Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“Any fucking cabs out here?” Eric said, and walked past them, off the sidewalk, looking east up Ninth. There were no cars in sight for more than two blocks, and only a pair of forlorn headlights in the distance promised a break. But even that wasn’t a cab. Eric cursed himself for using the garage in the building. It was closed from two to six in the morning. On Tenth Street there was all-night parking, but that cost an extra thirty bucks a month. The rule of going first class — any attempt to escape its tyranny ended in punishment. This little attempt at a savings had never once been inconvenient, but what a ghastly accounting there might be tonight.

He heard the kids whisper behind him in a rapid chorus, punctuated by a contemptuous snort of laughter. “I don’t take cabs, man!” the tall one said. Eric had his back to the teenagers — his shoulders tingled, as though developing radar to protect him from surprise — and he couldn’t tell if the comment was seriously addressed to him. He decided to ignore it.

The traffic lights in the distance turned green, but apart from the lone car, no others appeared. He turned around to look toward the uptown avenue. Only after Eric found himself staring at the trio did he realize it seemed like a reaction to the leader’s remark.

“You hear what I say?” the tall one spoke. He sucked on the joint and offered it to the others, stretching his arm behind him, the joint pinched daintily between two fingers. It was taken.

Eric didn’t want to be this person standing outside a building with a wife in labor confronted by the three stoned black teenagers spoiling for an incident. The sociological logic of the situation, reducing him and them to blank numbers in a simple equation, undoing the romance, the pleasant fear, of him and Nina at the instant of his child’s beginning — this was to be the memory? These stupid kids menacing him? His conversion from a young street-smart New Yorker to some timid bozo unable to get his wife to the hospital?

“Look!” Eric yelled. “My wife is in labor! I’m gonna get a fucking cab! Do you understand!” he shouted at an even louder volume than he had begun. It did him good, expelling not only tension but fear as well into the orange haze. The kids stood still, almost like statues, children absorbing an expected reproof. “Either help me, kill me, or get the fuck out of here!”

“Hey, man,” the tall one said slowly.

The lobby door opened. Nina appeared, carrying the little bag, its size ludicrous by contrast with her bloated stomach. “Eric,” she said in a calm, intimate voice, as if they were in bed together going over the events of the day. “Let’s start walking. Maybe we’ll get one on the way.”

Behind her, skulking in the doorway, Gomez shouted in a tone of nervous bravado: “The cops are parked around the corner! At the deli. Maybe they give you a ride.”

What a stupid transparent lie, Eric thought, disgusted.

The teenagers thought so too. The one who until now had backed away, had seemed most ready to flee laughed explosively and stepped forward to answer Gomez. “Kiss my ass, motherfucker,” he said, giggling from the dope.

“Watch your language!” Gomez scolded like an old woman.

“I don’t watch shit!” the giggler screamed, extending his right hand, a whooshing sound announcing the switchblade’s existence before the orange light glowed on its surface.

Eric felt himself shrink, his huge frame, filled out by his studious exercising, broad at the shoulder, narrow at the waist, his long arms, powerful enough to snap the kid’s arm in half, his thick thighs, and elastic calves, strong enough to bound over in a stride: the adult renovation on the puny body of his childhood detonated in a puff of demolition, reversing history, replacing the skyscraper with frail clapboard. He was little again.

We’re going to die and I can’t stop it.

Gomez seemed to lose his mind, his former panic replaced with insane boldness. He came out of the lobby doors and shouted at the kids: “What’s the matter with you! You crazy! You want to go to jail!”

“I’ll open you up!” the kid said, and made two slashes in the air to illustrate how.

Get between them, Eric told himself.

“You punk! You don’t have the cojones !” Gomez answered.

Nina walked away from the group, straight at Eric and the gutter. “There’s a cab!” she said with delight, and no fear, in her voice.

Eric turned to see a free taxi glide across the street, its turning signal blinking, angling straight for him, a guided missile adjusting with its target’s dodges. He stepped back to preserve his toes. The driver stopped and smiled at him knowingly. “What hospital?”

“Beth Israel,” Nina answered, and opened the door.

“That’s easy,” the driver said.

“I don’t want to fuck with you,” Eric heard Gomez say while Eric automatically followed Nina into the cab. The leader of the teenagers had turned to face the taxi, ready to challenge it. Gomez shouted and waved his hands disdainfully at the kid with the switchblade. The knife bearer remained in a melodramatic crouch, still pointing the blade where Gomez had stood earlier, ignoring the back and forth of Gomez’s angry pacing.

“Trouble?” the driver asked them, staring at the scene. “Should we do something?”

Nina leaned across Eric and rolled his window down. “We’re all right, Gomez! Thank you! Go to sleep!”

The leader of the kids, his face as still as the impassive mask of a sentinel, moved his lips. “Good luck,” he said.

Gomez seemed to pay no attention to Nina. He continued to lecture the switchblade holder. “What you mean making all this noise at night? People are sleeping!”

“We can go,” Nina concluded. The driver nodded and pulled away, taking the turn at the corner without slowing, so the cab swung out wide. Nina toppled into Eric’s lap. She smiled wanly at him.

And then her face scrunched up in pain. “Here comes another one,” she said.

DIANE WAS AFRAID. She studied the bubbles in the IV line, telling herself they couldn’t be air pockets that would enter her vein, travel to her heart, and stop it — but fearing anyway that they might be. And she hurt. A pain that had begun as a dull ache was now intense, pulsing from the base of her skull to her forehead, as if someone were trying to pry it off.

She complained. Slowly, very slowly, her complaints were answered. The headache (what a diagnostic understatement of her agony) was a side effect of her epidural, she was told. Sometimes during surgery it moved around, becoming, in effect, a spinal tap, and led to some sort of fluid movement that caused a severe headache. They didn’t want to give her a potent painkiller; she got a part Tylenol, part codeine tablet instead. That merely reduced the wrenching, stabbing pain to a bruised, throbbing hurt — a taunting reminder of life without the top of her head coming off, thereby making the resumption of intense pain more dismaying. She always seemed to need the next dose of Tylenol/codeine an hour before she was allowed to have it.

And then, any movement of the lower half of her torso was scary. Sometimes she suspected the incision in her belly wasn’t closed and her insides were spilling out. Usually her body sent a sharp order of distress, freezing her in place, wincing until the wave of nauseating weakness, soreness, and ache was overwhelmed by the oppressive pounding in her skull. It was then she felt grateful for the headache.

She hated the television in her room. It was mounted above the molding, way up in the air, positioned for a platform bed that hadn’t been built. The location gave a better view of its dirty plastic bottom than the broadcast. When off, the blank screen appeared to be a gray that she speculated was a layer of dust. When she turned it on, the picture looked old, the colors from another era, the shape excessively curved, reminding her of being alone on Saturday mornings watching farm programs while her mother slept late.