Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  “You have to stand up now, missy. Your claustrophobia will not improve unless you do.”

  “I’m not claustrophobic,” Margy said.

  Stand up! What were they thinking of? It could be over in an hour, the baby dead. She smiled sweetly.

  “You should have seen me last night. I hiked half a mile up and down the hall. My husband helped. We trotted all around the ward.”

  The nurse flipped back her gown and peeled off the electrode from her belly skin.

  “None of your stories, please. Let’s go. I know you haven’t been up on your feet.”

  Margy felt sincere, as if it were the truth.

  “I’m just tired now, from all that walking yesterday. Maybe later on.”

  The nurse jabbed one finger in the air.

  “I’m calling your doctor.” She left the room.

  Margy felt a squirt of glee. Wiggling around, she reached for the electrode, taped it back onto her belly skin. The monitor began to beep. She froze.

  It was just a small contraction, ripple of faint pain. It might be from wiggling around, or from the glee. Any feeling could be too much now. In her fourth month, Webster had kissed her, cupped her breast. She ended up down on the labor floor. They had to raise the beta-blockers, barely made it stop. Her doctor said they couldn’t raise them any more, it would be too much for her heart. Now she and Webster did not touch. She had stopped reading, watching TV. She tried not to daydream. Breathing deep, she closed her eyes and made her mind as blank and innocent as outer space.

  The beeping stopped.

  A thought floated by. It seemed harmless. Was it Wednesday? If it was, that would explain where Webster went. He would be up in Lincoln Park, with Calvin. Wednesdays were her day with him, and Webster took them now, drove him to doctors, pushed him out in his wheelchair. Calvin was coming back from Pneumocystis, holding off the megalovirus, skin marbled blue from Kaposi’s. Picking up the phone, she tapped his number in.

  “Hey, girl, you still in the missionary position?” his voice said, somehow still warm and deep. “I thought I warned you about that. Watch what you let boys do to you. You might get stuck.”

  She didn’t mean to laugh, it just sneaked up on her. A light, happy laugh that left her lungs like a small flock of pale blue moths that had been trapped in there and itching to get out. A second passed, and she was fine. Two seconds passed.

  And then the pain clamped down like monstrous teeth. She had no idea there was pain like that. She couldn’t move. The monitor against the wall let out a high-pitched squeal.

  “I can’t talk now,” she whispered.

  Calvin laughed. “Hey, you called me, remember? Pardon me for interrupting you.”

  The phone fell from her hand. The call button was too far off to reach. The pain ground its jaws around.

  The door swung open, and the nurse swept in. Eons later, when she returned, the gurney was behind her, clattering. A tall black orderly helped her to wrestle it through the door.

  “Ready?” Nurse Jones said as she took hold of Margy’s legs. The orderly slid arms under her back.

  “Where are you taking me?” she gasped.

  “The labor floor.”

  “No.” She wrapped her hands around the metal bar along the bed. “It’s too soon. It can’t start yet.”

  “It’s already started.”

  They heaved her to the gurney, and pain rushed out like boiling acid, filled the room. She made a sound she’d never heard before, like a panicked animal. Clipping her IV to the rail, they rolled her fast away, through hallways full of happy people, whose children were alive.

  “Lake Michigan is a dangerous body of water,” the sign said, half encased in ice, as Webster rolled the wheelchair out along a point in Lincoln Park. Icebergs on the beach loomed like dead whales, honeycombed and brown. Snow lay like Styrofoam on lifeless lawns. He had bundled Calvin up as best he could, in a down jacket, long johns, and wool pants. He was so thin the flesh showed through his skin, dull red, not like sunburn, more like he’d been flayed. Muscles stood out, sinews, bones, the whole anatomy. Calvin tipped his head back, trying to inhale around the clear tubes in his nose.

  “Ah, nature,” he said and pointed toward a grove of ratty pines. “Let’s go over there.”

  Calvin had always claimed to be afraid of trees, saying they offered shelter to axe murderers and rattlesnakes. He preferred the comfort of nice asphalt alleyways.

  “You sure?”

  Calvin waved a bony hand. “What are they going to do, kill me?”

  Webster rolled him into the grove and found a place out of the wind, in thin sun, where traffic roar was blocked from Lake Shore Drive. There was a good view of the shore. Calvin appeared satisfied.

  “Driver, you may park the vehicle.”

  Webster set the brake and checked the dial on Calvin’s oxygen. He never should have brought him out like this. But what was he supposed to say when Calvin asked for “one last picnic”? He was helpless now, with Calvin, with Margy. She lay fragile as an egg and never asked for anything. And the baby’s heartbeat, with its hopeful thump. Under the skin of Calvin’s balding head, blue veins pulsed visibly. Webster pulled his watch cap off, put it on Calvin’s neck.

  “Hey, I’m cooking in here,” Calvin said mildly. “It isn’t cold, you know. Feels more like spring.”

  “February 19? Not likely. There should be ice here six feet deep. It’s more like global warming, killing everything.”

  But it was true, the air had a certain poisoned sweetness, as if factories nearby were turning out Twinkies. Unpacking their lunch, he handed Calvin a sandwich.

  Calvin inspected it. “I like my tuna fish with little bits of dolphin in it.”

  “Don’t worry. There should be at least a few endangered species there.”

  “Oh, good.” His brow cleared. He began to munch contentedly.

  Webster wasn’t hungry. Taking a vial out of his pack, he walked down to the water, plunged it in. The water felt suspiciously tepid. Capping the vial, he flipped open his pocket-scope, squinted against the sky. Nothing in there, of course. Globs of old rubber in steel-mill effluent. Sometimes he found the larva of an armored worm, or of a plankton lamprey doomed to tumors as it grew. In May each year the lake still barfed up sick salmon to gasp in dammed-up inlets where their ancestors had spawned. Ah, nature.

  “Hey, Mr. Science,” Calvin called, rasping.

  He walked back up the breakwater. Calvin’s sandwich was only a little gnawed.

  “Eat that,” Webster said.

  Calvin ignored him. “What are those over there? Big rats?” He pointed with his sandwich up the beach.

  Webster pushed the glasses up his nose. Past some ice floes, he could make out two brown lumps. Fumbling for his pack, he pulled out field glasses and focused them. Beside a trash can stood two Canada geese, motionless as lawn ornaments. He handed the glasses to Calvin.

  “Goose derelicts. Spent the winter here, on trash. They’ll end up hanging by their feet in some Chinese restaurant. Might as well be rats.”

  Calvin peered into the field glasses, handed them back. “You take such a hard line on city life. Or is it all of culture you don’t like? All the evil work of humankind?”

  “Unreasonable, I know. It’s only killing all of us.”

  Calvin stuck his thin chest out and tapped on it. “It’s not killing me, bub. The natural world is killing me. Last time I looked, viruses were part of it.”

  “But not the airplanes that brought this particular one to you. In the natural state you never would have gotten it.”

  “Oh, I see, the natural state. How far back do we have to go? Me in a hut in Norway, you learning to skin buffalo? I’d be dead for sure of some childhood disease, or at least bored to death. Come on, admit you wouldn’t want to live without Chinese restaurants. Just once, before I die. It’s my last wish.”

  “How many last wishes are you getting? But all right. Maybe potstickers.”

  Calvin
grinned. His lips were blue. Webster pointed at his sandwich.

  “Eat that, would you? Next time we’re going out for Peking goose, some nice warm restaurant. Besides, I have to call Margy.”

  Calvin made a face.

  “Oh, don’t worry, the Queen Bee is fine. I talked to her a while ago, and she was bossy as ever. A bit of attitude, in fact. I think all that room service is ruining her personality.”

  Webster waited while he ate, packed up the trash. Turning the chair across dead grass, he took the most direct route back. Calvin gripped the armrests as the chair bumped over frozen ground.

  “Whoa, Nelly,” he said, tipping his head back. He seemed to study the sky. “What is that? I hear a most peculiar sound.”

  Webster kept rolling. A quarter mile away, a thousand cars a minute thumped through potholes over Lake Shore Drive. Somewhere in the city, chemicals splashed on the ground. Another ton of hydrocarbons rose into the air.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “No, really. Stop a second. It sounds like a crowd roar. Bravo. Brava!”

  Flourishing one hand, he gave a seated bow.

  Webster stopped. He could hear something now, like voices muttering. Not voices exactly, more like bleats. It seemed to come out of the sky. Craning back his head, he looked, but could see nothing but some sooty veils of cloud.

  “Must be a crowd somewhere. An angry mob. Demanding eight more lanes on Lake Shore Drive.”

  Suddenly he saw them. Necks stretched out, their wings beat frantically as if too small for their bodies. Brown geese, white cheek patches, long black necks. Five hundred in a V. No, more, a thousand geese, high up and flying fast. Behind them was another V as big. They flew north, up the lake, over a city of nine million people, five million cars, how many guns?

  “Honk honk honk honk honk,” they said, as if disputing how to go and where to land, and how soon would they eat? “Honk honk honk honk honk.”

  They flashed over, faster than he could have run. A minute later, they were gone. But another V appeared, and then two more, faint as smoke trails on the skyline, growing as they came, more lines behind, all down the twenty miles of city coast. Webster tried to add. Five Vs, five more, no end in sight. Some so high they almost disappeared, dark silhouettes against blue sky, a white half moon behind. A silver jet ballooned above the skyline, just up from O’Hare, and banked to miss the lines. How many geese across the sky at once? Ten thousand, twenty thousand, more?

  “Honk honk honk honk honk honk honk.”

  Calvin shouted over them, “There’s going to be some very lucky Chinese restaurant.”

  His face turned red, then white with cold. The sinking sun lit skyscrapers faint red. The lake shone with an emerald glow. Finally Webster rolled him home, legs almost too stiff to walk. But as they left, more geese flew over them, line after line in purple light.

  She smelled him first. He came in with the burnt smell of Chicago in his clothes, and hints of tuna, soap, formaldehyde. It made her gag. He held the rubber bucket while she heaved. She was just pain now, a machine clamped hard, and harder, crushing, crushed.

  She tried to see him through the roar of it. He was the only color in this terrible new room, straight black hair, red shirt, flush of cold on his brown skin, red haggard eyes. Tears slid down the wide bones in his cheeks. They must have told him what she already knew. When the amniotic fluid broke, they tested it and confirmed that the baby’s lungs were not developed yet enough to breathe. Not even with a respirator. If it was born now, it was going to die.

  “We’ll try to make it stop,” her doctor said. They shot her full of drugs, more than she’d ever had. It didn’t stop.

  Webster pressed his face into the pillow by her head, clutching her hand. She tried to cheer him up.

  “Love, honor, hold your puke bucket,” she said.

  Her mind felt strangely clear. She watched herself as if from far away, while pain crushed down, and all for nothing now. Too soon, too small, the baby dead, like all the lost babies. The two she’d lost, and the first one, in little pieces, eighteen years ago. Ann and Henry had had a baby boy, she’d heard, who had died in his crib. A violinist she knew had tried everything for years and finally conceived. But in the sixth month, they had said the baby’s head was huge and full of water, and it would not live.

  Margy wanted to make up for all of them. But she seemed to be a spaceship turning nose down to the ground, like the day they launched a woman science teacher into space, in a clear blue sky, schoolchildren watching everywhere. Margy had been visiting a Westside school that day, sent by the state to let the children meet a real musician, and she went to watch the launch with them. When the spaceship blew up in a puff of white, the children exclaimed with delight. Some of them cheered, because it was a teacher getting atomized.

  “Take it out,” a voice screamed through the wall. “Cut it out! I want it out of me!”

  How far were you melted down when you called your baby it and begged someone to cut it out of you? Nature did not care about the individual, Webster had said. It wanted to start over with fresh combinations of genes, new possibilities, new cells. What the old ones suffered meant nothing. Her belly hunched up like a wasp stinging a caterpillar dead. The stinger jabbed in through her belly, tried to reach her heart.

  “Take it out! Cut it out of me!”

  Outside it was dark. Pale orange light shone from the streetlights to the windowsill. A minute took forever when you couldn’t stand a second more of it. Every Good Boy Does Fine, sang some deep bank in her mind. Bill Grogan’s goat went up the hill. Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree. Sur la pont d’Avignon, l’on y dansa tout en rond.

  Someone wiped her face and pushed the hair out of her eyes. She’d never been so tired.

  Suddenly, all was calm. She seemed to float above the bed, looking down. She could see Webster sleeping in a plastic chair, his head dropped back, mouth open, face creased like a seam. He had been sitting there forever, and she felt a rush of tenderness, certain she would never see him again.

  Then she was on an empty stage, naked, alone. Webster walked on and told her calmly, being sorry, that he had stopped loving her.

  “I don’t love you anymore,” he said. “Love is voluntary and sometimes stops.”

  She watched him jump off a tall building into a swimming pool, having a good time with his friends.

  A roar of pain woke her. As she began to gasp, he jerked upright and took her hand.

  She tried to tell the dream to him. He looked at her wildly.

  “I’m going to love you forever. I already have loved you forever. Please don’t die.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to die.” Her voice floated dreamy in her ears.

  Then the roar covered everything. Dials on the monitor swung to the highest number on the scale and just stayed there. The room was red.

  He held a hand up to her mouth. “Bite me, please. Show me what it feels like. Please. Bite me.”

  What strange thing was he asking now? It seemed a small annoyance, far off, like a nagging sound. Dreamily, she bared her teeth and clamped them down into his hand.

  Sometimes it’s better not to be in your body. Crammed up in the top of her skull, she was trying to get out. She could not remember why they’d brought her here, into this awful brilliant place, silver metal gleaming all around, or what she was trying to do. It was too hard. Someone made sounds like a train out of control, metal-on-metal squeals.

  The room was full of people in green gowns, white masks. For a moment, she could see her doctor, several nurses, the neonatal specialist. He was a man in his thirties who had already lost his hair, probably from all the infant deaths he had to see.

  “Unnnnnnh!” she shrieked. “Unnnnnnnh!”

  Two nurses held her naked, sweaty legs. She recognized the big hands on her arms, brown and capable, Webster’s, one of them bruised. For a moment she could feel him all around her, holding up her back, his soggy shirt, his wet cheek, the shudder of
his breath. Then everything went white. Her body started turning inside out.

  “Don’t push,” a hard voice said. “Don’t push. We have the head. Let it turn. Don’t push.”

  She couldn’t do it, but it didn’t matter. She fell through space released, a puff of white. Now she was nothing and glad. This was where she had been headed all along.

  Her body roared. She bobbed back into it and felt the weight. Opened her eyes, cold and sick.

  A bloody mass lay on a green shroud over her. Masked people toweled and suctioned it. A baby’s emaciated leg emerged, thin as a skinned rabbit’s and red. It would have been a girl, with perfect feet and arms and hands, ten fingers and ten toes. The towels lifted to show a tiny hawklike nose, black hair, a face so thin the eyes bulged to the sides, translucent lids closed as if peacefully asleep.

  “We have respiration,” someone shouted.

  Everyone stopped moving. There were little sniffing sounds. The baby’s eyelids rose. Milky blue eyes glared. The neonatal specialist slid swift gloved hands under the tiny back.

  “This baby is much better than advertised,” he said and strode out of the room.

  A rush of air like a big sigh lifted above the crowd of masked people.

  “What does it mean?” cried Margy as she lay split open, on display as if filleted.

  No one answered. The masked people bent over her, tugged something, made new pain. It didn’t matter. Electrified, she plucked at Webster’s flannel sleeve.

  “Go with her. She’s all right. I know it. Go with her, make sure.”

  The room seemed empty now without the baby. The baby was the most beautiful creature! “Did you see the way she opened up her eyes? Did you see that? Did you hear her breathe?”

  Webster was crying, shivering, still clutching her arms.

  “Go on, put me down. I’ll be fine. Go see what’s happening to her. She’s going to be all right.”