Sttn to Adjust
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
She kept her childhood in a shoebox, but the shoebox had started remembering things she didn't. It had good memories, but some very bad ones of her childhood and some even worse ones she only dimly remembered. One day, it had stolen her shoebox.
The shock of it! And then when her son with the long hair who smoked dope all day, who did chords down the stairs at two in the morning, who kept dirty socks on the back of the toilet, who never ever emptied the tall rubbish bin in the kitchen, appeared in the hallway quivering, holding out the finger-drawn cardboard box.
And there was some confusion because both of you had been searching, feeling guilty...she...suzi? But that hadn't been her name, it had been.....was that it? Was it Sally? The question had been out there a long time, wasn't it? "Have we only forgotten-lost name from yesterday?"
And the young man reached out and touched her hand, trembling too. He had been looking for her for a very long time, waiting every day with grapefruit juice and crackers, trying to make the weather go better, and it had got worse.
Suzi looked in the box, and closed her fingers on a grey scrap. She had said, "Well, get the jumper out." And when she saw him breathing quicker, she searched the box until her hands closed over the hard little bones. They were coming into a small square of light; they were always coming back from somewhere into light, and the terrible horror of saying that began, "It is...," when what did she know for sure? The box moved and the sweater rasped on tangled grass hanks.
The small square of white and blue flashed in and out, contracting to a pin dot in sectors of light and oblivion, which seemed to be begging her to place the little bones in the gap between segments, to make light from the dazzling darkness, to bring her words to some meaning. Only the skeleton said yes.
In any case there was this one last chance of getting her old life said, of excusing the inconsolable gaps between things. This began for her an internal quest, that at first seemed like a puzzle in which some object had been misplaced. The object had not been forgotten- it had been stolen, along with all the other objects. Her soul eyes widened when they found out she had been missing, when someone had stolen her soul. She had passed from friendless soul to soulless friend, a conduit of realms of time and space, a life within a life, a movable ephemeral soul surviving on a diet of nothing. No cracker, not even an apricot. A condensed fuzz of what used to be; the reverse of the one way mirror in a television studio where, during the night, he observed a being with unfinished eyebrows grinning through the glass, hands striped with dye prevented from touching anything.
No arm for the bones. Suzi bundled them into the shoebox with characteristic impersonality, the passionate disinterest which had done so much damage now destined to hurt so much more. The woolen sweater shone in the box, sitting against the baby teeth, the miniature ribcage, and the desiccated heart. Suzi helped him home.
On the way they discussed her son.
He had the knot in the rope cutting the his weekend-casual shirt under his Adam's apple. She explained how she had already been taking him to psychologists for another eighteen months before a specialist told her about gas chambers. He was able to direct the blankness of the eyes with the glowing tip of a baton nail to a day when it wasn't raining and a door that opened out into the sun on the first day you got your braces off, the day you gave your kitten its first bath, the day you got a few dollars for your sewing box.
The sweater knit in their arms did what it could. It made the whole time run out for years every day in loops past her so quick that she can only remember it in half blurs, a shifting background blur of periods of clear memory. There wasn't any recurrence. There had never been any recurrence. The length of an outing with that funny boy with the bow tie and his seventeen camels could be set like a dial on a speaker, a sound whose width and height couldn't be multiplied. You could only walk from one end to the other and there would always be a third time.
"You saved something this time," said the bow tie boy.
"I never saved anything," she pointed out.
"Obviously you did. It moves freely even in box like that."
The journey home was short, recovered from the grip of the box. With bright eyes in the afternoon sunset, the sweater sweated milk, the shards of transfer needlework roared crying at the death of another set of threads. Those threads would never bounce. The sweater blazed in the box, glowing at the darkest half hours of the afternoon.
Their conclusion was that he was filled with himself.
Whoever he was, his wish failed. This was essential to the existence of the new, for now she had been away as long as he had been here, and he was the only one represent the old. The roomy lampshade in which his life vibrated, even on the days that were hopeless, had had to disappear, even through she thought of him as her son. He looked in the mirror, puzzled, and Suzi had to admit the terrible truth, for suicide could only be so, his abandonment of her soul. She had been obliged to forget that he had been her son.
For years she did this, threading the isolation between groupings of faces with her needles. She sounded no words. Her voice was lost in the radio of her own heart, and she was pleased beyond measure to find it was easy. She stitched inexorably on the eyelashes. She heartsongs.
She was addicted. Each moment shook out, like the residue of a vitamin pill, the intact memory of each word, every look, every smile of his. No applause came as his grandmother signed her remaining woven descendants for him as a gift for his having been born.
He was born not to be her village son but herPodunkson.
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