Wise Mother, Coughing Infant
My first thought after I was born was "this feels familiar."
Okay, yeah, I was just trying to make that sound dramatic and mysterious; my first thought was really billions and billions of thoughts all at once, but the familiarity of it was the real hook there. I guess that's not a really great way to demonstrate what I mean, though.
I was born in so many different ways and at so many different times, but I don't think this last one was technically "being born" so much as having the cosmos sorta mush its power into itself to figure out how I managed to exist where I did. I can only guess—what's it called, circumstantial evidence? One day, there was an empty piece of stretch of Death Valley, full of unhindered sagebrush, Joshua trees, and way more scorpions and coyotes than most people want to deal with. The next day, there was a human baby.
I wanna say that at the time I knew enough about living on Earth and being human and everything not to just start crying right away. I'd done it all before, you know? Plus, I did plenty of other species on top of that, and I could remember everything as far as my brains would let me. I at least remembered being a goldfish or a tiger or a whale or a mosquito. I wasn't the best at measuring time when I was doing those ones, on account of sea snails only barely know we're snails, let alone know how long a "year" is, as decided by some random animals on a planet bigger than I could've conceptualized. Do you know what a sea snail's brain looks like? Neither do I! A sea snail has no reason to know!
The point is, I had all this experience and memory to look back on, but it didn't help. It all hit me at once like a shot. It just made me feel like... It's just not something that happens, you know? And all I could think about was what it felt like to smell and taste things as a housefly, or a hundred houseflies, and I had every opinion anything could possibly have about that. And I was a baby and a parent that could remember what it was like to miscarry, and a parent that could remember holding my newborn twins, and a pregnant feral cat looking for a safe place to lay for a while.
There's so much time stretched through my head at once now, I still kinda don't remember a lot about the timeline between being a cosmically manifested nightmare baby and becoming the Coughing Infant. Someone calling herself the Wise Mother found me pretty soon after. That's something I know for sure, but she sure as anything on or off the Earth ain't the Wise Mother for real. I never bought into that hoax—or at the very least I had doubts most of the time—but she was the only one that knew what I was. That counted for something, I guess. I really didn't have a lot of options. Most newborn humans don't get a lot of freedom of choice, even if they have memories that exist eons longer than they have.
She named her messed up orphanage after me before I even knew it was my name. I mean, I had so many, I could barely manage not to react to every name I heard. Pretty sure most of them I might not have ever even had. Some of them might've just been regular words, actually.
But like, the orphanage was called Wise-Mother-Coughing-Infant, and it started as something that...
Okay. I wanna be really clear about something: memory isn't my strong suit. Getting this all in words is just as bad 'cause I can barely remember what point I was trying to make when I'm halfway through a thought. And I know, I know all of this definitely sounds like I'm trying to blow a bunch of smoke or like I'm delusional or trying to sell you something, but if you don't believe me, you can just toss this letter in the garbage and get on with your day.
The town, though. She told me it was supposed to start as an orphanage, and I don't even think she was saying that to talk down to me because she knew I wasn't a real child and she wasn't a real Mother. I think that was just a side effect. It was always a lie or a metaphor or a mix of the two though, because the first building there was a radio tower. I was barely managing speech around then, but I couldn't figure out how to comment on the fact that the thing wasn't constructed. It just was.
But all I said in my stumbling, stuttering child's voice was, "This doesn't look childproofed."
It feels so stupid looking back, even if now I know for sure the Wise Mother didn't actually care if I said something embarrassing like 24 years ago. I think it was probably more memorable dealing with this nightmare baby who simultaneously could and couldn't manage complex thought and fine motor control. I don't even know if that thing was capable of embarrassment, anyway.
Anyway, you might guess that the radio signals coming from that tower started all the awful things that happen in this town. You'd be completely wrong, but you might guess that. The truth is, the radio signals started the town itself to begin with. Everything else is the same as the way the Wise Mother talks up and around you and through you without meaning to. A side effect. The town itself is its own awful thing.
Wise-Mother-Coughing-Infant was only the tower, then I blinked, and I was learning how to speak, and there were other buildings. A motel, a pit stop, a casino. Just a few basics. Supplies and short entertainment for the typical Mojave traveler. The words I spoke to the people that actually passed through weren't English, though. I didn't understand that, either. I couldn't figure out why the people I spoke to never understood what I was saying. I don't even remember what it was. Probably four languages all at once, for all I know.
That's sort of how the town came to be, too. It was just basics, like a messed up baby of pure cosmic circumstance learning to stand on its own two legs, but then it starts thinking maybe it actually had four. People went through, though. They took it in stride. Not a lot of tourists heading to Reno, exactly, not like it is now. Mainly truck drivers making stops on their routes. People moving between cities for business or family. If a kid you don't know starts meowing and walking on all fours, you think it's kind of funny for a second, and you go on with your day, you know. It's that dry weirdness you expect on a night drive through a nothing-nowhere town in Nevada. Not even notable enough to tell your spouse about when you finally get some cell service.
But the radio kept pumping information to the town. By the time I realized I remembered how to work the sails of a ship despite having never seen the ocean, it was a fully realized ghost town, one big enough to catch your notice real fast. But it was more than that. The memory came to me when I realized salt was in the air, and it was still arid as any part of the desert could be, enough to make you cough, but I swore I could hear the braying of seagulls when I went to bed that night.
It took a while, but eventually I started to hate how much I had to depend on the Wise Mother for. I knew too much about the world for what and where I was, for how long I'd been in it. I knew the taste of copper in cotton fiber. I remembered thinking it was nutritious, and that was the only thing that mattered to me. I knew what flying above the clouds felt like. I knew what kind of vertigo you could feel past the point of vertigo, a millisecond after your parachute fails. I knew war and disease. I knew power and how little I had ever had. And even though my body had finally grown into something resembling a human, I could hardly do what other humans did. Ones my own age. Ones much younger or older.
I can't describe to you the knowledge of what a phantom limb feels like, but a lot of people feel like they understand it even if they've never felt it. People talk about it 'cause it sounds so fake, right? But it's real to so many. I kind of get pissed off thinking about it, because I feel like a sham when I know I have two arms and two legs, ten fingers and toes, but I'm still trying to compare it to that. But I've felt that before, in bodies before this one. Maybe it's still insensitive. Maybe I've written way too much in one sitting and my mind's racing faster than I can move.
My handwriting sucks. I used to be a calligrapher. I just can't hold a pen the way I know I could before, even if it wasn't in the past century.
I have to take so many breaks and even so I'm way more independent from that thing pretending to be a Mother now. I can't remember a lot, but I'm pretty sure I know exactly when the last time I saw her was. The radio tower is really big, you know, so it's more like I'm living in the same building than we actually live together. I can leave if my body's feeling up to it. She doesn't stop me. I don't think she cares a lot about what I do, just that I am. I still don't fully get what that even is, but I still think she wanted me to be more.
She still sometimes calls this place an orphanage. I think she might really believe it is one. I think how much she doesn't get about the world is the most dangerous thing about this place.
I think none of what I’ve been writing even makes sense anymore. I don’t know what I thought I was going to accomplish by writing this to you. I guess I thought you might make some sense of it. Maybe what I really wanted was to tell even one person and lie to myself that they could ever really get it. I guess I miss knowing other people. Humans get that way a lot. I should know, I am one, right?
If I actually send you this, then you know where to find me. Try not to die before that happens.
—Coughing Infant
