An Elegant Theory

by Noah Milligan

“Are you serious?”

  “Just fucking do it!”

  Coulter searched for “how do you know if your water broke?” In 0.20 seconds he got 6,430,000 returns. He clicked on the first one. “Amniotic fluid surrounds your baby during pregnancy,” it said. “Towards the end of pregnancy, the amount of collagen decreases in the chorion, the outer layer of the bag of water. Collagen is a fibrous connective tissue. It can be found in cartilage, ligaments, and tendons.” All facts, pointless, stupid facts that told him absolutely nothing.

  “Did you feel something pop?” he asked, finally getting to information that provided some hints.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t! Fuck. I’m freaking out here.”

  Dr. Brinkman would be waiting for him right now along with the rest of his dissertation committee. He was supposed to be there in twenty minutes. Twenty. Minutes.

  “It says to lie down. Wait for like five minutes or so and then stand up again. If your water broke, more fluid should leak from your vagina.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Sara lay down, her head propped up by two pillows. Her hair splayed about her like she floated in water, the strands drenched at the root to accentuate the effect.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said. “Oh my God, what are we going to do?”

  “What does the fluid smell like?”

  “I mean, I knew it was coming and everything, but fuck, it’s here. It’s here. We’re having a baby!”

  “Did you see it? What color was it? It should be clear more than likely. But it could also be yellow, pinkish, brown, or even green. That’s not very helpful.”

  “How can you be so calm?”

  “Maybe we should call your doctor.”

  “Okay. Hand me my phone.”

  Coulter did, and she called by pressing one button, her doctor on speed dial. Her breaths were short and quick, and spittle jumped from her open mouth when she exhaled. She looked scared, like she had for the past five or six months now. Of course, Coulter was scared, too—having a baby was an intrinsically terrifying experience regardless if the pregnancy was planned or not—but he hadn’t worn it on his expression like a disfigured Halloween mask. This had become a point of contention for them over the months.

  “Aren’t you worried?” she would ask. He’d be bent over a book, penciling in a diagram on a piece of graph paper, his fingers flying over calculator buttons all at once. She’d be across the kitchen table from him, clipping coupons and organizing them into an accordion folder.

  “Of course I am,” he’d say, his pencil still scribbling with such force that pieces of graphite flaked onto the page. Each time he wiped them away, they would discolor the paper like smeared soot.

  “You don’t show it.”

  “Everyone shows anxiety differently,” he’d try to tell her.

  She’d make a popping noise with her mouth and look slightly above Coulter’s head. She didn’t believe him. That much was obvious.

  “I don’t feel like you’re in this with me. I mean, I know it’s different for us. He is growing inside of me after all.” Whenever she felt it necessary to point out this little tidbit, he could feel agitation crawl over his skin and he had to fight the urge to wonder what it would be like to slap her across the face. Not hard, just a little tap to let her know that he didn’t appreciate it. “Everything I’ve read says that you won’t really feel like a father until he’s here and you can hold that little love in your arms, but I thought you would be more involved than this.”

  “I’m involved. I am.”

  She cradled her stomach as if it was a breadbasket. It was about as large as one and as soft, nothing like the firmness of pre-pregnancy. Not that Coulter wasn’t attracted to his wife any longer—that wasn’t it, not really anyway. It just felt inappropriate to touch her in that way now—she was somebody’s mother.

  A motherfucker.

  He would be a motherfucker, and that thought, for whatever reason, troubled him. He couldn’t get it out of his head. While they made love, he’d try to think of other women, attractive women, actresses and popstars, even girls from those dirty movies he’d watched as a kid.

  “I’m not saying like going to the doctor or anything. I know you’re there. But you’re not emotionally there. You know what I mean?”

  Each time she’d get into this line of questioning, Coulter would attempt to persuade her otherwise, but even to himself his persistent refutations sounded thin, like an exhausted parent too tired to use reverse psychology on his child anymore. Eventually he’d just drop it, shrug, and return to his work.

  That, unfortunately, was not an option this time—as soon as Sara stood up, amniotic fluid ran down the inside of her thighs.

  “Oh fuck,” Sara said. “Oh Jesus shit fuck Christ.”

  Coulter, to his surprise, went straight mechanical, moving at a steady and quick pace to the closet, grabbed the bag they’d previously packed for this occasion, and looped his arm around Sara’s.

  “Can you walk?” he asked.

  She nodded. She was scared, but at least she was responsive.

  “Okay,” he said. “Follow me.”

  The delivery room was larger than Coulter had anticipated. It resembled a hotel suite, not some cold and sterile operating room. A large television hung from the ceiling. The bed appeared comfortable, the mattress thick, the pillows plush, though it was clad in simple white sheets the texture of sandpaper. Floor-to-ceiling closets framed the bedside. They were pre-fabricated and assembled on the spot like a fixture bought at Ikea, but they were nice, roomy, and easily stored their overnight bag along with both their oversized coats. A couch was pushed up against the far wall underneath a large window that overlooked downtown’s skyline. Low-hanging clouds blocked out the sun, enveloping the city in a hushed glow.

  Sara was still freaking out, sitting straight up and already doing the breathing exercises she had learned at Lamaze class although they weren’t necessary yet. Hee—hee…hooo. Hee—hee…hooo. A slight, reverberating moan could be heard coming from her throat, like she was about to growl or maybe bark. Every few minutes she doubled over, clenched her stomach, and ground her teeth so that Coulter could hear the molars sawing down enamel. He wished he could do something for her. Massage her shoulders or get her a wet rag or inject her with morphine, but his excitement and anxiety and absolute, positive, prodigious terror kept him cemented to the linoleum floor with exclamations of Oh My God Oh My God Oh my fucking God on a recurring loop silently shrieking at him inside his skull. He’d never been much of a Cartesian theatre proponent, instead deferring to a more material reductionist view of consciousness, but yet he didn’t feel as though he had control of this voice. Some other being did.

  Sara wanted the epidural NOW. Not that he could blame her, but what in the hell could he do about it? There were just these two nurses here, chitchatting away about stupid reality television for Christ’s sake, who the Bachelorette, that slutty Becky, was going to end up marrying—not Rick, for the love of God, they didn’t want Rick. “The doctor will let us know when she would like for you to have it.” The doctor wasn’t even in the hospital. They had been communicating by cell phone, and who knew how long it would take before she could reach the delivery room. A Pitocin drip had been hooked into Sara’s arm that caused her to scream uncontrollably every couple minutes and inch along toward that finish line of pushing a human being out of her. It was like the two of them were in completely separate realities from the nurses—he in a panic, unsure of what to do or say, and Sara, doubled over in pain and about to give birth, and then there were these two women, discussing the goings on of reality television as if the outcome were the most pressing matter of their lives. It seemed unfathomable to Coulter. Unconscionable, really. So much so, in fact, he couldn’t help but wonder to himself: Did they even exist?

  “OOOoooohhhh my Godddddd!” Sara screamed. “I think I’m dying
.”

  “Just breathe,” Coulter said. “We’ll get through this together.”

  “I just wish Bobby knew what that slut said to Rick,” the fat nurse said to the tall one. “I mean, if you’re two-timing someone, you should give the one you’re stringing along the benefit of the doubt, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Unh-huh. I do. Just ain’t right.”

  “When did the doctor say that she would be here?” Coulter asked.

  The nurses continued to ignore him, jabbering along in that southern drawl that didn’t fit. Where were they from, Oklahoma? How many Oklahoma transplants could be in one Boston hospital room at one time? It seemed like one of those riddles that were constructed to be unanswerable—like the one that questions the evolutionary timeline of chickens.

  The egg came first, Coulter answered nobody, not the chicken. The egg was an evolutionary by-product created deep in the sea long before birds set foot upon the earth.

  “She’ll be here when she’ll be here, honey. Don’t you worry. We do this all the time.”

  They continued their prep work, which consisted of readying a cart for the doctor. There was betadine and forceps and latex gloves and an orthoscope and stethoscope. They stocked baby powder and antiseptic ointments and needles and IV bags of antibiotics and painkillers. They could’ve supplied a small nation-state with medical supplies with all the items they had. And all of it had its own little place, its own little compartment, planned and organized, well-prepared, and this should have calmed Coulter, but it didn’t. It didn’t at all. Why would they need so much stuff?

  “All right, sweetie,” the short, fat nurse said. She had the face of a pug, canine cheeks and bicuspids that gave Coulter the impression she would bite him if he said the wrong thing. “We’re going to go ahead and get started now. You just lean on back and don’t worry your pretty little head off, k?”

  They readied Sara. She lay back in the bed and propped her feet up on the stirrups and instructed Coulter to pull back on her knees when it was time to push. It wasn’t time just yet but would be soon. Coulter stayed near Sara’s torso so as not to wander too far south where he could see her dilated vagina. Not that he wasn’t curious. He was. Watching a human being born, nonetheless his son, was a fascinating event, a miraculous feat of evolutionary biology that had always astounded him. We could grow people. Just amazing. But he was timid, too, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to look at his wife, who he loved dearly, the same afterward. Would he still find her attractive? Would he still be able to make love to her? And there was that smell. It was a mixture of pesticide-treated soil and sautéed onions.

  Sara continued her breathing, and the pug-faced nurse crouched down like a catcher and peered inside his wife.

  “Everything’s looking hunky dory,” she said. “I can see the head. Hairy little thing. You must’ve had some nasty heartburn, little lady.” “I want the epidural!” Sara said. “I want it now!”

  “Oh, it’s too late now. We done missed our window.”

  “You. Give. It. To. Me. Now!”

  “Brace yourself, sweetie.” The pug-faced nurse winked. She actually winked. “We’re in for one hell of a bumpy ride.”

  Dr. Remington finally arrived with hands upturned in the air, looking like a woman who had eaten too much. Her eyelids drooped, her shoulders slumped, and her belly protruded. She looked like she could use a nap. She sat on a stool between Sara’s legs and slapped on some latex gloves. This was all routine to her. She’d done this billions of times before. In fact, she seemed more concerned with digesting her large meal than she was with delivering the baby. She belched slightly, her mouth filling with air before expelling it in a small whoosh. She twisted her torso, as if helping the food down her intestinal tract. Her nonchalance didn’t comfort Coulter at all. Instead, it scared the ever-living hell out of him. It was, after all, when practitioners got complacent that dreadful mistakes were made.

  “Betadine,” she said in a sleepy voice.

  She lathered up his wife’s inner thighs and vagina. Curiosity got the better of Coulter, and he looked. It wasn’t an aesthetically pleasing sight by any means, but the sight captured a beauty Coulter had never experienced. Within him came an outpouring of feeling, not so much an abstraction, an emotional idea such as love or empathy or happiness, but a physical reaction to the sight he was seeing—the birth of his son, Isaac. Neurons fired more intensely. His heart rate increased. His blood pressure escalated. His breathing quickened. He became attuned to his anatomy like he’d never been before. All the pain he had from clenching his muscles ebbed away. He felt numb on the outside, yet everything was magnified on the inside. It was an amazing effect, really, one that he never wanted to end.

  “When I say to,” Dr. Remington said, “I want you to push. Understand?”

  Sara nodded. She had the expression of a woman just told that her arms and legs needed to be amputated to stave off an infection that would, if not cut out, dissolve her heart and lungs into a black and vile sludge. Despite the worst imaginable pain known and experienced by mankind, she was determined to see it through. It was the bravest thing Coulter had ever witnessed, or, he was convinced, that he ever would. He’d never know that type of bravery. If faced with similar circumstances, he would, he was sure, opt for death.

  The baby’s head crowned. Dr. Remington rubbed her index and middle finger along the bottom side of the birthing canal. “Push,” she said. “Now. Push.”

  He pulled back on her left thigh as Sara strained to push out their child. Its head slid up and out of the canal, the coned skull just past the threshold, but then Sara tired out and gave into the pain and relaxed, and the head seeped back inside of her. A thick, phlegmy fluid soaked the child and the inside of the mother and the inside of her thighs. It coated everything, and it smelled of mold and exposed human tissue. The child’s thick, tangled hair matted against its pate, like the fibers of a brush soaked by paint. Coulter was afraid it couldn’t breathe, that they would have a stillborn baby. Why wasn’t it crying yet? Why wasn’t it moving? An anxiousness gripped his chest and constricted his respiratory system. It became tight and shrunk to a child’s size. He would, if this lasted much longer, suffocate. He was absolutely sure of it.

  “Keep going,” Dr. Remington said. “You’re almost there. Keep pushing.”

  But then, without warning, their child slid out of her and into the waiting arms of the doctor. It didn’t cry right away, and Coulter stopped breathing. It was purple. Wasn’t it purple? The doctor lightly smacked the baby’s butt, but still it didn’t scream. Sara had fallen back into the bed, too tired to lean forward any longer, but she reached for her child. She wanted to hold her baby.

  “What’s wrong?” Sara asked. “Why don’t I hear him?”

  “Come on,” Dr. Remington said. “Come on, little one.”

  Coulter waited for it, a sound. Anything. A cry bursting from weak lungs. The tiniest little whine, an asthmatic wheeze, pilfering through clenched lips. And then it came: a shrill, cackled scream, reverberating like the Doppler effect. He was here, his son, his baby boy, and there was nothing he could do about it now.

  I’M NOT USUALLY ONE FOR EMOTIONAL OUTbursts. It’s not that I find them crass, nor do I look down upon them with derision. If anything, I see my lack of emotion as a flaw. Emotions have evolved over millennia to serve particular functions. Fear can be used as a motivator to flee a predator. Sadness can assuage a grief-stricken individual. Happiness increases serotonin and triggers the pleasure centers in the brain. My lack of feeling has resulted in a numbness towards life, carved by short bursts of sublimity. Psychiatrists refer to this as repression and compensation. For example, a victim might repress abuse from a perpetrator for years, even forgetting the memory, replacing the lashes from a belt or the unwanted sexual touch with happier and fabricated lies, and then, much later, an event will trigger these unhappy memories, sending the victim into a hysterical bout of anger and self-loathing and lowered inhibition
s. I didn’t realize this was happening to me until I met my neighbor for the first time. But my outburst wasn’t immediate or short-lived. It was something I carried with me for a little while before acting out.

  Her name was Becky, and she’d been married for fifteen years, all of it spent in the apartment next door to us. She had a black eye, but it wasn’t her first. I could tell by the sunglasses she wore despite the overcast weather and the practiced way she tilted her head when she looked at you, so that at first glance you weren’t sure whether or not the bruise was just a shadow.

  The four of us—my mother, father, Sara, and I—had been returning home from dinner when we came upon her digging through her purse. She couldn’t find her keys.

  “I’m such an idiot sometimes,” she said. “I swear to Christ my ass would fall off my hips if I swung ’em hard enough. Good thing Taylor never takes me dancing.”

  We offered her water and crackers as we didn’t have anything else to give, and I called a locksmith who told me he would “get there when he got there.” I refrained from pointing out his unproductive tautology.

  She had an odd mix of personality, Becky did. She had the abrasiveness of a tomboy, a girl with older brothers, a girl who would rather build a fort and play with old tires than with a Barbie. Dirt lined her fingernails, and she wore men’s denim jeans. She didn’t filter her language, spurting out curse words that would make any Gloucester fisherman blush. But she had her reservations, too. She covered her mouth as she chewed, and she kept her knees touching and her shoulders hunched as if trying to take up the smallest amount of space as possible.

  Taylor was her husband and, presumably, the cause of the black eye. We’d often heard them fighting next door, arguing about money or how to discipline Gavin, their seven-year-old, but we’d never heard anything turn violent, with the exception of the other night. The thud we’d heard had apparently been her head being struck by something solid. A lamp base maybe. Or perhaps just a hard, closed fist.

  “Oh, I know what you mean,” Sara said. “Before, I thought this whole ‘pregnancy brain’ I was told about was a bunch of crap, but it’s true. I’ll walk into a room without the slightest idea why. I’ll run a bath and then forget about it and flood the bathroom. It’s like this little guy is eating half my brain.”