My Coney Island Baby

by Billy O'Callaghan

  Back when he was a boy, seven or eight years old, Michael had the opportunity to watch glass being blown. An uncle of his father’s worked for Waterford Crystal and, giving assurances that it was something genuinely worth seeing, made arrangements for him to visit the factory. Michael was excited at the thought of escaping Inishbofin, taking the ferry across and then the long bus journey down across the country from Galway, having the opportunity to pass through cities and towns and getting to spend a night or two nights on another coast, in a strange house with people he knew only by blood. He didn’t question his good fortune, even though, to him, at that age, glass was just glass, a substance that seemed simply to exist, and without the least mystique. So he was completely unprepared for the actual facts of the process, the swelling and elongating of huge fiery bubbles, the sort of elastic flexing that challenged gravity and then in countless brazen ways defied it. That his mind should somehow equate such a day as that with a random later one spent standing in a hospital room, watching on through a wall of glass as his little baby boy worked so slowly and thoroughly towards a death most undeserved, seemed at surface level equal parts astonishing and incomprehensible. Watching, waiting for it, even from a particular point onwards ashamedly expecting it, yet still being rocked inside out by the impact, still feeling the savage, vacuous suck of its implosion, when the inevitable did finally pan out.

  Logic seemed to play no obvious part in the association; rather, the whole thing had about it the sense of a gunshot fired blindly into the night, a bullet going from here to there, wherever here was, wherever there might be, vaguely directed but certainly nothing more solidly intended than that. Two thoughts, two experiences separated by a clutch of years and holding to polar opposite positions on the emotional spectrum, somehow fusing their way into cahoots by a spit of static, energising themselves into a kind of mutual being. Thinking about it, at the time and during the years that followed, trying to understand it from all manner of lateral perspectives, he identified within both moments an essential sense of shared awe, the same frozen, terrified wonder. Blowing glass was such a challenge to the belief system, the absurd captivation of watching a man breathe shapes out of a substance that appeared molecularly unmovable. Even to a mind as young as his it seemed to break definitive laws as to what qualified as truth. And then, following forward from this at a quantum stride of fifteen years, give or take, being forced to endure the hospital room situation that really was life, death and everything in between, and a particular but largely anonymous moment out of square thousands, hundreds of thousands, spent pressed to a sheet of glass which absolutely did not move, which wouldn’t give so much as a millimetre of reassurance. That, perhaps, was the link, some cognisant flicker of subconscious past singing precisely the right note, the right song, the right lament, as his breath turned to fog before his eyes. And just beyond, in that space preserved for those hopeless cases who refuse to accept the facts of a summation, the tiny precious body of his little boy, James Matthew, naked and yellow-skinned and ribboned with tubes. Existing, though only just. That face, even tensed against the bursts of pain, that giveaway nose, Barbara’s to a tee, those always lidded eyes and occasionally bobbing chin; and all flesh of Michael’s flesh, or of theirs, his and Barb’s combined, a miracle of their making, alive but untouchable, alive mainly because a machine said so and because a machine got to decide. And dead, in the end, for exactly those same reasons.

  He had to ask where the hand of the Redeemer lay in all of this. He and Barbara had trusted, and obediently and in good faith let themselves be taken to some impossible height, hurrying blindly to a veritable pinnacle of contentment. And then, when they could not have been less prepared, came the edge, and beyond it, the fall, followed by an impact that shattered everything from the inside out. Was that the work of an Almighty? If so, then what separated deity from demon?

  They’d had fourteen weeks as a family. Even with walls between them, the bonds were tied. And for most of that time, little changed. Day ran into day, and they sat and watched, waiting, concern kept in check only because the prognosis was always good and the reassurances came in soft smiles and with tidal regularity. Some days, a hint of hope, better numbers spilling from the monitors or the temperature holding steady by itself, but no obvious changes, nothing to break the wait. And living like that, at such a level of vigilance, tolled on body and soul in the same way that wind erases rock. Few lives are lived with such intensity of focus, and few can bear that for any significant stretch. For some, hours of it are too much. For Michael, and for Barbara too, it was weeks of positioning themselves day after day at the glass, sometimes in shifts but, more often than not, together. By the third month they’d gone beyond denial. The promises and insistences slowed and then fell away, leaving only dark thoughts to edge the silence. They kept to the glass only because there was nowhere else for them to be, and they watched until the sockets of their eyes throbbed and their minds, in a fluxing mess of guilt, relief, terror and the most bitter and deep-rooted form of grief imaginable, caught fire. Barbara often had to hurry away to the bathroom to be sick, and after a while they began to carry a hip-flask of whiskey with them, partly to deal with the nasty machine-made instant coffee and partly just so that they could feel some warmth inside themselves again.

  The shifts, especially towards the end, brought on a kind of meditative visual hypnosis, repetitions without end of nothingness. This was the next realm after you passed from the state of helplessness into the forlorn place beyond. And as the last of the held-out hope began to splinter, Michael learned to live his life within the minutiae, bracing himself with each new breath the infant pulled in, certain on a level where nerves physically affect tissue that this inhalation was somehow definably different from the ones that had gone before and therefore must surely prove to be the last.

  Part of the problem was how little the scene shifted. All they could do was hold themselves in a particular position, shoulders bunched, bodies stiff as boards in anticipation of some fall, some movement, anything at all beyond the scarce lag of a breath. Nothing else mattered, not work, not home, not the swarming Christmas city, the New Year city, the snow-flecked, frost-lacquered rooftops, the streets sluiced with gusting northerly winds. Standing there in that low-lit room, living from moment to moment, afraid to breathe themselves as everything deflated and stalled into stillness. And waiting out that stillness, churning with almost every mixed feeling it was possible to know, until finally the little fleshy shape before them began to bloat once more, the lungs heroically reinflating to begin the cycle all over again.

  Barbara refused to give up. She made an addiction out of denial, taking to it the way a desert wanderer celebrates an oasis. When landed in battle, there are always some who turn and run and some whose only instinct is to dig in. James Matthew’s status, which had, for what felt like the longest time, been supposedly secure, slowly about-faced and then flatlined to a whimper. The very doctors who’d earlier guaranteed so much and who’d hushed all hint of worry, now came, day on top of day, night into night, and spoke in muted tones, explaining how surprised they were that the situation had even managed to endure for so long. They stood and followed Michael’s gaze through the glass and made it clear that while this continued display of struggle – or of courage, if you wanted to call it that – was in many respects admirable, it was also, from a medical perspective, quite unfortunate. Because hope was one thing but the child’s condition had deteriorated far beyond the point of possible improvement. The end, to put it bluntly, was inevitable, and all that resistance could achieve now was a prolonging of pain. Their condolences, which had the echo of rote, weren’t quite an apology, or an admission of failure, but accounted for part of the whole process, another box ticked, a duty done. And Michael and Barbara did what anyone would do, anyone who’d endured even a shard of what they were going through. They listened, took turns grasping at hands whenever hands were offered, and nodded their heads in all the right hollows to
indicate understanding. Their stunned expressions encouraged the illusion of being somehow shielded, which suggested that they might yet make it through this without suffering too much in the way of collateral damage.

  But once they were alone and their defences began to crumble, there was only pain. Against that, Michael used silence as a guard and separated himself from the world with a wall of almost impenetrable thickness, but Barb wore her desperation openly, as nonsensical yearning. Planning for the future, for who and what their little boy would be, what kind of girl he might marry, how soon and how prodigiously he could be expected to make grandparents of them. And how complete he’d make their family, and their lives, once all of this was behind them. Michael hung his head but felt at a loss as to what he should do or say. So he said nothing. And then, one afternoon, he returned with pastrami and mustard sandwiches from a nearby street-corner deli, to find her on the ledge perched high above hysteria.

  Tears fogged her vision so that when he spoke, when he asked her what was wrong, she had to find him with a flailing hand, her fingers bouncing off his chest and shoulder, patting her way up to his jaw. It took a full minute before she could answer and he had to bear through that minute, more afraid than he had ever been in his entire life. More afraid even than the time, in Buffalo, when he was mugged at knifepoint by two men, one of them white, the other Latino, men with the mark of heroin oozing from every pore. Craven types, jittery and wired, who flashed a wooden-handled steak knife with five or six nastily protruding inches of serrated blade even after he had given up his wallet. That was a sore loss too, not just the entire month’s rent in cash which probably equated to a dozen fixes apiece for them if they shopped in the right place, but also the photo of Barb taken on the night of their first date, a beautiful fresh-faced Barb, young and smiling, nineteen years old and glowing with all the life yet to be lived. The Latino had nail holes for eyes and a crude Indian-ink tattoo spouting from the collar of his shirt and all the way up his neck and one cheek, the flames of an inferno morphing into a multi-headed serpent demon, and he was the one who brought the tip of the knife to the soft meat beneath Michael’s chin, pressing until it hurt and then let a little blood, a small amount but enough to make it assault, or even some category that passed for more serious. And he just stared, teeth clenched, while the other one, shaven bald and with a face milk-white except for a cloudy spume of several days’ beard growth, bounced back and forth from foot to foot, screaming with glee to do it, to go on and just cut the motherfucker’s tongue out through his throat. Start with his tongue. At that moment, Michael had felt death upon him, death as an actual physical weight, and all he could do was close his eyes and try to nullify conscious thought, even as his mouth repeated over and over for them to take the wallet, repeating it even after the wallet was gone, wincing only when the knife’s tip pierced him and drew blood, and wincing again when his attackers broached the idea of rape, of getting him into the alley and down in the dirt and the piss, him in that nice suit too, the fuck, and opening a train line on him. And somewhere between there and the few seconds later, after they had fled the scene, he had a picture in his mind, an absolute understanding of how it was going to be, of how they would wrestle him into the alley and work him over, taking turns on him not because they wanted to particularly but because they could, and then, after they were done, how they would take the knife and pummel his chest and stomach, or rip up his throat, one of them holding his head back by a fistful of hair while the other took the blade on a sauntering loop clean and slow from one ear to the other. Even after they had run off at a stumbling gallop, whooping laughter back into the night, the sense of death had remained with him. Sometimes he doubted that the feeling of it ever really went away. Until James Matthew’s condition worsened, this had been entire streets clear in any attempt at polling the worst moment of his life. But as bad from start to finish as the experience had been, the very fact that he had not died counted in the end for everything, that by providence or good nerve he had walked out of it, shaken, yes, and down some decent cash, but with his pulse, and his ass, still intact. Yet the terror he felt on that hospital afternoon, watching Barbara struggle to focus her eyes, to breathe, to speak and explain herself, was a thing worse by far and then by as far or further again.

  She’d been thinking, she said, when her words finally found some definable shape. Beating herself up, actually. About the part she’d played in all of this, what she might have done to cause what was happening, or what she might have done differently. She’d taken a drink, more than one, in fact. More than a few. Back before she’d even been sure she was pregnant, yes, but ignorance was no excuse. And even when she did know, there’d still been the odd glass of wine in the night-time, with dinner or in front of Carson. What if it was the wine, or that morning when she felt a twinge while out shopping but shrugged it off as mere over-exertion or simply something she’d eaten? Or what if it was something else she’d done, they’d done? Sex, say, some position that changed all the rules?

  Michael tried to understand but the talk as it came made no sense. Tears began again to clot her voice, to make a mess of her, but she kept on and he kept trying to listen, wondering all the while if he was missing some critical detail that would help clarify everything. He realised only gradually that she was rambling, that she’d become swamped in a fantasia of emotional self-flagellation. Desperate to apportion blame, she found herself to be the softest target.

  ‘These things happen,’ he told her, drawing her into his arms. Not meaning it, not really believing it, but wanting to try, nonetheless. Beyond the glass lay the tiny unconscious shape of their child, and their grip on him was coming loose. Some day soon, the whole of space would lie between them. The fear that had built and was choking Michael all at once fell away and left behind only a deep, perishing sense of despair. ‘It’s not your fault, Barb,’ he said. ‘It’s nobody’s fault. A glass of wine is not responsible for this. It’s devastating, I know, but we have to lift ourselves up from this. We need to be strong.’

  His voice had lost a lot of its belly and settled for scraping. Barb pressed her face to his chest and wept, and then after a while the tears abated and she looked up at him, nodded that she was all right now, that it was merely an aberration, a temporary eruption. He watched her, seeking signs, and to fend him off she smiled and raised herself for a kiss. He remembered for a long time afterwards exactly how, in that moment, her mouth felt against his. Pressing, eager for the connection. He could feel his own lips pushing back against his teeth in a way that was not comfortable but not painful either, just intense. That press and then, as she breathed, the invasion of her heat. Even after she’d pulled away, the sensation lingered. She smiled and he smiled back, and having without intent achieved sad matching expressions, they sat down on the two side-by-side pink plastic chairs and slowly worked their way through the sandwiches.

  She needed to vent. Michael understood this, and even though it was frightening in the moment, he learned to bear it, knowing it would quickly pass and that she’d sooner rather than later steady herself again. There was probably even something terrifically healthy about it all, even if her fantasies did occasionally threaten to get out of hand. Like the night she had awoken from a sitting-up doze and cried for the greater part of an hour over the one-in-whatever possibility that their little boy might turn out to be gay. As if that was her mind’s most pressing concern. The tears were not because of his potential homosexuality, she explained, when she could, but because of guilt at her own expectations and, okay, her selfishness. Shouldn’t it be enough to have him in their lives, healthy and happy? Why would it matter if he was gay? It was a parent’s duty to lend support, to nurture and care for and to reassure. The rest of the world would be judgemental enough without her adding to his pain. So why then was she already wishing grandchildren on him, why was she labelling him, boxing him into a life that he might not in all honesty want, or be able, to live? Her mind in such moments viewed the wo
rld as violently askew, and sent her wandering in mirror-walled labyrinths and fun-house mazes, where everything had more than one face and nothing was quite as it seemed. All that Michael could do when she got like this was hold back and just try to ride it out.

  But everyone deals with crises in different ways. The small explosions allowed Barbara at least some degree of control over her situation, even if she could not directly affect the outcome. And most of the time she was the strong one. Her weak moments were anomalies in an otherwise stable outlook, which was why she probably nurtured them so readily and with such vigour. Michael, on the other hand, followed a different tack. He coped through a technique of repression. He could still function on an acceptable physical level but, as the hospital time built, he took to viewing everything from a step removed. Inside, he was carnage, but he was not the sort to cry. And after a while his face set itself to a new, blank expression. He could feel the muscles reshaping themselves, pulling downwards over the bones of his face, settling around the persistent clench of his jawline. Lack of sleep had a lot to do with it, but not everything. The rest, at least as much, was due to the strain of watching, especially after hope had begun to fade. It was a survival mechanism, a lockdown, the body anticipating some hard blow and bracing itself for the impact. Neither his technique nor Barb’s passed muster as psychologically ideal, but then instinct follows no textbook.