by Robert Atwan
After our afternoon appointment with Patricia, our midwife, in which she announced your weight, we returned home, ate dinner, and watched the Sonics playoff game on our tiny black-and-white TV, which Richard set up on a bench in front of the couch. Around halftime I started having contractions. Just in case this was the real thing, I packed my bag, a blue suede overnight bag, and put it by the door. In the bag was my hospital reading, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, which I needed to get a grasp on for my upcoming comprehensive exams. I can imagine you shaking your head and laughing—I obviously knew nothing about labor or hospital stays.
Unlike my mother, who took no class and had no birth partner, we had prepared for your birth by taking a class offered through the midwife’s clinic that included drafting a birth plan. Yes, we had a plan. We paid scant attention to the physical exercises but spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out what music we wanted to hear during labor, as if it were a dance party requiring a playlist. The birth plan called for a teddy bear as a focal point for me to concentrate on, a tape player and tapes, a mat to lie on, and a baby bag full of clothes and blankets for you. When it started looking bad for the Sonics, Richard hauled all the birthing assemblage to our car, filled with boxes of books we had neglected to clear out.
The time between contractions was shortening and they were intensifying, rapidly and uncomfortably so. It seemed like real labor, what we had been waiting for, not a false alarm, not the practice Braxton-Hicks contractions. We called Patricia and were told to come on in. Back into our little Civic we went, packed now as if we were heading on safari.
The ride, our second in not many hours, was excruciating. The rhythmic bounce of the car as it passed over each seam of the bridge shot pains through my body. Richard tried to listen to the basketball game through my groans. Back to the parking lot that five hours ago seemed like heaven, only now I could barely lift myself out of the car or walk across the lot. If I didn’t move, the contractions might not be so bad or might not come at all.
When Patricia measured my cervix, it was as it had been at my office visit earlier in the day. She wasn’t certain I was in real labor. Without declaring labor, I couldn’t be admitted to the hospital, couldn’t be assigned my own room. I was instructed to walk up and down the back stairwells to stimulate labor. The optimism of the morning and afternoon had vanished.
At eleven o’clock I was measured once again. Slight progress, but not enough to declare active labor. Patricia sent us off wandering once again. Midnight came, and still I hadn’t been formally admitted. We climbed a few stairs, only to have me fall against the cement wall and slump to the steps when a contraction seized me.
You should know that contractions operate in stages like a thunderstorm. You feel them rumbling toward you from far off, tremors building incrementally until they arrive dead center.
At full strength, you feel as if every inch of your brainbodysoul has been taken captive by the seizure and there’s nothing you can do but give in to its superior power.
And then, when you feel you have been wrung out, it lets you go and rumbles off until the next tremor begins.
When this contraction lifted, Richard hauled me to my feet and we once again climbed the stairs. Up and down we went, stopping and starting until we exited the stairwell and staggered by the nurse’s station like beggars searching for a handout.
“Couldn’t someone do something? Give me something to move the labor along or ease the pain?”
“No,” replied the nurse manning the station, referring me brusquely to my birth plan, which was pinned on her clipboard. The plan firmly stated my opposition to drugs. I had wanted a natural birth, to be awake and alert, to feel everything. “What you are going through is perfectly normal,” the nurse said. “Not an emergency.”
I screamed—I’m sure I screamed—“But I didn’t know what labor was when I wrote the plan. Give me something, please.” She offered me ice chips. Richard rubbed my back. I cried.
I thought I was going to die and that you would never live through this. How could something so painful result in you? How could babies survive the turmoil of birth, the violence of it? Because make no mistake, labor is violent: it squeezes the air out of you. In the moments between contractions, when pain waited in the wings, I thought about women who had given birth before me, women who were at this very instant giving birth alongside me, in fields, in hospitals, in apartments, in elevators and makeshift infirmaries, women of all colors, sizes, shapes, who spoke languages I couldn’t understand and ate food I had never tasted. We were united by this scorching labor.
At 12:30 Patricia rechecked me. I had progressed and was officially declared in labor and admitted to the hospital. I was going to have you after all. Finally we moved to the birthing room we had toured nearly nine months ago, decorated like a bedroom at home, with pictures on the walls, rocking chairs, and a flower-patterned quilt. The walls were mauve with a burgundy border—rich and warm.
Unfortunately, by this time labor was so advanced that I was barely conscious of the decor that had been so important to me in the planning stages. I lay down in the quilt-covered bed but had even more difficulty getting through the pain. I tensed up, gripped Richard. I forgot about the quick shallow puffs of breath I had practiced in birthing class. I cried and looked to Richard, who was the only person in the room. I refused to let him go, even to bring our birthing accoutrements in from the car. I was long past teddy-bear focal points or playlists. I looked into his face during the contractions as he dutifully chanted, “Breathe, breathe, breathe.” When the contraction was over, I drifted out of consciousness. Far away.
Spent, and traveling out of the body, I returned to the apple trees of my earlier birth fantasy. This time the trees were in blossom, in sunlight, under a pale blue sky, and my friend Elizabeth, who had her daughter Emma a year before, stood beneath them. In between contractions I went to this place with Elizabeth and Emma. They seemed to be welcoming me. Emma was perched at her mother’s waist, stiff legs supported by Elizabeth’s cradled arm, while the apple tree’s canopy of branches crowned Emma’s head. Elizabeth grasped a branch, pulling it down as Emma pushed on her stomach to reach the blossoms waiting above them both. Early in pregnancy women can forget they are pregnant for an hour or two, a day perhaps. They can walk the fields at their usual pace, bend down and lift laundry baskets easily. They can hop, skip, jump, and run after a bus pulling away from the curb. In the last trimester every second is colored with the knowledge that you have something living inside you and it’s growing—it’s pushing against your being. When you turn on your side, you are turning for two. Nothing about me remained as it was.
Our midwife suddenly noticed Richard—how shaken and pale he was. He looked like he was going to faint. He alone had been my companion in labor; it was his face I looked at when trying to focus through the contractions, his hands I gripped, his voice trying to talk me through the pain, and it was his frame upon which I collapsed. There was no one else in the hours between arrival and admittance.
“Go down to the cafeteria,” Patricia said. “Get some coffee, something to eat. It’s going to be some hours before the next stage.” I let go of his hands that I had been holding on to like a life raft in a storm.
When Richard came back I was in transition, that period between the first stage of labor and the last, when you push the baby out. I had been drifting in and out of consciousness, when suddenly I got up, went to the bathroom, and threw up. Then the mucus plug that blocks the opening of the cervix was expelled and my water broke. It was as if a small balloon had burst and out came the water in one big gush. And then I had to push. There was no stopping, no slowing the need to push, a push that originated somewhere else, far behind me, a great epic push and I was the instrument of it.
I had been steadfastly uninterested in having children. Nothing moved me from my refusal, not holding a newborn in my arms or the transformative tales of motherhood. I was too wrapped up in the trouble of being a da
ughter forever waiting for her mother’s love that would never come. I was surprised when I was seized by a great longing for a child.
Husband, midwife, and nurse huddled about the fetal monitor in the birthing room, because it had started to register distress. Something was wrong—I could hear it in their voices, in the low tones, though I couldn’t hear what they said. I was concentrating on pushing. I had to get out of my bed and lie on a gurney being rolled in. Then away I went, wheeling toward an operating room. Patricia was trying to slow down my pushing—there was talk of a C-section, getting you out quickly, calling a surgeon. But I couldn’t stop pushing, and you crowned. Richard said he could see your head. I had never heard such excitement in his voice. Out you rushed, with your umbilical cord lassoed around your neck. That’s what was causing the distress. Each time I pushed, the cord tightened around your neck, cutting off oxygen and blood. Later I wondered if this was the origin of the term mother knot. But what could have been dire was not. As you crowned, Patricia was able to unloop the cord from around your neck, and all was well. It was 4:19 A.M. on April 18 and you weighed eight pounds, four ounces.
Richard wiped you off, wrapped you in a blanket, and put you in my arms. And a new story was born, a story I am passing on to you. And while I hope you live in the here and now, in a present so full that you have no reason to look back in puzzlement about how you came into the world, remember I know the story of your birth by heart.
CHARLES BAXTER
What Happens in Hell
FROM Ploughshares
“SIR, I AM WONDERING—have you considered lately what happens in Hell?”
No, I hadn’t, but I liked that lately. We were on our way from the San Francisco Airport to Palo Alto, and the driver for Bay Area Limo, a Pakistani American whose name was Niazi, was glancing repeatedly in the rearview mirror to check me out. After all, there I was, a privileged person—a hegemon of some sort—in the back seat of the Lincoln Town Car, cushioned by the camel-colored leather as I swigged my bottled water. Like other Americans of my class and station, I know the importance of staying hydrated. And there he was, up front, behind the wheel on a late sunny Saturday afternoon, speeding down California State Highway 101, missing (he had informed me almost as soon as I got into the car) the prayer service and sermon at his Bay Area mosque. The subject of the sermon would be Islamic inheritance laws—a subject that had led quite naturally to the subject of death and the afterlife.
I don’t really enjoy sitting in the back seat of Lincoln Town Cars. I don’t like being treated as some sort of important personage. I’m a midwesterner by location and temperament and don’t even cotton to being called “sir.” So I try to be polite (“Just call me Charlie”) and take my shoes off, so to speak, in deference to foreign customs, as Mrs. Moore does in A Passage to India.
“No,” I said, “I haven’t. What happens in Hell?” I asked.
“Well,” Niazi said, warming up and stroking his beard, “there is no forgiveness over there. There is forgiveness here but not there. The God does not listen to you on the other side.”
“He doesn’t?”
“No. The God does not care what you say, and he does not forgive you once you are on that side after you die. By then it is over.”
“Interesting,” I said, nondirectively.
“It is all in the Holy Book,” Niazi went on. “And your skin, sir. Do you know what the God does with your skin?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “Tell me.” Actually I was most interested in the definite article. Why was the deity referred to as the God? Are there still other, lesser gods, minor subsidiary deities, set aside somewhere, who must be differentiated from the major god? I drank some more water as I considered this problem.
“It is very interesting, what happens with the skin,” Niazi said as we pulled off the Bayshore Freeway onto University Avenue. “Every day the skin is burned off.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. This is known. And then, each day, the God gives you new skin. This new skin is like a sheath.”
“Ah.” I noticed the repeated use of the word you.
“And every day the new skin is burned off.” He said this sentence with a certain degree of excitement. “It is very painful, as you can imagine. And the pain is always fresh pain.”
Meanwhile we were proceeding through downtown Palo Alto. On the outskirts of town I had noticed the absence of pickup trucks and rusting American cars; everywhere I looked, I saw Priuses and Saabs and Lexuses and BMWs and Volvos and Mercedes-Benzes and a few Teslas here and there. The mix didn’t include convertible Bentleys or Maybachs, the brand names that flash past you on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica. Here, ostentation was out; professional-managerial modesty was in. Here the drivers were engaged in Right Thinking and were uncommonly courteous: complete stops at stop signs were the norm, and ditto at the mere sight of a pedestrian at a crosswalk. No one seemed to be in a hurry. There was plenty of time for everything, as if Siddhartha himself were directing traffic.
And the pedestrians! Fit, smiling, upright, well-tended, with not a morbidly obese fellow citizen in sight, the evening crowd on University Avenue appeared to be living in an earlier American era, one lacking desperation, hysteria, and Fox News. Somehow Palo Alto had remained immune to what one of my students has referred to as “the Great Decline.” In this city, the businesses were thriving under blue skies and polished sunshine. I couldn’t spot a single boarded-up front window. Although I saw plenty of panhandlers, no one looked shabby and lower-middle-class. I noted, as an outsider would, the lines outside the luxe restaurants—Bella Luna, Lavanda, and the others—everyone laughing and smiling. The happiness struck me as stagy. What phonies these people were! Having come from Minneapolis, where we have boarded-up businesses in bulk, I felt like—what is the expression?—an ape hanging on to the fence of Heaven, watching the gods play.
And it occurred to me at that moment that Niazi felt that way too, apelike, except that I was one of those damn gods, which explained why he had to inform me about Hell.
“You burn forever,” Niazi said, drawing me out of my reverie. “And, yes, here we are at your hotel.”
Sir and Hell: the two words belong together. After arguing with the hotel desk clerk, who claimed (until I showed him my confirmation number) that I didn’t have a reservation and therefore didn’t belong there, I went up to my room past a gaggle of beautiful leggy young men and women, track stars, in town for a meet at Stanford University, where I’d been hired to teach as a visiting writer. They were flirting with each other and tenderly comparing relay batons. Off in the bar on the other side of the lobby, drugstore cowboys were whooping it up, throwing back draft beers while the voice of Faith Hill warbled on the jukebox. Nothing is so dispiriting as the sight of strangers getting boisterously happy. It makes you feel like a stepchild, a poor relation. Having checked in, I went upstairs and sat in my room immobilized, unable for a moment even to open my suitcase, puzzled by the persistence of Hell and why I had just been forced to endure a lecture about it.
Rattled, I stared out the window. A soft Bay Area rain was falling, little dribs and drabs dropping harmlessly, impressionistically, out of the sky—Monet rain. A downmarket version of an Audubon bird—how I hate those Audubon birds—was trapped and framed in a picture above the TV.
I am usually an outsider everywhere. I don’t mind being one—you’re a writer, you choose a certain fate—but the condition is harder to bear in a self-confident city where everyone is playing a role successfully and no one is glancing furtively for the EXIT signs.
In his writings and his clinical practice, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan liked to ask why any particular person would want to believe any given set of ideas. He initially asked the question of behavioral psychologists with their dopey experiments with mice and pigeons, but, inspired by Lacan, you can ask it of anyone. Why do you desire to believe the ideas that you hold dear, the cornerstones of your faith? Why do you clutch tightly to the ide
as that appear to be particularly repellant and cruel? Why would anyone want to suppose that an untold multitude of human souls burn in extreme agony for eternity? Having left a marriage and now living and working alone, I found myself in that hotel room experiencing the peculiar vacuum of self that arises when you go on working without a clear belief in what (or whom) you’re working for and are also being exposed randomly to the world’s cruelties.
The idea of Hell has a transcendently stupefying ugliness akin to that of torture chambers. This particular ugliness is fueled by the rage and sadism of the believer who enjoys imagining his enemies writhing perpetually down there in the colorful fiery pit. How many of us relish the fairy tale of endless suffering! Nietzsche claimed that all such relishers are in the grip of ressentiment, whereby frustration against the rulers and anger at oneself are transformed into a morality. Ressentiment is what happens to resentment once it goes Continental and becomes a metaphysical category. After Marx, injustice no longer seemed part of a natural order. And if injustice isn’t part of a natural order, then ressentiment will naturally arise, the rage of the have-nots against the haves, the losers against the winners. Sometimes the rage is constructive, sometimes not. For Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, the unequal distribution of power is simply a condition of things-as-they-are:
It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, “These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—should he not be good?”