The Critical List

by Wenke, John;

  He pulls into the lot and Mina is gasping. She’s down to two minutes, barely recovering in time for the next spasm.

  Leaving the car on the curb at the emergency room entrance, Ringold helps Mina to the door. They are met with a wheelchair. Mina is whisked away, and Ringold is pointed to a reception area. There’s a line, seven people long. His heart stabs. He fears he’ll be late for the show. In a kind of fit, he reaches into his wallet and digs out his coverage card. He bustles to the front of the line and sticks his head inside the window. The receptionist is on the phone, ignoring him. Behind him, someone is shouting. He tosses his card on a pile of papers and backs off. The receptionist looks up, startled, irritated.

  “We’re pre-registered. The card’ll tell you who we are. Do whatever you do. I’ll sign whatever I have to later.”

  Ringold runs, slow, then faster. This will make a good scene. He toggles off the switch and fixes attention on the crowded corridor—the wheelchairs, the doctors, the parked gurneys. He weaves and dodges, his heart thumping, his veins filled with air, his breathing clogged, his head light. The perfect place for a heart attack.

  At the far end of a corridor, maybe fifty yards down, he sees Mina being hurried through another door. Now he dodges a moving gurney. It carries a man his age. He looks dead, pasty, and gray. Ringold bounces off a wall and picks up his stride. He doesn’t want to miss a thing. She’s probably less than two minutes or maybe even ready to push. He races, races, doing everything he can to catch up to Mina and Baby.

  Mina breathes with raspy regularity, her hands clutching the sidebars of the birthing bed, her gown pulled just below her breasts, exposing her rounded stomach and scribbled stretch marks. Mina’s navel, once an imploded plug of dimpled folds, is now a medallion of red brazed streaks, a cabalistic coin glazed with a runic skein. With indifferent abandon, her legs are cast apart. The birthing room lights are soft amber. Ringold stands to the side, patting her head, mumbling words. He is shaken, appalled, to see a brown watery stream gush from beneath her. It is followed by bursts of farting squirts. Nurse Mollars, her gray hair cropped, smiles and gathers the sheet, wiping Mina clean.

  “Just rest, dear,” she coos. “You’re doing great.”

  Mina seems not to hear. Her energy has gone all the way inside. She’s garnering strength, entering those places where women have always given birth—in high corn fields, next to swollen rivers, in steaming jungles, fetid cargo holds, and murky huts, in small cars, clean condominiums, bustling train stations, and contagious hospitals.

  The nurse has a vinyl glove on her right hand. With her eyes looking away, she examines Mina. Her shoulder dips; she leans forward. The lines on her forehead wriggle.

  “Good!” she exclaims. “You’re there. Ready to push. Dr. Cronin is just down the hall. It’ll take a few minutes to break down the bed and set up the cart.”

  She yanks back the curtain door.

  “Mary, tell Dr. Cronin Mina is ready.”

  The bed grows stirrups that stick way out. Mina’s feet find the straps. The bottom of the bed pulls away. She’s hanging near the edge.

  The room bursts into commotion. Mary, all smiling pudge and brisk motion, flicks through the curtain and smacks the switch. The ceiling screams with light: the dim cavern has become a florescent hollow. Ringold examines the sparkling faucets and the standing circular mirror. Mary wheels a cart laden with hardware: there are seventeen different kinds of hot dog tongs, a multitude of scalpels, scissors, and pincers. A small hammer. A host of hypodermic syringes and packets of needles. Three bulb aspirators. A pile of gauze, a reel of fish line. Dr. Cronin, who Ringold never much liked, bounces in, his smiling joking self. He’s all gowned-up, projecting the upbeat manner of a game show host.

  “Hey, Mitch,” he calls. “How’re the ratings?”

  Cronin hustles to the sink, turns the taps, and scrubs. Ringold rubs Mina’s quavering hand and strokes her cheek, her chin, her forehead. He ignores the question.

  “How’s she doing?”

  He turns back with dripping hands upraised.

  “Perfect,” Cronin blurts.

  Nurse Mollars applies the towel and snaps surgical gloves over and down. She turns off the spigot.

  “Her labor was incredibly quick. I was playing tennis in Ridgefield. I had to fly to make it. She’s doing great. She’s made for babies. She can easily have three more. It’s been a real breeze.”

  Ringold wants to disagree. It tears his stomach to see her poised and ready to writhe, her face smeared with sweat.

  “You’re doing great, darling.” He dabs her cheek.

  “We’re ready,” Cronin says. He wheels a circular stool to Mina’s open legs. He isn’t smiling. He squats into his seat and with an index finger rubs the rim of her vagina, tugging and stretching, making faster and faster ovals.

  “It’s all up to you, Mina,” Cronin says. “It’s time to push. When I say go, I want you to bear down and push. Ready! Now push!”

  Ringold’s chest seizes; his throat strangles. The doctor and nurses are yelling, calling. Mina strains and grunts, her face, usually so pale, is tomato red, swollen, contorted, her veins bulging. Ringold wants to call the whole thing off. Cancel the show. Mina stops and sags. With his finger, Cronin tugs the oval. Her vulva seems a pulpy fruit, peach red, turning inside out. Cronin squints into the tunnel.

  “That was tremendous. The head’s right there. See this, Mitch.” Cronin pulls back a flap and touches a swirl of gray goo. “This is the head. With a little push, the head will crown. Mina, dear, just give me a little push.”

  Mina breathes deeply and strains. Again, the doctor and nurses yell. This time Ringold joins the melee, this poltergeist spew of words.

  “Let it burn! Push! Push through the burn! Come on!”

  The gray goo becomes a bubbled mass.

  “Hold it there,” Cronin says. “The baby will be out in no time.”

  Mina lifts her head and looks in the mirror.

  “I see Baby. I don’t believe it.”

  “You’re going great,” Ringold mumbles, his mind a-twirl with all those worries about birth defects. Two heads. No arms. And then the movie where the monster tears right out of mother’s belly.

  Just beneath Baby’s head, Cronin slips in a needle and injects a clear stream. He waits ten seconds and then snips three times. He puts the scissors on the tray and lifts the aspirator.

  “One little push and we have the head. The worst is over. Now we get to the good part.”

  The grayish bubble inflates into a ball and soon Ringold sees a velvety ear smudged with white. With three quick squeezes, Cronin extracts fluid from the mouth and nose. The head turns. A bluish face with puffy lips rises from the earth like a balloon.

  Mina gasps and sits halfway up. She points to the mirror.

  “Baby!” She grabs Ringold’s hand. “I see my baby.”

  Ringold’s mouth works without words. He’s a boob tube without sound.

  “Push a little bit!” The doctor cups two fingers under the neck and gently delivers the top shoulder and then the lower one. In seconds, the blue mottled chest and waist emerge and then with two-handed motion, Cronin pulls out the newborn.

  Nurse Mollars yells, “He’s beautiful!”

  Cronin snickers. “Look again, Jane! You’re blind.”

  Ringold sees why. It moves away from him, the cord dangling. Cronin holds her up, eyes closed, hands grasping, the little mouth pursing After she wails, Cronin places her on Mina’s chest. Ringold watches the color change to a blotched pink.

  “Oh, my God!” Mina laughs. “She’s peeing all over me.” She brings the baby’s lips to her left breast.

  The cord, now clamped, slowly ceases to pulse. Ringold rubs Mina’s face and then with a shaky finger, he touches Baby’s wet papery cheek. Cronin offers him a pair of scissors.

  �
�Take it, Mitch! It’s time a guy your age does something worthwhile. Cut it there! Right there.”

  With his left hand steadying his right wrist Ringold snips it—quick and clean—and sets his daughter free.

  “Everyone’ll be so excited,” Mina proclaims. Her hand turns the tap. Inside the hanging hospital gown, wide open at the back, she stands barefoot on the bathroom tile. Behind the curtain, the shower gushes. “Mom and Dad’ll want to fly right in. After I get cleaned up, we’ll make all our calls.”

  Mina’s the one with the extended family. Her parents are still very much alive, having last year left West Allis, Wisconsin, for an active retirement in Treasure Island, Florida. Her three brothers and four sisters are scattered about the more desirable Milwaukee suburbs—Wawatosa, Brookfield, Glenside, Fox Point. Ringold has only two calls to make right away, one to his mildly estranged brother, Marv, a psychiatrist in San Diego, the other to his octogenarian uncle in Orlando, his father’s brother, Jack, a Disney World buff, a lonely widower without children, the last of only two Mohegans. Ringold’s late mother, whom he doesn’t remember, was an only child.

  “I don’t know why it is,” Mina wonders, stepping out of her gown and into the cubicle, “but having a baby is like coming home. My parents will finally think of me as a success.”

  “They’ve always thought of you as a success.”

  “How would you know?” she laughs.

  “I’ll let you get your shower. You’ll feel better.”

  “I feel great. Like I could lift a car. I was right not to let them give me that pain killer. It only hurts when I sit. I’m never going to sit down again. What are you going to do?”

  “Go down to the nursery and watch them clean up Baby.”

  “It’s Marsha now.”

  Already Ringold misses Marsha. Five minutes ago, when the nurse wheeled her away, his stomach swooned and ached. Ringold does not want her out of his sight. Last spring, they ran a docudrama about infant abductions, a true-life tale, dramatically reenacted with only a few enhancements. Ringold still sees the maniac woman dressed as a nurse sneaking the baby down a back stairwell.

  “I also want to check security measures.”

  “Just don’t be abusive!”

  “I won’t be abusive, darling. I’ll only ask questions.”

  Ringold hustles down the hall. He all but runs to the glass wall and stares at the cribs. There are ten babies—six white, three black, one Asian—all sleeping on their backs in diapers and T-shirts. Ringold tastes fear: he doesn’t see her. He wants to tap the glass—no, bang with both fists—till he finds another bank of windows. He hustles over and sees her just on the other side, attended by a large nurse, who wipes tar-like excrement from her little behind. While Marsha squalls and kicks and seems all rage, the nurse calmly dabs, glancing up to smile.

  “She’s mine,” Ringold smiles, tapping the glass and poking his chest.

  The nurse nods and makes elaborate mouth motions. “Seven pounds.” Seven fingers. “Three ounces.” Three fingers. “Twenty-two inches.” Two then more two fingers.

  Ringold watches the nurse fasten a diaper and slip Marsha’s arm into a T-shirt. Footsteps skid behind him. He turns and sees a frazzled young man, maybe twenty-one, carrying a little boy, maybe three. The man pulls next to Ringold and looks down.

  “There’s your sister. Jimmy, say ‘hi’ to Chrissy.”

  Ringold doubts himself. In a panic, he scrunches his eyes and sees her face, a rising balloon, and those puffy lips. Mine. The man keeps talking. He’s tapping the glass.

  “Hey there, Chrissy. Say ‘hi’ to Jimmy, your big brother.” He reaches with Jimmy’s hand and rubs the glass. “Say ‘hi’ and ‘bye-bye.’ We’ll come back later. We have to go see Mommy.”

  Ringold’s heart twists with consternation. He feels like grabbing the guy by the shirt and straightening him out. But then he pulls himself together. It’s one mistake that will do no harm, another illusion playing on the magic glass. It’ll be something to tell, a story for Mina, and now that he thinks of it, an ending to his television movie, though this time it will be Bart Gunther who gets his own baby wrong. They’ll play it to the max—the new father coo-cooing, tapping the glass, making faces, jumping up and down, the baby impervious, staring straight at him, seeing a moving blur. They’ll even give the blur from the baby’s perspective, and then they’ll see the mother, coming up from behind, pushing the bassinet, smiling, laughing, and watching her husband whooping in the hallway, going wild over the wrong baby. The audience will love it. They won’t want it to end. Even when the credits roll, they won’t want it to end. There will be Ringold in the semblance of Richard Gere, still jumping, his arms flapping, with people passing and staring and Mina right behind him, waiting to break the news.

  Anchorite

  Wakefield follows the large man up the creaking backstairs toward the attic flat, which, from the street, seemed a squashed top hat tilting from a wobbly head. From the second story apartment bursts the boisterous glee of Sesame Street, but the words are strangled by two sobbing children. They hike their voices to a level just below the hateful bellow and bleat of mutual spouse abuse.

  Fallow turns the corner and nods toward the door.

  “Don’t let ’em scare you off. Once in a blue moon, they get into a tiff. What’s a marriage without a few fights?”

  “Shut up, you bitch!”

  “Take your hands off me!”

  To the sound of breaking glass, Wakefield sighs and trails Fallow into the narrow stairwell.

  The smack of hand on flesh cleaves the air.

  “So, you wanna get tough? We’ll get tough!”

  “Put down the knife, you pig!”

  “Pretty soon,” Fallow declares, “he’ll bang the hell out of there and find a bottle to crawl into.”

  Grasping both rails, the landlord heaves his winded bulk to the next step. Wakefield follows, his face not three inches from Fallow’s undulating hams.

  Furniture turns over. Wakefield winces and his stomach swims. If he was the man he’d been that morning, he’d be inside the apartment, straightening the guy out. He’d do what it took to save the children. At sixty, Wakefield could still throw most men across a room. But it’s already too late. He failed, absolutely. Downstairs, a door slams.

  “There goes Chucky. About midnight, he’ll come back all drunk and sorry. Then they’ll make up. She moans and he grunts. Their bedroom’s right on top of mine.”

  With his last bit of oomph, Wakefield rattles Fallow’s cage.

  “On the phone, you said it was quiet.”

  Living atop the horror seems a proper kind of punishment.

  “Most of the time it is, but for two hundred a month, you can’t expect the Waldorf Astoria.”

  At the top of the steps, Fallow wheezes, fumbles with a key and clicks open the door.

  Two musty rooms are carved beneath a steeply pitched roof. Two dormers offer constricted access to the mottled sky and bare shivery limbs. To fling himself into space, Wakefield will first have to crawl to the window on his knees, belly down, appropriately. A bit of a squeeze, but he’ll fit.

  “I’ll take it for a week. I need that long to figure out what I’m doing.”

  Fallow laughs.

  “In my book, a week’s the same as a month. I want the first and last month’s rent and one month’s security. That’s six hundred. Up-front.”

  Wakefield reminds himself he’s still nobody’s fool.

  “I’ll give you fifty. After a week, if I’m still here, we can settle up proper. This place isn’t even up to code.”

  Wakefield pulls out a wad. He peels two twenties and slips out a ten. He waves the bills like a hankie.

  “No way!”

  “Cash. Right now. Take it or leave it. There are better doorsteps than this. A motel would be just as good.” />
  It wouldn’t: he’d be too easy to find.

  He rustles the money. Fallow’s eyes follow the green.

  “Okay. A week.” Fallow squints and holds out his hand. “Then we settle up.”

  “We’ll see,” Wakefield sighs. “I may be long gone.”

  Fallow pockets his loot.

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Smith. Joe Smith.”

  A thirteen-inch TV set burns on the chilled rutted planks. Beneath the bare screaming bulb, Wakefield shifts in the squeaky aluminum lawn recliner, his hands tucked beneath his thighs, his thick fingers picking the frayed nylon edges of saggy blue and white webbing. After deciding to leave his life, he took the chair from the shed and the black and white TV from the attic. With an exploding heart, he happened to spy his daughter’s old sleeping bag. While he didn’t wish to live, he also didn’t want to freeze. Later, upon first rolling it out, he found it mildewed. As he twisted in insomniac contortions, he relished the misery. A proper penance: to lie awake, tortured, in the clasp of a raunchy dump. Like doing the afterlife in a leaky coffin.

  While waiting for the end—by whatever means, spectacular or mundane, isn’t yet clear—Wakefield remains paralyzed before the tube, his spirit alternately drifting in dolor or razed by guilt. His hunger, once a jabbing blade spindling his guts, now after five days merely aches and stings like an infected laceration. The TV drone seems a watchful turnkey. Wakefield never shuts it off, never changes the channel. Even while enduring masochistic visions—he sees the shocked, angry, and grieving multitude moving past the lovely head propped so primly on embroidered satin—Wakefield never shuts it off, never changes the channel. It burns through afternoon forays with The Bold and the Beautiful, General Hospital and Dr. Phil and night owl replays of Entertainment Tonight, Forensic Files and Rush Limbaugh, a cavalcade of hand-wringing dilemmas, medical conundrums, reenacted disasters, sex perverts, Hollywood minutes, and right-wing diatribes. It all plays as Muzak to Wakefield’s throbbing woe. Even as Kelly Ripa and her changing cast of friends affect the comforting banality of well-adjusted, socially progressive, cheerfully enlightened adults, Wakefield remains within the terrible bubble. In the afternoons, he barely distinguishes between screaming recriminations on The Bold and the Beautiful and the serial warfare running below. Only when the police siren approaches, does Wakefield stir his weakened body and turn down the sound. The siren gets closer and closer. The cruiser blares to a stop at the curb. He sees the twirling blue lights, hears the banging at the front door, Fallow’s guttural shouts, the tramping of feet on the stairs. Wakefield gets ready to make one move or the other—either to answer the door or leap through the open window. But the feet stop too soon. More screams rise. They force open the door. When Chucky is dumb enough to resist arrest, Wakefield turns the sound back up and collapses into his seat.