Audio: Patricia Lockwood reads.
Everyone at gate B6 was bathed in gold. She sat there with one foot off the edge of the earth, close to falling, until she saw the couple with matching extravagant mullets that hung down past their shoulder blades. The man took out a brush and began to fight through his mullet until it was free, and then he handed the brush to his wife and she began to fight through hers with the same consecrated look; these mullets were their acre and when God came down he would not find a rock, a stump, a weed. They shook out their hair together, as if it were all on the same head, joined hands, and rested. She sat in the gold that made them the same and felt a little less like dying.
•
The cursor blinked where her mind was. She put one true word after another and put the words in the portal. All at once they were not true, not as true as she could have made them. Where was the fiction? Distance, arrangement, emphasis, proportion? Did they become untrue only when they entered someone else’s life and butted up, trivial, against its bigness?
•
A twenty‐three‐year‐old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of the feeling of being a public body; his skin seemed to have no pores whatsoever. “Did you read . . . ?” they said to each other again and again. “Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high‐five, for they had discovered something even better than being soul mates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.
•
“I have a theory,” she said to the crowd, and then paused, for somewhere she thought she heard someone groan. She tried to resume, but couldn’t recall what she’d been about to say—something about being a woman in our time.
•
In Vienna the little cakes looked like the big buildings, or else the big buildings looked like the little cakes. She ate both, layer upon layer. Then, as she swung at the top of the Ferris wheel in the Prater, coffee sloshing in her stomach above the linden leaves, her phone buzzed and there were the words, from her far mother: “Something has gone wrong” and “How soon can you get here?”
•
The question that was the pure, liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped‐clock answer. She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up until the very last minute, to require her perpetual co‐writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rain‐wise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once Photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, Oh, have I been wasting my time?
•
“Tell me,” she said to her mother in the car. The last maternal text had been just a row of blue hearts and the spurting three droplets, which she no longer had the heart to explain were jizz. Her mother laid her head against the steering wheel and began to weep.
•
The strange and sideways uses to which art is put! She stood in the hospital dark beside her sister, holding her slender hand and smoothing a wave of bleached hair back from her forehead. Her sister’s husband rocked back and forth on his heels, boyish in basketball shorts and flip‐flops, unable to stand still. The tech moved the ultrasound wand over the curve of stomach until a huge womph of heart filled the room, red‐black and fuzzed at the edges, somehow functioning. They were waiting for the baby to move her diaphragm, the tech explained, in and out, in and out. This would show that her body was learning how to breathe. The tech watched and watched, pressing the wand so hard that her sister cried. On the monitor a small everything swam and bulged; it was impossible to look at the gray-and-black wash of it and not be reminded of both the History Channel and outer space. Still, the baby would not practice her breathing, would not practice it in preparation for being born. The baby would not practice being in the world—why should she?—until she said to her sister, “I have an idea,” and took out her phone to blare the up‐tempo songs of the Andrews Sisters, sturdy mules and wide lapels and high brass shining in the hospital dark, music for the boys to listen to overseas, far from home and frightened, bright lungfuls for them to gulp before they headed into battle. It had been useful. It was useful again. The baby, where she did not need to, breathed.
•
The tech could see everything—the head that was measuring ten weeks ahead of the rest of the body, the asymmetry in the arms and legs, the eyes that would not close—but she wasn’t allowed to say anything about it. She marked down measurements, her mouth like a single stitch. At the end she smiled shyly. “I like your music,” she said.
•
Astonishing that a twenty‐first‐century existence could be threatened by something we had been doing for a million years. Had the caveman diet given us nothing? Had the ancient grains failed to fortify us against the far more ancient enemy? Could the person in all those Facebook pictures, the blinking three dots in the text window, could the ringtone that startled her whenever her sister called simply disappear?
•
For a while all anyone could talk about, in tones of portent and doom, was what the baby might be missing. “Forgive me for thinking,” she argued in the shower, “that every baby should get to have an ass. Call me old‐fashioned, but I happen to believe that a BABY! should get to have an ASS! no matter WHAT!”
•
None of the doctors, nurses, or specialists ever breathed a word about abortion. Because twenty‐six weeks was already too late? Because it was Ohio, and the governor’s pen was constantly hovering over terrible new legislation? Because the hospital was Catholic, and in the lobby there was a statue of Jesus holding a farm animal? They never exactly knew. “Did you read that article . . .” her sister asked one morning, and immediately she knew which one: a woman who had to fly hundreds of miles to Las Vegas, fight, head down, through a churn of protesters, and finally lie down on the table in a paper gown behind six inches of bulletproof glass. “I keep thinking of the protesters,” her sister said. “Spit flying from their mouths. How none of them knew.”
•
“I’ll drive you,” she said, in desperation. “I’ll drive you. I’ll do anything. Just say the word.” Her sister nodding sadly, both of them seeing that possible desert whip past, the sage and sand, those lilac mountains—they had never been, of course, had only seen the movie “Showgirls”—both knowing that the journey wouldn’t be safe, both knowing that their parents would never speak to them again.
•
She remembered that long‐ago trip to Norway, where one morning on her way to the market she heard a thin, high, strained sound, like a yellow thread pulled between two fingers. It was aimed through the top of the head instead of at the back of the teeth, so she knew immediately that it was religious. It was anti‐abortion singing, led by a woman in a long, cobwebby skirt, and a man in a white collar was standing next to her with a tambourine. Behind them were two ginger-haired, freckled young men with Down syndrome, embracing each other with both arms and their cheeks pressed close.
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Oh, my God, she had thought back then. As soon as our pro‐lifers figure out they can have a tambourine, it’s over.
•
“If I were you, honey,” one social worker told her sister, “I might just go out running and see what happened.” They blinked at her. Surely that wasn’t safe? Surely they hadn’t been transported back to nineteen-fifties Ireland? Surely no one would advise her, next, to drink a bottle of gin in a hot bath?
•
What she worried for was not just her sister’s life but her originality. She loved “Star Wars” so much, for instance, that she had walked down the aisle to “The Imperial March.” Would the impulse to walk down the aisle to “The Imperial March”—which seemed the essence of survival itself, the little tune we hummed in the dark—would that make it out of whatever was happening alive?
•
She went silent in the portal; she knew how it was. She knew that as you scrolled you averted your eyes from the ones who could not apply their lipstick within the lines, from the ones who were beginning to edge up into mania, from the ones who were Horny, from the dommes who were not remotely mean enough, from the nudeness that received only eight likes, from the toothpaste on the mirror in bathroom selfies, from the potato salads that looked terrible, from the journalists who were making mistakes in real time, from the new displays of animal weakness that told us to lengthen the distance between the pack and the stragglers. But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside.
•
If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?
•
“Do you understand that your daughter’s life is in danger?” she screamed quietly to her father in the car, for the baby’s head was still growing uncontrollably with no sign of slowing down, and her sister could not walk more than a few steps without starting contractions. “Do you understand that a century ago—” but stopped, because her father’s eyes were swimming. He was starting to see, and she couldn’t bear it if this was the thing that did it, and after all these years. She tried to wrench the passenger door open but it was locked; “Bad to the Bone” was playing on the radio, and it was not in her father’s nature to let her out of the car until it had ended.
•
Still, he wasn’t as dismissive as usual; he was trying to be good. “How is . . . your work . . . going . . . these days?” he asked over breakfast, and she thought of a recent event where she got legally high with some booksellers, became convinced she was dying, drank an entire pitcher of cucumber water, and then fell to the ground so slowly that she accidentally showed the entire room her snatch, all the while crying out for someone to Call an Ambulance. On reflection, she felt no shame. What was such an error but a replica, made miniature, of the sad trajectory that had brought her fame in the first place? “It’s going really, really well,” she told her father, crossing her indefensible forearms over her undefended chest.
•
“Everything that could have gone wrong with a baby’s brain went wrong here,” the doctors told them, and so she began to live in that brain, thinking herself along its routes, thinking what it meant that the baby would never know the news. The image of it approached total abstraction, almost became beautiful. “The neurons all migrated into isolated pods, where they will never talk to each other,” the doctors said. Ten words, maybe. Maybe she’ll know who you are. Everyone in the room gazing at the blooming gray cloud; everyone in the room seized with a secret wish to see their own, which they believed they would recognize by the subtle shadows of things in it. Oh, look, eight years of medical school. Oh, look, an old episode of “Frasier.”
•
The neurologist stood out from the others. Her skin had the gentle green cast of a Madonna balanced on a single fish‐shaped foot in a grotto, with sea light reflecting on the long upward thought of her forehead. Compositionally, she appeared to be fourteen per cent classical music, the kind you were supposed to listen to while you were studying. As she spoke, she stopped every few sentences to apologize. “Not your fault,” her sister kept saying, flicking solid silver away from her cheek, as whatever it was that had made the neurologist study the brain in the first place cracked the channel of her education and began to pour toward them as a direct current. She streamed in her fixed socket like a star. Said, “I am so sorry.”
•
If the baby lived—for the doctors did not believe she would live. If she lived, they did not believe she would live for long. If she lived for long, they did not know what her life would be—she would live in her senses. Her fingertips, her ears, her sleepiness and her wide awake, a ripple along the skin wherever she was touched. All along her edges, just where she turned to another state. Tide pools full of slow blinks and bubbles and little waving fronds. The self, but more, like a sponge. But thirsty.
•
The words “shared reality” stretched and stretched, flapped at the corners like a blue felt blanket, and failed to cover everyone’s feet at once, feet that all shrank from the same cold. Picture the blanket with its wide satin hem, for didn’t we all have the same one?
•
“Back in Ohio and heterosexual again,” she sighed. This happened every time she returned home, as soon as she saw the Quaker Steak & Lube, as soon as the first Tom Petty song came on the radio and began working at the zipper of her jeans, as soon as her speed on the highway produced a friction approaching fire.
•
As a teen-ager, she had tried to write poetry about the beauty of her surroundings, but her surroundings were so ugly that she had quickly abandoned the project. Why were the trees here so brown, so stunted? Why did the billboards announce “loose, hot slots”? Why did her mother collect Precious Moments? Why did the birds seem to say “Bur‐ger King, Bur‐ger King,” and why, in her most solitary moments, did she find herself humming the jingle for the local accident‐and‐injury lawyer, which was so catchy that it almost seemed to qualify as a disease?
•
If she had stayed, she might have gotten addicted to pills, too, she realized. Something about the way the lunch‐bag‐colored leaves wadded in the gutters in autumn, something about the way the snow stayed long after it was wanted, like wives. Something about her memory of the multiplication table, with its fat, devouring zero at the corner, and that chalk taste on the center of the tongue.
•
Instead, she had disappeared into the Internet. She had not realized what a close call she’d had until recently, for now, in the portal, men were coming up through the manholes to confess how near they had come to being radicalized, how they, too, had wandered the sewers of communal thought for days at a time, dry‐mouthed and damp under the arms. How they were exposed to the mutagenic glowing sludge just long enough to become perfectly, perfectly funny, just long enough to grow that all‐discerning third eye.
•
All along the roadside were signs reading “kidney for melissa,” “kidney for randy,” “kidney for jeanine,” with desperate phone numbers written underneath in Magic Marker. “Mom, what are those signs?” she finally asked.
“I’ve never seen them before,” her mother said, squinting through her drugstore glasses. “They must be a scam.”
“A scam to do what?”
Her mother was quiet for a very long time. “To get a kidney,” she said softly, finally, staring at her daughter like she was God’s own idiot.
•
There was grant money set aside by the hospital, and Obamacare helped cover a complete exome sequencing of the baby’s DNA, which pleased her on both the highest and the pettiest possible level: her father could never say the word in that tone again. “Don’t expect too much—we’re looking for a single misspelling in a single word on a single page of a very long book,” the geneticist told them. She felt for a moment that he had wandered onto her turf. The animal things in her bristled.
•
The error was in a growth-control pathway, which meant that what was happening to the baby could not and would not stop. There was in her arms and legs and head and heart a kind of absolutism that was almost joy. Inside her mother she was a pinwheel of vigor, every minute announcing her readiness, every minute saying, Hey, put me in.
•
Because of this vigor and this wheeling and this insistence, she felt more fitted to life than the rest of them—she was what life was, a grand and unexpected overreach, a leap out onto land. “I thought she was stronger than other babies,” her sister said, and she was right. “I thought she was protecting me,” her sister said, and who was to say she wasn’t?
•
Dread rose in their hearts on hearing the seven worst words in the English language. There was a new law in Ohio. It stated that it was a felony to induce a pregnant woman before thirty-seven weeks, no matter what had gone wrong, no matter how big her baby’s head was. The law itself was only a month old: fresh as a newborn, and no one knew whose it was, and naked fear on the doctors’ faces.
•
I’ll write an article! she thought wildly. I’ll blow the whole thing wide open! I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I’ll post about it!
•
“Men make these laws,” she told her mother. “And they also don’t know where a girl pees from.” She had once spent an entire afternoon figuring out where she peed from, with the help of a Clinique Free Bonus hand mirror and a series of shocking contortions she could no longer achieve. It had actually been extremely difficult.
•
“Surely there must be exceptions,” her father ventured, the man who had spent his entire existence crusading against the exception. His white‐hairy hand travelled to his belt, the way it always did when he was afraid. He did not want to live in the world he had made, but, when it came right down to it, did any of us?
•
Another thing he said: “They’ll do an abortion right up to the very last minute . . . you know, health of the mother,” putting the last phrase in finger quotes, even as his daughter sat before him in her wheelchair. When that sentence woke her in the purple part of night, she would tug her phone off the bedside table, post the words “eat the police” in the portal, wait for it to get sixty‐nine likes, then delete it. This, in its childishness, calmed the thrash of helplessness in her stomach, so muscular that it almost seemed to have its own heartbeat.
•
The baby was information printed on pink paper. The baby did not know the news. The baby kicked and pretended to breathe to the sounds of bright horns: Don’t sit under the apple tree, Duke and Ella, an America she was in and was ready to join, America! The baby went mad when her mother drank a single Coca‐Cola.
•
Her sister would sometimes turn a dull brick red when another woman in the waiting room, due any minute now, went outside to chain‐smoke in the blooming courtyard. To cheer her sister up, she considered telling her about that post where someone claimed that telling pregnant women not to shoot up heroin was classist, or something like that. Ha ha, that post ruled! She laughed out loud just remembering it but snapped her mouth shut as soon as she heard herself. She had started laughing like a witch five years ago as a joke and now she couldn’t stop.
•
“Any kids?” one of the nurses asked her. No. She hesitated so long she could feel her hair growing. A cat. Named Dr. Butthole.
•
During those weeks animals came up to her on the street and pushed their soft muzzles into her palm, and she always said the same two words, never wondering whether they were a lie or not, the words that dumb things depend on us to say—because when a dog runs to you and nudges against your hand for love and you say automatically, “I know, I know,” what else are you talking about except the world?
•
At night, to take their minds off things, they watched a show called “River Monsters.” It always started with the blue‐eyed British host arriving in a village where the fishermen were disappearing, dragged down, thrashed to death, swallowed by the Biblical unknown. For the rest of the episode he would track sinuous ripples in the water until sometimes he hauled up something monstrous and prehistoric, with a crisp eye that breathed the moonlight like a gill, and he would call it beautiful and then let it go.
•
At night, to take their minds off things, they watched LeBron James. The soles of his feet were geniuses. The pink tips of his fingers were geniuses. In his hands, the basketball became a genius; the hoop, as it received his arc, became a genius; the air that he sliced through was the breath they were holding, aha, aha, aha, eureka; he travelled down the court, outrunning everything they did not know; the rusted city unbent and rose to the moon; the whole world was a genius of watching that man.
•
The doctors’ specialized faces were alive with interest. In front of her sister they fought over their future shares of the placenta, the cord blood, mother’s blood, baby’s blood. “I have never seen anything like this,” the geneticist declared almost hysterically. “And I will never see anything like this again until the day I die.”
Messy bench who loves drama, she thought, the words rising into her head like a warding spell, for, whatever lives we lead, they do prepare us for these moments.
•
The exome test had found the misspelling, the one missed letter in a very long book. The family sat at the conference table as the entire dictionary was fired at them through peashooters. The words the doctors said were “Proteus syndrome,” the words they said were “one in a billion,” the words they meant were “Elephant Man.” She thought of the bare Victorian rooms with clocks ticking in the background, of the splendid dignity and dialogue and makeup of the movie—which must have understood something, but, no, did not understand this. Of the words on the poster: “i—am—a—man!”
At the end of his life, the Wikipedia entry said, the Elephant Man laid down his head so that he could sleep like other people, and suffocated under the weight of it. But that bit of the Wikipedia entry, the end, was always the most suspect.
•
Oh, she dared the geneticist to try to tell her who Proteus was. She dared him to hold out his thick, miracle‐roughened, eminent hands and mime the changeable water slipping through them, there and then not there. If he did, she would slap the table with all her might and say, “Who do you think you’re talking to? I was a mythology girl.”
•
The baby was the first and only case that had ever been diagnosed in utero. The excitement in the room was as palpable as an apple, for the tree of knowledge had suddenly produced an orange. “Still,” the doctors urged them finally, “don’t go home and look this up.” That was the difference between the old generation and the new, though. She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die.
•
People went to pinewood shacks at the edge of town, she told the baby, as she played brass music to her sister’s stomach. People went to night clubs and slouched together between palms, and slid silver flasks out of their back pockets. It was a terrible age, she told the baby. The best players were black and it was Jim Crow. The best players were Jewish and it was the Second World War. But the horns played past some eternal curfew; the horns lasted as long as anyone wanted to dance. The horns seemed to say, I am here, I am here.
•
An art therapist showed up at the house, sat at the kitchen table, and began unpacking her pens and pastels and watercolors with the pretty irrelevance of a girl poking a daisy into the barrel of a gun. “Art?” she wanted to cry out. “You think art can help with this, you fucking hippie?”
•
Her sister clinging tight to her at midnight, her belly molten hot like the center of the earth, the breath pouring out of her like the atmosphere of Venus, planet of love, and saying, “Maybe . . . she will help us . . . find out about things.”
•
Her sister spoke of them often, the Numbers; she spoke of how often things go right, how human replication was a machine for things mostly going right. When considering the vast waterfall of data in the baby’s exome sequencing, for instance, it was impossible not to think that there was some power of gravity, a magnet, that the drops of mercury mostly flew together, the flock cohered into a single wing. The Numbers, mostly, did not get sick, stayed well.
•
She could try to pray. She could put on a white nightgown, kneel down, and fold her hands—though she doubted that her cries would be heard, considering how recently she had written in the portal that jesus was a thot and a hoe.
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“I cannot see the good in this,” her mother whispered in the small sheltered airspace of the car, where they had taken to having controlled mutual outbursts as soon as they left the house. Her shoulders rounded once more over the steering wheel, the same shape as her grandmother’s hump. Last night they had watched a slideshow and eaten popcorn, and, amid the warm, glowing agates of 1976, she had seen her teen-age mother walking toward the camera in a bathing suit, with the same flat stomach her sister had had, before.
•
This is what happened: they knew someone. They knew someone at the hospital, and so the tall stack of her sister’s paperwork rose to the top like cream. When the ethics committee finally signed off on a thirty‐five‐week delivery, the female doctor, in a silk head scarf and a rose‐gold Michael Kors watch, the doctor who might now be barred from the country, the doctor who was not allowed at any point to mention termination, the doctor who must have felt a ping in her lower belly the moment we lost the Supreme Court, the doctor actually wept.
•
She thought of women in grape‐dark business suits with their hair pulled back testifying in front of Senate committees. The faces of the senators were always comfortably closed against them, like doors on a federal holiday. Because the worst‐case scenarios had happened to them, the women must have done something to deserve it.
They knew nothing about this period when we were inside the great bicep just before it flexed, when we were not yet the people it had happened to.
•
Dark stock photo of an elderly ob‐gyn crouched between a pregnant woman’s legs, eating a large and luxurious sandwich.
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All along the walls of the hospital were memorial tiles, which must have been cheap enough that even poorer families could afford them. Excusing herself from the waiting room, she would sneak out to the corridors and obsessively photograph the tiles, many of which included terrible drawings. Ronald McDonald giving a thumbs‐up—to what? She shivered. A frightening, large toad named Big Billy. A picture of a baby in a full feather headdress, dead in the year 1971, when that sort of thing was still fine.
•
How far did a word have to travel from its source in order to become unrecognizable? Spellings of the word “baby” that the portal had lately cycled through: babey, babby, bhabie. Middle English had seen similar transformations: babe, babee, babi. Yet in every variation the meaning shone through, as durable as a soul, wrapped in swaddling clothes.
•
Raw almonds in the waiting room, and then a cry in the operating theatre, and the photographers from “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” crowded all at once around her sister and brother‐in‐law to take stunning black‐and‐white photographs of the baby before she passed away. But she didn’t, and she didn’t, and then she unfurled like a wet spring thing and was alive.
“I believe she will come out and I believe she will cry,” the grotto‐green neurologist had told them, alone of all the doctors.
•
All the worries about what a mind was fell away as soon as the baby was placed in her arms. A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world. The baby, like a soft pink machete, swung and chopped her way through the living leaves. A path was a path was a path was a path. A path was a person and a path was a mind, walk, chop, walk, chop.
•
How she wished she had never read that article about octopus intelligence, because now each time she sliced into a charred tentacle among blameless new potatoes she thought, I am eating a mind, I am eating a mind, I am eating a fine grasp of the subject at hand.
•
When the baby was put to the breast for the first time, she hovered behind her sister’s shoulder to document it, with her phone sealed inside a disinfected ziplock so that all the photographs she took appeared to take place in Heaven. Her sister’s neck from the side had the smooth poured texture of a birdbath, rising and rising. The winged thing, pink blink, blurred cardinal, lit on her surface and drank.
•
She herself was named godmother, a word she could never hear without seeing a wand turning things into other things. A tap on the forehead—always on the forehead!—and then the bursting of mousy outlines into static, wide white, the wide sky.
•
“So good,” the nurses crooned, when they saw the baby in her scratchy white baptismal gown, with a broad chuckle in her eyes at their earnest human ceremony. She flooded with triumph as the priest poured water from his chipped seashell, because here at last was a child whom religion could not frighten, here was a child who could not be made to dread the afterlife.
•
She found herself so excited by the baby that she could hardly stand it. The baby was doing so well. She was stupendous. In every reaching cell of her she was a genius, just like the man with the basketball whose body always knew what to do. Her eyes travelled and travelled though she could not see—would not be able to see, it was immediately clear, because there were drops of wild dragon‐scale fluorescence where her irises ought to be. So? So what? That every person on earth might be observed in this way, given a party whenever she waved and raised her little arms, breathed just like the rest of us. Turned to hear a voice she knew. The news. The news.
•
It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life. She was a gleaming, a sterilized instrument, flashing out at the precise moment of emergency. She chugged hot hospital coffee and then went “ah-h-h-h-h,” like George Clooney on “ER,” like she was off to go slice out the tumor that had lately been pressing on the world’s optic nerve. She wanted to stop people on the street and say, “Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!”
•
O.K., she was a gleaming instrument until the moment she shut her bedroom door at night, at which point she exploded into a white mist of tears and strange gasping sounds that were a million years before or after language. For she had spent the past two years letting things sink in, and now . . . guess what, bitch! Further absorption was no longer possible! All day she drank in information, but no one was telling them the main thing. No one was telling them how long they would have her, how long the open cloud of her would last.
•
There was a channel that played the baby in fuzzy black-and-white, looking like she was about to steal a pack of cigarettes from a convenience store. They tuned in to it at night, all of them in their separate beds, and this was what she used to think the angels did—watch the channel that played her. If so much as a sock slipped off the baby, they could call, and God would move into frame from nowhere and put the sock back on.
•
Her blue‐and‐vanilla guest room looked out on the street, and in the corner was a handle of potato vodka and every book she had ever given her sister for Christmas, back to the time they were teen-agers. After she’d finished bursting into a mist, after she’d anxiously checked the channel that played the baby, she would slosh an inch of warm vodka into a water glass and begin reading, sliding lower and lower in the bed until the sentences undressed and slept, until it no longer frightened her that there was so much not set down in books.
•
“I guess I’ll go home when the handle of vodka runs out,” she told herself, like the opposite of Cinderella, though still slipping into the glass that fit her perfectly.
•
One of the books was a sex diary, which exerted the particular frontier charm of Internet writing before 9/11. This sex diarist wore pigtails and had eyes like blue sequins and lacked inhibition entirely. She made New Hampshire sound like a place you wanted to go: an endless orifice amid black ice, buzzing like an “open 24 hours” sign. Cups of coffee in the morning, adrenaline‐fuelled e-mails in the afternoon, solitary preparations for threesomes at night.
This seemed the writer’s whole existence but was in fact only one room of it. In another was her son, Wolf, who had been born with a microdeletion in one of his chromosomes. In one of those unforgivable intimacies that the modern age allowed us, she had looked them up every few years, to find out—to find out what? Wolf was still alive, and the last time she checked he had become a Christian, painted marvellous self‐portraits, and constantly monitored the weather. “It always makes me feel safe because . . . if I don’t listen to it, how will I know what’s going to happen?” he said.
•
A dream where she herself was pregnant, and was seized with panic when she realized that she had been drinking and smoking the whole time—a cigarette was unfolding like a paper crane between her fingertips, and ice cubes shook geologically in her glass. A flat red light came through her window then and illuminated her stomach so that she was see‐through: and in a cushion of ocean inside her was the baby, with the larger head and the long froggy limbs facing upward, and the rose-of‐the‐world mouth asked her, nearly laughing, Why are you doing this to us?
•
That magnifying liquid at nighttime saved her, but at dawn, like a jailer, she had to haul her own body out of the bed by the scruff of the neck, yelling, “Morning, sunshine!” For in order for life to continue she had to get to the hospital as soon as possible, her right hand curled permanently around the close‐to‐burning cup of coffee, rushing through red lights side by side with her mother, hearing that cover of Toto’s “Africa” on the radio, trying not to join in but then breaking down and howling, “I BLESS THE RAINS!”
•
“She only knows what it is to be herself,” they kept repeating to one another. The rest was about them and what they thought a brain and a body ought to be able to do. When the neurologist, in that first‐ever meeting, had said gently that maybe the baby would one day be able to count to three, she had almost turned the table over on her, because who needed to count to three? Look where counting to three had got us. I’m warning you.
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The heart grew. Where it hit the limit of the individual, it hurt. It tried to follow the pathways as far as they would go. It tried not to know.
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Once, when she was reading out loud to the baby, she came to a chapter where a little girl died, and went up to Heaven, and “received all the news of the world from the birds.” It was not in her nature to skip, so she kept going in a tinier and tinier voice, until the sound grew so small that even the birds could not carry it, but the baby never noticed a thing.
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What did a story mean to the baby? It meant a soft voice, reassurance that everything outside her still went on, still would go on. That the blood of continuity still pumped, that the day ran in its riverbed. Her blue eyes rolled when the voice of the story came, and sometimes she shook with what must have been excitement, trying in her tininess to be as large as what pressed in on her. In the dome of her head, the mercury of all things was trying to tremble together.
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The great gift of the baby knowing their voices, contentless except for love—how she turned so wildly to where the pouring and continuous element was, strained her limbs toward the human sunshine, would fight her way through anything to get there.
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Different, yes, different. But we were going to be different, the future had asked it of us, we had already begun to change. And there was almost no human being so unlike other human beings that it did not know what a kiss was.
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The baby kicked her legs past other legs, punched her fists past other fists, windmilled her arms, climbed the air like a staircase. Plucked idly at the pale hair on the back of her head. It was the baby whose movements were designed for a new and unimagined landscape, the baby who was showing us how to blast off and leave—how we would fly, touch down, pick flowers in other places.
But please, not yet, we liked it here. ♦
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