Forever, in Pieces

by Fawver, Kurt

  Two weeks ago, he had taken Dawn to the obstetrician for a scheduled exam. Her due date was, then, only five days away. Most of the tests had been normal. There was a slight irregularity in the amniotic fluid—some sort of chemical composition issue James didn’t understand—but the doctor had assured them that it was “just an intriguing abnormality . . . nothing to be concerned about.” Their child was supposed to arrive healthy and on time. Again, the doctors had asked whether James and Dawn wanted to know the sex of the baby or see any ultrasound images and again they had declined. Dawn told James she wanted to “revel in the mystery and the magic of birth,” which was fine by him. He’d always felt that ultrasound pictures showed little more than a drifting mist of blurry, human-shaped but not quite human blobs of gray and white. Ghosts in the uterine lining. Things masquerading as people. It was unsettling. So, Dawn and James saw no sneak peeks of their impending child; they learned nothing of its nature beyond a few inscrutable medical terms. They were happy and supposedly prepared, and drove home to wallpaper the nursery with anticipation and hope.

  But no one came to fill the room. Five days passed and the baby refused to be born. Another week slipped by and still the fetus resisted its introduction to the world. Finally, this morning, just as James and Dawn were about to eat breakfast, it charged for the gates, knocking Dawn from her chair with tremendous contractive pain. The couple rushed to the hospital and waited. The doctors waited. Everyone bit their bottom lips and spoke in hushed tones. But still nothing happened. Dawn’s labor continued and the attending nurses began sweating. A battery of tests were run; their results made the doctors huddle together in the hallway and steal brief sidelong glances at Dawn’s maternal bulge. Eventually, a decision was made to speed the child’s fall over the precipice into life. The doctors recommended a Caesarean delivery and explained that prolonging labor could result in various complications involving infection and oxygen deprivation. Dawn and James didn’t know the correct questions to ask, so they simply consented.

  That had been almost two hours ago. Now James sat on an over-cushioned couch in the waiting room, leg shaking rapidly, wondering why the doctors had been so quick to jump to surgery and why they had looked at Dawn only in uneasy flashes. What had they withheld? What did they not say? Why wasn’t Dawn in recovery yet? What should he do?

  Another half hour passed, during which James absentmindedly picked apart a seam on the couch. Every nerve in his body quivered. Errant visions materialized in the unlit alleyways of his rationality. He saw Dawn’s torn midriff spilling organs and blood onto a grinning toddler beneath the operating table. He saw Dawn screaming and slowly being pulled inside out, as if her flesh was a reversible jacket. He saw a surgeon lower her surgical mask to reveal a gaping black hole where her mouth and chin should have been. He saw a clear plastic cube stuffed with gurgling babies constrict and expand, constrict and expand—a pumping heart crushing the tiny bodies inside with every compression. He heard skulls burst. He heard bones snap through skin. He heard someone enter the waiting room.

  It was Dawn’s obstetrician. James blinked back to reality, but not before the doctor began speaking.

  “. . . wife’s operation went extremely well,” he informed James. “She’s awake and in her room, but is still a bit groggy. Also, you should know that you’re the brand new father of an eight pound, ten ounce daughter. Very alert. Very healthy. Congratulations, Mr. Dodd.”

  James nodded. His muscles unwound, ever so slightly.

  “Thank you. I can see Dawn now? And my daughter?”

  “Absolutely. Your wife is in room 319, just up the hall. I’ll have a nurse bring your daughter in. It’ll be just a few moments.”

  Again, James nodded.

  The doctor glided away and James was left to his withering jitters. He slowly rose from the waiting room couch and ambled to his wife’s bedside. She grabbed for his hand and mustered the will to smile, although vacant space still clung to her pupils.

  “How’re you feeling?” James asked, taking her grasping hand in his and squeezing.

  She shrugged.

  “Like a rounded square.”

  James bent down and kissed her. She tasted of chalk and evaporated desire.

  “Someone’s supposed to bring in Samantha soon. We’re sticking with Samantha, right?”

  An unfamiliar ripple crossed Dawn’s pupils. She shook her head.

  “What? Who? Who’s Samantha?”

  “Samantha. As a name. For our daughter. They said it was a girl.”

  Zeros flitted about the room. Dawn opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing. Somewhere beyond the door, a machine beeped rapidly impending doom. James felt hair rising on his arms; a prickle of dark ice ran from his neck to his temples. This was supposed to be one of the happiest days of his life. He was supposed to be puffing a cigar and lifting his golden child high in the air for all the world to behold. Triumphant music was supposed to be playing in the background. This should have been the prime halcyon hour. But, instead, he was coaxing his wife out of a drug-induced cavern and barely controlling an irrational, intangible dread.

  “Remember, hon? Samantha. We talked about that name for two or three years. We said that’s what we’d name a girl.”

  Dawn still stumbled inside herself.

  “Oh. Yeah. I remember. Samantha,” she murmured. “A girl. They told me it was a girl. I remember that. When I woke up they told me. And they said something else. Something important, I think. I’m not sure what it was.”

  James ran his fingers through his wife’s hair and let them fall against her neck.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just rest and relax. We’re parents now. We have to be on our game for the next 20 years or so. We’re going to need all the energy we can get.”

  Dawn breathed deeply and lazily, but didn’t exhale—it was her peculiar variation on a sigh. James had always been bothered by it. It was a gesture that seemed incomplete, a signpost that pointed the way toward exasperation, boredom, and exhaustion but never actually welcomed you to those places.

  “Why aren’t you smiling?” she asked suddenly.

  “I . . . um . . . I’m . . . not?” James hadn’t anticipated that his unspeaking mouth would betray his calm, reassuring words. An unnameable fear mounted his shoulders, sunk its knotted tentacles under his flesh, and squeezed.

  “No. You’re not. Why?” she asked again, more emphatic this time, her concern blooming. “Why aren’t you smiling?”

  James had no explanation. He had no logical port where he might anchor his ill ease. How could he describe a thing that had no definite origin, no absolute shape, no real reason to exist? How could he read a story from a blank sheet of paper?

  Someone knocked on the doorframe. Dawn and James turned to see a nurse entering the room. In her arms, she carried a crisp, white bundled blanket in which their daughter presumably rested. James couldn’t see his child’s face yet. He didn’t see any movement in the depths of the swaddled cotton, either.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Dodd?”

  James nodded and mumbled a mostly unintelligible assent. Is this it? he wondered, his pulse rapidly firing. Is it really happening? Is she finally here? Our baby. My princess.

  The nurse stepped around the couple and gently placed the bundle in Dawn’s waiting arms.

  “I’d like to introduce you to your daughter.”

  The nurse stroked Dawn’s forearm then leveled a reassuring gaze at James. With such a gaze, she might have said “all is ordered and well, Mr. Dodd” or “the world is at peace now,” but she didn’t. It was more the look mourners might exchange by casketside, all misty carnations and firm palms on the shoulder.

  “I’ll give you some time with her,” the nurse said, and breezed through the doorway, off to perform other duties.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” Dawn cooed, gently rubbing a finger along some unseen curve within the blanket.

  James stepped closer to Dawn’s bed. He attempted to angle his
body so that he could bask in the revelation of his daughter’s freshly minted form, but her tiny face still eluded him. Is she this small? So small I can’t even see her from two feet away? Can that be normal? Is she smothering in all that cloth? he worried, a needle of panic probing the base of his skull.

  “James, look!” Dawn gasped. “She’s staring at you! She’s staring at her daddy!”

  He leaned over Dawn’s shoulder and flipped back part of the blanket, hoping to be more than an oblivious bystander to one of Samantha’s first moments of wonder. But what greeted James was not a tiny fist or an adorably scrunched nose. It was not love and possibility and eyes overflowing with the future. It was nothing. Space leered up from the soft, barren plane on which his daughter was supposedly resting. His stomach began churning.

  “Where? Where is she? What’s wrong here?” James implored, unraveling the blanket and tearing it away from Dawn. No child was beneath its folds. No daughter had been cocooned inside. Dawn was cradling a void.

  “What are you doing?” she snapped, “Are you trying to be funny? She needs those covers.”

  Dawn snatched back the blanket and wrapped it around itself, tucking in the corners and leaving an open triangle at one end, a hole for a head that was not there.

  “There you go,” she breathed into the opening, drawing her hand across a downy scalp that did not exist. “It’s all better. Daddy was just being crazy for a minute.”

  She was speaking to a flattened blanket. James’ mind spun on its axis, his emotional spectrum oscillating between poles of terror and rage. Yet, he managed to maintain a level tone when he finally spoke.

  “Dawn? Where is she? What’s going on here? I . . . I don’t understand. Am I missing something?”

  Dawn rocked the blanket in her arms. She stared into the emptiness and smiled.

  “What do you mean? Missing what? She’s so beautiful, James. Samantha. Our Samantha. So beautiful. She’s everything I wanted. She even has your chubby cheeks.”

  Dawn giggled.

  James was either losing his mind or some bizarre plot was unraveling before him. His wife was laughing at an imaginary baby, a baby she fully believed to be nestled in her arms. And the nurse. The nurse had brought this nothing child into the room as if it was truly what had been born. This day, James was a man wandering in hysterical darkness; this day, he was supposedly a father.

  “Can I hold her? Just for a minute?” he asked.

  He carefully slid a trembling hand over the folded blanket and forced stillness into his digits.

  Dawn studied him carefully, her eyes more focused than when he had initially entered the room. She was shaking off the anesthetic rapidly.

  “Of course,” she answered. “Why would you even have to ask? Just remember you have to keep a hand under her head. Her neck is weak.”

  “I know, I know. I read the books and the magazines, too.” James lifted the blanket away from Dawn and pressed it to his chest, pleading to unseen forces of darkness and light that he might feel eight pounds of euphoria squirming within its recesses. But he didn’t. The blanket was only that—a blanket. His daughter was a myth. The belief in her presence was a virus that had somehow not infected him. His pulse blasted through his arteries, his hands shook despite his best effort to control them. A terrible chain of reasoning slithered up from the pits of his burning cortex.

  Dawn was definitely pregnant for the past nine months, James thought. Something was growing inside her. But what if that something was, literally, nothing? What if she had been gestating an abyss, her womb a cavity? What if we’ve been laying the foundation for our future, for our happiness and our hope, atop a bottomless chasm, atop a thing that exists but does not exist—an idea, a word, and nothing more? And what if our Samantha is that thing? What if she is constructed of nothingness?

  No. He forced the idea from his overclocked brain. It was absurd. It was insane. It was the ranting of a tired, stressed man who had seen too many horror movies. There was a rational explanation lurking around a corner somewhere. There had to be.

  The nurse ducked back into the room and, it seemed to James, stifled a gasp when she saw him holding the empty blanket. Maybe it was only a yawn.

  “Everything alright in here? The little girl’s doing fine? No problems?” she asked. A sweet, creamy sheen coated her questions. It was too authentic, too gentle, too slathered in kindness. Such utterly altruistic caring was unnatural. James didn’t trust her.

  “She’s wonderful,” Dawn replied. “She’s a dream come true.”

  “That’s what we like to hear,” the nurse said. “And how are you feeling? Any pain from the incision?”

  “A little. But it’s not really pain, I guess. My insides just feel . . . I don’t know . . . hollow.”

  The word sent a crisp shock through every nerve ending in James’ body. A hollow feeling couldn’t possibly be normal.

  “That’s normal,” the nurse said, checking the tubes running into Dawn’s arm. “It’s the combination of the pain medication and antibiotic that we’re using coupled with the reduction in internal pressure that comes from getting your baby out of you. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  The nurse’s explanation seemed straight from a bad medical drama or a poorly researched novel. James doubted that a feeling of bodily hollowness could be caused by a change in “internal pressure,” but he remained silent, clutching the bundled blanket tight to his chest.

  After jotting down a few notes on Dawn’s chart, the nurse turned to leave. She brushed by James without even so much as a glance and swept back through the doorway.

  Though his heart was slamming against his ribs and his otherwise stationary organs were vibrating with apprehension, James knew he had to speak with her. He had to ask questions that might make him sound delusional or schizophrenic. He had to risk being hauled away to the psychiatric ward; his daughter’s life—whatever that entailed—hung in the balance.

  He turned and followed the nurse, straining to swallow back the bile writhing in his throat. Dawn called after him, asking where he was going with Samantha, but he ignored her. He could explain the intricacies of his bravery—or his insanity, depending on the outcome—when he returned.

  James caught up with the nurse only a few yards down the hallway. Once he was only a few steps behind her, he tried to gain her attention.

  “Excuse me,” he said, half under his breath.

  She continued walking. His intestines gurgled.

  “Excuse me, nurse?” he tried again, this time with more confidence. He reached out and tapped her shoulder.

  The nurse halted in mid-step and spun to face James.

  “Mr. Dodd,” she said, her voice wound taut, “is there a problem? Do you need something?”

  James began to sweat. His body was one tremulous collection of doubts and fears.

  “Um . . . yes, actually. There’s . . . well . . . there’s no baby here, in my arms. My wife doesn’t seem to notice. She thinks our daughter is here, but she isn’t. Look. You brought us nothing but a blanket. So where is our daughter?”

  He offered the folded mantle to the nurse for inspection, for validation.

  She surveyed James’ pleading eyes and frowned. Not even for a brief moment did she glance down at the pile in his hands.

  “I think you’d better come with me, Mr. Dodd. You should meet with Dr. Grant, the head of the post-natal unit. He can answer any questions you might have.”

  The nurse turned and continued walking. James followed, unsure but willing to meet anyone who could help explain the situation.

  “Am I going crazy? Is this some sort of condition, like postpartum depression?” he asked as they glided through the hallway. “Am I holding my daughter right now or not? Do you see her?”

  James’ questions dangled in the air like worn nooses waiting to be filled by the necks of the condemned.

  The nurse ignored them.

  “Just follow me, Mr. Dodd,” she said.

  Th
ey walked on, through corridor after corridor, the rooms along their path gradually transforming as they passed. New and expectant mothers had lain inside the rooms that branched off from the first few passages, but as they traveled further, the occupants gradually grew fewer and fewer, the rooms darker and darker. In the final hallway they had traversed, there were simply no patients—at least, as far as James could tell. Every doorway led into a pitch black void; the light from the hall seemed to be barred from entering those rooms. James wondered how such a thing was possible. He also wondered who or what was beyond the inscrutable darkness. Light didn’t just stop at a threshold like some common vampire needing permission to enter. Entire corridors of hospitals were not totally deserted, either.

  James’ hands were shaking again.

  After passing through two more hallways of void rooms, the nurse finally stopped in front of a plain oak door. Engraved into the wood in small, neat letters was the name “Dr. V.L. Grant.”

  “Here you are, Mr. Dodd,” the nurse motioned at the door.

  James waited, hoping the nurse would go in first. She stood perfectly still.

  “You can see Dr. Grant now. Please, go in.”

  James breathed in deeply and swallowed hard. He reached out, turned the knob, and pushed open the door. A blast of frigid air escaped from the doctor’s office. The room was poorly lit and radiating an intense chill. Even so, James haltingly stepped inside. As the door swung closed behind him, he thought he heard the click of a lock. However, he was too preoccupied by his surroundings to care. His sight adjusting to the dimness, he could see that, on every side, he faced a geometric nightmare.

  The doctor’s office was an confusing amalgam of obscene angles and jagged architecture, as if several other rooms elsewhere in the world had exploded and all the shards had attempted to reform here, in one spot. There was no symmetry or readily apparent logic to the design. There were no windows and there was no furniture—only unnameable shapes protruding where desks, chairs, and cabinets might have otherwise rested. It was like nothing James had ever seen before.