Interfictions 2 (40 page)

"She can't have that,” the nurse says and promptly confiscates it. “Empty stomach, remember?"

"Shitfire,” I say, morose in the bed, with a fetal monitor strapped to my belly and an armful of Pitocin guaranteed to start my labor.

"Hello?” says my man, as the little Philippine nurse walks past him, out the door. “About the dragons?"

She has an eye for color, but her work here is done, and she doesn't spare my husband a glance.

"I'll see what we can do,” she says, in passing.

My husband finds the dragons distasteful, but he's not alarmed. There have been hints of them around before. Most notably at our wedding, when the cake burst into flame as we cut it, and at my father's funeral, where many of them showed up dressed as professional Sicilian mourners. They may have been at our daughter's birth, come to think of it, but he was too busy looking at her to notice, and I was too busy watching him look at her. The dragons may have been hiding, that time.

Now there are two dragons, we think, but it's difficult to tell them apart. They're both the same poisonous green, and they're off in a corner, coiled into one another like snakes. It's difficult to tell where one starts and the other begins. They are smallish.

It is not lost on me that I am now beginning to think of certain dragons as “smallish."

These are not quite the size of certain prehistoric alligators I'd read about in the second grade. It is their wings that take up so much room. Like the elbows of adolescents, they shoot out at odd moments and knock magazines out of our hands. One of them knocks my husband's coffee cup over onto one of the monitors; the machine whines and hisses, and a nurse trots in to frown and adjust it. She is not my little student nurse, but stern and large-bosomed and dark brown, and I am afraid of her. My dragons have made a mess, and I'm afraid I will be scolded.

Instead, she picks up the chart by the bed, sponges coffee off with a tissue, and squints at it severely.

"How are the contractions?” she asks.

Pitocin is an evil chemical made from the piss of pregnant horses, or so I've been told. It is designed to jump-start labor, and all the midwives and the other mothers have warned me about it. “Worst contractions you'll ever experience,” they all predicted with funereal cheer.

So far, it hasn't been so bad. Deep within, the contractions announce that they are still a long way off, like the distant rumblings of a train that hasn't reached my station yet.

"I'm fine,” I tell her, which is my stock answer to any person I catch in a lab coat, or working anywhere near a doctor's office or a hospital. “I'm fine.” Please don't work your voodoo on me.

"We'll just crank up the drip, then,” says the nurse, and adjusts my IV.

A train whistles ominously. One of the dragons lifts its head.

"Did anyone else hear that?” I ask.

"I can't hear anything,” my husband says, gesturing toward the dragons, “with these things, here, wheezing like this. Nurse, can we either get them out of here or get another room?"

"There's been a bit of an infestation, I'm afraid,” says the stern nurse.

"You mean they're all over the hospital?” I ask.

"No. Just in here."

"Can we get another room?"

"I'm afraid not."

Having wiped the coffee off the monitors with common paper towels, she leaves us.

My husband has gone to get more magazines.

There is nothing left to do.

We have observed the habits of the dragons (one of them has defecated, sizzlingly, against the far white wall), but we don't talk about the number of neonatal specialists who have checked in with us, or what we think we might have seen on the last ultrasound screen. We don't talk about the number of chromosomes we are hoping for.

Down syndrome babies are awarded an extra chromosome.

As open-minded as we try to be, my husband and myself find it a dubious award.

We are hoping, and trying not to be crass about it, for forty-six chromosomes per cell.

There are forty-six chromosomes in a normal cell.

But what's normal?

I am huge with two infant boys, pregnant mare piss is pumping through my veins in an effort to startle me into labor, and I have no idea how many chromosomes the average dragon needs to rack up, in order to appear ordinary. Their wings are folded on their backs, and they nap, one on top of the TV, one in the corner, on the floor behind my husband's chair.

My husband sighs and shifts and finds the chair too hot, eventually. He pulls back the hospital blanket and rubs my feet. He puzzles out the monitors, absorbs himself in the green blip of my heartbeat on the screen, and tries to follow the quicker heartbeats of Baby A and Baby B on the screen below.

I send him for magazines.

I tell him I want something thick and glossy, smooth-haired and full-lipped and the kind of shoes I would never wear because (although I am proud of my legs) I feel hobbled and helpless in high heels. I want a scented page full of nothing but a single Prada sling-back. I want to meditate on it, on its knife edges, designed to keep a woman off-balance, spread-legged, unable to dig in or to flee, tilted forward, ass out, constantly on the verge of being tipped over and fucked. I am a mother, and currently my feet are bare, but I took care to shave my legs for the birth, and I find myself craving that sort of frivolous, self-imposed imbalance.

They have given me a wee drop of morphine.

So when I thumb the remote for the TV, and hear the sounds of kids screaming over cell phones, and see helicopters circling a nondescript high school in a nondescript suburb, it takes me a long time to sort it out. There is gunfire, and students, their shirts riding up to expose their backs as they drop one another from broken windows. The dragon sitting on top of the TV is awake now. It has brought its hind leg up to its mouth and is gnawing industriously on its talons.

"What is this?” I ask it. “Where is this? A bombing? Israel?"

The dragon is so pretty, and green, and lethal as a Prada sling-back. Like the shoe, it has no answers but spits heat.

When my husband returns with copies of the
New Yorker
and
Harper's
, I am sweating.

"There's something going on in Colorado,” I tell him. “Something biblical. Two boys. Ow."

The morphine has worn off. The contractions feel like fists. I am being pounded from the inside. My husband drops the magazines and does this beautiful thing where he runs to my side and picks up my hand and starts rubbing it, and my arm. Unfortunately, it's the arm with the IV in it.

"Ow!” I yelp. “Goddamit, ow, there's a needle in there, man!"

"Sorry,” says my husband. “Two boys,” he says.

"Colorado,” I say.

"No, here,” he says. “Soon."

"Two boys are killing their classmates in Colorado,” I say.

I push the green power button on the remote control and we watch emergency vehicles circle, hear the kitschy pop of automatic weapons, listen to panicked high-school kids on cell phones conferring with media vultures.

My husband's face is like a souffl?, at first; soft in the middle, collapsing, and then hard around the edges. I feel I have spoiled his party by turning on the TV. He doesn't like TV, and this is his day, the day he will stand back and watch sons emerge like some sort of magic trick, like rabbits out of a hat. For him, it is as though he cut the deck thirty-eight weeks ago and is only now being presented with his card, the two of hearts.

Maybe he is not counting chromosomes; maybe I'm the only one doing that.

He despises standing by.

He cannot watch what is happening in Colorado, he is powerless when it comes to Columbine, but when it comes time, he will take his children in his hands and study them thoroughly. He will catalogue their parts, and he will not flinch.

He puts his hand on my forehead now and keeps it there, walking alongside my bed as the orderlies roll me into the OR.

There are two boys in Colorado who have had it. They will not live out the day.

They will kill themselves while I am having my legs taped to the stirrups. I do not realize I'm having my legs taped to the stirrups. There is a dragon on my belly. The two boys who are killing themselves do not realize that somewhere in the Midwest, a woman is lying on her back, spread open among strangers in a hard white room, wondering about those same two boys, wondering why no one will do anything about the goddamned dragon. It's unhygienic, to say the least, and it is drooling napalm, which runs in hot lines down either side of me. It hurts.

"I thought you left,” I tell it. “I thought you were so done with me. I thought you were all red and black and sneering at my tax returns and my varicose veins."

But it is here, as undeniably green as a new fig leaf. It inches forward, puts its head down on my breasts, and nudges the underside of my chin with the top of its horny jaw. I realize I do not want it to leave. It flinches slightly at the sound of the duct tape being ripped from the roll. A nurse heaves one of my legs onto the stirrup and tapes my ankle to it.

My four-headed obstetrician is draped in OR green, which clashes with the dragons, but I can tell by the way her surgical masks crease that all four mouths are smiling reassuringly at me. Four neonatal specialists stand guard next to two empty incubators, quietly discussing their weekend. One of them mentions a sailboat, the other his prize-winning rose bushes. The orderlies hold their mops at the ready, and an anesthesiologist with an unpronounceable name and deft fingers quickly slips a needle in between the vertebrae of my lower back.

They all move around the room like geese, with their green paper caps and their quick hands and feet.

I raise my head and meet the eyes of the dragon. In their many facets, I can see the hairline fractures of time and space and all the blood that fills them up, and beyond that my own bare knees, spread wide apart. The fists inside of me flex and try to knuckle their way out.

This will all end in tears, I think, and have to close my eyes to dispel the sudden, quick headache. A soft voice in the room draws attention to my blood pressure. They have taped my legs to the stirrups because I can't feel them. The fists inside me relax.

I tilt my head back on the table and stare at the anesthesiologist, who has worked his mojo on me. He smiles pleasantly, swarthy and competent, with strong-looking teeth, one of Ali Baba's thieves. Along with the pain, he has robbed me of my ability to cut and run. Plastic tubes lead to plastic bags leading to my spine, to my arm, to my monitors. The Philippine nurse keeps her lovely accent in her mouth while she rearranges metal carts on wheels and soaks rolls of gauze in a basin full of yellow-brown disinfectant.

"Should I push?” I want to know.

"No, no, no, no,” says my four-headed OB.

"I don't like where your blood pressure is going,” says one.

"Baby A is breech,” says another.

"I'm going to try to turn him around,” says the third, and puts one arm inside me, up to her elbow. Her other arm is on my belly, manipulating. Because my anesthesiologist is so Ali Baba competent, this affects me only slightly, as though I were a purse and the OB was rooting around in me for a set of lost keys. Her eyebrows draw together, and the crease between them deepens as she concentrates, the one face close to my belly, the others hovering, watching my blood pressure. She frowns in frustration and swivels her head around to communicate a silent message to her sisters.

"You need to sign this,” says the fourth OB, presenting me with a clipboard and a Bic Rollerball pen. I scribble my signature on a release form as the stern black nurse introduces a catheter into my bladder. Knives are readied while the nurse who knows a thing or two about the French symbolists tents me. My pregnancy disappears from my sight by a surgical screen arranged just above my breasts. My arms are free of it, but I am cut off from the action. The dragon is still there, peering out, kittenish from beneath green draping.

"Fuck off,” I tell it. “You're gonna have to move.” It retreats beneath the tent.

My obstetrician steps forward, eyes as sincere as the four surgical masks that cover her mouths. She bends over me. I am her work, now, and she has taken no chances, she knows my tricks. I cannot rise up righteous this time. I feel nothing below my pumping heart.

She selects a scalpel and holds it up casually. There is nothing that catches the light like a brand new scalpel.

I breathe, as I have been instructed.

I am splayed, filleted, my spine does not know itself. I am a beached sea creature dredged up from its purple cave and tied down, gray, under white lights. Who knows what could come out of me; a cloud of ink, a hail of bullets, a sermon, some dice, a pair of dragons. My husband, in his green paper shower cap, waits nervously by my head, ready to do his duty and cut the cord. Will he still get to cut the cord? No, he is not allowed past the tent around my belly; huh, they let a dragon hang out in there, but not a tenured college professor; this is some crazy hospital.

My OB's hands disappear behind the draping, and I imagine a thin red mouth opening from east to west in the flesh of my belly, below my navel.

A tugging commences, just barely north of my groin. The OB has set her scalpel down and has slipped her gloved fingers into the incision, in order to pry me apart. The dragons shriek and fly up with a great commotion of wings and claws, as my abdominals are muscled apart. In a panic, the dragons knock the ceiling fixture askew, throwing light into the eyes of the anesthesiologist, my gentle kidnapper, who swears softly.

As they spread their wings and attempt to circle the small OR, I lift my head to follow their flight but find I cannot lift my ribcage.

I wonder, wildly, if my feet are cold.

My hands are free, and unaffected, and I raise one arm to shield my eyes from the glare of the light. The anesthesiologist, seeing that it is the arm with the IV, reaches across my face to grab me and keep me from pulling the needle out.