by Eugen Bacon
• • •
Margo climbed into Ken’s light truck about noon. The truck was perfect blue in color. It was a four-door truck with a tow bar. Ken called it his simple workhorse. Its sparse interior and capable carrier gave no hint of the truck’s stubbornness: it ran out of fuel, its gear was shifty and the carriage wobbled. This was a car Ken’s father and grandfather had both separately owned, and in all that time no one had thought to fix the smell of burning that rose from within its engine when it ran.
The Shadbolt Clinic was right in the middle of town, off Orion Street. The clinic stood between a bakery (Milly’s Crumpets) and a butcher (Sirloin and Shank), opposite a blacksmith’s shop (Horseshoe) and the Antique Bookshop.
The odor of alcohol in the Shadbolt Clinic overwhelmed Margo. She counted hand cleansing gels (eleven pump jars) from the doorway, past the reception to the doctor’s room. Its sole nurse, who was also the receptionist, wore a white apron and pale green gloves. Inside, all rooms were completely white and blinked with light. All floors shone like silver. A sign on a wall overhead said: “Toilets for use only by patients.”
Dr Ace was the only doctor in Sheepwash Creek. He wore braces and rimless spectacles. He was a general practitioner, and a bone and heart specialist. He was a fresh face from some overseas college and brought along brand new knowledge of unconventional medicine. His client base was largely sporadic, if not outright negligible.
Ken and Margo on their first visit were relieved to find the doctor was agreeable to tackling matters of fertility, and of animals, it turned out. When they arrived he was attending to a sad little boy and his mother, both sniffling over a rabbit the good doctor had euthanized.
“Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge,” Dr Ace was saying to the distraught duo. “These are Plato’s very words. You desired for your rabbit to live. Now you show emotion at its death, but you have knowledge that my action today has eased its suffering. This knowledge will guide your future behavior.”
When he rid himself of mother and son and got chatting on fertility, he squirted gel into his hands. “Animals matter, “ he said. “Did you know that man (or woman) is a civilized animal? Plato said this.” He faced Margo and Ken. “Now, what can I do for you?”
Ken explained.
Dr Ace looked at the couple for a moment, hand on his chin. “The beginning is the most important part of the work,” he said. “This is what Plato himself said. You have come to me for intervention at the right time.”
He prescribed Margo two sets of pills: a bi-colored capsule to swallow with water every morning before breakfast, and a bloodred pill that tasted like beetroot or blood depending on what part of her tongue the tablet touched. Margo was to swallow the red pill three times a day in the week straight after she finished her menstrual cycle.
Ken and Margo had many questions but, before the good doctor could answer all of them, a man burst into the clinic carrying a fur-splotched puppy that had been mauled by two canine brutes.
“Will he make it?” asked the man.
The doctor adjusted his glasses and stared for a long moment from above the rim at the man.
“He is a fighter,” said Dr Ace, and went on to resuscitate the pooch. “He will pull through.”
“Have you treated many dogs?”
“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers—Plato’s very words.”
• • •
The bicolored and bloodreds did nothing for Margo. After swallowing pills and regulating coupling for seven months, one morning—it was wet season—Margo and Ken looked at each other across the table.
“Cereal?” she said.
He took the container and poured.
“Milk?” she said.
He took the jar and trickled.
She rose and made toast.
“Butter?” she said.
Their fingers touched in the exchange.
When they locked eyes, something in each gaze was like a mirror suddenly visible, and it reflected the scale of their discord. This was not the life they had imagined. Without words they examined their motives and wondered how stupid they had been. That night they cradled against each other and freely breathed.
“Can’t imagine you put up with all that,” said Margo.
“The right is always right. Got to know where your bread is buttered.”
“Cream doesn’t always float?”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
Longing for each other coursed through them thick as life.
Margo remembered something she had already realized years ago: that Ken, this man who was a carpenter and did not know how to sit on a horse, was her paradise. She could behave young again with him. She offered herself up to him and, in that abundance, by some fooling of fate, or a consequence of it, or perhaps it was trickery, the womb that had closed itself like a solid bean and refused to nurture a child opened itself.
• • •
It was a delicate pregnancy. Nausea, fatigue, heartburn and anemia assaulted Margo. It didn’t matter what she ate. Still, she avoided spicy foods and allowed Ken to cover her belly with ointments from the clinic.
“Ah, salmon oil. Let’s rub the tottie,” he said.
“Happy tottie,” she said, bedroomed on a dark, wet day.
• • •
Three times during labor Margo nearly passed out.
Dr Ace pulled out a pallid baby. Its tiny mouth on Margo’s breast had no strength to suck. When Ken put a finger to its nose, he couldn’t tell if the tot was breathing, until its ribs moved faintly and its lips parted to let out a faint whimper.
The child’s health increasingly failed all the way from the clinic. But at last, at last! There was baby noise in the house. The child would not stop whining.
The tot continued to be feeble. He was colicky and his bowels pushed runny fluid. He turned white when he slept, so white that Margo had to roll a towel and place it under the cot to raise his head. Three months later it was hard to tell whether he was teething or had an earache because he was ceaselessly whining and rubbing his ear. His fingers were so tiny they did not close around Margo’s thumb.
He had acquired the indigo in his pupils from Margo. Despite feebleness, Ken couldn’t help but notice the startling blue and gray that shifted in the tot’s eyes. It would be years before his weak nose and lips gradually shaped to take Margo’s handsome form.
By this time all of the child’s remaining grandparents had died. The baby was Ken and Margo’s problem, no one else’s. Matter of fact, Ken was more and more taking on other clients’ work from near and far, so the tot was largely Margo’s problem. She thought it was a temporary difficulty because, frankly, she and Ken did not think the baby would live. They could not bring themselves, or perhaps, with all the nursing they just had no time to bother, to give him a name. They simply called him Tottie.
For his business, Ken needed a reliable truck that did not leak engine or refuse to start. They sold Nibble, Margo’s favorite horse. Gradually they sold the rest of the horses to pay the doctor’s hefty bill each time Tottie’s health sank.
Twice Margo harbored ugly thoughts of snatching Tottie from his cot and swaddle and dumping him under the white oak tree for the gods to decide his fate. Twice she abandoned the idea. What reformed her mind was less of panic about how she might present the abandonment to Ken when he got home, and more of acquaintance with the maternal tug in her chest.
When the child’s stuffy nose refused to clear and he lost interest in eating, only Dr Ace stayed optimistic.
“Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable. Plato said this. I have the very remedy for this champ. Lots of music,” he said.
“People will think I am mad!” said Margo.
“Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance, Plato’s very words. Plato understoo
d that music is moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life.”
Margo wished Ken was present, but he had bought a new truck and was up north in Nuntin Creek, building a house for a client. Bewildered and on impulse, she left the clinic and entered Milly’s Crumpets. She bought a rye cob and a few plaits. She stepped into Sirloin and Shank and selected some sausages and ham. She found herself wandering with her groceries and droopy baby into the Antique Bookshop and its dim inner room.
At the counter she approached a young female with braids and purple nails.
“Music?”
The girl pointed.
Margo put her baby and the groceries on the floor. She trawled through a box of records and picked out a few labels: classical, folk and something called “progressive.”
The drive home was without hiccup—the truck did not stall.
Margo retrieved from the attic the record player her mother had bequeathed her. She took it from its case, lifted the dust cover and set it aside. She positioned a record onto the turntable and played the classical and then the folk and then the progressive music, which turned out to be drums and melodies that built up and troughed.
Tottie ran a new fever in spite of the music. He trembled with chills. He flopped and whined when Margo put him to her hips. When she tried to settle him in his cot, sporadic crying accompanied his disrupted sleep. His forehead grew hotter. Slowly he sank into delirium.
Margo climbed back into the truck with her baby, and this time the car wouldn’t start. She opened the hood and found nothing. She got back into the truck, wiggled its gear, tried the engine and it turned over but didn’t start running. She took one look at her dying baby, found a plank and hit a piece of metal inside the hood.
As she struck the damn thing, she thought about how comfortable she was with her father’s truck. It drove as though she and the truck were one. It understood her intentions and flowed with them. She had only to look in a direction, and the truck followed. She had only to will it to halt and its wheels slowly rolled until they locked to the ground. But this . . . this . . . b-beast of a truck! It roared, it bucked, it charged when it was not in comatose! Now it was taunting her. Now? Now! Her baby was dying. Tears flowed—Margo’s and Tottie’s. She whacked at anything in the truck that looked like it might be the problem.
Finally when she tried the engine this time it started. The truck jarred forward, shook as it took the road, but it ran. Halfway, Margo stopped and investigated an acrid odor from the bonnet. She lifted it and a blast of steam nearly scalded her face. One glance at her baby, and she jumped back into the truck. The engine agreed to start, but the gear stick refused to move. Margo found a plank by the roadside and hit the gear until it slipped. She drove to the hospital with service lights on.
“We are twice armed if we fight with faith,” the doctor said. “This boy is a fighter, and you need to be one too—Plato would have said.”
Margo found herself in a room partitioned by glass from another that housed an anemic kitten dying from a parasitic tick. Next to the kitten was a broken-limbed baby goat that an eagle had snatched and dropped.
Sharing her room were two women wrapped in shawls and scarfs. They looked like a mother and her daughter. The women talked recipes over a gray child with a grandmother cough as it lay. Their words floated into Margo’s nightmare: Fold in the egg with a spatula . . . Almond meal in chocolate cake makes it moist . . . Twenty-two minutes after the child’s cough stopped, twenty-two because Margo had counted, a nurse came and pulled a sheet over the child. The women abandoned their recipes and went berserk with grief.
Despite the frail heartbeat she felt on Tottie’s neck, Margo panicked each time a nurse approached. Each time she was relieved to find the nurse was not carrying a sheet to pull over Tottie’s face. By now Margo was certain she would not walk out of the clinic with her boy.
But she did. The boy refused to die.
Perhaps nudged by his near-death experience, Tottie actually began to thrive. It was then that Ken and Margo decided to name him.
“Vida,” said Margo.
“Vida?” said Ken.
“It means vitality.”
“In what language?”
“The boy is a survivor.”
Vida toddled at the age of four. His joints were tender and his legs started off bowlegged. The good doctor at Shadbolt Clinic gave him chicken bone powder for strength in his feet. He prescribed lime green tablets for his weak heart. The doctor would have continued recommending other remedies but, soon as Vida could voice it, resist it, he declined further visits to Dr Ace. Nothing Margo said or did would nudge Vida to undig his heels.
One day when Vida turned five his dad gave him a chessboard. It was a hand-crafted set, meticulously polished. Ken meant for Vida to play with the wooden figurines as one might play with toy soldiers. He was taken aback when Vida set the chessboard on the coffee table and suggested a game.
“These are knights,” his father pointed. “These are bishops. This is the queen. And here is the king.” Ken arranged the pieces on the board. “This is your army. And this is mine.” He looked at Vida. “Your goal is to get my king.”
Vida did.
This is how they both discovered Vida was exceptionally good at chess.
In time, his knees straightened but his body remained frail. Ken took to calling him his “little alien”—an alien because no one in Ken’s or Margo’s family could possibly have passed on such a doubtful constitution.
Margo, who had never before taught anything but lettuce, cabbages, chicks and foals (she taught them to grow, and they grew) took to homeschooling.
• 21 •
Pale-complexioned, frazzle-haired and completely sport-poor, Vida sometimes believed it was true: he was an alien. His fragility rendered him unminded when he was not being homeschooled. He noticed how his parents handled him gingerly, as if he was a hummingbird’s egg and they were frightened he might break. True, sometimes he played chess with his dad. But those games were only at night when his dad got home, because Ken worked all days through weekends.
Vida became the boy who played alone. He forged friendships with lettuce and cabbages in the garden. He befriended the white oak tree and its birds at the edge of Sheepwash Creek. Often, surrounded by a friendly tweeting, he would put his arms around the tree’s waist and listen to what he chose to think was an alien colony inside the tree. One day creatures would emerge and the rest of the world would dissolve around him in embryos of light, he determined.
At night from his bedroom window he would look closely at the stars, and search for kindred spirits. He would roll his eyes toward the heavens, roll them far back as he could until he found a pulsing black star north of his eyeball. Sometimes he saw a creature inside the star, a creature that was nothing but eyes on a float of brains.
What if, he often wondered as he took his breakfast, what if the clock on the kitchenette wall stopped, and fluorescent beams entered the house, a magnetic field surrounded his parents, and unconsciousness took hold of Vida until he woke up to find himself cushioned in rotating lights, mingled with kindred spirits, aliens like him? Often he looked at his bowl of cereal, expecting it to talk to him.
Because he did not attend formal school and was mostly alone, Vida played with marbles when he wasn’t out in the garden or conversing with his tree. One day he taught himself to make fire using a magnifying glass and focus rays from the sun. That night he curled on his bed and sought sleep, but it evaded him. He looked out the window at swaying branches of a lofty pine tree against a deep blue sky. As the pine’s leaves shimmered, one after another, he wondered whether, if he looked hard enough, he might see a spaceship inside the shimmers.
He angled the magnifying glass to the moon, focused it until a steady stream of light through the window clasped the moon’s s
hine in a straight beam. To his astonishment, inside the steady handshake of light Vida heard voices: Clicks. Tweets. They formed syllables and he understood the . . . talking. He had no clue who was talking, but he understood what they said, understood it so well he laughed.
He angled the magnifying glass toward the moon differently. Again, a straight beam fell from the sky and into his room, then clicks and tweets, voices whose words he understood, words that made him laugh.
During the voices, sound changed to a cacophony and a tremor shook his room. Vida threw open his window, leaned out and skyward. A dazzling object swashed! an inch from his nose and crashed down below. He trembled for a while in silence. No sound came from his parents’ room. Vida mustered courage and peeked out. All was still. After another wait he slipped out the door, along the corridor, down the stairs. He pulled the bolt and stole outdoors into a blast of tepid wind. The ground was equally warm, increasing in temperature around the house.
He examined the ground outside his window, but there was no crater two meters wide. No debris and certainly no dent on grass or soil. Instead he saw a square tablet almost hidden from sight but for dazzle. It was cool to touch, oddly cool given the heat it caused around it.
Vida wrapped it in his pajama top, took it to his room and studied it. The tablet had black, silver and gold squares embossed on its face.
What a find!
He stroked the tablet, laid it on his mantel, gazed at its blaze. A handshake of brilliant light fell from the sky. The light grew thicker, whiter, stronger. It too dazzled.
Suddenly there were military choppers, soldiers dropping from the sky into the front and back yards. More militants marched in formation along the streets outside Vida’s house, a brigadier commanding the squadron.
A noise, shrill and harsh, came from the lit sky. It changed in pitch and resonance. First, there was a rise and dip of garble, and then sirens, gurgle, more sirens, more gurgle. Cacophony became floating sound. And then, in an invasion of silence, the beam from the magnifying glass to the moon transformed color from blinding to radiant.
