“Mom!” my son cries out, “Quick, before it disappears!” I button my coat on the way to the bathroom. “Look,” he says, pointing into the bowl at the bubbles his urine has made. “It’s Africa.” A tiny Africa floats in the toilet, its long neck and camel’s profile already popping and returning to liquid. “See? That one next to it is Hawaii.” My eyes follow my son’s pointed finger, and there it is: foamy archipelago.
I am late for work, or I would tell him about Pangea, and then Pangea Ultima, what marine geologists and physical oceanographers say is one configuration the world’s land could take when the next supercontinent forms a couple hundred million years from now—a scenario in which the tip of Africa would nestle below the southernmost part of North America, narrowing the ocean wide gap between Cape Town and Honolulu.
“Wow,” I say instead. “Look at that.”
At night, my son slams into my bedroom, thrashes his way underneath the covers, rounds his body into mine. His bottom tucks into my pelvis, his back presses against my chest, his head—his fine hair—buries the tip of my nose and mouth. I breathe a warm spot onto his scalp. His heels jerk backward into my shins. “I’m scared,” he says. Sometimes he trembles. He dreams oceans of lava, embered waves he can’t outrun.
During the day, he conquers the lava. The floor is slick with liquid fire, and he leaps over it, from couch pillow to dining room chair, from a stool carved with his name onto the kitchen counter, where he shimmies on his belly along its edge. When he reaches the end of his stamina or the end of the course he has designed, he jumps down and says, “It’s fine. I’m wearing lava shoes.” No one needs to worry that he will disintegrate into orange-red oblivion. For now, he has kept at bay the molten rock that later will explode through his bedsheets, sending him fleeing imaginary smoke into my room where the air is thick with sleep.
The night before my mother dropped me off for college, we shared a double bed at a B&B in a suburb just outside of New York City, near the campus that would become my home the next morning. We had driven for over two weeks, from Austin, Texas, my hometown, to New York, taking our time with cousins in Georgia and at the beach in Virginia. Of course, I had seen my mother asleep before. She is a consummate napper, and as a child, when I lost track of her at home, I nearly always found her, knees bent into her stomach on top of the bedsheets, lips puffing and deflating. I couldn’t recall, though, ever having slept together. It never would have occurred to me to crawl into my parents’ bed. It was an unarticulated understanding that I would not be welcomed there. No! I can imagine my father’s voice, deep and definitive, had I tried.
My mother fell asleep before I did, and her hair, long and silver then, fell over her neck and shoulders and onto the cotton lace of her nightgown. A bright light through the window—moonlight? street light?—drew a luminous border around her body. Overcome by the fact of our imminent separation, I curved my chest and abdomen around her back, pushed my face into her hair, extended my legs around the backs of hers, separated only by the narrow space between our bodies running like a fault line from my collarbone to the tops of my feet. I remember wanting to press into her skin, to become the same body again, to live nested inside of her—my body absorbed into hers—so she could not leave the next day without me.
I never touched my father this way. A couple of days after he died, I sat in the office of an East Texas funeral parlor as my stepmother discussed end-of-life logistics with the mortician. I kept excusing myself from the meeting—to the bathroom, for a quick walk—to sneak into the private viewing room we’d already entered and left, where my father’s body still lay, dressed up in a tan suit. My stepmother had asked for my father’s body to be embalmed so that my sister and I could see him one last time. The fluid had filled up the loose skin that sagged from the weight he’d lost while he was ill. He looked more like the father I’d known in my childhood—his belly rounded, his chin thick and doubled. The seams of his eyelids gleamed with what I assume was glue but looked like the shining rim of a blinking eye, wet with tears from cold weather or fatigue. I did not want him to be alone (because I could not look at my father’s body and not see him). I did not want to be apart from him, as long as his body was still in the world. Over and over again, I returned to him, and over and over again, I pressed my hands into his arms, touched my forehead to his forehead, my nose to his nose, his body as cold and unyielding as stone.
“Out!” my son shouts. “I want private time.” He sits on the potty, a National Geographic Why? book teetering on his bare legs. Before I can shut the door, he calls my attention to a graphic rendering of Earth, the top right quarter of its sphere sliced open to reveal layers, like a multi-colored jawbreaker: crust, upper mantle, mantle, outer core, and glowing inner core. “Do you know why you can’t dig all the way through the world?”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll get hot, hot, hotter.”
The temperatures at the base of the earth’s crust can reach nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It would take running more than a few consecutive marathons’ worth of miles straight down into the ground to grow as hot as the furnace that held my father’s body inside the crematorium. For months, after he died, I pictured his body alight with fire, his skin curling into the flames. I later learned that my father’s body was never set on fire, that extreme heat caused the water and embalming fluid in his body to evaporate, and the remaining molecules to oxidize, to break down and pull apart. The ashes we spread over the cemetery grass in Winona, Minnesota, buried in a shallow hole near his gravestone in Nacogdoches, Texas, and shook from a baggie into Lake Austin. Snapped into a locket that hangs around my stepmother’s neck were his leftover bones and teeth, ground into a powder.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. There is an unreality in perceiving my body as land, but land it will become, its hills—my bottom and rounded thighs, the soft stomach—where my son and daughter rest their heads when I lie on the floor after returning home from work. “I’m a baby hyena,” my son says, stretching out, opening his mouth wide, threatening my cheek with his pointed teeth. “I’m a Tasmanian, Arctic mountain lion with a poison-tongue.”
“I’m a fox,” my daughter says, and they pretend to devour me.
“Heh! Heh! Heh!” the hyena-mountain lion laughs. “Yowwwwwwl!” I wonder how this creature has evolved inside of my son’s imagination and recall his finger trailing longitudinal and latitudinal lines along his globe. “You go: Maryland, down to Virginia, through the Atlantic, over to Portugal, to Spain,” to pay a visit to cousins in Sevilla. “Back through the Atlantic, up to Ireland, over to Iceland, across to Greenland. . .” to get to the North Pole. Forget thruways and transitional spaces—airports and ports, railway stations—he follows his finger. I imagine the genetic composition of my son and daughter coming together in this way: their ancestors, mine and my father’s, following a pointed finger from there, to there, across an ocean, to there, to here.
My ancestors have become land, left behind on continents across oceans, buried deep or shallow in the dirt and devoured by worms, turned to soil. Some swallowed into bodies of water that for hundreds of millions of years have expanded and contracted, will expand and contract, forcing bodies of land together or apart.
Graveyards and all of the places we spread ash are transitional spaces. Hospitals, too. A week after my son’s birth, he and I reentered the maternity ward at a D.C. hospital, where they allowed me to hold him against my chest. My baby, a giant relative to the other newborns, curled into a question I couldn’t answer. My body convulsed with fever, the top row of my teeth slamming against the bottom row. A postpartum infection had turned septic, entering my bloodstream, and I imagined the bacteria like a hungry pride moving in on my heart and lungs, as I hacked and heaved under the weight of them, my skin turning Savannah green or the color of split peas. My husband pushed the dinner tray toward me that held the evening’s soup, tomato flecked with black pepper. “You have to eat.”
I imagined the soup was the eye of a volcano. Smoke rose from the red eye and blew over the blue sea linoleum. My mind propelled itself out of the hospital room and toward the blue-green-gray-red eyes of the planets, through the cotton clouds covering earth, so soft I would have slept on them if I hadn’t known I’d fall into the sea. When my son cried, I returned to my body. Return, return. It was the only choice. My son was hungry, and I pulled down my shirt to feed him. I remembered the first seconds of his life, when he knocked his face against my chest until he found my nipple and nursed there, like someone feeling in the dark for a door and finding its handle.
You have to eat. While my body was busy deciding whether or not to die, I was not hungry, not for food, not for any of the things that flipped my stomach with want when I was well—new clothes or furniture, recognition from my husband for how impeccably I’d cleaned the house while he was away at work, a summer rental in the south of France, where we could buy our baguettes and cheese fresh every day, practically stamp our own wine from the vine. But I was overwhelmed with the desire to press my son back into me, or myself into my son, to take up residence in each other’s bones, which was its own kind of hunger—the earth devouring itself, the earth—all of us—engaged in an endless cycle of separation and reunion, a cycle of disintegration and rebirth inside the mouth, the stomach, and the bowels of some other beast.
My stepmother said that my father was sitting up, just fine, and requesting something to eat on the afternoon he died. He had been airlifted in a helicopter to the hospital from one small Texas town to another the night before. His blood cell and platelet counts were all over the place, but by morning, he was stable again. Unstable, stable, a wobbly balancing act between the kidneys and heart, back and forth for years. By the time my stepmother returned to his room with food, the nurses had set off the panic button. My father had tried to speak, his mouth forming words with no sound. I picture the way his hands might have moved, the bewildered gesturing to try to bring forth language that never came. Then, his eyes rolled up in his head, he pitched backward, and my stepmother didn’t see any more. She was rushed out, allowed to return only when it was clear he could not be stabilized again. She could hold his hand, steady him as he traversed out of this life into whatever’s next.
The moment of his departure, like any moment, was an eruption, a fissure, a setting adrift.
After he died, after I hung up the phone and sat looking out the window, two moons—both crescents—hung in the sky like an open quotation; what did my father want to say? I won’t downplay the mystical. There is a scientific explanation for what I saw, a phenomenon called total internal reflection, but I’d looked through my bedroom window at the moon a thousand times, and it had never before been divided into two. The timing was synchronous. I sensed that one moon was my father and went back and forth over whether the second was my deceased grandmother (my father’s mother) or me. Either way, one moon cradled the other, and for a short time I felt relieved of the fear of death.
“One life!” Bono sings while I cook dinner.
My son, at the dining table, uses a plastic pick to scrape away dirt from the gems and fossils embedded in his dig kit. He startles. “One life?” he asks.
“Right.”
“Why does he say one life?”
I am never ready for these conversations. They pour forth unexpectedly, as if the stress of unanswered questions my son carries inside suddenly causes him to burst. I don’t want to scare him, and I don’t want to lie.
“Because we only live life one time.”
“One time?”
“You only get to be you one time.”
“Me, one time?”
“Yes.” My son holds still, looks off into some distance beyond the apartment wall, where he has fixed his eyes. “How do you feel about that?”
“I’m wondering.” He pauses. “What happens after you don’t have life any more?”
I do my best to explain it in simple terms. No one knows. Some people think you are reborn into another body. Some people think that’s it; there isn’t anything else. Some people believe in something called heaven. I do my best to describe the promise of light and joy and resurrection as it was explained to me, in case it appeals to him, offers him something to hold onto. He blows at the dirt, and it scatters.
“I don’t think there is heaven.”
“No?”
“No,” he says.
“Why not?” But he doesn’t answer. He has moved on.
“I want something to eat.” He jumps down from his chair, shuffles into the kitchen. If there is lava flowing over the slats of wood fitted together to form our floor, it does not concern him.
“What do you want to eat?”
“You.” He smiles with all of his teeth.
“Me? You want to eat me?” My fingers are wet with oil.
“I’m going to put you in a frying pan.”
“Why do you want to eat me?”
He doesn’t say. He wraps his arms around the backs of my legs and squeezes until it hurts.
