God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  I was proud to have Molly meet them. She caught my eye many times while we all talked, and I could tell she just knew, too.

  * * *

  One night, Jevn called me while he was moving out of his apartment with the ten-foot-deep closet. I was surprised to hear from him; there was no business we needed to attend to. I was determined to let go of him, let go of dreams of him and hopes for the future, let go of his music, his mountains, his way of drawing, but I told him I was glad about the baby, because it meant my feelings for him didn’t have to end; they would get to have some kind of life, somewhere in the world without me. It was about 7:30 and the sun had just set; summer was coming. I was lying on my bed, listening to the bamboo with my windows open, and he told me he was lying on the only few pillows left in his apartment. He said he was waiting to understand why we couldn’t be together. That the day we met, as much as this night, he wanted to know me.

  * * *

  My belly had become a stranger—like someone other than me entirely—but I’d suck it in and feel lithe and aerodynamic, surprised to look down and find it protruding just as unapologetically as before. One night I went into the studios to collect aluminum cans and found I couldn’t bend over at all. Leaning sideways into the recycling containers we’d clearly marked Aluminum Only, I discovered plastic bottles and crumpled napkins, X-Acto blades and scrap chipboard. I threw a plastic bottle across the room, and Coke sprinkled the floor. Students working just paused to look at me.

  At night, my belly slept on the bed beside me, more than in me, and I dreamed it was a greyhound, galloping away. I followed it, collecting my loose skin, returning it to the cavity below my ribs. Sometimes the bulge was lopsided and the movements it made had character; sometimes they made me smile. Telling Paula and Erik about it, seeing them accept it as reality, reality enough to call it Jonathan, made me think that inside my belly really was, maybe, Jonathan.

  FOURTEEN

  It was on the side of a road somewhere in Switzerland. My mother, flagging a car with French plates, thinking it was her friend, instead met my father. I’d pictured that road a certain way. A steep slope on one side, a valley on the other. I thought I would recognize it, instinctively. When I arrived in Grindelwald, I borrowed a bike from a cyclist I met near the station. “The Alps are easy,” he said, “just once up, once down!” I followed him for a while, but he left me on the mountain with half a banana. I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since I left Italy the night before, but I didn’t want to change money again.

  Standing on the side of the road, I looked across the valley and wondered whether the wind had swept across the very same glacial ice and climbed up on the air, cutting through the heat of the sun all those years ago, when things aligned to make me possible. I stepped over a fence, pushed my hands deep into a trough of water, and drank. The chill in the air, in midsummer, was the fine edge along which I walked. What if my father had turned off to have a rest—what if she was behind him and took no note of his plates? I wouldn’t be there, in the Alps, trying to give weight to the lightness of my origins. I would not be here at all, and no one would be grieving.

  On the train leaving Switzerland that night, I’d written a letter to Jevn. I went biking in the countryside today. Remember the time I fell asleep at your place and you woke me with fruit? I will have missed you in so many different cities by the time I see you again. He responded, All those places seem closer to me because I have been thinking about you there. I’ll call when I am in Denver. I’ll know what to say when I call. Just weeks later, I would try to break up with him, and days after that, I would find out I was pregnant.

  * * *

  Tall trees surrounded the pool. I put my keys and shorts on a chair and stepped slowly into the water. I fell forward to my shoulders, and the heaviness floated up like a balloon. I didn’t know until that moment how heavy it had become.

  After spending so much time trying to persuade myself I was pregnant, I don’t remember when it became impossible to imagine the opposite. Thin again, bendable, hollow. I swam back and forth across the kidney-shaped expanse, through leaves and insect casings, wearing the same swimming suit I’d had for years, stretched tight around my stomach. But in place of the weight, there was buoyancy, a feeling I didn’t think I’d get to feel until I’d surmounted so many more hurdles.

  When I got home, I lay on my bed, shedding the dry dust of chlorine-coated skin. I felt like I was ten again in my damp bathing suit, succumbing to that special swimming sleepiness, my skin radiating the day’s heat. My surface was so perfectly acclimatized to the room temperature that a soft summer breeze made me pull the comforter around me the wrong way. I found peace in the warm stillness, knees nested one in front of the other, belly resting softly beside me. My body felt everywhere-worn. Outside, the row of thick bamboo filled the south window; as the sun set, the shadows on the wall shimmered, and I shut my eyes to sleep.

  The questions returned to wake me, as they always did. I went out to the stoop to escape them. The sky was saturated, and the sun, already set, was still illuminating the rims of the clouds. I triangulated; those distant clouds, just above me, the approximate location of the sun beyond the crest of the earth, my life here in Cincinnati. How little this problem in fact was, whether I kept him, whether I gave him up.

  The Nepali woman who lived next door passed by, slowly and heavily pushing her grocery cart, followed by her friend. She stopped to look at me. Her dark eyes squinted under her scarf.

  “I think tomorrow you have much problem,” she said, nodding once, unsmiling. Her friend stopped behind her.

  “Yes … Pain. Pain.” Her friend shook her head sadly.

  Jevn called to see if I wanted to go to a movie. He picked me up at my apartment and we walked down the hill. It was the end of the world, spaceships and space creatures, and some celebrity had to save us. I happily let those alien concerns displace my own; the cold air removed me entirely from the summer of the world outside. I savored the last seconds as the credits rolled, and then I felt my own forgotten and foggy concerns begin to crystallize and return to me. Jevn dropped me off at my apartment, and though my due date was just two days away, he didn’t ask how I was feeling.

  The next morning, I returned to the pool. Between laps, I sat on the side in a lounge chair, my hands behind my head, my skin covered by a soft summer oil. When I bleached dry and began to bake, I’d get back in. I swam like my mother, alone, on my side. Leaping out to my right with one arm, the other paddling short and softly in support. I’d roll to my back and look up at the sky. Back and forth, water filling my ears with silence. As I pulled myself out of the water, each rung of the ladder restored the burden.

  I had been half-attentive to my internship. Our only project had me on my feet in a planned community north of Cincinnati, going door to door to survey residents about their neighborhood’s successes and failures. Most people didn’t want to take a survey, but one man answered the door and then stuck his head out to look up and down the street.

  “What are you doing out here in the heat? How far along are you?”

  I was embarrassed.

  “Do you want some water? Do you need to sit down? Here, come in.” I went inside. I was riding on the back of someone everyone wanted to protect.

  * * *

  In the middle of July, Paula and Erik came back to Ohio. They stayed an hour north in Dayton with family, and the four of us had meetings with Molly and excursions in the city together. The evening before my due date, we packed a picnic for a concert on the banks of the Ohio. We spread out our blanket and picked at the fruit salad and the crackers. The sun was setting; the air was perfectly warm. I asked Paula if she didn’t think Sting had aged remarkably well, but I stopped in the middle of what I was saying.

  “I think I just peed in my pants,” I said, stunned by the sudden wetness.

  “Amy, I think your water broke. Let’s take you to the restroom.” She told Erik and Jevn to wait there, and we weaved acr
oss the lawn between the picnic blankets.

  “I think she’s in labor!” I heard someone say, in a kind of a panic. But Nina had taught me not to panic. It was only time to go grocery shopping. She made labor sound like another infinity, another stage of an endless process that would keep me safely removed from the decision.

  Paula handed me wads of toilet paper under the door. I looked down and saw a little bit of blood on my underwear. Stall doors slammed as people moved in and out around me. I sat for a few moments, feeling the weight lower than before, then quickly got up, stuffed my pants with toilet paper, and suggested we should stay for the concert we’d paid to see. We made our way back to the blanket, and I sat down carefully, but the loss of fluids meant his elbows were no longer cushioned but sharp, and I started to experience his bones in my belly, a human being in my belly, where a human being doesn’t belong.

  I’d told Paula and Erik I wanted them to be there with me for the birth, and I’d submitted a form to the hospital giving them permission to be. I wanted to share the experience in the same spirit with which I would eventually share my son, but Paula thought I might change my mind. We drove home from the concert and they left me to spend the night in labor. The moon was full, hanging just above the treetops to the southwest, casting cool light through the bamboo. I sat on my low futon, beside Jevn’s big blue duffel bag, beside Jevn, who tried to rest, and waited anxiously for the deep pull of the heavy door, the release into the unknown.

  Labor wasn’t painful like being dealt a blow—it felt like labor, like digging a ditch. I stood still to rest between each exertion. But before it started, no one would tell me that. Even Nina had shrugged her shoulders when I asked her what it would feel like, as if it were a peculiar place, its features so singularly elusive, no memory could clutch and keep it, much less escape with trinkets that might hint at its particular strangeness. Or a place like death that simply mutes the mouths of all its witnesses. Nina had assisted a hundred births and had four of her own, but when it came to that question, she just said that everyone’s experience is different.

  Over the phone, Nina advised us both to go to sleep. Sleep as much as possible, preserve your energy. We would need it tomorrow. Eat. She wouldn’t describe the nature of the pain, but she insisted it was nothing to fear. She told us to call her when my contractions were regular and five to six minutes apart. My contractions were intense but erratic. My stomach clenched and I was comforted by familiarity: contractions were like period cramps—but cosmic. Each one a threshold. And between them were intermittent phases of complete relief, when I could fall asleep. When a contraction came, it would shock me awake—a hand inside squeezing, pounding, pulling some interior and intricately connected flesh with sudden certainty, into an abyss even deeper inside. And this pain had real purpose: each contraction was a passage to a place where there were no words, only work.

  Jevn lay quietly beside me in the dark. The crickets were chirping, and the loneliness was sweet, like a sleepless night camping. I already longed for the fullness, the perched expectancy, the before-everything of pregnancy. Speechless, Jevn turned and touched me, and, wildly, his hands explored the still-evolving terrain. They seemed to have a hundred questions, and as he broke the silence of eight months, he answered my own. He held me. We kissed. But a powerful aloofness had silenced me. My body was moving ahead. His touch grasped a skin I was shedding, and I could only mourn the glimmer of desire as it receded. I felt him let go, as if he’d given up, and then he settled and went to sleep.

  I sat for hours watching the moon. It was the only orienting thing in a night that seemed to wrap itself around me. While the world slept, I worked, turning its gears with calm concentration. Waiting, perplexed. What was happening was the biggest and yet most natural thing in the world; I didn’t know what to do, and yet, as though I had been specially trained for it, I had no doubt. I didn’t think about what Nina had taught me; I just remembered she’d said not to be afraid. I pushed forward blindly through the night, trusting myself at every step. The animal darkness, the bamboo waving, the thin panes of glass, the cranks that opened the windows north and south, the little strap of metal Jevn had wedged between the window frame and the brick to hold the bird feeder, the vast park, all its trees, the insects. Everything seemed to be gathered, knowing something most real, most meant to be.

  I imagined my son doing his work from the inside, so close and so far from me. But even as we approached each other, on either side of the thin surface of my skin, I couldn’t translate the feeling into a person who would have his own name. Jonathan. I was not laboring for someone else. I had the blinders of an insect, performing its clicking, repetitive, buzzing task, deep under the surface of the bark, deep within the nest. My rhythms were the unself-conscious habits of the living soil. I did a woman’s work, the invisible nighttime work of turning a heavy world slowly on its axis.

  Time was a deep black landscape whose boundaries surged and plummeted, condensed and sailed. Time was no longer a string that could be traced, step by step, from here to there; time was infinite textures of darkness. Yesterday, I thought, trying to pin time down. Yesterday was so beautiful you could really see that once this wasn’t a city. That day, a cloud of a world floating far away, it seemed the ground had forgiven the way we’d unsettled it.

  Yesterday—I tried to remember it. I’d sat in the shadow of dusk and spotted the sun still shining on the top floors of the apartment building across the street. I could measure a movement as monumental as the planet on a scale as minute as the floors of a high-rise, as shadow swallowed the building, floor by floor, and the upper levels peeked over the arc of the earth, as it turned away from the sun. Here, on the steaming asphalt, releasing its warm breath, it was dusk, but on the eighth floor they were having a spectacular sunset. The windows of the airplane that passed above had a view, too, and they flashed in recognition.

  In another world, I thought, I would bend and ride a bike. That thought was another cloud that crested and broke across the sky. Before it disappeared, I’d forgotten its shape altogether. I was detached from all my thoughts and history and hopes. The night had taken shape and developed topography. Night wasn’t comprised of simple laminations that securely lapped the day. It felt like a land we could live in forever.

  But morning came, dimly. It pushed cruelly forward, and night’s dimensions, its chambers and secret passages, dissipated. Morning cast the same brash light on everything, on the students racing to their classes, on the park across the street, on me. By sunrise, the contractions were four minutes apart. Nina arrived angry that I’d progressed so far without calling her. But I’d been lost, or busy. I hadn’t been timing my contractions; they were worlds I’d entered without duration. Jevn had fallen asleep, as she’d advised us to do. And I hadn’t felt like I needed anything.

  She was upset that I hadn’t eaten or slept. She shook me alert and made me remember the things I was supposed to do. She put grapes and ice in my mouth. She cleaned my house hastily, as though someone were arriving for dinner. She touched my back as I leaned through contractions. My forearms rested on my light blue wingback chair, and I bowed forward, letting the weight hang down. I’d been laboring for hours, and I could feel Nina reading my Signposts. I was still in the earliest stages of labor; I could still smile and speak. Her examination shifted to the sunburns in my armpits, where I’d neglected to put sunscreen when I went swimming. I was flushed and swollen and rashed and burned, like a many-layered watercolor, all shades and textures of pink.

  My contractions were so strong that Nina thought the baby would arrive by late morning. But twelve hours came and went, and I was still able to smile. I thought my son and I had our own pact; I’d let him feel the orange warmth of so many sunsets that he would want to arrive at the end of day. Jevn did his job; he told me I was doing well, he massaged me and stayed close. He and Nina behaved like a team, bustling around me, making work. I was a giant parade balloon bulldozing clumsily forward as my drivers
scurried far below, tending the strings that bound me loosely to the ground.

  This was as intimately as I would ever know my son. From the tiny seed he was to a thing with ankles and fingerprints, he moved through me, and as he did I would take an impression. I would linger on every moment, feel everything and hold it like I wanted helplessly to hold the sunset. But I didn’t want Nina to see me turn reflective. She’d know I’d reached full dilation when I started to fall silent, and then I would say I don’t think I can do it, and that would be when I would start to push, and then it would all be over. I resolved to smile, to stop time and keep this closeness to my son.

  By two in the afternoon, I was no longer progressing and my contractions became short and erratic. We decided I needed food and a walk. We went to the park across the street, but by the time we got there I couldn’t put one foot fully in front of the other, and the contractions stopped me in my tracks. I managed to smile as I ate a baked potato Nina or Jevn had bought somewhere, sitting by the pond in the park overgrown with summer. I made it only halfway around before Nina suggested it was time to head to the hospital. We wanted to get there no more than three hours before the birth. My birth plan specified that I wanted a natural birth, but we would wait until I was dilated enough to ensure they wouldn’t medicate me and, if for some reason they did, the impact on the baby would be minimal; his systems would have already begun detaching from my own.

  Park staff, trimming trees along the pond, asked, cheerfully, “How far along is she?” Somehow they knew not to address me, but I was surprised to be seen at all.

  “She’s having contractions now!” Nina held my arm, but she sounded far away. Something had changed. The sun had shifted and it wasn’t anymore the white light of early afternoon that has no trace of melancholy, the short shadows of noon skies, the blared-out blues, the flaccid clouds, the time of day that doesn’t ask to be remembered. Now oranges were emerging and the thistles could be distinguished among the taller grasses as the shadows lengthened. Nina said, “It’s time to go.”