My job as his attendant is to decide when he’s about to suffocate. Over his bed is a black box that blinks bright red digits, like a radar gun. One hundred is a perfect score. Under ninety and the box starts to beep, and I’m meant to call a nurse to suction the mucus from his nose and mouth. For an hour or so, his number is a reassuring ninety-four, but then it plummets, and I call a nurse. Twenty minutes later it happens again, and then again and again. It’s about six at night when at length he is finally able to breathe properly, and falls asleep. That’s when the phone rings. I didn’t even know there was a phone, but there it is, howling, right beside his ear. He wakes up and begins to cry. I pick it up. It’s a woman who says she’s from the hospital’s “financial counseling department.” The department has checked our health insurance, she says, and discovered that we have a hundred-dollar deductible.
“So?” I say. Walker’s now trying to holler. Only he has no voice, so the cries emerge as tiny gasps.
“How do you want to pay?” she asks.
“Just send it to me,” I say.
“We typically collect before you leave the hospital,” she says.
“Can’t you just stick it in the mail?” I ask.
“I’ll send over by courier,” she says.
Forty minutes later the patient is soothed and sleeping again when in charges a nurse. “Where’s Mama?” she asks loudly. Walker wakes up and begins to cry. The nurse tsk-tsks around him until he is inconsolable and then finally says, “There should be more fathers like you.” “There are!” I want to say, but before I can, she’s gone, and I’m working to get him back to sleep.
Thirty minutes later the courier bangs on the door, with the bill, waking him all over again. And so it goes, for the next twenty-four hours. Bill collectors, nurses, doctors, interns, floor cleaners, linen changers: As soon as he’s recovered from one of their visits and fallen back to sleep, another bursts into the room and disturbs him all over again. Each time he wakes, he cries, and each time he cries, he generates mucus, and each time he generates mucus, he begins to wheeze and his radar-gun readings plummet. The odd thing about this is that the doctors all admit that there is nothing they can do for him. He’s in the hospital only so he can be near an artificial respirator. But the hospital seems only to increase the likelihood that he’ll need an artificial respirator. Such is the state of our health-care system: They keep you from dying, but somehow leave you feeling you’re getting the raw end of the deal. Asking politely for peace and quiet does no good; the nurses change every four minutes, and the new one never has any idea what the old one did or didn’t do. After the fifteenth time he’s awakened, I decide that it’s time for a show of paternal authority. I make a sign:
PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.
I’M SLEEPING.
THANK YOU.
WALKER.
I tape it to one side of the door, and drag the chair that doubles as a bed against the other, so that no one can enter without climbing over it, and me. Then I hunker down, like some Montana survivalist, and wait for the enemy. The first assault comes about ten o’clock that night: a new nurse.
“Can I help you?” I say curtly.
“I just want to look at him.”
“Why?”
“We’re supposed to,” she says—which is to say that even she knows she serves no good purpose other than to collect evidence for any future lawsuit.
“Nope,” I say.
And she leaves!
I repel several more assaults until, finally, word must have spread that there’s a total asshole guarding the little boy in Room 5426, because we find ourselves well and truly alone. I change his diapers and feed him and suction the mucus from his nose. I notice for the first time that he has my hands and feet. I study the little heart-shaped birthmark on the back of his head. I discover that if I hold him to my chest and hum against the back of his neck, he falls right to sleep. Tabitha comes and offers to take over, but the truth is I don’t want to leave: He feels like my jurisdiction. After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you’re meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It’s only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.
And he gets better, and better. On the third day, he’s hitting one hundred on the radar gun, and seems almost himself. At six o’clock that morning, an intern—a student who is there for no reason other than to satisfy his curiosity—catches me off guard in the bathroom. But I hear a stir. I bound out to discover this child-doctor bent over my son, preparing to apply cold metal to sleeping flesh.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I snap at him.
“Can I listen to his breathing?” he asks. He’s not even a doctor. He’s a tourist.
“No!” I boom, Shrek-like. I haven’t slept in two days and I’m in no mood. Still, it comes out a more menacing sound than I intended. The poor kid actually trots out the door. Then I look down at Walker and, unless I’m mistaken, he’s laughing. He’s got tubes coming out of every orifice, and he’s having a ball. We’re just two guys in a foxhole, defending ourselves against repeated, ceaseless assaults from the hospital staff.
“How you doin’, buddy?” I say.
“Coo!” he says, and smiles. It’s a big sloppy grin. It’s then that the doctor arrives, with good news. She points to the black box over his head—his number flashes between ninety-four and ninety-six—and says, “He’s the strongest on the floor.” My first thought: There are twenty-four other kids with the same thing and they’re all more likely to die than he is, and…since no one ever heard of twenty-five kids dying in a children’s hospital…he’s not going to die. My second thought: He’s winning the RSV tourney! I look down at him, proudly. He smiles again. I’m hooked.
SPLAYED ON THE operating table, staring at the back of a nurse scrubbing her hands, I was struck by the possibility that, in addition to its other challenges, a vasectomy might be a socially awkward experience. “Do you need to empty your bladder?” asked the nurse, who clearly found hospital English the safest language in which to address a stranger’s genitals. The clinic walls were undecorated, save for a lone medical drawing of the male sex organ, flayed to reveal its sober inner logic.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right back to give you a shaving,” and left to do whatever nurses do before they apply razors to testicles. Two months earlier, in the pre-interview, during which it was determined that whatever I may have been told by my wife or the state police, I was under no legal obligation to be sterilized, the doctor explained that California law required a cooling-off period between consultation and operation. On that chilly afternoon, he told me many other things about vasectomies but somehow failed to mention that they began with a good ball-shaving from a woman who didn’t look you in the eye, or say a word beyond the bare minimum.
The nurse returned, wearing the same blank expression but now waving a new disposable razor, which struck me as a cheap tool for a dear job. She worked quickly and joylessly, like a Marine barber. I wanted to be helpful but there wasn’t much to do, except to hope she didn’t flinch. In the vast silence, insane thoughts flitted across my disturbed mind.
Is it possible to shave something off by mistake?
Jesus Christ…What if I get an erection?
Would it be my last?
Maybe I should pop one off, just for old times’ sake.
There are times when the mind is a dangerous place to be, and this was one of them. The ceiling, like the floor, was speckled linoleum. I stopped thinking and counted speckles until, at length, she finished. Chucking the disposable razor, she said, “The doctor will be here in twenty minutes.”
The interesting thing about twenty minutes is how many more they can seem to be. One of the reasons I found myself on this table was that I hadn’t imagined what exactly was going to be done here. I now had time to consider the matter and ask myself a few obvious questions. For example: What
the hell am I doing here? In theory, the answer was at hand. My wife wanted me to be here, and it seemed too transparently selfish to refuse. She’d endured three pregnancies, suffered the pain and indignity of three childbirths, changed most of the diapers, gotten up most of the mornings, and, on top of it all, given me the leisure to keep a journal of complaints about the inconveniences of fatherhood. The time had come for Daddy to take one for the team.
This explanation had sufficed—right up to this moment. Now, with the doctor’s scalpel just minutes away, it was drowned out by a new sound, of a grown man screaming:
THEY’RE GOING TO CUT A HOLE IN MY JOHNSON!
I mean, why am I really here, stretched out and hairless and exposed and not knowing what to say to the mute lady scraping away south of the border? I now asked myself. What’s the meaning of this outrage? This operation wasn’t about birth control. It was about life control. I should have fought for my reproductive rights, like other men. A friend of mine, when his wife suggested he might go and get himself gelded, had just laughed and said, “What if I want a trophy wife one day?” Another had declined his wife’s invitation to a beheading by saying, “What if you and the kids go down in a plane crash?” Other men I knew refused on the grounds of rumors they’d heard about the operation’s side effects. “I have a friend who had it done and he couldn’t feel his dick for ten months,” a guy at a dinner party told me knowledgeably. “After that I said, ‘No way.’”
And these were men who lived in Berkeley, California! Imagine the conversation in the red states, where men were men. One day someone is going to interview a statistically representative cross section of the population and write the definitive sociological treatise on the hidden debate inside the post-reproductive American marriage about whose loins were meant to be surgically closed for business. As that treatise has not yet been written, we are left to guess at its future conclusions. My own guess is that wives across America are seeking, OPEC-like, to control the flow of their husbands’ sperm while those husbands are struggling to keep the pipelines open. There’s a war being waged for control over a precious resource, but without correspondents. The only news comes from couples in which the male already has been neutered: These people of course always piously claim that it was never really an issue and the husband honestly never wanted anything so much as to become an It.
Alone on the operating table, I got myself well and truly worked up. Then, from nowhere came another voice. “You’re being a dick,” it said.
Sweet Reason had intervened. “You are not being fair,” she said. “You agreed to do this and she never really pressed you that hard, except to remind you every two months that you had promised to do it, and to ask if you had scheduled the appointment.” I began to list all the good things I could think of about being sterile:
If my wife gets pregnant, I’ll know for sure that I am not the father.
If some other woman gets pregnant, I can’t convincingly be blamed for it.
Maybe it was my inability to think up a third item for the list, or perhaps it was the bright red flayed penis on the wall beside me, but now a new notion popped into my head: Flee! Shaved goolies and all, I could leap off the table before the doctor arrived. My car was a mere forty yards away. Forty yards I could still dash, intact. A Man In Full. To seem heroic, while at the same time maximizing sympathy for myself afterward, I’d driven myself to the doctor’s office and was driving myself home. No one would ever know.
The doctor entered.
He raised my dressing gown, took a perfunctory let’s-see-what-we-have-here peek. We exchanged pleasantries. If he had any sense of the mental turmoil he’d interrupted, he hid it well. “There’s something I’ve been wondering about,” I said. “But you have to promise me, if I ask, you will tell me the truth.”
“I promise,” he said.
“Have you ever opened that door thinking there was a patient in here and found no one on this table?”
He laughed. “You mean does anyone ever chicken out?”
“Yes.”
“No. Not once,” he said. “But it’s funny. About one in four—no, maybe more like one in three—schedule the operation and never show up.”
Yes, I agreed, that was a riot. Then it wasn’t: There was a needle in my scrotum. Scrotums were not designed with needles in mind. But this doctor worked quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I couldn’t help but suspect he knew he must work quickly, or find himself chasing down the highway after his patients. My hands were now clenched and tearing at the sanitary paper bedspread. “It’ll only sting for a minute,” he said. “After this, if you experience any really sharp pain, you should tell me.”
But there was no more sharp pain: For the next thirty minutes, I felt instead a strange pulling and pinching, along with an occasional heavy stomach wrenching sensation, as if he were seeing, just for fun, what would happen if you applied 170 pounds of pressure on a single male testicle. A vasectomy feels half the time as if you are being kneaded into a loaf of bread and the other half of the time as if you are being sewn into a quilt. And that is the spirit in which the doctor worked: of a man either baking or knitting. He chatted as he sewed, or baked as he chatted, and after a stretch I realized that I’d become so wholly focused on being ready to shriek at the top of my lungs at the first sharp pain that I had failed to keep up my end of the conversation.
“Tell me something else,” I said, interrupting whatever he was saying.
“What’s that?”
“Do you have children?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you intend to have more?”
“No.”
“Have you had this done to yourself?”
“No,” he said, with a slight pause. “I haven’t.”
“Hypocrite.”
He laughed. “You don’t know the details,” he said. But he was done, and so were we. “Okay, you can get dressed,” he said. “But be careful.” He left the room. I rose from the table, and wobbled. Glued by sweat to my backside, from neck to thigh, was a paper bedsheet that came away only in strips and patches as I picked at it. I stepped into my pants, hobbled to my car, and drove myself home. A hero to my wife. A traitor to my sex. A thoroughly modern American guy.
EVERY NIGHT AFTER Walker is asleep and the girls are in their bunk bed, Tabitha reads to Quinn from a book about puberty. This might seem premature—she only just turned nine—but it’s breathtakingly shrewd. If you introduce the general concepts to a child early enough you might screw them up for life, but you also catch them before they know enough to be embarrassed or to make you squirm. Sprouting hair, sprouting body parts, foul body odors, gooey emissions—all are facts to be absorbed, and even things to be hoped for. Every morning as they brush their teeth, Quinn gives Dixie a powerful lecture on who gets hair where and when; and who smells badly in which place and why. Neither professor nor pupil giggles or squirms or exhibits so much as a trace of self-consciousness. This knowledge transfer is not at all as I remember it; it’s all so grown-up and even un-American; they might as well be French. Yesterday Quinn insisted on being taken to buy brassieres. Seeing the flat, cupless pile, Dixie asked seriously, “Did Quinn catch puberty?”
From her position on the bottom bunk Dixie has learned enough to feel left out. When I come to read to her she reaches for a book called Mommy Laid an Egg. Mommy Laid an Egg is a cartoon to explain to small children where babies come from, so their parents never have to. In Mommy Laid an Egg, Daddy has pods, and Mommy has a pod receptacle. Daddy inserts pods into Mommy’s pod receptacle and a baby grows. But Mommy Laid an Egg goes further, for it shows Mommy receiving Daddy’s pods not just gleefully, but with reckless abandon, eighteen different ways from Sunday. It shows pictures of Mommy and Daddy humping away on a skateboard, for instance, and other pictures of Mommy and Daddy banging away on the kitchen counter. It’s a little shocking and at the same time reassuring that this sort of thing can still get past the censors. After all, they removed the ashtr
ay from Goodnight Moon.
At any rate, none of this seems to have the slightest effect on Dixie. Instead she dwells, at length, on the cartoon of the birth itself. It shows the stick-figure baby emerging from a stick-figure Mommy, but because they are nothing but stick figures the path of exit remains a little hazy.
“I’m not going to have any babies,” she says finally.
“Why not?” asks Tabitha from above.
“I don’t want anything coming out of my butthole,” says Dixie, and yawns.
“It doesn’t come out of your butthole,” says Quinn knowingly—but then, she now says everything knowingly. “It comes out your VULVA.”
Dixie’s falling asleep and Quinn is just starting a new chapter on body odor, which is apparently so gripping that she will spend the next few days convinced that she has it. I leave them to it, but the moment I’m gone Quinn turns to Tabitha and asks, “Why did Daddy have a bisectomy?”
“It’s called a vasectomy,” says Tabitha.
“No, it’s not,” says Quinn
“What’s a bisectomy?” asks Dixie.
“A VAS-ectomy,” says Tabitha wearily.
“Yeah,” says Quinn, “but the reason Daddy’s pods don’t work anymore is because he had a BI-sectomy.”
Alas, Daddy’s pods do not lend themselves to such definitive statements. As the surgeon who’d done the job explained, a vasectomy doesn’t end anything. It merely cuts off the new supply of live sperm; there’s apparently a holding tank teeming with the reckless critters that needs to be emptied, and emptying it can take—well, that depends. A friend fresh from the operating table was told by his doctor he needed to have sex six times before he even bothered being tested for sterility and he burst out, “That’s a whole year!” My own doctor had skipped the small talk and told me to wait six months, then go into a lab and take a semen test.
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