The Dazzle of Day

by Molly Gloss

  He had touched wild birds, several of them, during the little time he’d been apprenticed to Ridaro Rogelio, the ornithologist. And a few times, in the sutaĝo beneath a house, gathering up drifts of leaves or taking a look at the kitchen plumbing, he had found sick opossums or porcupines recuperating or dying, had touched a few of them accidentally or because he had thought them dead. He had touched snakes and lizards in the rescue of chicks or chicken eggs. But he realized: This was the first time he had been touched by a living, unrestrained, undomesticated animal. He was inexplicably gratified by the snake’s settling against his body, as if its trust in his innocence was something he could take credit for.

  He was conscious of holding still, of holding in a breath, stilling a heartbeat; but gradually the unmoving weight of the snake began to seem an extension of himself, a massy benign tumor obtruded from his armpit, and his stillness became devotion, a kind of exaltation. When he shut his one movable eye he imagined himself imbued as the trees are, with silence and equanimity in the midst of irrational things. He began simply to wait, growing passive, receptive. Waiting for what? he wondered. For night? sleep? death? the stars?

  His mind wandered, and he dreamed that he slept. When the weeds stirred softly and a draft opened against his shirt, he said, “Vilef,” to keep his son from wriggling away from his side. Vilef was four, had been mobile for more than a year, could move himself small distances by an undulating flapping of his elbows and hips. Or he was dead, had been dead for more than eight years.

  “There’s beetles in the grass,” the boy said, not wanting to be held.

  There was a particular perfume he gave off when he’d been lying asleep and flushed with heat. Humberto breathed it in, the piercingly nostalgic smell of his son’s skin. He opened his eyes. “Vilef,” he said.

  The boy’s shortened arms were single-digited, atrophied, his body a kind of writhing divided limb without hips or buttocks, the thin legs flaccid and unjointed, but he rolled his skinny, pliant body on the canes of fallen corn, looking back at Humberto. His small head was slung sideward on the long thin stalk of his neck, his mouth open in that heartbreakingly familiar way, a sagging grin, the small rows of teeth straight and neat, perfectly formed.

  “I want to look for beetles,” the boy said, stubbornly pleading.

  He was naked, his pale skin rosy where it clung to bone at elbows, heels, chin, the tips of his pointy single fingers; deep mauve where there was heat, darkness, dampness—his genitals, the cave of his mouth, the smooth hollows at the axilla of shoulder and arm. Humberto fixed his eyes on the small dark muscle of his son’s tongue moving in the dark mouth. Vilef never had spoken in his five years of life. Whose voice was issuing from his mouth? “Come here,” Humberto said. “Come and lay down here with me.”

  The boy wobbled as if boneless, as if he were a curved blade of grass trembling and swaying, weighted by a bead of rain. The leaves shook slightly with his nervous fidgeting. Humberto was helpless, must wait for his son to come or to wriggle away.

  “You fell down,” the boy said, explaining something.

  “I’m just sleeping. Come here and sleep with me.”

  Vilef grinned foolishly, rocking up on his flexuous waist, and then he settled himself against Humberto’s ribs again. He lay with his small head flung back, his face turned up to the daylight, his mouth open to catch the falling rays of the xenon lamps. His heated fragrance filled Humberto with an excruciatingly indefinable impulse.

  Vilef breathed noisily. “Tell the names of birds,” he demanded.

  Humberto stared skyward where the spars of the ceiling were wound with thready clouds—a gathering of afternoon humidity, the incipience of the evening rain. A cowbird still flew there, beating back and forth within the frame of Humberto’s view, the coarse fringe of leaves and tassels of corn.

  “There is a brown cowbird,” he said. He felt around for the nib of a memory, something he once had known. “They slip into other birds’ nests, Vilef, and leave their eggs to be brooded and hatched by that other family.”

  The boy made a dry cht, birdlike, a sound of puzzlement. “Why?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do those other birds care?”

  He considered. “I don’t know that either. They raise the young cowbirds with their own children. I don’t know if they mind doing it.”

  He and his son watched the cowbird in silence. The bird drew a barely perceptible network of lines on the sky, its wingbeats snagging and trailing the mist.

  “More,” Vilef said solemnly.

  “Gray’s thrushes, and ruddy ground-doves,” he said, “build their nests on the bananas, right on the ripening bunch, where the fingers of the fruit reach up and hold it cupped like this.” He formed the intent to gesture delicately, stiff-fingered with one hand, but nothing came of it. His hands remained outspread, lying on the ground, inattentive. Vilef held one of his own formless hands up, the single finger pointing from his birdlike, truncated arm. “Like this,” he said, and Humberto, smiling, feeling that he was smiling, answered, “Yes.” Then he said, “Tanagers hide their nest in the center of the bunch, between the hands of the fruit. Sometimes, in the days between building the nest and feeding the babies, the fruit thickens, and the gap where they pass through becomes so narrow they finally can’t slip in and out; then sometimes their children must starve.”

  “I would widen the doorway,” Vilef said staunchly, and Humberto said, “Yes, I have done that.”

  “What else,” Vilef said after a small silence.

  He cast around in his memory. “Some woodpeckers live in families, aunts and uncles and parents and children all together sleeping in a single house. And the ani birds live in great shared domaroj, laying all their eggs together and rearing their children in a bunch without setting one apart from another.”

  “More.”

  “They perch in long rows, anis do, all facing the same way, ten or fifteen or twenty of them crowded together; when a bird at an end of the long row wants to move to the opposite end, it walks over the backs of the others.” Vilef made a wet loose sound in his throat, his habitual choking laugh, and Humberto’s heart, from habit, clenched and released in a spasm of love. How easily the old responses reinhabited his body!

  “I have looked for you,” he declared tearfully, meaning something that was unfathomable even to himself. Vilef rocked his small round skull, and the heat of his breath blew intermittently against Humberto’s ribs.

  “Where did you look?” the boy asked dreamily.

  Humberto felt himself caught in a mindless turbulence, a flood of echo, chord, vibration. Something latent and formless, long preparing, had arrived. “Where should I have looked?” he answered.

  Vilef made a cunning sound, huh huh huh, the same dry, calculated chuckle he used to make in his sleep all those years ago, before the sheer weight of his own outsize heart had progressively strangled and killed him. Humberto strained to see his son’s face; from the lower edge of an eye he watched the tip of a tongue searching the corner of a mouth, not able to distinguish whether it was his own tongue, his own mouth, or Vilef’s. “You know where,” Vilef said slyly.

  He did know. Something turned inside him. He gave up straining to see his son’s face; he looked up through the halo of light into the faraway framework of the ceiling, but then shut his eye, and through the transparent membrane saw the paths of blood in a carp’s eye, in a dragonfly’s wing, in the body of a tick.

  “Paĉjo,” his son said, and touched his outflung wrist. The heat in the touch startled him, jerked his eye open, and his grown son Ĉejo stood leaning down to him, his round face creased, worried—“Paĉjo, why are you lying here?”—and behind him, another face, an unknown girl with eyebrows thin as fingernail parings, her mouth an open bow. His other son, Vilef, had already slipped away from his side as swift and silent as if he’d been delivered whole into heaven.

  On the old terms, he said, clutching his son’s hand, or meaning to c
lutch it, meaning to say, It must be on the old terms.

  A small hoarse croaking came out of his mouth, and the sound drained him of anguish—he felt suddenly empty and free, as if his soul could leave his body in the next moment. He hovered there, at that charged balance point of his existence, holding out to his son on the delicate upturned cup of his hand as if it were a construct of moss and twigs and brown maize, an unnamed land. Ĉejo shook his head or shuddered, uncomprehending, and the moment went forward with a small stir of Humberto’s heart. He fell back inside the days of his life as into a hollow vessel, full of familiar voices and people, of seasons repeating themselves, of sorrow and joy going out, returning, waiting, undreamed of.

  7

  Bjoro

  I sing the body electric,

  The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them.

  They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

  And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

  Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?

  And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

  And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?

  And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

  WHEN THE AIRLOCK was opened, the quick rush of the draft was like a wind, piercing cold, bitter against Bjoro’s skin, and at once he began to shake. He had had thirty-one days in the closeness and warmth of the Ruby to get over his chill, but now his body swiftly gave up its heat and he felt as he had when Luza had strapped him in the gondola of the balloon, the bones of his ribcage enclosing a central, numbing cold. Eighty or a hundred people were gathered there in the south pole of the Miller in the big open docking arena, a great daunting welcome, and it struck him bitterly that this was a mortafesto as much as a celebration of homecoming.

  When he looked for his wife in the faces suddenly crowding him—a jumble of grins and moving mouths, unrecognizable—he had a sudden, unexpected glimpse of Luza. On the Ruby they had made an unspoken agreement not to say too much; they had kept to things that were devoid of pain, had kept clear of talk about the crash, Peder’s dying, the pale, fluttery tangle of Isuma’s balloon pitching down the night sky. In the silences between them there had been a kind of tender closeness. Now all at once he wasn’t able to bear Luza’s look, bear looking at her. When their eyes touched, he shifted his own away jerkily. A clot of anguish and impenetrable rage swelled in his throat. He knew if he let his mouth open, a thick dumb wordless shout would fly from it.

  Juko appeared suddenly among the faces. She was keeping a fierce smile, her lips in a wide line which she pressed against his ear. “Where’ve-you-been?” she said, whispering their old homecoming usage. He wasn’t able to answer: out-of-the-way. He had imagined this reuniting, imagined that she might be moved enough to weep, and he would taste her tears on his tongue. But her face was familiar, unsentimental, and his body was stiff and numb with cold, he wasn’t able to bend it to his will. He lowered his head effortfully and let his mouth down against the crown of her head; on his tongue was the dry, acerbic taste of her hair.

  Some of the faces around him became members of his family, his sister, niece, cousins, brother-in-law, an intricate web of relations he felt helpless to negotiate. “Paĉjo,” his daughter murmured to him, and put herself under his armpit in her familiar way. He put his arm around her shakily. Juko had been on his other side gripping his hand, but now she let him go, and it was his son Eneo holding that hand suddenly and saying something to him, and he was grateful for the cacophony of people’s voices relieving him of the necessity of hearing the words, or of speaking. He felt distanced from his wife, his relatives, his children, as if years had passed and meanwhile they had become other people.

  Someone, maybe it was his sister Olinda’s husband, said irritably, “Make them a way through. Let them go home, eh?” and other people gradually took up this proprietary mustering. The crowd opened a little, swimming slowly against the free-fall, and let the crew of the Ruby and their families go out of the docking arena and up the winding corridors to the gallery of lifts. When people spoke to him he tried to smile, but went on unable to speak, his brain filled with a jittery misery. The heat of his son’s hand became his point of concentration. He felt mercurial, transient, was dimly grateful for Eneo’s clasp anchoring him to a fixed base.

  For years he had been piloting tugs, had made three or four space junkets as long as this one—longer. He always had dreaded the heaviness, coming down to the torus after those long periods of free-fall, had been days getting back his land legs. But now crowded in the lift with the nine or ten members of his family, he found an obscure comfort in the way his body felt taking on quick weight, substance, falling heavily down from the center. He thought, All right. All right, now, giving himself a kind of rebuke.

  He looked for Juko. She stood holding the hand of his young granddaughter, but she was watching him with a look that was anxious and wary—a surprise. He reached for her suddenly, put his arms around her in a fierce clench. Her back shook briefly under his hands—she was letting go of a few tears—and when he understood this, he experienced a moment of exhilaration and loosening. “Ended,” he said in a hoarse voice, and sobbed out loud. Other people in the lift began to weep too, their hands reaching to touch him, to stroke his cheek, pet his arm. “Yes. Yes,” his family said, “the old Ruby has got home. Gift of God.”

  It was a vast surprise to come out into the Miller’s yellowish, humid daylight and find the jacaranda trees still in bloom, their lavender blossoms seeming impossibly glorious after long days and nights at the edge of the gray lake, weeks of incandescent lamps and tiny metal rooms in the Ruby. He was a technologist, not a botanist; a mechanic, not a farmer. It struck him that he had lived his life until now without ever looking on the landscape of his world. Now the brilliant green of the rice, the scarlet passionflowers against the rank verdure, the high-up ceiling, hazy with cloud and refracted light, filled him with helpless longing and love.

  He hadn’t thought of his mother being absent from the homecoming until he saw her standing in front of the house, squared on her feet, peering with her bad eyes down the path into the bunch of them coming up toward her. Maybe it was the hub she had stayed away from, she had a hatred of the free-fall now she was old. Neighbors, his mother’s friends, his wife’s relatives, were with her, standing about in the narrow path and the little garden before the house, waiting for him.

  When he saw how many there were, a kind of exhausted panic made his legs suddenly unsteady: He wanted to be let alone, not be made the center of their celebrating. Kristina’s eyes picked him out finally, gave him a long narrow look, and then he heard her dry voice suddenly over the others, she was turning to her friends, pulling at their arms. “My son is wayworn, used up,” she was saying. “We’ll let him sleep, eh?” It was a terrible moment, realizing his mother had seen this in his face as if he must still be a child. But when people started going off meekly, he was weak with gratitude.

  He hadn’t believed her advice to people was meant to be absolute, but when he came up the ladder onto the loĝio of the house she pushed him into the little apartment, the little room he and Juko slept in, and the two women rolled the bed out and put him onto it. His skin was rough with cold, and they covered him with a sheet, put a pot of tea on the floor beside the bed, closed the shutters over the window casement to shut out the daylight and people’s voices. They behaved as if he were sick, and he let them behave that way. He submitted to everything helplessly, not having the strength for explaining, the will for protesting.

  They left him alone in the room. As soon as the wall was closed, a burning anguish sprang up in his chest. He worked his brain, grappling to give a name to his feeling. He had yearned to be alone, but now, alone, he realized he wanted his wife to get into bed with him. He wanted her to lie with him on the bed without speaking, with the heat of her t
orso pressing against him in wordless, undemanding sympathy. He wanted her to hold him like a sick child until he slept, and he blamed her for not realizing this.

  He drew his knees up and huddled on the mat, under the heavy weight of the air, shaking with cold and self-pity and irrational resentment. He could hear his relatives and neighbors talking softly on the other side of the thin wall, their voices an indistinguishable murmur. When he heard a word, it was meaningless, irrelevant. “Point,” he heard someone say, and later, “Carry down.” He realized he was straining to hear his own name, he wanted to overhear them talking about his health, his grief of heart, how much they had missed him, how much he had suffered.

  He wasn’t able to keep his eyes shut. His look jumped anxiously, distractedly around the room, not settling anywhere, not focusing on anything. The house had a quality not just of unfamiliarity but of transcendent strangeness, as if his whole experience had been a life in the branches of trees. He thrashed about, restless, until he was crouched on his knees with his forehead pressed against the mattress. He rocked on his head, his knees, the pressure behind his eyes making a wavery kaleidoscope of yellows and reds. Gradually the rocking soothed him. He slept a little in a milieu of feverish dreams and woke exhausted, sweating under the sheet. It was dusk, and the room’s shadowiness, the dim light cast through the papery panes of the wall, disoriented and oppressed him. He saw that Juko, or someone, had gotten the room unaccustomedly clean, the individual motes of dust on the floor boards a testament to recent washing.

  He sat on the mat, his body heavy and dull, and held his head in the cups of his hands until he was fully awake. Voices were still speaking softly somewhere in the house, a sound that made him feel excluded and vaguely sorrowful. He stood up and slid back the door. Juko sat in the dimming light beside the casement in the common room, braiding rattan. His mother sat near her, shelling beans in a battered clay bowl. When he opened the door, they both looked at him critically.