The Mouse and His Child

  The Canada geese took off in a flurry of great beating wings as the water rushed away. The beavers shot out of their lodge, surfaced in a welter of broken twigs and splintered branches, and grasped the situation at once. “There goes the pond!” they yelled. “After it, men!” Jeb and Zeb, drawn backward in a foaming rush of water, shouted, “No more school forever!” as they shot the falls, while startled fish on all sides cried, “The world has sprung a leak!”

  The pure-and-applied thinker, dining underground in his den, felt the earth shake. The fireflies went dark with fright, and Muskrat, stumbling through the clutter, limped up to the daylight. The sun had come out through the overcast to burn away the morning mist. The sky was clear; the air was soft with spring. He looked out on a broad expanse of rank-smelling mud, debris, and matted grasses by a tiny, trickling stream where once the pond had been, and while he stood and gazed, the blue jay, passing overhead, called down, “What’s new?”

  Muskrat pointed to the desolation. “Why times How equals What,” he murmured.

  “Pond minus Dam equals Mud,” replied the jay as he flew off. “That’s not news.”

  MANNY RAT had let go of the string as the tree fell, but the mouse and his child were tied to it. When the top of the aspen struck the ground, the butt of the trunk lifted, caught the string, and flung father and son far out over the pond and into the outward-rushing waters. “Wait!” yelled Manny Rat, but they were gone. He felt a sudden pang, and knew that somehow he was going to miss them. His life seemed oddly empty, purposeless, and poorer.

  The elephant stood facing the pond, her single eye fixed on the place where the mouse and his child had disappeared. Convulsive, racking sobs were shaking her; she wept as if her spring would break, and still weeping, was wound and started homeward to the dump.

  Manny Rat was certain that the mouse and his child had gone to the bottom of the pond, and he assumed that as it emptied they would be buried in the mud, never to be seen again. But the father and son had fallen into a floating tangle of sticks and branches, and on it they shot through the broken dam and downstream through the little valley, tossing on the flood.

  Half submerged on their flotsam raft, the mouse and his child raced on. Sunlight and shadow, rocks and trees and snags flashed into and out of their vision as their heads bobbed out of the icy water and went under again. Plunging over falls, bumping in the shallows, whirling through all the bends of the stream, they sped on until the flood, having run the length of the valley, poured itself into another pond, miles from where the tree had fallen.

  The water rose to overflow the banks and run off into the surrounding marsh, the raft spun in the eddies, and the good-luck coin, whipped out centrifugally to the length of its string, pulled the mouse and his child off into the deep water. For a moment the nutshell drum kept them afloat; then the strap slipped over the child’s head and they sank to the bottom, the brass coin winking into darkness with them.

  The broken reflections of trees and sky settled once more into mirrored stillness, across which moved slow ripples from the little bobbing drum. And below the ever-widening ripples, on the bottom with its bitter smell of darkness, of lost boots and old bottles, of rotting leaves and waving green water plants, the mouse and his child stuck headfirst in the mud.

  “What happened?” said the child, his words bubbling into the mud and up through the murky water.

  “What happened indeed!” said the father. “Why times How equaled What, and here we are, no closer to self-winding than before!”

  “And we’ve lost the elephant again, right after finding her!” said the child. “We never even had a chance to say a word to her!”

  The father did not answer, but he sent a long and heavy sigh gurgling into the mud.

  “Earliness,” said a voice that boomed and quivered in the deeps. It was a slow and heavy voice, and the sound of it was like the sound of gravel sliding from an iron bucket. “Earliness in the sense of untimely awakening,” it said. “See above. One arises to consider the corporeal continuity of AM.” The voice came closer. “One becomes aware of appetizing aspects of IS. Which see.” KLOP! A pair of sharp and horny jaws closed on one of the mouse father’s legs. “Note well,” said the voice. “In the work cited. Inedible.”

  “Get us out of the mud, please,” gurgled the father, “and stop bending my leg.”

  “If you’re capable of speech, you’re capable of being eaten,” said the voice. KLOP! The jaws opened and closed again on the mouse father’s leg. “Compare,” said the voice. “In the same place. Still inedible. Very well then, let us talk.”

  “What is there to say when one’s head is in the mud?” said the father.

  “What is there not to say!” came the answer from the gravelly voice. “The relation of self to mud is basic to any discussion of TO BE. Basic. At the bottom.”

  “Our heads are at the bottom,” said the mouse child. “We’re upside down.”

  “The upside-downness of self,” said the voice. “A good beginning. Continue.”

  “We cannot continue,” said the father, “unless we are put back on dry land and wound up.”

  “ ‘Wound up’?” said the voice. “Define your terms.”

  “I don’t want to,” said the father. “I don’t like this sort of talk.”

  “What other sort of talk is there?” said the voice. “Here below the surface one studies the depths of TO BE, as manifest in AM, IS, and ARE. And if you don’t hold up your end of the conversation I may very well snap you in two even though I don’t choose to eat you.”

  “We ARE upside down,” said the father.

  “We want TO BE right side up,” said the child.

  “For example,” said the voice, and the jaws again closed on the mouse father’s leg, more gently than before. He and the child were lifted up and set down feetfirst in a whirling cloud of mud particles. The cloud drifted off into the dark, the mud settled, and they found themselves face-to-face with an enormous snapping turtle who stared at them with a savage fixity of concentration. His shell was covered with waving moss and green algae. He was very old and ponderously fat, and the eye that watched them seemed the very eye of time itself, set like a smoky gray jewel in some old and scaling rock. His beaked head swayed before them, snakelike, striking right and left to punctuate his remarks.

  “It is undoubtedly a great pleasure for you,” he said, “to meet C. Serpentina, thinker, scholar, playwright — voice of swamp and pond….” He paused to snap up a sleepy frog that had risen from the mud. CHOMP. CHOMP. CHOMP. ULP. “And the jaws and stomach as well,” he continued. His words ascended to the surface in a string of bubbles, and each one made a silver circle as it burst in sunlight.

  “How do you do,” said the father. “Mouse and Son.”

  “To return to our discussion,” said Serpentina. “ ‘Wound up,’ you said. In what sense?”

  “In the sense of the key in my back,” said the father.

  Serpentina looked at the key. “What does it do?” he asked.

  “Key times Winding equals Go,” said the child.

  “Go?” said the snapping turtle. “Go where? This mud being like other mud, we may assume that other mud is like this mud, which is to say that one place is all places and all places are one. Thus by staying here we are at the same time everywhere, and there is obviously no place to go. Winding, therefore, is futile.” Serpentina settled himself comfortably in the ooze, and dismissed the subject of winding from his mind.

  “Then how are we to find the elephant again, and the seal?” said the child, and he began to cry.

  “We must get out of here,” said the father.

  “One has no need to get out of here,” said Serpentina. “One is at home on the bottom. One sees below the surface of things. One thinks in depth and acquires profundity, the without which nothing of…” SCRUNCH! A fish had swum near him, and he struck with terrible, snaky swiftness. CHOMP, CHOMP, CHOMP, ULP. “Contemplation,” he said, finishing the sentence
and the fish together.

  “What do you contemplate?” asked the child.

  “Infinity, mostly.”

  “What is infinity?”

  “Which see,” said Serpentina. He turned father and son so that the child found himself facing a tin can that stood upright half buried in the mud. BONZO DOG FOOD, said the white letters on the orange label, and below the name was a picture of a little black-and-white spotted dog wearing a chef’s cap and an apron. The dog was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which there was another can of BONZO DOG FOOD, on the label of which another little black-and-white spotted dog, exactly the same but much smaller, was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which there was another can of BONZO DOG FOOD, and so on until the dogs became too small for the eye to follow.

  The can had been at the bottom of the pond for a long time, and some of the dogs had dissolved in bits and shreds of colored paper that drifted off into the dark water. Tiny organisms bloomed on the label, and snails and little flatworms journeyed boldly from the small print at the bottom to the large letters at the top, grazing contentedly upon the rotting paper.

  “Infinity,” said Serpentina with a proprietary air. “There’s no end to it. There comes a time when each of us must contemplate it.” He struck at the empty water two or three times for emphasis.

  “My son is only a child,” said the father. “Let me do it.”

  “One can’t begin too young,” said Serpentina. “The child is father to the mouse. Note well,” he said, his voice resounding in the depths: “an endlessness of little dogs, receding through progressive diminution to a revelation of the ultimate truth.”

  “Where?” asked the mouse child.

  “In the same place,” said Serpentina, “in the work cited. Beyond the last visible dog.”

  “It’s odd that you should say that,” said the father. “There is a play by that name.”

  “I am the author of that play,” said the turtle, snapping his jaws dangerously close to the father’s head. “C. Serpentina. Oneself. No doubt you find it astonishing that a thinker of my depth should have conceived anything so light and diverting, so riotously entertaining, so popular in its appeal.”

  “There was certainly a great deal of excitement about it the night we saw it performed,” said the father tactfully. “It brought the audience to their feet right from the very beginning.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” said Serpentina, “Furza and Wurza representing as they do the very ISness of TO BE, cloaked in fun and farce.”

  “Quite true,” agreed the father. “Do you suppose you might help us out of this pond after we’ve finished with infinity?”

  “For shame!” roared Serpentina. “Each of us, sunk in the mud however deep, must rise on the propulsion of his own thought. Each of us must journey through the dogs, beyond the dots, and to the truth, alone.” Having said which, he dug himself into the mud, closed his gray eyes, and went to sleep.

  “How are we going to get out of here?” the mouse child asked his father.

  “I don’t know,” said the exasperated father. “We are helpless, as always.” A bit of Muskrat’s string, still tied to his arm, floated upward to remind him of their vain hopes at the beaver pond.

  “Didn’t Uncle Frog once say that the bottom was strangely close to the top?” said the child.

  “This one isn’t,” said the father. “We’re in very deep water. Can you see anything beyond the last visible dog? It isn’t fair to burden you with this sort of thing, but I’ve got my back to it.”

  “The child is father to the mouse,” said the child. “I’ll do it.” He examined the BONZO can. “There’s the first dog,” he said, “and the one after that and the one after that.”

  * * *

  UNABLE TO TURN AWAY, the mouse child stared at the can as the days passed. He felt himself grow dizzy as the dogs undulated before him with the motion of the water, but as hard as he stared, he was never quite certain which dog was the last one visible.

  Winter had left the pond. The trees had lost their bare sharpness, and their branches were blurring into leaf. Skunk cabbages pushed their coarse green points up out of the black, boggy earth, and the nights grew clamorous with spring peepers. Robins were hard at work among the earthworms; the rattling cry of the kingfisher sounded along the banks; mallards cruised among the reeds; and from the surrounding swamps came the whistle of the marsh hawk and the pumping of the bittern. The fish that swam past the mouse and his child moved more swiftly now, and the sunlight filtering through the depths seemed warmer than before. Grown frogs and young tadpoles, newts, snakes, and turtles, awakening from hibernation, swam up to the surface as spring came to the pond.

  “There’s that little dog, and the one after that,” said the child. But no matter how hard he tried, he always lost his place among the dogs before he found the last one that the eye could see.

  “Maybe I could help you look,” said a small and gentle voice, “and maybe you’d talk to me and not eat me up. Would you, do you think, not eat me?”

  “We don’t eat anybody,” said the mouse child. “Where are you?”

  “Here,” said the voice, “by your feet. I don’t have anyone to talk to. It’s depressing.”

  “Who are you?” said the father.

  “I don’t know,” said the voice. “I don’t even know what I am. When I talk to myself I call myself Mudd. That’s silly, I know, but you have to call yourself something if you’ve got no one else to talk to.” There was a stirring in the ooze at the mouse child’s feet, and an ugly little creature rose up and leaned lightly against his leg. “What are you?” it said.

  “We’re toy mice,” said the child. “Is it Miss or Mr. Mudd? Please excuse my asking, but I can’t tell by looking at you.”

  “Miss,” said the little creature. She was something like a misshapen grasshopper, and was as drab and muddy as her name. “I’ll be your friend if you’ll be mine,” she said. “Will you, do you think? I’m so unsure of everything.”

  “We’ll be your friends,” said the child. “We’re unsure too, especially about the little dogs.”

  “I know,” said Miss Mudd. “It’s all so difficult. And of course everyone bigger than I tries to eat me, and I’m always busy eating everyone smaller. So there isn’t much time to think things out.” As she spoke she flung what looked like an arm out from her face, caught a water flea, and ate it up. “It’s distasteful,” she said. “I know it’s distasteful. I’ve got this nasty sort of a huge lip with a joint in it like an elbow, and I catch my food with it. And the odd thing, you see, is that I don’t think that’s how I really am. I just can’t believe that I’m this muddy thing you see crawling about in the muck. I don’t feel as if I am. I simply can’t tell you how I feel inside! Clean and bright and beautiful — like a song in the sunlight, like a sigh in the summer air. Do you ever feel that way?”

  “Ah!” sighed the father. How could he say how he felt? Far different from the tin mouse who had danced under the Christmas tree certainly, but less than whatever it was he needed to be, hoped to be, and now almost despaired of ever being. His works were clogged with mud and dirt and rust; his spirit was heavy in him.

  “I’ve lost my place again,” said the child.

  “I’ll help you,” said Miss Mudd. “I’ll point to each dog as you go. There,” she said as she climbed up the side of the can and clung to the label. “Now I’m at the first dog.”

  “And the one after that and the one after that,” said the mouse child, while Miss Mudd changed her position accordingly and pointed to the appropriate dog.

  All through the lengthening days of spring the mouse child looked at the BONZO label. Water plants put out their roots and anchored to him; little colonies of algae settled on him, flourished, and increased; snails fed on the last scraps of his fur; catfish nibbled at his whiskers, and still he sought the last visible little black-and-white spotted dog. The father, his eyes fixed always o
n his son, saw the words YOU WILL SUCCEED disappear as the good-luck coin turned green, then black. The child’s glass-bead eyes grew ever dimmer and more tired while the father watched helplessly, infinity at his back.

  Springtime passed. The flickering play of shadows from the leaves above dappled the depths below, and the mud on the bottom smelled of summer. Water striders darted on silver points of light far above the heads of the mouse and his child, and fish leaped after hovering mayflies, to fall back with bright splashes that spangled the quivering water ceiling.

  “Have you found it yet?” the mouse father asked the child. He felt his clockwork stiffening inside him with long disuse, and as all hope of getting out of the pond faded, he found himself thinking that the mud, once one got used to it, was not uncomfortable; the motion of the water was soothing. The startling, sudden, lightning-bright image of the elephant in the mist of that departed morning was sharp within his memory, and it was painful to him, as if a spring within his mind were wound up achingly tight. Powerless to act, he could not convert that coiled energy to motion, and his determination faded as he settled deeper in the mud.

  “If Why times How equals Dog,” said the child, who was thoroughly confused by now, “then Dog divided by How must equal Why.”

  Two passing tadpoles swam between him and the BONZO can, where they encountered a water snake. “This way, please,” said the snake, and swallowed them.

  “It looks bad,” said one of the tadpoles as they disappeared down the snake’s throat.

  “You never know,” said the other. “If we can just get through this, maybe everything will be all right.”

  “Keep your eyes on the dogs,” said Miss Mudd to the mouse child. “Let us persevere even though the prospects are uncertain.”

  The water was especially clear that day, and the BONZO label sharp and well defined. To the mouse child the endless dogs no longer seemed to be printed on the paper label of a tin can. He felt them to be real and alive — a pack of ancient brothers through which his spirit, projected from his seeking eyes, ranged forward on its journey. As in a dream he felt himself move on from one dog to the next until he saw, with sudden and shocking clarity, the last and smallest little dog still recognizable as dog. Beyond that were only tiny dots of color. Still the child stared, and saw between the dots of color blank white space, emptiness that seemed to flow back toward him from the smallest dog out through the largest.