Woman on the Edge of Time

Inside, a little boy with red-brown skin sat curled up in a wooden chair wearing a metallic cap like a gold hairnet. His eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly as if in sleep. Magdalena cautioned her with a tiny hand to keep quiet. The boy opened his eyes and turned to a screen on which a moving light showed waves that slid evenly across.

“Good, Sparrow! Now without the guide.” An old man sat against the wall like a bag of bones, with only shreds of white hair clinging to his huge skull.

“What is he learning?”

“Pulse and blood pressure,” the boy said. “How do you start in your village?”

“Start what?”

“Inknowing,” the child said wonderingly. “Do you call it different where you come from?”

She turned to Magdalena, who said, “In your day some of it was called yoga, some meditating, some biofeedback, and some had no name at all.”

“We aren’t mad to control,” Luciente said, “but we want to prevent overreacting—heart attacks, indigestion, panic. We want to get used to knowing exactly what we feel, so we don’t shove on other people what’s coming from inside.”

“We want to teach inknowing and outknowing.” Magdalena gestured apology and swept the women gently back into the hall, shutting the door. “To feel with other beings. To catch, where the ability exists—instance, so strongly in you. We teach sharpening of the senses. Coning, going down, how to reach nevel, how to slow at will.”

“What is all that stuff?”

“States of consciousness. Types of feeling.”

“How can you teach somebody to feel? From a book you can learn the multiplication tables. But how can you teach love?”

“But every mother always has. Or failed to.” Seeing something in Connie’s face, Magdalena went on quickly. “We educate the senses, the imagination, the social being, the muscles, the nervous system, the intuition, the sense of beauty—as well as memory and intellect. Anyhow, we try!” She laughed again, that laugh that picked immediately at Luciente and made her grin too. “People here in our bony skulls”—lightly Magdalena rapped on Connie’s forehead—“how easy to feel isolate. We want to root that forebrain back into a net of connecting.” She turned back to Luciente, smiling broadly. “Here comes Jackrabbit with Dawn. By the road, your child grows better and better at the arts of defense. You’ll be feathered when you see the next demo!”

Long-limbed rangy Jackrabbit came loping through an archway, making high neighing sounds. A brown-skinned girl with dark braids clung to his neck, laughing with a wide-open mouth that showed her small teeth. Avid teeth flashed. Arms hung on tight She clung to his neck and laughed and laughed and kicked his ribs with her bare feet. She was about seven, wearing a lavender summer tunic, and she had a scab on her small round, her heavily tanned, her kissable knee. How she laughed, like dry bells, like bells partly muffled, how she laughed: her golden-brown eyes met Connie’s. Connie’s heart turned in her chest. Her heart sharpened into a dagger and stopped.

“Angelina!” she cried out, and her voice burst from her like a bubble of blood from her mouth. Then she was back in the isolation cell, flat against one wall as if she had been thrown there. She held both hands against her striving chest.

Angelina! Or any brown-skinned girl child of seven or so with golden-brown eyes. How did she know what Angelina would look like after three years? She wouldn’t be barefoot in Scarsdale.

Suddenly she assented with all her soul to Angelina in Mattapoisett, to Angelina hidden forever one hundred fifty years into the future, even if she should never see her again. For the first time her heart assented to Luciente, to Bee, to Magdalena. Yes, you can have my child, you can keep my child. Even with your obscenities and your talking cats. She will be strong there, well fed, well housed, well taught, she will grow up much better and stronger and smarter than I. I assent, I give you my battered body as recompense and my rotten heart. Take her, keep her! I want to believe she is mine. I give her to Luciente to mother, with gladness I give her. She will never be broken as I was. She will be strange, but she will be glad and strong and she will not be afraid. She will have enough. She will have pride. She will love her own brown skin and be loved for her strength and her good work. She will walk in strength like a man and never sell her body and she will nurse her babies like a woman and live in love like a garden, like that children’s house of many colors. People of the rainbow with its end fixed in earth, I give her to you!

EIGHT