THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 75
should jerk off today so we can do it
Friday, F.Y.I.”
We were forced to apply all kinds of
porn to the problem.
“Do you think any of them are at-
tractive?” she asked.
“Santa’s helper.”
She didn’t lay a hand on me when
we did it anymore, and afterward I was
sorry to have to put her through this
insemination. When we weren’t con-
ducting our marital affairs, I was cor-
dial. As a couple, we were finished,
though still copulating. Between the
dirty footage and the dregs of hope, the
furtive inelegance of our biological ne-
cessity, we stayed in business.
That summer, I travelled to a li-
quefied-natural-gas ship in the Gulf of
Mexico, and when I came home there
was nothing left to fix, nothing left to
want, and I sat shaking like a coward.
But she had news. Then she was ten
weeks pregnant, and twelve....
We got the chance to leave our his-
tory behind, transcend our suffering
through a whole new language, one
without freighted insults, and threats
to end things or to bankrupt the other
and cut off his dick. We traded old
problems for new ones as the preg-
nancy blossomed into another kind of
misery that I could only witness: an
acid stomach at the end of her first tri-
mester, so powerful she had to sleep
practically standing against a wall; mys-
terious pains that shot down her legs,
an agony that drove her, crippled and
pantsless, into sobbing pleas for Vico-
din. She became clumsy, forgetful, and
fun. We were both a little amazed, and
she ate like a crocodile, and laughed at
her belly, and her anguish gave me trac-
tion. That she held my DNA mattered,
and I caught myself staring dreamily,
and smooched her for no reason, and
sniffed her hair, and did her laundry,
and anytime I heard her in the other
room, breathing hard as she attempted
to put on her shoes, a nameless eupho-
ria overtook me. Something was hap-
pening to her, for our sake, and she be-
came more, somehow—more willing,
more sturdy, tenderly accepting of what-
ever I did to comfort her. At last, it
wasn’t her fault, and it wasn’t my fault,
and it wasn’t the kid’s fault. The kid
was invisible, though unapologetic and
a little cruel, considering. We’d have a
baby soon, it would be as simple as
that; it wouldn’t be anybody else’s, al-
though I had no idea what it would be.T
he nurse appeared, holding a bot-
tle of formula the size of a tube of
lipstick, and asked if I wanted to do the
feeding. Before I could start, we had to
do the diaper. Before that, I had to put
on a gown. The nurse opened the hatches
of the isolette and I reached in. A green
plastic splint was taped to the baby’s
right arm to hold it flat for
the shunts of her I.V.s. There
were five very thin wires stuck
to her chest with sticky pads,
and one thicker wire taped
to her ankle, and the wires
draped down to the floor and
then up to a monitor above
her. I had to dodge all those
to get the diaper on my kid,
as her body wilted in my
hands. The top parts and the
bottom parts didn’t seem con-
nected. The middle was the droopiest.
And then she began to wail, a faint,
crackly sound, thrashing weakly, and
kept going and wouldn’t stop, because
I was standing on the wires, ripping
them off her skin. The alarm blasted,
signalling heart failure. It was the same
bone-jangling shriek that comes out of
a fire alarm. Another nurse appeared,
but mine waved her off, pressed a but-
ton to stop it, and then helped lift the
wires out of the way.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right.”
The baby seemed to be sleeping again.
“There’s poo on her foot,” the nurse
said. “And you’ve got the diaper on
backward.”
The diaper had a picture of Baby
Elmo on the front. I had to pull the tabs
to the edge of the picture.
Then the nurse slid a U-shaped pil-
low around my waist and tightened the
strap and I wore it like a guy selling pea-
nuts at the ballpark. She showed me
how to keep the baby upright with one
hand, bottle in the other, one finger of
that hand pressed up under the baby’s
chin, to remind her to suck. I did that.
She started eating like crazy.
In order to eat, a kid needed to suck,
swallow, and breathe at once, but the
brain wasn’t wired for that until it was
fully cooked. In this case, that was twomonths away. So with possible choking
and asphyxiation looming, the idea now
was to not kill her. I had to hunch about
ten feet over to see what I was doing. I
got a crick in my neck. She needed to
eat every two hours, or things would
spiral down from here and a new plan
would go into effect. She’d been doing
O.K. so far.
“What a cutie,” said a woman in a
rocking chair a few feet away, holding
her baby. It was the first compliment.
It was such a lie that it hurt
to hear. My kid was purple
and scrunched and writhing,
with a crabby look on her
face like that of a guy on line
at the Department of Motor
Vehicles.
“Thanks.” I felt ridiculous.
“She’s a little bug.”
A man leaned over the
woman’s shoulder. “Well,
now,” he said. He also held a
kid, wrapped tight. He swung
it around in the crook of his arm like a
salami.
“I’m Lizzie,” the woman said in a
high-pitched voice, waving her baby’s
hand. “What’s your name?”
“I don’t know.” My kid didn’t have a
name yet.
They’d been in the nicu for eight
weeks. They had twins, a boy and a
girl. Until today, the boy had been
across the hall in an even more in-
tensive intensive care. They explained
how to read the monitors, and pointed
out the stash of sticky pads for the
wires, and told me how much this
place cost a day, and laughed because
they couldn’t pay for it and their par-
ents were dead. The woman was short
and svelte with dark eyes, and the guy
was tall, bald, and heavyish, and looked
like a hippopotamus. As they laughed,
the boy baby’s breathing dipped on-
screen. When the number turned red,
the woman stood and killed the siren
as the dad waved a wand in front of
the kid’s nose, casually, as if he were
misting a fern.
“That’s apnea,” the dad said. “That’s
normal. It’s what we all do—we stop
breathing between breaths.”And it was
especially normal in infants, he said, and
even more in preemies.
The twins had been born three
months early, barely a pound each, and