The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

  When Iggy first came home from the hospital, in that ecstatic, disarranged week of almost no sleep, my intense happiness was sometimes punctured in the dead of night by the image of him with a half scissor sticking out of his precious newborn head. Perhaps I had put it there, or perhaps he had slipped and fallen into it. For whatever reason, this image seemed the very worst thing I could imagine. It came to me when I was trying to fall asleep, after many hours—sometimes many nights—of not sleeping. We were up so often that we put a red lightbulb in the living room lamp and kept it on all the time, so that there were periods of sun followed by periods of red, no real night. Once, while wandering in the red soup, I told Harry I was worried I was having a postpartum crash, as I was having bad thoughts about the baby. I couldn’t tell him about the half scissor.

  I can’t remember now the connection between the little boy’s building of ships in the bottles (Argo’s?) and his commitment to paranoid anxiety, but I’m sure there was one. Nor can I find the original story. I wish that I could find it, as I’m pretty sure its moral wasn’t that all good comes from repeatedly imagining the worst things that could ever happen. Likely a wise old crinkly grandpa drifts into the tale and disabuses his grandson of his rotten notion by taking him to see some wild birds flying over a hillside. But now I think I’m mixing and matching.

  That wise old crinkly grandparent has not yet waltzed into my life. Instead I have my mother, who lives and breathes the gospel of prophylactic anxiety. When I tell her that it would be easier for me if she could keep her anxieties about my newborn to herself, rather than have her e-mail me to tell me that she’s having trouble sleeping for fear of bad things happening to him (and to everyone else she loves), she snaps: “They’re not all irrational anxieties, you know.”

  My mother thinks that people don’t really know what they’re in for in this life—what the risks are. How could there be such a thing as an irrational peril, if anything unexpected or horrific that has ever happened could happen again? Last February a sinkhole opened up under a man’s bedroom near Tampa, Florida, while he was sleeping; his body will never be found. When Iggy was six months old, he was stricken by a potentially fatal nerve toxin that afflicts about 150 babies of the 4 million+ born in the United States each year.

  Recently my mother visited the Killing Fields in Cambodia. After she returned, she sat in our living room showing me her trip photos while Iggy motored around the shaggy white rug, doing “tummy time.” I barely want to tell you about this, because of the baby, she said, nodding in his direction, but there was a tree there, an oak tree, called the Killing Tree, against which the Khmer Rouge would kill babies by bashing their skulls. Thousands and thousands of babies, their brains smashed out against this tree. I get the point, I say. I’m sorry, she says, I really shouldn’t be telling you this.

  A few weeks later, talking about her trip again on the phone, she says, Now, there’s something I shouldn’t really mention, because of the baby, but they had this tree there, at the Killing Fields, called the Killing Tree …

  I know my mother well enough by now to recognize, in her baby-killing-tree Tourette’s, her desire to install in me an outer parameter of horror of what could happen to a baby human on this planet. I don’t know why she needs to feel sure I have this parameter in mind, but I have come to accept that she feels it necessary. She needs me to know that she’s stood before the Killing Tree.

  For the week after the man’s visit to my work, campus security will assign an officer to stand outside the door of my classroom while I teach, in case he returns. On one of these days, I teach Alice Notley’s grouchy epic poem Disobedience. A student complains, Notley says she wants a dailiness that is free and beautiful, but she’s fixated on all the things she hates and fears the most, and then smashes her face and ours in them for four hundred pages. Why bother?

  Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining. That’s what you kept telling me when we first met—that in a real, material sense, what is made from where. I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning. I still don’t understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip.

  Notley knows all this; it’s what tears her up. It’s why she’s a mystic, why she locks herself in a dark closet, why she knocks herself out to have visions. Can she help it if the unconscious is a sewer? At least my student had unwittingly backed us into a crucial paradox, which helps to explain the work of any number of artists: it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices.

  In Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece 100 Blow Jobs, Sprinkle—who worked for many years as a prostitute—kneels down on the ground and gives head to several dildos nailed to a board in front of her, while recorded male voices yell degrading things like “Suck it, bitch.” (Sprinkle has said that out of the approximately 3,500 customers she had as a sex worker, there were about 100 bad ones; the sound track to 100 Blow Jobs derives from the bad ones.) She sucks and sucks, she chokes and gags. But just when someone might be thinking, This is exactly what I imagined sex work to be like—haunting, woman-hating, traumatizing—Sprinkle gets up, pulls herself together, gives herself an Aphrodite Award for sexual service to the community, and performs a cleansing masturbatory ritual.

  Sprinkle is a many-gendered mother of the heart. And many-gendered mothers of the heart say: Just because you have enemies does not mean you have to be paranoid. They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence: There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

  The realization that I could incorporate the stalker into my talk about Sedgwick eventually became an incitement for me to get back to work. Yes, get back to work. It even became a source of comfort, as if bringing such an episode into the orbit of Eve would neutralize its negative force.

  Not everyone believes in the magical powers of such an approach. When I told my mother that I was thinking of including the stalker in a public talk, for example, she said, “Oh honey, are you sure that’s a good idea?”—meaning that she didn’t think it was a good idea at all. Who could blame her? She’s spent over forty years warding off the specter of wingnuts with attaché cases who tell women they deserve their violent deaths before they occasion them. Why give them any more attention than they deserve?

  Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don’t. Often I watch myself gravitating toward the bad idea, as if the final girl in a horror movie, albeit one sitting in a Tuff Shed at a desk sticky with milk. But somewhere along the line, from my heroes, whose souls were forged in fires infinitely hotter than mine, I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection.

  I am not going to write anything here about Iggy’s time with the toxin; it is not precious or rich to me. All I will say is that there is still a loop of time, or there is still a part of me, that is removing the side of a raised hospital crib in the morning light and climbing into it beside him, unwilling to move or let go or keep living until he lifted his head, until he gave any sign that he would make it out.

  The bummer about stalkers, Lamprey told me when we first spoke, is that the best thing that can happen is nothing. You don’t really want any form of contact that would merit a court date or a call to 911, he said. You just want the days of silence to add up.

  By the third night of Malcolm’s watch, I started having delusions that he could sit outside our house forever, to protect against whatever. But the money had run out, as had the logic of the enterprise. We were on our own.

  The task of the cervix is to stay closed, to make an impenetrable wall protecting the fetus, for approximately forty weeks of a pregnancy. After that,
by means of labor, the wall must somehow become an opening. This happens through dilation, which is not a shattering, but an extreme thinning. (O so thin!)

  This feeling has its ontological merits, but it is not really a good feeling. It’s easy enough to stand on the outside and say, “You just have to let go and let the baby out.” But to let the baby out, you have to be willing to go to pieces.

  Thirty-nine weeks. I take a long walk across the campus of Occidental College. It’s a hair too hot, as it always is in Los Angeles, where the sun has no mercy. I come home frustrated, taut with baby, anxious for it. Harry has friends over; they are getting ready for a movie shoot, wearing dingy white outfits and hats with skinny white ceramic horns that Harry inexplicably asserts make them look like lice. Don’t let the lice talk to me, I say, pulling down the shades. I feel feral, a little sad, very full. Backache.

  The previous day, walking in the arroyo, green and fresh, I had invited the baby out. Time to rumble, Iggy. I knew he heard me.

  Some pains start. The lice go home. For no good reason we decide to rearrange the bookshelves. We’d been meaning to do it for weeks, and Harry suddenly feels frantic to get it done, make things right. I keep sitting down to rest amid the books on the floor, arranging them into piles by genre, then by country. More pains. All these beautiful pages.

  Harry calls Jessica, says, Come now. Tried to sleep, but the night began to cavern. New dim lights in the house, new sounds. Birds chirping in the middle of the night while I labor in the tub. Jessica asks if the birds are real. They are. She rigs our tub with duct tape and a plastic bag so the tub can grow big with water. She has tricks. I keep wondering bleakly why she’s texting through my labor; later I learn she has an app on her iPhone that times the contractions. Night passes quickly, in the time that is no time.

  In the morning Harry and Jessica persuade me to go for an hour walk, briskly, in the gray day. It’s hard. The contractions aren’t going to stop if you stop moving, Jessica keeps telling me. OK but how does she know. We walk down to the Rite Aid at York and Figueroa to get castor oil, but when we get there, no one has a wallet. I squint in the gray light. I am going, almost gone. Back to the house for wallets, back to the store, we pace the parking lot, which looks scabrous with trash. I want to be somewhere more beautiful, I think, and also, everything is right.

  At home I eat the castor oil mixed into chocolate ice cream. I want what’s inside to come out.

  We’d been living together for just over a year when your mother received her diagnosis. She had gone to the doctor for back pain and was there told that she had breast cancer that had already spread to her spine, a tumor threatening to crack her vertebrae. Within months the cancer would reach her liver; within the year, her brain. We flew her out from Michigan when she became bedridden from radiation with no one to help. We gave her our bed, and started sleeping on our living room floor. We lived this way for months, all of us staring in dread and paralysis out at our mountain. We each anguished differently and severely: you wanted to give her the care she’d once given to you, but could see it was breaking our new household to try; she was sick and broke and terrified, utterly unwilling or unable to discuss her condition or her options. Eventually I, villainous, drew a line; I couldn’t live this way. She chose to go back to her condo in the suburbs of Detroit and decline alone rather than accept the substandard care of a Medicaid facility near us—all her assets liquidated, a TV blaring from behind a neighbor’s canvas curtain, nurses whispering about accepting Christ as your personal savior, you know the place. Who could blame her? She wanted to be at home, crowded in with her beloved Parisian-themed knickknacks—all her I LOVE PARIS plaques, miniature Eiffel Towers. All of her passwords and e-mail addresses were variants on Paris, a city she would never see.

  As her time grew near, your brother took her in. His family situation was under strain, but at least she had a bed there, her own room. It was almost good enough.

  But really none of it was good enough, even though it was better than many get. When she began to lose consciousness, your brother had her moved to a local hospice; you flew there in the dead of night, desperate to get there in time, so that she wouldn’t die alone.

  Now I’m sick of these two clowns who aren’t in pain. I say I want to go to the hospital because that’s where they take the babies out. Jessica stalls; she knows it’s not time. I begin to get desperate. I want a change of scenery. I’m not sure I can do this. We’ve spent hours on the red couch with a heating pad, in the tub kneeling on towels, in the bed with me holding Harry’s or Jessica’s hand. I have to think of something that will convince them that it’s time to go to the hospital. “The baby feels low, and I’m having it at the hospital, and that’s where I want to be,” I growl. Finally they say OK.

  The car is where the pain turns into a luge. I can’t open my eyes. Have to go inside. Outside there is a lot of traffic; I squint and see Harry doing the best he can. Every bump and turn a nightmare. The pain cavern has a law, its law is black shudder. I begin to count, noticing each one takes about twenty seconds. I think, any kind of pain must be bearable for twenty seconds, for nineteen, for thirteen, for six. I stop making sounds. It is horrible.

  Hard time parking, no one around, even though every other time we’ve been to the labor wing there has been a bevy of attendants with wheelchairs. I am going to have to walk. I walk as slowly as a person could walk, doubled over down the hall. Jessica greets some people she knows. Everything around me is normal and inside I am in the pain cavern.

  We check into the labor wing. The nurse is nice. Freckled, heavy-set, Irish-seeming. She says five centimeters. People are happy, I am happy. Jessica tells me the hard part is over, she says getting to five centimeters is the hard part. I am nervous but relieved. Jessica asks for room number 7. The hospital is blessedly slow, quiet, empty.

  Room number 7 is lovely, dark. We can see Macy’s from the window. Whitney Houston has just been found dead in a hotel about ten blocks away, the Beverly Hilton. The nurses are talking about it in hushed tones as they come and go. Was it drugs, I manage to ask from the cavern. Probably, they say. In our labor room there is a bathtub, a scale, and a baby warmer. Maybe there will be a baby.

  The pain luge continues, the counting, the dedication, the quiet, the panic. I am phobic about the toilet. Jessica keeps wanting me to go pee, but sitting down or squatting is unthinkable. She keeps telling me I can’t stop the contractions by staying immobile, but I think I can. I lie on my side, I squeeze Harry’s or Jessica’s hand. I pee without meaning to in a slow-dancing position with Harry, then in the tub, where strands of dark red mucus have started to float. Incredibly, Harry and Jessica order food and eat it. Someone feeds me a red Popsicle, which tastes delicious. I throw it up moments later, fouling my tub’s waters. I throw up when the contraction hits bottom, over and over, tons of yellow bile.

  The tub has a jets button we keep hitting accidentally, which is horrible. Jessica pours water over my body, which feels good.

  They measure again: seven. That is good.

  Hours later, they measure again. Still seven. Not so good.

  We talk. They tell me the contractions are slowing down, getting less powerful. This could go on for hours. They say maybe five more hours, or more, to get to ten centimeters. I don’t want that. It has been twenty-four hours of labor, maybe a little more. We talk Pitocin. The midwife says I have to be ready to get a lot more uncomfortable than I am now. I am scared. How deep can pain go.

  But I want something to change. I want to do the drug. We do it. The pic line keeps getting bent, a small red alarm goes off each time, I am frustrated, the nurse keeps having to redo it. Twenty minutes go by. Then twenty more. They up the dosage once, then again. Turn into the new cavern, a cartoon turn. I grow very quiet and concentrated. Counting, counting. Jessica says breathe into the bottom and I can tell that’s where the baby is.

  each of the volunteers told me that my job was to let my mom know that it was ok to go. i
believe that i was unconvincing for the first 33 hours of my time with her.

  however on the last night, i put a pillow under her knees, and i told her i was going to take a walk. that i would smell honeysuckle and see fireflies, wet my shoes in midnight dew. i told her that i was going to do those things because i was going to stay on earth in this form. “but your work here is done mama.” i told her that she had set us all up very well with her love and her lessons. i told her she had inspired me to become an artist. i told her that i loved her so much, that we all knew that she loved us too, that she was surrounded in love, surrounded in light. and i walked. after my walk, among other things, i told her i was going to go to sleep, and she should too. i said it firmly. i told her to not be afraid, to relax, that it was ok if she had to go. i told her i knew she was tired and that all accounts of heaven (from those who have so briefly visited) are that it is pure bliss. i told her not to be afraid. i thanked her. i said, “thank you mom.” i leaked tears but tried to hide them from her now. i turned on the bathroom light and closed the door so a long foot thick rectangle of yellow reached her from feet to head. i touched her feet over the blanket, then her thighs, her torso and bare chest below her throat, her shoulders her face and ears. i kissed her all over her beautiful bald head and i said, “goodnight mama. you go to sleep.” and then i laid down in my little chair bed there put my jacket over my upper body and silently cried myself to sleep. the sound of her breathing, deep and gulping and certain.