by Chris Adrian
Come up, they said. Come up. It’s almost time.
“Fuck off,” she said quietly, but they didn’t go away, and eventually she rose unsteadily and started the climb. They were kinder now, not so likely to yell at her or insult her. There you go, said Dr. Sundae, shooing her farther up the ramp as she passed the third floor. Upward and onward, said Dr. Walnut, showing his pointy brown teeth in a warm smile. Almost there, said Dr. Snood on the eighth floor, when she stopped a while, more because there was a sense of finality about being on the roof that she didn’t much like, and she felt they were trying to tell her something, these imaginary creatures, with the friendly cheerleading that had replaced the scolding and the disappointed sighing—they all knew she wasn’t ever going to come down again.
It was warm outside. The date, she knew from obsessive twirlings of her pregnancy wheel, was the twenty-second of May, but it felt more like deep summer, with the moisture in the air and the heat in the wind. She listened hard for crickets, but heard only Ishmael’s sullen weeping, coming from underneath the sycamore tree. She held up her hand in front of her face, shielding herself from him, and walked on the edge of the roof, where a ghost brighter than any other was kneeling by the edge of the roof. From far away she thought it was Calvin, because he had a huge knife in his hand, but when she got up close she saw that it was Rob.
“You’re not supposed to do that,” she said. “Somebody already did that.”
We’re all supposed to do it, he said. We were always supposed to do it. We all have to do it, now. Are you ready?
“No.”
Well, that’s no excuse, he said. That doesn’t change a thing about how things are. That doesn’t delay things but for a second. We’re almost there. Don’t you see it? He pointed out over the dark ocean. Thick low clouds hid the stars and the moon, but she thought she could see a different kind of darkness thrown up against the horizon where he pointed.
“It’s not for you,” she said. “You don’t have to do it.”
Ready or not, he said, lifting the knife and twirling it just like she had always imagined Calvin must have, though who knew if he made a flourish, or just got on with it? She only had the coroner’s report to go by, its solemn tones seeming somehow reverential of this extraordinary living dissection, mentioning the bell and the candle and the iron brick and the chain but not guessing at their meaning. Rob brought down the knife and cut swiftly into his belly. Jemma was ready to watch the whole thing—she’d seen it in her head so many times, already—but no sooner had he cut himself then he disappeared. The ghosts went out and she felt the pain, different from the endless false contractions of the past weeks, it started in her back and seemed to push her to her knees before she even felt it, a knife in her belly, and she knew she was alone on the roof except for Ishmael, still wailing and wailing under the tree.
She had everything she needed: two clamps, sterile scissors, a bulb suction, a defibrillator, many towels folded inside a picnic basket turned battery-powered blanket-warmer, hauled up on a cart in between contractions. She was trying to prepare for the worst—meconium aspiration or cord prolapse or respiratory arrest or some other nasty surprise that she was too unskilled to pick up with the ultrasound. She felt powerful enough, sitting on the roof in the middle of the soccer field, to put out the moon by poking it with her thumb, but she didn’t trust herself to be able to fix her baby, if he came out all fucked up.
The new OR, or in her room, or in the lobby, or in a special room the angel might have unfolded for her, an actual delivery room, these might all have been places more appropriate to give birth, but none of them were better than the roof. She liked it up there, and it was harder for the angel to talk to her—the closest visible speakers were ten yards away, under the grass, and there was always a nice breeze to carry away the icky smells that she remembered too well from her days in OB—blood and shit and the weird, alien-fish smell of the placenta, and the ever-more-curious odors she’d encountered wafting from a vagina in distress. Up here she could keep an eye on the looming bulk on the horizon, still just a huge smudge, five hours after the contractions had started, but in a moment of Vivianish perspicacity she had concluded that the smudge was the barometer of her labor, and that the closer they came to it, the closer she’d come to being done.
She’d read a story when she was little about a dog hidden in labor underneath the porch, squeezing out a litter to surprise her family (a collection of imbeciles who’d not known her very long, and thought she was a fat boy), and Jemma thought there was something doglike, or creaturelike, in the way she prepared a place on the soccer field, flattening the grass with her feet until it was smoothed down in a circle twice as broad as she was tall, laying down her blankets and placing her tools close at hand. Just when she had the blankets perfectly straight, and secured at every corner with a flat stone from a fountain, her water broke and made a stain in the shape of a huge teacup. She sat down, right in center of the wet spot, overcome suddenly with a suffocating sense of finality not associated with the worsening contractions or the fuzzy mountains on the eastern horizon.
“Go on, crybaby,” said Ishmael. “Cry for me.”
“You’re not invited,” she said, not lifting her face from her hands. She felt him in her head, all of a sudden, an ugly canker, painful in a way that was distinct from the contractions and this new weighty sadness. “Go away. I don’t want you here.”
“You need me here,” he said. “I’m going to help you.”
“Just get away,” she said, but he was standing quietly a few yards off, when she opened her eyes. He walked off, but returned at regular intervals to offer up another insult or taunt, like a bad doula. She wished they would both shut the fuck up. She was used to Ishmael’s accusations—you are the whore of the world, you are the sickness that ruins, you are corruption itself—though they were getting harder to ignore, and every so often one of them would sting terribly. The nervous, fluttery ejaculations of the angel were simply annoying. Any of the ghosts would have been preferable. Can’t you even give birth right? Dr. Tiller would ask, and Dr. Chandra would somehow make her excruciating pain a subsidiary of and commentary on his lonely sadness. Rob would have been best. She was supposed to be lying back against him while he counted out breaths and Vivian stood between her legs, pounding her fist impatiently into a catcher’s mitt. “Rob,” she said softly, and Ishmael heard, clear across the roof.
“You killed him,” he called out. “Don’t forget! You killed everybody!”
“Let me comfort you,” said the angel, her voice muffled and soft. “Put your hand in me and I will bring you fentanyl.” There was a stirring in the ground beyond the blanket; a capped needle poked up through the grass, seemed to sniff at the air, and then withdrew.
“No thanks,” Jemma said, standing to turn her back on Ishmael, then squatting, then lying down, then kneeling with her legs opened toward the water. She found it was a comfort to rock back and forth, but it did not keep her from imagining once again a series of looming obstetric disasters.
Common and obscure complications, difficult to remember during her OB exam, presented themselves for her to obsess over. She had looked with the ultrasound while she was gathering up her supplies and was nearly certain she’d seen the head down and the feet up, but who could say the baby wouldn’t wiggle and turn at the last moment, to make himself a footling? It was an image she could describe to herself in detail, her body, dead of her failure, lying in the middle of the field, one little leg poking out from between her legs, the rest of the baby dead inside, crushed to death by her uterus. And there were a dozen other reasons for it not to get out, shoulder dystocia and cephalopelvic disproportion—still something she worried about though Vivian had already given her pelvis a good name: platypelloid, which made Jemma think she’d be better suited for laying eggs, but Vivian only smiled and said she could squeeze a watermelon though her pelvic outlet—and all the varieties of vertex malpresentation: face and brow and persistent
occiput posterior, not to mention the chance that the baby would raise his hand in salute to the new world and catch the cord against his arm. Only the arm would get out and she would pull at it frantically until it popped off in her hand, and that would be all she would ever see of her baby.
She tried to practice saving maneuvers in her head, trying to remember the names. She thought of Vivian helping her study, telling her to imagine a man named McRoberts on top of her, pushing her legs back to her ears while he grunted and thrust. That one, at least, she remembered.
“Lie back against me,” the angel said. “Let me take you in my arms.”
“No thanks,” Jemma said.
She started screaming an hour before dawn, when the contractions were coming every two minutes, very regular in their frequency, and regularly getting worse. “You deserve worse,” Ishmael kept saying, and every so often she’d turn a scream into a protracted and extra loud “Fuck you!”
Up until then she had thought she was going to be able to take it, whether because of her gift or because the events of the past nine months had inured her to pain, or just because she was feeling too sad, too cruel, and too crazy to feel it. “I can do it,” she said confidently (“No you can’t,” said Ishmael), walking around her blanket, or to the edge of the roof and back again, breathing in a cheery locomotive cadence. The first really bad contraction had dropped her to her knees and made her grind her face in the dirt, where she felt the soft hands of the angel stroking at her cheeks and was powerless to get away. When it passed, she rolled over and vomited, right on her blanket.
Now she was screaming regularly, not shy about the cursing, especially with Ishmael creeping closer and closer. She had called the dawn a motherfucker, and shrieked like a harpy when the line of mountains suddenly clarified against the horizon, a thin black edge along the purple sky. She felt exalted and afraid when she saw it, and as the sun rose higher and light spilled down the front of them to pick out the colors, so different from what was in the water, forgotten greens and browns and purples. Soon the sun had climbed above them and was shining right in her face, making plain the blood on her blanket and the wet spots seeping up from the deeper layers. She screamed again, up and down the new coast. They were still miles off from it but she half expected a flight of birds to rise from the cliffs, startled by her cry.
They got into a sort of routine: she’d have a contraction; Ishmael would insult her; the angel would say something useless and sweet; she would lie a few moments on her back, watching the ever clarifying land, catching some new smell on the air; and then another contraction would come.
“I’m almost ready to tell you,” Ishmael said, striding in front of her with his hands behind his back, looking for all the world like he was out for an ordinary morning stroll.
“You’re blocking my view,” she said.
“I am so disgusted. Disgust is melting my bowels… Oh! I feel them turning to water, all my insides turning and turning in anger. You are so much… How could you ever stand to have lived? Listen, I almost know what to say. The baby is in the way of it—get it out! What’s wrong with you? So lazy, as usual…” Jemma shrieked, too early for the contraction, but it was enough to drown him out, and drive him a little farther away.
“Don’t listen to him,” said the angel. “What does he know? He’s never had a baby.”
“Have you?” Jemma asked.
“You are all my babies,” she said. “I have held all of you all these months, safe and happy and well.”
“You’re too fucking much,” Jemma said.
“I am the preserving angel,” she said simply.
“Can’t you finally be the shut-the-fuck-up angel?” Jemma asked, then gasped—it was starting to hurt even before it started to hurt, a prelude to the real pain. A needle rose up between her legs and glinted in the sun.
“You only have to say the word,” said the angel.
“Just stay away from me,” Jemma said, but still the ground seemed to push at her shoulders and massage her back. “Stop,” she said.
“I know you don’t mean it,” said the angel, and Jemma shrieked again, and the baby moved a little farther. At least they weren’t useless contractions—they were getting a lot of work out of her suffering. She still couldn’t see into the blank area where the baby lived, but she could see the edge of it, and she could still do things the old-fashioned way, with her arm stuck up her vagina. Scream by scream the baby was coming a little closer to the outside.
“Almost!” Ishmael said at the crowning. Jemma could hear the surf breaking on the shore in front of them—it had taken her many minutes to recognize the sound.
“I love you,” said the angel. “You are my sweet baby and I love you.”
“Fuck off!” Jemma said, indiscriminately now, over and over whether she was contracting or not.
“Push,” said Ishmael, from between her legs. “Push, you nasty fucking whore!” She pushed at him with her arms, sitting up and punching at him, till he fell back, and pushing from inside, too, and pushing with her mind. The head popped out, surrounded by a wave of blood and fluid. She was vomiting again as she saw the head rotate so she was suddenly face to face with her little baby. He was purple and gray and looked entirely dead. She coughed, and started to yell, but it turned into a whimper. She pushed again, pulling down on the head and praying for it not to pop off, to deliver the shoulder. It came out easily enough—no dystocia—but then she realized that she had forgotten to suction the mouth and nose. Now it was too late. The other shoulder delivered without her even pushing, and suddenly he was lying between her legs, gleaming in the sun and not moving a muscle.
She fumbled in the blanket warmer, then remembered her clamps. She shrieked again when she clamped and cut the cord—it wasn’t supposed to hurt but it felt like she’d cut off a finger. She was yelling at the thing as she rubbed it with the blankets, trying to pick him up but just rolling him in the grass, at first, so dirt and loose blades of grass stuck to the wet skin. He started to kick, and opened his mouth wide but didn’t make a noise until she leaned forward and put her mouth over his nose and lips to give him a breath.
The boy cried. Jemma gathered him up, still rubbing him, in the wet blanket and held him to her chest. She was just going to have a moment with her baby, here at the end of the end of the world. Ishmael leaned down to whisper in her ear. “You hate him. You have already ruined him,” he said. Jemma turned and slapped him in the face, a skillful move while holding the baby and still in horrible pain and bleeding more and more. She was afraid to look between her legs.
She meant it to be a very special slap. “Take off that human face,” she said, because with a twitch of her mind she loosened the fascia under the skin. It was supposed to fly off and lie on the ground like a used shammy. Nothing happened, though. She struck again: he should have swallowed his own tongue but he just stared at her, not screaming, not burning. There wasn’t a lick of fire anywhere on the roof.
“Now you are dead,” he said, and sat back, and laughed and laughed, a whole minute of Santa-sounds while Jemma cursed at him. He looked all around him when he settled. “What a beautiful day,” he said.
“You’re dead,” Jemma said, clutching her squalling baby. “You are!”
“I am not,” he said. “I am finally… myself. How strange, to be so angry. I remember it, but do not understand it. I do not remember why I was so upset. Do you remember, dead creature?”
“You were mad because…” She wanted to say something cruel, but she couldn’t think of anything. Her baby was crying. She gave him her breast and he quieted, turning his dark eyes on her face. He was as ugly and beautiful as an old man. “Because you’re fucking stupid,” Jemma said lamely.
“Sister!” Ishmael said. “Come out!”
“Presently,” said the angel, and the whole hospital shook so hard that Jemma almost dropped her baby. She looked around for an iceberg but only saw the land; they’d run aground.
“Brother and
Brother! It is time!”
We are already here, I say, because we are standing at our corners, I in the South and my brother in the West. Jemma sees the air unfolding but doesn’t see us yet. Ishmael goes to stand in the East, his feet almost touching on the bits of earth that spilled onto the ledge when the hospital ran aground; the hospital is received into a curve in the land, and the green top of the cliff is just level with the roof.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jemma asks, because Ishmael is unfolding, too, picking off his put-on flesh by the handful and filling up a shape drawn in the air above him.
“Sister!” he says again. “Come out!”
“Patience,” she says. “We are still waiting.” She unfolds in the West, withdrawing herself from the hospital. Floor by floor, the replicators stop their sighing and the lights dim. The toy slows and stops.
“Waiting for what?” Jemma says.
“For you,” I say.
“Get away from my baby!” you say, clutching it tighter, though I am nowhere near it. It cries again; the tip of your breast has fallen away in ash. You switch sides and look to the four quadrants. Now you can see all of us, my little brother rising over the pieces of his fleshly disguise, a heap of parts at his feet; my sister with her kind mouth; my big brother and his black wings; and me.
“You are your brother’s sister,” I say.
“What the fuck do you know about my brother?” you ask me.
“Look,” I say, and the vision rises out of you: your brother’s feast, except now it is laid before you and comes from you.
“Go away,” you say. “None of you are real.” My little brother raises his wings to smash you, but our sister restrains him. “Go away,” you say again, but we can’t go anywhere yet, so you go away instead, ignoring us, ignoring the flow of blood and ash from between your legs, ignoring your blackening toes and feet, ignoring the feast, ignoring everything but your baby.
You turn away and look through the space between my brother and sister to see the land. “See?” you say to your baby. “See it?” You try to imagine the life you will live with him there. You throw up the structure of a life in your imagination. It is as big as a cathedral but collapses before it has even assumed a whole shape. “That’s all right,” you say. “It’s okay.” You look deep into his face. “Seven and ten,” you say, fudging the Apgars a little—there’s no such thing as a ten but no carping resident is here now to bitch at you about that. He looks so serene you know he is not going to miss you. “Look,” you say again, trying to turn his face to the land without disturbing his latch, and you think, “It isn’t mine to give, but I give it to you.”
