Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

The Baby is startled. The Mother is startled. The Baby starts to scream and redden behind the plastic, but he cannot be heard. He thrashes. “Tell him it’s okay,” says the nurse to the Mother.

Okay? “It’s okay,” repeats the Mother, holding his hand, but she knows he can tell it’s not okay, because he can see not only that she is still wearing that stupid paper cap but that her words are mechanical and swallowed, and she is biting her lips to keep them from trembling. Panicked, he attempts to sit. He cannot breathe; his arms reach up. Bye-bye, outside . And then, quite quickly, his eyes shut; he untenses and has fallen not into sleep but aside to sleep, an odd, kidnapping kind of sleep, his terror now hidden someplace deep inside him.

“How did it go?” asks the social worker, waiting in the concrete outer room. The Mother is hysterical. A nurse has ushered her out.

“It wasn’t at all like the filmstrip!” she cries. “It wasn’t like the filmstrip at all!”

“The filmstrip? You mean the video?” asks the social worker.

“It wasn’t like that at all! It was brutal and unforgivable.”

“Why that’s terrible,” she says, her role now no longer misinformational but janitorial, and she touches the Mother’s arm, though the Mother shakes it off and goes to find the Husband.

She finds him in the large mulberry Surgery Lounge, where he has been taken and where there is free hot chocolate in small Styrofoam cups. Red cellophane garlands festoon the doorways. She has totally forgotten it is as close to Christmas as this. A pianist in the corner is playing “Carol of the Bells,” and it sounds not only unfestive but scary, like the theme from The Exorcist .

There is a giant clock on the far wall. It is a kind of porthole into the operating room, a way of assessing the Baby’s ordeal: forty-five minutes for the Hickman implant; two and a half hours for the nephrectomy. And then, after that, three months of chemotherapy. The magazine on her lap stays open at a ruby-hued perfume ad.

“Still not taking notes,” says the Husband.

“Nope.”

“You know, in a way, this is the kind of thing you’ve always written about.”

“You are really something, you know that? This is life. This isn’t a ‘kind of thing.’ ”

“But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it’s the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.”

“I told you that.”

“I’m quoting you.”

She looks at her watch, thinking of the Baby. “How long has it been?”

“Not long. Too long. In the end, maybe those’re the same things.”

“What do you suppose is happening to him right this second?”

Infection? Slipping knives? “I don’t know. But you know what? I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta just walk a bit.” The Husband gets up, walks around the lounge, then comes back and sits down.

The synapses between the minutes are unswimmable. An hour is thick as fudge. The Mother feels depleted; she is a string of empty tin cans attached by wire, something a goat would sniff and chew, something now and then enlivened by a jolt of electricity.

She hears their names being called over the intercom. “Yes? Yes?” She stands up quickly. Her words have flown out before her, an exhalation of birds. The piano music has stopped. The pianist is gone. She and the Husband approach the main desk, where a man looks up at them and smiles. Before him is a xeroxed list of patients’ names. “That’s our little boy right there,” says the Mother, seeing the Baby’s name on the list and pointing at it. “Is there some word? Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” says the man. “Your boy is doing fine. They’ve just finished with the catheter, and they are moving on to the kidney.”

“But it’s been two hours already! Oh my God, did something go wrong? What happened? What went wrong?”

“Did something go wrong?” The Husband tugs at his collar.

“Not really. It just took longer than they expected. I’m told everything is fine. They wanted you to know.”

“Thank you,” says the Husband. They turn and walk back toward where they were sitting.

“I’m not going to make it.” The Mother sighs, sinking into a fake leather chair shaped somewhat like a baseball mitt. “But before I go, I’m taking half this hospital out with me.”

“Do you want some coffee?” asks the Husband.

“I don’t know,” says the Mother. “No, I guess not. No. Do you?”

“Nah, I don’t, either, I guess,” he says.

“Would you like part of an orange?”

“Oh, maybe, I guess, if you’re having one.” She takes an orange from her purse and just sits there peeling its difficult skin, the flesh rupturing beneath her fingers, the juice trickling down her hands, stinging the hangnails. She and the Husband chew and swallow, discreetly spit the seeds into Kleenex, and read from photocopies of the latest medical research, which they begged from the intern. They read, and underline, and sigh and close their eyes, and after some time, the surgery is over. A nurse from Peed Onk comes down to tell them.

“Your little boy’s in recovery right now. He’s doing well. You can see him in about fifteen minutes.”

· · ·

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.

It is a horror and a miracle to see him. He is lying in his crib in his room, tubed up, splayed like a boy on a cross, his arms stiffened into cardboard “no-no’s” so that he cannot yank out the tubes. There is the bladder catheter, the nasal-gastric tube, and the Hickman, which, beneath the skin, is plugged into his jugular, then popped out his chest wall and capped with a long plastic cap. There is a large bandage taped over his abdomen. Groggy, on a morphine drip, still he is able to look at her when, maneuvering through all the vinyl wiring, she leans to hold him, and when she does, he begins to cry, but cry silently, without motion or noise. She has never seen a baby cry without motion or noise. It is the crying of an old person: silent, beyond opinion, shattered. In someone so tiny, it is frightening and unnatural. She wants to pick up the Baby and run — out of there, out of there. She wants to whip out a gun: No-no’s, eh? This whole thing is what I call a no-no . Don’t you touch him! she wants to shout at the surgeons and the needle nurses. Not anymore! No more! No more! She would crawl up and lie beside him in the crib if she could. But instead, because of all his intricate wiring, she must lean and cuddle, sing to him, songs of peril and flight: “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. We gotta get out of this place … there’s a better life for me and you.”

Very 1967. She was eleven then and impressionable.

The Baby looks at her, pleadingly, his arms splayed out in surrender. To where? Where is there to go? Take me! Take me!