Happy Mutant Baby Pills Page 19

  “That little fucker’s gonna be a world-shaker” was all Jay said about it. “A regular little X-Man.”

  Oxycodone made his voice deeper than heroin. It sounded like he was croaking from beyond the grave. Which could be disconcerting, and startled the other patrons of Chico’s, who’d look away and mutter low to each other in Spanish. (I thought I heard diablo, but maybe not.)

  I was as close to a techno-peasant as you could be and still know how to text. So when Riegle went on about how “Tumblr’s configurable post queue can automatically publish your posts at designated intervals,” my eyes glazed over even more than they already had. In my world electronic devices were to be procured and traded. Generally for an illicit product . . . I was whatever you call the opposite of cutting-edge. I owned a BlackBerry, the world’s most un-trendy paperweight, and lived guiltily as a bill-paying member of Verizon’s union-busting network.

  When I tuned back in, having spilled coffee on my lap—I was either sleepy or becoming palsied—Nora was declaiming her intentions yet again. The waitress, a plump Colombian mother of five named Daisy, forgave all at the sight of Nora’s belly. But didn’t stay to listen after she wiped up.

  “This is the core of the message, guys. My baby is one hundred percent USDA and AMA approved.”

  This was, indeed what Nora wanted to get out there.

  “That’s cute,” Jay said.

  We hadn’t told them that cute might not be a part of the package. By unspoken agreement we just didn’t explain why we wanted to document and publicize the event. This was the A-bomb, and we were our own Manhattan Project.

  Nora had—disturbingly—found photographs of birth defects that no Calcutta sideshow would have seen fit to display. But once—she deeply believed, and endlessly repeated—once people see, once they really see what the products that surround us do to us, to our sweet, innocent, lovely, never-had-a-say-in-the-matter children . . . Well, “We Are the World.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Secret Bible

  Did we love the child? Did we even care about the child, or was the child just collateral damage?

  These are the questions I imagined people asking later. (Was it, as we coke-projected some artsy pundit later observing, as if, instead of painting Guernica, Picasso had just built a bomb and blown up a child, to show what bombs can do? I didn’t think so, but that’s me.) Knowing what we had subjected our little princess to. Princess, yes: Nora decided it was going to be a girl—that is, if it even had a sex or, anyway, if it had just one.

  Toward the end of the second trimester, if she had smoked enough crack, Nora claimed she could hear the child talking. There were eerie moments, sitting in the backyard of our termite-infested Echo Park bungalow at night, or the time, deep in bed at some pitch-black-curtains-closed three in the afternoon, when she grabbed my arm and eased me sideways, so I was ear to belly, and made me listen. “Do you hear that? What she’s saying? She’s saying she wants to be here. She knows she’s been selected . . . She sounds just like Nina Simone.”

  “Nina Simone. Huh. That would be so odd, in a baby.”

  “She’s not a baby,” Nora corrected me. “She’s unborn. The unborn are an entirely different species. We can’t even be sure how many there are . . . Listen. Can you hear?”

  “Um . . . not really.”

  Nora closed her eyes, altered her voice like an eighties trance channeler. Ramtha! “ ‘Mommy, please, don’t worry about me. I want to help all the other mommies.’ ”

  This spoken in her fetal Nina Simone voice.

  I know how this sounds. It’s just, I had so many feelings when I was with Nora. Fear being just one, at this particular moment. Which she seemed to sense, before she slowly guided her hand back to me, before easing her face south and planting it between my legs, before taking me inside her mouth. It was, I sensed, a gesture. But what wasn’t? She wanted me with her; I wanted to be there. We’d come so far together, down this strange road, I could barely remember not being on it.

  “Relax,” she said, forgetting to switch out of her fetal Nina. It was disturbing, but not that disturbing.

  As she mouthed me, massaging and sucking all at once, I heard the skittering of raccoons who lived under the house. I wondered, insanely, if they knew, and a thought occurred in the midst of my transport. Is there such a thing as a maternal Messiah complex, when a woman believes, not that she’s the Messiah, but that she’ll be giving birth to one? A Mary jones?

  “Mmmm,” Nora moaned, “pop it out and fuck me. Call me a dirty virgin.”

  Then she burst out laughing. A habit with Nora that, mysteriously, didn’t make sex less hot. It was somewhere between role-playing and parody. But I was too close to my appointment with destiny to appreciate it. I had that old premonitory quiver. What got Nora genuinely excited, what pretty much comprised her porn of the moment, was the thought of the toxins roiling out of my testicles.

  Her thumb stayed in my mouth while she pulled her lips off my cock, semi-moaning, mumbling—mostly, I suspected, to herself. “Mary knows what Joseph needs. It’s in the Secret Bible . . .” She ran her tongue up my stomach, to my mouth; with her other hand, now mumbling below coherence, she parted herself, under her clit, and brushed upward with her ring finger. “You know what I want . . . Fill me.” So I did. I had to. (Some men, I know, from the months I put in writing and answering fake questions at Penthouse Forum, have issues with women who masturbate during sex with them. As if it’s a competition. A comment on their ability to please. As opposed—at the other end of the self-pleasuring spectrum—to an act of unselfish, unself-conscious naked appetite. But not on the Internet. In real life. I couldn’t hold out, and filled her with my thrilling, AMA-condemned, poison sperm.

  This may be counterintuitive, but knowing what we’d done—what we were going to do—made us love the mutant munchkin more. Knowing the world of pain to which we had possibly condemned it—and knowing why we’d condemned it—only made us cherish her more. Does that make sense? This baby—can I say this too many times? Have I?—this baby would be a message, a global warning, a kind of toxic inoculation of the entire species. Our baby, the little Mutando, would by her example protect legions of future babies. At least that was the plan.

  “John 3:16.” Nora surprises me with her recitation. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

  “How do you even know that?”

  That badass shrug. “I’ve done a lot of motel time.”

  In any event, that’s what we were doing—giving our only begotten child, so that others wouldn’t perish. Not for their sins—but for the sins of Monsanto and Dow and Squibb and Pfizer, etc. . . . (Not to mention Abbott, who more or less saved my life. Ironies abound . . .) People don’t realize the torments even our staples can wreak. (Thank you, Diet Coke, for aspartame, bringer of stroke and brain cancer.) But after the birth of our child, after the artfully planned full-bore assault accompanying it, they would see with their own eyes.

  Nora and my erstwhile Christian Swingles pals were spending more and more time together, cooking up the social media afterbirth, to make sure of it.

  You see where this is going, right? You want to make God laugh, make a plan, etc. . . . Five weeks before the due date we’d been given, Nora jerked up out of deep sleep to find her sheets soaked. She threw back the blankets, like Jack Woltz in The Godfather before he saw his Arabian horse head gushing blood on his pajamas. Khartoum. She’d broken water and she wanted to unbreak it.

  All the experts tell you to have a hospital bag packed and waiting by the door. But we weren’t expecting a hospital trip for another month. We couldn’t find the car keys, and I noticed burn holes in her T-shirt—technically, my T-shirt—right where you’d expect to get burn holes if you were holding a crackpipe to your lips and the hot rocks kept popping out. She hadn�
�t showered in a while, either, and there was a trace of brownish gold around her mouth where she must have huffed something without turpentining her face afterward. “Honey,” I said, as gently as possible, “you have to at least wash your face and change into something else. You don’t want some ER nurse to get suspicious.”

  “Fuck that!” Nora was hysterical. Then I realized it wasn’t hysteria, it was anger. She was furious she was going to have the baby and nobody would be there to see. All that planning! All the prepared remarks! All the high-impact photo ops! It was not supposed to be this way. What if a monstrous and deliberately deformed tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to tweet?

  The baby is getting its revenge. That’s what I thought but didn’t say. Nora was already beside herself, throwing shit around the bedroom. She banged her hairbrush off the mirror and cracked it, so her face stared back splintered, like an old horror movie poster.

  “We need Jay! We need Riegle! This ruins everything!

  “I can video with my phone,” I said.

  She pounded her fist on the dresser, hard enough to knock out a few loose mirror shards. “That’s not the plan! You know what we wanted!”

  The plan. Right.

  Here we were, relieving the 1974 Larry Cohen classic It’s Alive. You’ve seen the poster. A stark black-and-white of a baby carriage below the cutline “There’s only ONE thing wrong with the Davis baby . . . IT’S ALIVE!”

  Mom-to-be was such a wreck she decided a little Mexican tar would help. It made me nervous. But everything made me nervous where Nora was concerned. “I’m not criticizing, baby, but are you sure you want to be gowed when you’re having your baby?”

  “I need to be gowed. It’ll kick in the epidural. And don’t look at me like that!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re Mister Fucking Rogers and I’m some fucking degenerate junkie whore.”

  Oddly, she’d asked me to call her that, when we were fucking. (Odder, I kind of wanted her to call me Mister Rogers, but this did not seem like the time to bring it up.) Nor did I bring up my fave fact about everyone’s favorite kiddie host, that his real name—or maybe his middle name—was McFeely. Mister McFeely’s Neighborhood. That’s a whole different show.

  Her contractions had kicked in hard. From none at all to under two a minute. Zero to red zone. Not normal. The last thing I wanted to do was fight, but she needed a target.

  “It’s like,” she went on, “you think you’re better than me. Don’t forget, you’re my accomplice, motherfucker. They come after me, you’re going down too.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. With the payload of mutagens she’d been feeding her fetus, Mommy was bound to be out of sorts. But, as zero-hour drew near, that’s not what had me freaked. I’d been in denial about my own culpability. But how could I be? If Nora was Mama Frankenstein, then I was Fritz, the lurching, hunchbacked creepy assistant.

  I threw a bag together with an extra T-shirt. Literally, a paper bag, like Nora’s, from Vons supermarket. (Where, at the height of low-end junkiedom, I used to work my champion can scam: shoplifting that fifteen-ounce Dinty Moore beef stew, banging it on the curb to put a dent in it, and then returning it for a quick $1.99. Such was my life of crime. Not exactly Goodfellas, but you have to start somewhere. The art of it was maintaining dignity and conveying the muted indignation of a solid citizen appalled by shoddy shelf-stocking. Tough to do when you haven’t changed your pants in a year.) The one suitcase we had was full of Rust-Oleum and Roundup cans. Nora wanted to keep the poison flowing till the bitter end. I threw her T-shirt in the Vons bag along with her Aveeno Active Naturals Positively Radiant tinted moisturizer. (Dying for beauty!) A product so natural, she explained, that it was shown to cause thyroid and brain-signal problems in lab animals.

  The spoon was stained brown after we shot up all the dope. Shoe polish will do that. Lately the tar we copped on Alvarado was cut with the stuff. I don’t know what studies had been done on the subject of IV Scuff Kote abuse, but it had to be as noxious as skin cream. At least there was enough left to spruce up our boots.

  “You’ll need a change of underwear, too,” I said, fishing around on the floor and sniffing for something fresh. Nora saw me with the panties in my face and sneered. “Do we really have time for that, now? This is a catastrophe!”

  “Nora,” I said, thinking to throw her back one of her own pitches, “when Dow killed eight hundred seventeen people in one day at Bhopal, that was a catastrophe.”

  “What that fucking CEO did to me was a catastrophe, too.”

  Have I mentioned I already had doubts? Nascent. Not that she had (or hadn’t) been raped. Molested. Tortured by a family member. Any and all. You rarely meet a hard-core addict who doesn’t have some kind of hard-core abuse in their closet. Or not even in the closet. More like all over the room. That was a given. Then again, before Nora, I never knew one who grew up to be . . . Nora. I’m talking about the big-time CEO end of things. Her claim—and I suppose, using the word “claim,” I am telegraphing my evolving attitude about her veracity. (Not to sound political spokespersony.) I can’t tell you when they started—my doubts—but there, I said it. I sat there, among the toner cartridges, microwaves, paint thinner, and all their toxic friends—and reality curled its fingers around my throat. My mouth went dry.

  As the big moment approached, I began to feel ambivalent. But it was too late.

  I helped her cook up a shot and then slid a needle full of questionable Mexican between her big toe and the next one—her fore-toe?—despite the imminent trip to the hospital. I didn’t mention that New Jersey charged a half dozen mothers with aggravated assault for giving birth to drug-addicted babies. What kind of case would you catch if your child was born rust-proofed? Happily, we weren’t in Jersey.

  By now Nora was groaning in pain. And fighting me. On her back, in bed, squeezing her legs together.

  “This mmmmph this baby is not mmmmphh this baby is not coming out!”

  Forget the labor pains. She did not want to go to the hospital. It was all wrong! She’d come so far. Endured so much. For the chance to record her attack on the plague of capitalism, on what America was doing to itself, on who we are and what we consume and what it does to the most innocent among us. We never even talked about what she was risking personally. Her body, her future, her soul. No question, a woman who uses the health—no, the sickness—of her child to make a point is going to pay for it. Turn your uterus into a fetal test kitchen, folks are bound to have opinions.

  We made it to the door, Nora doubled over, clutching her stomach, walking with her legs jammed together in tiny, mincing steps. I had one arm around her, holding the overstuffed Vons bag with the other, car keys in my teeth. I don’t even remember the drive. Just that the last thing she grabbed going out the door was a Bible. I didn’t even know we had one, or why she kept it in the oven.

  “It will be good for the nuns to see,” she managed, between clenched teeth.

  “Maybe,” I said, “unless they find out you’ve circled all the bad acid shit in Revelations.”

  At this hospital, it all happened fast. Intake. Then—whoosh—right to the ob-gyn. The RN had to snatch the BlackBerry out of Nora’s hand. The plan called for cameras, a news feed, national outrage, international attention, and—at least in Nora’s wish-fulfilling mind—fury-driven and (thanks to her) enlightened global policy change.

  “Are you the husband?”

  Nora was now vibrating on the gurney. They were shoving an IV in her arm. I handled the paperwork. Watched them prepare to whisk her off.

  “Are you the father?” the nurse asked again.

  “No,” I said. (Awkward.) “Just a friend. I’m not the father. We live near each other. She needed a ride.”

  I spoke in a lowered voice, concerned. Though mostly my voice was low because I did not want Nora to hear. Did I love her? Of cours
e I did. Do. Though that moment feels like the proverbial lifetime ago. I have done some very bad things for her, and with her, and—even though I was acquiescing, not initiating—to her.

  But never mind.

  I saw the RN consulting with a doctor at the elevator. Imagined, in that way you do when you’re high, that what I thought they were saying they were really saying. Nurse: “Doctor, there’s something here I think you should see.” I watched the man in the white coat lean over, and then raise his face gravely: “What is this, Citizen Ruth? She’s huffing.”

  Of course, this was just in my head. For all her aspirational toxicity, Nora looked like a healthy mom-to-be.

  In truth, probably nothing of what I thought was said was said. Still, I had to wonder. Had I wiped off the gold smudge-ring around her mouth? Paranoia is just heightened awareness of possibly unlikely, possibly inevitable consequences. Or leaky adrenaline, depending. This was no longer about capitalist fallout. This was about not getting arrested. She was too far along to turn away, and the sourpuss admitting nurse did not hide her opinion on the matter.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Let’s Review!

  Okay. Breathe.

  For the second time: Did we think about the child?

  Of course. We both wanted her to be comfortable. And yes, I know how that sounds.

  We weren’t delusional. We knew what people would say. (As I’ve said.) What they would accuse us of. But the backlash was part of it. The more blowback, the better. The louder they—they being everyone: media, preachers, lawmakers, moms—screamed about what we’d done, the louder we’d scream that it was being done to us. We wanted editorials, hate mail, talk-radio rants, ultimate recognition for the sheer horrific rightness of the point we were making. However horrific the means of making it.