There is some rustling of magazine pages.
The Mother clears her throat. “Tiny Tim forgot the wet bar,” she says.
Ned, who is still up, comes out of his room and down the corridor, whose lights dim at nine. Standing next to her chair, he says to the Mother, “Where are you from? What is wrong with your baby?”
In the tiny room that is theirs, she sleeps fitfully in her sweatpants, occasionally leaping up to check on the Baby. This is what the sweatpants are for: leaping. In case of fire. In case of anything. In case the difference between day and night starts to dissolve, and there is no difference at all, so why pretend? In the cot beside her, the Husband, who has taken a sleeping pill, is snoring loudly, his arms folded about his head in a kind of origami. How could either of them have stayed back at the house, with its empty high chair and empty crib? Occassionally the Baby wakes and cries out, and she bolts up, goes to him, rubs his back, rearranges the linens. The clock on the metal dresser shows that it is five after three. Then twenty to five. And then it is really morning, the beginning of this day, nephrectomy day. Will she be glad when it’s over, or barely alive, or both? Each day this week has arrived huge, empty, and unknown, like a spaceship, and this one especially is lit a bright gray.
“He’ll need to put this on,” says John, one of the nurses, bright and early, handing the Mother a thin greenish garment with roses and teddy bears printed on it. A wave of nausea hits her; this smock, she thinks, will soon be splattered with—with what?
The Baby is awake but drowsy. She lifts off his pajamas. “Don’t forget, bubeleh,” she whispers, undressing and dressing him. “We will be with you every moment, every step. When you think you are asleep and floating off far away from everybody, Mommy will still be there.” If she hasn’t fled on a bus. “Mommy will take care of you. And Daddy, too.” She hopes the Baby does not detect her own fear and uncertainty, which she must hide from him, like a limp. He is hungry, not having been allowed to eat, and he is no longer amused by this new place, but worried about its hardships. Oh, my baby, she thinks. And the room starts to swim a little. The Husband comes in to take over. “Take a break,” he says to her. “I’ll walk him around for five minutes.”
She leaves but doesn’t know where to go. In the hallway, she is approached by a kind of social worker, a customer-relations person, who had given them a video to watch about the anesthesia: how the parent accompanies the child into the operating room, and how gently, nicely the drugs are administered.
“Did you watch the video?”
“Yes,” says the Mother.
“Wasn’t it helpful?”
“I don’t know,” says the Mother.
“Do you have any questions?” asks the video woman. “Do you have any questions?” asked of someone who has recently landed in this fearful, alien place seems to the Mother an absurd and amazing little courtesy. The very specificity of a question would give a lie to the overwhelming strangeness of everything around her.
“Not right now,” says the Mother. “Right now, I think I’m just going to go to the bathroom.”
When she returns to the Baby’s room, everyone is there: the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, all the nurses, the social worker. In their blue caps and scrubs, they look like a clutch of forget-me-nots, and forget them, who could? The Baby, in his little teddy-bear smock, seems cold and scared. He reaches out and the Mother lifts him from the Husband’s arms, rubs his back to warm him.
“Well, it’s time!” says the Surgeon, forcing a smile.
“Shall we go?” says the Anesthesiologist.
What follows is a blur of obedience and bright lights. They take an elevator down to a big concrete room, the anteroom, the greenroom, the backstage of the operating room. Lining the walls are long shelves full of blue surgical outfits. “Children often become afraid of the color blue,” says one of the nurses. But of course. Of course! “Now, which one of you would like to come into the operating room for the anesthesia?”
“I will,” says the Mother.
“Are you sure?” asks the Husband.
“Yup.” She kisses the Baby’s hair. “Mr. Curlyhead,” people keep calling him here, and it seems both rude and nice. Women look admiringly at his long lashes and exclaim, “Always the boys! Always the boys!”
Two surgical nurses put a blue smock and a blue cotton cap on the Mother. The Baby finds this funny and keeps pulling at the cap. “This way,” says another nurse, and the Mother follows. “Just put the Baby down on the table.”
In the video, the mother holds the baby and fumes are gently waved under the baby’s nose until he falls asleep. Now, out of view of camera or social worker, the Anesthesiologist is anxious to get this under way and not let too much gas leak out into the room generally. The occupational hazard of this, his chosen profession, is gas exposure and nerve damage, and it has started to worry him. No doubt he frets about it to his wife every night! Now he turns the gas on and quickly clamps the plastic mouthpiece over the baby’s cheeks and lips.
The Baby is startled. The Mother is startled. The Baby starts to scream and redden behind the plastic, but he cannot be heard. He thrashes. “Tell him it’s okay,” says the nurse to the Mother.
Okay? “It’s okay,” repeats the Mother, holding his hand, but she knows he can tell it’s not okay, because he can see not only that she is still wearing that stupid paper cap but that her words are mechanical and swallowed, and she is biting her lips to keep them from trembling. Panicked, he attempts to sit. He cannot breathe; his arms reach up. Bye-bye, outside. And then, quite quickly, his eyes shut; he untenses and has fallen not into sleep but aside to sleep, an odd, kidnapping kind of sleep, his terror now hidden someplace deep inside him.
“How did it go?” asks the social worker, waiting in the concrete outer room. The Mother is hysterical. A nurse has ushered her out.
“It wasn’t at all like the filmstrip!” she cries. “It wasn’t like the filmstrip at all!”
“The filmstrip? You mean the video?” asks the social worker.
“It wasn’t like that at all! It was brutal and unforgivable.”
“Why that’s terrible,” she says, her role now no longer misinformational but janitorial, and she touches the Mother’s arm, though the Mother shakes it off and goes to find the Husband.
She finds him in the large mulberry Surgery Lounge, where he has been taken and where there is free hot chocolate in small Styrofoam cups. Red cellophane garlands festoon the doorways. She has totally forgotten it is as close to Christmas as this. A pianist in the corner is playing “Carol of the Bells,” and it sounds not only unfestive but scary, like the theme from The Exorcist.
There is a giant clock on the far wall. It is a kind of porthole into the operating room, a way of assessing the Baby’s ordeal: forty-five minutes for the Hickman implant; two and a half hours for the nephrectomy. And then, after that, three months of chemotherapy. The magazine on her lap stays open at a ruby-hued perfume ad.
“Still not taking notes,” says the Husband.
“Nope.”
“You know, in a way, this is the kind of thing you’ve always written about.”
“You are really something, you know that? This is life. This isn’t a ‘kind of thing.’ ”
“But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it’s the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.”
“I told you that.”
“I’m quoting you.”
She looks at her watch, thinking of the Baby. “How long has it been?”
“Not long. Too long. In the end, maybe those’re the same things.”
“What do you suppose is happening to him right this second?”
Infection? Slipping knives? “I don’t know. But you know what? I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta just walk a bit.” The Husband gets up, walks around the lounge, then comes back and sits down.
The synapses between the minutes are unswim
mable. An hour is thick as fudge. The Mother feels depleted; she is a string of empty tin cans attached by wire, something a goat would sniff and chew, something now and then enlivened by a jolt of electricity.
She hears their names being called over the intercom. “Yes? Yes?” She stands up quickly. Her words have flown out before her, an exhalation of birds. The piano music has stopped. The pianist is gone. She and the Husband approach the main desk, where a man looks up at them and smiles. Before him is a xeroxed list of patients’ names. “That’s our little boy right there,” says the Mother, seeing the Baby’s name on the list and pointing at it. “Is there some word? Is everything okay?”
“Yes,” says the man. “Your boy is doing fine. They’ve just finished with the catheter, and they are moving on to the kidney.”
“But it’s been two hours already! Oh my God, did something go wrong? What happened? What went wrong?”
“Did something go wrong?” The Husband tugs at his collar.
“Not really. It just took longer than they expected. I’m told everything is fine. They wanted you to know.”
“Thank you,” says the Husband. They turn and walk back toward where they were sitting.
“I’m not going to make it.” The Mother sighs, sinking into a fake leather chair shaped somewhat like a baseball mitt. “But before I go, I’m taking half this hospital out with me.”
“Do you want some coffee?” asks the Husband.
“I don’t know,” says the Mother. “No, I guess not. No. Do you?”
“Nah, I don’t, either, I guess,” he says.
“Would you like part of an orange?”
“Oh, maybe, I guess, if you’re having one.” She takes an orange from her purse and just sits there peeling its difficult skin, the flesh rupturing beneath her fingers, the juice trickling down her hands, stinging the hangnails. She and the Husband chew and swallow, discreetly spit the seeds into Kleenex, and read from photocopies of the latest medical research, which they begged from the intern. They read, and underline, and sigh and close their eyes, and after some time, the surgery is over. A nurse from Peed Onk comes down to tell them.
“Your little boy’s in recovery right now. He’s doing well. You can see him in about fifteen minutes.”
How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.
It is a horror and a miracle to see him. He is lying in his crib in his room, tubed up, splayed like a boy on a cross, his arms stiffened into cardboard “no-no’s” so that he cannot yank out the tubes. There is the bladder catheter, the nasal-gastric tube, and the Hickman, which, beneath the skin, is plugged into his jugular, then popped out his chest wall and capped with a long plastic cap. There is a large bandage taped over his abdomen. Groggy, on a morphine drip, still he is able to look at her when, maneuvering through all the vinyl wiring, she leans to hold him, and when she does, he begins to cry, but cry silently, without motion or noise. She has never seen a baby cry without motion or noise. It is the crying of an old person: silent, beyond opinion, shattered. In someone so tiny, it is frightening and unnatural. She wants to pick up the Baby and run—out of there, out of there. She wants to whip out a gun: No-no’s, eh? This whole thing is what I call a no-no. Don’t you touch him! she wants to shout at the surgeons and the needle nurses. Not anymore! No more! No more! She would crawl up and lie beside him in the crib if she could. But instead, because of all his intricate wiring, she must lean and cuddle, sing to him, songs of peril and flight: “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. We gotta get out of this place…there’s a better life for me and you.”
Very 1967. She was eleven then and impressionable.
The Baby looks at her, pleadingly, his arms splayed out in surrender. To where? Where is there to go? Take me! Take me!
That night, postop night, the Mother and Husband lie afloat in the cot together. A fluorescent lamp near the crib is kept on in the dark. The Baby breathes evenly but thinly in his drugged sleep. The morphine in its first flooding doses apparently makes him feel as if he were falling backward—or so the Mother has been told—and it causes the Baby to jerk, to catch himself over and over, as if he were being dropped from a tree. “Is this right? Isn’t there something that should be done?” The nurses come in hourly, different ones—the night shifts seem strangely short and frequent. If the Baby stirs or frets, the nurses give him more morphine through the Hickman catheter, then leave to tend to other patients. The Mother rises to check on him in the low light. There is gurgling from the clear plastic suction tube coming out of his mouth. Brownish clumps have collected in the tube. What is going on? The Mother rings for the nurse. Is it Renée or Sarah or Darcy? She’s forgotten.
“What, what is it?” murmurs the Husband, waking up.
“Something is wrong,” says the Mother. “It looks like blood in his N-G tube.”
“What?” The Husband gets out of bed. He, too, is wearing sweatpants.
The nurse—Valerie—pushes open the heavy door to the room and enters quietly. “Everything okay?”
“There’s something wrong here. The tube is sucking blood out of his stomach. It looks like it may have perforated his stomach and that now he’s bleeding internally. Look!”
Valerie is a saint, but her voice is the standard hospital saint voice: an infuriating, pharmaceutical calm. It says, Everything is normal here. Death is normal. Pain is normal. Nothing is abnormal. So there is nothing to get excited about. “Well now, let’s see.” She holds up the plastic tube and tries to see inside it. “Hmmm,” she says. “I’ll call the attending physician.”
Because this is a research and teaching hospital, all the regular doctors are at home sleeping in their Mission-style beds. Tonight, as is apparently the case every weekend night, the attending physician is a medical student. He looks fifteen. The authority he attempts to convey, he cannot remotely inhabit. He is not even in the same building with it. He shakes everyone’s hands, then strokes his chin, a gesture no doubt gleaned from some piece of dinner theater his parents took him to once. As if there were an actual beard on that chin! As if beard growth on that chin were even possible! Our Town! Kiss Me Kate! Barefoot in the Park! He is attempting to convince, if not to impress.
“We’re in trouble,” the Mother whispers to the Husband. She is tired, tired of young people grubbing for grades. “We’ve got Dr. ‘Kiss Me Kate,’ here.”
The Husband looks at her blankly, a mix of disorientation and divorce.
The medical student holds the tubing in his hands. “I don’t really see anything,” he says.
He flunks! “You don’t?” The Mother shoves her way in, holds the clear tubing in both hands. “That,” she says. “Right here and here.” Just this past semester, she said to one of her own students, “If you don’t see how this essay is better than that one, then I want you just to go out into the hallway and stand there until you do.” Is it important to keep one’s voice down? The Baby stays asleep. He is drugged and dreaming, far away.
“Hmmm,” says the medical student. “Perhaps there’s a little irritation in the stomach.”
“A little irritation?” The Mother grows furious. “This is blood. These are clumps and clots. This stupid thing is sucking the life right out of him!” Life! She is starting to c
ry.
They turn off the suction and bring in antacids, which they feed into the Baby through the tube. Then they turn the suction on again. This time on low.
“What was it on before?” asks the Husband.
“High,” says Valerie. “Doctor’s orders, though I don’t know why. I don’t know why these doctors do a lot of the things they do.”
“Maybe they’re…not all that bright?” suggests the Mother. She is feeling relief and rage simultaneously: there is a feeling of prayer and litigation in the air. Yet essentially, she is grateful. Isn’t she? She thinks she is. And still, and still: look at all the things you have to do to protect a child, a hospital merely an intensification of life’s cruel obstacle course.
The Surgeon comes to visit on Saturday morning. He steps in and nods at the Baby, who is awake but glazed from the morphine, his eyes two dark unseeing grapes. “The boy looks fine,” the Surgeon announces. He peeks under the Baby’s bandage. “The stitches look good,” he says. The Baby’s abdomen is stitched all the way across like a baseball. “And the other kidney, when we looked at it yesterday face-to-face, looked fine. We’ll try to wean him off the morphine a little, and see how he’s doing on Monday.” He clears his throat. “And now,” he says, looking about the room at the nurses and medical students, “I would like to speak with the Mother, alone.”
The Mother’s heart gives a jolt. “Me?”
“Yes,” he says, motioning, then turning.
She gets up and steps out into the empty hallway with him, closing the door behind her. What can this be about? She hears the Baby fretting a little in his crib. Her brain fills with pain and alarm. Her voice comes out as a hoarse whisper. “Is there something—”
“There is a particular thing I need from you,” says the Surgeon, turning and standing there very seriously.
“Yes?” Her heart is pounding. She does not feel resilient enough for any more bad news.
“I need to ask a favor.”
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