Hieroglyph (65 page)

Earlier today there was a TV program about the tur-nado. They interviewed an expert. He said that although a tur-nado is strong, it is also delicate. I think I know what he means. Before it is born, the tur-nado is a confusion of cloud and wind. It takes only a little touch here and there to turn the cloud and wind into a monster that can destroy houses. Even once it is made, you can't tell where it is going to go, because it is so delicate a thing that maybe one leaf on one tree might persuade it to go this way instead of that. Or one breath from one sleeping farmhand in the field.

When I leave the hospital, I'm going to help rebuild my village. And I'm going to collect all the pages of Dadaji's books that are scattered all over the fields. I imagine I will find the thoughts of a scientist or philosopher, or the speeches of a poet, stuck in a tree's branches, or blowing in the wind with the dust. I will pick up every page I find and put it together.

I have to find out how I can keep learning. Dadaji was going to teach me so that I could be a learned man like him when I grow up. How is it possible for a tur-nado to be so powerful and so delicate at the same time? How do we tell Dharti Mai we are sorry? How do we stop the mining company that wants to take our land? Please print that in your newspaper—we cannot let them mine and burn more coal, because that is destroying the world. Please tell the big people in the cities like Delhi and in faraway places like America. They won't care about someone like me, but ask them if they care about their own children. I saw just yesterday that it is not just the poor who will suffer in this new world they are making. Tell them to stop.

I have been seeing crows at the window all afternoon. They land on the sill and caw. The orderly says Shani Deva has shown me grace, because of the crow I saved. Everyone fears Shani Deva because he brings us difficult times. But crows remember, and they tell each other who is a friend, and maybe the crows will help us. It's their world too.

I'm very tired. In one day I lost my grandfather, hid my people from the tur-nado, saved two Rajput children, and became a friend of crows.

Something strange happened after dinner. I was half asleep. I heard a woman saying very sadly, “What shall I do to bring the rain?” Then I saw it wasn't a dream, because there was this young woman on the computer screen, a foreigner. I thought she must be one of the people who used to talk to the professor. She looked sad and tired. I told her, you have to sing to the clouds. You have to sing the rain down. Between the radio and my dadaji's lessons I have learned a little of the raga—
Malhaar,
the rain-calling raga. I sang a line or two for her before the connection broke.

Dadaji told me once that sound is just a tremble in the air. A song is a tremble that goes from the soul into the air, and thus to the eardrums of the world. The tur-nado is a disturbance of the air, but it is like an earthquake. Perhaps it is the song of the troubled earth, our mother Dharti Mai. One day I will compose a song to soothe her.

. . . IN TEXAS . . .

. . . it was the kind of day Dorothy Cartwright's husband wouldn't have allowed. Wasn't it just a year and a half ago—he'd gotten so mad at the heat wave at Christmastime that he'd cranked up the air-conditioning until she had to go find a sweater? But they'd had the traditional Christmas evening fire in the fireplace, and weather be damned. It was nowhere near Christmas Day, being March, but it was hotter than it should be, the kind of day when Rob would have had the AC going and the windows closed. Closed houses always made her feel claustrophobic, no matter that her old home had been over four thousand square feet—just the two of them after their son, Matt, grew up and left home. But now Rob was dead of a heart attack more than a year ago, and Dorothy lived in a little two-room apartment in an assisted-living facility. She could open the windows if she felt like it. She did so, and turned on the fans, and checked the cupcakes baking in the oven. There was a cool breeze, no more than a breath. The big magnolia tree in the front lawn made a shade so deep you could be forgiven for thinking evening had come early. She arranged the chairs in the living room for the fifth time and glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes and they would be here.

As she was taking the cupcakes out, the phone rang. She nearly dropped the tray. Shaking, she set it on the counter and picked up the phone. It was Kevin.

“Gramma! Guess where your favorite grandson's calling from?”

He was cheerful in the faked way he had when he was upset. Which meant—

“I'm in rehab and this time I'm going to quit for good.”

“Of course, hon,” she said. Who could believe the kid when he'd been in and out of rehab six times in two years? She remembered Rob's cold fury the last time the boy had been over. Her grandson was adrift, and she was helpless and useless. The other day she'd watched a show on PBS about early humans and how the human race wouldn't have survived without old people, other people than the parents, to help raise the young and transmit the knowledge of earlier generations. Grandmothers in particular were important. That was all very well, but in this day of books and computers and all, who needed grandmothers? They lived in retirement homes, or in huge, echoing houses, at the periphery of society, distracting themselves, waiting for death. Times had changed. Kevin was beyond anyone's help. She gripped the edge of the counter with her free hand. An ache shot through her chest. She felt a momentary dizziness.

“I'll send you some cupcakes,” she said. All she had been able to do for the people she loved was to offer them food, as though the trouble in the world could be taken away by sugar and butter and chocolate. She said good-bye, feeling hopeless.

He had sent her an orange wristlet, rather pretty. It had jewellike white buttons on it that allowed her to communicate with her new notebook computer (a gift from her son) with a touch. She looked at it and thought how nice Kevin was, to get her a present. She touched the button and her notebook computer lit up, and there was an image of a woman in a diving suit suspended in murky blue water, her arms working, and a reedy electronic voice like a cartoon character saying something about cold Arctic waters and repeating a name, Dr. Irene Ariak, Irene Ariak. Surely she had heard the name in some show or other. A scientist working in the Arctic. What a dangerous thing to do, to go up there in the cold and dark. “Bless you and be careful up there, I'm praying for you,” she said. The cartoon voice said,
Mrs. Cartwright, thank you!
And the screen went blank. Dorothy wondered if she'd heard right. Well, this was a new world, to be sure.

The doorbell rang as she was setting the cupcakes on a plate. Patting her hair, glancing at the small oval mirror over by the little dining table (her lipstick was just right), she went to the door.

There they all were, smiling. Rita, with her defiantly undyed white hair in a braid tied with rainbow-colored ribbons (Rob would have thought them loud), said, “How nice of you to host the meeting, Dorothy!,” and planted herself in the comfortable armchair. The others, Mary-Ann, Gerta, Lawrence, Brad, Eva, and three women she didn't know, crowded into the small living room. Dorothy handed around cupcakes and poured tea and coffee and felt as awkward as a new wife hosting her first dinner party. She scolded herself:
Now, then, you've known these people for eight months, and you've hosted more parties in your life than you can remember!
This was about reinventing herself. Stretching outside her comfort zone, learning new things. Rob would have never allowed these people in their house—there was something not
done
about their passionate intensity. “Aging hippies,” Rob would have said. He would have told her what was wrong with each of them, and she would never have invited them again. Once she'd had a local mothers' group over for tea; Rob came home early. He'd been pleasant enough greeting them and had gone upstairs. The women were upset about the firing of the principal at the local elementary school, and one of them had raised her voice emphatically, making her point. Rob had banged the bedroom door so hard upstairs that the reverberation made the windows rattle. She'd never invited those women over again.

She sat down and let the conversation swirl around her, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest. Keeping up the smile was becoming difficult.

“Well,” Rita said, “our energy-saving campaign has been successful beyond anything we expected. Management has stopped grumbling. We've saved them $14,504 in energy bills, annually!”

“New lightbulbs and more insulation, and cranking down the AC so it isn't freezing in the middle of summer, and one set of solar panels . . . who'da thought it?”

“Our see-oh-two emissions are down by . . . let's see . . . 18 percent . . .”

“Multiply individual actions by millions or billions, and you're looking at real global difference . . .”

It was one of the new women, a blonde with intense blue eyes. Not from the apartment complex. Dorothy had already forgotten her name. Now the woman was smiling at her a little uncertainly.

“Mrs. Cartwright, we need to recruit people for the protest. The pipeline is coming to us. Janna Helmholtz's land is being
violated
—they got a court order to cut a corridor through her woods to bring the oil pipes through, and we're going to protest. Can we count on you?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Dorothy said, feeling foolish. What had she agreed to?

“ . . . they say fracking for shale oil and gas is going to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but can you believe they base that on completely ignoring the methane emissions from the fracking?”

“Methane is twenty times worse than see-oh-two . . . cooking the planet . . .”

“My objection to fracking is entirely on another plane—see, less coal burned here means coal prices fall, and it gets exported elsewhere, so coal usage will go up somewhere else if fracking happens here in the United States—idiots don't understand the meaning of
global . . .”

“Yes, but there's also the issue, I told him that, I told him just because you work for Texas O&G, try to have an open mind for fuck's sake—I told him, think about switching to green energy. Fracking for oil and gas just means putting off what we need to do. Like, you know, you need to fucking quit, not go from cocaine to . . . to meth!”

Rob wouldn't approve of the f-word either. Dorothy told herself to stop thinking about Rob. Rob used the f-word as much as he liked, but he couldn't stand women swearing. Generally, he said that meant that either they were common, or they needed a good lay.
Shut up about Rob,
she told herself.

“Well, Mrs. Cartwright?”

She cleared her throat. What had they been talking about?

“I don't know,” she said. What could she do? Her life behind her . . . she felt a sudden wave of utter misery.

“What can I do? I'm not trained . . .”

“Dorothy, you don't need training for this,” Rita said, in her proselytizing voice. Rita was a You-nitarian, You-niversalist, as Eva had once said in mincing tones—
Rita, there's so much You in UU, where's the room for God?
They'd had quite a spat about it, but they stayed friends. Rob had always said you could only be friends with people who thought like you.

“Honey, there are retired people all over the country like you and me who care about the world we are leaving our grandchildren—”

“—hell, everyone thinks we are old fogies, useless relics, and I say we are a totally untapped resource, a revolution waiting to happen . . .”

Lawrence (“not Larry”) nodded. “We have experience, and knowledge of human nature—Dorothy, just by being who you are you can make a difference—”

She found herself signing up to recruit five people and be at the meeting place today in three hours. Janna Helmholtz had called to say the earthmovers were going to be on her property ripping up the trees her granddaddy had planted and she needed them to be there. Three hours! (
Well, the fracking company doesn't wait at our convenience, honey; besides imagine if you were in the middle of the workday, you wouldn't be able to make it. But we have the time and the determination! So be there or be a quadrilateral!
This from Eva, retired math teacher at Pine Tree Elementary.)

After they had all left, Dorothy found herself putting the dirty dishes by the sink in a mood of despair. How was she going to go to wing 5 and recruit five people? She couldn't imagine being able to convince anyone. Talking to people was difficult anyway, especially when they didn't wear their hearing aids or were taking a nap. She heard Rob's voice:
You're being a fool, Dottie. We Cartwrights don't get into other people's business. Do you really think you can make a difference?

It was hard to remember that she had been second valedictorian at her school, and that she had got into a prestigious college and been on a debating team. After she met Rob—he'd chased and flattered her relentlessly—she had seen the possibility of another life, the kind that she'd only glimpsed through the iron lattice gates of rich acquaintances—a life of going to theater and art museums and raising children to send off to the best schools. Who in the world would love her like Rob? She remembered when they were both young, and he had lost his first job, how much he'd looked up to her, needed her. She began to scrub the baking tray, thinking of Rob's love for her cooking. He'd always praised her culinary skills to his business friends whenever there was a party. She sighed. He would not have been pleased about her involvement with this cause. But she'd given her word—what had made her agree to talk to five strangers? She wiped her sudsy hands absently on the towel, and her wristlet beeped. “I'm no use to anyone,” she said aloud. “I don't know what to do.” And she heard a voice from the little computer on the mantelpiece say, with the utmost conviction: “Something good will happen to you today.” Very clear English, but a strange accent. She went and picked up the computer but the screen had gone dark.