Our Andromeda

by Brenda Shaughnessy

  broken and ignored, no sloppy

  hospital where everyone checks

  their own boxes and only consults

  the check marks when making

  decisions that will hurt us, Cal.

  None of those individual segments

  will be there in Andromeda,

  no segments to constitute the worm

  that burrowed into our bodies

  and almost killed us. The worm

  that is supposed to return us back

  to Earth is supposed to come after

  we die, not when we are giving birth

  and being born. But even in the Milky

  Way, we did manage to get you born;

  and I will never forget the spark,

  the ping of mind, the sudden gift

  from nowhere that told me what I had

  to do to push you out. I had

  no force left in me but a voice

  in my head, “Love. Love!” A command.

  The kind of love we cannot understand,

  so concentrated that had it been made

  of blood it would be compressed

  into a pure black diamond

  as large as a galaxy and as heavy

  as a crushed star.

  The eye would explode from looking at it.

  The mouth would attach itself

  like a leech and fall off, dead.

  LOVE. Over and over that voice told me

  what to think and do and what to use

  and finally, it worked.

  It cracked me open with the muscle

  of a Roman god’s shattering

  fist and it was the god of war or the sea

  called in for the emergency, on alien

  wires by some Andromedan operator.

  That is how you were born.

  You were hardly alive, hardly you,

  horribly slim-chanced. I blacked out

  hard but I heard you were blue.

  That voice that told me what to do

  came from Andromeda. It’s the only truth.

  There wasn’t a soul in that hospital

  room told me a single thing anywhere

  near as true. It was Andromedan

  love that delivered you.

  •

  Wait till you see the doctors in Andromeda,

  Cal. Yes, the doctors. It’s not the afterlife,

  after all, but a different life.

  The doctors are whole-organism empaths,

  a little like Troi on The Next Generation

  but with gifts in all areas of the sensate self.

  Not just mental or emotional empathy

  but physiological. The doctors know how

  you feel. They put their hands on you

  and their own spleen aches, or their spirit

  is tired, tendon bruised, breast malignanced,

  et cetera. The patient’s ills course

  through the doctor’s body as information,

  reliable at last. There are no misdiagnoses

  or cursory dismissals as if the patient

  were a whiny dog who demands another

  biscuit. Or shooting in the dark like good

  Dr. Shtep in the NICU, when you were

  trying to begin living, who asked me

  whether I had taken street drugs. What else

  could explain your catastrophic entrance

  into the human fold of the Milky Way

  but the gross ignorance and disregard

  of me, not her colleagues? Not even a god

  we’d never share. The doctors there

  are more like angels are supposed to be,

  when they breathe you can sleep peacefully.

  You might be surprised to hear that illness

  occurs on Andromeda. That the field

  of medicine is still a necessary patch of land.

  Did you think I was telling you a fairy tale,

  Cal? Trying to get some religious parables

  into your already impassioned childhood

  and indoctrinate you toward the obligations

  of heaven? I am not. People still get sick

  in Andromeda, and woe and death

  and grief arrive each day like packets

  of mail through a slot in the door.

  How could it be otherwise? It is life,

  after all. And despite what the religious

  on Earth try to prove, no one can choose

  life. We can only choose choices.

  •

  People get sick in Andromeda.

  The difference is that people taking

  care of the sick don’t pretend

  they know what they do not

  and cannot know. In Andromeda,

  everybody knows what they

  need to know. Even doctors,

  even patients. Even, yes, insurance

  companies that don’t even use

  the word “claim,” certainly not in the form

  of a form, in their business,

  because it’s just rude and heartless

  to hurt further a hurt person by making

  them shout in the wind, wondering

  whether their pain will be approved, deemed

  real, awarded validation in the form

  of not bankrupting the sufferer instantly

  with avalanching bills. They know that there.

  We don’t even need to pack our bags,

  Cal. I can’t be sure but how much

  you want to bet they have better bags, too?

  •

  You’ll learn to read so much more easily there,

  Cal! You’ll be able to see the letters

  better in that atmosphere.

  Maybe their alphabet has twenty-six, or maybe

  thousands like Chinese characters.

  It won’t matter because your vision

  will delineate even the finest fifteen-stroke

  pictogram and you will laugh and laugh

  at how the letter O looks like an open mouth

  in your old language. How childish that will

  seem! Your beautiful eyes may change color

  with all the perfect seeing you do.

  Maybe we’ll miss the aqua ring around

  sandy-colored irises flecked with gray and green,

  little tropical islands studded

  with prehistoric boulders and effusive flora,

  encircled by rich, bright ocean.

  Perhaps the new air in Andromeda will turn

  them into brown and gray buildings,

  a city in which to flick on all the lights

  in a skyscraper so you can read

  so far into the night I call from the next room:

  “That’s enough, Cal. The book will still

  be there tomorrow. Time for sleep.”

  •

  And yes, Cal, you can roll your eyes at me,

  your frumpy old mom with her wacky

  ideas. I do believe in Andromeda.

  You don’t have to. I’ll believe hard enough

  for the both of us.

  Because it’s all my fault, you see.

  I’m the one who joined that cult

  of expectant mothers

  who felt ourselves too delicate

  and optimistic to entertain the notion,

  as if I were inviting it to an unpleasant

  afternoon tea, of something going wrong

  with the birth of my child. Like so many

  others, I thought it wouldn’t happen

  to me. In a way, it didn’t happen to me.

  It happened to you. And because

  I wouldn’t invite the terrible guests

  into my psyche for goddamned tea,

  I wasn’t careful enough. I thought

  my experience of childbirth

  was a consideration. I thought

  I was playing it safe by having the Best

  Midwife, one who truly understood
>
  the beauty and horror of childbirth

  and who would take my side

  in the ordeal (I didn’t know that meant

  she’d take my side against you!)

  and who would be like a sister

  to me, an expert sister and nurse and doctor

  and goddess of natal wisdom

  all in one, with the extra precaution

  of planning to deliver in a hospital,

  in case the tea-guests arrived

  without invitation. I thought the hospital

  was a real hospital, too. That it knew

  what it was doing and had a legal

  and moral obligation to know

  what it was doing. I thought that

  since I was so healthy, and you were

  growing so beautifully, and all the tests

  and charts and balances were perfect,

  that I was doing everything right.

  I was arrogant. I was selfish. I wanted

  to do it all correctly as if I were building

  a model birdhouse at summer camp.

  I was wrong. I was wrong to see the other

  new mothers sighing over their sore

  perinea and healthy infants

  and believe that I would be like them.

  Since when have I ever believed I was like

  anyone else? Only when it served me,

  Cal. I can blame just about anyone for what

  happened to you, but ultimately it was my job

  to get you into this world safely. And I failed.

  There is no other way to look at it.

  The other day I was walking down Court Street

  in my neighborhood and saw a mother,

  her child in a stroller. We were all stopped at

  the same corner, waiting for the light

  to change, to cross the street.

  The mother was craning her neck to the left

  to watch for cars, her stroller pushed out

  so far ahead of her it was already

  in the street, ready to go, when an unseen car

  zipped fast past us, dangerously close

  to her child, and the first thing the mother did

  was turn to me and say, panicked,

  “Did you see that? He didn’t even have the light!”

  But I couldn’t feel any sympathy for her.

  In fact, I recoiled from her safe and lucky outrage.

  It’s not the driver’s fucking job to ensure

  her child grows up safely. She could be right

  and the driver wrong and her kid dead.

  Two out of three is what happened instead.

  She should hold him a little tighter

  than usual and not waste this lesson

  on being angry at a car. But I said nothing,

  and, disgusted, wasted my own anger on her.

  •

  I suppose I could blame God. That’s what cowards

  do, the lazy. Like people who pretend to be

  so abysmally unskilled at cooking

  that someone else feeds them throughout life.

  Those people are always the pickiest eaters,

  have you noticed?

  But let’s say I won’t eat potato or dairy and I can’t

  tolerate onion, eggs or wheat,

  what exactly would I be blaming God for?

  A mistake, misjudgment, an oversight (a word

  that has always amused me, its simultaneously

  opposite meanings) or utter cruelty?

  Weakness? Naptime? Drunk driving?

  Vengefulness? Power-madness? Experimenting

  with karma, playing with matches,

  autopilot? Stupidity, quotas, just taking

  orders? Mixing up the card files Comedy

  and Tragedy? An inept assistant who

  has since been fired? Poor people-skills?

  Forgetfulness? Had a headache?

  A cover-up? Setting things in motion so that

  this poem would be written? Overworked,

  underpaid? The system being broken?

  Technical difficulties? Couldn’t find remote?

  Track-work, electrical storm, hurricane,

  prayer-lines jammed by the devout,

  new policies, change of direction within

  the administration? On vacation, paternity

  leave, sick leave, personal day, long-term

  disability, short-term disability, layoffs?

  Who am I to underestimate God in this way?

  To imply he’s some bumbling Joe,

  working stiff trying to do an honest day’s work?

  I mean really. Who knows his workings?

  If I don’t know what to blame him for,

  how can I blame him at all?

  Perhaps there was never a flaw in the first place,

  no mistakes. Perhaps God is perfect,

  utterly blameless. He is what he is. Evil.

  •

  The gods of Andromeda, however benevolent,

  cannot answer unless called.

  They don’t operate like Milky Way God,

  who doesn’t answer at all,

  who is always busy offline, jetskiing

  on our waterbodies, our handsqueezed

  oceans of salt water, competing in dressage

  though he always spooks the horses.

  In those days when I would call and call

  into the stupid air, if I ate something

  sweet I would begin to cry, overwhelmed

  by how small comfort had become.

  •

  So you see, Cal, we’re not in particularly

  good hands here. Not mine, helpless

  and late, not even yours,

  tiny, graceful stations the train lines

  keep skipping though we’ve all

  been waiting in the rain.

  We will find our kind in Andromeda,

  we will become our true selves.

  I will be the mother who

  never hurt you, and you will have your

  childhood back in full blossom,

  whole hog. We might not know

  who we are at first, there, without

  our terrible pain. But no flower

  knows the ocean.

  The sea can never find the forest,

  though it can see the trees.

  The succulent has no bud for salt

  but one mile away the deer lick

  and lick as if the sea

  were in its newborn body,

  replenishing the kelp of the hoof.

  Though a sea would as soon

  drown a deer as regenerate it,

  there’s a patch of mercy, sweetly

  skewing between the two.

  The new wind is already in us, older sister

  to us all, blowing windfall and garbage

  alike to those who do not deserve

  either gifts or refuse.

  •

  And then of course, there were the friends.

  It’s amazing how the ones without children

  leapt to their feet in anguish

  and keened, utterly genuine and broken,

  made their way to our apartment with stews

  and wine and tears, fruit and olive oil

  and kindness so beautiful it wasn’t of this world.

  While our own families, our parents,

  seemed so stunned (as if by a stun gun)

  by their own fear that they receded

  into an ether, the veiled planet Venus

  for all I understood, some bright

  occasional visitation and months

  of silence. And, oh, the friends with precious

  children. The ones who withheld,

  thin-lipped. The most articulate,

  sensitive souls suddenly bumbled,

  tongue-tied, unable to say anything at all

  but the weakest thing, the things that

  actually made everyt
hing worse.

  We’re so scared for you. We’re so sad for you.

  As if our new child had died. I remembered

  so vividly the ecstatic leaps of joy

  I’d made without condition,

  when their children were born. I knew

  from several occasions that the most basic

  thing to say was: Congratulations!

  Because our beautiful baby boy

  was in fact alive. I heard mostly silence

  from the parents of those kids I’d celebrated.

  Why on earth would it be the closest,

  dearest friends to shit the most toxically

  on a sad new family struggling to find

  blessing where blessings were?

  I wondered. It seemed to me that those

  with children could ill afford

  to sympathize—we were their nightmares—

  how could they not be half-glad

  it happened to us and not to them,

  our misfortune statistically

  tweaking the odds of misfortune

  in their favor.

  But the guilt of that relief

  showed on their faces. A sight

  I’ll never forget.

  Of course, our crisis doesn’t actually