Xhenet Aliu - Brass

“Who?”

“The mother of Christ, our lord and savior.”

Bashkim rubbed his temples. “You are not her.”

“I know.”

“Not even a little bit her.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, I will be away for a little while.”

There was no reason for him to flinch the way he did. I knew it was coming.

“How long?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe two, three weeks.”

I sank down deeper into the pillows. They were new, too, thick stuffed things that kept my neck at an unnatural angle. After all my lobbying and whining for a real mattress, the damn thing was harder on me than the floor was.

“We haven’t decided on a name for the baby,” I said, some kind of halfhearted attempt at protest.

“The baby is not here yet.”

“Yeah, but you’re supposed to decide ahead of time.”

Bashkim pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, looked at it and then at me, and put it away again. “I like Jak. J-A-K. It looks Albanian and American both.”

“What do you like for a girl?”

“I have not thought about for a girl.”

“You should,” I said. “Just in case.”

He might as well have been on the plane somewhere over the Atlantic already, as far away as he looked to me. He cracked his knuckles one by one, each of them at a slightly different pitch, as if someone were lightly tapping the toy xylophone in the baby’s room. “My mother was named Luljeta,” he said. “It is a nice name.”

“Was she a good person?” I asked.

“She lived through hell, and you could see it. But yes, she was a good person,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll see.”

“I will be back for the birth, though. Hold on as long as you can,” he said.

I almost laughed at how naïve he sounded then, and I almost cried for the same reason, but instead I just closed my eyes and opened them only once more that night, when he woke me to tell me goodbye.

He didn’t say goodbye, actually. What he said was “I’m sorry.” He grabbed my hand so tight it hurt and said it again. “I’m sorry. I am.”

I’m the one who said goodbye.

The next time I got out of bed it wasn’t to pee or eat or get ready for work. I sleepwalked to the kitchen, but when I came to I knew exactly what I was looking for, just like I knew, before I even reached my hand into the empty tin, that Greta’s cash loan, that fat paper knot that represented every favor I had ever called in, every hope I dared still hope, was already gone, on its way to the Balkans, and that I was right there at the bottom of that pyramid scheme Dan Rather had talked about on the evening news.

It was a lot of weight to support, and my legs shook until they gave way altogether.

On the floor I wept, but it felt like a performance, like I thought someone was watching me and I had to grieve the right way or I’d fail that test, too. I understood, in theory, that my paddle was way, way down the shit stream, tumbling over a shit waterfall, caught up in a violent shit eddy. I understood, in theory, that the person I was planning to escape from had escaped me instead, just like Greta’s money had escaped me. Every promise I had made to her, every promise I had made to the kid, every promise I never even bothered to make in my head or aloud, were all broken before my water was. But it was all happening an hour before my alarm clock was set to go off, so I thought that maybe none of this actually counted, since the day’s sandglass hadn’t really been turned over yet. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I picked myself up and went back to bed. I told myself I’d come up with a plan later, later being that dangling carrot a few ticks ahead in time, that little future heaven where all my greatest plans are made and deployed.

A pain tore through my middle and I curled into myself and wriggled.

“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud. I thought for a minute: My god, I’m in labor, but I remembered the British doctor who said that labor doesn’t hurt, fear does. I’d been afraid for months without ever feeling these kinds of spasms, so it had to be something else. The new mattress, I thought. Bashkim had bought one made of nails and they punctured my vertebrae as I slept. The alarm clock was still twenty minutes away from ringing, but I cursed it as if it was what had woken me instead of the pain. I could barely move. I needed some Advil desperately but we’d run out earlier that week, between my back pain and Bashkim’s endless headaches—headache, really, a singular one that stretched on forever. We still hadn’t fixed the phone that I’d ripped out, and it was too early to call anyone, and who would I call to run my errands for me anyway? Another spasm hit, and then I had to shit, too. The pain in my back had made me forget about the rest of my body, but eventually I recognized the familiar pressure on my lower gut. I thought that if I could just get myself to the bathroom and rid myself of it, I could flush the pain away, too. The pain wasn’t part of me, it was a phantasm and could be exorcised, I thought. It could be shat out.

I rolled to my side. The pain bit back, gnashing at whatever parts of my insides it could reach. My spleen, it felt like. Or my liver. I never could remember what went where. The baby had taken over my whole middle and pushed all the organs aside anyway.

I clutched my thighs. My sweatpants were soaked through. The comforter was too warm, my body rejecting it after months of acclimating to the cold.

I wanted Bashkim. Or Mamie. Or neither. Pull yourself together, Elsie, you don’t need Bashkim or your mother to shit. I used the wall as a brace to pull myself to my feet and looked back down at the demon bed, surprised it had even been able to support my weight, the thousand pounds of it I had to be carrying. But I was on my feet now, well on my way. I slid across the floor as slow and smooth as I could, but the pain still washed over my back in steady, hard waves. After what felt like a decade, I was closer to the door, and then in another year or two I was at the door, and then I was down the hall, at the bathroom. When I made it inside, I wanted to plant a flag down, declare it mine.

I closed the door behind me and dropped onto the toilet so hard I expected it to shatter into a million porcelain pebbles, but it just rocked a little on its bolts and took on my weight. I waited. The pressure was building but nothing was moving. I waited.

Something was moving. I gasped because something was moving fast and hard inside of me. My insides were about to drop out of me. I put my hand to my crotch to hold it in, but I was too late. My insides were right there, pushing hard and ready to fall.

It wasn’t my guts. It was a hard stone. I’d swallowed a boulder and it was going to pass.

It wasn’t a boulder. It was the head of my daughter, trying to peek into the spacious world outside her tiny walls.

“No,” I told her. I held her back. This wasn’t going to happen now. I’d carried her around for so long like Atlas carried his globe, an eternal punishment. Eternal. One that would last forever. I wasn’t ready for it to end. I wasn’t ready for her, not ever. “No,” I said again, softly. I didn’t have enough air in my lungs to pump out a louder sound. I moaned and sat still. If I didn’t move, the baby wouldn’t, either. I’d sit here forever. I’d take my meals here. I’d invite Greta for Christmas.

She moved again. She’d gotten a taste of air and didn’t want to go back. Or she wanted to stay in there but the walls were closing in on her. I had to convince her to stay inside, where it was warm. I had to help her out or she’d be crushed.

I had to do nothing. She called the shots. She pounded on the walls of my stomach like she was ringing a brass knocker. Let me in. No, actually, let me out.