Last Things (15 page)

“There are some animals that have no eyes,” my father said. “They live deep at the bottom of the ocean where it is always dark. Even if they had eyes, there would be nothing to see.” He walked across the stage and got into a tiny car. The question girl stepped from behind a curtain and got in with him. When they drove, their feet were the wheels. This made everyone laugh. They pulled their car up to a backdrop painted like the bottom of the sea. There were coral reefs and fish with whiskers and yellow fins. In the far corner was the hammer head of a shark. “Careful,” my father said. He moved a little away from it. The music sputtered on. The question girl stepped into the small circle of light in front of her.

A
RE THERE ANY ANIMALS THAT GLOW IN THE DARK
?

At the bottom of the sea, there are many luminous fish. They glow with a blue chemical light that helps them find each other in the dark. If you tried to dive
down to see them, you would die because they live too deep
.

W
HAT ELSE
?

There are glowworms and fireflies, but their light is much fainter. You can catch them in a jar and look at them if you wish
.

“He looks like a salesman,” my mother said when she saw him on TV. I liked to turn the dials and hear his voice coming in louder and louder, but my mother liked the volume very low. The best show was the one where he put on a silver space suit and pretended to walk on the moon. He took big slow steps across the moonscape, then turned to wave at the Earth below. His face was hidden behind a mask. A recording explained that, during all moon landings, one astronaut remained in space orbiting the moon. When this astronaut was on the far side of the moon, he was thirty-five hundred miles from the nearest human being. “No one had ever been that far away from other people before,” the voice said, “and no one has ever been since the moon landings ended.” The tape recorder clicked off. My father walked to the edge of the moon in his heavy boots. Behind him, a field of stars sped by. “This is a good one,” my mother said.

That night, she told me a story about astronauts too. Once, thousands and thousands of years ago, God came to earth disguised as one, she said. His skin was silver and his boots were made of light. He came
because all over the world man was starving. The age of ice had come and all the plants and animals were covered with frost. Everything was dying; even the giant cats and reptiles that once ruled the earth had frozen in their tracks. Man too was almost extinct. The few tribes that were left hid in caves, weak with hunger. They lived off melted ice and tiny snow worms. There were fewer than a thousand people left when the astronaut came. These people had survived because they were the strongest and the ones with the most hope. He taught them how to use their hands to make fire and how to plant and cultivate crops. Everywhere he went, he left seeds behind, and in his wake, plants and flowers grew. In this way, agriculture was invented and mankind ceased to be a race of wanderers. This was because men set up camps beside their crops and these camps became villages and these villages cities. And that is how we came to build bridges and towers and roads, my mother said. And that is why we feel homesick when we look at the stars.

That Sunday, my mother took me to church. We drove across town to the one with the neon cross in front. I liked this church because everyone sang songs and talked back to the minister. Sometimes during the service my mother closed her eyes and waved her hands in the air too. This was a secret I was keeping from my father.

At the beginning of the service, the minister asked everyone, Who made the world? and they said in one voice: God made the world.

My father believed that the world was made of dust and ice, I knew. Once he had taken me to a zoo and shown me monkeys who had hands and feet just like mine and carried their babies on their backs. This is where we come from, he said, and once we slept high in the trees and leapt from branch to branch without falling. He told me that the Bible was only one version of a myth people all over the world had told for thousands of years, the story of the first man who walked the Earth and how darkness came to be separated from light.

There was a puppet show at this church and in it was a doomed dog who did not believe in God and was always angry. A cow, a rabbit, and a pig tried in turn to speak to him of Christ’s love, but he wouldn’t listen. “I don’t believe you,” the angry dog cried. “There is nothing to believe in but the sun and the sky.” The dog stood alone on the stage and shook his paw at the small children below him. I sat quietly among them, my hands in my lap. Then the cow, the rabbit, and the pig rose up behind the dog, and suddenly he disappeared and there was only the minister’s naked hand fluttering among the animals.

“One will be taken and one will be left,” my mother whispered. “Two will be sleeping in a bed and one will disappear.”

A man came and took the puppet show away. The minister stood at the front of the church with his
hands upraised. “I beseech you, Beloved, to love and serve Him all of your days.” His face was flushed. Behind him, the music began. He touched his dog hand to his heart. “Beloved,” he said once more.

There was a sound from the back of the church and a man came down the aisle carrying a wooden cross on his back. He was a bent-over black man with green eyes that looked like glass. When he reached the altar, he stood in front of the cross with his arms outstretched. The minister spoke in a low voice. He told how Christ had carried the rough cross up the hill, how he had been fitted with a crown of thorns, how he had been nailed to the wood, one nail pounded into each wrist, another in his feet. Each time he talked about the nails, there was the sound from somewhere of a hammer hitting wood. The man on the cross flinched each time he heard this. Dark spots appeared on his wrists and feet. He let out a long cry which seemed to catch in his throat. Then it was over and everyone began to sing about a train.

On the way home, my mother made me promise not to tell my father about the man who had been hammered. The minister had said that Jesus’ father was a carpenter and this worried me because my father liked to build things too. I asked if Jesus’ father had had to make his cross. “Oh no,” my mother said. “By then, he wasn’t a carpenter anymore.”

At the church library, I found a book about saints that was so small it fit in the palm of my hand. In it, I read
about St. Anthony, who preached to the fish and the birds and was so holy a donkey knelt before him.
St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. He will help you find whatever you have lost, if only you come forward with a believing heart
, the book said. Then there were the saints who ate only bark and dirt, who threw themselves on funeral pyres crying, Praise be to the Lord above, Glory to God in the highest.

I put away the book and took out my homework.
Dec. 29: First primates
, it said at the top. My mother came in and showed me a tape about a gorilla in California who had learned to talk with her hands. Her name was Koko and her favorite word was “gorilla,” my mother said. Does she think she’s a person, I asked. Oh no, my mother said. She fast-forwarded the tape to a scene where Koko was being shown different skeletons, one a bear skeleton, one a dog skeleton, and the last a gorilla’s. The woman who showed her the skeleton was her trainer, my mother said, and her name was Penny. In the movie, Koko is asked to point to the gorilla skeleton. Right away she does.

Penny (says and signs): Is the gorilla alive or dead?

Koko (signs): Dead, goodbye
.

Penny: How do gorillas feel when they die? Happy, sad, afraid?

Koko: Sleep
.

Penny: Where do gorillas go when they die?

Koko: Comfortable hole, bye
.

Penny: When do gorillas die?

Koko: Trouble, old
.

The screen went black, then the credits appeared. My mother clapped her hands. “See, she knows all about it,” she said.

D
EC
. 30: F
IRST HOMINIDS

The first hominids, known as Australopithecines, lived on the African savanna nearly five million years ago. They were small, ape-like creatures who walked upright but had not yet lost the ability to climb trees. Scientists believe they were an evolutionary dead end, but similar hominids arose in their wake. Over time, these primitive humans learned to make tools and conquer fire. They hunted communally and may have communicated with simple signs. Perhaps one of the earliest consequences of their developing consciousness was a dim awareness of their own end
.

A sparrow’s heart beats four hundred and sixty times a minute. A man’s, just seventy-eight. But sometimes, at night, my heart approached sparrow speed. This happened when the darkness crept into my bed and wrapped itself around my feet. It made a low whirring sound when it touched me. Then it crawled
onto my chest and lay there, daring me to breathe. If I did, it would kill me, for this was the agreement we had made.

I never knew how long it would stay. Once, it seemed to curl up on my arm and fall asleep. Another time, it brushed across my face and left through the window with a quick rustling sound. This was the sound of all the creatures that waited in the dark, I knew. At night, they roamed the woods behind my house, calling out their names to me.

I was afraid that one night these creatures might come for me. I thought this because of a story I had read in
The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained
. The book said that once in China a creature who was half man and half ape climbed through a window and carried off a girl. This happened very early in the morning when no one else was awake. The creature ran with the girl through the empty streets, dragging her long hair along the ground. She screamed and screamed, but no one heard. But then, just before they reached the woods, some women working in a field saw the beast and chased after him. They rescued the girl and hacked the beast to death with their metal hoes. Some of them took home bits of his hair as souvenirs. The dead beast had hair like a yak, but his hands were smooth like a man’s. A young biologist who lived in the town cut off its hands and preserved them in a jar. “I think he was in love with the girl,” my mother said. The biologist, I thought she meant, but later I wondered if it was the monster.

In the winter, there was an owl that lived in the tree outside my window. The call of an owl meant a baby would die, my mother had told me. In Africa, when this happened, the woman nearest the owl cried,
Ameliliwa
, which meant, “My baby has been hooted over,” and everyone in the village came to see the baby one last time. Sometimes, after it died, the baby’s father went into the woods and shot an owl, but this only brought more bad luck. Had my father done this when Sophie died, I wondered, but my mother wouldn’t say.

The darkness moved through my room like smoke. Sometimes I saw it and other times I could see right through it. I never told anyone about the way it moved across me, but one night my mother opened the door and scared it away. When I saw her, I screamed without making a sound. Only my mouth opened.

My mother rushed to my bed. “What is it?” she asked. “Did you have a bad dream?” I tried to speak, but no words came. I could feel the darkness in the corner watching me. My mother turned on a lamp. When she did, the darkness slid under my dresser and hid there.

“What were you dreaming?” she asked. She stroked my hair with her cool hands. Now that my father was gone, I sometimes dreamed we were the last two people left on earth.

I shook my head.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

There were still a few shadows left in the corner. I closed my eyes. “My legs wouldn’t move,” I told her. “I woke up and I couldn’t breathe.” I shivered a little, thinking of how the dark thing had pinned me down. My mother pressed her hands against my chest.

“Like that?” she asked.

Yes, like that. In the dim light, her face looked strange. For a moment, I thought she might be someone pretending to be my mother and not my real mother at all.

She took my hand. “This thing that comes is called the Old Hag,” she said. “All over the world, people speak of it, though they call it by different names.”

“Does it come to you?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “And when it comes, it brings with it every black and terrible thing. Some have claws and teeth, some wings, but each has a horrible voice that whispers and whispers in the dark.”

I thought of how the voice I heard at night started in my head, then moved to fill every corner of the room. Was it the same as the voice she heard?

My mother squeezed my hand tightly. “I’ll tell you a secret, Grace. All you have to do is say the name of the Old Hag out loud and she will vanish. One brave word and she will disappear.”

This was no help, of course, for how could I speak when I couldn’t breathe?

“I can’t,” I said.

“Practice with me, then.”

“No,” I said and started to cry. Soon she would go away and leave me in the dark again, I knew.