Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  And it was necessary, at least in my opinion. When we arrived at the hospital, with a portable Sony and a few tapes of favorite music—Albert King, Samuel Barber, Billie Holiday—and a bottle of Moët, Olivia was brought to the midwife’s birthing room, where she stayed in useless and excruciating labor for eight hours, until she was finally transferred to a more conventional labor room, where such things as fetal monitors and an intravenous drip of some labor-inducing drug were added to the program. She was suffering so much. There was nothing like natural childbirth to make you despise the natural world.

  We had taken our Lamaze classes. I had attended them faithfully and had looked around the little gray-and- boysenberry classroom in the Ethical Culture Center, at the other prospective fathers, most of them, like me, trying to play catch-up ball with their utterly absorbed wives. What are we doing here, gentlemen? I had wanted to say. Do we really think we can escape the spells of our own fathers by becoming fathers ourselves? Well, of course we were there to learn ways to lessen our lovers’ pain when the child within began kicking and twisting its way toward the light—breathe, darling, puff puff puff—but at least for Olivia and me it all turned out to be a waste. Olivia was in far too much pain to follow the rules of rhythmic breathing, and when she could it did no good anyhow. She held my hand and wept silently. I looked at her pale, sweaty, stricken, appalled, and overworked face, and then at the oscilloscope upon which our baby’s heartbeat was recorded, and then at the IV bottle of Pitocin, which was meant to induce her contractions, and then, finally, at Nurse Wurtzel, who continually jabbed her fingers into Olivia and scolded her for not dilating.

  “Let’s get a doctor in here,” I said to the midwife. She pursed her lips, furrowed her brow, and shook her head no. “We’ve been here for fifteen hours,” I went on. “She’s dilated four centimeters. I think—”

  “I know what you’re about to say,” said Wurtzel, now adding mind reading to her medieval bag of tricks, “but I can’t interrupt Olivia’s labor. She came here for natural childbirth.”

  “No,” I said, “you came here for natural childbirth. We came here for a baby, and I want that baby, and I want it now. You understand me? Get that fucking baby out of my wife.”

  “Sam, Sam,” said Olivia, feebly, her voice of reason making its way to me through a gauntlet of pain. Her lips were white, cracked. She patted my hand: more than a little humiliating, that.

  Wurtzel extended her fingers into Olivia and manually stretched the recalcitrant cervix. Olivia shrieked with pain.

  “What are you doing?” I bellowed.

  “It’s all right, Sam,” said the midwife; like many people uncertain of their status, she spoke in a superior tone.

  “I want her to have a Cesarean, right now. I want a doctor in here and I want her taken out of your hands—”

  “Sam,” said Wurtzel.

  “Look here, this natural childbirth is all you’ve got. Without it, you’re selling frozen yogurt. You understand me? Why do you have that peculiar expression?”

  “Stay with Olivia, Sam—she’s pushing, and I don’t want her pushing.”

  “Don’t push, Olivia,” I said. “Breathe.”

  “Okay, okay, we’re getting some action, folks,” said Wurtzel, evidently going through a bit of a personality transformation once the child’s head poked through, which was why she must have gone into this line of work to begin with, for these very necessary personality transformations. “We’ve got a baby coming through. Come on, Olivia— you’ve been wanting to push, now’s your chance….”

  And so forth and so on, all of that cheerleading and self- help lingo and gentle scolding and passionate rooting; but it would only be in retrospect that I could be arch about it—at the time I was as crazed as Wurtzel, practically shouting my encouragement into Olivia’s ashen face. In all the excitement, I didn’t notice Wurtzel had taken a pair of surgical shears to Olivia and widened her for the baby’s premiere. There was so much wetness, so much pain, redness, and chaos. I heard in my own voice a certain desperate quality; I was screaming and cheering like some loser on the rail of the clubhouse turn. Olivia held on to me, she squeezed my hand. She lifted herself off the bed as she made the effort to push the baby out, and she pressed her forehead into mine. The optimist who had told us these breathing techniques would greatly reduce the woman’s discomfort during birth had also warned that at a certain point in the labor it is not uncommon for the woman to turn savagely against the man, but this too did not turn out to be true. She clung to me as if I was her best friend as well as her husband and lover. I had never been so happy in all my life.

  “It’s a boy!” cried Wurtzel. She sounded jubilant, triumphant, and greatly relieved, as if—and this only occurred to me for a split second—this were the first time she had ever pulled one of these deliveries off successfully.

  I kissed Olivia. I placed her soaking, boneless hand upon her stomach, which even now was deflating. Wurtzel wrapped the boy in a blanket and handed him to Olivia, and in a frenzy of joy I kissed Wurtzel hard on the mouth.

  Michael was not an easy child. He seemed to miss the floaty darkness of the uterus, and we kept the apartment as dark as possible. He seemed also to dislike gravity—his face contorted all day long as if he were in a rocket ship going through G-force. Born with a full, minky head of hair, he soon lost it all save a few long, silky strands, and his naked scalp grew little scabs. He loathed having his diapers changed; cold pee and slimy shit were better than the intrusion of my hands. It had been agreed upon that this was my job, since Olivia had to do all the feeding. I warmed my hands near the electric heater, smoothed baby oil on them, tiptoed, smiled, cooed; but still Michael howled, arched his back, hovered above the changing table as if he were being given shock therapy.

  Michael slept in two-hour segments, a revolutionary howling in the hills of his own colic. Olivia and I walked him, but he was inconsolable. We rocked him back and forth, devised little dances that might jiggle him to sleep. “Go to sleep, go to sleep, you fucking asshole,” I would sing in a lilting whisper, as I held my miserable, squirming child in my arms.

  Eventually, inevitably, Michael would fall to sleep, and I would place him into the crib with almost psychopathic gentleness. And looking down at my son’s troubled face and his angry little body, I would suddenly love the boy with a kind of punchy rapture. He was so small, so tender; the will to protect him was so fierce that it must have somehow been there to govern an errant desire to do away with him once and for all. “My little guy,” I would whisper. “Son.”

  And now, beside me in my bed, Olivia truly was asleep. Her breaths were deep and slow. I slid next to her, held her warm body close. Some shrink I once interviewed for one of the men’s magazines told me that touching your wife while she sleeps is a return to taboo; it is our mother’s haunches we caress in the deep, timeless darkness of the boudoir. It amazed me that whatever a man does, there is always another man willing to charge money to tell him he is doing the wrong thing.

  I fell asleep for half an hour and then reawakened, my heart pumping stones. I thought of the first words of the Inferno: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and awoke to find myself in a dark wood.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  EARLIER THAT DAY, WHILE SAM TALKED TO MICHAEL’S shrink, Michael sat in Pennyman’s waiting room and reread Nadia’s letter. It aroused him, sickened him. He folded it up, stood, and slipped the single page into his back pocket. He stretched; his fingers almost touched the soundproofed ceiling. He forced himself to sit down again, picked up a copy of Newsweek, an old one with a picture of several pregnant teenagers on the cover. Nice to have been a part of that, he thought, and then, repelled by his own lonely lust, feeling that it connected him to the repulsive reality of his own father, he threw the magazine onto the carpet and stood up again. He had a strange and powerful urge to plunge his hand into the fish tank and squeeze the life out of those iridescent slivers of sl
ime.

  Michael left Pennyman’s office, not yet realizing that he could not face his father, or his mother, or any part of his life until he decided what to do with that letter in his pocket. He was already running, but he didn’t know it. He waited for Sam for a few minutes in front of the Leyden Craft Shop, next door to Pennyman’s building, but the sight of those skeins of yarn bunched up like toxic figure-eights made him physically ill: everything irritating about the move to Leyden seemed to be captured by those packets of copper, yellow, and pink. Who in their right mind would ever make or wear something in those colors?

  And so he drifted down Broadway and then, when he was on the corner of Broadway and Route 100, with the Smoke Shop on one side of him and the George Washington Inn on the other, Michael, with the casualness of someone flipping a coin, stuck out his thumb.

  The first car that appeared stopped. “And so it was ordained by fate,” Michael intoned to himself as he ran toward it, a Honda Accord the color of shit.

  Michael opened the Accord’s door and peered in. The driver was wiry, with a freckled face, dark glasses. He looked like a pilot for a small regional airline, whereas he was in fact a salesman flogging stainless-steel juicers. He had boxes of them in the backseat, along with a tan sports jacket on a wooden hanger, its sleeves stuffed with pink tissue paper.

  “What’s up, champ?” the salesman said, delivering the line with gusto, believing in the indelibility of first impressions.

  Michael slipped into the car, relieved to be entering someone else’s life. The car smelled of the air freshener that came off the little cardboard pine tree that dangled from the rearview mirror. Crosby, Stills and Nash were on the cassette deck. Michael hated oldies.

  “Where to, champ?”

  The salesman patted his own hair and frowned. The scented pine tree swung back and forth as he negotiated a curve. They were picking up speed. He noticed that Michael was staring at the cassette player.

  “You like the sounds?”

  “Not really,” said Michael.

  “You want to listen to something else? I’ve got tunes for every mood. Jazz, rock, torch songs—I even have show tunes. I sing along with them when I’m starting to nod out.” He gestured toward the glove compartment.

  “It’s your car, you can listen to whatever. Anyhow, thanks for stopping for me.”

  “Out there for a while, huh.”

  “Negative, sir.”

  The salesman squinted at Michael, a little uneasy with that last remark.

  “You haven’t told me where you’re going,” he said.

  “Correct,” said Michael. It was a form of reply he had picked up in Leyden High: to the point, crypto-military. It spread gloom in his house when he used it. The salesman looked at him and then, slowly, smiled. Michael sensed the guy was already regretting having stopped.

  “So. Where are you going?”

  “This way is fine. The way you’re driving.”

  Now the bud of the salesman’s regret was opening quickly; it was almost in full flower: time-lapse photography.

  “Are you in some kind of trouble, champ?”

  “No.”

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing about how life used to be so hard and then they bought a house in the country and a fucking pussycat and that made everything great.

  “Actually,” Michael said, “since you offered, I guess I wouldn’t mind turning the music off.”

  He pressed the Eject button on the cassette player and the radio kicked in, tuned to a station the car had passed through hours ago, now reduced to a storm of static. Michael touched the Power button and the car was silent. Michael listened to the hiss of the tires over the two-lane blacktop. They were already well out of town.

  “You sure you’re not in trouble?” the salesman asked, in a level, almost friendly voice, as if sounding sincere would elicit sincerity in others.

  “What if I am? Isn’t everybody in some kind of trouble?”

  “I’m not in trouble,” said the driver.

  “Then neither am I.”

  “I think you’re kind of a wiseass, is that it, champ?”

  “Sorry. My father’s screwing somebody and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “What makes you think you gotta do anything?”

  “I just think it. I don’t know why I think half the things I do.”

  “You want to know what I think? I think you and I aren’t going to be able to do business.” He was already slowing the car down, steering it to the side of the road, up on a shoulder of pebbles and pine needles. “Take a hike, champ.” The salesman drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. His nails were manicured, lightly coated with clear polish. His gold ring had a dark red stone at the center.

  “Oh, come on,” said Michael. He stalled for time, but he knew he was out. He could feel the salesman’s desire to hurt him; it was like a dog whose growl was so deep you couldn’t hear it, but your bones buzzed.

  “I’m not going to debate it with you, champ. This is my car and what I say goes.” He reached for the passenger- side door, brushing against Michael. Michael sensed the guy’s tense, hard body beneath the bright white shirt. The door flew open so quickly it bounced on its spring hinges and almost closed again.

  “Thank you ever so much for the ride,” Michael said, getting out, carefully, insanely carefully, closing the door behind him. He stepped back as the car peeled out, the tires spitting pebbles and dirt. Michael cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted after the car, “I forgot to tell you to go fuck yourself!”

  He waited there until the car disappeared and then there was silence, except for the wind blowing through the treetops.

  He walked along the highway, bereft of plans, with no idea where he was going. It struck him: until this moment he had always been on his way somewhere—to school, to bed, to dinner or the movies. Even the hours of excruciating boredom were crossed by the shadow of some looming obligation. As a young child, he had once despaired that all of the continents, even every island, had already been discovered, and wherever you would go someone else had been there first. But now, at last, he had found a place to call his own, an emptiness that was his and his alone, a private preserve of nothingness.

  Suddenly, he didn’t want to risk being seen. Maybe his parents were already looking for him; maybe a friend of theirs might coincidentally drive by. He got off the highway at the first dirt road. The mouth of the road was wide and dusty, but it immediately narrowed, darkened, as it wound through the dense, budding woods that grew on either side of it.

  Michael walked south on Paige Road. Spokes of soft, lint-drenched sunlight fanned through the trees. Here and there, dandelion spores rotated slowly in the breeze. The sky was dark, the electric, almost pathological blue of airport landing lights.

  He heard a sound, looked up. The treetops moved slowly, in a kind of visual stutter, pictures in a flip book propelled by a faltering thumb. Michael reached into his Army fatigue jacket and pulled out a lone Marlboro. In the other pocket was a book of matches Sam had brought home from Shun Lee West in New York. He lit up and stepped off the road. He didn’t know exactly where he was, or how close to the nearest house. He only smoked in private; it just wasn’t something he wanted to do in plain sight, any more than he’d want to urinate or pick his nose or read Penthouse in front of others. He inhaled voluptuously and stood there in the budding brambles along the roadside. He looked into the woods. The spokes of sunlight seemed further away. He scrambled up a slight incline and now he was in the first row of saplings. Deeper in, the trees were gnarled, thick. There was no pathway, but the trees lured him in, farther and farther. They exerted a kind of irresistible green magnetism.

  CHAPTER

  5

  WE WERE HOMELESS. THOUGH WE STILL HAD A ROOF over our heads, several changes of clothes, food, heat, bank accounts, toilets, a TV, Michael’s disappearance rendered it all useless. The things of life are not pleasures
so much as protection from pain, and once they can no longer stop or even mitigate your misery it is as if they have disappeared. Our beds turned to stone; the food rotted in the refrigerator, or the frying pan, or in our very mouths; and the roof was lifted off as if by a storm—though we could hear the rain beating against it, it also fell directly upon us, soaking us, freezing us, as we staggered from room to room, wondering where in the entire world he could be.

  Amanda came home Sunday morning around eleven. We had hoped she would stay with Elektra for the whole day, but Elektra and her mother were fervently religious and they spent Sunday in church. We would have liked to protect Mandy from the truth about Michael, but we were ravaged, and we knew we had to tell her he was Out There Somewhere and that we were looking for him.

  “The important thing, sweetie,” I said, “is that you don’t worry. Okay?” I was sitting at the kitchen table, with Amanda half on my knee. She had slept in her clothes; her hair held a faint whiff of incense. I tapped my knuckle on her chin and smiled. Olivia, I noticed from the corner of my eye, was frowning at me. Was I saying the wrong thing? Or the right thing in the wrong way? Was I appearing too nonchalant, or acting like a liar? What? It was all I could do to restrain myself from looking at Olivia and saying, “Do you have a problem?”

  Amanda was beautiful, like Olivia, like Olivia’s sister, Elizabeth, like their mother. Tall, bony, dark-haired, coal- eyed, with a full, red mouth and a long neck, she even had a copper-colored birthmark the size of a ladybug beneath her right ear, just like the rest of them. She seemed to belong to them in some immense and fateful way. I could imagine all of them, years from now, shopping together, traveling to Scotland, drinking tea laced with whiskey by the fireplace, sharing their secrets. They seemed like an unbroken chain, a chain of women, and I was just something that had happened, someone who had come in and out of their lives.