Skeletons

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The earth revolves around the sun once every 365.2 days. Along with the sun, the other eight planets, and all the various debris including comets, asteroids, and detritus of our planet such as satellites, the earth revolves around the galactic plane, that is, the core of our own Milky Way galaxy, once every two hundred million years.

Which means, if there was a certain area in the galactic plane composed of strange plasma, space fog, unknown gas particles, or whatever, the earth would pass through it once during each revolution around the Milky Way's galactic core—in other words, once every two hundred million years.

There was.

It did.

Today something happened to me.

Mrs.
Gaee
, my counselor at Withers,
 
has said that I am like a seed closed tight and ready to grow.
 
She says that I am mute because my voice, too, is locked inside the seed.
 
She says she is a gardener, and that she is trying to find the right kind of soil, the right sun and right water to make me sprout.

Today, for the first time, I felt the seed shiver.

This early summer day at Withers Home for Women, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, started like any other day. All of us up at six-thirty, the donning of drab uniforms, washing and brushing, a half hour of calisthenics in the gym with Mr. Cary. Then breakfast in the prison-like cafeteria, rows and ranks of benches and tables, no talking permitted, the stacking of trays, back to our rooms. An hour of meditation, they call it; aloneness, I call it. Then therapy, followed by lunch, again eaten in silence.

Then, the television room.

The tyrant Margaret Gray, the oldest tenant of Withers Home for Women, was waiting there, because that is when we are finally left alone. As always, she waited until Priscilla Ralston, her eighteen-year-old toady, put on the television to the religious channel, waited until Priscilla had regained her chair. Then she moved quickly to the front of the room, climbed a chair, and turned to face us.

"We'll learn," she said, her thin hand closing into a bony fist, her eyes darting the room, daring anyone to contradict. Even her voice was hard and mean and thin. "We'll watch and learn."

She climbed down, stood under the television like a sentinel, making sure all eyes stayed on the set. Everyone remembers Laura Paine, the girl whose eyes were scratched out. Laura was big, nearly twenty, knew how to laugh. She came to Withers last summer, nearly a year ago, and was blinded a month later. She had an alcohol problem, and beautiful blue eyes. For three weeks she put up with Margaret Gray's television tyranny, then got up one day, pushed Margaret aside, and put the soap operas back on. The other girls cheered. Laura smiled, stood sentinel where Margaret had been until Margaret left the room. We watched the soap operas the whole week.

Then on Friday morning Laura didn't appear for breakfast. They found her in her room, fists pressed tight to her scratched-out eyes, drunk. The staff said she had smuggled the liquor in and done it to herself. Priscilla Ralston told one of the other girls that Margaret Gray had held a knife to Laura's eyes, which Laura thought were her best feature, and made her drink until she passed out.

According to Priscilla, Margaret had said, "If
thine
eye offend thee, pluck it out," and then slashed Laura's eyes while she lay unconscious.

When television time ended at four, we went back to our rooms for more enforced loneliness. At five I saw Mrs. Garr for an hour.

Mrs. Garr took me to the window of my room. The cool late-afternoon summer breeze blew across me. She made me look out at the rolling grounds, the playing field, the little cemetery with Mr. Cary's cottage nearby, and beyond, the glint of water, a red boat on Long Island Sound, through the trees.

"Don't you want that?" she said, standing behind me, squeezing her hands on my shoulders. "Don't you want to run through the grass and shout, or jump in the water, take it all in and blow it all out again like a whale?"

I looked up at her silently, and she squeezed my shoulders harder.

"Oh, Claire, I want you to flower so badly." She turned me around, held my hands in her hands, and looked deep into my eyes. "You're almost sixteen years old," she said. "You've never spoken a word. But there's nothing wrong with you. Your vocal cords are fine. You're intelligent, and your written work is as good as a college student's. You perform your tasks well. You get along with the other girls, here.

"But it's like all of you is inside that seed. Like you haven't started to be alive yet. Like you're ... waiting for something."
 
Mrs. Garr's frustration showed in her voice. "You're going to speak when you're ready, Claire. I know it. I want you to begin to live."

Mrs. Garr waited for my response, but I only looked at her until she finally put my hands down and walked away from me, balling her hands in frustration.

“That seed's going to break open," she said, leaving my room.

At six we ate dinner, followed at seven by more television, with Priscilla playing her part of putting on the funny shows, and Margaret Gray marching up to change it to the religious channel. Margaret held court until
ten
, when we all marched to the bathroom, again to wash and brush, and then to bed. Mrs. Garr stopped at my room, her form outlined in hall light, to say good night before closing the door.

And there I lay quietly in bed, and slept, until sometime in the night I awoke, and something happened to me.

I sat up in bed.

Like a breeze from the window, something washed over and through me. I felt a tingle from my fingertips crawl down deep within me, and there was a leap inside me.

I rose, and went to the window.

Outside, I saw shapes in the darkness moving over the hills near the trees and water.

Someone screamed.

And then I heard much noise around me, and Mrs. Garr threw open the door to my room.

"Claire, hurry," she said.

And then she marched into the room and took my arm, pulling me out into the hallway, and there were more screams.

This was to be the greatest of all rallies. Think of it: the finest day of all our lives, delegates from Asia, the Third World, North and South America, Australia, Europe, even Cuba. I saw with my own eyes this morning, as the sun rose on Red Square, on the tents that had been springing like flowers there for the past week, held down on the corners with rocks, a crowd in excess of what was expected. Did I say a hundred and fifty thousand? More like two hundred thousand. Maybe more. Up to a point I thought I knew what to say to them all, to open the greatest single day on earth in the cause of democratization.

And me, a humble man from humble Cambodia, a land raped repeatedly for thousands of years, a country still laced with Khmer Rouge and nearly as bad
Pnompenhists
, chosen to open the proceedings. The Moscow leadership would even come out to greet me. There wasn't an unfriendly soldier in sight.

But when the sun rose on that assembly, on all those thousands and thousands of tents and bedrolls, those hundreds of thousands of different faces, it was too much for me, I suddenly didn't know what to say, and I had to get away.

As I left the stage there was Jon Roberts, from the United States, sixties headband around his forehead, long hair held in place. "Like Woodstock," he said, smiling almost naively, though he is not naive, only too young. "I'll make breakfast. Pancakes in Red Square."

"I'll be back," I said, suddenly unable to keep my breath, suffocated by the fact that it had all actually happened, that all these speakers from around the world, great thinkers and scientists and writers and musicians, had actually come here, to this place, to celebrate democracy.

"Don't go far," he cautioned, frowning. "Peter, Paul, and Mary go on in twenty minutes, the CNN people will be here in less than an hour, you know they want—"

"You handle CNN," I said, patting his shoulder. "You can do it, Jon."

"But the media, you know how important all this shit is—“

"You handle that part," I said. "You're better at it.”

“Be back by noon, dammit!" he called after me. "You have to be back by noon to speak—"

"I promise," I said, turning away to push through the crowd.

Some of them recognized me, and though most made a path, there were those who needed to shake hands, to talk. Finally I reached back into my backpack, found my sunglasses, put them on, veered right, head down. Soon no one recognized me. I watched as I walked: a sea of human picnics, families rising with the sun, which now pushed up over the square. It was cold here even on a July 1st morning, at this time of day. But already you could feel the mist, the dew, dissipating. I saw nothing but smiles.

This is remarkable, I thought to myself. This is truly remarkable.

It took me nearly a half hour just to get out of the crowd. And then, suddenly, I could breathe. There were buses, the big, boxy, clanking things the Russians still make, and I was able to catch one leaving the city. I had to be out somewhere with dirt under my feet, farmland, at least for a little while. The bus clanked along, wheezed to a stop, listing to one side as passengers entered, rolled along, and within forty minutes we were out of Moscow.