“I’ll think of something,” I said. “Jacob-something-Rankin. It’ll be a good name.”
I’ve known a lot of Jacobs. Yacoub worked in the tanneries in Fez and wore a pair of bright yellow shoes he’d dyed himself. It was ugly work, and he was considered unclean for doing it. The fumes from the dyes were burning away his lungs, but we didn’t know. Our sons went to the tanneries when they were grown, and I’m glad none of us understood that it would kill them, too. The name wasn’t the problem. If I flinched at every name I’ve known before, I’d never be able to look at anyone straightways. But his having a name at all made the feeling worse. Jacob got bigger and would kick me, hard and constant and spiteful, and Murray would say, “Feel that,” like I had a choice. “Feel what a powerful little kid that’s going to be.”
One evening when Murray was out, Jacob was thrashing like mad. I tried to distract myself, to read a book or watch TV. I wanted Murray to come home, but I knew it wouldn’t be’til late. The second Saturday of every month he went over to a friend’s house to play poker. Murray grew up around here, and his friends are still friends from high school. They’re good guys, but they treat him badly sometimes, maybe because he’s the one who went to college, who works in a school, who does a job women do and has a wife who makes more than he does and who lives in the nicest house of any of them because of it. They gang up on him, make sure he leaves the table with less money than he started with, no matter which of them ends up with it. They think he doesn’t know, but he does, and plays with them anyway.
Jacob kept on kicking me, and finally I hit him back, lifted up my shirt and slapped my belly, hard, several times. I shouted at the baby to stop, I told him that I hated him, and eventually he went still. I managed to bruise myself, a violet smudge above my left hip. It was stupid. Murray saw it and asked what had happened. I told him I hadn’t noticed anything, and he scolded me to be careful.
“I wonder if he’ll remember being other people,” Murray said one morning, slow and sleepy. It was Saturday and we were still in bed. I’d always slept on my back before, and I didn’t sleep so well now that I had to lie on my side. It was one of the moments that made me think he believed me, that he took on faith everything I’d ever said about myself. I didn’t think he had it in him to bait me, to try to draw me out like that if he didn’t.
“I didn’t remember right away,” I said. It had taken me until the spring of my third-grade year. The big fads that year were slap bracelets and demon possession. The bracelets were flat strips of neon plastic that coiled around your wrist when you slapped them to your skin. The demon possession fad started when Amber Novotny, the most popular girl in the third grade, had a grand mal seizure during art class. She fell off her stool, knocking her watercolors to the floor. Yogurt cups filled with dirty water spilled and pooled around her head as she thrashed and then lay still. It was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen.
Later that day during recess, one of Amber’s best friends, maybe worried that Amber’s epilepsy would be considered distinctly un-cool, told us a thrilling tale of the demon that was struggling for Amber’s soul, trying to take up residence in her skin, to unwrap all her birthday presents and take the lead in the class play. Amber had been fighting bravely, battling the demon in unsung silence. It was marvelous and horrifying. We all wanted one, a demon of our own, to name and invent long tales of struggle against. During recess we would stand in circles and recount these tales to each other, and when the playground supervisors’ backs were turned, drop twitching into the grass.
When it came time to name my own demon, describe its fiendish designs on my immortal soul, my answer came easily, swift and unexpected. I asked myself who else might be living in my skin and there she was, the first one I remembered. She was named Sally, I told the other children, and they groaned. Sally was no name for a demon, but she wasn’t one. She was an English woman, born in 1795. A thief and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, a prostitute. I had no idea what to make of her memories of a succession of men, the way they held her and pushed inside her. She was transported to Sydney in 1819.
I wonder if I have descendants in Australia, and if I do, if they live somewhere scenic. I have fantasies of taking a roundthe-world trip someday, staying for free in the homes of all the people I’m related to, all the people who would not be alive on earth at this present moment without me. But there’s no way to ask them. I lose track of all the people I loved or hated, or just knew, indifferently. I don’t know what happens to them, what kind of lives they go on to lead. I couldn’t tell that morning if Murray wanted Jacob to remember, if he thought I had some special gene, and was hoping that it was dominant instead of recessive. I think he’s jealous of me sometimes, that I’ve experienced so much. He doesn’t listen when I try to explain that all he’s missing out on is heartache.
Jacob Alan Rankin was born by scheduled cesarean in the 42nd week. I’d picked Alan because I disliked it, purely a matter of aesthetics, not of bad associations. I’d grown so angry with the child I didn’t want to give him a name I cared for. I had to have a cesarean because the birth presentation was a breech, not feet first, but knees first, kneeling, Jacob’s arms in front of his chest and his hands pressed together like he was praying. He was born perfect: no claws, no fangs, no horns. Since he hadn’t had to squeeze through the birth canal, his head was still flawlessly round; he stood out in the nursery from all the red-faced cone-head babies. A woman from La Leche League gave me a lesson on breast-feeding, which I didn’t need. Inuit women used to breast-feed their children up to the age of five. It creates a powerful mother-child bond. Perhaps too powerful. My second son never looked for a wife, but seemed content to stay by me. I appreciated his help, but it made me wonder if I’d done something wrong that had stunted him, shrunk his life and tied him too closely to me. Jacob not nursing was not a lack of proper technique. Perhaps he could taste the bitterness in me, how I was recognizing who he was, putting a name and a face to the hate I had when he was inside me. I’d looked at him now. I’d seen who he used to be.
I feel I need to be clear on something: that I don’t run around swearing vengeance. Revenge is about satisfaction, but it’s also about restoring balance, and I think that’s something that enough living wears away, the idea that there’s any balance to be restored. I have never expected justice, in any of my 126 other lives, and I’ve been right not to. I’ve been done wrong, plenty of times, and done plenty of wrong myself. If I could point to one and say, that was it, that was the Worst Thing, that was the one thing I couldn’t forgive, this would all make a lot more sense. But I can’t, so let’s pause for a minute to lay aside all the microbes, the bacteria and the viruses. We’ll lay aside the cancer and the autoimmune diseases and the genetic defects, all the worst surprises the body springs on itself. We’ll lay aside a lack of food or water or shelter or warmth. We’ll lay aside old age. There’s no way to make them answer. We’ll lay aside any nonsentient killers, animals who snapped or mauled or gored me out of life. They aren’t culpable. Let’s lay aside the deaths in battle, the anonymous soldiers who did me in. The anonymous babies that I died trying to birth. None of it was personal.
Something that was personal: that I was drowned once, as a child. I can’t remember when, or where, or even why I remember. I don’t remember infancy, usually. But I remember being held under the water by my mother, put down like an animal. I don’t know who she was or why she did it. But I always knew that if she came back, if I recognized her, I wouldn’t be able to forgive her.
The body fights. That’s what I remember most from a life I spent in serfdom, working a scythe through wheat. The wheat was high above our heads, and we moved carefully, in a pattern, cutting in the same rhythm, a few paces apart. I got turned around somehow in the field, and when I swung the blade to my right I hit my neighbor’s thigh, the femoral artery, and by the time I pressed my hands against the cut his pants were already wet with blood. I remember the way the blood ca
me in the same rhythm as his pulse, his heart beating his own life out. His lungs seized for air. He would not go. I knew I’d killed him, and I wished he’d hurry, that his body would not fight so hard. But the body is an animal thing and does not know how to surrender.
An infant’s body fights quietly. Jacob’s life was so new, perhaps he didn’t know he had anything to lose. In a way he didn’t, because there I was, and there he was, the old soul, the hands that held me under. Everything that mattered about me had survived him, and he would survive me. He would become someone else’s child, and this abbreviated life, this little mistake, would be behind him. I hoped he would come back in the developed world somewhere, where he could go to school and eat well. I’m not petty. I didn’t wish miseries on him. I figured this would make us even.
In the crib: a blue blanket, a large stuffed bear, a cow that said moo when you squeezed it. I thought about the bear, then took one of the pillows from the master bedroom, from my side of the bed, not Murray’s. I wouldn’t do that to him. It is possible that Jacob never woke. Some infants suffocate themselves against their own mattresses; the brain is so undeveloped it will starve without rousing the body. Perhaps he did wake, and wondered why the world no longer provided the things he needed, the air his lungs clutched for. In any case he didn’t move. He didn’t flail. There were no muffled cries. The minutes were still and silent and there was no indication that his brain was starving, his heart shivering and erratic and finally failing. When it was over I put the pillow back on my bed. I brushed my teeth, put on my nightgown, and went to sleep.
Murray was at his poker game. I knew when he came home he’d look in on Jacob, not so much to check up on him as just to admire him, feel his own heart lift, feel the rush you get from looking at a child you love helplessly. Murray would be the one to find him. I couldn’t think how else to do it, even though the cruelty of it seemed enormous, even to me. He woke me up shouting my name, then Jacob’s, then mine again. I called 911 while Murray pressed Jacob’s chest with two fingers, breathed into his mouth. When I got off the phone I put a hand on Jacob’s arm. It was cool to the touch, and I tried to make Murray stop, but he wouldn’t listen to me. The paramedics came and took Jacob out to the ambulance in the driveway. They closed the doors behind them and didn’t come out for several minutes. For show, I think, or just getting themselves ready to break the news. Then we all had to wait for the medical examiner to come, the police and the police photographers. I put on a pot of coffee.
I fielded the questions, about how I’d put Jacob to sleep on his back, not his stomach. How I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with him. They took photographs of the bedroom, the crib, how the mattress was the right size and softness, how there weren’t too many blankets, or pillows, or soft animals, how there wasn’t anything anybody could point to that we’d done wrong. The medical examiner took Jacob’s body away for an autopsy. The office telephoned a few hours later, to say they could release the body, to ask us where we wanted it sent. I picked a funeral home out of the yellow pages. It was morning by that time, but Murray was still sitting on the couch, a mug of cold coffee on the table in front of him. He’d barely moved.
Other relevant facts: that it is impossible to distinguish at autopsy between Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and accidental or deliberate suffocation with a soft object. That the possibility of such suffocation should only be investigated if the parents have had previous infants die under the same circumstances, or if both of a set of twins has died. That in all other cases, the parents should be treated with every courtesy and consideration for the suddenness of their loss, the depth of their grief, and the near-assuredness of their innocence. That this was another webpage I’d minimized at work when the Director of Internal Auditing came in to talk to me about my upcoming maternity leave. That the small, soft body I grew inside myself turned out to be infected with a soul I could not keep. That I couldn’t do it, and that I know there are no words in any of 109 different languages to defend myself.
Murray’s grief has flayed me. He clings to the fact that it’s a sorrow we can share, that we’re united in this terrible sadness. It makes me feel guilty, yes, but also ashamed for him, because he has no idea how alone he is, the weight of the grief he bears by himself. I’m light with relief, and I don’t know how to be with him anymore. I’m split to the bone, and when he touches me his hands are like salt. It’s all I can do to lie beside him when we sleep. Murray says he’s ready for another baby, and I’m stiff with shame. We’re both back at work now. We’ve been out to the movies, to dinner. Murray went to a basketball game with some friends last week, although he still won’t go play poker. Soon I won’t know what to tell him. I can’t tell him that I’ve hurt him in a novel, freakish way, a way I never hurt anybody in 5,000 years, and that I’m finding it hard to match the wrong I’ve done him to the practiced love I had for him before, that I still have for him.
I can’t tell him that I’d hoped, assumed, that Jacob was an isolated incident, but that the world’s getting crowded. I’m remembering too much. The new weatherman on the Channel 4 news, or the boy who works Sunday afternoons at the deli counter at Safeway, who’s slow with the meat slicer, like he’s got all day: I’ve realized I remember them. I’m recognizing more and more. They’re familiar to me and sometimes I miss them and sometimes I hate them and it scares me. I want to tell them that we baked bricks side by side for twenty years, indentured, and invented secrets to tell each other to make the work go faster. That I do not forgive them for taking two more wives after me. That I loved the way they sang or that I was impressed with how well they could track an animal. I can’t tell Murray that I haven’t recognized him yet, that I look at him and still just see Murray, but that I’m terrified that one day that won’t be true.
It’s hard for me to keep my mind on things at work. To be an internal auditor, you have to sign a contract promising that you’ll demonstrate “professional skepticism.” I’m trying, I am. But it’s like when I’m going over some shaky accounts, and behind the one set of numbers I can see what’s going unsaid. I can see the different breakdowns, different scenarios, different versions of events, what’s being hidden by the straightfaced statistics. It’s an awful thing, to live in a world that’s contracting, backing up on itself like a highway pile-up. It’s not a place I understand. I wonder if it would help to get out of Des Moines. If I should concentrate on my career for a while, start applying for corporate transfers. We’d probably have to put off another baby. It’s something to run by Murray.
One thing: my dreams have stayed peaceful. They’re of daily things. No deaths, no births, no reincarnation. I’m wandering up and down the aisles of the grocery store with no list. I show up at work and I’ve got an algebra exam. I’m on stage and I’ve forgotten my lines. Classics. The old naked-in-front-of-a-crowd thing. As far as I know, that’s never actually happened to anybody, at least not any of the 127 anybodies I’ve been. It’s something. It’s a comfort.
At the Zoo
At the Orangutan Dome the grandfather purchases a plastic cup in the shape of an orangutan head. He offers his grandson a sip. Then he slips behind a tree with the cup and afterwards the boy isn’t allowed to drink from it. The boy begs for his own.
Eight dollars for soda in a plastic head, his mother thinks. The flesh-and-blood orangutan is dignified and bored. It sighs and its body deflates. The family turns away toward a glass case labeled Fennec Fox. “Look,” the grandfather says. “Weasels.”
The foxes are tiny, chihuahuas with gold fur and satellite dish ears. “Elephant Weasels can hear things happening in space,” the grandfather tells the boy. “They can hear when your tummy rumbles, and they think how much they’d like a little boy to snack on.” The boy clutches his grandfather’s hand. He believes nearly everything anyone tells him. He has large, serious eyes and a constant look of apprehension that make it easy for his mother to forget his growing size, the way he is too old now for the collapsible stroller she has broug
ht in case he becomes tired. His legs dangle whenever she straps him in with the juice boxes and snacks.
“You know what their favorite foods are?” the grandfather asks. Everyone standing at the enclosure knows—the label lists them—plants, small rodents, lizards and insects. “Elephant weasels love roast beef,” the grandfather says. “And key lime pie. And kid stew.” He picks up the boy to give him a better view. The people at the enclosure decide they do not care enough to bother saying anything. Let the foxes be weasels. What does it hurt?
The mother does not share their indifference. She grinds her teeth when her father speaks. Her whole life he has been telling these stories, and there was once a time she believed him. As a child she gave Show and Tell presentations on birds that turned out not to exist, on fictive countries whose names were sexual innuendoes she was too young to understand. She was marked down, taken aside by concerned teachers. She still winces at those old humiliations, her own credulity. She has promised herself that her son will grow up on firmer footing.
The grandfather has one hand around the boy and the other around his drink. He gestures with the cup and the orangutan head smacks the glass. The foxes prick their ears toward the sound. Someday, the mother thinks, her father will break her son’s gullible little heart.
“Let’s see something bigger,” he says. “This zoo got any rhinos?”
The mother is a patent lawyer. Her father is in town for the week visiting, and she is using a vacation day rather than leave him alone with her son. She is supposed to be preparing an infringement suit related to proprietary athletic surfacing, patented types of artificial turf and running track. Her husband is a dermatologist, and they will always have enough money, the lawyer and the doctor. On the way to the rhinos the family passes the capybara habitat. “What do they eat?” the boy asks.
This Is Not Your City Page 11