Love Letters of the Angels of Death (18 page)

Twenty-One

Maybe it's somewhere in the dark knots suspended in the blood. Maybe that was all it ever was – our never-born.

“I think I'm losing it,” you say from behind the shaking curtains of your hair as I come through the door, textbooks falling to my feet. At the sight of you, I'm stomping right across the floor, leaving a path of mud and slush on the carpet. You've pulled your spine in, concave, and you're standing, leaning with both your hands on the edge of the kitchen sink.

All you say is, “It's bad.”

I look for blood on the floor, on your legs and feet, but you've got something inside your clothes gathering it all – hiding it from me.

And I'm pivoting on the ball of one foot, spinning around before I reach you, moving back to the door. It's just to shut out the apartment building hallway outside. You're calling me back – no words, just sound – but I can hear that you think I'm leaving you too, as you stand, bowed over your womb cramping out its bright, secret blood.

“The door,” I explain. “For your privacy–”

But everything in the apartment is already losing its colour along the edges of your vision. I've nudged the sickly ivory-coloured door firmly enough for it to move on its hinges in a slow arc, sweeping across your senses, wiping them out as it goes. You're slipping, your hands still clamped around the lip of the sink. The sounds in your ears are the final things to fade as the room washes white and disappears. And what you hear last of all is me, cursing as you hit the ground.

Our next pregnancy goes the distance.

And by the time it's nearly over, I hardly recognize you – even though you look almost exactly the same as you did before all of this. Actually, I'm working hard not to get freaked out by the way you never really “show.” It's not like you're a big person or anything – not like those obese ladies who go to the hospital complaining about their gall bladders and then leave with perfectly healthy babies a few hours later. It's more like you keep it all held in tight with the force of your will alone. When I ask the doctor about it he tells me there's nothing wrong with you.

“What kind of ignorant man-question was that? Don't make me ban you from the doctor's office,” you warn me later, in the car. These last few weeks you've been angry, almost constantly – except for during the times when you're sorry. But now you're leaning back in your seat, pulling your black T-shirt down tight over the thing and yelling, “Look at it. It's huge – like someone turned a pterodactyl egg upside down and rammed it up into my ribcage.”

Packing the baby up that high inside your skeleton makes you look like you've been holding in your breath ever since the night you led me by the hand into the dark and said, “Let's try it again. We've just got to get it over with. We'll be too poor to go anywhere or do anything 'til you're out of school anyway.”

There is an argument in all of this that means something to me and – since you're mad all the time anyway – I'm going to rake it back to life. It's one of your favourite things to fight about, so I don't think you'll mind.

“They're going to ask me,” I tell you. “The prenatal instructor said they're going to point the handles of those shiny, sterile scissors right at me and expect me to cut the cord.”

You slam your palm down on the dashboard. “To cut
my
cord.”

“
Our
cord. Half the DNA in it comes from me, doesn't it?”

“Half a cell, that's the most you can claim. The rest of it is made out of my meat.” You're so gross sometimes.

“All dads cut the umbilical cords these days. They'll think there's something wrong with us if we don't do it too.”

This is the part where you shout something about groupthink and start to look like you want to punch me in the sternum. “How can you even ask me?” you're raving.

I try to laugh. “Look, someone's got to cut it eventually. You can't just leave him hanging there.”

“That's right, Brigs. The doctor cuts it. When he does it, we can all tell ourselves it's clinical. If you do it, there's no way to argue it's not political. I can't think of a better example of patriarchal violence than you cutting through my flesh to tear my baby away.”

“But letting me do it gives me a real role in this. Even if it's all just ceremonial, it gives me something to do – ”

“
Do
? You can't
do
anything. Not here.”

This is the part where I bend over the steering wheel until my head touches the horn. If I'm reckless I might mutter something about feminist baggage. And I'll wonder if you'll have any sympathy for me if I try to be tender and entreat you to let me join in with this amazing creation thing you've got going on. But whenever I choose that road you just laugh – cold and hard – and remind me of all the times you couldn't get new jars of spaghetti sauce open.

“Come on, Brigs. We each have to come to terms with the physical limitations of our sex someday.”

Here at the hospital, at the end, they've got you doped up on something. You're brushing cobwebs off your face that just aren't there. I ask you if it still hurts and you grab me by the shirt, pull me into you, and then throw me back again. I'm not sure if you can still talk.

I asked you once about that new thing they do where they thread a tube into the spine and shut everything down from the middle of your back to the tips of your plain pink toenails. It sounds pretty good to me.

“It would,” is what you said at the time. “If men birthed their babies themselves, that's the kind of technology that would have been invented before the frickin' wheel.”

I thought you meant you wanted to have it done yourself.

But then you just got even madder. “How can you suggest that I call a man in a white coat to alienate me from my body precisely at the point in time when it's at its most powerful?”

That was your last word on it. Maybe I should have asked you if it would still be patriarchal violence if the doctor who did it was a woman. But I didn't. It felt like a landmine at the time. And I think it's too late to mention it to any of the hospital people now – even though it's getting harder and harder to keep all this fear off my face when you look at me.

And now in the hospital, after all these weeks, you're not angry anymore – and it's really scaring me. You're not even angry at the nurse, standing on the opposite side of the bed-chair thing from me yelling, “Push harder, push harder,” right into your face for two hours straight – like you've got something more important to do later in the day and you're trying to save your strength for it.

“Lady,” I finally have to say. “Cool it, okay?”

We've been here almost a whole day and I think I'm getting good at reading the output from the electronic fetal monitor. You'll tell me later you've got a post-traumatic stress reaction to the sound pounding out of the machine.

Kee-ow-wow-wow-wow, Kee-ow-wow-wow-wow

I ask the doctor if the strength of your contractions will ever get stronger again after they start to wane, like I can see yours are doing. He says, no.

You want to tell me you're dying. Somehow, I know that's what you'd say to me if you could. And if you told me so yourself, out loud, I would believe you. I can see it's true in your face, where a thousand tiny, rusty bruises have bloomed – as if the pores in your skin are about to start bleeding, right around your eyes.

But instead of letting you die, they call this old specialist doctor. He comes into the hospital room with a set of long, curved tongs like something from the Inquisition. He cuts and thrusts and pulls and out comes the whole thing. That's when I know for sure you can't talk – not with language anyway. Your voice is a landslide.

There must be seven people in the room by the end, all twitching for disaster, tearing open packages, rubbing, sucking, and making the same notes over and over again.

“No. No again. No, she's still not allergic to anything.”

When they give me the lavender baby I walk it over to where they're sewing your birth canal back together for me with a long, fish-hook needle each of us is taking pains not to look at. The baby is a boy, like you wanted. He's wide awake.

Your voice is wordy again but low and wrapped in cotton. “I couldn't see,” you say to me. “I couldn't see anything. Did you get to cut it?”

At least I have this to give you. “No.”

And that – for the first time in this, the longest of all the days of creation – is when you cry.

Maybe it would have been easier at first if the baby had been born as a dinosaur out of your pterodactyl egg – a gigantic, toothy reptile that could walk and forage and lapse into sleepy, cold-blooded stasis without much help from you. But he's far too big for that. Instead, he's come to you like an eclipse of the sun – more vast than anything, crushing you into the gravity of the endless revolutions of his need.

Of course, you understand what it all means before I do. He's still just barely born when I notice you won't say his name above a whisper in the hospital in case the nurses or the janitors or – anybody – hears you.

“It doesn't seem right for us to be able to just start calling him whatever we want,” you say. “Our name for him – it's so arbitrary. I mean, we just made it up.”

I remind you of what you told me once about our names being social constructs. “It's how we show he belongs to us, remember? Out on the bridge that night?” I pause to assemble your old arguments. “Our names only exist outside ourselves. We don't even bother to use our names in our dreams, when we're asleep. Right?”

But you still look a little scared as you shrug one shoulder. Me and the baby – we've each changed your name. When we got married, I got you to abandon the surname you'd been known by for your first twenty-one years. And without a word, the baby now demands that you call yourself something like “Mom.” He's taken everything. Even a real dinosaur would have spared more.

At home, after dark, you are a ghost – a small, pale ghost rising from my bed in the night; walking over the carpet with bare, white feet; twisting the door knobs in the dark; grappling with the mass of snuffling, sticky humanity I call “Scottie” in the daylight – as if I know him. You stand away from me, in the quiet of the living room, swaying with the baby in the dark until the shabby apartment carpet starts to close over your toes and heels. The hallucination startles you awake on your feet, over and over again.

In the morning, when I ask how you've both slept, you tell me – hour by hour – how it all passed. And I listen, trying to stop my features from forming into the blank, sceptical face of any grown man listening to a ghost story.

“This nursing thing has got to be a sham,” you tell me. “Feel my breast. No – not like that. Like this. Do you feel that? It's not full of milk. It's packed with pebbles.”

“No, no.” I make a bright protest. “Look at how well he's growing. You can't build a boy like that out of pebbles.”

You bend to kiss the baby's silky head where he lies on the bed between us, waving his hands and fanning his fingers as if he's trying to maintain some kind of complicated magic spell over us. I don't know how you can keep from hating him, and I'm always relieved to see you kiss him or make some other kind of small display of your unlikely affection for him. Sometimes, I worry that it's all just Stockholm Syndrome. But then I decide that, for now, Stockholm Syndrome will do well enough.

Outside the apartment, there are term papers for me to write about fluid dynamics and kinematic determinacy. There are study groups full of paper cups and expensive calculators. There are labs and lecture halls – hard math classes and hard math classes called by other names. So I leave you, all day long. And for all but a few harried hours in the evening, my life looks remarkably similar to the one I lived before the eclipse of the sun – the end of your world.

You mourn your lost self. She leaks out in millilitres from your eyes every day at three o'clock in the afternoon.

“She's gone for good and as good as dead,” you tell me. “She's gone and I never realized before how much I loved her.”

Remember how badly it all scared me? Remember how I hid all the Radiohead CDs and looked up the number for the postpartum help hotline in the telephone book?

“Don't be stupid,” you say as you push the phone book back against my chest. “I'd be more worried about my state of mind if something like this failed to upset me.” And you show me a reference to something with the diminutive, flippant label of “baby blues” in the index of our dog-eared pregnancy and childbirth manual.

In all the years that follow, we never speak about the afternoon when you nurse the baby to sleep on our bed, tuck yourself back into your clothes, kiss my face, and tell me you're going out to buy bread and eggs. You drive to the grocery store, walk the aisles, pay our money – but you don't come home. You steer the car all the way through the city until you find an unfamiliar stretch of freeway charging northward. It leads you past the greasy architecture of the eastside refineries, the candy striped smoke stacks, the flaming orange gas flares.