Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“Have you talked to Dorothy? Isn’t there some, I don’t know, some kind of crazy midwife thing they can do? Some root you can chew or something?”

Cara took hold of his shoulders, and pushed him away from her so that she could look him in the eye.

“Prostaglandins,” she said. “And you’ve got them.”

“I do? Where?”

She looked down at his crotch, trying to give the gesture a slow and humorous Mae West import.

“That can’t be safe,” Richard said.

“Dorothy prescribed it.”

“I don’t know, Cara.”

“It’s my only hope.”

“But you and I—”

“Come on, Richie. Don’t even think of it as sex, all right? Just think of that as an applicator, all right? A prostaglandin delivery system.”

He sighed. He closed his eyes, and wiped his open palms across his face as though to work some life and circulation into it. The skin around his eyes was crepey and pale as a worn dollar bill.

“That’s a turn-on,” he said.

He took off his clothes. He had lost twenty-five pounds over the past several months, and he saw the shock of this register on Cara’s face. He stood a moment, at the side of the bed, uncertain how to proceed. For so long she had been so protective of her body, concealing it in loose clothing, locking him out of the bathroom during her showers and trips to the toilet, wincing and shying from any but the gentlest demonstrations of his hands. When she was still relatively slender and familiar he had not known how to touch her; now that she loomed before him, lambent and enormous, he felt unequal to the job.

She was wearing a pair of his sweatpants and a T-shirt, size extra large, that featured the face of Gali Karpas, the Israeli kung fu star, and the words TERMINATION ZONE. She slid the pants down to her ankles and lifted the shirt over her head. Her brassiere was engineered like a suspension bridge, armor plated, grandmotherly. It embarrassed her. Under the not quite familiar gaze of her husband, everything about her body embarrassed her. Her breasts, mottled and veined, tumbled out and lay shining atop the great lunar arc of her belly, dimpled by a tiny elbow or knee. Her pubic bush had sent forth rhizoids, and coarse black curls darkened her thighs and her abdomen nearly to the navel.

Richard sat back, looking at her belly. There was a complete miniature set of bones in there, a heart, a pleated brain charged with unimaginable thoughts. In a few hours or a day the passage he was about to enter would be stretched and used and inhabited by the blind, mute, and unknown witness to this act. The thought aroused him.

“Wow,” Cara said, looking at his groin again. “Check that out.”

“This is weird.”

“Bad weird?” She looked up at Richard, reading in his face the unavoidable conclusion that the presence of the other man’s child in her body had altered it so completely as to make her unrecognizable to him. A stranger, carrying a stranger in her womb, had asked him into her bed.

“Lie back,” he said. “I’m going to do this to you.”

“There’s some oil in the drawer.”

“We won’t need it.”

She lowered herself down onto her elbows and lay, legs parted, looking at him. He reached out, cautiously, watching his hands as they assayed the taut, luminous skin of her belly.

“Quickly,” she said, after a minute. “Don’t take too long.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Just — please—”

Thinking that she required lubrication after all, Richard reached into the drawer of the nightstand. For a moment he felt around blindly for the bottle of oil. In the instant before he turned to watch what his hand was doing, his middle finger jammed against the tip of the X-Acto knife that Cara had been using to cut out articles on nipple confusion and thrush. He cried out.

“Did you come?”

“Uh, yeah, I did,” he said. “But mostly I cut my hand.”

It was a deep, long cut that pulsed with blood. After an hour with ice and pressure they couldn’t get it to stop, and Cara said that they had better go to the emergency room. She wrapped the wound in half a box of gauze, and helped him dress. She threw on her clothes and followed him out to the driveway.

“We’ll take the Honda,” she said. “I’m driving.”

They went out to the street. The sky was obscured by a low-lying fog, glowing pale orange as if lit from within, carrying an odor of salt and slick pavement. There was no one in the street and no sound except for the murmur of the Hollywood Freeway. Cara came around and opened the door for Richard, and drove him to the nearest hospital, one not especially renowned for the quality of its care.

“So was that the best sex of your life or what?” she asked him, laughing, as they waited at a red light.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “It wasn’t the worst.”

The security guard at the doors to the emergency room had been working this shift for nearly three years and in that time had seen enough of the injuries and pain of the city of Los Angeles to render him immobile, smiling, very nearly inert. At 2:47 on the morning of May 20 a white Honda Accord pulled up, driven by a vastly pregnant woman. The guard, who would go off duty in an hour, kept smiling. He had seen pregnant women drive themselves to have their babies before. It was not advisable behavior, certainly, but this was a place where the inadvisable behaviors of the world came rushing to bear their foreseeable fruit. Then a man, clearly her husband, got out of the passenger side and walked, head down, past the guard. The sliding glass doors sighed open to admit him. The pregnant woman drove off toward the parking lot.

The guard frowned.

“Everything all right?” he asked Cara when she reappeared, her gait a slow contemplative roll, right arm held akimbo, right hand pressing her hip as though it pained her.

“I just had a really big contraction,” she said. She made a show of wiping the sweat from her brow. “Whew.” Her voice sounded happy, but to the guard she looked afraid.

“Well, you in the right place, then.”

“Not really,” she said. “I’m supposed to be at Cedars. Pay phone?”

He directed her to the left of the triage desk. She lumbered inside and called Dorothy.

“I think I’m having the baby,” she said. “No, I’m not. I don’t know.”

“Keep talking,” said Dorothy.

“I’ve only had three contractions.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Contractions hurt.”

“They do.”

“But, like, a lot.”

“I know it. Keep talking.”

“I’m calling from the emergency room.” She named the hospital. “Richard cut his hand up. He … he came over … we …” A rippling sheet of hot foil unfurled in her abdomen. Cara lurched to one side. She caught herself and half-squatted on the floor beside the telephone cubicle, with the receiver in her hand, staring at the floor. She was so stunned by her womb’s sudden arrogation of every sensory pathway in her body to its purposes that, as before, she forgot to combat or work her way through the contraction with the breathing and relaxation techniques she had been taught. Instead she allowed the pain to permeate and inhabit her, praying with childish fervor for it to pass. The linoleum under her feet was ocher with pink and gray flecks. It gave off a smell of ashes and pine. Cara was aware of Dorothy’s voice coming through the telephone, suggesting that she try to relax the hinge of her jaw, her shoulder blades, her hips. Then the contraction abandoned her, as swiftly as it had arrived. Cara pulled herself to her feet. Her fingers ached around the receiver. There was a spreading fan of pain in her lower back. Otherwise she felt absolutely fine.

“You’re having your baby,” Dorothy said.