Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  She had to get out of here, she realized. She had to get out now. The shower was still going, Megan presumably soapy beneath it. Totteringly, Alexis rose from the toilet, the automatic flush drowning out her weepy grunts. She could feel it falling from her now, gravity greasing its exit, and her eyes brimmed tears of pain and confusion. She was able to get her sweatpants up but she couldn’t close her legs or stand anywhere near upright; her posture was that of someone straddling an imaginary horse. She knew she couldn’t scream, not with Megan in the shower, though that was all she wanted right now: to eject this terrible pain from her body in one sustained and lung-emptying shriek. She promised herself that scream just as soon as she was safe in her room, where she could destroy a pillow with it, but until then the scream had to be denied, she had to pretend the pain didn’t exist. She could do that, she could. She clicked open the latch and hobbled sideways out of the stall, her legs akimbo, her back hunched, her face distorted with smothered torment. Enough of the girls had seen her go fleeing into the bathroom in a state of writhing pain; maybe seeing her come out that way would seem as natural.

  The shower stopped. Hearing Megan blow out a refreshed exhalation, Alexis froze, thinking she should retreat back into the stall to wait her out. But she couldn’t retreat: The pain was driving her forward, like kicks from an invisible torturer booting her from behind, along with an uncontrollable urge to just push. She wheeled toward the door, the blood from her bitten lip flooding the crevice beneath her bottom teeth, and was just through the wooden door as the contented thwip-thwap of Megan’s flipflops came echoing from the showers.

  Her room was directly across from the bathroom; she’d requested that positioning, owing to the IBS. From down the hall she heard a mixed ruckus of voices—everyone left their doors open at night, as an invitation for passersby to pop in to interrupt their studying—but the hall itself was empty, shimmery from a fluorescent light down the way that was trying, with buzzy struggle, to stay lit. She wambled across the hallway, with her legs spread wider now, her torso pitched lower, feeling the thing pulsing in and out of her as she went. When she got inside her room she collapsed straight to the floor, kicking the door shut behind her, and cupping her bloody lips against the carpet she vented a huge scream into its dirty fibers. She crawled forward, on her hands and knees, to the edge of her bed, but that was as far as she could go; when she tried rising again her body bucked in resistant agony. She tugged down her sweats and panties and kicked them by the door.

  She both knew and didn’t know what was happening to her. For the last eight months she’d been equipped with two separate and opposed brains, imparting two separate and opposed realities upon her. They’d demanded she choose between them, and, unconsciously, she had chosen, allying herself with the brain whose explanation for what was happening to her body, and her life, was less devastating. This didn’t mean the other brain was entirely eclipsed. At the doctor’s office with her mom, for instance, its voice had been loud and insistent, and inside that examining room she’d fully expected to have the choice made for her, the irreconcilable realities reconciled. But when the doctor said nothing, when he removed his hands from her abdomen and asked foggily about her IBS meds, the other reality came roaring back: See? it said, reassuringly. And then there was Gus’s visit, when he’d come to see what Varick life was like, and said to her, “Who knocked you up?” She’d gone apeshit on him, goaded by that alternate reality, dismissing him as a “faggot” (which was what the jocks called him, but never ever Alexis, no matter how hard the two of them had fought), and with tears in her eyes she’d fled down the sidewalk from him, later blocking his texts after he wrote, Srsly. Not a weight joke. WTF?

  Because it couldn’t be otherwise. Couldn’t be. Because, for one thing, she’d been on the pill, though not all that regularly. The pill played havoc with her goddamn IBS—something about hormone absorption and the lower intestine, she’d looked it up online after noting how her symptoms subsided when she was taking the one week of white pills versus the three of blue—so she’d tended to go off it during flare-ups, figuring she had enough residual hormones or whatever to coast through a few days or a week. But, for another—and here was where her mind always seized up, here was the chasm between the one brain and the other—she couldn’t say who the father was. Miguel, probably, which was bad enough. But—God. Possibly Chico, his best friend and cousin, whom Alexis hooked up with two days after she discovered Miguel’s cheating. It was just to get back at him, that was all. She’d never felt that way before: so used, so disposed of, so monumentally worthless. Like he’d taken his bite of her, and ditched the rest. The thing with Chico: It was just one half-drunk night, at a party Stacy Friedkin threw when her parents went to Bermuda. Poor Chico, he was such a loser, as awkward and ditzy as Miguel was smooth and connivingly smart. She’d attacked him like a vampire, up in Mr. and Mrs. Friedkin’s bedroom—a vampire wanting Miguel’s blood, to avenge the bite he’d taken from her with a bite of her own. In his stunned helplessness Chico lasted less than a minute, and putting his jeans back on he muttered something in Spanish that Alexis understood to be pleas for forgiveness from God or his cousin or both. She had expected to feel better afterwards—restored, atoned, equal. But instead she felt like death, her worthlessness compounded, and Miguel’s cheating almost validated because who would want a girl like herself? Despite all her rehearsals she’d never even told Miguel. She’d just gone on the same way Chico had: like it had never happened.

  The two brains were arguing now, waging a last-ditch battle for her consciousness. One ordered her to dial 911, while the other called that insane, an act of certain suicide. But she needed someone, she couldn’t bear this alone, it was suicide either way. Gus, yes Gus—but not Gus, she’d hurled him from her life and anyway he was the least stable person she knew. In an act of compromise the brains threw up Dave. Dave would understand. Except, no: No one could understand. She didn’t understand. But Dave was good at keeping secrets, Dave knew how to cover things. Plus he was in the city for a dinner meeting somewhere uptown; she knew this because earlier in the day she’d blown off his text about delivering her some jackets or warm clothes or somesuch shit her mom thought she needed. She positioned the phone in front of her as her hips rocked, her body determined to push but her mind objecting, the burning and the bulging bringing more tears to her eyes. Sick, she was able to type, sliding the phone up and away from the tears dripping onto the screen. Need u plz.

  A minute later came his reply: On my way home. Seriously?

  A contraction forced her head to the carpet and she clamped her eyes shut against it. She wanted to push so badly but she couldn’t, wouldn’t; she didn’t want that thing out of her, it had to stay there until she figured this out. When her body slackened she punched out: Hlp me.

  By the time the phone rang, with Dave’s numerals flashing, she was weeping. She wouldn’t have been able to answer it had she wanted to, which she didn’t. A text pinged shortly after: Turning around. She dropped her head again, letting it hang loosely from her neck, swaying. Texting him was a mistake; he couldn’t keep this secret, and therefore couldn’t help her. Her life was at stake now, every future she’d ever dreamt, every desire she’d ever had was being obliterated by this blackness forcing its way out of her, and the only possible thing he could do was make it all fucking worse. Barely able to control her fingers, which were like end points for the pain, shot through with its electricity, she typed nvrmind. She knew him. The easy way out was always Dave’s preference, and this would be enough for him. The phone rang, Dave again. He’d assume she was stuck in the bathroom, unable to talk. That one of her intestinal tornadoes had just blown its way through her. Nvrmind: that she’d finally crapped it out, keep driving.

  But the arguing brains, she realized, didn’t matter. They weren’t in control anymore, and neither was she. She felt another scream gathering in her lungs and grinding her lips into the carpet she redirected it through her nose, a blast of ai
r shooting through her nostrils as from a gas station tire pump. A ribbon of snot slapped her upper lip and she licked it off, mingling it with the blood on her tongue. Her vee-jay felt suddenly ablaze, with the flames spreading back toward her butthole, as though everything down there was melting into a single deformed orifice. Out of instinct she reached a hand beneath her, to try to ease the pain with some kind of adjusting, and she saw droplets of blood on the dorm-room carpet. Abandoning the adjustment, she yanked the duvet off her bed, raising one knee and then the other so that the fluffy, floral-printed duvet was bunched beneath her. Another contraction detonated, and she choked off her guttural scream with the carpet. Then she dragged a corner of the duvet up toward her face, to escape whatever foul graininess the carpet was gluing to her lips. The duvet smelled like the Febreze Amanda was always spraying through the room, and Alexis ground her face into its lavendered plushness as a massive push surged through her.

  When she lifted her head she could tell something had changed. The fire was out, at least partially. She heard a foamy, sputtering noise, and reaching beneath her again she felt the terrible wholeness of a—oh Christ, a head. It was dangling out of her. “God no please,” she moaned. Then the flames returned, even hotter than before, and unable to withstand it she reached underneath the head which swiveled in her palm and as she pushed she felt its knobby edges sliding inside her. Then came a giant fast squish as it slid out of her into the soft folds of the duvet.

  For a half-moment she felt a torrent of relief—physical relief, as though three hundred pounds of pressure had just been sucked from her body, every one of her cells twitching in grateful astonishment. But then she looked between her knees and saw it there, a blue and gray thing coated with blood and creamy white stuff. For another half-moment she felt another kind of relief: If it was blue, it was dead, or almost dead, and if it was dead then . . . but no: She could see it pinkening, and making bubbly noises as it moved or fell onto its side and jerked its limbs outward. The fact of its life, undeniable and irreparable, ripped a hole of terror through her mind, and to flee it she took two crawl-steps forward. But a squiggly blue cord, swinging out of her like a snake, was linking her to it. She reached back to pull the snake from her but the pain was excruciating; it was caught on something inside her. With a fierce grunt she tried pushing it out, but to no avail; the cord just dangled there, rebuking her, shouting Look this is yours. She had to disconnect herself, unlink herself, she had to cut the cord—

  Cut the cord. That’s where the saying came from. She’d just heard her mom say it the month before, as Alexis packed for college: cutting the cord. The umbilical cord. She crawled forward another six inches, more of the cord slithering out of her, until she could reach the desk drawer where Amanda kept her art supplies. She groped inside the drawer, trying to feel for scissors. When that didn’t work she wrenched the whole drawer from the desk, and a shower of supplies—paint-tubes and markers and brushes and colored pencils and glues—clattered to the floor. She fumbled through them until she found scissors.

  Gingerly but determinedly, she turned herself to a sitting position. It was squalling now, along with the voices in her head, and to them as much as it she murmured shutupshutupshutup. To muffle its cries, and to avoid her having to see it, she draped the duvet cover over it, focusing on the cord. It was flaccid now, and whitish blue, a thin rope of slime tethering her to the bump in the duvet. She fixed the scissors on it and squeezed, but the scissors slipped sideways. The cord was too tough, it was like wet rubber, and she let out a mewl of defeat and pulverized sorrow. She lifted the cord between the blades and tried again, sawing at it now, and from it popped a small blister of blood. Then she squeezed with both hands, and with a red spurt the cord fell apart from the scissors. From its end of the cord came a faint trickling; from her end, as she rose to her knees, the swinging cord spattered droplets across the duvet cover’s pansies. Her body was heaving again, the cramps re-activating, as she reached down to attempt again to pull the cord from inside her. But it was too slippery; it slid right through her hand. She threaded its bloody end around and between her fingers and pulled again, gently, and as if to aid her her body issued a minor but effective wave, and then another, and she felt something come slithering out of her and land with a viscid splash.

  She’d pulled out another it, oh God, another baby: This was her first panicked thought. Then another thought blew in, only slightly less alarming: She’d pulled out her liver. Her fucking liver! How else to explain the limp, purplish organ in an oozy puddle on the duvet? She measured her breaths, fully expecting death to claim her at any moment, because she knew you couldn’t survive without a liver, and for a swift and weirdly ecstatic moment she welcomed this end, invited death to strike her, because her dying meant that none of this mattered, because death would annihilate her future the same way life was doing, except without the pain. Then she looked down, and saw the duvet moving, and heard the bottled-up cries from inside it. Her heart was still beating; she could feel it, banging beneath her breasts which had never felt so sore and anxious as now. She didn’t want to be but she was alive.

  All that remained was it. If not for it, everything would be okay. If not for it, all she’d be facing was—a laundry crisis. She leaned back and surveyed the room, which looked like a murder scene. Stabilizing herself with the corner of the desk, she rose to her feet, but lightheadedness overwhelmed her, and she dropped her hands to her knees to keep from fainting. She had to get rid of it, she knew. It wasn’t healthy, she told herself—that blueness she’d seen, all that goop. It couldn’t survive this—things like it, they required hospitals, nurses, complicated machines, tubes, heaters, antibiotics. She glanced down at herself, horrified to see the smears of damp blood painted down her thighs, and the trail of red spatters on her t-shirt. She slipped off the t-shirt, dumping it first in the laundry hamper and then, reconsidering, stuffing it into the trash along with her sweats and underwear. She found she was able to walk, if very unsteadily and against a turbulent headwind of exhausted soreness, and with drips painting the carpet with every step she took. Stealing a maxipad from Amanda’s stash, she pulled on fresh undies, fresh sweatpants, a t-shirt, her own flipflops, tucked her phone into the waistband of her sweats: just like normal. A wincing glance in the mirror, however, confirmed her fears of how horrid she looked, the girl she’d once been reconstituted as a monster. With her bathrobe, hanging from the door, she scrubbed the blood from her chin and then her hands. Then she turned her attention to the duvet.

  Bending down, she unfolded the duvet off of it. As if in response, it let out a tremendous bawl, a shrill, pinched cry that caused Alexis to swoon, and almost faint right on top of it. She had to get it off the duvet somehow. The bathrobe, she thought, yanking it from the door hook. With the bathrobe spread beside it, she rolled it over, and from that one touch alone, or so it seemed, it went suddenly and expectantly quiet, mewing in anticipation. “I’m sorry,” she heard herself saying, in a voice that sounded distant and not quite hers, echoing up from the dark bottom of that gulf dividing the two brains. She wrapped the other side of the bathrobe around it, noting as she did the strange slack hose jutting from its middle, which looked inhuman, an alien appendage. She tucked in the loose ends to make a kind of white terrycloth bundle which she lifted onto the bed.

  The duvet was a sick mess, its pansies splotched with blood and other mysterious fluids. No way was it going into the trash can, a small bin already overflowing with her stained clothes. Amanda had some giant silvery trash bags, Alexis remembered, that she used for wrapping big canvases when walking them over to Sullivan Hall in the rain. She stuffed the duvet into one of the bags, and then fetched her clothes from the bin and added them to the bag too. She was breathing hard now, like she’d been running, and was startled to find her cheeks soaked; she hadn’t known she was crying. She held the open bag while staring at the bed, wiping her face with the back of her hand. A thought flashed, then was immediately expunged. She d
ragged the bag to her closet and crammed it inside, and by pressing the weight of her back against the closet door she was able to snap it shut. She was almost okay, she told herself, as she hobbled toward the bed, and with a grimace gathered up the bundle. She was almost okay.

  She didn’t know the time. Midnight, one, maybe later. She took the emergency stairs, the elevator not even a consideration, easing herself down by sliding her left hand down the rail while her right hand secured the terrycloth bundle to her chest. It wasn’t crying so much now, not like before. The students weren’t supposed to know the security code for the back service door but everyone did; that’s how they sneaked their hookups and/or boyfriends in and out. Though she’d never used the service door herself, Alexis had heard the code relayed in hushed conspiratorial tones, seen its four digits slyly enumerated in grin-backed sign language. She plugged in the code, and pushing through the door she emerged into the dark service alley.

  Outside the night was warm, even balmy, and for the city it seemed unusually quiet. She fell back against the wall beside the door, beneath the dirty yellow glow of the security light which unlike the lights back home was unbombarded with insects, paid no attention by the world. She stayed like that for as long as she could, or until a tiny crinkled fist poked its way out of the bundle. She bent it back inside, and tucked the bundle tighter. A hospital, she thought. Or a church. Either one would accept it, right? But then who’d be at a church at this time of night, and at a hospital—surely they wouldn’t just let her drop off a baby. Not without a blitz of questioning. She could say she found it, and run—except no, she couldn’t run in her condition. She could barely walk. Maybe—maybe near a hospital, against the wall by the Emergency Room door, where surely someone would hear it, surely someone smoking outside would be drawn to it, peek inside . . . she pulled out her cellphone, thinking she could use it to find the nearest hospital, and it vibrated in her hand. She answered it out of instinct, or maybe confidence, imagining this would all be over soon.