Stay Awake (7 page)

“Yes,” he said, his voice parched. “Yes. That’s right. I’m Rosalie’s father.”

“I’ve seen her,” the nurse said. “Them.” There was a pause and Zach flexed his fingers again. Something about her tone of voice disquieted him.

“You … saw her?” he said. But the nurse was silent, busy with some task, and maybe she didn’t hear him. He could sense her presence, her movement at the periphery of his vision, the winged tip of her nurse’s hat. He didn’t know they still wore those.

“You know,” the nurse said, after he had almost decided that she wasn’t going to answer him, “I’ve always believed that God puts every one of us on earth for a reason.”

He cringed inwardly, but tried to smile. “Yes,” he said. Ever since Rosalie’s birth, people had been quoting such homilies to him, and he had gotten used to accepting them—gracefully, he hoped. He was not a particular fan of religion.

“I think you’ve been blessed,” the nurse continued, in her oddly singsong voice. “That’s just my opinion. Some people might tell you otherwise.”

Zach felt the woman’s hand brush lightly across the lower part of his abdomen. “Thank you for your kind thoughts,” he said. He wasn’t sure what else to say.

He rolled his eyes downward and he could vaguely see the white shape of her uniform. There was a tube that had been inserted into him, a catheter. Tape had been applied to his skin below his navel and he felt her fingers smoothing it down.

“Poor baby,” the nurse said softly, almost musically. “Poor baby.”

Of course no one was to blame for Rosalie’s condition.

Though he often felt guilty about it—it seemed as if, with some people, there was a kind of unspoken condemnation hovering in the air, his sister, Monica, for example, Monica and her two healthy children. He would be describing their struggles with conception, all the biological and scientific complexity, all the tests and methods—gamete intrafallopian transfer. Superovulation. Intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Gonadotropins. And then he would sense a very light film of judgment in her voice.
What about adoption?
Monica said.
What about adopting a baby from China? They have such beautiful babies
.

“We want to have a baby of our own,” he said.

Was that wrong?
he wondered, after Rosalie was born.
Were they being punished?

When Zach woke again, Amber was sitting at his bedside. It was dark outside, and he could see the entire hospital room mirrored against the surface of the window. Here was Amber in the foreground, reading through a sheaf of papers. Here he was, in the bed nearby, posed like a statue in his various braces. Snow was falling through their translucent reflections.

It had been, he guessed, several days since he and Amber had
actually spoken. In the months since the baby’s birth, their paths seemed to cross less and less. He would sometimes come into a room and it would surprise him to find her there and she, in turn, would seem to stiffen, alert and wary as he entered. It was like finding a deer or some other sort of woodland creature grazing in the backyard.

The two of them had been married for five years, and increasingly much of that time had been occupied by the issues of fertility. The process of conception, in all its arcane biological complexity. Long stretches of their married life together had been given over to such concerns—packets of materials arriving in the mail; hushed, endless waiting rooms and the subsequent conversations with condescending specialists and gently manipulative quacks; silent drives home afterward.

He could often sense Amber brooding as he drove. She was a lawyer by training, and she was bothered by the unfairness of it—by the simple fact that so many women had babies without even trying. They hadn’t had to struggle, as she was; they hadn’t even had to ask. Sometimes, in a supermarket or on the street they would encounter a mother who was not taking proper care of her baby. The mother would be swearing at it, or carrying it in the bright sunlight without a bonnet, or holding it carelessly against her hip, ignoring it, letting its nose run as she gossiped with another mother. At such times, Zach would watch Amber’s eyes settle on the woman. It would seem that the very molecules of the air vibrated with Amber’s disapproval, with her intense dislike.

Once they had heard on the radio a program about a woman who had drowned her two toddlers during some kind of postpartum
depression and Amber’s hands had tightened against each other in her lap.

“I’d like to see that woman tortured,” Amber had said quietly. “I’d like to see her burned alive.”

Zach hadn’t said anything then, though the light in her eyes had disturbed him. They didn’t really argue about things, the way he imagined other couples did—though the ghosts of their disagreements would waft underneath their conversations, curling like the fingerlets of incense smoke that Amber would sometimes burn.
RELAXATION
, the incense said.
GOOD FORTUNE, HAPPINESS
.

He looked up at her face from his hospital bed and he was reminded of the grim look she would get as she lit her little incense sticks and candles. She had never expected to have so much hardship in her life.

Amber had looked up from her reading at last, and she’d noticed that his eyes were open. They regarded each other, and he could see her expression tighten. It felt as if her thoughts were withdrawing backward into the shadows so that he couldn’t see them.

“You’re awake,” she said softly.

For a moment, he expected that Amber was going to tell him that their baby had died. That was, of course, what would happen eventually. Sooner or later, some member of the hospital staff would emerge from a closed room to speak to them in a hushed voice:
Mr. and Mrs. Dixon
. They both knew this was coming.
I’m so sorry to tell you—there was nothing to be done
. The doctors had
more or less assured them of this, even as they prepared for the surgeries. There had never been a successful separation.

On the Internet, Zach had found one example of a craniopagus parasiticus baby who had survived into childhood. This was the so-called Two-Headed Boy of Bengal, who was born in 1783 in the village of Mundul Gait. He had apparently lived for four years without any special medical treatment, and had purportedly died of a cobra bite, rather than anything relating to his condition.

The skull of the Two-Headed Boy was still on display at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

Zach would sit in front of the computer late at night after Rosalie was born, searching the Internet. He downloaded a photo of the Two-Headed Boy’s fused skull. He read various accounts.

He read that the parents of the Two-Headed Boy were poor farmers who soon realized that they could earn money by exhibiting their child. In Calcutta, they would cover him with sheets to prevent people who hadn’t paid from glimpsing him.

After the Two-Headed Boy died, he was buried near the Boopnorain River, outside of the city of Tumloch. The grave was later plundered by an agent of the British East India Company, who dissected the child’s decaying body and carried the fused skull away with him to England.

Sometimes Zach would fall asleep in front of the computer and wake up with his forehead pressed against the keyboard.

One morning after he’d been up nearly all night, he awoke and Amber was standing above him. “Zach,” she was saying, her hand against his shoulder, and when he lifted his head he could
feel the tooth marks of the keyboard impressed into the skin above his eyes. “Zach,” Amber said, and she stared at the screen of his computer, at the photo of the Two-Headed Boy of Bengal’s skull in its glass museum case—

“It’s seven-thirty,” she said, and glanced at her cellphone. He didn’t know what she had been doing with her own night, while he had been following various branching trails of information, one Internet search leading to another and then another. Sometimes he would find her sitting in the television room, watching a sitcom; sometimes he would find her sleeping, curled up on the bed, on top of the covers with her shoes off, and he would lean over her, wishing that he had found a useful bit of information to give her, some kernel from his long foraging.

“I’ll see you at the hospital at six,” she said. She touched the screen of her phone, used her thumb to scroll, furrowed her eyebrows, and he ran a hand through his hair.

“Even when a child’s death is imminent, the parent must forever carry the image of the child moving forward, alive, into the future.” After Amber left, he had found this written in his own handwriting on a Post-it note on his desk. Was it a quote from something? Had he thought of it himself?

He was thinking about all of these things as Amber spoke to him. “You’re awake,” she said and he opened his eyes and Amber’s face floated above him.

He was aware of specific thoughts, images, connections: the fused skull in the museum, the movement of Amber’s fingers against her phone, the little Post-it note. All of these things had been in the process of sliding into place, connections were being
made, and then the links seemed to unfasten as his mind rose out of sleep. He lifted his hand and some kind of monitor was clipped to his index finger.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and there were so many things that he didn’t even know what he meant. Was he sorry for the two-headed boy, exhibited by his parents; for all the time he’d spent reading such stories, staring at his computer while Amber moved through another part of the house; for falling asleep at the wheel and leaving her alone to deal with the terrible details of their child’s last days; for being yet another burden to worry about; for the life they had been thrust into, which was unexpectedly difficult and unexpectedly unexpected; for his hoarse voice, which was a crackling of paper.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry
.

“Zach,” Amber said firmly, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Are you able to focus? Can you hear me talking to you?”

There was still a little paperwork to be done concerning Rosalie’s upcoming operation. Release forms and so on. These documents needed to be signed immediately.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m listening.”

Meanwhile, upstairs, the babies had opened their eyes again as well.

Above them, a mobile was turning in a slow circle: blue giraffe, yellow duck, red doggy, bobbing on wires, turning slowly around an axle, and the babies followed the motion of the shapes as they wheeled by.

Rosalie moved her tongue inside her mouth and the other one’s brow furrowed. Rosalie’s hands waved gently in the air and the other shifted her eyes back and forth, searching. After a time,
they could see the pointed cap of the nurse above them, a blurry white peak on the horizon. A hand emerged and lowered itself toward them and they felt the cold of the air as their diaper was undone. The legs gave bright, athletic kicks, a burst of energy or excitement, and the parasitic head smiled dreamily.

“There, there,” the nurse murmured. “It’s all right, it’s all right.” She began to hum, and the babies liked the music, the sound of a lullaby and the touch of the warm cloth as their body was cleansed.

The surgery would need to be performed immediately if there was to be any possibility of saving Rosalie’s life.

The parasitic head had begun to grow faster than Rosalie’s own, and the doctors feared that the pressure from the growth would start to hinder Rosalie’s brain development. Because the two brains shared common arteries that were dependent on Rosalie’s organs, Rosalie was now in constant danger of heart failure. The other head was getting nutrition from Rosalie’s body, blood from Rosalie’s heart, oxygen from Rosalie’s lungs. Keeping both heads alive was becoming a daily struggle for the body.

Zach listened as Amber repeated these things to him. She was reporting the information in a careful, formal voice, the way one might recite a lesson in a foreign-language class. “Sagittal sinus,” she said. “Venous drainage.”

“Well,” he said. He considered for a moment. He was a college graduate, but he had no idea what to say. No one had ever prepared him for such an occasion.
After the head was removed, would they bury it?
he wondered vaguely.
Would it require a headstone?

“You don’t have to say anything,” she said. Her expression flinched, and she looked at the hand he had lifted to hold out to her. She patted her palm against his knuckles, pressing his hand back down to the bed. “Just rest,” she said.

When this is over
, he thought. When it was over, there would have to be a way to repair their marriage. They would have to find their way back to the life they once had. Maybe a trip, he thought. They had once liked to travel. They had gone bird-watching in the cloud forests of Ecuador; they had walked through Roman ruins in the Dordogne of France, holding hands as they passed through the archway of an ancient gladiatorial arena; they had driven recklessly on one-lane roads in the Scottish Highlands, singing. They were a happy childless couple once. They could be that again.

“Everything will be all right,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

He lay there, waiting, awake. The operation would take many hours. He didn’t know how much time had passed. It was now the middle of the night and he could see the snow was falling again onto the parking lot outside his window.

From time to time he would hear the
clip-clop
of someone’s hard-soled shoes against the floor of the hallway outside his room. The footsteps would gradually grow louder and then they would grow softer.

The doctors would need to separate Rosalie’s brain from the conjoined organ in small stages. Blood vessels and arteries were shared between the two heads. The doctors planned to slowly cut off the blood supply to the extra head. The doctors would clip
the veins and arteries and finally close Rosalie’s skull, using a bone-and-skin graft from the second head.

If Rosalie died, he imagined that someone would come to tell him. Or—if the operation was successful, they would come and tell him that, too. He had called once and a nurse’s aide had come to assure him that he would be the first to know. Whatever happened, she said.