Circuit
My mother claims to have the power to recharge dead batteries by touch. She holds them gently for half an hour and they begin to work again.
She can’t fully control the power. Sometimes, the batteries don’t charge. Sometimes, the charge only lasts a brief time. But often, they’re as good as new.
She doesn’t always need to touch the battery—just being nearby can be enough. Occasionally, she drains fully charged devices by accident, usually when she’s feeling sad or anxious. She can’t tell which way it will go until it happens.
She no longer wears a watch—she can’t trust the time.
A clock in her bedroom tends to stop around the anniversary of her father’s death. She says it’s a message from him, a little hello. Once, she changed out the clock battery for a new one, and it died again days later. Every new battery died until her father’s yahrzeit at the end of October. “He really wanted to say hi,” she said.
***
Last year, while visiting home for the holidays, my watch stopped.
“Do you want me to hold it?” my mother asked, as if offering me something as ordinary as water.
I hadn’t thought about her power in twenty years, since leaving home. The memory of it felt fragile—one of those washes of uncertainty about which childhood events were real and which were staged by an adult trying to make the world seem more magical, like leaving me coins from the tooth fairy, or pulling objects out of my ear.
But her offer was sincere. There was playfulness, too—she was challenging me to discard my skepticism and accept her reality. Do you want me to hold your watch meant Do you believe I am who I say? Do you agree to it?
I was nervous that it would work, and that it wouldn’t. Perhaps it was one of those tricks everyone secretly knows—of course, you hold dead batteries to recharge them. At some point, I’d learned the science, diagrammed the electrons and ions, visualized the invisible, but I could no longer recall how or why batteries worked. How much of our knowledge is just the memory of once having known?
My mother lay on the couch, legs up. I looked at her—glasses smudged, shirt food-stained from dinner, her face as familiar to me as my own—and considered the possibility that she had an unusual mystic ability.
“Okay.” I handed her the watch.
***
I asked an online forum of engineers if anyone could offer a scientific explanation for my mother’s power.
One engineer speculated that the battery hadn’t actually been dead, just dormant. Perhaps sub-zero temperatures had made its performance decrease. When my mother heated it in her palms, it began producing more voltage and gave the illusion of coming back to life.
But my watch hadn’t been frozen.
Another proposed that the battery had accumulated an oxide layer over time, which the simple act of handling had cleared away. The same effect, he suggested, could be achieved by taking the battery out of its compartment and wiping it off on my shirt.
But my mother didn’t take out the battery. She just held my watch.
One engineer said the phenomenon could not be scientifically explained, and left it at that.
None of them said anything about my mother.
She had gone to art school for lithography and, before I was born, directed a printmaking center and had a blossoming exhibition career. Afterwards, she tried to work from home. She built a studio in the backyard to house her printing press and an array of solvents (which, she came to believe, triggered her rare form of breast cancer decades later). I loved playing in her studio, watching her prepare the plates, ink the press, hum along to records—Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Paul Simon’s Graceland. Working in her art studio, she was happy.
Her prints were abstract, unsettling pieces. She worked from photographs, capturing images of brick walls, painted glass, metal sheets, webs of hay. She would wave a flashlight over long exposure shots, scribbling eerie beams over the angles and shadows. I’d watch her adjust a piece of straw, or stand undecided between two swatches of gray, and wonder what it was she saw. Her prints hung all over the house, vast looming portals to other worlds. I spent years staring up at them.
In the basement was her darkroom, the only place I wasn’t allowed. When she went inside, I wailed, knowing she couldn’t come out until the photos were developed.
As I grew, her prints shrank in size. Eventually, she stopped printmaking altogether. The chemicals were too strong; more urgently, the work took stretches of time too intensive to be compatible with parenthood. My father was a touring musician, leaving her home alone with me and my sister for days or weeks at a time.
Instead of art, she threw herself into mothering. She ran our home like a summer camp, programming new crafts and games and activities every week. We made sculptures and puzzles and forts and treasure hunts and puppets and costumes and jewelry and books. Once, she unraveled a ball of red yarn all over the living room, wrapping it around lamps and piano legs and couch cushions, weaving a dense laser grid through the space, like a Chiharu Shiota installation. I spent all morning climbing through the yarn jungle, hunting for the prize she’d hidden at the end of the ball. She sewed my wardrobe from scratch, tailoring everything to my growing body and erratic preferences. She volunteered alongside my teachers, painted animal murals on our classroom windows, fed whatever kids had accompanied me and my sister home for lunch. She made elaborate desserts—she’d learned the perfect pie crust from her father, a baker. She fostered a menagerie of pets: one dog, nine cats, fighting fish, zebra finches, a lovebird—just one, so it would bond with her. She read thick novels to me aloud, talked with me about everything we saw, stayed up with me all night when I was sick to stroke my head. She drove me to piano lessons and choir rehearsals and swim meets, waiting quietly in the back to take me home.
***
It’s popular to talk about love as being infinite. The more you love, the more it expands. They say loving someone deeply doesn’t prevent you from caring in equal measure for others; from caring for yourself.
But energy is finite—that’s one science lesson I remember. How could giving so much to a child not deplete you?
The world my mother created was magic. It had no rules, no chores, no curfews, and few routines—all the freedom and play a kid could want, in exchange only for her involvement in every part of it.
***
I’d left Toronto at eighteen and spent most of my adult life elsewhere. My periodic visits home felt increasingly fraught for reasons I couldn’t pin down. It was the house where I’d grown up and everything felt the same, but less, and also somehow too much. We cycled through the usual family rituals, each iteration a little fainter, like practice for stopping completely. I was impatient with my mother, frustrated when she paid me too much attention, and when she paid me too little.
Particles with the same charge naturally repel each other. The chemical reactions inside a battery, I learn, force negatively charged electrons to accumulate together on one terminal, while positive ions collect on the other. It’s this imbalance that provides the driving force that allows the circuit to flow—particles pushed into proximity against their natural state.
***
When I visited home as an adult, my mother took care of me—because she always had, because it felt natural. But I had a growing suspicion that it was unnatural, that the current was supposed to flip.
I’d always been ambivalent about having a baby. I couldn’t do the math—energy out versus reward in. I could see the abstract appeal of such a close connection to another human. But as a teacher, I spent so much energy creating experiences for others—the idea of curating not just a ten-week course, but someone’s whole life, seemed daunting. And I worried I’d have no time to write; I’d seen what I’d stolen from my mother, although she would never call it theft.
***
While my mother held my watch, we sat on the couch together, talking. She began telling me about the end of her father’s life, a story I’d never heard before.
He had a brain tumor that made him go blind in his final weeks. She flew out to Edmonton and spent all day sitting beside him in the hospital, talking to him and holding his hand.
At the end of the day, he exclaimed, “It’s ten o’clock, already?”
My mother was startled—his vision had returned enough that he could read the clock on the opposite wall.
“I think the power might work on people, too,” she told me. “I’ve always felt guilty I didn’t stay in Edmonton longer. He died a week after I left. Maybe if I’d stayed, I could have kept him alive.”
I paused, not sure what to say. I made a joke about how lucrative the power to recharge humans would be.
“I’d never sell it,” she said, dead serious. “If I had that power, I’d give it away.”
When I left home, she began drawing—hyper-realist colored pencil portraits, indistinguishable at a glance from the photographs they were drawn from. (“They’re better than photos,” she’d say.) At the beginning, each one took several months to finish. She worked in silence, for most of the day, beginning with the eyes and moving outward, attending to every pore, every strand of hair. When she was finished, she gave the portraits away as gifts to the family and friends whose faces she drew.
Watching the reveal made me uncomfortable. It felt like too much extravagance, a distraction from whatever occasion had warranted the gift. How could anyone thank her sufficiently for something that represented such a large chunk of her life? We purchase gifts to compensate for the time we don’t spend together. I encouraged her to stop gifting her portraits and sell them instead.
“I’m not doing it for money,” she’d say. “Besides, if I charged what they were worth, no one could pay.” She knew her gifts were priceless, the balance unequal. The nonreciprocity was the point.
Eventually, she did start charging fees, exhibiting in shows, entering (and often winning) contests, building a successful career just as most start winding theirs down.
But she still gifts many drawings and hesitates to take new commissions. She doesn’t want her portraits hanging in the homes of people she doesn’t like—it’s too much of herself.
***
Now, she draws for eight or ten or twelve hours a day, and sometimes through the night. Her eyes are deteriorating: she has glaucoma and macular degeneration, and she’s racing against time to produce as much as she can.
At first, I hadn’t understood her shift from abstract work to human portraits, and I didn’t get the point of reproducing a photograph so precisely. I encouraged her to draw what she really saw—the distorted faces and wavy lines of the world through her compromised vision. It would look so cool, I told her.
The suggestion angered her. “No one wants to see that,” she said.
Later, I got up close and looked at the vibrancy and dimension in every pencil stroke, and I understood: this was what she saw. These drawings were portals, too.
***
I’ve never let her draw my portrait. I’m not sure I want to know what she sees.
As I write this, I decide to propose a deal: she can draw me if I can write about her.
***
Even rechargeable batteries aren’t infinitely rechargeable. The chemical reactions that drive their power ultimately degrade, whether or not they’re used.
***
My mother handed me back my watch. It was ticking again.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing.”
She nodded—of course it was.
The watch worked for four more months.
Laura Hartenberger teaches in the Writing Programs at UCLA. Her writing has appeared in Noema Magazine, Redivider, The Massachusetts Review, Hawaii Review, subTerrain, Cutbank Magazine, NANO Fiction, and other journals. Her writing won a SoCal Journalism Award from the LA Press Club and has been highlighted on Longreads, LitHub, and in The Best American Non-Required Reading. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto and a BA from Yale.
