The Floating Cradle

Twenty-Eight

We fetch him water in empty jars, wet strips of cloth to lay across his forehead. His skin has taken on an ashy tinge; the sweat has since dried in salty rosettes, and the nostrils leak a pinkish foam, which Allie wipes away with tender fingers, his head resting in her lap. His diaphragm rises and falls with each ragged breath.

Daddy sits with his hands buried in his beard; Lyle and Blake pace in a circle, repelled by each other like magnets of the same charge. Felicity prays, chin tucked to her chest, and Pete rubs a hand along her back, tears tracking silently down his face.

"What're you doin'?" Lyle asks as Dan kneels down before the dissected electronics.

"Tryin'," Dan says. He starts rummaging through the wires, turning the crooked radio antenna over in in his hands, acting on faith because when the numbers fail that's all that's left.

Faith, and you. You are always the last number.

"...and we'll cross that bridge in Giverny, over the water lilies...I know you said you thought the room in the Orangerie was borin' 'cause you can't see the colors, but I still wanna go..." Allie is murmuring to the tantum as he fights to keep his eyes open. When he tries to speak, she says, "I know, I know."

It's not like in the movies, where a person whispers their final goodbyes and then dies, relaxing into an elegant S-curve in their lover's arms. It turns out death takes a long time. Hours pass with no change to the tantum's labored breathing. I can't help but stare, watching Allie's loving ministrations, her comfort, even now, in having his skin against her own. I try to imagine drawing someone that close to myself, human or tantum, but I can't. There is a lot to it I don't understand, but God, do I want the chance.

Any chance, any reality, so long as all of us are in it.

Jack's breaths become faster and shallower. His feet twitch and scrabble against the concrete. He reaches up and claws at Allie's clavicle, as though trying to reach her face, so she lowers it to his, swallowing her sobs. With immense effort she hoists him up by the armpits and tries to drag him toward the stairwell.

"We need to leave—the suit—it's up there, I know it—"

Nobody tries to reason with her. Only Daddy blocks her from the stairs, the shotgun a bar in his hands. Lower lip tucked, he lays the gun across the bottom step and stands aside.

Jack is too heavy; Allie's knees buckle and he falls across them, the cellar full of her terrible keening. Mama alights behind her daughter and cradles her as Allie cradles the tantum, her arms encompassing them both like wings.

A tear explodes on the back of my hand, then another. Then another.

Why should the smallest things breaking apart and coming together unleash such power? Atoms and people, even pills and letters and words—such small, small things! And all across the world their ripples are colliding; the Earth is painted with vibrations, and those vibrations sing out from the crust, calling—and somewhere in space there is an ear or instrument listening, a thing built or born for the serenade of our misery. A thing that will seek us, broken though we are.

But then there's the distance, that big in-between that seems only to exist as a stage for small things. It is vital to the premise of our greatest actions that we and the things we channel are small, that in pitting ourselves against the vastness—the cold vastness yonder, the other within—we can raise ourselves from the mud. You can't float in a puddle. It takes a sun to spark even the meanest mote of life. What that life then chooses to do with itself—and its sun, whose tricks it inevitably learns, like a child studying its mother—is another matter. But here, at the bottom, the distance has never been greater. I've got to believe that something in us, some effervescence even we cannot annihilate, will bear us up.

It occurs to me, as the cellar resolves to silence, that the greatest function of distance will never be leaving, but coming. Joining. Union is the epitome of gravity. It expels the most light—even in bombs and light speed engines, fusion makes a child of fission. Sending out a clever trinket of metal, bidding it farewell to ply the big nothing—it's cool, don't get me wrong, but at most that's just observing distance, shouting into it. But for another's hand to take the trinket, learn its ways, know it is a built thing, long for its creator like a phantom limb—that makes distance yield, just a hair. And then, for the recipient to follow the breadcrumbs, push into another world, fulfill the touch—that is a full contraction, an act of the atomic order, a quantum leap, the miniscule molding the massive. It is a child's hands squeezing an unaccountable universe. It is Allie and the tantum beaming into each other like starlight, waiting for the rest of us to remember.

Perhaps this is why we are small: to mitigate the terrible power that rocks the living. Perhaps this is why we are born: to please an enormity that always dreamed of being small.