My mother’s life came into existence, like the central spindles of a spider’s web, at the moment of my conception. She did not truly exist before my birth and when she dies, my life will become the moment of a performance when the lone member of the audience turns from the stage. And so, I like to curl under my mother’s breast and bring my lips to her teat. It gives me comfort to do this and has since before my memory.

She holds me in her arms. Now that I am a man in my fortieth year and she always thirty years my senior, the action has become as natural as a limb for the both of us. There is even a place for me, a divot in her arms and stomach, where I belong. It’s smooth there and my body fits like a creature in a shell.

My business has taken me to Delhi and Jakarta, where I stand at the head of long tables of men and some women, my hands resting on these tables in these distant locales, distant because the center point of my life rests in her home and waits for my return. In my briefcase, I keep a portfolio of photographs of her. When I’m feeling disrespect from a client over the phone or even across the table, I tick open the folder and gaze at those portraits, which she gave to me on Mother’s Day.

I always return with treats from abroad. I suckle, and my mother turns over the carved elephants I buy her and speaks of her favorite philosophical subject, of how the span of one’s individual memory functions in the same way as a vinyl record, that there is a distinct moment when the needle is placed (by God, she supposes) on the material and crackles to life through the speaker. Assuming all goes well, she says, stroking my hair.

She claims to have seen my own functional record spring to life for the first time. I had just begun walking, she recalls, which means my brain was in a developmental stage akin to a rock rolling down a steep hill. She began to cook nutrient-rich foods for my developing mind: smoked salmon and handfuls of blueberries, crushed flax.