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WHAT HAPPENED in a cave long ago. What happened in a classroom. What happened at a crossroads, in a meadow, on a bridge.
When the Piper was not paid, he treated the children as he had the rats. Led them away. They disappeared into a mountain. All but one who was lame. What was in the mountain?
They never found Henry Froelich’s body. Jack never heard from Simon again. He never heard of Oskar Fried again. All the children disappeared into adults, all but one who returned to the earth and remained there. Forever young.
The cave called Dora remained part of East Germany, borders shifting around it. The Berlin Wall began to crumble from within. One side could no longer afford the arms race and, like a homeowner taking the precaution of opening windows before a hurricane, parted the Iron Curtain and called it glasnost. The wind reawakened a babel of nations, and they wanted borders that followed bloodlines.
Oil crises, hijackings and environmental disasters. “Terrorism” arose to rival “Cold War,” and “covert action” entered common parlance. Security required secrecy, and so did its crimes, but all was worth it if we managed to avoid “the big one.” As it turned out, the small ones were very profitable, waged by “freedom fighters” or “terrorists,” depending on who had last sold them arms. The trick was to spread the weapons and the cash around in such a way as to keep the Third World, the Arab world, all the “other” worlds, at each others’ throats. The West was winning.
Rockets bred anti-ballistic missiles and spawned dreams of Star Wars — safety nets in the sky, life imitating entertainment to lull the prosperous into forgetting about the danger lurking in human hearts; the same anger that triggered a holocaust in 1914 with a simple assassin’s bullet, its trajectory traceable through a century. Fanaticizing anger. Anger that requires no bullets. Anger that consumes empires.
Still the cave waited. Gaping, sore and empty. As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People’s dads.
These were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they roll like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave.
It takes a village to kill a child.
BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA
IN POP CULTURE and folk tales, ghosts haunt creepy houses at night, appear in old photographs of church picnics, are glimpsed in the rain-lashed beam of a headlight on a country road amid endless fields of corn. In life, they arrive when you are emptying the dryer at ten A.M.
The shadow is the same. It chooses mundane moments. Like most ghosts, it does not wish to scare you off. It needs to be seen. That’s why it has come. Imagine the sheer exhaustion of making the journey up from the shades time and again, only to have your long-lost one shriek and run away. That’s why it learns to approach in the open, when you are engaged in familiar tasks, guard down. Doing the dishes. Driving. It doesn’t necessarily want you to crash, but it does want your attention. It gets this by making the familiar shockingly unfamiliar.
Madeleine can no longer drive on the 401 where it proliferates into sixteen lanes across the top of Toronto. She can no longer see the whole road all at once, only one piece at a time — broken line, section of guardrail, whoosh of a passing car, another, another, another. These days she has to take the slow city streets all the way up to the After-Three studios in the northern suburbs, adding forty minutes to the trip. Life is too short, but she has no choice. That place from which we perceive the world — the cockpit behind the eyes, the meness—fragments into a multitude of formerly autonomic tasks that suddenly require volition: breathe now, blink now, beat now, steer. Trust your instruments. Her only real choice is to wrench the wheel into traffic. Not to do so is to prolong the terrifying paralysis of entrapment. The terrifying insanity of no choice. You have a choice. Wrench the wheel. This will make something make sense.
With multiple lanes shooting past her on both sides, Madeleine repeats random phrases, ads—“‘You deserve a break today, so get up and get away’”—until she is able to pull over or exit. Then, forehead resting against the steering wheel, parked in front of a mall where there is nothing to buy but water purification systems and barbecues that roast whole steers and bake cakes: “‘You’ll wonder where the yellow went, the yellow went, the yellow went….’” Okay. It’s okay now.
“I’ve become neurotic. I’m going to be one of those irritating middle-aged women who’s got to have the aisle seat and can’t be trusted next to the emergency exit. I’m afraid all the time, a total coward.”
Nina is silent. Madeleine takes a breath; her eyes wander to the Georgia O’Keeffe print — bleached skull of a steer — then over to the clock, distended Dali-like through the glass water pitcher.
Nina says, “Fear isn’t the opposite of courage.”
“What?”
“It’s the prerequisite to courage.”
Madeleine dismisses this with a raised eyebrow.
“You said ‘the thing’ first happened when you were performing,” says Nina. “But did it remind you of anything? Was it familiar in any way?”
Madeleine is surprised because the answer is so close at hand — lying on the surface, like a sealed envelope on a stack of mail after the holidays. She opens it:
It was during Bambi. Part of a double bill with Bambi Meets Godzilla at the Rialto Cinema in Ottawa. Her best friend, Jocelyn, had smoked half a joint but Madeleine, being a failed druggie, hadn’t had any, so it wasn’t that. She was fifteen, Joss was sixteen.
“Wake up, wake up! Wake up, friend Owl!” cried Thumper.
At the sight of the cheery rabbit Madeleine felt her extremities cool. At the same time her face grew hot. “Are you hot?” she asked Jocelyn.
“No, it’s freezing in here.”
“I mean are you cold?”
“Are you stoned or what?”
Madeleine felt fear rise like a tide to her chin. Her heart began to ripple, then race. She became convinced she was about to die. She had in fact been diagnosed with a heart murmur — mild, the doctor had said, no impediment to athletic activity or a normal life, just have it checked as you get older. But this rippling didn’t feel familiar. Was this what a heart attack felt like? A “murmuring” heart — what was it trying to say?
“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all!” chanted the stoned audience along with Thumper.
If I think about my heart, my heart will stop. If I don’t think about my heart, my heart will stop.
“Bird!” Bambi’s first word.
“Want some?” Jocelyn passed Madeleine the popcorn.
“Butterfly.”
Madeleine obeyed an old impulse and smelled her hands. Jocelyn didn’t notice, she was gazing up at the screen, giggling, glassy-eyed.
Madeleine rose from her body. She gripped the armrests but this only caused her to rise more swiftly.
“Wait here,” said Bambi’s mother. “I’ll go out first, and if the meadow’s safe, I’ll call you.” A shot rings out.
“Faster, Bambi! Don’t look back!”
She hovered in an elastic curve high above her own hands, she could see them lying limp on the worn velvet armrests below. She must have grown, for she was stretched over several rows of seats now. It was not entirely unpleasant. Winter comes and goes. In the meadow, new grass pierces the snow. Crows sound the alarm….
“Mother! Mother!” cried Bambi. The audience laughed.