “Do you believe that you can tell a transformed person by its eyes?”

  “Pardon me?” Walker said.

  “Haven’t you heard the children with their werewolf talk? Peter and Trip? They’ve spoken of nothing else for weeks. They fou
nd a book or something. Haven’t you heard them? Is it just me they talk to? All that stuff about people vomiting fingers and dogs’ paws. All that stuff about the souls of animals infusing themselves into the trunks of men . . .”

  Walker rubbed his forehead with his hand

  “Did you know for instance that, long ago, people executed animals for crimes they believed they committed in the guise of men? That they conducted proper trials and formally hung beasts? And if the creature was unfortunate enough to be caught in his crime while he was still affecting the appearance of the man, his body was often torn apart by those convinced that they would find the body of a beast inside . . .”

  “Pearl,” Walker said.

  “And those plays they put on! Children shouldn’t be doing that. Children should be throwing Frisbees or something. Those plays! They say it’s mostly Shakespeare. Mostly. I don’t believe it. They’re always killing one another.

  ‘What means this bloody knife? ’

  Tis hot, it smokes

  It came even from the heart of . . .’”

  “Pearl,” Walker said. “Be quiet for a moment.”

  The door to the flight deck had closed on the crew and the plane was taxiing into the position for take-off. From the window, she could see several other big planes strung in a semicircle behind them.

  Pearl held Walker’s arm. She moved his fingers to her lips. His hands were hot, velvety, as though the blood were burning fiercely there.

  “It’s just that I want you to see my point. Those children could drive a person crazy. They make their little worlds. . . it’s a terrible thing to see . . .” Her voice was rising. A teenager with a flimsy mustache and army camouflage trousers looked at her in gentle alarm. The trousers would have merged perfectly with a sofa her mother had once, Pearl thought.

  Pearl sighed. She rested her head against the starched white napkin pinned to the top of her seat.

  Every four weeks the moon is swallowed by a hostile pig. So the children would say, giggling. And so what, so what! As good a way as any for explaining why it wasn’t out that night.

  Pearl stroked the baby Sam’s hair absentmindedly. He was sleeping. None of the roaring that filled her ears bothered him in the slightest. It was night. Nights were all right. Now the mornings she was more suspicious of. The way the light sneaked up on you. And that gap between dawn and sunrise! Who could make preparations for a sneaky light like that? Who could make amends?

  Her father had once told her, on a day when they were all alive, that she had magic mittens magnetic to snow.

  The flaps of the plane’s wings were raised. The extensive minute machinery was visible. An arrogant complexity. Unseemly. Railing against heaven.

  They were all imprisoned here, in this plane’s fragile shell. Pearl realized with abrupt clarity that the plane was going to crash. They had left the ground now. The sound of the engines was high and steady. They were climbing. But Pearl knew that they would crash. They were too low, somehow flying beneath the horizon. She held Walker’s hand.

  In school she had learned that the edge of the universe had been sighted. Dutifully, she had copied in her notebook the manner in which this was told. The edge of the universe would represent the first accumulations of matter in an evolving cosmos. The matter is seen by looking a great distance through space and hence into the past.

  The notebook had long ago been lost. She was no student. And yet now this page, these words, blazed in her mind’s eye—a signpost to a chaos so complete, so ordered, that she glimpsed the lunatic face of God.

  She dropped Walker’s hand and picked up the baby.

  She hugged her knees and pressed her forehead against the back of the seat in front of her. Off the coast of Madagascar, inhabiting the depths of the sea, live obsolete fish which have never kept their appointment with extinction. Something, again, her father had told her in the days when they were all alive.

  Three minutes after take-off from Miami, the pilot flew serenely into the aurora of grasses that was the Everglades. The plane skated briskly for a moment and then nosed heavily into the mud. The right wing was sheared off and partially entered the cabin, almost separating the plane in two, opening it up like a child’s hinged and portable toy. Pearl felt herself torn from the seat and flying awkwardly, belly-up, through the air. Perhaps this really was the way the dying did it. Imagine. Being depicted accurately all these years by the visionaries. One simply spread one’s arms and flew home.

  She saw Walker, forced backward, his thick hair opening up, letting in the night. Her arm fluttered toward him but her fingers could not hold to his shoulder. She had lost all contact with the baby.

  She fell from the air with a painful crack and lay on her back, a hundred feet from the plane, water running into her eyes, a heavy weight on her chest. The light in the swamp was faintly lavender. Everything was smoking. The grass stank terribly. She plucked at the weight on her chest weakly. It seemed like something she could push away. But it was nothing. The bodice of her dress stuck to her fingers and came away in shreds. Something crawled away from her on all fours, screaming. She kept plucking at her chest, fretting about the weight now, wanting it, wanting it to become the baby’s weight. The sky possessed the faintest, most delirious color, casting a glow upon the scene that it brought it out of darkness certainly but not into any sort of light. Sections of the fuselage burst into flame and extinguished themselves in almost the same moment. Flesh and metal had fused, and damaged and distorted objects gave no clue as to what they once had been but everything seemed cruelly, senselessly alive. A man stood not far from Pearl, standing very straight, seemingly uninjured, and screaming, screaming, although she heard no sound.

  Pearl struggled to turn on her side, on her stomach, to search with the rest of the living for that which was lost. Two dogs, pets that were being transported in the luggage bay, loped past her, whining. One returned, circled her, sniffed her head and then ran on. Pearl clutched at the grass that supported her but her arms sank into the muck almost up to her elbows. She crouched, swaying, and, finally with great effort, got to her feet. She felt like a savage, drooling slightly, incapable of decision.

  She heard her own voice absurdly calling the baby’s name. And then Walker’s name. Her mouth was swollen. The words were meaningless even to her own ears. She had brought this disaster down upon them with her foolishness, her selfishness. She stumbled on through the swamp. A shoe was missing and part of the skin on her right arm. The plane was bright and barren in the moonless night. People were moving now. There was yellow smoke everywhere. The sky was yellow. There were lights in the sky dropping straight down.

  She brushed against something and shrank back. The thing wafted against her bare arm. It was crisp, yet feathery, the seared wing of some large wading bird. Killed in its own domain by the impact of the crash, it lay across Pearl’s path, charred yet whole, its long elegant legs crisscrossing Pearl’s own, its brutal beak discreetly shut. A fishing feeding creature whose destiny had crossed a more powerful and inept one. Pearl gagged. Her legs seemed caught in the thing’s legs.

  She saw a wig floating in the mud. Several wigs.

  She crawled away from the bird. “Walker!” she screamed. Walker. Walker. She had lain with him and made a baby. She had punished them all.

  Suddenly, her ears seemed to open up to holocaust. Airboats with huge spotlights were floating across the grass toward the wreckage. And the sounds of the injured were inhuman. But familiar, like the cries of the owls at home. WAUGH-O WAUGH-O. Owls feeding on the abundant meat of despair.

  Healthy men were moving around her now. Men who were intact. She passed the young camouflaged boy still strapped into his seat. One eyebrow was half torn off and fluttered from his face. There was a sloppy dark stain around his waist where the seatbelt cinched him in.

  Pearl saw the dogs again, running ahead of her, bumping into things as though they were blind.

  “My baby,” Pearl said. “Please, I had a baby. Pleas
e give me back my baby. He was in my arms.”

  A man brushed by her almost knocking her down. She grabbed his arm. “There’s a baby here,” she said. “You must find it. It’s my baby.”

  He looked at her hopelessly. “All right,” he said. “Stay right here, don’t move from here.”

  He left. But she was nowhere. She was beside nothing. No landmark. The owls, or something in the swamp, kept moaning. An owl’s nest was full of everything. All food for their grief. Trout, rabbits, thrushes. Balls of hair and bones with rings attached. WAUGH-O WAUGH-O. She was calling Walker’s name again and then the child’s. “Please,” she called, “I have a baby. He’s here.”

  Pearl sat down. The swamp sucked at her sides. She folded her arms across her lap as though she were holding something there. Then she felt it in her arms, something trembling, small, and other arms around her, carrying her, hurriedly but not without care. She was on a stretcher now, with a blanket lying loosely across her, and pressed against her troubled heart was a living infant boy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In the hospital nursery the baby lay, covered with ointment and lying on greased paper, prepared much like fish en papillote. He twitched occasionally in sleep, rosily singed, every bit of hair burned off his head from the crash.

  On the floor above, in a private room, lay Pearl, her ribs and arm bandaged and a square of gauze taped to her forehead. She lay with her eyes squeezed, against the pillow.

  Walker was dead.

  She lay with her eyes squeezed shut trying to resurrect him. Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection.

  Pearl had never had much faith. Her mother’s favorite hymn kept intruding upon her compilation of Walker’s images.

  Ohhhhhh He walks with me

  And He talks with me

  And He tells me I am His owwwwwwn

  Christianity was too carnal for Pearl. She turned and lay on her back.

  Once Walker had taken her on a jeep ride across the island. There were three or four children bouncing along with them. Blueberries fell from the bushes and into the jeep like rain. The ecstatic children hung panting over the sides, almost falling, their lips rolled back over their gums, their eyelids fluttering with smashed webs.