The First Bad Man

  I tried to make it more real, describing the craggy peak, its majesty. “Think of the picture on the one-dollar bill, the mountain.” I got out my purse. There was no mountain on the one-dollar bill—it was a pyramid. “Focus on this, you’re at the base of it,” I said, holding the dirty money in front of her face.

  “Okay.” She glued her eyes to the tiny pyramid. “It’s starting.” I used a bobby pin to trace her progress up the steep side. “Too fast,” she said. The pyramid was so tiny that it was hard, at first, to go slow enough. But soon we had it down and each time a new one came she would pick up the dollar and thrust it at me and we’d make our way up to the floating eye. It was a tool the government gave out for women in labor; it could be spent again and again but only to buy a contraction.

  At seven o’clock Rick let himself in with his key. We were in the middle of the pyramid so I ignored him. He used the bathroom and watched us from the doorway. Once Clee was down the other side she told me to tell him to leave.

  “I’ll just be in the yard,” he said, trying to slip back out.

  “I don’t want him to hear me,” Clee whined. “Or see me through the windows.”

  Rick crumpled and shuffled away. My cell phone rang.

  “It’s me,” said the midwife. “How’s she doing?”

  “Okay. We’re using visualization.”

  “That’s good, that’s perfect. The flower opening?”

  “No, the mountain.”

  “There’s a lot of great mountains around here. Have you ever been to Idaho?”

  “You’re still in Idaho?”

  “It’s beautiful but not in an obvious way, you know?” It sounded like she was trying to open a package of chips with her teeth. “I once had a boyfriend who lived out here. Much too rural for me. I wonder what ever happened to him.”

  She was bored. She was calling because she was bored.

  Clee thrust the dollar at me and I hung up. The journey was getting slower and harder.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” she said.

  “Just make it to the eye. See what it says at the top? ‘Annuit Coeptis.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “ ‘He favors our undertaking.’ God does.”

  She breathed out fiercely. “I’m not kidding, I really can’t.”

  Her face looked crazy and swollen. Her blond hair had darkened with sweat and was sticking to her face. She clumsily pulled off her shorts; I looked away and spied Rick tiptoeing into the bedroom. Why was he still here? I skipped through the pink handout to the white ones.

  “You’re in transition,” I said. The teacher had told us about this—it was a good sign.

  “What do you mean?” It was almost like she hadn’t attended the class with me.

  “This is the worst you’ll ever feel.”

  “Ever?”

  “Well, maybe not ever in your whole life. We don’t know how you’re going to die—that might be worse.” I had veered off course. I put my face right in front of hers. “You can do this,” I said. She looked at me like I knew everything. She was hanging on my every word.

  “Okay,” she said, suddenly clamping her hands to my forearms. “It’s starting.”

  Now the dollar was cast aside, spent. For the length of each contraction she lived in my eyes, never blinking, never looking away, gripping my arms like they were steel supports. I wasn’t strong enough for this but that was a problem for later.

  “Shouldn’t she be here?” Clee wheezed. I had been telling her the midwife was on her way, which wasn’t untrue. I was waiting for a break, during which I would explain the situation, we would calmly discuss the options, and then we’d go back to having the baby.

  “She’s driving her friend’s car from Idaho to California. She won’t make it in time. We have to go to the hospital.”

  “Really? Is that really true?”

  I nodded.

  She was crying, and now another contraction was starting. “They’ll cut me open, I don’t want to be cut.” She began to pee. Then, with the pee still running down her thigh she lowered her head to the floor and threw up. She was exploding and disintegrating. I tried to clean her off but she rolled against the wall. “If we don’t go, does it mean the baby will die?”

  “No, no. Of course not.” She said thank you; the only thing she cared about was not going to the hospital. If I had it to do over again I would have said Probably. It might live, but probably not. Also, I would have dragged her to Dr. Binwali the moment the midwife said Idaho. Because now it was getting away from us; the hospital seemed like a rest stop we had missed hours ago. Clee let out a bellow. “Should I push?”

  “It feels like you want to push?”

  “I have to.”

  “Okay, just a little. Let me call the midwife.”

  But she wouldn’t let me leave until the push was done. The midwife had the radio on very loud—a country song, it sounded like.

  “What do I need for the delivery?” I yelled.

  “She’s progressed? You need to go to the hospital.”

  “She’s pushing. We’re having it here. Do I need to boil water? What do I do?”

  She turned the radio off.

  “Shit. Okay. Bare minimum, you need three clean towels, some olive oil, a bowl of hot water, some sanitary sharp scissors, and a clean piece of string.”

  I was running through the house, grabbing the things as she said them. Rick was in the kitchen, pouring boiling water into a mug.

  “I need that water!” I yelled.

  He bent down and calmly unlaced his tennis shoe. “There’s already hot water in the bedroom,” he said, dropping his shoelace in the mug. “I don’t think you have any string, but this will do.” He was rolling up his dirty sleeves and washing his hands at the kitchen sink with brisk authority.

  Clee bellowed in the other room.

  “Do you really know how to do this?”

  He nodded modestly. “I do.”

  I studied his face. It was not soft or deranged; his eyes were clear, his brow almost hawklike, though overly tan from outside living. A fine surgeon who fell from grace—malpractice, destitution, homelessness. I didn’t verify any of this, just followed him into the bedroom. He gently placed the mug on my dresser, beside a steaming bowl. The scissors and olive oil were waiting, and a stack of towels. The floor was covered with black plastic garbage bags. I smiled weakly with relief.

  “You’ve done this before.”

  His brow furrowed and he started to speak, a response that already sounded terrifyingly longer and more complicated than Yes. Clee screamed, crawling into the bedroom on her hands and knees.

  She was yelling that its crown was showing. A royal baby. She meant he was crowning, but he wasn’t.

  I explained about how we were in Rick’s hands and also how he had washed his hands. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the swarm of doubt flying around the room. But she was past all that.

  “Can I really push now? I want to get it out.”

  My heart jumped. It. I had forgotten about the baby. Until then she had been giving birth to birth—to contractions and noises and liquids. There was someone in there.

  We gave her water and Recharge energy drink and a little bit of honey. I had forgotten these things earlier but with Rick here it was easier to think. He suggested I wash my hands before the next contraction. But it was too late. She squatted and with an unearthly scream her legs slowly split apart to reveal a perfect wedge of head. Clee reached down and touched it.

  “There’s no face,” she said.

  Rick took my palms and squirted Purell into them. He waved his hands in the air to indicate I should do the same. We flapped our hands. Clee suddenly reclined and seemed to fall asleep. I raised my eyebrows at Rick and he made a smooth gesture with the flat of his hand, indicating that this was
normal. He put his face in front of her and in a low, unfamiliar voice he said, “It comes out on this push.” Clee opened her eyes and nodded obediently, as if they shared a long history.

  “Big breath in,” said Rick. She took a big breath in. “Release it with noise and push. Harder.”

  It came out with a gush of fluids and Rick caught it. A boy. He looked dead, but I knew from the birth videos we watched in class that this was normal. The silence was terrible, though. And there was a foul smell. Rick tipped the baby to the side and he coughed. And then he squawked. Not like a person making his first sound ever, but like an old crow—a bit tired, a bit resigned. Then silence again. Rick lay the baby on the floor and cut the umbilical cord with a seasoned swipe of my nail scissors. He tied his sanitized shoelace onto the baby’s stub. Clee tried to stand and fell into a convulsive squat. A pile of gizzards dropped from between her legs. The placenta. She leaned back against the bed. “You take him.”

  He weighed almost nothing. His legs were covered in green slime, like pea soup, and his eyes rolled upward like a drunk old man trying to get his bearings. A pale, drunk old man with floppy arms and legs.

  “He’s pale, isn’t he?” I said.

  I looked at Clee’s skin, tawny even now.

  “You’re not pale. Is his dad pale?”

  I tried to think of all the very pale men in Clee’s world. The baby was so fair it was almost blue. Who that we know is blue? Who, who, who do we know that’s blue? But this question was just a funny costume, a silly clown nose on the real thought I was having.

  “Call 911,” I said.

  Clee lifted her sleepy head and Rick froze.

  The phone was by his knee; he picked it up slowly.

  “Pea soup. We learned that in class. It means something bad. Call 911.”

  The baby was darker blue now, purple almost. Seconds, I was thinking, we’re down to seconds. Suddenly there was a feathery sound like giant wet wings unfurling—it was Clee’s body unsticking from the plastic garbage bags. She was standing. Her big hand tore the phone away from Rick. She dialed and said the address, she knew the zip code, she knew the cross street, the dispatcher was giving instructions, she clearly relayed each one—“wrap him in a towel,” “cover the top of his head,” and I completed each task with an unusual fluidity, as if we’d been working on this scenario for years, this baby-saving simulation, and now was our chance to perform it. Rick watched from the corner, disheveled and shrunken; he was the homeless gardener again.

  The ambulance people yelled and threw equipment around like a swat team. A beige blanket was wrapped around Clee. An athletic-looking older woman was counting over the baby. Maybe keeping track of how many seconds it had been since he’d died. She would never stop, she would count forever if that’s how long he was dead for.

  Rick handed me a Tupperware container just before I got in the ambulance.

  “I washed it off,” he cried. “It’s clean.”

  Spaghetti, I thought. Kate’s spaghetti in case we get hungry.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Something huge was inserted into his tiny throat. A cord was implanted in his raw belly button. He was covered in white stickers. A net of cables and tubes was woven between him and many loud, beeping machines. There was hardly enough baby to accommodate all the things that had to go into him.

  “Do you think they know?” Clee whispered from her wheelchair.

  We were gripping each other’s hands between the folds of our white hospital gowns—a small hard brain formed by our interlocking white knuckles. I peeked around at the nurses. Everyone knew that this baby was up for adoption.

  “It doesn’t matter. As long as he doesn’t know.”

  “The baby?”

  “The baby.”

  But there was no thought more horrible than this baby fighting for his life not knowing that he was completely alone in the world. He had no people, not yet—legally we could walk out the door and never come back. We stood there like mesmerized criminals who had forgotten to flee the scene.

  My own brain and its thoughts were just distant noise. What mattered was that every few seconds she or I would tighten the fist, which meant live, live, live. A bag of blood was rushed in; it was from San Diego. I’d been to the zoo there once. I imagined the blood being pulled out of a muscled zebra. This was good—humans were always withering away from heartbreak and pneumonia, animal blood would be much tougher, live, live, live. A beefy man in scrubs motioned us over.

  “He’s critically stable. If he starts to desaturate you’ll need to leave him alone.”

  He showed Clee how to put her hands through the holes in the clear plastic incubator. The baby’s palm miraculously curled around her finger. That’s just a reflex, the man said. Live, live, live.

  Clee was mumbling a rolling chant that I could barely hear; at first it sounded like a prayer, but after a while I realized it was just “Ohhh, sweet boy, oh, sweet baby boy,” over and over again. She only stopped when the head doctor came over, a tall Indian man. His face was gravely serious. Some people’s faces always look this way, it’s just how they’re raised. But as he talked it became clear he wasn’t one of these people. Meconium was repeated several times; I remembered the word from birth class: excrement. Meconium has been aspirated leading to PPHN. Or PPHM. He was talking slowly but it wasn’t slow enough. Nitric oxide. Ventilator. We nodded again and again. We were actors nodding on TV, bad actors who couldn’t make anything look real. He finished with the words closely monitored. We forgot to ask if the baby would live.

  A toothy young nurse with glasses suggested Clee lie down in a receiving room on the Labor and Delivery floor. Clee said she was fine and the nurse said, “Actually, you’re bleeding a lot.” The back of her gown was soaked through. She fell back into the wheelchair, suddenly not fine at all. Her eyes were strangely sunken. They would call us, the nurse said, if anything changed. We looked at each other darkly. If we didn’t leave, then we couldn’t get a terrible phone call.

  “I’ll stay,” I said, and Clee was rolled out the door.

  I was afraid to look at him. There were ten or fifteen other babies, each one hooked up to a beeping machine that regularly burst into alarm; the alarms overlapped, creating an undulating chaos. On the other side of the NICU another team of doctors and nurses surrounded something small and unmoving. Its parents stood apart from each other to let all of us know the other one was to blame and would never, ever, be forgiven, for all eternity. Their prayer was rage. The mother looked up at me; I looked away.

  Without Clee’s hand to hold, my thoughts were terrifyingly unbound. I could think anything. I could think: Why am I here? And: This is going to end in tragedy. And: What if I can’t handle this, what if I lose my mind? I started crying giant wet tears.

  Ha. I was crying.

  It was easy now, stupidly easy. I wiped my nose on my hands, contaminating them. I went back out to the foyer and washed them again; the hot water on my skin made me homesick. This time I was asked to sign in. For Relationship to the baby I wrote grandmother because that’s who everyone thought I was.

  I forced myself to look at the tiny gray body. His eyes were shut. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t deduce, from the beeps and the sound of feet on linoleum, that he was in a hospital. He didn’t know what a hospital was. Every single thing was new and made no sense. Like a horror movie, but he couldn’t even compare it to that because he knew nothing about the genre. Or about horror itself, fear. He couldn’t think, I’m scared—he didn’t even know I. I shut my eyes and started humming. It was easier to do back at home, when he was still inside her. That time now seemed like a silly TV show, the three of us floating in a daze, believing we would always be safe. This here was real life. I hummed for so long I started to get dizzy. When I opened my eyes, he was looking right at me. He blinked, slowly, tiredly.

  Familiarly.


  Kubelko Bondy.

  I smoothed my hospital gown and tucked my hair behind my ears.

  I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know it was you until now, I said. He gave me the same warm look of recognition that he’d been giving me since I was nine—but exhausted, like a warrior who has risked everything to get home, half-dead on the doorstep. Now it was unbearable that he should be lying untouched except by needles and tubes. I opened the circular doors and carefully held his hand and foot. If he died he would die forever; I would never see another Kubelko Bondy.

  See, this is what we do, I began, we exist in time. That’s what living is; you’re doing it right now as much as anyone. I could tell he was deciding. He was feeling it out and had come to no conclusions yet. The warm, dark place he had come from versus this bright, beepy, dry world.

  Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works. And in case he wasn’t into nature, I added: And it’s a really wild time in terms of technology. You’ll probably have a robot and that will be normal.

  It was like talking someone off a ledge.

  Of course, there’s no “right” choice. If you choose death I won’t be mad. I’ve wanted to choose it myself a few times.

  His giant black eyes strained upward, toward the beckoning fluorescent lights.

  You know what? Forget what I just said. You’re already a part of this. You will eat, you will laugh at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret and yearn and keep a secret. You will get old and decrepit, and you will die, exhausted from all that living. That is when you get to die. Not now.

  He shut his eyes; I was wearing him out. It was hard to lower the pitch of my mind. The Asian nurse with the glasses went on her lunch break and was replaced by a pig-faced nurse with short hair. She looked me over and suggested I take a break.