Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

  Sometimes this goop would pour out of Luna’s eye socket, milk-white pus that looked like android blood from Aliens. The socket was wide open and you could see deep into it—the strange wet opening like the roof of a mouth, the red-blue scraggle of veins, the useless twitch of optical nerves. At first I worried it was prone to infection but when I asked Shelly she said the best thing for it was the open air. She said you could cover it or stick a fake eyeball in there but there was nothing you could really do to fix it—it would always be a septic wound. She figured it was best not to let anything fester. The socket was a great home for bacteria. “If it’s moving in,” she grinned, “it better be paying rent.”

  Sometimes, especially if it was windy or the temperature changed abruptly, this milk-goop would leak from the socket and I would wipe it up for her. Not wanting to reach right into the cavity, I’d wait until the goo dripped out and then I’d wipe it from the socket’s lip. When I did this I’d stare straight into that crimson concavity. I would gaze into that open unhealable wound and marvel at it. How strange, I thought then, to look into the place where an eye should be and see only flesh. And somehow I could never accept that there was not something there, something beholding me, recognizing me—something looking back.

  Maybe I didn’t fully realize that getting pregnant meant getting sober, like totally, terribly, sober. More likely I didn’t realize that fortyish weeks is a seriously long time to be sober. Perhaps I didn’t realize that I’d been slowly listing towards boozebaggery for a decade give or take. Like partying every weekend at twenty-one turns into partying four nights a week at twenty-five turns into “wining down” every night and it’s not drinking alone because Pierce is there. And then a sudden prohibition like zero tolerance for the first trimester and it’s not like I craved a drink but I missed it. It had become a treat, a ritual, and a person needs treats, needs rituals. But maybe I didn’t realize that the complete cut-off would be shocking and that I would crave the ceremony of it and yes I might even miss the odd moment of abandon, of having a bath or lying on the couch and saying fuck it. Part of me was afraid of becoming like my not-quite-functioning alcoholic friends back home—drinking hangover Caesars and 3 p.m. casuals and white wine from a sippy cup because what kind of cop’s going to pull you over and check your sippy cup when you’ve got a toddler in the car seat. Maybe I don’t want to end up like that but I also don’t want to be sober, I don’t want to be an adult, I don’t want to live in a world where making one dumb mistake means ruining someone else’s life and having to live with that. But it’s finished now. It’s finished and it’s too late to lie awake at night thinking what have I done? Too late but that doesn’t stop me.

  Pierce and I walk down to Mud Lake and there’s a pair of cardinals there in the stark March branches and I’m wondering if he’s noticed the missing three fingers of bourbon yet and whether I should tell him before he does. Pierce puts out his finger and a downy woodpecker flutters right down and sits on it but all he can say is “cardinal.” The woodpecker flaps away and Pierce says something about a skybound rose but I’m not looking at the bright red cardinal. I’m looking at the female, the colour of bark with a twinge of red on her beak and tail. I’m looking at this grey-brown female bird and thinking how she is the object of all the male’s beauty, that she is the end goal of his dazzle. And what does he see in her, this livid-red male who must be totally enthralled with her understated charm.

  “Isthmus,” Pierce says into the March chill.

  I look at him like “what?” and he says, “Narrow body of land surrounded by water, joining two larger pieces of land.” He’s practising for one of his freelance jobs, the one where he makes lists of words for a dictionary website. Lists like “five wacky weather words” and “three words to tank your cover letter.”

  “We just called it the armpit of the peninsula.”

  He looks at me like he’s surprised that I know the word already so I tell him if there’s anything you learn growing up in the Wentworth Valley it’s the word “isthmus.” When your grandfather drives groomers at the Wentworth ski hill, you know the word “isthmus.” When people say “the city” and it’s unclear if they mean Moncton or Halifax, you know the word “isthmus.” I rub my belly and tell him that I basically am an isthmus.

  Pierce says that’s what he loves about me and as usual he means it. But today the comment just stirs the wretched brew of guilt. We walk home along the river trail, look out over the sprawling woebegone of late March ice. A rotten snowscape chanting bourbon, whispering failure, and I am longing to confess but remaining quiet and sullen and lonely even as Pierce walks beside me, breaking into a jovial impromptu song about the luckiest cardinal in the world.

  I go upstairs for a nap and find a copy of Gulliver’s Travels on my pillow. I read the dustjacket and stare into the crudely drawn maps and then skim from Lilliputians to Houyhnhnms. The story starts off strange and fascinating but soon turns into Gulliver explaining the inanities of Queen Anne’s England to an aristocratic rational horse. Though the horse does not even understand the concept of clothes, I picture him wearing tails and a monocle. I picture him grinning and avuncular, benevolent as a Georgian plantation master. And of course it turns out that the Houyhnhnms keep slaves and practise eugenics AKA human breeding so I drift back to sleep thinking horse people, horse people.

  Before I got my job at the Federation I taught riding lessons at a stable in Kenora, which meant I still felt like a horse person. Not the same horse person who lifted bales and casually stomped garter snakes at her aunt’s farm. Not the same horse person who snuggled inbred barn kittens in the hay loft, holding their mutated paws and letting them lick her with their splinter-gruff tongues. Not the horse person who galloped across an open pasture looking out at the valley and breathing a wind thick with Fundy’s salt caress. This was a horse person who taught ten-to-thirteen-year-olds from the Glebe how to get a boot into a stirrup, how to swing their right leg overtop of a rheumatic Arabian named Perseus and keep their hands loose on the reins. This was the horse person who held a lead and chanted “heels down” and “confirmation” and “it’s a conversation don’t forget to listen.” Back then my back seat still held a Troxel and an old stained saddle pad and the upholstery was clotted with different shades of horsehair and on the way home my car was rich with the smell of hay and manure. I’d often roll down the window to let the air in and I’d just sit there smiling with the sun on my face, not knowing or caring why.

  I’m in bed tumbling through internet holes when I get a text from Denise: the word “Oregon!” above a picture of the Manager of Jumping grinning brattishly, a hairy tuft of kale clenched in his right incisor. Repulsed as I am, I keep staring because I’m trying to parse the word “Oregon.” So I keep looking and puzzling and then I notice that the picture’s a photoshop job—the Manager of Jumping’s face has been grafted onto a pregnant woman’s body. A pregnant woman’s body that I eventually realize is my pregnant woman’s body. I’m combing this image trying to figure out what exactly is so unnerving about the Manager of Jumping’s ruddy lipless face fused onto my pregnant body and then I see it: the Manager of Jumping has “pregnancy glow,” the storied brightness I’ve never managed to attain. The deep corrosive horror in me is that the Manager of Jumping looks somehow right, somehow perfect, somehow flourishing as a pregnant lady.

  I’m lying there staring at this picture in a wretched frantic trance when I get a follow-up text that says “sorry Oregon supposed to be prego damn autocorrect” and as I’m parsing this semantic masterpiece I get another text asking if I could please send out a reminder email about Monday’s budget meeting. “NBD but if you want that job in Dressage your going to have to start talking some initiative.”

  I dream the baby with a tail. I dream the baby floating in utero with hooves and a tail and not in a good way. Not at all in a good way and my horse-human fetus has enormous brown eyes with no sclera and it’s a gi
rl now, definitively a horsegirl. My horsedaughter looks at me and leans close, leans very close in order to whisper through the amniotic fluid and what she says is it’s us. It’s us, Mum, we are the horse people. In the dream this makes total sense. In the dream this is a revelation and everything becomes love, an insanity of love and I am trying to pick up my beloved child to bring her close and tell her yes of course, trying and trying but I can’t get close enough. In the dream I feel a craze of love for this out-of-reach child but when I wake up I’m nagged for hours by a strange and nameless murk, a distant cloying shame.

  SUNDAY

  Place the blueberry into your vagina. The instructor is saying to put the blueberry into your vagina and hold it there. Squeeze the blueberry gingerly. Cradle it in the labia. Do not squish it, do not let it fall. Cradle it in the vagina, really nestle it.

  The instructor is saying this to twelve women lying spread eagle, propped up by bolsters and splaying their legs out and I’ve never really thought about the term “spread eagle” before but now I see it: twelve women with their lower limbs perched in the air looking like a fleet of soaring birds and I am sweating and hungry, suddenly ravenous for blueberries.

  During Shavasana the instructor says think purple thoughts, send soothing energy to your baby so of course I go straight to the bourbon. A gaggle of gestating humans tilted up on bolsters and we are supposed to be cultivating peace and stillness for our babies but I’m shamefully recalling the sear of bourbon in my throat. Then I’m remembering the baby book, how it said a little alcohol is okay. The book written by a Fulbright Scholar and cancer researcher who is also a mother and she said about correlation. All the studies are based around correlation not causality and there are also studies that suggest that mothers who have one alcoholic drink per day have smarter babies so there’s really just no way of knowing. The doctors say zero is best because FAS is real and awful and saying zero is the best way to protect people with low impulse control. But there is nothing conclusive and probably a little bit of alcohol is fine, especially in the third trimester. Even a little bit of hard liquor is probably not devastating and surely people have done much much worse and still produced healthy babies so why am I thinking strabismus? Why am I lying here in Shavasana picturing horns and extra digits and a heart beating outside a body? Why am I just now remembering “horseshoe kidney,” a FAS-related condition where the child’s kidneys fuse together? Why am I recalling or possibly inventing the fact that when someone has horseshoe kidney the space where the two organs join is called the “isthmus”?

  The instructor comes around spraying tea tree mist and I feel her hovering near me, placing a hand on my stomach. She chirps “aren’t you cute as a button?” which ruins the already-compromised yoga trance. Seeing her this close I notice that her face has the same ruddy redness in the cheeks as the Manager of Jumping. She even has the same frowning unibrow, the same nearly lipless mouth.

  Addressing everyone again, the instructor beams about the light in me and the light in you and although I usually shudder at this particular ritual of cultural tourism this time I succumb. I hear myself whispering, not as a gratitude to the beaming kerchiefed instructor but as a plea to my gestating liquor-sodden child: namaste.

  There is a strange March warmth building so Pierce and I walk out into the backyard and just stand there in the open grey. Pierce says “petrichor” and when I ask what he means he wheels a hand around his nose. “The smell. It comes from the soil. Most people think it only happens after the rain but actually that chemical is released before precipitation as well.” So we stand there together smelling the petrichor and I think how that pre-rain smell is more beautiful now that I know its name.

  Pierce asks me to tell him again about the private jet so I say how people know about the horse semen. It’s basically common knowledge that a dose of sperm from a retired champion thoroughbred is worth a hundred thousand plus. What people don’t know about is the private jet. One reason horses need passports is for competitions like the Olympics. Another is the horse sex plane, the private jet full of stallions that travels pretty much non-stop so that these horses can exit the plane and inseminate a mare in Perth one day, Singapore the next. And why not just mail the semen? Why not just use AI? Because organizations like the Jockey Club—the governing body of American horse racing—make “live cover” mandatory for all registered foals. “Live cover” being a euphemism for physical sex. All of this ensuring stallion and mare breed through intercourse rather than with human extraction of horse semen through artificial horse vagina. Stallion sex plane or human-horse hand jobs and subsequent semen injection. Those are the two options and neither seems exactly sane.

  Pierce is doing his scrunch-think face, which is not his most attractive face but nonetheless it feels good to make someone’s brain flex. “So it’s like animals having orgasms and humans making money off those orgasms and the stallions never get to see their children or even know they have any offspring. And the mothers carry those babies for eleven or twelve months and then look after them for a few and pass them off to some fascistic trainer and most people just walk around thinking this is completely fine.”

  I tell him yes and we stand there in the windy desolation, contemplating horse semen and stallion sex planes. I’m once again thinking tell him tell him tell him and eventually thinking why am I not telling him? We head inside and lie on the bed watching raindrops ticker off the skylight.

  On the message board there’s a post titled “Did I Cook My Baby?” There’s a woman who took to the internet frantic because she stood in front of a hot element for five minutes and when she walked away her stomach was hot to the touch. Of course she put ice on it right away but could someone please reassure her that she did not cook her baby. Someone has responded that maybe six minutes would have cooked baby but with five she should be fine. Which is maybe a bit mean but also funny and what the whole thing gets me thinking about is paranoia. The baby book says it’s common to worry about birth defects but for the most part the worry is irrational. Pierce would probably tell me I’m being paranoid. Pierce would say it will be fine, in all likelihood our child will be completely undamaged—plucky and hale. Pierce would say forget about it, our baby will be lovely, our baby will be beautiful and even if there’s something wrong we are going to shower it in delirious narcotic love and there’s nothing else we can or will do but meet it and care for it and love it to excess. Pierce would say all this and it would make me feel better so why am I not telling Pierce?

  The same spring Luna bit me we learned that she was pregnant, had most likely been sold to my aunt pregnant. We were surprised that at twenty-five Luna was still capable of settling. Shelly said I could help her and the vet deliver the baby which mostly meant filling bucket after bucket of water and occasionally running to get ointment and latex gloves from the vet’s Silverado. This was not the first time I’d seen it but it was nonetheless astounding when the vet slid her right arm up to the shoulder in Luna’s anus. First the vet’s eyes were taut and curious as if she were surveying a sprawling vista. I asked what she was doing and she said “just looking around” and I pictured eyeballs on the end of her latexed fingertips, gazing around the rectal depths. She said okay let’s give her some privacy so we cleaned out the empty stalls while we listened for Luna to lie down and start pushing.

  Her labour took a massive ten minutes and then the foal came out feet first, covered in a milk-white sac that the vet removed. The foal was gangly and wet and its coat was rich chestnut and it wasn’t moving. Luna shuffled around in the hay until she was able to nuzzle her foal but it stayed still, terribly still. The vet wasn’t doing anything and my aunt hooked her thumbs in her beltloops and I was saying why is it not moving, why is it not moving. The women did not answer and they did not need to and the three of us stood there in the stall watching Luna lick her child’s muzzle—licking and nudging that motionless foal, nuzzling slower and slower until finally sh
e rolled away, sounding one deep groan then fluttering her eyes and finally closing them, submitting to sleep.

  In the dream I’m in a studio full of jacked, muscular women and I’m a horrible soft blob and Denise is in front of me and she has no legs. Denise is doing a perfect bridge and she has no legs, just four corked and double-jointed arms. She also has two heads, both of them turning to glare into me and then the back head which is also sprouting out of some sort of a shoulder cleft butt crack becomes Chad’s face. Four-armed bridging Denise/Chad scuttles closer to me and then Denise’s face grins wide-eyed and says “mommy brain,” says “prego,” says “budget,” after which Chad’s head squeals “WTF” and “aren’t you cute as a button?” Then both of them start jabbering “Dressage Dressage Dressage” at which point they seem to want me to jump onto the fused isthmus of their back so I do. I leap on and dig into the stirrups and they keep chanting “Dressage” and bucking like a rodeo bull and I’m thinking this can’t be good for the baby but what else can I do but clutch the mane and cling on.

  MONDAY

  The Manager of Jumping dances up to my desk playing a flute of chocolate ex-lax. “Squirrel,” he says gleefully but it takes me a minute to draw the connection. It takes until I watch the Manager of Jumping head to each corner of the room raising four of the spongy office ceiling panels and sliding several cubes of ex-lax into each one for me to realize that what he means is that he’s attempting to poison the squirrel. He twinkles about the office, humming dreamily as he stands on wheeled chairs to raise the ceiling squares, his dress shirt rising to show a little gust of undershirt, the fungal-pink frown of his love handles. Scanning my computer I see that it’s 9:22 a.m. I have never seen the Manager of Jumping in the office this early or this happy.