Report from Planet Midnight Read Free

made him scream in pain, I called Babette in panic. Turns out poo and pee are really damned important, especially when you’re responsible forthe life of a small, helpless being that can barely do anything else. Russ gurgles with helpless laughter when I blow raspberries on his tummy. And there’s a spot on his neck, just under his ear, that smells sweet, even when the rest of him is stinky. He’s a perfect specimen; all his bits are in proportion. I ask Babette what new thing is bothering her about her kid, if not the delayed growth.
    “She gets along fine with me and Sunil, you know? I feel like I can talk to her about anything. But she gets very frustrated with kids her age. She wants to play all these elaborate games, and some of them don’t understand. Then she gets angry. She came stomping home from a friend’s place the other day and went straight to her room. When I looked in on her, she was sitting looking in her mirror. There were tears running down her cheeks. ‘I bloody hate being a kid,’ she said to me. The other kids are stupid, and my hand-eye coordination sucks.’”
    “She said that her hand-eye coordination sucked? That sounds too …”
    “Yeah, I know. Too grown up for a ten-year-old. She probably had to grow up quickly, being an adoptee.”
    “You ever find out where she came from before you took her?”
    Babette shakes her head. She’s eaten all of her pavlova and half of my carrot cake.
    It just so happens that I have a show opening at Eastern Edge while Babette and Sunil are in town. “Excavations,” I call it. It was Russ’s anthill escapade that gave me the idea. I’ve trucked in about half a ton of dirt left over from a local archaeological dig. I wish I could have gotten it directly from Mexico, but you make dowith what you have. I seeded the soil with the kinds of present-day historical artifacts that the researchers tossed aside in their zeal to get to the iconic past of the native peoples of the region: a rubber boot that had once belonged to a Mayan Zapatista from Chiapas; a large plastic jug that used to hold bleach, refitted as a bucket for a small child to tote water in; a scrap of hand-woven blanket with brown stains on it. People who enter the exhibition get basic excavation tools. When they pull something free of the soil, it triggers a story about the artifact on the monitors above.
    Sunil is coming to the opening. Babette has decided to stay at her relatives’ place and nap. Six months along in her pregnancy, she’s sleepy a lot. I’m holding court in the gallery, Cecilia striding around the catwalk above me, doing a last check of all the connections, when Sunil walks in. He’s brought Kamla. She doesn’t alarm me any more. She’s just a kid. As I watch her grow up, I get some idea of what Russ’s growing years will be like. In a way, she’s his advance guard.
    Kamla scurries in ahead of her dad, right up to me, her head wobbling as though her neck is a column of gelatin. She sticks out her hand. “Hey, Greg,” she says. “Long time.” Behind her, Sunil gives me a bashful smile. I reach down to shake the hand of what appears to be a six-year-old.
    “Uh, hey,” I say. Okay, I lied a little bit. I still don’t really know how to talk to kids.
    “This looks cool,” she tells me, gazing around. “What do we do?” She squats down and starts sifting soil through her fingers.
    “Kamla, you mustn’t touch the art,” says Sunil.
    “Actually, it’s okay. That’s exactly what I want people to do.”
    Kamla flashes me a grateful glance. I give her a small spade, take her through the exhibition. She digs up artifact after artifact, watches the stories about them on the video displays, asks me questions. I get so caught up talking to her about my project that I forget how young she is. She seems really interested. Most of the other people are here because they’re friends of mine, or because it’s cool to be able to say that you went to an art opening last