No One Is Talking About This (30)
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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.
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Raw almonds in the waiting room, and then a cry in the operating theater, 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.
She remembered the peculiar onrushing pain of the portal, where everything was happening except for this. But for now, the previous unshakable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone.
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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.
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How she wished she had never read that article about octopus intelligence, because now every time she sliced into a charred tentacle among blameless new potatoes she thought to herself, I am eating a mind, I am eating a mind, I am eating a fine grasp of the subject at hand.
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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 in a disinfected ziplock so that all the photos 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.
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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.
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“So good,” the nurses crooned, when they saw the baby in her scratchy white baptismal gown, with a broad chuckle in her eye at their earnest little human ceremony. She flooded with triumph as the priest poured water from his chipped seashell, because here at last was a child religion could not frighten, here was a child who could not be made to dread the afterlife.
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She found herself so excited by the baby that she could hardly stand it. She 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 traveled and traveled though she could not see—would not be able to see, it was immediately clear, there were drops of wild dragon-scale fluorescence where her irises ought to be. So? So what? That every person on earth might be watched in that 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.
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It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life. She was a gleaming sterilized instrument, flashing out at the precise moment of emergency. She chugged hot hospital coffee and then went, “AHHHHH,” 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!”
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OK, or 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 last 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.
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A feeling like a thousand flickering kisses, and how long could she bear it? She had only lasted a few minutes with her feet in a tub of doctor fish before she whipped her legs out in a frenzy, saying that they were going too far, that they were eating more of her than other people. The girl at the desk had tried to stop her, telling her how soft she would soon be, that if she was only patient she would be nibbled back to her original state, but she paid with cash and then ran out of the establishment, not even realizing she had lost her flip-flops somewhere on the burning pavement till she was more than a mile away.