Followers

by Megan Angelo

  The power seized again as a nurse led Orla and Mrs. Salgado past the nursery. Babies, no babies. Babies, no babies. The newborns, indistinguishable in their caps and cotton wrappings, seemed not to notice the blinking.

  A new pain hit as Orla settled into bed. “Breathe,” someone said, but she held in all the air she could get. A nurse with a snarl of watches in a small bin handed one to Mrs. Salgado. Mickey Mouse’s white-gloved hands claimed it was eight fifteen. “You’re in charge of contractions,” the nurse said to Anna’s mother.

  The doctor stood next to Orla’s bed with her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. “Sorry, honey, no epidural,” she said. “We’re short-staffed. But you can do this. Millions of women have done this. You have your mother here with you. It’s gonna be fine.”

  “I’m forty-six,” Mrs. Salgado sniffed.

  The doctor stuck her fingers inside Orla, who tried not to gasp. “Three centimeters,” the doctor said.

  Three hours later, it was only four, and the baby’s heart rate was slowing. The doctor called in another one. The two of them conferred in the corner, near a yoga ball that hung from the ceiling in a large mesh hammock.

  “All right,” the first one said to Orla. She clapped her hands together. “We have to do a C-section. That means,” she went on in doctor singsong, “you get some anesthesia! Finally, right?”

  When they were about to wheel her in, Mrs. Salgado bent over the gurney. “If this watch is right, it’s still Christmas,” she said to Orla. “Your baby will be here before midnight—you won’t believe how fast it goes. I had a C, too.” She reached down, tentatively, and smoothed the tiny curls at Orla’s hairline back. The lights went out again. The little OR-bound parade stopped and waited.

  “I’m sorry,” Orla said into the darkness. “I’m so sorry.”

  It was silent for a moment. Then the nurse over Orla’s left shoulder said, “Funny—it’s usually the husbands who say that up here.”

  When the lights came back on, Mrs. Salgado was gone.

  “It’s all right,” the nurse said, as Orla lifted her head, looking. “She’ll be there when you get out.”

  But she wasn’t. Mrs. Salgado tried to stay. But she had to go when her mind filled with thoughts of Anna—Anna being lifted out of her, as she lay on a table just like the one they cut Orla open on, Anna’s first fierce sound, Anna’s slick and pumping fists, Anna’s reddish-purple chest, swelling with her first breath. No one told Orla any of this. By the time she woke up in recovery and let them put Marlow on her chest, no one had to. She was a mother. She understood.

  All that was left of Mrs. Salgado was a neat stack of wool on the chair in Orla’s room: tiny pants, tiny sweater, tiny hat. Orla knew the yarn. She was sure it had been a scarf unspooling over Mrs. Salgado’s hands these last several weeks, outside her building. But she also knew, from having a mother who knit, that an experienced purler could change her design, if she just changed her mind in time.

  * * *

  On the first day of Marlow’s life, the world was still timeless and frightening. But in Orla’s room, everything was perfect. Marlow slept, prompting relieved looks from the overworked nurses. Marlow ate, prompting a grin and a loud “praise be” from the nosy lactation consultant. Orla beamed right back at her. Look what she had made. She would never be alone again.

  Normally, they wouldn’t have left her alone with Marlow so much. Normally, there would have been baths and tests and admonitions that Orla stay in bed, so that the deep slit in her belly could heal. But under the circumstances, they kept saying, and what they meant was: they weren’t watching. They told Orla to be careful when she got up. They showed her how to remove and replace the canvas pumps strapped around her legs, coaxing her blood to flow evenly. They told her to buzz if she was light-headed, and to be patient if they didn’t come quickly. They told her to, above all, listen to her body.

  Only because there was nothing to do, Orla figured out the outages. They happened every twenty minutes or so, and lasted for about thirty seconds. Each time the shadow and hush fell over the floor, the nurses would rush from their stations toward patients who had something crucial plugged into them. Then the generator would kick back up, the power would return, and everything would go back to normal.

  Later that day, while Marlow slept in the clear bassinet, Orla swore that she heard the bouncing lilt of a cell phone. She went to her door, cracked it, and looked out at the nurses’ station. All of the nurses were huddled around the brunette with the feathered hair, the one who had made Orla blow into a cylinder just a few minutes before.

  The brunette was holding her phone. Orla could see, from the blue light in the grease on the woman’s chin, that the phone was on, its image moving. A video. Behind the brunette, two nurses exchanged looks. They backed away.

  “What?” the brunette shouted suddenly. She was talking to the phone like someone was on the other end. But clearly, nobody was. “Ava is seeing this?” she said. “What the—Oh, no, oh fuck!” She stood up. The other nurses scattered like pigeons. The brunette walked to the stairs in her soundless shoes and slapped the door open with both hands.

  “Was her phone working?” the girl in the room next to Orla’s called out.

  “Back in your rooms, please, everyone,” another nurse snapped, and Orla realized that it wasn’t just her—everyone was watching. She got back in bed and strapped her pumps back on. Five minutes later, a nurse she hadn’t seen yet—baby-faced, with dime-tight black curls—came into the room. She didn’t look at Orla as she picked up the foam block from the ledge of the dry-erase board. She wiped away the brunette’s name and replaced it with her own. Then she left the room and went back with the rest of them, cloistered behind the high walls of the cubicles, whispering together—what the fuck just happened?

  It had been two feedings, a change, and the better part of Marlow’s next nap when Orla realized that no one, not the young nurse or anyone else, had been in to see them in hours. She was sure she was overdue for her small white cup of pain pills; the flesh on her stomach was burning around her incision and aching underneath. It seemed, Orla thought, like she and Marlow had slipped through the cracks.

  She was about to press the call button and beg for someone to bring her a painkiller when a thought shot through her. A crazy thought, an unthinkable thought. But that only meant it matched the state of things.

  She took her finger off of the call button.

  “Just ran right out of here,” her nurse was saying, outside the door, to someone who had just come on shift. “Something about a video, and Ava seeing it. Isn’t Ava, like, nine?”

  Orla rose slowly, gripping the bed’s bars, and went into the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was thinking that maybe this crack they slipped through was actually an opening.

  She winced as she pulled her clothes on, over the white medical corset and the bandages beneath it. She swept all the supplies from the bathroom into her bag, even the things she didn’t understand: cold packs that stretched the length of her crotch, the comically oversize maxi pads, the soft plastic bottle with its nozzle top. Then she moved to the bassinet and packed everything from there, too: the diapers, the wipes, the little snapped shirts that bloomed around the baby’s seven-pound body, the extra hat, the tiny comb, the bulb for sucking her nose clean. She stopped to lean over Marlow, to make sure she was all right. The closeness of her breath made the baby flinch and wrinkle her nose.

  Orla went to her door, hung the laminated sign that said she was breastfeeding and not to be disturbed, and closed it softly.

  She unwrapped Marlow on the bed, marveling again at the tiny limbs that sprang wide when she opened the blanket, at the firm little belly with its lingering nub, pupil black, of the cord that connected them. Marlow was still as Orla changed her diaper, fumbling the yellow tabs over and over. “Good girl,” Orla said.

  The pant
s that Mrs. Salgado had made, she saw gratefully, were footed. She pulled the sweater inch by inch over Marlow’s head.

  “We’re going home,” she whispered to Marlow. She put her back in the bassinet.

  She hauled her overnight bag up onto the nest of sheets, the motion like a knife running straight across her middle. The things she had brought, the things she was taking—almost all of it, fortunately, amounted to padding. She pushed everything to the sides of the bag, making a well in the middle.

  She picked up Marlow and waited for the next round of darkness.

  The plastic bracelets both of them wore had matching numbers and a sensor. If either of them went through the swinging unit doors before discharge, the sensors would sound an alarm, a nurse had told her. The hospital would lock down. “Except,” the nurse said in a low voice, “during these goddamn generator fails. But we’re talking seconds at a time. What are the odds, you know?”

  Finally, the lamp over Orla’s bed flickered out. The room cooled and quieted.

  Orla opened the door and stuck her head out. She looked at the nurses’ station. All of the women were up and jogging toward the rooms that needed them. A chorus of “How we doin’ in here?” rang up and down the hall.

  Orla shut the door, went back and picked up Marlow. She placed the baby gently in the bag and zipped it an inch short of all the way shut.

  She walked briskly down the hallway, her torso blaring with every step. She kept her eyes on the exit. As the doors got closer, she asked herself, panicked, what the fuck she was doing and got the answer swiftly, pure intuition. She was listening to her body.

  Her hand touched down and pushed. They were through. She braced for something terrible, but the only sound behind them was the swish of the closing doors.

  She had made it to ground level, to the sign that said EXIT TO STREET, when the lights came back on. She already had the door open. And then she was out, they were out, on the wet sidewalk that now seemed miraculous, beneath the scaffolding that now looked like majesty, in the damp city chill that now felt like new life. Free and clear on Fifty-Eighth Street.

  There was less snow and fewer cops on the street now than when Orla went in. And there was a man walking toward her, wearing a suit, which no one did in an emergency, she thought. He was holding a banana. A banana! Like it was any other day, like he had to eat on the run. Looking at the fruit, she almost wept.

  And here was another yellow miracle: a cab, all alone on the street, coming down the block right toward her. Reflexively, she put her arm into the air.

  “I had to get out of the house, man,” the driver said as she got in. He pointed at the meter. Its screen was blank. “I won’t charge you, but no Brooklyn, no Queens. I got a quarter tank of gas and I gotta make it last. Shit, the techpocalypse couldn’t go down before my mother-in-law flew in?”

  “No problem,” Orla said. “Twenty-First and Eighth.” Her plan was to go back to Manny’s, to hide there until she found a way out of the city, back to Pennsylvania. Gayle and Jerry weren’t back from their trip yet, but she could go home and let herself in. She imagined her and Marlow, safe behind the screen door of her parents’ enclosed porch. She imagined sliding the spare key out of the fake hydrangea on the plant stand. It was funny, how she used to think she knew what it was to want something. She had never felt the kind of burn that ran through her now when she pictured that key in her hand.

  She unzipped the bag and looked, heart pounding, at Marlow, nestled inside. The baby’s eyes were closed, but when Orla put a finger to her mouth, she sucked it instantly. “That’s my girl,” Orla whispered. “That’s my girl.”

  The cabbie stopped at every block, checking for crosstown traffic, but it was still the fastest ride home from Midtown Orla ever had. The bars and restaurants on Ninth were all packed, even this early, spilling people out their narrow doors. What Orla thought, as the cab crept past a painted storefront, was that she had never seen so many people with their heads held straight up. She had never looked into a bar and not seen squares of lit screens. The people in the bar were looking at a tall, bearded guy who stood atop the bar. He was singing, and strumming a guitar, and bending his knees just slightly, so that his head wouldn’t graze the ceiling. Orla watched through the window as the crowd threw their hands up in happy unison. Even with the windows rolled up, Orla knew what it was: the man had started playing a song that everybody knew.

  On the seat next to her, Marlow cracked an eye and sighed. Her tiny fist gripped the seam of a pair of the massive mesh hospital underwear. Orla stroked Marlow’s cheek with a finger. “A little farther up,” she said, when the cabbie pulled over half a block before her door. Any other day, in any other year, she would have gotten out wherever. But now she spoke for two people. Mrs. Salgado had been wrong, she thought. Already, she was different.

  The cabbie seemed not to have heard her. His head was down, and Orla realized, suddenly, what he was looking at: his phone, which had shed its white tiles and was showing him a document. Even from the back seat, she could see its truncated lines, its clots of carets and single-spaced text—it was an email chain. He was thumbing through it furiously.

  “Sir?” she said. “I really appreciate the ride. If you wouldn’t mind—”

  The man got out of the car. He left the engine running, and his door wide open. He began to walk toward Ninth. Orla turned to watch him through the smudged rear windshield. When he got to the old firehouse building, he stopped and turned, dramatically, to face the curved red door that had once let horses and buggies pass through. The cabbie hesitated for a moment. Then he lunged—kicking the door, punching the door. The flag above it quivered.

  Orla got herself and Marlow out of the car as fast as her cut would allow. Before she walked into her building, she remembered the man was saving his gas. She reached in the driver’s side and shut off the ignition, leaving the warm keys dangling.

  * * *

  Manny wasn’t answering. Orla rocked Marlow back and forth as she slapped at the door, waiting. Soon, Marlow began to wail.

  “Shh, Marlow,” she said. “Shh, baby, shh.”

  “Orla.” She turned and saw the Ukrainian man at the end of the hall, walking toward her. He had a plastic bag of groceries in his hand. She didn’t know he knew her name; she still did not know his. He looked down at Marlow, then back at her. “They’re gone,” he said.

  “Gone?” Orla bent her knees and straightened them, trying to soothe the baby, whose cries were growing louder. “Where would they go?”

  The Ukrainian man nodded. “You’ve been in hospital, of course,” he said. “Things out here, well. Everything is moving pieces.” He put the groceries down and rolled up his sleeves, unfurled his forearms toward her. “All right,” he said, over Marlow’s crescendo. “Let’s go. We take our time.”

  She stared back at him, not understanding.

  “I’ll hold you,” he said. “You hold her.”

  “The thing is, I can’t go to my apartment,” Orla said. She pictured Floss at the door, waiting, drumming her nails on folded arms.

  The Ukrainian man took a step forward and began to lift her gingerly. “We go to my place, then,” he said.

  “The penthouse?” Orla said, as her feet left the ground.

  He breathed with force, like a weight lifter, as he curled them into his chest. “Just nine floors,” he said.

  “Okay.” Orla clutched Marlow close. Somehow, it had always seemed higher. On the way to the stairs, she looked down and saw, strewn in the hallway, the jewels Manny gave his wife for Christmas. The necklace was slumped against a strip of vinyl trim, the bracelet turned metal belly-up on the carpet. One earring crunched beneath the Ukrainian man’s foot, and another lay just ahead, waiting. As if someone angry had hurled it down, a second after its match.

  * * *

  The man’s name, it turned out, was Andriy. The first thing Orla n
oticed, when he put her and the baby down just inside his apartment, was the alarm clock on the card table near his sofa. It read 11:18 a.m. Orla gasped and pointed at it. “Is that real?” she said.

  Andriy nodded, grinning. “They got control of the current earlier,” he said, when he caught his breath. “My clock was blinking twelve when I woke up. I took it out on the street and asked someone the time, and when I set it, it keeps track.”

  Orla lowered the baby toward it. “Marlow, look,” she said.

  Andriy gestured to the television. The padded wall remained. “They say this is next,” he said. “We can hope.”

  “Where did Manny and his family go?” Orla asked. Marlow began to fuss again. She stuck her thumb in Marlow’s mouth, wondering where she would feed the baby in this strange man’s apartment.

  Andriy stopped smiling. “That is the thing I am not getting yet. The rumor that there is more to this. That time, power, data all going away, this was nothing. Just curtain for them to work behind. This morning, when I went out with my clock, Manny and his wife are shouting. I hear it even in the stairs.” Andriy raised his hands, as if to show he had nothing to do with it. “And then when I go outside, I see this again. People yelling, people crying. People whose phones have come back.”

  He told her what he saw when he went looking for the time. People stopping in their tracks at the sounds in their pockets, sounds that had long been so familiar they were more like flicks in their brains, sounds that nonetheless were startling after the last few days. He widened his eyes and dropped his jaw, aping the shock of those who thought they were blessed when their things came back on. Bystanders gathered around the twinkling machines, peered over their owners’ shoulders. What happened next, Andriy said, was always the same: the screen would light up already cued to a text. Or an email, or an image, or a document, a video or audio file. And the owner’s delirious relief would harden into something else—fear, or panic, or anger. One young woman he had seen, Andriy said, peeled the rubber bunny backing off her phone and smashed it on the rim of a metal trash can. Then she sat in a snowdrift and cried.