Other than the plainly ornamental column that rose out of the center of the living room, the apartment was ideal for their growing family. The oddity came seamlessly out of the floor, as if it had been integral to the architecture, and exited into the ceiling just after a flourish of volutes. It stood in the dead center of the spacious, light-drenched room, which was separated from the pass-through kitchen by a sleek faux-marble breakfast bar. It was round, the column, with vertical ridges, and stood sentinel to the actions of the living room. It reminded Pris of the panopticon, the theoretical all-seeing guard tower in the center of a three-hundred- and-sixty degree prison, where a single guard could keep a colosseum of prisoners behaved through the mere suggestion of surveillance—one never knew when one was being watched.
Pris had studied panopticons in her graduate work. She’d studied the architecture of jails, prisons, internment, detention, and concentration camps, psychiatric facilities, sanatoriums, asylums—anywhere a person might be held against their will. She was in the middle of her first book of serious scholarship on the subject, tentatively titled Stuck In The Middle With You: The Prison As Prelude To Workplace Surveillance, and hoped that its publication might lead to tenure-track opportunities.
“You’re not being held against your will, are you?” David sometimes joked. Like on the night before their wedding. Or the night they started trying to get pregnant. Or the night they found out they were pregnant.
They were pregnant. David preferred that phrasing; it’s not like he hadn’t been trying, too. Trying was what became of sex—and after a few months of goal-oriented sex, that’s what it felt like to Pris, too. An effort. Barring that, though, David lamented that he didn’t—couldn’t—contribute much to the pregnancy. He could rub her feet, which he did, could microwave her heating pad, or take on the majority of chores, but he couldn’t really be helpful. Not in a meaningful way. It’s not like they could take turns carrying the baby. This was all very distressing to David, and Pris found herself taking care of his needs more than the other way around.
It was David who had convinced Pris to take a semester off to have the baby. For years, her adjunct professors union had fought doggedly for better, securer contracts, and for all their effort they received a meager thirty-six days of partially-paid time off for family leave. As David sagely reminded Pris, she wasn’t in it for the money. But he, at his firm, was. Money for their family. Not for material fripperies or luxurious vacations, but for their family. David defied his generational pigeonholes; he didn’t want his children to have to pay for a single thing. Though she felt like his parenting philosophy in this regard was a recipe for entitlement, Pris couldn’t help but appreciate the security. It all but promised that she could pursue her passions for the rest of her life, provided he didn’t die in a freak accident. But for now, they would be fine without the lousy pay a couple of semesters would afford.
The broker showed them the rest of the apartment. The master bedroom was large enough for a queen-size mattress and the expensive automatic bassinet they were considering, built to sense the baby’s mewling and respond with louder shushing, more aggressive vibrating. The bassinet would be by Pris’ side of the bed. There wouldn’t be enough space for a nightstand; she’d have to figure out what to do with her water, her lotion, her nipple butter. She’d spied a rolling, tiered cart on Amazon that would fill the need nicely, provided the floors were level enough.
There was a spacious second bedroom for the nursery, too, one that would eventually evolve into a playful, airy toddler’s room. And in the bathroom, no more inlaid tub—no more claw-footed antiquities like they’d put up with in the last couple of places they rented. This was a modern bathroom, with a vessel sink basin and a rainfall shower head. No, this place was perfect.
Where she would find space for a desk, she didn’t know. At their last place, Pris had her own office to disappear into, where she worked on her book with a grated view of the prewar building next door, a view she grew to cherish after framing it with knickknacks and hanging plants. There was no such room here. She walked the empty apartment again and circled the column which, though it stood in the center of the living room, was not a dealbreaker to either of them. They liked the idiosyncrasy; it wasn’t a real New York City apartment unless there was an utterly irrational feature they could brag about to friends.
It really was a shame about the lack of office, though. It’s just that, as David explained, this met all the criteria. It was within reasonable commuting distance of his office, the schools were good enough, there was an elevator, and it was at a price point that would guarantee a return on their “investment.” Pris didn’t want to seem irritable, or dissatisfied. And the idea of touring more apartments, having more arguments, losing more invaluable pre-baby weekends—it was too much to bear. She reasoned that she would be herself wherever she lived. Nothing would take that away from her.
Pris and David put down an offer. It was accepted a few days later.
◆
She heard the mover ask if he was Dave. She heard him say no. Heat rushed to her face.
This was something he did. She could see one of the guys from where she was bent, stretching her lower back against the living room column; he was looking at David in a way that signaled either disappointment or confusion or both.
“David,” said her husband, stressing the second syllable, at the height of his powers. “It’s David.”
“Okay,” said the guy. “Your elevator is busted. It’s going to be another four hundred. One per floor.”
David sighed, stepping aside so the mover could enter the apartment to strategize, then he bounded down the stairs after him to supervise the unloading. Pris could hear a second guy cursing in the stairwell, bringing the first of their boxes up the stairs. Pris was nearly eight months pregnant. Four floors of stairs would not do. She pictured herself stumbling down them, her water just broken. Though one of the midwives told her that the amniotic sac only broke spontaneously in something like fifteen percent of all pregnancies. There were stories about it in her family; her Aunt Janet’s water broke an hour into a showing of The Parallax View; she stayed put till the credits rolled, rapt as she was. Pris and David thought this was asinine.
Pris didn’t know if she wanted her water to break like that. There was something sort of cinematic about it, a story that she’d tell her children with pride for the rest of her life—she was on the subway, she was buying groceries, she was at the dentist. There was a lot she didn’t know. She didn’t know if she wanted an epidural or a natural birth without meds. She didn’t know if she wanted a boy or a girl. All she knew was that she wanted motherhood to push her in some direction. She wanted motherhood to help her make decisions.
The apartment went silent. Pris couldn’t see anyone from where she was stretching. No David, no movers—not even sounds from the street.
She shimmied up to standing and looked around the column. An Amazon delivery man was standing by the open door, holding a large brown box. She accepted the package; he tipped his hat in an old-timey way, and turned toward the stairs. Ten or twelve other boxes were piled neatly in the hallway against the grimy wall.
“These weren’t included in the estimate,” the mover said, pushing past her. “You don’t want us to trip on them.”
David appeared next to her. “What did you order now?”
“Nothing,” said Pris. “I didn’t order anything.”
David began bringing the boxes in, placing them in the corner of the living room. Pris chose one at random and cut through the tape. She pushed around the contents—infant onesies, swaddles, organic baby-friendly lotions, pacifiers, hats, burp cloths. The waxy packing slip was at the bottom. A list of items and the note: Hope this helps! No sign of a sender. She gave the slip to David as he finished piling the Amazon delivery.
“Your parents. Clearly.”
“I don’t think so. They don’t use Amazon.”
David laughed. “Oh, right. But your Dad’s got the Tahoe.”
He walked into the kitchen, where the movers had finished. Pris sat on the plastic-wrapped couch and watched David find homes for his collection of antique cast-iron skillets. Setting everything up just so. Drilling pilot holes for anchors into the walls. Counter-leveling the spice rack against the slanting floor. Naming the drawers with his label-maker. Turning the kitchen into his studio. She had dozed off. A lot of time seemed to have passed.
When the movers were finished, Pris started in on their art. She hung ab-ex prints in the bathroom, the rare Serbian film one-sheet in the bedroom. Her diplomas in the office. She disliked the part of herself that needed to be reminded of her accomplishments, but couldn’t forgo it either.
“Those’ll have to come down,” said David, looking on from the door. “In like a month.” He pointed at her belly. “Remember?”
For a few minutes, she hadn’t.
◆
The apartment was empty when Pris woke up. It took energy and motivation to get out of bed so she waited for both to come, listening to the stirring city filter through the windows.
There was still so much to do—so many boxes left to unpack, pictures to hang on walls, a bathroom to organize. The stress got her moving. She dressed, a task of greater and greater difficulty, and got to work, assuming David had gone out early to pick up the supplies they needed: wall tacks, a drill bit replacement, a plunger.
She sent her husband a text thanking him for running out. It was a Sunday.
At noon, when she still hadn’t heard back from him, she gave him a call. Faint buzzing in the bedroom told her that he’d forgotten his phone. Unusual for fastidious David. She made an effort to put his whereabouts out of her mind, burying herself into unpacking, arranging, assembling. It wasn’t long before her lower back started to feel raw from all the bending. She took breaks to stretch, sitting against the column and reaching a pitiful distance toward her toes. The column was warm against her back.
She really was making a herculean effort not to think about David. Not, at this point, out of anxiety for his safety. No, she was angry with him. She was eight months pregnant, for God’s sake. It wasn’t likely that she’d go into labor any minute.
But at the same time, they had several friends—several—who’d delivered premature babies. Preemies. The word made her shiver. For David to not leave a note or a text was irresponsible. Worse, it was selfish.
At four, Pris heard a key in the door. She came to the hallway to meet David, prepared to deliver an assertive yet vulnerable speech about empathy. But when the door opened, a man and a woman she did not know walked in.
“Hey!” she said. “You can’t—don’t come in my house!”
The woman was already inside, the man halfway through the frame, his hand on the doorknob. The three of them froze. Then Pris registered the sound of shoes coming up the stairs.
“It’s all right, Pris.” David’s voice. “Sorry,” he said pushing past the couple and into the apartment. He went to embrace Pris but grabbed her awkwardly, putting too much pressure on her belly. She recoiled and caught his eyes, humongous, alien.
“This is Joy Gladdis. And Harry Gladdis. Neighbors from 5F—right above us.” David thumbed the ceiling. “They’re lovely.” He turned to them, gesturing. “Come, please. I’ll make us tea. You like tea?”
“We like tea,” said Joy, smiling. “Decaf. No caffeine after noon for me. For Harry, caffeine around the clock.”
“I like the buzz.”
Harry followed Joy into the living room. They sat on each end of the couch, leaving the middle seat open, expecting Pris to take it. She stood in front of them as they smiled up at her. Joy had a bouffant hairstyle and wore pearls. She was heavily made up, with thick, almost gloopy mascara, and ruby-red lipstick. Her hands were collected modestly on her lap, fingers entwined. Next to her, Harry’s finger drew circles on the open cushion. He wore a jangling bracelet of gold links and a hefty Rolex. His stick-thin arms disappeared into a short-sleeved polka-dot button down. He had the most intense Adam’s apple Pris had ever seen. It hung to a point and bobbled dramatically when he smiled.
“Such an odd affectation,” said Joy. Pris touched her belly, thinking the comment about her, but Joy rose and moved past Pris, too close, and circled the column, running her hand along its four faces, tapping with a long painted fingernail. She looked up at the ionic scrollwork. “Of course, we have the same column in our apartment. But these flourishes.” She gazed admiringly at the ceiling. “When Harry and I moved in about—would you say a decade ago, dear?”
“Correctamundo,” said Harry.
“Yes. It used to be one unit—yours and ours. So they told us.”
“Is that right?” said David. “Isn’t that incredible, Pris?”
“You see all manner of architectural oddities over the years,” said Joy. “One does.” She finished circling the column, arriving at Pris, admiring her from head to toe, lingering on her bump. She smiled, revealing a smudge of lipstick on a tooth. “That’s marvelous, dear.”
Pris thanked her. “Do you have kids?”
Harry laughed, then shifted his weight to one side to fetch his wallet from a back pocket. He unfurled a laminated waterfall of photographs. There were six photos, all pictures of a chunky newborn boy with a severe expression.
“Adorable,” said Pris. “What’s his name?”
Harry laughed again. As did Joy. “The top one is Marcus. Then we’ve got, from top to bottom, James, David, Steven, Harry Jr., and little Charles.”
“You’re joking.”
Joy chimed in. “Not at all. Six boys. We were so lucky.” “Such strong family resemblance.”
“Just you wait,” Harry said. “Once the first one arrives. It’s all over.” “Don’t listen to him. Once the first one arrives, it’s just the beginning.”
David appeared with the tea. He served Joy and Harry, then turned to Pris. “I didn’t ask if you wanted anything,” he said. Fact, not contrition.
“I’m all right.”
“Did you thank our neighbors for their generous gifts?”
Pris turned to the couch, where Joy had returned, now sitting next to her husband. “Gifts?”
“The baby presents,” said David. “The boxes? They’re from Harry and Joy.
Generous, to say the very, very least. Thank you again. Really. We don’t know what we’re in for.”
“Just you wait,” said Harry. “When the first one comes, it changes everything,” said Harry. He chuckled. “This is your brain off babies. This is your brain on babies. Any questions?”
“Harry. Please.”
Pris was trying to process. “How did you know we were expecting?” “It’s clear as day, dear. No offense.”
“But the boxes were delivered the day we moved in.”
David stepped over to Pris, snaked his arm around her waist, and pulled her closer. “That’s when I told them. Moving day. They were so helpful.”
“It was nothing at all,” Harry said.
Pris didn’t want to be rude. But she couldn’t resist. “I don’t think we met on moving day?”
“That’s right, dear. David, you’re all mixed up. We met before then. When you came for the tour.”
“Of course, of course,” said David.
“It’s you who has pregnancy brain,” Harry said, laughing. “I can’t remember it.”
“David, dear,” Joy said, “Tell your wife about your day.”
Pris had forgotten that he’d been gone all day. “You worried me,” she told him. “I forgot my phone.”
“I’m aware.”
“We were at the Met.”
“You went to a museum?” said Pris. She tried not to be hurt. She tried to be angry instead. He didn’t notice either way.
“Have you ever seen the body of the dead Christ in the tomb?” A startling question that she had no answer for.
“The painting. Hans Holbein the Younger. The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. Harry and Joy took me. They said I had to see it. On loan from the Kunstmuseum Basel.”
“That’s right, David,” said Joy.
“I took up the post after I retired,” said Harry. “I’m a docent. A Met docent.” He pulled his lapels together proudly. “Always loved art. Now I get to talk about it to anyone bored enough to listen.”
“He’s wonderfully articulate,” said Joy.
David agreed. “I’ll take you. We’ll go tomorrow.” He glanced into the kitchen at the microwave clock. “I’d even take you now if there was time.”
“And you, dear?” said Joy, looking at Pris. “What is it that you do?”
“She’s a professor,” said David. “She’s brilliant.”
“I study prisons.”
“Prisons?” said Joy, glancing at her husband. “Isn’t that unusual. And what’s that like?”
“Well, for instance, a paper I read recently argued that Hitler’s inspiration for the concentration camp came from an internment camp in New Mexico that the government established to exterminate Navajos and Apaches. It was called Bosque Redondo. ‘Round Forest’ in Spanish.”
Pris looked at her blankly.
“Sorry we asked!” said Harry, laughing.
David rubbed her back. “Let’s find a time we can all do dinner.” “But not now,” said Pris.
She told Harry and Joy that she wasn’t feeling well and asked if the guests wouldn’t mind leaving. She apologized. She really was very sorry.
“We were just leaving anyway,” Joy said. “Come on, Harry. Let’s give our new neighbors room to breathe.”
◆
That night, while David massaged Pris’s feet, he described how he had lain on the floor of Gallery 626 in the European Paintings wing, peering up at The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb from a unique angle, a secret angle, a vantage from which no one had ever seen the painting, and now nothing would ever be the same again because no one had noticed that this particular painting, by Hans Holbein the Younger, of the sixteenth century, of German-Swiss heritage, contained an anamorphosis, a secret image one could only see from a unique angle, nearly unreproducible really, but David knew the trick now, Pris understood, the trick of the angle, where to align one’s head vis-à-vis the bench for visitors and a microscopic nick in the grey baseboard, the secret angle one needed to catch the message intended only for a chosen few.
He dug his thumbs deep into the arches of Pris’s feet, into the tendons, ravaging them. The pain was exquisite.
“It’s a painting of a dead man,” explained David. “Just a humble dead man. Who happens to be Jesus. But it could be anyone: Scott, Bernard, Adam…”
“Who are they?”
“Nobodies. That’s my point.”
“So what’s the message?”
David stopped massaging and leaned back onto his elbows. “I can’t just tell you. You have to see it for yourself.”
Pris knew, no matter the angle, she would not see what David saw.
“Harry told me I was the first person since they acquired the painting to see it. I know it sounds childish—but he told me I was special.”
“Oh, love. You are special.”
He scoffed. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
She hesitated, then said, “Are you sure you’re not like—“
“What?”
“Compensating?”
“Because of Dad?”
“Sure.”
“Let me check.” He knocked on his head. “Nope. Not compensating because of my dad.”
They were quiet. “Such an incredibly odd couple,” said Pris. “I still can’t believe you spent the day with them.”
After Harry and Joy left, David had told Pris that they had insisted and insisted and, given that they were in the apartment just above, life could be very difficult if they all got off on the wrong foot.
“Agreed,” said David. “Bizarre. But nice. Really generous. The kind of people you want living near you.”
“I guess.”
David let go of her foot. “Oh, what is it? Not everyone needs an academic judgment.”
“You’re just more trusting.”
He smiled, surprised by the compliment, and returned to the massage. “You could be, too,” he said. “Just follow these three easy steps.”
Later that night, Pris roused to the sound of David mumbling. She shifted quietly to look at his face in profile, his eyes open wide to the ceiling, his lips moving, wet, smacking. She didn’t want him to know she was awake. She wanted to listen. He was talking, not blinking. Speaking to the ceiling about—about Hans. He was referring to him as Hans.
What is it? What is it? What is it supposed to mean?
He waited for an answer from the ceiling and none came, but David nodded his head anyway.
She fell back to sleep and had a terrible dream in which she was watching an empty crib through the screen of a baby monitor. Wind agitated the lace curtain in the room and interference in the feed made her vision warble. She dreamed this nearly still image in what felt like real time, trapped in a static tableaux for hours and hours. When she woke again, it was a little after five. She was exhausted.
David was asleep with a pillow over his face. He slept like this most nights, with the pillow positioned over his eyes like an enormous eye-mask. Pris tried to go back to sleep but tightness in her inner thighs kept her awake. She butterflied her legs under the comforter but the stretch didn’t quite ease the discomfort. It was there in her lower back, too. A light blanket of pain, not bad enough to do something about, not minor enough to ignore. At last, she forced herself out of bed to stretch in the living room.
Her yoga mat was rolled up in the corner. She pushed a few boxes to the wall to make room, and unrolled the mat next to the column so she could use it for support. Pris sat down, butterflying her legs again and leaning over to get the lower back. She leaned over her pitiful distance, using her elbows to push her thighs to the floor, trying to break the tightness. When she sat up, her elbows brushed against the ridges of the column behind her and came away wet.
Dawn light was filtering through the alley-facing living room windows, the ridges of the column darkening, giving the room an eerie stillness. Pris trailed a finger down one of the ridges, gathering moisture. She held her finger to her nose; it smelled like musk. She laid her hand against the column, and as she did, felt something rush through it and land, with a muffled splash, inches from her face. It happened again, and again she could feel the whoosh of water and sound. This time water began to seep out from some invisible fracture in the column. Cursing quietly, Pris fetched a couple of ratty beach towels from the linen closet and surrounded the base of the column. A third sound—less, now, the cascade of a waterfall, but rather hundreds of individual raindrops hitting still water—then silence.
She thought about waking David but didn’t want to risk his irritation about something that could wait till morning. She knew what he’d say anyway. Call the super. Call management. Don’t make a big deal out of something that isn’t. She went back to bed.
It was after nine when she woke again; her last class of the semester was at quarter past. She called the History Department office, told the receptionist that she’d be a half hour late but that he should let the students into the classroom. She dressed, then spent ten minutes looking for the number of their super or the management company or anybody at all related to her new building, but the only contact information she could find was the address of the P.O. Box where they mailed their rent each month. She texted her husband, wondering if he knew where to get a phone number. He told her to try Harry and Joy.
◆
That afternoon, Pris came home to another cityscape of Amazon boxes piled outside her door. She brought them inside, one by one, and lined them along the hallway. Then she sat in the kitchen and looked at them. She really didn’t want to open them. These weren’t boxes of hand-me-downs from cousins with older babies; these weren’t presents selected lovingly by friends from Pris and David’s baby registry. These were boxes from Harry and Joy. Whom she did not know in the slightest.
She kicked the boxes till she found the lightest one then brought it into the living room, slicing the tape open with her housekey. Nasal aspirators. Individually packaged. Hundreds of them. Baby-boy-blue nasal aspirators, bulbs that drew to a long, rubbery syringe for the vacuuming of mucus from the baby’s clogged nostrils because babies can’t blow their own noses.
There was a note.
You’re going to need these! Trust me! — Joy.
She was going to need hundreds of nasal bulbs? Pris examined one of the little packages—they were fine to reuse as long as you washed them out with warm water. A warning cautioned that they should not be used more than two or three times a day on a baby. Pris grabbed her phone and went to one of her favorite parenting blogs. She searched the archives for nasal bulbs and found a number of posts on the dangers of over-sucking. One did not want to dry out one’s baby’s nasal passages and “make matters worse,” read one of the posts.
What matters? Even a month away from full term, Pris was not worried about drying out the nasal passages of her unborn child.
Her child. Their child. David had insisted on putting the ultrasound images on the fridge. Their insurance paid for 3D imaging but Pris regretted it the moment she saw the printout: a half-formed child of clay, the color of terracotta, the lines and wrinkles, the human face. The fetus in suspension—fetus was precisely the wrong word for the child here. Its hands curled by its sleeping face. Its knees framing its head. Was it sleeping? Was it awake, its nerves sounding off, its mind restlessly permuting?
Pris took one of the nasal aspirators with her when she climbed the stairs to 5F. Joy answered quickly, spying the bulb in Pris’ hand.
“The packages came. I’m delighted.” She brought her hands together and clapped soundlessly. “But Harry’s not at home. He’ll want to be here if we’re speaking.”
Joy tried to close the door but Pris stopped her.
“I just wanted to thank you,” she said. “And ask—why so many?”
“I’d really rather wait until Harry’s home. You know, he’s very careful about—” “But did you mean to send so many? There must be a hundred. How much
mucus could a baby possibly have? I mean, isn’t mucus a good thing? Nasal linings need to be lubricated. Laura’s Little Guys says you have to be careful not to over- bulb. Isn’t—”
Joy poked her head into the hallway, past Pris, as if to check for company. She sighed resignedly, burdened, perhaps, by Pris’ presence. The nerve to be put upon, thought Pris, resenting Joy, her presumption, her intrusiveness, her arrogance.
“Come,” said Joy, taking Pris’ hand and guiding her into Apartment 5F, into a foyer that smelled of cat food. Shoes were piled in the corner behind the door, and the fibers of a rotting welcome mat peppered the floor. Pris braced for the home of a hoarder but found, as Joy led her down the short hallway and into the living room, that the Gladdis’ had prim taste. Tranquilizing taste. But not busy. Pink and blue pastels everywhere. A pink sofa. Matching wing chairs in sky-blue upholstery. Pink piano bench cushion. Flowery wallpaper. Soft blue carpet with a perfectly circular cutaway for the passthrough of the column. Curiously, though, the column didn’t reach to the ceiling but terminated a few inches above Pris’ head. There was no adornment on its top—just a flat finish, like the decapitated stem of a flower. She ran her hand along the smooth column and felt what seemed like grating.
“This is lovely,” said Pris. Joy smiled sedately and thanked her.
Pris expected to be offered tea or coffee—the Gladdis’ were clearly the hosting type—but Joy continued through the living room and into the Gladdis’ bedroom.
She felt foolish wielding the nasal aspirator aloft like a conductor’s baton; she brought it down by her waist, uncomfortably conscious of it.
Joy dropped her hand and dropped to the floor, onto all fours, scrambling under the bed. Pris observed the soles of Joy’s puffy white slippers, and the way her pink dressing gown swished along her calves. When she noticed with a start that Joy wasn’t wearing any underwear, she looked away, blushing, at a wall of framed photographs of baby boys, Joy and Harry’s children. The boys were wearing the same style of clothes that Pris could best describe as child mariner chic.
“Aha,” Joy said.. She crawled backward until her head was clear of the frame, then stood up, smoothing out her kimono, holding a photo album. Joy led Pris back into the living room, where they sat on the sofa which had lost whatever cushion it may have once had. Joy placed the album on the table, looked at Pris, waiting, Pris thought, for her to open the book. She was about to reach for it when Joy spoke.
“So how is nesting coming along?”
“We’ve only really just started. The baby still feels years away.”
“Look at you,” said Joy. “It’s around the corner.”
“Thanks.”
“And the habitus?”
“The habitus? I’m not familiar.”
“Your baby’s build, dear.”
“Her build? I’m sorry, Joy, I—“
“A girl! How wonderful.”
“Well, we don’t know. But we’re hoping.” Despite her best efforts, Pris had been thinking of the baby with female pronouns, knowing full well that she was setting herself up to be disappointed if they had a boy. She did not want the first thing she felt when she met her baby to be disappointment.
Joy moved closer. “I can tell you what you’re having.” She showed Pris her palm. “May I?”
Pris assented, and Joy placed her palm on Pris’ belly. She craned her wrist to the left, to the right. Then she stood her hand up on fingertips and applied pressure. Pris breathed in sharply. Joy’s fingertips probed, lightly, forcefully, lightly—she dug in with her fingertips and Pris pulled her body away.
“Oh, don’t be such a wiener.”
“You mean a weenie?”
They both laughed. “So what is it?”
“You’re sure you want to know?” Pris nodded.
“I’ll sit with it and tell you when you leave.”
The album was presented. Joy positioned it between their laps, so the spine fell between them. Leather-bound and scuffed with script on the front: The Boys.
“Harry would strangle me if he knew I was showing you this. It breaks his heart.
He can’t handle all the passing time. Look.” She turned to the first page and Pris gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. There were four photographs, each showing a very large infant in a blue diaper on a hospital bed, his parents, a doctor, and a nurse on either side of the mattress. The boy is looking at the camera, the adults are looking at him. His eyes are blue and—empty? Their blue a kind of echo of a deeper color. The picture seemed medical grade, taken to document, not for sentiment.
A dark film ran down the boy’s body, from his nose to where it accumulated at the diaper lining. Thick, viscous, a current of ooze.
“This is Marcus at about six weeks,” said Joy. She ran her finger down the boy’s body. “It poured out of him from day one.”
“Is it mucus?”
She nodded, turned the page. More babies in hospitals. “Steven’s here,” she said, fingering a polaroid of a similarly aged baby. Same blue diaper. Lighter hair, thinner face. Same oozing mass down his small body. “All of them had it.”
“What is it?” Pris asked, but Joy didn’t answer. She turned the page. More photographs, more recent.
“And here’s our special little Charles at his third birthday.”
She pointed to a picture of a smiling child wearing a cowboy hat, a tee-shirt, and boots with spurs. Nothing on his shirt. Nothing on his trousers. A normal toddler.
Joy turned to Pris. “Charles is our special guy. He’s the only one who didn’t—” She choked up.
The implications of the unfinished sentence hit Pris all at once. She stood suddenly, knocking the photo album out of Joy’s hands and onto the carpet. “I’m just not—“
“No need to explain.” Joy came to her, placed the back of her hand against Pris’ forehead. Her knuckles were cool; they were grounding, a relief.
“You said the only…”
Joy nodded.
“I am so sorry. No one should have to endure…It’s just so…”
Joy looked away for a moment, lost, then turned with alarm to Pris. “That’s why you need to prepare,” she said.
“Surely, it’s a rare condition,” said Pris. She was again surprised to find that she was still holding the nasal aspirator. She quickly put it down on the coffee table.
Joy smiled, paused, chose her words carefully. “I thought so, too,” she said. “But parenthood is unpredictable. It’s a wild ride—like a roller coaster.” She laughed. “There’s no way to talk about being a parent without sounding like—well, like a fool. You spend years trying to find the words to describe the feelings, the exhaustion, the emotions—the way you know, in your bones, that you would do anything for your babies. But you can’t find the right words. You make trite observations. And the aggression! You surprise yourself with aggression. ‘You’re so cute I could squeeze you till you pop. You’re so sweet I could swallow you whole.’ Hugging isn’t enough. Kissing them isn’t enough. And besides, they don’t understand kissing. It’s not innate, you know. You have to teach them kissing. And then you have to lead them from kissing to love. And hugging. Hugging is awful. It’s never enough. You can hug and hug them but it’s simply never satisfying. You want to hug them until you hurt them. And you do—sometimes.” She looked off. “When you hurt them with your hugging, that’s when you know.”
“When you know what?”
“That you love them too much.”
Pris followed Joy to the door, thinking she was being shown out. Instead, Joy knelt by one of the hefty bags of cat food and pulled out a measuring cup overflowing with the pungent brown pellets. She turned to Pris and gave her a kind of paralyzed smile, her little mouth the only thing moving on her heavily made-up face. With her free hand she opened the door.
“I’m sorry I didn’t meet the cat,” said Pris, but Joy either didn’t hear her or chose not to respond. They stepped into the hallway. “So you really think my baby is going to have—what your children had?”
“You’re carrying just like I did for all six of my boys. Plus,” she said, “you’re having one, too. A boy, I mean”
Pris laughed. “Everyone has their own method of guessing, each more arcane than the last. No offense, Joy, but you can’t tell.”
“But I know. I saw the ultrasound myself. On your fridge.”
“And you think you can tell from the ultrasound? Believe me, you can’t tell.” “My dear,” said Joy. “It was the ultrasound that told me.”
◆
More packages arrived early the following morning. Pris was able to grab the delivery guy before he made it upstairs to his next deliveries. In her bathrobe, her hair a mess, barefoot in the dirty stairwell, she berated the Amazon employee for bringing them so many packages. “Does this seem like a normal amount of packages?” she asked him. “We’re not ordering these. I don’t accept the delivery.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. A kid in a blue and black uniform, his hat swallowing his ears. “I can’t bring them back.”
“I am officially refusing this delivery,” Pris said, exercising her right as—what?
An American? She heard herself arguing with a hardworking kid, worse off than she, and tried to sugarcoat her childish impertinence. “It’s not good for the environment. All the driving.”
“I feel guilty about it, ma’am.”
“Why don’t you quit?”
His face fell. He had every right to be indignant. He apologized instead. “I can give you the number for customer service?”
Pris looked at the four or five boxes the young man had neatly stacked. He had another under his arm. Its angle gave her a view of the address label: it was for the Gladdis’.
“You’re just doing your job,” Pris said. “Let me pay you back.” She pointed at the box in his arm. “I’m going up to the Gladdis’ in a little bit. I’ll bring it to them.”
He relented, faster than she would have predicted, and beat it down the stairs. Pris kicked the stack of boxes through the door, the Gladdis’ package in her arms. She opened that one first. Books—four of them: Terrariums: Eden In Mini, Mysteries of the Deep, Updated Developmental Childhood Disorders, and a mass-market paperback mystery.
Pris pushed the books aside and got up to make coffee. As it brewed, she placed the largest of the new packages on the table and tore it open. Inside was a doll in stiff rectangular plastic packaging—“Ready-or-Not Tot, Enhanced, Drug- Affected, Light Female.”
There was another note on the shipping receipt. For Practice. Love Joy.
Pris examined the packaging, whose copy boasted the doll’s dual merits: A drug-enhanced manikin is BOTH a drug prevention baby and a general teen pregnancy prevention baby!
The exclamation mark. The enthusiasm of its manufacturers. Pris wondered which use Joy had intended the doll for—did Joy think that Pris’ baby would be drug- enhanced? Did she imagine that her child would cry 31 times instead of the standard 25 in a 48-hour period?
The doll could differentiate between shaken baby syndrome and other types of abuse; it was designed to simulate the lack of muscle development present in a baby born from an alcohol- or drug-dependent mother. It weighed 5 lbs. 8 oz., was 20 inches long, and latex-free—the anatomically correct qualities of the baby of a teen mom.
Pris turned the doll over in her hands, its head flopping back and forth. They would have to get out of this apartment. She couldn’t stay here. They couldn’t raise a baby here. Some threshold had been crossed with Harry and Joy; they were too close now, pried too much. Too much involvement. They were obviously senile. Pris put them both in their late fifties or early sixties, not completely safe from the grasp of Alzheimer’s.
She left the doll on the table and went to wake David, but found the bed empty.
He wasn’t in the bathroom either.
“David?” she called. David didn’t answer.
She was certain—fairly certain—that David had been in bed beside her when she leapt out of bed to grab the Amazon guy. He couldn’t have snuck out unnoticed. They didn’t live in a house. There were no alternate routes in the apartment. A linear space.
Pris pushed aside the blackout curtains in the bedroom and looked out at the brick apartment building across the alley, the sole view from their apartment. With effort she lifted the stiff window. Car exhaust, cigarette smoke, airborne grime. Rhythmic bass Dopplering by. An argument. A rare cut of light. Wasn’t it a cliche that New Yorkers were the most isolated, the loneliest—the most alone? Pris felt alone. She felt lonely. She didn’t think of the baby inside her as a presence in the room. She’d heard that other women did. A friend told her that she never felt alone when she was pregnant. “Not even once.” This had not been Pris’ experience.
Things that weren’t there couldn’t keep her company. She remembered that when she first moved to the city, her teenage acne came back. Her chin again battered with zits. The space between her eyes bridged with whiteheads. Her dermatologist told her it was a typical story: the city brought back the dirtiest parts of your body’s past. Your excretions ran on the same nervy city energy as rush-hour train passengers did. She remembered — it was over a decade ago — the bathroom’s wallpaper at the dermatologist’s office in the Village: black skulls against purple velvet. A funhouse mirror above the sink, meant to exaggerate her blemishes. The doctor told her to think of the pimples like roommates about to be evicted.
What an odd metaphor.
She felt unbearably sad, looking at the windows across the alley. Her work could keep her company—would keep her company. With the semester behind her and only a handful of papers to grade, she would have time to spend on her book. If she could find the energy for it. David had promised help, promised a babysitter, a nanny, tantalized her with the progressive paternity leave offered by his firm. He would be good for it, but Pris would have to be assertive in getting what she needed out of him. With shaping he would be a good parent. It was with that same shaping that he’d become a good partner. He supported her passions. He didn’t necessarily try to understand them, but he supported them through occasional affirmations, and always money. He respected her, respected her space. Her research and writing. That had always been enough. Love and pragmatism were closely connected to her.
Shadows moved in the window across the alley. A black cloud of exhaust dissipated just outside the window.
David had also convinced Pris take the year off from adjuncting. Maternity leave for adjuncts was a mere ten weeks—hardly worth sticking around for. And she could more or less count on a couple of classes when she was ready to return. To their credit, her union was trying maneuvering for an expansion of parental leave but there was a stultifying divide between those willing to strike for better conditions and those too afraid of the repercussions. Pris regretted her indifference to the union but not often. In any case, David had promised to be proactive about the nanny-hiring process once the first few months of baby-rearing had passed.
Pris lowered herself onto the couch and scrolled through her phone. She waffled between calling David or handling it on her own. She recalled an old CBT technique to help, rating her anxiety on a scale from zero to ten. At first, she put her discomfort about Harry and Joy at nine, but that felt preposterous. They were odd, yes, but they did not need to cause a nine’s worth of anxiety. She downgraded her anxiety to a four. She did not need to move. She saw now how much of an overreaction that would be. Over-eager neighborliness wasn’t a good reason to move. Frankly, Pris didn’t think she could take another move anyway. Eight months pregnant meant that the baby could arrive at any minute. First babies tended to be late, sure, but one never knew. Joy was only trying to be warm. And if the packages persisted after the baby was born, she would find a solution. She could contact Amazon, or write a letter to Joy—no, speak to her face-to-face. She wasn’t afraid of confrontation.
◆
There was a sound. David shook Pris awake. She couldn’t tell which came first. “Could you get her?”
Before she registered his meaning, she registered the throb of her backache and the desperate itchiness spreading across her breasts. Then she returned to his voice, though some seconds had passed.
“When did you get in?” She couldn’t remember him coming home. She turned to look at him but the blackout curtains were doing what they were intended to do and she could hardly make out her own hands.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Her hands were in the air above her face. She was trying to see them. “What time is it?” she asked.
“It’s late. I had a thing.” She heard the sound. It was crying—a baby, crying. “Could you get her?” he asked for the second time. “Please? I’m so exhausted I can’t move.”
How long had she been crying? She felt awful about it. She was not being a very good mom at all.
Pris tried to sit up a few times before finally managing it. When she swung her legs off the bed, the baby inside her kicked so hard that she jumped. She put her hands to the spot and felt an extraordinary contour, as if the baby’s limb was about to break the surface tension and shoot out, like a spy-hopping whale.
“The baby,” she said, on a mission now. She lifted off the bed and hobbled sleepily into the living room, nearly slipping on the water that had leaked from the column. The Ready-or-Not-Tot was on the kitchen table where she had left it, but that’s not what was crying. The doll in her hands, its head bouncing limply from side to side, was silent. She let it fall to the floor, then walked back into the living room.
She looked down at her bare feet. She was standing in water. Her big toes lifted and slapped the water, making little ripples.
Light was on in the apartment across the alley. Pris could see them clear as day: a couple, the man leaning against the kitchen counter with a beer in his hand; the woman seated, gesticulating. He, coolly observing the dregs of his bottle.
Swishing the bottle. Turning the bottle. She was yelling at him. She had thin brown hair, very straight, that swished whenever she made a point. Suddenly their light went off, though neither of them had moved. When it came back on a minute later, the woman was looking directly at Pris, her neck bent to the side. Then the lights went off again.
Pris lowered herself to the floor and crawled to the base of the column, which she realized was the source of whimpering. She paused on all fours and listened, unsure, unbelieving. She reached out her hand and touched it, gingerly at first, then fully, committing herself to its need for her. She stroked it, shushed it, told it she was right there. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Eventually the whimpering stopped. She had been needed and had been able to satisfy that need.
Her legs were soaked. She stood and found the bathroom, holding her belly lovingly as she walked, then undressed. She could feel the baby’s leg or elbow or knee still poking out against her skin. She wanted to see herself in the mirror. The chain for the light hung above the bathroom sink. She pulled the chain and the light burned her eyes. She stood in front of herself and ran her hand down the flat stomach and screamed.
Then she was in David’s arms, on the bathroom floor. Then, hours later, Pris was in bed again, alone. There was light from the morning on the wall in an outline of what the curtains couldn’t contain.
She dressed, blurry from a bad night. She refused to accept that her elastic maternity jeans were too small. She had a handful of boring formless dresses that she cycled through, but she was sick to death of them. She forced her way into the jeans and selected a top at random from her closet. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, moisturized. She had been so dry and so itchy—her elbows, her upper arms, her forehead. Her hair she pulled into a high pony. Then she left the apartment, stopping on the landing outside her door. She tried to look inside herself, but a mist of exhaustion was blocking her from seeing and knowing.
What did she want out of motherhood? She wanted the baby’s arrival to confirm that she wanted it in the first place.
With the Gladdis’ resealed package under her arm, Pris took the stairs down to the third floor. She walked the hall till she reached 3F, the apartment beneath hers, and knocked. A woman around her age opened the door. Her head tilted, she was threading an enormous gold hoop earring through her ear. She had the harried expression of someone in a hurry, but once she took in Pris her face betrayed concern.
“Can I help you, mama?”
The word caught Pris off guard. She saw the woman glance down at her belly. “I live just upstairs,” said Pris.
She nodded. “Do you need help getting home? Are you all right on your own?”
Pris shifted to see into the woman’s apartment but some kind of media console blocked her view of the living room.
“Do you have one? Does it come through your apartment, too?”
The woman pulled her phone from her back pocket and glanced at it. “I’m going to be late and I can’t be late. Let me walk you back upstairs?”
But Pris didn’t want to go upstairs. “I want to come in,” she said.
The woman shook her head firmly. She seemed to prepare against a threat. “Do you have someone to help you dress?”
“Dress?”
Pris looked down at herself and saw that she was not wearing her maternity jeans and that her hair was not in a high pony but rather in a limp helmet around her face. Her feet were in slippers. One side of the untied belt of her bathrobe rested on the floor. She pushed her way into the woman’s apartment and ran straight into the living room. There were kids’ toys all over the floor, magazines on a coffee table, a lamp with a crooked shade—but no column. Pris gaped at the ceiling and saw something she’d never seen in a city apartment: a ceiling fan. But no column.
“Get the fuck out!” the woman yelled. “Get out! I’m calling the cops!”
Pris turned to her and mumbled an apology, scurrying down the hall and towards the stairwell.
“Crazy bitch!”
The words followed her up the steps. They would have stung if she’d let them— but she was too busy for that. She didn’t stop at her floor but pressed on to the fifth, picking up the Gladdis’ package where she had evidently dropped it.
The door to 5F was open—just slightly. She was about to knock but froze, listening. There was a rustling, a shuffling, a digging sound. Like scooping grains from a glass jar. Or cat food. Joy hummed an improvised melody to herself. Harry was home: his voice was distant, but not too distant. He was in their living room, Pris guessed, trying to echolocate him.
“Nearly lunchtime,” he said.
Joy sing-songed, “I’m on my way.” She walked towards Harry. “Here you are.” “Thank you, dear.” The sound of creaking metal. A hinge. “Bottom’s up.” The cat food pellets cascading out of their receptacle, plopping. Then a separate sound, of water falling into water from a great height.
Pris pushed the door open.
Harry was standing on a stepstool, his face a few feet above the top of the column. He handed something to Joy, something that looked like a wrench or a small tube, then noticed their visitor.
“The neighbor’s here.”
Joy turned. They made eye contact. She said, “You don’t know what you’re looking at, dear.”
Pris nodded dumbly. “Your package,” Pris said.
Joy crossed the distance quickly and took the books from Pris’ outstretched hands. She moved her head so that her lips were just by Pris’ ears and whispered, “You’re very tired, dear. Go get some rest now.” Then she closed the door, leaving Pris in the hallway.
Pris went down a floor and entered her apartment. She walked into the living room and lowered herself to the floor by the column, which was not wet—it was just a column. She rubbed her eyes and felt bone-tired. She felt wretched. It occurred to her that maybe it was the baby that was making her feel wretched—no, not the baby, the pregnancy. In all likelihood it was just ordinary exhaustion. Her weekly appointment with the midwife was in a few days, though she couldn’t remember the last one. She was tired of searching for the difference between Braxton Hicks contractions and real ones. Tired of the uncertainty, the unknowability. David had stopped coming after the first few checkups and tests. She had “let him off the hook.” She remembered using that phrase. Remembered reading, years ago, his best man’s email to the bachelor party group, remembered the directive to “say goodbye” to David. She thought about her research, the book she was writing, her interest in prison studies. She felt oppressive, like the structures she studied. Was she just the walking embodiment of a jail, incarcerating her husband, incarcerating her fetus, soon to be incarcerating her child? She wanted her baby to love her. She wanted it to love her so badly. There was no guarantee it would.
Her phone was on the couch. Pris crawled to it and scrolled through her texts and recent calls list—nothing new, nothing missed. She hadn’t heard from anyone in days. No one from either side. No siblings or siblings-in-law. No friends. David had installed a spam call blocker on her phone a while ago—she wasn’t even getting telemarketers.
Why hadn’t her parents called to check on her? Where were her friends?
David’s voice in her head: They were being respectful. They were giving her space. They didn’t want to add to her stress.
What stress?
She thought about calling her parents, or a friend, her brother in Los Angeles.
But it was midday, midweek. People were working. People were busy.
She called David instead. “Pris?”
She was surprised he picked up, surprised at the sound of his voice. “Pris? I need your help.”
“What’s wrong?”
There was a burst of background noise. “…a mistake. I’m…”
“David?”
The line went dead. She tried him again but got voicemail, then began to panic.
She did a breathing exercise which got her halfway back to normal. Then she crawled onto her bed and tried to find comfort in the warmth. Infinite permutations of David dying zoetroped through her mind.
A couple of hours later she got a call from Lenox Hill Hospital. David had had a seizure. Pris didn’t understand how he had wound up there; his office was in the Flatiron District and Lenox Hill was far uptown. The man on the line told Pris that he’d be released once someone came and picked him up. He was perfectly stable. He’d come by ambulance from The Met.
The elevator was still broken. Pris pictured the four flights of stairs, imagined sitting in a stuffy cab, imagined being in a hospital, exposed, vulnerable. She imagined getting dressed. She imagined sunshine and cigarettes and backfiring automobiles. She imagined being in the world. She remembered how little David had been around these past few days. Where was he going after work?
“I’m almost nine months pregnant,” she said.
“Okay,” said the man. “I’m just calling because he asked me to call. Someone’s picking him up already.”
“Who?”
“Uh,” said the guy. She heard him rifle through papers. “Harris. No—Harry Gladdis.”
◆
She waited up for him, sat in the kitchen for him, paced the living room for him, so she could hear his footsteps in the stairwell. She heard plenty of footsteps, plenty of voices, none his. She heard two pairs of shoes walk past their door and take the stairs to the fifth floor. She waited until it was night and she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. Then she went to bed.
Hours later, sometime in the very early morning, Pris woke to the sound of crying—David crying. He was sitting hunched on the far corner of the bed. Lamp light from the living room illuminated the vertebrae of his spine. His face was in his hands: he was only a disembodied torso.
“You’re home,” Pris whispered. She clicked on the bedside lamp but he barked at her to shut it off.
His back heaved; he was sobbing loudly. She was afraid to get close to him. Her eyes were adjusting but she couldn’t see either side of his face, just his head and black hair bobbing up and down in his hands.
“Do you want me to touch you?” “Yes,” he said, between sobs.
But she was too afraid to move. She realized she hadn’t seen his face in many, many days.
“It finally spoke to me,” he said.
“What did?”
“His body. Through the painting.”
“Were you with Harry?”
“He works there.”
“I remember.”
She realized that he had been going every day. She’d let herself believe he was at work and she was angry at herself for that.
“Harry’s a good person,” he said. “He did a terrible thing, but he’s a good person. He’s a good father.”
“What did Harry do?”
David began to rock again, with more force, more speed, a metronome ticking too fast. “He let me stay after hours. He let me have the room to myself. He believes in me,” David said. “He said I was the one who could see it. The only one. He let me in on secrets no one can know. He told me I could help him. Help us.”
Their dialogue unfolded before her, near visibly. She didn’t know if us meant she and David or David and Harry.
The baby kicked, struggled, repositioned. Her center of gravity shifted dramatically to her right side. She adjusted to support the baby’s new location.
“Help how?”
“Harry’s going to teach me how to be a good father. I’m not going to be a fuck-up like Dad.”
“You’re going to be a good father. You don’t need his help. Joy and Harry are completely crazy. Do you see the things that Joy keeps sending us?”
“People deserve second chances.” “What are you talking about?”
“I heard them saying I was having a seizure. I wasn’t having a seizure, Pris. I was getting a message.”
She didn’t want to know.
“Pris, ask me. Ask me, Pris.”
She didn’t want to ask.
“Ask me, Pris.”
She swallowed. “What did Harry do?”
“He’s a good father.”
Pris remembered the photographs Joy showed her. She remembered that they had lost all of their boys but one.
“Where is Charles Gladdis?” she asked, as quietly as possible.
His rocking deepened.
“David?”
“He said it was an accident…an impulse…he couldn’t control it. He was so angry.
They had just moved into their apartment and it was right there—he called it a portal. I don’t remember the exact word. They didn’t know where it went. They didn’t realize that our place and theirs had been one unit. He thought it went all the way to the basement. It told him how to save him. He had lost five sons. Five. Can you believe that, Pris?”
Pris said she couldn’t.
“Do you remember what I told you about anamorphosis?”
Pris said she didn’t.
“The secret images you can only see from a certain angle? Hans Holbein was famous for them. Harry said he noticed it one day—just like that. No one knows about it. All of Holbein’s anamorphoses are documented except this one. Harry’s the only one who knows about it. He took the painting off the wall and he put it on the floor. And I laid on it. I laid my body on the body of Christ. That was the angle. I had to be above him. I could smell him. His wounds. His putrefaction. But he felt alive; he felt warm. His warmth spread through me, through the oils. My skin absorbed his. And the message—Harry translated for me. He was with me the whole time. He was in my ear, whispering to me, translating. It was transcendent. It was like—remember when we did acid? It was like a bad trip—that quality of the intensity, of being untethered, of being really, really scared—but the inverse of that. Harry kept me from spinning away. He kept me here,” said David. He let his hands find the mattress. “Here.”
It seemed like he was waiting for her to respond. She said, “Do you feel like you’re here now?”
“I am here now.”
“What was—what did the painting tell you?”
“They wanted a girl. They wanted Charles to be a girl. It would have been different if they’d finally had a girl. It wasn’t the painting that was speaking to me.”
“Was it Jesus?”
David laughed. “No, Pris. I’m Jewish. Jesus doesn’t speak to me.”
“Was it—the painter? Hans—?”
“No. It wasn’t Hans Holbein the Younger.”
She was getting frustrated. She hadn’t asked for a part in David’s play. “You don’t have to be like your father, David. It’s a choice. You can decide to be better. I know you hate it, but with the right therapist, you could figure it all out.”
He nodded, not listening. “Harry said I was like a kind of antenna. That’s how he described it.”
“None of this is like you.”
“If this isn’t like me—what is like me?”
A valid question. She could ask it of herself. What is like anyone? “I think you’re more grounded,” she offered, but he ignored her.
“It was Charles. Harry translated. He said he couldn’t speak to his son without me. He said he knew it the moment we moved in. They knew it even before we moved in. They saw us when we came with the broker. Harry said they even spoke to us. They said hi.”
Pris didn’t respond.
“He wants to thank you,” David said, lifting off the bed.
“You’re scaring me.”
“He gave me permission. He gave them permission. To stop taking care of him. To finally say goodbye. I think we were able to help them grieve. So they can finally move on.” He appeared to tear up. “I think it’s really beautiful.”
She watched him walk the length of their bedroom and pause before entering into the light of the living room.
“Charley found a way home.”
He was wearing only his underwear—old white briefs with a partially detached waistband. She rose and felt a fist clench inside her, pulling her down. She grabbed hold of the door for support. A contraction. Maybe even a real one.
How can you tell a real contraction from a Braxton Hicks contraction? How can you tell if your body is practicing or performing?
Her studies involve the intersection between the theory of the horrible and the practical implementation of the horrible.
So, what’s the difference between theory and practice?
In theory, David is still the man Pris married. He has a stable job, is mostly intuitive about things like chores, argues fairly but passionately, prefers the company of her friends and family to his own, has secret, quaint interests like Victorian poetry and rollerblading that embarrass him, is responsible with money, is good in social situations. He can cook. He cleans thoroughly. He is a bad driver but can fix a flat tire.
In theory, they have transformed their apartment into a safe and nurturing place for a newborn. In theory, they turned the second bedroom into a welcoming nursery with blackout curtains, a crib, a changing table, a dresser, a diaper pail, a white noise machine, a mobile, a shelf for stuffed animals, a shelf for books. They have the expensive nursing pillow and the modesty scarves and they have an overnight bag for the hospital, with snacks and sports drinks and changes of clothes zipped up and standing at the ready near the front door. They have a cozy nook in the living room with light and plants and an antique walnut letter writing desk that Pris can just barely squeeze her knees under. Given the constraints of the place, it’s wonderful for Pris’ work.
In theory, the panopticon is the perfect prison, as it requires only one guard to exert control over hundreds of prisoners. The guard sits in the center of the building, in his inspection house, where he can’t be seen by the prisoners. He can see all of them from where he sits but they can’t see him. They feel that they could be watched at any moment, and they behave accordingly. They behave well. They avoid pain and seek, instead, pleasure.
In practice, the prisoners lose their minds from the stress. From the constant observation—real or imagined.
In practice, her second contraction came very soon after the first. Her lower back seized up, her knees wobbled, she clung tighter to the door frame. David walked past the column and down the short hallway to the front door, not noticing his wife in pain. He opened it, letting Harry and Joy inside. He followed the neighbors back into the living room. Joy carried a stack of tightly folded towels.
Harry held an ax.
In practice, stress can induce labor.
In practice, Joy knelt before the column, laying out the towels in a circle around its base, then lit a number of fragrant candles and placed them in the windowsills. When she was finished, she sat on the couch, smoothing out the wrinkles in her black skirt. David stood by their TV cabinet, his hands hanging by his side. Harry moved towards the column, testing the weight of the ax, circling it—then, without any fanfare, he swung.
The first strike made a shrieking sound that pierced the calm air. Pris cowered in the doorframe. The second strike landed, a thicker, quieter sound. Water trickled out of the gash. Pris felt fluid shoot down her legs. As Harry readied the ax, she realized how special this made her. Only fifteen percent of women. He swung again, the third strike giving way to a torrent, quickly saturating the towels and cascading towards Pris, soaking her feet. The water was warm.
One more strike from Harry’s ax opened the column up—it emptied itself of its contents: cat food and chemicals, a child’s rattle and rubber bib, and, as Pris lowered herself to the floor—humbled, desperate, yearning to meet her baby—a set of bones too small to be mature, too old to put back together, and too sad for any expecting mother to have to see.