* * *
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Through the membrane of a white hospital wall she could feel the thump of the life that went on without her, the hugeness of the arguments about whether you could say the word retard on a podcast. She laid her hand against the white wall and the heart beat, strong and striding, even healthy. But she was no longer in that body.
* * *
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I was with you I felt I was a part of it, until
* * *
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The next-door neighbors had a concrete goose in their front yard that they dressed up according to mood and season: a yellow slicker when it rained, a basket of colored eggs on Easter, a miniature jersey on game day. She posted about it one morning, just to let people know she was still alive, and a reporter called to interview her for the sort of feel-good story that would give people in the portal an excuse to look away from the news. “The goose is prepared for every occasion,” she said grandly, pacing the smoking section in front of the hospital with a cup of coffee in her hand. “It has an outfit for every kind of day that could ever pop up on the human calendar.” But when the reporter asked what she was doing in Ohio she found herself speechless, all cute little costumes of language gone, for how would you dress up a goose for this?
* * *
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On the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that the dictator had finally gone too far. The next day, on the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that no he hadn’t, and in fact that it was no longer possible to go too far.
* * *
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A father in highly regional camouflage switched from the news to Ancient Aliens, where it was being posited that the metaphor of death as the Grim Reaper came from aliens in our cornfields spraying pathogens over medieval peasants. The man watched. She watched the man. Some needle in his face moved steadily from Possible, to Plausible, to I Would Die for This Belief, which was bewildering until you remembered the wild beeping of his daughter’s machines.
* * *
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Another baby in the NICU was named Bo, and he sobbed when he was left alone but laughed when other people came. Every day the nurses brought a mirror to Bo, and he looked into it and laughed uproariously, until it actually did start to seem funny—the unlikeliness of it all, the fact that they were all there together. Where’s Bo? There’s Bo. Oh there he is.
* * *
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Bo’s mother called his feeding tube his cheeseburgers. It was important to do things like that—if you didn’t call your baby’s feeding tube his cheeseburgers, then somehow the feeding tube won.
* * *
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Her husband, when he flew up for a weekend visit, found himself physically incapable of being in the NICU for more than an hour. “I never realized how strong a baby’s Agenda was before,” he said moodily, the words STOP IT visible just near his hairline. “To make you calm, to make you feel as if nothing in the outside world is wrong. A whole room of them—well, you’ve got no chance.”
* * *
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“Ableism,” her husband said, encountering this concept for the very first time. “Moby-Dick . . . was ableist . . . to Captain Ahab?”
“No,” she said, her head in her hands. “No. No. No. No.” His grasp of such subjects had always been limited. He believed, for instance, that sexism was when someone was “mean to Mary Tyler Moore.”
* * *
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“All I know is this,” he told her, shifting the baby instinctively into the crook of his elbow so her oxygen levels would rise, blue as the sea, to 98 percent. “You can never call me Daddy again.”
* * *
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In her photoroll, between pictures of the baby appearing to smile, was a picture of perfect juggalo makeup imprinted on a woman’s bare ass. “Look. Look at her beautiful face. Look how wise,” she would tell people, total strangers, scrolling quickly past the picture of the woman’s hole.
* * *
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The heart grew. It hurt, where it hit the limit of the individual. It tried to follow the pathways as far as they would go. It tried not to know.
* * *
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Looking at the baby she sometimes believed that nothing was wrong or could ever go wrong, that they were on a planet together where this is simply what a baby was. Then she traveled back to earth with the baby in her arms, and she gripped her stomach in pain, because suddenly the sweet small body was a jagged heap of jigsaw pieces in the bottom of her belly that she must put together, put together, keep putting together at every moment, wave after wave of that pain in the stomach, solve into a picture of the sea.