Mr. Peanut (15 page)

David was holding her diaphragm, the device lathered with white spermicidal paste. It was part of their ritual for him to insert it before he entered her
—a rite of passage
, he liked to joke—but he’d never taken the time to examine the thing, which he did now. It looked like the top of a newly iced cake. He placed it gently on the bedside table, wiped his fingers on the comforter and, while they made love, couldn’t take his eyes off of it. He felt like some virgin triangulating his pleasure, repeating
dead kittens dead kittens dead kittens
so as not to come too fast. He was desperately disengaged. They were procreating. Having intercourse. Twice Mr. Penis went
soft, slippery, and had to be slipped like sausage back into the casing. It was the worst sex they’d ever had. And when he finally came, he thought: It doesn’t matter.

His disengagement—this first thought—haunted him.

“I think I’m pregnant,” Alice told him. And from the two blue lines on the home pregnancy test to her first trip to the OB confirming the same, from the odd dissociation that he felt holding her in his arms in the bathroom and at the doctor’s office—“We’re going to have a child,” she said excitedly—David feared this thought had somehow poisoned her womb, causing a deformity in the fetus, that it had set off some karmic ripple that could only lead to disaster. He knew it wasn’t rational, but the anxiety was relentless. Make her abort this thing, he thought. Wipe the slate and start clean. Then he regretted these thoughts too. He’d gone from feeling nothing to living in perpetual fear, and when he had the opportunity at the end of the month to fly to Honolulu for a week at a gamers’ convention, he was thrilled. Just being near Alice exacerbated his dread, convincing him that something was wrong, perhaps because she’d been terribly uncomfortable as soon as she became pregnant, as if the condition itself was slowly killing her. She suffered a broad range of symptoms: sharp pelvic pain from uterine spasms that doubled her over or sat her down suddenly, clutching her stomach no matter what she was doing, then rendered her still. She was regularly, violently ill for most of her second month. To call it morning sickness would have left out the rest of the day: she clapped her hands to her mouth getting out of bed, into bed, and walking toward the bed, morning, noon, and night. She vomited on the train or the bus. She upchucked out the car window when David drove her to school, her drool trailing from her mouth like a comet tail. She barfed, it seemed, at the mention of certain people and places, at the smell of coffee and curry. Of course these symptoms caused Alice some alarm too, though it was more about the process, the rumors of pregnancy confirmed, something seen on television that was now happening to you. “You really do puke,” Alice said. “You feel like you’ve got the flu, just like they say.” Mostly, she took it in stride. Mostly, she seemed overjoyed. “Mr. Peanut,” she said, “made me sick today. Mr. Peanut,” she went on, “must not be very happy.” She sometimes wondered aloud, “I wonder what Mr. Peanut will look like.”

Ruminant in bed the night before her sixteen-week ultrasound as Alice was ruminating over the toilet, David found himself newly terrified, the pregnancy itself, this thing inside her as deadly as an asp. A child could bring them great joy, true, but it could also kill her. It had killed Alice’s
mother after all—a fact that had somehow got lost. All the medicine and technology, all the focus on the embryo, made you forget about the mother. And so it
did
matter. It mattered because there was risk.

“Come with me to Hawaii in a few weeks,” he said when she finally lay down beside him. He didn’t want her to come and knew she’d say no. But he wanted her to feel wanted, in which case she’d happily stay put. “You need a break,” he added.

“I can’t,” she said, rubbing her belly. “We wouldn’t make it.”

It mattered because there was risk, he thought again. This occurred to him even more powerfully the next day while Alice was stretched out on the table in the ultrasound technician’s darkened room, quiet and made peaceful by the fossil-colored, fun-house-mirror image on the screen, her guts gone calm for now, as if the translucent gel the tech had rubbed over her belly was an anesthetic. David held her hand and watched the screen over the nurse’s shoulder, aware of the difference between their expressions—Alice’s beatific, like the wand pressed to her abdomen was a joystick varying levels of bliss, his own facial muscles tensed into a squint—while they saw the fetus drip and dart into view, its bones gone liquid and then coalescing to hardness again, as delicate as a bat’s now, its movements as quick and as seemingly predatory, a creature built for speed. Suddenly it curled to a stop, the whole body hunched in his wife’s gut.

“It’s moving a
lot,”
the tech said, then looked at them and nodded ominously.

This made him want to ask if something was wrong, but he was too scared. The technician toggled along, capturing images, taking measurements, cropping and enlarging as if she were doctoring a photograph, measuring the diameter of the brain and stomach, checking the vertebrae and spinal cord, magnifying the heart from every angle, the ventricles discretely visible and winking as they sucked amniotic fluid—
blood
, David thought—like the mouth of a giant squid.

Alice turned to him and smiled. “Look at Mr. Peanut!” she said. “Can you believe that’s him?” He smiled back, and when she turned again to watch he squinted once more, aware for a moment that he was holding his breath. Then the tech amplified the volume of the fetus’s heart—background noise he’d barely noticed, ambient but unrecognizable until now, a sound of
p
’s and
e
’s mixed with saliva, a lisping that filled the room, like boys make when they imitate the bang of a gun.

Don’t you hurt my wife, David told it.

Her pregnancy was progressing normally, Dr. Redundi assured her after the exam, and true, the OB explained, the morning sickness she was suffering
from was acute, but not uncommon. The uterine spasms might be indicating other problems, perhaps endometriosis; if they continued for another week or so, she’d want to look carefully at Alice’s diet. But she was satisfied for now. The baby looked perfectly healthy. Her discomfort could abate at any time. So when Alice experienced a complete cessation of symptoms several days before David was to leave for Hawaii—it was her twenty-second week—she changed her mind and decided to go along.

She didn’t like to fly. In fact, she loathed it. It was a testament to the power of movies that
Fearless
, about a group of passengers who miraculously survive a plane crash, had permanently scarred her, traumatizing her with an extended graphic sequence—they’d watched the film together—that depicted the inside of the cabin upon impact: the seats came unbolted in rows and carried people on crests of force, the energy ripping infants from mothers’ arms and sending luggage down the aisles at warp speed, slicing through dangling ganglia of oxygen masks, the tangled tubing indistinguishable from flayed guts, the passengers wide-eyed when the rent fuselage revealed gashes of ground and sky. This montage, David imagined, must have played itself out over and over again in her dreams, always pressing near the surface of her consciousness the moment she got near an airport, because even at the gate her breathing became shallow and by the time they reached the walkway she was dizzy, her face seasick-green, and when the plane finally took off, after the accusation that he’d forced her on board, her palms were sweating like tidal pools in his own and her breath went rank for reasons he didn’t understand.

“What was that?” she said after there’d been a rumble, as they climbed, as Queens fell away, her wedding ring pinching his finger until his skin nearly broke. She buried her face in his arm.

“Those are the wheels,” David said, pressing his forehead to hers. “They’re retracting.”

She clung to him tightly as he waited and held her close. She seemed to relax, finally, and this relaxed him too. She’d closed her eyes, so he closed his for a time. At every sound, her fingers contracted in his. It was a night flight under a full moon, and soon they’d climbed over that impossible land on top of the clouds, that great glacial meringue as pristine as a ceiling and also never to be explored. Ever since he was a boy this particular view had thrilled him. Give him emptiness. Endless fields of snow. A city devoid of people, wide avenues empty of cars. His thoughts turned to the apocalyptic movies he’d loved growing up:
Damnation Alley. A Boy and His Dog. The Omega Man. (The last man on earth
, its poster read,
is not alone.)
The plots now escaped him, but they weren’t important. It was the open space
that he recalled. The freedom. Vastness. Speeding down Park Avenue at a hundred miles per hour, weaving through expressways littered with wreckage, the smoke and gutted skyline rising into view. Give him strange beds in the apartments of total strangers. Let him forage without guilt through other people’s rooms, pull down clothes from racks in abandoned stores, spend nights in ancient buildings preserved in museums. In these places he would find his true love. She was out there. When they found each other they wouldn’t be afraid; each would look at the other and understand.

It was odd to be so pleasantly haunted: to want such things. These were dreams, after all, engendered by someone else’s. Had he and Alice found such an understanding? He could remember believing they had. Yet it was more often in his own dreams that he recalled this, in the dreams of somehow losing her that he became aware of his singular need. “I had the worst dream,” he would say, just waking, still half asleep. “Tell me,” she said. “I dreamed that you left,” he told her. And at the same time it was the view out his window and those thoughts of living at the end of possibility that woke him up now, increasing altitude bringing him back to earth. We’re having a child, he thought, and it
does
matter. This fear and anxiety—for Alice, about everything—carved not a path for love but a canyon, wide enough and strong enough to channel the greatest force.
We’re having a child
. Could he feel it twitching inside there? He put his hand on her stomach. No. Becoming aware of their child inside of her was
his
part of the process. It was a beautiful, wonderful thing, as mysterious and remarkable as flying and life’s greatest surprise, because you
knew
it was coming but still couldn’t inhabit the womb; you could glimpse but not know this person any more than you could wander through this world of clouds beyond the window. You could only peer, and that only set you back to dreaming. Holding his palm to his wife’s stomach, David resolved that he must be strong.

She slept through dinner and he set hers aside for later. After he ate, he dozed briefly himself. When he woke, the first movie they were showing was ending. He checked the time. The captain announced they were above the Grand Canyon, but David could see nothing but blackness. He removed the safety pamphlet and considered the different points of exit in the event they went down. In an open-water crash, the plane floated all of a piece, as if built for just that. Would he and Alice be able to survive on a desert island? Have their child there? First you must make a fire. But desert islands didn’t exist, or at least the possibility of getting so lost. There were no unknown places in the world.

He ordered himself a drink and when the attendant returned with it, he
discovered he had no cash in his wallet. Alice’s purse sat between them, and searching through it he noticed the small box of Unisom, a sleep aid whose active ingredients were antihistamines and which the doctor had cleared her to take. He figured the length of flight and took two pills himself and ordered another drink, then settled in to watch
Dodgeball
, the movie that had already begun, but the earphones were on the fritz, the sound as garbled and static-filled as a mayday sent from the center of a storm, so he took them off and closed his eyes and then sleep came over him, fairy tale deep, the kind that arrives when everything you have to do on earth is done, that allows you to pass from one world into the next …

He woke to a crash.

It felt as if the plane had been broadsided, for it was knocked to the left by an impact at the tail that sent a creak down the whole fuselage. People gasped, as did David, not because he was afraid (nothing about flying ever scared him) but because Alice was gone. The seatbelt lights flashed on, their game-show gong tolling repeatedly, the captain asking people to return to their seats in a voice that sounded comically calm. They’d hit some bad chop, he explained, and were trying to climb out of it. “We’re looking for some good air,” he said. Out the window, no clouds now. Nothing below but the ocean. It seemed sickeningly close, molten iron in texture and streaked with chalk-white glare from the moon. David, looking up and down the aisle, saw two attendants rapping on one of the bathroom doors, knowing full well that his wife had locked herself in. Puzzled that she hadn’t wakened him, he went to unbuckle his seatbelt, but the moment he touched the clasp the plane plummeted, so suddenly that in the seat in front of him the liquid in the man’s drink rose in a neat stream from the cup he held, gone airborne above his tray table before landing back in place without the loss of a drop.

This fall sent another collective gasp through the passengers, and when the oxygen masks dropped down from above there were screams. They were being shaken now, the vibration landslide-loud. David’s skull was trembling, his teeth rattling. The captain was speaking again, inaudibly. A woman across the aisle from David said, “What did he say?” and he shrugged. “I can’t hear him either,” he said, already getting up. The woman gripped the arms of her seat, pressed her head back, and began to cry. David approached the flight attendants, one of whom had already sat down in her jump seat and was clipping her four-point belt together. When she saw him, she ordered that he sit down. Then another blow, the shockwave seeming to crack the whip down the coach compartment, bending David’s whole tubular view. He grabbed the headrests to steady himself and then, as if they were
rungs in a ladder, pulled himself hand over hand toward the bathroom. Passengers sat staring forward, utterly blind. But there was no need to fear flying, David thought, since it was out of your hands. Nearly everything was.