Parachute

Because a lie is not a lie if the teller believes it, the way beautiful things reassure us of the world’s wholeness, of our wholeness, is not quite a lie. Beautiful things believe their own narrative, the narrative that makes them beautiful. I almost believed it until the new mother strapped her infant to her chest, opened the eighth-floor window, and jumped. My daughter tells me, after her preschool field trip to the Firefighter Museum, about the elephant mask, its hose like a trunk, and the video of a man on fire being smothered in blankets. She asks me if she knows anyone who got dead in a fire, anyone who got fired. When will I die? she asks. When I was a child, I churched my hands, I steepled my hands, and all the people were inside, each finger a man, a woman, a child. When I die, will you still love me? she asks. The mother cracked on the pavement— how did the baby live? Look, he smiles and totters around the apartment eight stories up. Beautiful things reassure us of the world’s wholeness: each child sliding down the pole into the fire captain’s arms. But what’s whole doesn’t sell itself as such: buy this whole apple, this whole car. Live this whole life. A lie is not a lie if the teller believes it? Next time the man in the video will not ignite. The baby will open like a parachute.