The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

  A decade later, Cox had come to UB with the International Republican Institute, an arm of the American political party that does development work in nations susceptible to capitalist influence. Cox was an earnest believer in the power of the free market, and by the time I met him, he was working as a liaison between foreign companies seeking to do business in Mongolia, and the country’s parliament, the State Great Khural. Cox was gay, Southern, and progressive, though he still identified as a conservative because “those are my people,” he told me, when I arrived at his apartment. He was listening to Beyoncé and pouring Champagne for a friend, a young mining-industry lawyer from New Jersey. His place was clean and modern, but modest: In UB, it’s easier to accumulate wealth than it is to spend it.

  The guys warned me that when I visited gers in the Gobi, I should expect to eat “the grossest food you’ve ever had in your life,” as Cox’s friend put it. “They bring out a bucket of meat that’s been sitting there for a week, and they heat it up and think it’s a scrumptious treat.” I said that if I weren’t pregnant I’d be all over it, but that I’d rather be thought rude than poison the baby. “How’d you get that baby?” Cox asked. I described the doctor’s office, the blood tests, the syringe, and the moving being I’d seen on the computer screen. Cox said he wanted to be a parent someday, too.

  We went to a French restaurant, where we all ordered beef—seafood is generally terrible in Mongolia, which is separated from the sea by its hulking neighbors, China and Russia—and then they took me to an underground gay bar called 100 Per Cent. It could have been in Brooklyn, except that everyone in Mongolia still smoked indoors. I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of Republicans and smoking gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange. I ended the night early.

  —

  WHEN I WOKE UP the next morning, the pain in my abdomen was insistent. I wondered if the baby was starting to kick, which everyone said would be happening soon. I called home, and Lucy told me to find a Western clinic, just in case, so I emailed Cox to get his doctor’s phone number and scrawled it on my notepad. Then I went out to interview people: the minister of the environment; the president of a mining concern. There were local elections that day, and I went to some of the polling places with a Mongolian friend of Cox’s to ask voters about their hopes for the boom.

  My last meeting was with a herdsman and conservationist named Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, who had become a folk hero after he fired shots at a mining operation that was diverting water from nomadic communities. I met him in the sleek lobby of my hotel with Yondon Badral—a smart, sardonic man wearing jeans and a parka, whom I’d hired to translate for me in UB and then accompany me a few days later to the Gobi, where we’d drive a Land Rover across the cold sands to meet with miners and nomads. Munkhbayar was dressed in a long, traditional deel robe and a fur hat with a small metal falcon perched on top; he sat down in one of the Blue Sky’s space station–style chairs. It was like having a latte with Kublai Khan.

  In the middle of the interview, Badral stopped talking and looked at my face; I must have been showing my discomfort. He said that it was the same for his wife, who was also pregnant, just a few weeks further along than I was, and he explained the situation to Munkhbayar. The nomad’s skin was chapped pink from the wind; his nostrils, eyes, and ears all looked as if they had receded into his face to escape the cold. I felt a little surge of pride when he said that I was brave to travel so far in my condition. But I was starting to worry.

  I nearly canceled my second dinner with the Americans that evening, but they offered to meet me at the Japanese restaurant in my hotel and I figured that I needed to eat. Cox was leaving the next day to visit his family for Thanksgiving, and he was feeling guilty that he’d spent a fortune on a business-class ticket. I thought about my uncomfortable flight over and said that it was probably worth it. “You’re being a princess,” Cox’s friend told him tartly, but I couldn’t laugh. Something was happening inside me. I had to leave before the food came.

  I ran back to my room, pulled off my pants, and squatted on the floor of the bathroom, just as I had in Cambodia when I had dysentery, a decade earlier. But the pain in that position was unbearable. I got on my knees and put my shoulders on the floor and pressed my cheek against the cool tile. I remember thinking, This is going to be the craziest shit in history.

  I felt an unholy storm move through my body, and after that there is a brief lapse in my recollection; either I blacked out from the pain or I have blotted out the memory. And then there was another person on the floor in front of me, moving his arms and legs, alive. I heard myself say out loud, “This can’t be good.” But it looked good. My baby was as pretty as a seashell.

  He was translucent and pink and very, very small, but he was flawless. His lovely lips were opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world. For a length of time I cannot delineate, I sat there, awestruck, transfixed. Every finger, every toenail, the golden shadow of his eyebrows coming in, the elegance of his shoulders—all of it was miraculous, astonishing. I held him up to my face, his head and shoulders filling my hand, his legs dangling almost to my elbow. I tried to think of something maternal I could do to convey to him that I was his mother, and that I had the situation completely under control. I kissed his forehead and his skin felt like a silky frog’s on my mouth.

  I was vaguely aware that there was an enormous volume of blood rushing out of me, and eventually that seemed interesting, too. I looked back and forth between my offspring and the lake of blood consuming the bathroom floor and I wondered what to do about the umbilical cord connecting those two sights. It was surprisingly thick and ghostly white, a twisted human rope. I felt sure that it needed to be severed—that’s always the first thing that happens in the movies. I was afraid that if I didn’t cut that cord my baby would somehow suffocate. I didn’t have scissors. I yanked it out of myself with one swift, violent tug.

  In my hand, his skin started to turn a soft shade of purple. I bled my way across the room to the phone and dialed the number for Cox’s doctor I had scrawled on my reporting pad. I told the voice that answered that I had given birth in the Blue Sky Hotel and that I had been pregnant for nineteen weeks. The voice said that the baby would not live. “He’s alive now,” I said, looking at the person in my left hand. The voice said that he understood, but that it wouldn’t last, and that he would send an ambulance for us immediately. I told him that if there was no chance the baby would make it I might as well take a cab. He said that that was not a good idea.

  Before I put down my phone, I took a picture of my son. I worried that if I didn’t I would never believe he had existed.

  —

  WHEN THE PAIR OF Mongolian EMTs came through the door, I stopped feeling competent and numb. One offered me a tampon, which I knew not to accept, but the realization that of the two of us I had more information stirred a sickening panic in me and I said I needed to throw up. She asked if I was drunk, and I said, offended, “No, I’m upset.”

  “Cry,” she said. “You just cry, cry, cry.” Her partner bent to insert a thick needle in my forearm and I wondered if it would give me Mongolian AIDS, but I felt unable to do anything but cry, cry, cry. She tried to take the baby from me, and I had an urge to bite her hand. As I lay on a gurney in the back of the ambulance with his body wrapped in a towel on top of my chest, I watched the frozen city flash by the windows. It occurred to me that perhaps I was going to go mad.

  In the clinic, there were bright lights and more needles and IVs and I let go of the baby and that was the last I ever saw him. He was on one table and I was on another, far away, lying still under the screaming lights, and then, confusingly, the handsomest man in the world came through the door and said that he was my doctor. His voice sounded nice, familiar. I asked if he was South African. He was surprised I could tell, and I explained that I had spent time in his country, and then we talked a bit about the future of the ANC and how beautiful it is in Cape Town. I realized that I w
as covered in blood, sobbing, and flirting.

  I borrowed the doctor’s phone and called Lucy, who was sitting in the Jeep on the street in front of our apartment waiting for a parking spot. She wept and said that she would tell my parents and the baby’s father—who, I felt sure, would never be able to forgive me, would never give me his sperm or his love or his money ever again.

  It was very late when I handed the doctor back his phone. He said that he was going home, and that I could not return to the Blue Sky Hotel, where I might bleed to death in my room without anyone knowing. I stayed in the clinic overnight, wearing a T-shirt and an adult diaper that a kind, fat, giggling young nurse helped me into. Then she said, “You want toast and tea?” It was milky and sweet and reminded me of the chai I drank in the Himalayas, where I went so long ago, before I was old enough to worry about the expiration of my fertility. I had consumed a steady diet of hashish and Snickers in the mountains, and ended up in a blizzard that killed several hikers but somehow left me only chilly.

  I had been so lucky. So little had truly gone wrong for me before that night on the bathroom floor. And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me. I was still a witch, but my powers were all gone.

  That is not what Dr. John Gasson said when he came back to the clinic in the morning. He told me that I’d had a placental abruption, a very rare problem that, I later read, usually befalls women who are heavy cocaine users or who have high blood pressure. But sometimes it happens just because you’re old. I could have been anywhere, he told me, and he repeated what he’d said the night before: There is no correlation between air travel and miscarriage. But he also asked, not unkindly, “So, at thirty-eight, you just decided to start a family?” I told him that was how we did it in Manhattan. Then I said that I needed to get out of the clinic in time for my eleven o’clock meeting with the secretary of the interior, whose office I arrived at promptly, after I went back to the Blue Sky and showered in my room, which looked like the site of a murder.

  I spent the next five days in that room. Slowly, it set in that it was probably best if I went home instead of to the Gobi, but at first I could not leave. Thanksgiving came and went. There were rolling brownouts when everything went dark and still. I lay in my bed and ate Snickers and drank little bottles of whiskey from the minibar while I watched television programs that seemed as strange and bleak as my new life. Someone had put a white bath mat on top of the biggest bloodstain, the one next to the bed, where I had crouched when I called for help, and little by little the white went red and then brown as the blood seeped through it and oxidized.

  I stared at it. I looked at the snow outside my window falling on the Soviet architecture. But mostly I looked at the picture of the baby.

  17

  When I got back from Mongolia I was so sad I could barely breathe. I couldn’t sleep. When I was alone, I made sounds that I never knew could come out of me.

  “You’ll have another one,” my father told me, desperate, crying himself.

  “No. I want that one.” It was the savage truth. I had a longing—ferocious, primal, limitless, crazed—for the only person I had ever made. The sleeping almonds of his eyes. The graceful wings of his rib cage. His living, moving arms. (His soul.)

  I had wanted to experience unconditional love, what Mary had described in Jerusalem: It is ordained; it can never be otherwise. A love that came from somewhere beyond my brain, beyond my ego. Here it was. A wild feeling from the deepest part of me, as deep and dark as the will to survive, for someone whom I alone had known during his whisper of a life. We were blood.

  Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work. Logically, I knew that the person I’d lost was not fully formed, that he was the possibility of a person. But without him I was gutted. If my baby could not somehow be returned to me, nothing would ever be right again. This bitter winter would go on forever.

  —

  THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG with the Lucy who’d picked me up at JFK. Her eyes were untenanted. But I couldn’t stay focused on it because it was all just intolerable, everything. Late one night, I woke suddenly when I felt myself bleeding not just between my legs but also from my nipples. When I turned on the light I realized that it was milk, not blood, coming out of me.

  It seemed like sadness was leaking out of me from every orifice. I cried ferociously and without warning—in bed, at the grocery store, sitting on the subway. I could not keep the story of what had happened inside my mouth. I went to buy clothes that would fit my big body but that didn’t have bands of stretchy maternity elastic to accommodate a baby who wasn’t there. I heard myself tell a horrified saleswoman, “I don’t know what size I am, because I just had a baby. He died, but the good news is, now I’m fat.”

  On five or six occasions, I ran into mothers who had heard what had happened and they took one look at me and burst into tears. (Once, this happened with a man.) Well-meaning women would tell me, “I had a miscarriage, too,” and I would reply, with unnerving intensity, “He was alive.” Often, after I told them that, I tried to get them to look at the picture of the baby on my phone.

  Of course, I was not supposed to say the baby. I wasn’t supposed to even think it. He was not someone who slept and played; we did not have routines; he had not established preferences or facial expressions. But the statement I had a miscarriage did not feel like the truth. Euripides wrote, “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?” That was more like it.

  Am I allowed to say “my son”? Was it not a statement of fact that I had given birth on the bathroom floor of the Blue Sky Hotel in Mongolia and watched my son live and die?

  Everywhere I looked there were pregnant women, a gaudy show, repulsive.

  —

  TIME WOULD NOT MOVE. I thought of Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Woman Destroyed. “Has my watch stopped?” she wrote. “No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don’t look at them. Think of something else—anything else; think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.” There was no due date to anticipate now, but I was often distracted by a poisonous kind of counting: Seven days ago, he was still alive. Fifteen days ago, I saw him moving on the sonogram. (This went on for a very long time: Next month I would be giving birth. And later: He would be one week old now…six months…one year. As I write this, he would be two and a half.) I did nothing to stop the emails coming from the pregnancy website every Monday with news of what was happening in his development.

  All roads led to my son. If I watched a movie with a little boy in it, I’d see shadows of where his face had been heading. If I walked along the icy Hudson I thought of how many layers he’d need to be out with me—a sweater, a bunting, and the blue whale blanket? I saw him under my closed eyelids like an imprint from the sun.

  —

  I WENT TO SEE DOCTORS, specialists, to get vial after vial of blood taken and tested. (Since that night at the clinic in Mongolia, the feeling of needles in my arms, the sight of my own blood flowing through thin tubes, had become routine.) They were checking to see if my placental abruption was due to a clotting problem, or perhaps a genetic predisposition.

  It was crucial that I present a convincing simulacrum of sanity to the medical professionals: I mustn’t cry or seem unhinged; I had to ask the questions that a rational person in my situation would want answered. Questions about cabin pressure, for example: If people get blood clots on long flights, couldn’t a long flight upset the blood flow in the womb, in the placenta? It’s not like that, they told me. People get blood clots on long flights from sitting for too long, not because they are in the sky.

  Had I remembered to get up and stretch on the flight? Of course I had. Like any pregnant woman, I’d had to use the bathroom every twenty minutes.

  Could I eve
r have another baby? Yes, but the risk of miscarriage would now be increased. (I didn’t see how it could be any higher than having happened.)

  I went to see a bald, authoritative specialist in high-risk pregnancy at the Weill Cornell medical center who was not covered by my health insurance. I would pay anything; he was the expert, everybody said so—his word would be the last. He sat behind a long wooden desk, in front of a shelf of medical books. I liked that there were no photographs of people’s babies up on the wall, no framed pictures of his own gleaming family on the desk. “There’s no reason to think the same thing wouldn’t have happened had you never left New York City,” he told me after he reviewed my test results.

  I nodded and tried to look competent, levelheaded, sharp—like someone he might be seated next to at a dinner party. But I wasn’t really there to find out what had gone wrong. I did not care that my bloodwork had all come back normal. I didn’t care that I was “perfectly fine.” Secretly, I was still taking folic acid every day, just in case. And the only thing I wanted to learn was how to take what had happened and undo it. I knew I couldn’t say it out loud, but I stared at the doctor and willed him to answer my question: How do I get him back?

  18

  Lucy—my Lucy—was missing. From the moment she pulled up to the curb at Kennedy airport, I loathed the zombie who had swallowed my spouse. I realized she was long gone. Sometimes I would busy myself wondering whether she’d left me before or after I cheated on her. I could never really know, and it didn’t matter now, but there were moments when considering it was a desirable break from thinking about the baby. When I slept, I dreamed of seashell lips and frozen skies.

  How did people do this? People who’d lost children who had existed—not for minutes but for days, decades? Children who had voices, who had opened their eyes. Children with names. Did these people wake up every morning until the day they died and beg Mother Nature to return what she had given and then taken away?