 |
| New Planet by Konstantine Yuon |
It was always the same. The story in the picture book The Mountains of Tibet told of an old man in Tibet who died and was then asked to decide how he wanted to live his next life. And when the mother read the story to her child, the boy would always carefully study the watercolor illustrations that showed the old man’s visions, the visions that guided him back through all the galaxies in the universe, to be born again as a child on Earth, in the mountains of Tibet. The boy followed the old man’s journey quietly, from the great milky splash that is our galaxy, all the way to the page that showed the creatures of Earth. On that page, it was always necessary to linger for a quite long time, to ponder, to discuss, to choose. Although the old man decided to live life again as a child, the boy would always select a different animal, pointing to its vivid, painted image on the page—a dolphin, a tiger, an eagle—“I think I’ll be that one.”
Except tonight.
The boy’s mother had had a hard day. There had been work, of course, and then in the afternoon, they had all left the office to go to a funeral. The husband of a woman they worked with had died suddenly of cancer. The couple was young, had been married only two years, and had just recently conceived a baby. In the six weeks that it took him to die, her friend’s husband had helped his wife choose a name for the baby; but he would never see his daughter.
Sitting through the service, she kept remembering the last time she had seen her friend’s husband alive, at a party in a Mexican restaurant, about three months ago. He had offered her a taste of his wine margarita, and she refused, blushing, telling him it was because she did not want to leave lipstick on his glass. But he insisted, telling her not to worry, he was used to lipstick on his glass. So she accepted his glass, took a sour, icy sip from it, and then handed it to back him, that tall, outspoken man, with a dark intensity, who was now dead.
The grave site was at the top of a hill in Oakland, with views that spanned the west, the south, and the east. The grass was soggy from the winter rains, and thin, gray clouds kept passing across the sun so the afternoon went dark, then light, then dark again. One by one, everyone there had taken a turn at tossing a clod of mud onto the coffin, and stopping by the widow, to say a few words. The widow stood slightly apart from her family, in a plain maternity dress and bulky brown leather jacket, her face stripped bare, her eyes empty.
When it was her turn, the boy’s mother had searched desperately for words, but there was nothing there, absolutely nothing. Later that afternoon, when she had gone to pick up her son, instead of giving her the happy grin he usually had for her, he stopped stock still on the sidewalk, his little backpack slung over his shoulders, both his shoes untied, and said accusingly, “How come you’re so late picking me up? It’s almost six o’clock and all my friends left a way long time ago. You know I hate being the last one time to leave!”
She had explained that she was sorry, that there were things that she had had to do, but he had kept on whining, “It’s not fair! One of my friends always gets picked up at 4:30, and the other one is always gone at, like, five. You could’ve come earlier if you tried!” He had sulked and frowned at her the whole ride home.
When she got to the house, it seemed like the mess was worse than usual, with all the beds unmade, the breakfast dishes still uncleared, and toys all over the living room floor. Then, at dinner the boy had refused to eat the meal that she had cooked and had poured himself a bowl of dry cereal in protest. Sitting at the table, spooning his cereal down, he looked at her reproachfully, with tears in his eyes.
“You know I hate pasta!”
At that, she had broken down. “How can you do this to me?” she shouted. “I had the most terrible day. Remember? I told you all about it this morning. Today was the funeral for my friend’s husband. I’m really, really sad, and really, really upset, and all you can do is complain about my picking you up late—when I had to go to a funeral—and have a fit about what I make for dinner.... God, I can’t just can’t stand it!”
Then she pushed her plate away and ran to lock herself in the bathroom. She sat down on the toilet and sobbed, a painful, dry keening that she thought would never end.
When she finally came out of the bathroom, lightheaded and drained, the boy ran up to her, holding the picture book The Mountains of Tibet out to her. Once it had been his favorite book, and they had read it countless times, but lately they had been busy with books for older children, “chapter books” as he called them.
“Mom, he asked softly, “I put my jammies on, brushed my teeth, and went pee already. Can we read this tonight?”
Her husband called from the other room. “Don’t worry. I’ll read to him, tonight. Why don’t you go ahead and lie down for a while?”
“No,” she said, “that’s all right. I feel like reading to him, actually.” She wanted that soothing ritual, the familiar words and the familiar pictures, the sweet weight of his head on her breast and the rich, warm smell of his hair.
“All right,” she said to him, and took his hand. “Let’s go lie down on my bed and get all comfy against the pillows.” As she straightened out the bedcovers, she noticed that it had started raining again, that same cold, heavy downpour they’d had almost every day for the past month—the El Niño storms. It was starting to make her slightly uneasy. The Russian River was rising, and the newspapers were full of photographs of houses crushed by mudslides and people out sandbagging in water up to their knees, but that happened every rainy winter. But this year, for the first time, she’d been hearing about flooding in places that she had always thought of as safe, like Palo Alto, an old, established city on the penninsula, where she had lived with her husband when they were first married.
She opens the book to the first page, the page that shows a small Asian boy holding a kite, a boy who was born in Tibet.
The boy with his head on her shoulder is her only child: a six year old boy with a strong, sturdy body, a narrow, freckled face, and red-gold curls. When he was six months old and his red hair, his real hair, had just started to grow in, she had had been astonished; neither she nor her husband had family with red hair. But now that red hair was something that she cherished—it summed up the surprise of him, his difference, his separateness from her.
She reads about how the little boy grew to be man, married, had children of his own, and lived to be very old. The old man’s life did not turn out as he had expected, but of course, no one’s life does. Then she reads the sentence where the old man dies. It simply says this: “And then he died.”
The boy suddenly lifts his head up and turns to look her.
“Do you believe that stuff, Mom? You know, all that about being reincarnated after you die?”
“No,” she says slowly, “I don’t really believe it. But there are a lot of people who do. And it brings them a lot of comfort.” They have been through this before. The boy has not had a religious upbringing, but he has always asked questions. And she has tried to answer them. Just a year ago he had been saying boldly to his father that even though his father did not believe in God, he, the boy did. These days, he seemed to be reconsidering that.
She herself is not a believer. She does not believe reincarnation, in heaven and hell, or in any form of afterlife. And she does not believe in God, any god. Why not? she often asks herself, why not, when so many other people on this earth believe as naturally as they cry? Because the idea of God simply seems so outlandish and improbable to her, just as outlandish and improbable as the thought that the universe in which she lives was once smaller a grain of sand. The faith that other people have baffles her as deeply as trying to comprehend the distances between the stars and the time that has passed since their birth. When thoughts like these sift down to the bottom of her mind, she feels a profound vertigo, like in the dream she had as a child where the elevator door opened and she stood staring out into an endless, starry void.
“Well,” the boy says, comfortably, “I guess we won’t know until we die what's true—you know, if you get reincarnated, or like if you go to heaven like Christian people say say, or like if dying is just the end and there is nothing more.”
“Yes, we can’t really know for sure. Everyone has different beliefs, but no one really knows.”
“I do hope there is reincarnation, though,” he says, “that would be so cool.”
“Yes, that would be. But you know, I’m surprised that it doesn’t seem to hurt you to talk about all this.”
“Why would it hurt? It’s not going to happen ‘till I’m like seventy or eighty or something.”
“Well, it hurts many people to even think about it, now matter how old they are.”
Do all children talk about death this easily, she wonders. When she had miscarried the last time, he had wanted to know why the baby had died. She had explained it this way: “You know how when we put out baby plants in the garden, some of them do well and grow up to be big, strong plants, and some of them die? It’s kind of like that. Well, my baby was just like one of those baby plants that just weren’t strong enough to make it. It’s nature’s way.”
In protecting him that way from her grief (there would be no more children, she had realized then, for she could not go through that ever again), had she being doing him a disservice? Of course, he is still very young. At seven or eight, she knew, he would start to question it all: magic, fairies, the authority of her words....
She reads him the page that shows our solar system, the page on which the old man chooses to return to Earth because it reminds him of a blue-green marble he once had.
“Know what?” he says unexpectedly, “I think that when I die, I don’t want to come back to Earth. I think I want to go to another planet. I think...” He studies the picture intently, “I think I’ll go to Saturn next time.”
“Really! What makes you choose Saturn?”
“Because.... Because next time, I think it might be good to go somewhere completely different. I wonder what kind of creatures are on Saturn....”
“Hmmm. You know what? I just remembered a science fiction story that I read a long time ago which took place, I think, on Saturn—or maybe Jupiter. Whatever. Anyway, some people from Earth had a station there, and they were trying to explore the planet. Because the air there was so toxic to them—full of all kinds of poisonous gasses—they had this machine that would transform them into native life forms, the kind of creatures that normally live on Saturn.
“Cool!”
“There was a problem, though. Every time they transformed someone into one of the Saturn creatures and sent them out to explore the planet, that person never came back. So in the end, the head guy decided to transform himself and go out there to find out what happened to everyone else. Also, since he had his little dog with him—who he loved a lot—and the little dog was very old, with all his joints hurting and his eyes not working so well anymore, the head guy decided to transform the dog, too, so they could stay together, just in case he didn’t make it back.
“After the man and the little dog were transformed and they transported themselves outside the station, they were completely surprised. You see, everything that had looked so awful and poisonous from inside the station was—now that they were in their new bodies—so very beautiful, full of all kinds of fantastic colors and magical sounds. It was just bliss—you know what that word means? And their new bodies felt so wonderful—the little dog went running along, just so happy to be healthy and strong again, stronger than ever before. The man also felt better than ever, too, and then he knew why no one had ever returned to the station—no one wanted to go back to being human again.”
“That’s a good one, Mom,” he said thoughtfully. “So maybe there are some really cool creatures on Saturn, and I could be one of them next time.” Then he settles his head back on her breast and waits for her to start reading again.
Now she reads the page that shows all the creatures of the earth, the page where the old man decides to become a child again, the page where, in the past, the boy had always chosen to become something else.
“Mom?” he asks suddenly, in a worried tone, “do you promise when you die, if you do get to choose where to live your next life, you’ll choose the same place I’m going?”
“Yes,” she says solemnly. “Yes, I promise.”
“So we’ll be together in our next life...” he muses. But then suddenly his voice rises, in a panic, “But what if I don’t recognize you?”
“Don’t worry,” she says, “I’ll give you a special sign. You know, something like this.” She moves her thumb and forefinger together in a circle and shows him the A-okay sign. “And even if I don’t have fingers—I mean, who knows what I’ll look like—I’ll find a way to let you know. After all, I’m your mother; I’ll be sure to know you.”
“Oh, good. You’ll give me a sign. That’s okay then.” He sighs softly, and curls up more tightly against her.
She pictures herself on Saturn, a beautiful, strong creature, basking in the ecstatic, swirling colors of its gasses and the exquisite liquid music of its ammonia waterfalls. And there he is, walking slowly towards her, with a look of dawning recognition and joy, a beautiful, strong creature just like herself, newly born.
There are only a few pages left now, where the old man must choose the kind of people among whom he wishes to live, the place on the planet where he wishes to make his home, and the couple, the man and the woman, he wants for his parents.
The boy is quiet now. His eyes are closed. Even though he is six now, and getting heavy, he still loves to be carried, sleeping, to his bed. He knows that if he is awake when she has finished reading his bedtime story, she will make him walk to his own bed; but if he falls asleep, she will call his father to take him. Lately, he has gotten very good at timing it.
The last page is a picture of a small Asian girl, holding a kite.
His head is resting more heavily upon her now, and his breath is slow and even. He is really asleep now, she thinks, but she reads the last words of the book, anyway. “In the mountains of Tibet, a little girl was born. She loved to fly kites.”
She lets him breathe softly against her for a few minutes, then she calls her husband. He lifts his son carefully, and the boy relaxes onto his father’s body, his arms hanging limply, his head draped over his father’s shoulder. How lucky he is, she thinks, getting to fall asleep like that, getting to be carried like that. She tries to remind herself that being a child is hard; all the fears, the confusion, the painful longing. Still, she cannot help but envy the ease with which her child can be comforted. She remembers that night, a few years ago, when her husband was away on a trip and she was struggling with insomnia—the hours passing in the dark, the sharp, stabbing noise of the clock’s ticking, even after she had buried it under a pillow, the overwhelming solitude. Then her son had cried out to her; he was having a nightmare. She had been so tired that couldn’t think of what else to do so she had brought him into bed with her and held him tight. “It’s all right,” she whispered, “I’m here. It’s all right now.” And that was all it took, just that—he had slipped quickly back to sleep, with a serene look on his face.
But it turns out that the boy is not really asleep, only pretending. Just before his father leaves the room, he begins to stir and lifts his head up from his father’s shoulder.
“Don’t forget, Mom,” he says gravely, “see you on Saturn.”
Comments
Post a Comment