Cataclysm Baby

Yaretzi, Yasmina, Yatima

From between my wife’s legs quickened only this puff of womb-air, this gasp of baby-breath trapped for months inside her, followed by no body, no afterbirth, no cord to cut or miscarriage to scrape away. Afterward, my wife insisted she heard the sound of our baby girl crying, but what was I to say in the absence of that child’s shape? How was I to call her anything other than mad, when my wife insisted our baby was near, that she could hear her every move?

If only my wife had lasted longer! If only she could have made it through the too many years of try, try again, through the eventual barrenness that followed all those pregnancies producing only air, only wet sound, then together we might have enjoyed what I first heard only in the weeks and months after her passing: A voice, tinkling from beside my bed, from near my right ear, whenever I sat in the rocking chair bought to rock the many daughters I did not believe had lived.

And what words this daughter-voice says! What new machines she gives to me, filling this old tinker’s mind with complex combinations of horns and needles, with great spoolings of copper wire meant to circle the spindle of our house, reaching higher and higher—

It takes time to build what she first tells me to build, but with the closing of the factories I have nothing but time.

With the departure of every neighbor for miles around, it’s just me and the daughter-voice, together day after day, conversing in whispers while I rig new antennas atop the roof of our house, welding them from the left-behinds of those fled for more hopeful havens.

When she tells me the house isn’t tall enough to reach the signal she’s promised, then I take her advice and abandon the low roof, begin my first true tower in the rock-stubbed field behind our home.

When the tower is finished, the daughter-voice says, Close, but not quite.

She says, Try again, Pa, try again.

And then erecting a second tower taller than the first.

And then a third taller than the second. And then a fourth and a fifth.

Then a whole array of towers, of scavenged wood and steel hung up toward the heavens, an entire village rubbled so I might build the monoliths the daughter-voice commands.

By the time there are a dozen towers dotting the field, it already takes a whole day to climb the tallest, to wrap bundles of wire around some new hanging dongle, some better apparatus designed with her help.

By the time there are a score of towers, my back is stooped, my fingers arthritic. The daughter-voice is older too, her speech husky like mine.

You take after me, I tell her.

Upon the scaffolding of my newest height, I say, Your mother’s voice was softer, sweeter.

With my wet face freezing in the high wind, I say, She never once raised her tone in anger. Not even when I didn’t believe you were real, when she was the only one who could hear you speak.

And the daughter-voice says, Build.

She says, Build so that you might climb, then climb so you might speak to her again.

She says, All the world below is death, but above it other lands still float.

By twenty stories there are no buildings below to go home to, everything scavenged for tower after tower, and so I build bunks in the sky. When the earth below is so wasted nothing will grow, then at twenty-five stories I plant a garden, lifting the last good sod with rope and pulley, hauling questionable seeds up ladders in satchels and packs.

At thirty stories I realize I’m going blind.

At forty, I lose control of my bowels for the first time.

At sixty, I fall deaf in my right ear, and when I scream I hear only half the fear I feel.

When the daughter-voice returns, I refuse to build another inch until she reassures me, and so she tells me to sit still, to put my good ear to the final horn I installed, to listen for what I can.

At last! At last I think I’m going to hear my wife, but no, I do not.

What I hear are several voices just like hers.

Voices as similar to my wife’s as the daughter-voice is to mine.

Other daughters, born of other pregnancies, other once-thought failures now flying at this height, this six-hundredth foot of upstretched steel. All these voices raised without me because I could not see them, could not touch them, because without sight and without touch I would not believe they were real.

How sad they must have been as they each drifted upward, floating frightened in the drafts until they caught here in the first rung of clouds, with all the rest of their sisters.

My daughter-voice says, Pa, you have to build. She says, You’re so old now.She says, I’m so old now too.

Please, she says. How long before your other ear goes? Then what good are these towers? What good is it to reach mother’s voice, still shrieking in the heights, and you with no ear to hear her?

Build, my daughter says, and for the rest of my life I build and I climb and at each new story I strain to hear the first voice I ever loved, the only one I still wish added to the crowded air around me, the dozen daughters singing static from every earpiece and speaker and receiver and crank-powered radio installed along the way.

Their voices lift me, and upon them I climb until below me are only clouds, and below them some lost world I need never see again, because what I want most is already up here with me, or else waiting above. I climb until all I am is wind-carved wrinkles, sun-bleached whiskers, until my hands are crippled by the hammer and the saw and the wire-snips, by the frost that dusts my knuckles every morning.

I climb until my eyes are as empty and useless as the clouds, and always my first daughter teases me with her mother, keeps me chasing my wife, this sky-flung memory she promises still floats.

Higher, the daughter-voice says, her voice crone-rasped, cough-hacked.

Higher, until the sun burns you free of your weak meat. Until you are nothing but voice too. Until you are the same as we, the last loves you have left.

A life is not too much to give, my daughter says.

After how you tortured our mother, a life is hardly anything at all.