The Postmortal (13 page)

I already saw that
Sky News
is branding this lady the Freezer Mom. There’s a report on Mike O’Grady’s feed that she already has a publicist and is shopping a TV show.

Sonia had another ultrasound yesterday morning because the baby’s amniotic fluid was low. I was at work when she called me from the doctor’s office.

“The baby has a low heart rate,” she said. “I have to go to the hospital and be induced.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“Holy shit.”

I hung up and flew out of the office. When I got to the hospital, Sonia was still on her way. I tried to sit and wait, but I was far too restless for that. I felt the need to be productive, even though I had nothing to do. So I got up and—I don’t know—dawdled. I spent two solid hours being a great annoyance to myself.

Eventually, Sonia came sauntering through the door with Nate, her fiancé. She looked relaxed, as if she was going for a pedicure. Her hair was a different color. She was a blonde now.

“Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?”

“John, relax. I’m not in labor. I have to check in, and then they give me the Pitocin. We’ll be here awhile. Just mellow out. You’re here for the long haul.”

I exhaled. “Your hair looks different,” I said.

“I had it done. I found a new geneticist, Dr. Neil. He’s great. Like the blonde?”

“Sure. Absolutely.”

She checked in and we were escorted to a delivery room. They stripped Sonia down, put her in a gown, squirted a tablespoonful of transparent goo onto her stomach, and strapped a heart monitor onto her. For the next twelve hours, we sat watching the contraction monitor, staring at the peaks and valleys. At some point the contractions were supposed to become more intense and frequent. But as far as I could tell, the peaks on the screen stayed the same—or even worse, the peaks would diminish a bit. After a while I stopped staring and turned my attention elsewhere. I even had a couple of not-too-awkward conversations with Nate. Then we turned on sitcom reruns. No one tells you just how dull waiting for a new life can be. Eventually, around midnight, Sonia rolled to one side and felt around in her bed, underneath her backside. The gauze pad separating her from the fitted hospital sheet was drenched with diluted plasma.

“I think my water broke.”

I assumed this was a huge deal and that it meant the baby was forthcoming. I was wrong. It’s just a thing that happens along the way. More waiting. More staring. Four hours later the doctor came in and told Sonia it was time to push. Nate and I each held one of Sonia’s legs and lifted them up to her ear for ten seconds at a time while she tried to get the baby out. We did this for two hours. Sonia looked at ease with the entire thing (the epidural helped, no doubt). I, meanwhile, was about to collapse to the ground in crippling pain. But I wasn’t the one passing a child out of my body. No sympathy for me.

I pressed on until the doctor told Sonia to stop pushing and ordered an emergency C-section because the baby’s heart rate was too low. They made us pack up all our things and escorted us to the operating room, where a team of masked doctors awaited her with long scalpels and pads to soak up the blood, as if they were preparing to disembowel her. I sat behind the curtain and held Sonia’s hand; Nate sat opposite me and grabbed her other one. I thought this would be strange. In fact, it was quite the opposite. We made a good team, Nate and I. Whenever I started to wear down, he’d pick up the slack, and vice versa. I highly recommend that any woman giving birth pack two men for the trip.

Thirty minutes later one of the doctors reached over the curtain. “And here’s your baby,” he said casually.

Our son was screaming, soaked in blood, announcing himself. The umbilical cord extended out from him, shiny like an old-fashioned twisty phone cord, the kind my grandma used to have. They quickly took the baby over to a corner of the OR to wipe him off, check his vitals, and weigh him. They cut the cord without first asking me if I would have liked to do it, which aggravated me. They asked Nate and me to stay in our seats while they did all this. Sonia passed out as they massaged her uterus back into place and stitched her back up. The nurse came back with the baby swaddled in blankets, bits of blood still caked in the crevices of his ears and entangled in little clumps of his hair.

The nurse looked at us. “Who do I give him to?” she asked.

Nate nodded toward me. “Him.”

“Here you go.”

She presented the baby to me. I stared at him. I held him close to Sonia’s face to show him to her, even though she was knocked out. I ran my hand over his head, which was still bruised and misshapen from being stuck in utero. I checked his hands. They were pruny from spending months and months bathed in amniotic fluid. They were wrinkled and puffy—like an old man’s hands. And like an old man, there were stray bits of skin peeling on different areas of his body. The nurse assured me that this was normal. You’ll grow younger, boy. Yes, you will.

I handed him to Nate. He counted all of the baby’s fingers and toes. Then he examined its face, studying its eyes and nose and little ruby mouth. “He looks just like you,” he said.

He was right. He hadn’t taken definitive shape yet, but I could tell from the creases around the eyes. He looked like me. He
was
me. He’s the part of me I’ll leave behind whenever I exit this plane of existence. I looked at his face, and it was as if he existed both inside and outside of my body. I turned to Nate. He had a look of envy about him. Nothing malicious. No jealousy. Just a look of wonder, a desire to feel what I was feeling at that moment. I gave a small nod and smiled at him. He smiled back warmly.

Soon I felt an envy of my own—for Nate. I thought I’d feel freer without marrying Sonia. But at that moment I didn’t feel that way at all. I knew it was Nate who was going to go home with Sonia and my son, while I would be trapped in a world just outside of theirs. I didn’t love Sonia anymore. But she had been right. I wanted to be part of something that meant something. I just never knew it. And nothing could be done now to get back in. I kissed my son on the head and held him tight to my chest. Forty-five minutes later, in the recovery room, Sonia woke up. I handed our son to her, and the past nineteen hours were jettisoned in her wake, like so much useless flotsam on the ocean. She was reborn.

After I gave the baby his first bath in the nursery, they took him and Sonia to a new recovery room in the maternity ward. It was Sonia’s own room. No other new mothers around. An hour later a nurse came in and asked to take the baby away for some “routine blood tests.” On instinct, I leapt for him and cried out, “No!” clutching his arm tightly in mine. I heard phantom screams come from behind other doors. Everyone looked at me like I was crazed.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I had a friend in China.”

The nurse looked offended. “We don’t brand babies in this country, sir.”

“I know. Can I come with you? That’s what I meant to say.”

“Of course you can. Has he had any genetic work done or is he organic?”

“Just the Parkinson’s. Otherwise, he’s organic.”

“Wonderful. Come with me, sir.”

And so I did. They took his blood and pricked the heel of his foot, and he came back safe and sound. No branding. No Freezer-Mommying. It was all routine. Just like they said it would be. He weighed eight pounds, four ounces. He’s gonna be a big boy. He’s gonna be a load.

I was out at a restaurant last night and sitting at the bar, waiting for a date to arrive. We had an eight o’clock reservation, but I like to show up for these things early so I can have a drink and stuff myself with free mixed nuts. Another guy occupied the stool next to me. He was a tall man, as I am. He had intensely bright blond hair, almost white, along with a deep tan complexion. He was striking both in his looks and his mannerisms. His personality—warm, gregarious—radiated out of his body without him having to utter a word. I took a gamble and chatted him up. Turned out he was an Australian. Of course he was. Every Australian I’ve ever met possesses that exact same effusive quality. His name was Keith.

“What are you doing here in the city?” I asked him.

“Aw, this is the first stop of my American year.”

“Your American year? Is that some sort of work thing?”

“Work? Nah, I don’t work. This is my year in America. I’m spending one year in every country on earth. January 1 to January 1. When the year is over, I pack up my kit and move on. I started in Canada, last year. Figured I’d get the easy countries out of the way first.”

“So, why are you staying in every country for a year?”

“Why not? I got the cure. I’ll be around for a bit. Why not take advantage?”

“But don’t you miss home?”

“Home? Nah, mate. Why would I miss home? It’s always there. Frankly, home is a bit of a crutch. It’s just so easy to stick around and keep doing all the same shit, isn’t it? What’s the point of that, especially now? I can go back home a hundred years from today, and it’ll all be the same. My friends will be the same. My wife will be the same.”

“Your wife? You’re doing this entire trip without your wife?”

“Sure, why not? She’ll be around. If I’m going to live 1,000 years, I’m not gonna spend 999 of them in Wahroonga. Anchor yourself to one spot, my friend, and you’ll eventually grow contemptuous of it. I’m doing North America and Central America first. Then South America. Then Africa. Then Europe. Then Asia. Then Oceania. A rough circumnavigation. Should take just under two hundred years. If I’m lucky, Russia will invade Ukraine and I can kill two birds with one stone. Maybe bring back a Russian bride to show off to the missus.” He laughed at the notion.

“She’d be okay with that?”

“Why not? I’m not gonna spend a year in a country without sampling the ‘culture,’ if you get my drift.”

“What about her?”

“Oh, she can have sex with anyone she damn well pleases,” he said. “Fine by me. She’s an attractive woman. No sense in saving herself for me all that time. She shacks up with my mate Kevin every now and again. I think they have a good time together. It’s great. Don’t want her getting rusty—figuratively or literally.”

“Holy shit.”

“You know, it’s amazing to me how tight-assed you Americans still are, even after all this. I don’t care about what people think of me or my relationships. Let my morals be some other idiot’s concern. You know what I care about? Indelibility. That’s what gets me hard. I have a chance to experience everything on earth with this cure, and you can bet your ass I’m gonna do it. Why would I do anything else? You stay in one place, and you forget your day the second it’s over. Everyone and every place and every thing get old if you do them enough. Even the best things. I’m not gonna forget a single day of the next two hundred years. I’m gonna camp out with bushmen. I’m gonna swim in the Amazon. I’m gonna machine-gun a dead cow in Cambodia. I’m gonna do all that. And when it’s over, I’ll be able to tell every story I’ve ever wanted to tell. I’ll be the richest man on earth. I promise you I won’t be a bore when someone decides to chat me up in a bar.”

“I think you’re already a raging success on that front.”

“Just you wait. Just you wait until you talk to me in 2230.”

My date arrived. I asked Keith to join us. She got up and left halfway through the meal. I barely noticed. Most enjoyable three hours I ever spent. As he rambled on and quaffed glass after glass of wine, I began envisioning Keith traversing the entire earth. I saw him among the hordes in China. I saw him hiking up mountains in New Zealand. Such was his enthusiasm for his prospects that I felt I was already on the trip with him. I was living vicariously through him, though I had the exact same freedom he did, just not the balls to carry it out. After we ate, we walked outside. He took out a cigarette case, one of those old-fashioned ones. He tapped a cig against it, lit it up, and basked in the idea of his present and future life.

“I’ll say this, though. I can’t wait for my year here to be up. Next country I go to is gonna be one that lets me smoke a fag.”

I was walking on the Upper West Side yesterday, after a dentist’s appointment, when I passed by a huge building under construction. Since scaffolding covered its entire facade, I was forced to walk through one of those makeshift corridors they always set up where there’s a work zone. I hate those things. They’re always half the width of a normal sidewalk, and I usually have to plaster myself against the wall every twenty feet to make way for some giant robostroller. As I made my way, I saw a group of people in the center of the walkway, handing out fliers to passersby. I kept my head down and tried to wriggle past them. One of them jammed a flyer in my face. I took it just to be rid of him and kept on walking. He walked with me, beaming one of those creepy frozen-in-place smiles that’s always a telltale mark of the deluded.

“Warmest greetings from the Church of Man!” he said.

“Yeah, not interested.”

“Did you know that when this building is completed it will be the largest Church of Man in the world?”

“Not interested, thanks.”

I kept on walking and eventually the Church of Man guy gave up and walked back to his little congregation. I was privately shocked that there was a twenty-story building going up dedicated entirely to the Church of Man. I mean, I know a couple of celebs are big on the church. But I didn’t think real people actually cared. I kept the flyer and read it. Here it is: