Dear Mr. You

by Mary -Louise Parker

  Your goat-face is such a map of sweetness. When you chew on my son’s shirt or look at me through the pen window that perma-smile is so Christ-like that I have to fall to my knees and hug your neck. I pat your giant hairy belly with little slaps, releasing clouds of dust from your gray coat. When you were little I could hold you in my arms but now it takes both my daughter and I pushing with all our might to shove you back into the barn.

  You have to know that it is entirely because of my loyalty to you that I was willing to castrate another goat.

  This wasn’t a mutiny on gonads. My readiness to hack off Bully’s testes was my instinct to protect you and I was ready to get after it.

  I want to be clear: Bully was only doing what biology asks of him. When a goat wakes to discover his scrotum coursing with blood, he starts butting into trees, silos, and the UPS woman. Bully had not been dehorned and he sported a set that could do real harm, not to mention that he was a breeder. Shortly after bringing him into the pack we had three baby goats. I know you had no hand in that, Gem, since you have neither horns nor a nut-sack situation that makes you seek quality time with Peaches or Melissa. Bully may as well have moved into the pen with an open bar and a Commodores cover band playing twenty-four/seven. He strutted around bleating to himself. He took long naps during which he let forth farts that were just to the left of geothermal. His vibe was equal parts entitled and misunderstood, leaving a pen of ravaged lady goats that huddled together and licked their privates. The gals appeared both sated and needy, like they wanted to open up but needed therapy. It was hard to watch. I’d open the pen to find them panting, looking like they’d give up their feed ration for a tube of Vagisil.

  Bully, I speak to you directly now. I saw you bang those lady goats from here to Xanadu and sometimes you weren’t even in the mood. As you hammered away at Diana Ross, I’d see you distracted by a chipmunk. I’d see you looking around like

  Is this really all there is?

  Gem, you know it was your needs I was addressing in having to unsex your friend Bully. He came with massive swinging balls and pointy horns. He used those horns on you, Gem, gentleman goat, and that is where I drew the line.

  I won’t forget the sight of you, Gemini, as you rounded the corner that morning while I exited the pen after collecting eggs. To see your face bloodied and cut by the horns of your goat-bro was too much. When Bully trotted up moments later, I was still wiping blood from your beard and his eyes were cold and dead.

  He rolled up like Caligula, mid-assassination.

  Bloody skin tissue dripped off his horns and onto a nearby chicken, who tried to flee by frantically jumping into the pen with the piglets. This created a gruesome, live horror showcase of Babe: Pig in the City. I ran to my neighbor gesturing wildly for him to turn off his table saw, and he looked stricken when I told him about the attack on you, Gem. He marched into his barn and got the castrating pliers and we stopped to get his handyman Louis to help us.

  Now, I have held down a girl goat to clip her horns or shave her ladytown privates before birthing. It isn’t easy. You need two sets of hands for that unless you tie them to a post, but holding down Bully was another ball of wax. I had to sit on him. I sat on Bully and thrashed to and fro as my neighbor gripped his horns and Louis lay on the ground with both arms around his hind legs. This part was merely to get him into the pen so we could figure out the next step.

  Gem, I may be projecting, but you bleated and Bully seemed to answer you. He slowed to a stop except for the clump of blood and facial ligament tissue swinging from his forehead.

  What did you say to him, Gem? Did you say “Bro, you don’t need balls to have balls?” Whatever it was, Bully heard it. He looked at the girl goats on the hay with flies buzzing all around, knowing he was expected to cruise over and bang each and every one. It was a job he was not up for, because he turned back to me with a plaintive expression that said

  Lady, I am so ready for you to take this off my plate

  My neighbor stopped and we read each other’s mind. He got the other pliers and dehorned Bully. This was the loudest and craziest experience of my adult life, bloody and insane. It left your friend Bully with a few more years of goat love but unable to harm you, Gem. It calmed him down sufficiently.

  Last week we had to move Bully to the back pen by the pigs since the ladies are expecting again. You are there, Gem, keeping watch on the mamas-to-be and it’s a job you couldn’t be more right for. Sweet granddaddy goat, that’s more how I see you. You were never meant to be a baby daddy, or a player, and there isn’t a drop of shame to be found in that.

  Dear Little Owl,

  You are nothing yet, in the absolute best way, and I am your eyes since yours haven’t opened. You’ve not even met air! Or purple! Or snow. Or your mother, who is my friend! She is lying here so ready to hatch you. Embarrassment is years away! Ditto candy and kissing. Falcons, punch lines, and regret are even further down the road, with certain agonies that I hope never appear.

  I tell you this now before you can speak: strength is a myth. It’s not what it is, when it looks like what it is. It’s usually what it is when it looks like something else. It takes bravery to admit that you’re petrified and keep soldiering on despite it. Oh, and, “easy”? Also a hoax! If it existed it would be sold for the same as what you got it for—nothing! Ha!

  Gather perseverance, perspicacity, and Pez. Be wary of guilty pleasures. Best to open the floodgates and let pleasure wash over you until you’re floating in its yummy, with not a wink to guilt. Try saving guilt for having gossiped or disappointed your children. Be sheepish about not reading Proust or neglecting to offer your car at the right moment, or your kidney. Don’t tell lies. Lying will slowly set your soul on “decay,” unless you really and truly must lie, in which case LIE YOUR EYEBALLS OFF, lie until your nose grows so long it touches the floor when you drop your head in shame, but then go seek forgiveness.

  It’s terrifically useful to recognize where you are lacking in relation to others. Accept and even celebrate it because envy will poison, it will give you acid reflux and strange pervasive malodors. I believe you will know, when the time comes, about Colorado, the Beatles, and the high road. About keeping secret your good deeds and giving when you don’t have enough set aside for yourself. I know that you’ll find and be found.

  And I know that you are coming! Any second! I’m next to your mother on her birth slab! But Holy Moses what do I hear from yon auxiliary power dock? I recognize this song from its opening notes, and wow. No, I can’t let this happen. I won’t live with myself if this song, which is seeping into your delivery room like atomic sewage, is allowed to continue. I feel conflicted to interrupt this C-section as my dear friend’s uterus is being traded hand to hand like a Frisbee in a game of Ultimate. She lies there beatifically in a blue shower bonnet, unaware, but so help me, the song is still playing and you are about to come out, into your one life, and I’ll be a monkey’s uncle before I stand by and let the first music you hear be “XXX is a XX.” I get a sudden image of you hearing it and clutching the umbilical cord, hurriedly zip lining straight back into the womb, traumatized, so I politely but firmly ask the nurse, please, sir, I realize you have other shrimp to fry but it’s sort of an ethical imperative right now that I have the iPod remote. I’m so sorry but this song is not worthy of the moment so by all means keep sterilizing that thingy but could you please point? Nurse points to it! I’m now diving for the remote, heroically changing it in the nick of time, and great day but if it isn’t Bob Marley! All sunshine and feral joy spinning out, and then . . . Lots of muttering and orders given over there where the doctors are with your mother and then so fast! You are found!

  Like royalty you are held up there in a moment that doesn’t need anything but observance. You are here. Here for all of us to wonder at and dream for. It isn’t even love I feel looking at you, still dripping and swimming, but something higher.

  I go to where they’ve laid you to measure and your father is
there. He is standing over you to the side swaying a little, hands behind his back about a foot away. He is not touching you, not even reaching, and I see his eyes burrow back and deep. He knows this moment is escaping all of us and he is suspended inside it. In the hall before they let us in the delivery room, where we were standing just an hour ago, he’d said,

  this is my fourth child, and this, this next bit here

  then he made a gesture with his hand as though dividing everything on earth in half, as if to mean: this is what matters and this is chaos, and he said

  this right now, this is the only time I am all here and no part of me needs time travel

  Right now I see him standing over you, still not touching. I see him out of his time capsule and connected to the immediate and the Ever of you, which is all the gravity he needs.

  Then he hands you to me, little owl. I have you. I hold all your new and your ancient. I carry you to your mother. She holds you. I sit. I watch that happen.

  Dear Doctor,

  I came to you only partially conscious. Once I went into shock you were already saving me with your vast knowledge that I will never grasp. I’m confident I wouldn’t understand the most basic medical strategy if it were explained to me by Mr. Rogers.

  I went to sleep feeling poorly and woke at two a.m. with a pressure on my left side so intense that I put my hand over my mouth to muffle a cry. I searched the Internet for “agony on the left side of the body” and read that you only needed to be alarmed when vomiting blood, and as if on cue I coughed up something too salty to be saliva. I went to the sink and what I expectorated was pale pink, which I thought qualified as only blood-y? I tried going back to bed but my mouth began filling with blood, and three more times in twenty minutes the color of what came up deepened from pink lemonade to beets. The children’s nanny answered her phone but I don’t remember much after that until she arrived. I was writhing while my son urged her to call 911 and my daughter curled up in a terrified ball at the end of my bed. The paramedics arrived and when they came into the room, my kids stood up. My son put his arm around his sister. He tipped forward at the waist in my direction as though he were decorating the bow of a ship. He was craning toward me with all his might while she had crawled so far inside herself that her face would have seemed impassive if not for the set of her jaw. Her eyes patently demanded I not leave her, don’t you dare, I won’t let you they said, blinking fiercely. The imprint of them trying to look like their own ideas of dutiful children for my sake is the one I took with me. No matter how far I drifted I saw them there like that. When I pictured it in my head the image vibrated a little, like looking through a viewfinder.

  As you know, I almost wasn’t here anymore. Do people feel grateful for almost dying? I felt oddly privileged, despite seeing everyone poised to go down another set of tracks while I was held forcibly behind.

  For weeks I had felt unwell but the doctor said it was just a cold so I kept going. At night a terror would crawl across my neck and up my arms. There was a prescient thought so horrifying, a voice saying that I was not entirely safe. This voice was ghoulish, it made me nearly roll my eyes, but if I was alone or anywhere silence could tag me I’d begin to actually tremble. I worried. Ignored it. Pet the dog. Snuck a cigarette.

  That one Saturday I seemed fine. I went upstairs and sat on my bed. I noticed that I was breathing quickly.

  I took off my shoes, looked at the chair in the corner, and considered moving it. I shrugged in response to nothing.

  There was a mirror across from where I sat and I saw my reflection, which I did not like. I didn’t look right. There was nothing to recognize except the names for things: brown hair—check, black coat—check, haunted expression—check, but I couldn’t understand how my name went with that face staring back. I remembered buying the mirror, I saw myself years before in vintage boots, wandering an antiques fair in another country. Who was that? Why was I talking about peaches and champagne? Was that me in the memory or was this me, here, and why did I feel like both were doomed? I went cold inside. A rushing happened, but it eludes me how to describe the climate of your entire life’s experience catching up to you and presenting itself. I felt myself at nine years old. At thirteen and thirty-nine. At fifty. It all entered my body and I swayed, drunkenly, though I’d only had coffee. It happened on my inhalation, and I was simultaneously elated and petrified to let go my breath.

  My head began to shake back and forth slowly in answer to the question I hadn’t realized I’d asked, which was what if I died, I feel like I might

  I turned away from the mirror, my head saying no to myself, shaking back and forth. That feels awful, so no. I looked over and saw my soundless refusal staring back in that mirror.

  • • •

  You don’t get to clean off your desk. You don’t get to say I prefer April. It can always be tomorrow morning. The severing is complete and cauterizes all autonomy with it, which yes, is obvious, but not fully grasped until you’ve heard the sound of machines and voices keeping you alive, and then imagined the absence of that sound, so unceremonious when it quits. When I woke up in the hospital where it nearly happened, I saw the room as it would have looked had I died in it. I lay there listening to the swill of oxygen tanks, the ensemble of alarms and beeps, and I imagined the whole orchestration abruptly stopping and everyone in the room filing out. I saw the overlit hallway where my friends would have stood while you explained what happened. I knew the face of at least one of the men who would have put my body in a bag and zipped it up, and I could picture that bag being taken through the back doors of the hospital. My friend Nikki was wearing her blue T-shirt with the arrow on it when she dropped everything and left her children to go to the airport. I have an image of her returning home in the same T-shirt. In my mind every scene is dressed with the actual props and wardrobe, making it seem like I escaped something I was already in the midst of. The fantasy stops once I get to the point of my children being told that the last time they saw me was the last time they ever would. That image of them in the morning when I was taken away by ambulance, when they stood there so courageously, has to end with them in my bedroom.

  Seeing it play out with an unhappy ending distills a life span to no more than the inexorable velocity demanded of working organs. What is it like in the room when they shut down? Is it like the hitting of a light switch, which is just an interruption of current? After you turn the switch, photons remain clinging to the walls for a disputable length of time after our brains tell us that it’s dark, and what if we hovered there like that, part of us painted on surfaces in an in-between state. This could be true if we are nothing more than the future beds for violets and moles. Where did I go when I went into shock and started speaking in gibberish? I felt myself convulsing and came out of it long enough to see my children’s nanny cover her mouth and cry. I strained to put my head up, saying, “Don’t worry, please, I always shake like this when I’m afraid.” I asked about this later but everyone in the room said that I was not speaking English. Unintelligible sounds fell from my mouth. Metabolic encephalopathy is the medical term for it, but you were not there, is the phrase I kept hearing.

  My friend lived next to the World Trade Center and I was on the phone with her while she saw people jumping, close enough to see the color of their socks. Her husband urged her to move away from the window. Why are you doing that to yourself, he asked. She said

  Someone has to watch them

  She felt to walk away was to shut them out and so she stayed, holding them with her eyes and talking to them. It makes me wonder when they actually died. Don’t we all wish they were dead before the asphalt rose to meet them with a force the human body should experience only in cartoons? That their hearts couldn’t sustain that force and they died only after a rapturous feeling of flight? Did they have an in-between, or, like a cartoon, did their anguish and unsaid good-byes hang in the air like a cloud, invisible to anyone who saw their broken bodies on the concrete and had to look awa
y?

  I felt a partially opened window somewhere that might pull me through and this was not an abstract thought. I heard ugly words that I knew were bad news. They fell from the lips of your nurses with implicit underscoring: septic shock, hypoxemia, cyanosis. At one point there were at least nine people in my room and everyone was moving so fast. I became somewhat conscious and was asked questions about “proxy,” and who to call “in case.” I kept asking why I couldn’t call someone myself? My phone is somewhere, I babbled. I had to sign permission for a procedure that could potentially puncture a lung. I heard the head nurse shout out “I’m doing this the old-fashioned way, don’t talk to me about fever reduction, go get me fucking ice, I’m doing this myself.” More faces filed through. One of your fellows said, “You will feel this,” as he took a scalpel and sliced into my thigh to prepare a femoral cannulation. As he stitched me up I whispered, am I going to be okay? Speaking to himself more than me, he said

  We are doing the best we can, I promise

  Late the next day you came to my room. Everyone was required to wear masks and no one could touch me but a few of my friends were there. Yourself and a few colleagues were going to have a drink and celebrate that I’d made it. I saw my friend Nikki’s face fall when you said that. It just kept getting more real, how gone I almost was.

  I moved my oxygen mask to the side for a second but you motioned for me to put it back. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Just a place down the street, it’s called Parish.”

  I said, “Seriously? Could they not name it ‘Thrive’?”

  My friend Adam said, “No, dummy, he said, ‘parish,’ like a church,” he turned to the doctor to make certain, “Right? With an ‘a’ not an ‘e’?”

  “Yes, yes! Oh God, sorry,” you said, “definitely with an ‘a,’ not Perish!”

  “Like clergy,” said Hunter, as Joan, the evening nurse, entered. “Look at this, pure gold, that’s what I’m talking about!” she said, holding up my catheter bag and giving a fist to the heavens.