The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  “Natural, okay,” I said. This was her rodeo, her heart.

  It sounded pleasant. Blue skies. Rainbows.

  But I worried.

  I had seen a natural birth before. In a barn. Blood. Screaming.

  My wife soon found herself under the influence of friends who announced that childbirth had been “medicalized” by the gynecological-industrial complex and that hospitals were “death traps” and “full of sickness” and that if you wanted your baby to be healthy, you had better have it in a chicken house.

  “You’re not sick,” one angry mother said. “So why would you go to a hospital to have your baby?”

  My thought was, Because that’s where they keep the towels?

  They told us that hospitals didn’t offer the kind of “peace” or “tranquility” or “sitar music” required to give birth in a more happy, natural way, explaining that we needed to find ourselves a “doula,” which I assumed was some sort of tropical fruit that would bring good fortune, but was actually a kind of nurse without all the baggage of medical training.

  “You surely have a birth plan?” they asked. This, they said, was a memorandum to the physician, a sort of Declaration of the Rights of the Mother. “It’s a letter where you tell them what you want and what you don’t want, and they have to agree to it,” they said. “Whether they like it or not.”

  “Some of these mothers seem very angry,” I said to my wife, later.

  “We need a plan,” she said.

  “God has a plan,” I said. “That’s what your aunt said.”

  “What about the episiotomy?” she said. “What about Pitocin and the placenta?”

  What I wanted to say was that “Pitocin and the Placenta” sounded like the name of a band I saw in college, and I didn’t like them at all.

  Up until then, everything I knew about childbirth was learned largely from television, which taught me that when a pregnant woman is in labor, she moans in a humorous way, usually while at a restaurant, perhaps while eating a salad, which is followed by a great deal of funny breathing—there’s a special guild for screenwriters who write nothing but funny woman-in-labor-breathing scenes—and then the baby comes out and then there’s a commercial. Giving birth, I learned, was fundamentally no different than having diarrhea.

  In the sixth grade, they’d taken all the girls into a classroom and showed them a film about their changing bodies, while they corralled us boys into an adjacent classroom and made us do homework. We knew, vaguely, the subject of this secret film. We were envious, because this film would likely contain images of female breasts, as elusive and desirable as a pair of rare African birds. Surely there was a male version of this sex movie, one that might tell us precisely at what age our penises would grow to enormous size?

  “Do your homework,” the teacher said.

  The real homework was in the other room.

  Write this down,” my wife said. She was my teacher now.

  I never really expected to find myself typing a sentence like, “I would prefer to keep the number of vaginal exams to a minimum.” It was very upsetting. How many times was too many? “And I definitely want perineal massage,” she said. “Put that.”

  “What’s that for?” I said.

  “The perineum.”

  “And what is the perineum, exactly, and why do you need it massaged?”

  “It doesn’t matter why.”

  “You know, this thing is at least half my baby.”

  It wasn’t my fault I didn’t have a uterus. If I could help make the baby, I would. I would make the hell out of that baby. But Nature denied me that. Nature said I got to watch, in horror, helpless, while somebody massaged my wife’s vagina. Because, as she explained, sometimes the vagina is too small for the baby.

  “Sometimes they have to cut it,” she said.

  “They cut it?” I said. “They cut your hole?”

  I understood, finally, why they hadn’t invited the boys to watch that film.

  We finished our Birth Plan. It had many great lines, such as, “I want to be able to squat during labor” and “I want the baby to be put on me immediately after delivery.” Where else would our doctor put the baby, a Presto FryDaddy?

  And what about this line: “I am aware that many pain medications exist, and I’ll ask for them if I need them.” What would the nice physician think of this one? It would be like pulling one’s attorney aside and explaining, in a whisper, “I am aware of laws.”

  We drove to the doctor’s office in Vicksburg, thirty miles north, a drive that never didn’t make me think about General Grant. He, too, had marched from Port Gibson to this town, and here we were, with our own tactical plan, which I handed to the doctor and smiled.

  He read it over, courteous, nodding, thanking us for being insane.

  “The main thing is, we don’t want to know the sex of the baby,” I said, trying to sound as uncrazy as possible. His nurse did not like it.

  “Come on, Dad!” she said. “Don’t you want to know?”

  I looked at my wife.

  “We are aware of science,” I said.

  The sun rose and fell, and people kept lying to us, telling my wife how luminescent she was, because she was now the size of a small moon.

  “You did this to me,” she said.

  She resented those mothers who stayed thin by eating nothing but hay. According to my wife, the best way to deal with those mothers was to hate them and assume their fetuses also hated them.

  “That baby’s hungry,” she would say, and then feed our unseen baby a dish of banana pudding.

  Soon enough, our doula arrived, a sweet woman with many children and cattle of her own, and they hit it off, speaking of terrible things as calmly as the weather.

  “When should I expect my bloody show?” my wife asked her.

  What in the hell were these people talking about? It was like my asking a neighbor, “When should I expect to have my heart ripped out by a robot?”

  Women suffer, I knew that. They grow. They hurt. They look in the mirror and see a thing that looks like a mother. But men. We look in the mirror and cannot see anything, because our wives are in the way, and they are so big.

  I waited for a moment of blinding enlightenment when I would feel like a father who had fathered something. At baby showers, I stared into the eyes of fathers when they were looking away. Were they different from me? Yes, but how? Pop came to a shower, and I looked at him, deep into the dark place behind his eyes, but found no comfort there, no lessons.

  It’s time,” my wife said.

  She had begun to make noises, like something you might hear at the Dixie National Livestock Show.

  “Are you okay?” I said, and she threw a trivet at me.

  We went to bed. It didn’t feel right, lying down next to a creature making those sorts of sounds, but I wanted to be there for her, although it felt safer to be outside for her, perhaps behind a blast wall.

  Around 11 p.m., she began to thrash.

  “It’s time,” she said again.

  “You said that already.”

  “Get out.”

  I went to the futon, or as I liked to call it, the Iron Taco. I lay down, said a prayer for my wife, and looked forward to having scoliosis in the morning. At 1 a.m., she woke me.

  “I’m in labor.”

  “Again?”

  The plan had been to do all the laboring at home, so as to give my wife the greatest chance at bleeding to death in her own living room. But my wife needed sleep and was getting panicky, parts of baby protruding from her body at upsetting angles. At 2 p.m., twenty hours after my wife had first announced that her labor had begun, and both fifteen and fourteen hours after she’d also said it had begun, she said that, finally, at last it had begun.

  She was trembling. I’d seen that look before, the last time she’d been forced to drive over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.

  “I want to go to the hospital,” she said.

  I reminded her about the medic
ines they would try to give her. I didn’t really care. I was merely being argumentative, which I felt was my role.

  Then she started moaning louder, louder, building, bracing herself on the frame of the door, the whole world contracting, ripe with fleshy bounty.

  “What do I do?” I said.

  “DON’T LET ME DIE,” she said.

  My poor wife was about to give birth to our child on the front porch, like some kind of animal and several of my second cousins, and I still didn’t feel like a father.

  Let’s have this baby!” a nurse said, and then abandoned us.

  “Where’d everybody go?”

  That’s another lie they tell you, that when you’re ready to have a baby you go to a hospital. You don’t. The place where you go is more like an expensive and very cold motel where strange people come in, make vaguely dark pronouncements about your wife’s cervix, and then charge you five hundred dollars for a commemorative bedpan.

  Natural childbirth, I noted, made my wife appear very unnatural. Like she was—what was the word?—ah, yes: dying. Somewhere in the epic of her suffering, she had taken on the noble aspect of a dying ruler, fading, fading, staring down ghosts, a flash of recognition, a pitiable sadness, a very real loneliness, locked as she was in the private chamber of a pain only she could understand, a pain other mothers knew, closed off forever to a world of men who were not competitive eaters.

  Hospital staff came in and stared, whole gangs of nurses.

  “Don’t see much natural these days, seems like,” one said.

  I found this hard to believe. This was Mississippi, where just two or three decades ago, everybody had been giving birth in cotton gins.

  “I bet she’ll cave,” another whispered, on her way out.

  Late into the evening, I found Pop, sitting alone.

  “Hey, boy,” he said.

  We sat there for a while, quiet. I thought this might be a good time for him to provide some counsel about how to be a father, or even to feel like one.

  “Were you in the room when I was born?”

  “Shit no.”

  Pop came from an older generation of men who believed delivery rooms were dangerous places, full of cats and evil spirits. I felt a little sorry for him, and jealous, for I knew I would have to be in there and would have to see the spirits.

  “What do you remember about the day I was born?”

  “Lemme think,” he said. Here it comes, I thought. He was about to drop some serious wisdom. “I reckon we was about to go see a movie and your momma was frying some pork chops and she come to hollering and there you was.”

  It was a touching story.

  Mom came staggering up from a darkened corridor.

  “You done had a cigarette,” Pop said. “I can smell it.”

  “Kiss my butt,” she said.

  “It’d be a lot to kiss,” Pop said.

  These were my role models.

  “I don’t even know how to hold a baby,” I offered. I’d held only one or two babies in my life and found the experience upsetting.

  “Your father knows how to hold a baby,” Mom said, patting him on the arm. He was a known Baby Whisperer.

  “Shoot, babies like me,” Pop said.

  Was it in my bones to do what he did, and to like it?

  He stood up. He could only take so much emotion before he became gassy.

  “You’re not staying for the birth?” Mom said.

  “Did you know I was a boy?” I said to him, desperate to learn anything.

  You could see the fire in his eyes, this unquenchable desire to place firearms in the hands of small boys and watch them maim things. He needed a grandson. He smiled. He left. We sat there, Mom and me, and my wife lay there, somewhere down the hall, and distant cannonade could be heard in this or that room, and the siege continued, forever, into the dark maw of the Mississippi night.

  My wife was hyperventilating. I looked at the clock. It was midnight. She had been awake for forty-six hours. The doula was there, with her pillows and massage oils and a large yellow fitness orb in case my wife wanted to work on her abs. Hours passed. Devices beeped. Nursing shifts changed. Sanity departed.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING I HATE THE BEEPING WHERE IS MY ICE?” she yelled.

  She had turned against the doula, too, who at around 2 a.m. of the second night had attempted to nap behind a potted plant in the corner.

  “ALL OF YOU PEOPLE ARE ASLEEP AND I AM DYING!” she said.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I DON’T CARE I HATE YOU GET ME MY BALL.”

  I picked up her Golden Orb of Suffering, and the doula and I lowered her onto this object, which, it was explained, would relieve pressure on her cervix. She ripped off whatever wires and tubes they’d put on her, various alarms rang out, and she squatted on the orb. I stood in front of her, holding and rubbing her arms, and she buried her face in my chest, in what I thought was a pathetically loving sort of way, and she seemed to be weeping.

  This is love, I thought. This is family.

  When she started biting my nipple, I wanted to scream out, but knew that this was my role now, to give my wife something to latch on to like a fruit bat. Perhaps that’s what being a father was?

  The contraction passed, she unlatched, looked up at me, a suspension bridge of spittle connecting her mouth to my shirt.

  “Don’t let them give me anything,” she said.

  There were medicines in every darkened nook of this facility, drugs that could induce hallucinations, deaden whole regions of the body, heal the nipple.

  I got her back to the bed.

  All through the dimness of the room she wrestled with the demons of her suffering, her past, the memory of her mother, who was never not present, rendered almost material by the wailing, the shelling of the city of her body by nature’s best artillery, and just when it was darkest and bleakest, when the hours had grown too many to count, when all sanity and reason had been bled from the room, she sat up in bed, suffused with light.

  “She’s pushing!” the doula said.

  “Put this on!”

  Somebody threw me a freeze-dried parcel of blue napkins. What were these? Ah, the scrubs! It was happening! I was so excited to wear the scrubs, so energized by the sudden burst of activity that I removed all of my clothes, and I now wore nothing but the blue napkins, which did not seem to offer sufficient protection from the lights that had dropped from the ceiling, which were burning my skin, or protection from my wife, who clearly was trying to eat me, and I found myself at her right hand, in the Universal Place Where Fathers Stand When Babies Come Out of Their Wives, and there was screaming, and barking, and yelling, and pushing, and more screaming, and I found myself screaming, too, just like I’d done in that barn so long ago, and the lights burned and then.

  And then.

  And then.

  Nothing.

  Our doctor was looking down, something was wrong. And so I looked. And what I saw was a shock. The place where the penis was supposed to be was no penis.

  Our son had been born without a penis.

  They said nothing. They were waiting for me to say it. To declare it.

  “It’s a girl,” I said.

  It had been three days. I looked down, expecting my beautiful wife to smile and cry and talk to the baby, but her eyes stayed closed. She had other business, deep inside. She was talking to her mother.

  Watch her neck,” my wife said from her wheelchair, the day we left the hospital, as I tried to put the baby, who looked more like an undercooked pastry, into her car seat, a seat that had seemed so small before but now seemed designed for an adolescent narwhal. Many people had come to see the baby in the hospital, including Bird and his wife, who lived just over the river, not far at all.

  “You got to keep that baby clean,” Bird said. “You got to change its diapers.”

  “We had planned on letting it stay dirty,” I said, “but maybe you’re right.”

  It was like a novelty baby, a j
oke baby. We took her out to the car, and I got the straps around what I guessed were its arms and legs, although it was possible she was upside down.

  Why had so many people lied about how hard it would be, making it, growing it, pushing it out into the atmosphere?

  “The birth of a child is a beautiful thing,” they say, as though it’s a rainbow, or a sunset, and I guess that’s true, especially if you are looking at a rainbow, during a sunset, while someone sprays you with amniotic fluid.

  I wanted other young idiot fathers to know that these things happen, that it’s a Greek drama, that the place where the baby comes out might actually tear, as it did on my wife. It tore. Tore. We had to pay a man to sew it back. He went to school to learn how to do it. School. What did you study in school? I studied paragraphs.

  The doula, nurses, doctors, I bow to them, low and full. They work at the gates of hell. They work until the walls of the city fall.

  That first night alone, I tried holding the baby, not ceremonially, but actually, the way Pop had done with me, rocking, while my wife slept long and hard. I tried talking to this new person, which felt strange, but became easier, the more wine I drank.

  It cried, and I tried to stop it, but could not. I was no Baby Whisperer. Not yet.

  Fatherhood had not fallen on me like a Damascus light. It would be long and slow in coming, with furious bursts, like labor, but it would happen.

  “Hush, little baby,” I said, and she did not hush.

  There can be only one baby of the family, and I’d just handed the torch to this one, and she’d pass it to others, too, in time. There was still much I didn’t know, such as how many holes were actually on the female body. Too many, it seemed. They’re a mystery, these women, and their numbers in my house had just doubled, and so had the mystery, and the light.