Sea of Flames
F
rom the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam
of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, octahedral,
unsurpassed in hardness. Already it is old: unfathomably so. Incalculable eons tumble past. The
earth shifts, shrugs, stretches. One year, one day, one hour, a great upflow of magma gathers a seam
of crystals and drives it toward the surface, mile after burning mile; it cools inside a huge, smoking
xenolith of kimberlite, and there it waits. Century after century. Rain, wind, cubic miles of ice.
Bedrock becomes boulders, boulders become stones; the ice retreats, a lake forms, and galaxies of
freshwater clams flap their million shells at the sun and close and die and the lake seeps away.
Stands of prehistoric trees rise and fall and rise again in succession.
Until another year, another
day, another hour, when a storm claws one particular stone out of
a canyon and sends it into a
clattering flow of alluvium, where eventually it finds, one evening, the attention of a prince who
knows what he is looking for.
It is cut, polished; for a breath, it passes between the hands of men.
Another hour, another day, another year. Lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut. Mantled with
algae, bedecked with barnacles. Crawled over by snails. It stirs among the pebbles.
Frederick
H
e lives with his mother outside west Berlin. Their apartment is a middle unit in a triplex. Its only
windows offer a view of sweet-gum trees, a vast and barely used supermarket parking lot, and an
expressway beyond.
Frederick sits on the back patio most days and watches the wind drive discarded plastic bags
across the lot. Sometimes they spin high into the air and fly unpredictable loops before catching on
the branches or disappearing from view. He makes pencil drawings of spirals, messy, heavy-
leaded corkscrews. He’ll cover a sheet
of paper with two or three, then flip it over and fill the
other side. The apartment is jammed with them: thousands on the counters, in drawers, on the toilet
tank. His mother used to throw the sheets away when Frederick wasn’t looking, but lately she has
given up.
“Like a factory,
that boy,” she used to say to friends, and smiled a desperate smile meant to
make her appear brave.
Few friends come over now. Few are left.
One Wednesday—but what are Wednesdays to Frederick?—his mother comes in with the mail.
“There’s a letter,” she says, “for you.”
Her instinct in the decades since the war has been to hide. Hide herself, hide what happened to
her boy. She was not the only widow made to feel as if she had been complicit in an unspeakable
crime. Inside the large envelope is a letter and a smaller envelope. The letter comes from a woman
in Essen who traces the course of the smaller envelope from her brother to an American prisoner-
of-war
camp in France, to a military storage facility in New Jersey, to a veterans’ service
organization in West Berlin. Then to a former sergeant, then to the woman writing the letter.
Werner. She can still picture the boy:
white hair, shy hands, a melting smile. Frederick’s one
friend. Aloud she says, “He was very small.”
Frederick’s mother shows him the unopened envelope—it is wrinkled, sepia-colored, and old,
his name written in small cursive letters—but he shows no interest. She leaves it on the counter as
dusk falls, and measures out a cup of rice and sets it to boil, and
switches on every lamp and
overhead fixture as she always does, not to see, but because she is alone, because the apartments
on either side are vacant, and because the lights make her feel as if she is expecting someone.
She purees his vegetables. She puts the spoon in Frederick’s mouth and he hums as he
swallows: he is happy. She wipes his chin and sets a sheet of paper in front of him and he takes his
pencil and begins to draw.
She fills the sink with soapy water. Then she opens the envelope.
Inside is a folded print of two birds in full color.
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