The office was split into two levels, and as Dorothy was finding her place on the page a skinny woman came up from below and fumbled to open the gate at the top of the stairs. A heavily pregnant woman admonished her toddler to stay in place and went over to help the girl. The skinny woman intrigued Dorothy. She was draped in white, like a beachcomber or cult member, and her hair was shorn like a spring sheep. She might have been in the early weeks of pregnancy, or due for an annual pap, or the victim of a nasty UTI, or suffering from stage I or II cervical cancer. There was no way to tell from the outside what was happening inside. Illness could be asymptomatic. The sickest people could glow with false health—red lips, dewy cheeks. This was the whole thing about “showing.” Life and death, viability and unviability, persisted under cover of darkness. It took time to thicken in the middle. When you most needed a seat, you could not ask for one. And then once you were showing, you were the show.
The woman in white took a seat opposite Dorothy and busied herself with the forms on the blue clipboard. Anything could be going on with her but someone wearing that much white was probably not continuously bleeding, or else she was exceedingly confident in the quality of her feminine-hygiene products. The doctor was running late, as usual. Dorothy read half a page of Rebecca. It was odd that no one in this book had children. Perhaps that was the meaning of the double. By reproducing an individual, the double interfered with the reproduction of a generation.
A Pretenders song ended and the energetic opening chords of “Second Hand News” picked up speed, like sonic horses leaning into a bend in the track. From a list of all music in the world that had ever been recorded, someone had chosen this music to play here, in this environment. Or rather, someone had chosen music like this music; they had selected a genre, and the computer had done the rest. This experience, like so many in the modern world, had been curated with the minimum of human intention/agency. The feelings she was feeling—an uptick in happiness and energy, a humming mood at once new and familiar—had been factored into the choice and yet were also a happenstance of the shuffle. What was worse—the institutionality of silence or the institutionality of noise? Was being left to one’s own devices better or worse than being coerced into pleasure?
The light was gentle and emanating. If there were bulbs in the fixtures they were invisible within the frosted glass. A nurse with a high forehead and bleached streak came through the reception area dancing. She opened a drawer, took something out, and danced away. Perhaps she had chosen the station, or perhaps she was lucky in a different way—to be so entirely suited to her surroundings. She had found her place! Dorothy hoped she would never lose it. Neon pink cows with big moony eyes silently lowed from the wallpaper like rejects from Warhol’s studio. Or maybe it was an actual Warhol pattern? Dorothy didn’t know if the cow motif was supposed to be funny but it felt inappropriate just the same. Pregnant people already felt like cows, didn’t they? Or maybe when you saw the cows you were supposed to think of milk. Wasn’t that offensive to people who used formula, or who weren’t pregnant at all?
Mother whales make two hundred liters of milk a day. Gaby had texted her that piece of trivia when she was first breastfeeding. Oddly, that wasn’t the only animal mammary knowledge that Dorothy had at her fingertips. She also knew that elephant seals nurse for one month, after which they leave the pups to fend for themselves. Some of the pups don’t fend. They hang around the beach and find other mothers to nurse them and when those mothers leave find other mothers and repeat as long as they can until no one nurses them and they die of starvation. She had learned that on a trip to a marine hospital that Rog had insisted on visiting last year while they were driving up the Northern California coastline.
The marine hospital was awful. It was like a jail for seals. Dorothy didn’t understand why it had to exist, or why Rog wanted to go there. And why didn’t the authorities let the seals die on the beaches? she said while they stood on the cement overlook peering down into the metal cages. It wasn’t like they were endangered.
“You’re heartless” is how Rog responded. Later, over beers on the cold gray Sausalito sand he had added, “And you have no grasp of optics. People don’t want to see a pile of dead baby seals when they’re out for a walk.”
Rog had misunderstood. It wasn’t that Dorothy was heartless or unsavvy about the media or unable to imagine the pressures of running a nonprofit. It was that she didn’t believe that everyone or everything could be rescued. There was something neurotic, she said, in the avoidance of death. Rog countered that there was a difference between avoiding death and ameliorating needless suffering.
“But why would we overrule their mothers?” asked Dorothy. “Don’t mothers know best?”
* * *
—
Dorothy shifted in the plastic seat. She rubbed her shoulder, her neck. She had to stop hunching. If she wasn’t careful she would become one of those ancient horizontal city-dwellers who walk bent in half, twisting their decrepit necks to the side to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk. She would have said she was exhausted, but she had to admit, as she pressed her fingers into the hard knot of compacted, agonized muscle, admiring and fearing the resistance she encountered, that she had lost a sense of what it felt like to be normally energetic. Was she tired? How should a person feel? Maybe everyone felt like this—twisted and sore, blunted. Maybe this was the standard. She had no sense of what was reasonable, of what she could reasonably expect, of what, therefore, could fail to measure up. The last time she had felt truly awake was the morning after the miscarriage. After the sanguinary deluge and the dark deep oxy sleep came a fabulous dawn rush—an explosion of physical and mental energy. She sprang out of bed! She could not remember ever in her life having felt so good! The rot had been flushed away and with it the dread; she was risen.
That morning, when she was still heavily bleeding and wearing maximum absorbency sanitary napkins, Rog took the day off and they went to the Guggenheim to see the Hilma af Klint retrospective that everyone was talking about. Rog had wanted her to stay in bed to rest, but she insisted. The top of her head had been taken off. She had to get out. At the museum she had so much to say; she could not control the tempo of her speech. She scanned the paintings as one takes stock of a crowd but mostly she wanted to talk about how good she felt. How she was living, once again, in open time. Open time that was not for anything. People lived in this time without knowing what it was, without knowing it had a name. She had journeyed to other times and was back to tell the tale.
“I guess we dodged a bullet,” said Rog, eyes fixed on the wall text. “It sounds like you really didn’t want to have a baby.”
“That’s not fair,” said Dorothy. “That’s not what I said.”
Rog read out loud. Af Klint, a Swedish mystic, had been a gifted draughtswoman who made money with scientific drawings. She co-illustrated a book about horse surgery. He gestured to a realistic drawing of a dog. Dorothy found the neediness of the dog inexpressibly moving. That the woman who drew that dog had also invented her own abstract symbolic language was impressive. They paused in front of a series of huge canvases that af Klint had painted for a temple that had never been built. Everything was round, squiggle, flower. An orange and a blue circle overlapped just slightly, the yellow meeting point suggesting only the narrowest ledge of mutual comprehension.
“Do you think,” Dorothy said, “that she felt her life was unfinished? Because her work couldn’t be seen the way she had intended for it to be seen?”
By open time, she added, she meant time in contrast to reproductive time. Reproductive time, she said, following Rog across the proscenium, had been waiting time: waiting for the second line to appear, and then waiting for the OB appointment, and then waiting for the follow-up appointment, and then waiting for the Cytotec to kick in, and then waiting for the second Cytotec to kick in. It hadn’t worked the first time. She’d had to do it twice. You had t
o push the tablet all the way up to the second knuckle, way into the vaginal canal so it could be absorbed into the walls there. Waiting time was sitting time, lying down time, sitting up again time, for hours, it was watching television while checking your phone time, it was alone time, texting with Rog, Rog was at work—
“I got home as soon as I could,” said Rog. “You know I didn’t mean to be late.”
In fairness, he had arrived before the onset of the terrible abdominal convulsions, which felt like something tight and compacted inside splitting a little bit, and then a lot, like Dorothy was a seismic zone and there was a tectonic plate inside her mantle grinding against itself. She managed with a heating pad and the painkiller, and by lying on her side, and moaning, out loud, like an injured animal, an abandoned seal. Pain effectively removed the need to think about anything else, it removed inhibitions around itself, it made itself the priority. In that sense it was relaxing; there were no decisions to be made. You knew where you stood with pain. She wasn’t sure how long the pain went on but it was a relief when it started, it represented the start that would also be the end. She would never have called them labor pains—how embarrassing, to claim them as such, how disrespectful—but she knew, technically, that they were. What to call them, though? In what category of pain did they belong, and if they didn’t have a category, did they even exist? Rank this pain on a scale of one to ten, Rog had said, concerned. Dorothy had just looked at him, like, Why?
There was blood. The doctor had told her it would be “heavy,” that she would “soak” through sanitary napkins, but those were just words, letter and phoneme combinations, liability coverage. There was too much blood, it must have been coming from somewhere other than inside her own body, and yet where else could it have originated? Then there was more. It seeped through the plastic coating on the underside of the pad, sagging in huge red maps. It had a dull metallic smell. The smell was big, like a cave; you could live inside the smell. Rog repeated how unfair it was that Dorothy had to suffer this way because she was a woman but Dorothy did not understand why you would want not to suffer this way. This way was all-encompassing. Was there another way? Again and again Dorothy changed the sanitary napkins, rolling them up into huge scrolls and stacking them in the trash can, and fell asleep, exhausted, dreamless, undefended. Where had Rog slept? In the bed?
“Yes,” he said, breaking eye contact with a black swan to look at her. “Right next to you.”
Once or twice Rog tried to turn the conversation from Dorothy’s sheer insane joy to be alive back to the paintings, geometric abstractions in pink and orange and other colors that Dorothy had seen in museums, but spread out as accents, never in this volume and density—never this much pink, this close together—but Dorothy did not especially want to talk about the paintings, and wished she had gone to see them some other day, by herself.
Of one, he said, “How feminist,” an anachronism that made Dorothy extremely angry.
“We need to live in our own time” was all she could get out.
Usually Dorothy didn’t bother to linger over art. If she was going to see something, she saw it right away, especially if a face was concerned, or if the canvas was busy or freighted with objects. These paintings were different. They were empty for the most part, but it seemed like the more she looked the more she could see of them, or maybe she meant she could go deeper into them, like a portal, or perhaps like the feeling of DMT, which she had read was like rushing toward a door in your mind. It was like the time that Dorothy and Rog had taken ayahuasca, in a salsa-dancing studio that overlooked a gas station, but the shaman, made nervous by the size of the group, had intentionally watered down the dose, and although Dorothy had dutifully puked up her dinner into a pink plastic bucket and felt a rapid mental rushing through space like what she had read was associated with DMT, when she got to the door it was locked, and wouldn’t open. The paintings of Hilma af Klint were exciting and frustrating like weak ayahuasca. Dorothy rushed toward them expectantly and though they didn’t repel her they also didn’t transport her and they themselves did not change or go anywhere else. They were more of what they had been. She could never have written a paper about them. She could not think about them; she could only think near them.
Dorothy didn’t bring up the ayahuasca with Rog. It still made him angry to think about. He still wanted his money back. “If there were a better business bureau for drugs to complain to, I would” had been his first and last take on the experience.
At the museum, Rog said again how feminine the paintings were, how “female.” Dorothy nodded but knew he was wrong. They were cold, precise, genderless messages from the far reaches of outer space, from a place where there were lines and pyramids and crystals but no bodies and no blood. As they ascended the spiral ramp Dorothy felt herself attaining the higher ground after all, not in one painting but in the aggregate of all the paintings. She was leaving her body behind, reaching closer to heaven or the transcendent heavenly sphere. The air was thinner up here. She felt a joy to be leaving her body but also expected, from the highest point in the museum, to feel a joy when she reunited with her body at the bottom level. By the time they had descended and exited the building, however, she had slipped back into her body without being aware of it, and when they stopped for lunch Dorothy ate all the bread on the table, and all the food on her plate, and when she was uncomfortably full, she was sad there wasn’t any more to eat.
* * *
—
Dorothy’s pocket dinged. She let her book close and fished the phone out of her jacket. Gaby was having a panic attack, or thought she might be. Without activating any process in her cerebral cortex—without choosing, deliberating, or thinking—Dorothy’s thumbs ricocheted over the screen.
Dorothy: What are your symptoms?
Gaby: …
Dorothy: Are you OK?
Gaby: I’m freaking out.
Dorothy didn’t understand why Gaby texted these things instead of calling. Was Dorothy supposed to call back? Or would calling be aggressive, a way of raising the stakes, and ought she respect the medium in which Gaby had initiated the conversation? Then again, maybe Gaby hadn’t chosen to text at all—her fingers, presumably, were as automated as Dorothy’s.
Gaby: I think my marriage is ending.
Gaby: He holds Sherman wrong.
Dorothy: What do you mean wrong
Gaby: I can just tell he doesn’t like it! I’m his mother so
Gaby: I know!
Gaby: I’m crying sooooo hard
Dorothy: It’s ok you’ll be ok
Gaby: I think I’m hyperventilating.
Gaby: What is hyperventilating like?
Dorothy: I think it’s breathing really fast?
Gaby’s words intruded or heedlessly barged their way into the calm bovine space of the waiting room like someone who did not respect the need to schedule an appointment. Dorothy had the unpleasant sensation of falling between worlds, or more precisely, of being divided and conquered across multiple planes. Gaby was somewhere else, not so far by miles but it would have taken forty minutes at least to travel to her. But space, which had begun to constrict two centuries ago with the invention of the bicycle and the railroad, had been in the last decade entirely obliterated; it was less than an afterthought, it was a dim cultural memory, it was telling stories around the campfire. The psychic effect of texting was to introduce a foreign and yet highly localized weather pattern, as if it had suddenly begun hailing on Dorothy’s head, and the other patients were blinking in sunshine. And yet since the words came from Dorothy’s own phone, lit up on the book on her lap, it was perhaps more like the words were coming from Dorothy herself—like the weather was coming from Dorothy herself—like she was the intrusion. But that only made it harder to understand how to prevent it from happening.
Dorothy: Calm down!!!
Dorothy: Sorry, I know that isn’t helpful.
Dorothy: What do you do when you need to feel calm? Can you meditate? Count down? My therapists tell me to count down.
Gaby: Snuggle the baby but
Dorothy: Well one of them tells me to count down. The other one says just to do it if it works for you. Does it work for you
Gaby: …
Dorothy: I read an article about meditating. Should I send it Y/N?
Gaby: …
Gaby: …
Gaby: The baby is with the babysitter
Dorothy: Can you look at a picture of the baby? Send me a picture and we can look at it together!
Gaby: …
Gaby: …
Gaby: I can’t decide, I’m freaking out which one is the Best oen to send???
Dorothy: It doesn’t matter, never mind, just look at all of them.
Dorothy: Don’t send me any.
Gaby: Don’t you want to see??
Dorothy: Yes OF COURSE, I am just trying to help remove some of the indecision here.
Dorothy: Hello? Are you OK? Do you have a Xanax or something?
Gaby: I DO NOT NEED TO GO ON ANTI-DEPRESSANTS
Dorothy: That’s not what I mean.
Dorothy: Do you KNOW anyone who has a Xanax?
Dorothy: It’s insane, how can you not know someone who has a Xanax?
Dorothy: I took a Xanax once, it really helped. ??????
Gaby: I’m okay now
Dorothy: Are you sure?
Gaby: Stalin
Gaby: …
The Life of the Mind Page 7
