[1] Johnny’s Big Day

A world like this, all comforting miracles – people can change if we really try. The world spins to itself and flies around the sun – I believe that much, there’s faith. But I’ve noticed it tonight, and now I can’t drive the speed from my head. The minute you start to measure that, you can’t forget the numbers. You don’t want to go there, I tell you. You don’t want ever to see that place. Dip your toe in, the world rips it off to the knee and goes on without a burp or a cough. The world some nights is one big dare that you try it. So, okay.

 I can tell you – I’m staring at this – you don’t ever want to know what happens later. The powers tell you the future will be more wonderful than ever when one thing leads to the next, so that leads to this, and then we can all know why everything will be what it all became. Don’t believe it – the world, this world, is never going to tell you how close the future or how long, which, I tell you, is the joke it’s playing. Focken doctors, hired killers, and Emma fears them as much as I loathe them right now. And these are supposed to be the best in all the Dream City. At least when I brought her here, to this wheeled bed in this hard white room, thirty hours ago, there was only one of them, head wrapped in tall linen like an Assyrian priest or a pastry chef, shovel beard down to his chest. More of them have been sliding in sideways since the twenty-seventh hour, crowding out the nurses, not that they’re doing anything. They’re standing there, now me too. I’m no good at hearing, listening, whatever you call it. I can’t organize noise, and she was punching too much of it through the door. Put a graphite in my hand, a bit of chalk, a burnt stick. Show me a wall to draw on, the edge of a newspaper, a patch of mud, something. I can make sense of the world that way. But not all this tormented air and her screams overpowering. So I look no matter how hard. If I die with her if it comes to that, I’ll know that I didn’t just listen and that watching was all I could do for her.

Emma has never suffered quietly. Her face was a twisting mask for the last hour, caught in a thundercloud of sweat-darkened hair. No more – now it’s a crumpled moon, bloated around the edges and collapsed in the centre. The sheet under her is a maze of wrinkles like an old woman’s skin, dark with sweat, the blood seeping through each time they change it. She was blushing five minutes ago every inch of her, but no more.

Carbolic, ether, and defeat have stifled breathing, and the coppery taint of too much human blood. Four or five of them, junior butchers, are munching dinner at the bedside, one pace back. A weisswurst him, an apple him, two others chewing salt rolls and all muttering doctor talk while they watch. The All Highest One at the bed’s foot is staring at her belly, scraping his jaw through his beard. She was screaming off and on for most of the evening, for me, for her grandfather, then for nothing at all. Words have stopped escaping her. That last one, five minutes ago, I knew was the last from how it struggled so hard not to fade. That was her death-facing word, but I’ll never know what it was. Only that it meant to us stop, anything’s better, and that everyone knew it without saying so.

I elbow to the foot of her bed and stare again at two drooping red legs, a little soldier in his helmet. Breach birth. He was almost a boy. A yellowed sheet over her breasts to her throat, spotted and rivered, her face pale and damp, her chin longer somehow. I don’t know the colour of her face – it belongs in a different world. It’s no white you’d ever see in nature. It’s the white of the cloud a life’s soul turns into the moment it goes pffft. Her hair doesn’t wave to me any more. It’s plastered onto the pillow like a sea gone solid, leaching the little colour it has left. Does Death even take colours with him?

‘Get the father,’ the All Highest One says.

‘I’m the father.’

I’m thinking, superficial iliac circumflex, inferior mesenteric artery, vasa vasorum. Words forgotten years ago. And that if anyone has killed her, it’s me. One seed, that’s all. If it had been any other, those months ago. If we’d waited ten minutes, or two, would that have made a difference now? What point is this luck making?

Shovel beard says something I ignore, and says it again, and then pokes my arm and says –

‘We can save the boy, possibly.’

‘Doctors,’ I tell him. ‘I thought you always saved the mother first. Her grandfather told me.’

‘That’s a good deed, not a commandment. She’s gone, Mister Karsch. We can save the boy, maybe, right now.’

‘How do you know she’s dead?’

‘We’re men of science.’

‘You’re saying you don’t know anything.’

His sigh lands like a punch. ‘Look you. Her pupils are uneven, you see that from here. The back of her neck – feel the tendons.’ And he reaches there to show me. ‘They’ve been pressing through for one hundred minutes, and ninety’s the limit. Look at her feet – grey. Another minute, her ankles and so on up. Your boy tore an artery on the way out, bad luck. But he’s getting oxygen yet. We can save him, maybe. You decide.’

‘His name was going to be Johnny.’

‘If you want to baptize him, you’ll have to let us cut. He’s his mother’s son till then. Tell me now, do I try to save a lad?’

He brushes crumbs off his forearms, cracks his knuckles. A cleaning lady comes in pushing a mop at our feet. We step back while she works under the bed, clicking her tongue. How easy should death be? Death isn’t afraid, do you know. That’s the power it has over us and its weakness too: Death thinks fear goes one way.

‘Are you going to let us try, Mister Karsch? It’s all your decision.’

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘Let them rise together in grace.’

‘Wrong answer,’ he says, and body-blocks me out of the way. The strength, the shock. I’m up again in time to see the scalpel go in, a thumbnail blade with the power to gape a crease like that, and a soft, furry head float up from a lumpy pool of blood. He comes up with a tug and a pop, legs last, stone-faced, then snip, and Doctor Salt Roll dangles him by his feet, clears his mouth with a finger, gives him a shake and a slap. No starburst howl from Johnny. The room echoes with his cough, then a high-pitched squeal, then a snarl. He’s angry as hell, just like me, who wouldn’t be. When I look down again, they’re already stitching her and her face is that same white, and I know that shade now: liquid bone, that’s the name. Imagine that before you see it. Emma, you didn’t want to go. You didn’t, and we knew that last, together. You were like the best of us still here in that way if no other – don’t deny your last, I tell you … Let me remember that you’d have chosen another minute.