Natural State

I’m sitting at Nathan’s, reading a biography of Darwin who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle “no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”: he’ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years. Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”: those philosophical poems of William Bronk’s. What’s most delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten, are reading, each of them enmazed in a fantasy novel that squeezes them by the attention-bone behind the eyes in its thimble pool of pineal juice and drizzled endorphins. Tristan cared enough to cry when he finished his previous book and its battle of shadow and radiance was over. Each of us: his individual book; and yet the silence is communal. This is a natural state at Nathan’s. Holly, however, is reading the Sunday paper and so serves, without saying a word, to remind us how natural it was for Raeshawn Nelson, seven, to fall while running and burn out his eye on the disregarded meth pipe, or for Anna Rietta, nine, to have come home from school and excitedly been the **!star!**, each day, of the homemade porn her parents peddled as “young fun” over the Internet. This was what they knew, and all they knew, and so they entered it as comfortably as Tristan does his opened world of sorcerors and valiant knights and fancy-talking beasts, since use x frequency = familiarity. That’s the strict, imperious math of everybody’s insular subuniverse. Sherena asked me what this thing “vermouth” was (she pronounced it “mouth”) and ordered quiche as if it were the brother of “touché”; but then she needed to explain to me why C-C was the “bottom bitch” and what a “T-girl” is and how to put down money on Ice’s book at “the county,” by which she meant jail. And those years when Darwin parsed the slimy fiber of his barnacles (discovering the species where “the female has no anus” and the one with “tiny parasitic males [that were] embedded in one female’s flesh like blackheads”), “squinty . . . laborious,” were among the final decades of hundreds of years when a woman in China would suffer ritual foot binding, at five, the bandages limiting growth until the toes were bent and curled (the toenails growing into the balls of the feet) and the arches broken. This resulted in the desirable “shrunken plums” and “three-inch golden lilies” sought by marriage brokers. Traditionally, a prospective mother-in-law would check below the hem, and reject any feet over four inches long. Entire generations of women could only mince and hobble. And this was natural, this was the air and the light and “the-way-of-things-forever” that you woke up to every day . . . as natural as the implicit laws in Aidan’s book, by which a bear converses with a girl in growly mutual-speak, and a boy of sturdy heart and his wingéd horse ascend their sky with the unremarkable grace of birds in ours. That’s ordinary Newtonian physics there, and Aidan subjects himself to the rules of flying horsemanship, and the code of those of innocent spirit about to war with wyverns and the wormfolk, and the governing instructions of gods with the heads of wide-eyed animals . . . and even now, Sherena texts my phone to say that WEATHER GOOD and SHINE GOT BULLET IN LUNG FROM POLICE