The Messenger (31 page)

She leaves the kitchen light off and starts down the hall, turning off lights as she goes. At Paula’s door, she taps quietly, waits, then goes in.

“This hurts …” she hears Paula say from the bed.

“Is Nadja here?” Daria asks.

“She went to the bathroom,” Paula says with a groan. “This fucking
hurts
 …”

Daria goes to the front window and looks out. There is a single streetlight whose glow is obscured by the blackberries and bamboo growing along the property line next door. The dried-up front yard is a lighter-toned plain extending down to the sidewalk in front of the house. No one on the street. The tail of Brutus’s Pontiac in the
driveway. Distant sirens heard through the glass. She steps back and pulls the curtain.

No, Nadja is not in the bathroom, and she goes back out to the kitchen and looks for the cigarette in the garage again. Nothing.

She tries the back door. It opens quietly enough and she puts her ear to the crack and listens.

Ah … she thinks.

Brutus has got his wish.

Daria is half asleep on the sofa when Nadja comes in to tell her that Paulina is having real contractions now and the baby is starting to come. Paulina is right behind her, hands on her hips, striding through the room, blowing out through her cheeks. “It hurts,” she says.

Daria gets up and heads for the kitchen. She has planned to leave via the back door. She’s stashed a big bottle of water back there. It’s the way she can most easily make her exit when the time comes. She’s all ready to go, she
should
go. This is her chance … but now she only puts on the kettle.

A few minutes later, Monica drives up and takes charge of the bed, making sure there are new sheets, nice soft lighting in the room. Fresh air. Everything prepped and ready.

Brutus has gone home to clean up; when he comes back he brings a two-pound bag of sugar the girls require for their tea. Daria has not seen him since the little lights in the garage. “Did you discover anything out there? Any white men in vans?”

He turns down the corners of his mouth, frowns. “No … ain’t nobody around here now, if there ever was.” Maybe it’s something funny in her expression, because he just stares at her for a long second and then steps back as if wounded. “Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” she answers. “Nothing …” Thinking that she’s missed it now. That she should have gone earlier. She should have gone.

“Aw, come on …” he says, and turns back to his business.

Paulina rounds the doorway. Her face is slack, but she is still
blowing like a locomotive. She sags against the archway, and Nadja walks behind her, rubbing her spine while she groans.

It hurts.

At the end of the day, Sam Watterman sits at the table alone. All the way across the “terrace” of the FBI bar, or “Fubar” as it has become known to the regulars. He follows Maggie’s progress three times a day courtesy of Barrigar, who lets him talk to the caregivers for as long as he needs.

When Barrigar sees he’s put the cell down and is simply sitting there staring off into space, he joins him for a nightcap. Like most of the men, he’s wearing a golf shirt—dark blue in his case, with a yellow FBI across its back. The various agencies have different shirts, all color-coded with acronyms printed on the back. It’s helpful if you happen to be looking for someone from Agriculture (USDA) or the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the members of the liaison team loaned from the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), or a consultant from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which, it turns out, has officially hired him.

They clink glasses and Barrigar cuts right to the bad news. No more international calls allowed. “We’re under a complete lockdown since Yaghobi. The people that you’ve put on your list …” Barrigar winces. “It’s every biowarfare expert in the world.”

“Okay, so they are very successful at what they do, so …”

“No.” He shakes his head, handing him the paper. “Write an email. I’ll push it up the line.” Barrigar sounds a little distracted. As if he’s half asleep, or is on meds.

“You realize how … absurd this is?”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. There is a greater war.”

“Oh, really?”

“Definitely. In the greater war, we not only follow one or more of our National Incident Management plans to deal with the attack, but we also have to be able to initiate offensive action. We have to
be able to turn off their lights. Khan, as far as we know, only sent four people to the U.S. And we have accounted for three and are chasing the last one right now.”

“Sure, sure. I don’t doubt it. Great job.” Because of the acoustics, everything has a kind of muffled booming echo to it. Talking intimately is a little harder to do. You have to lean closer or talk louder to hear your neighbor.

“Doc, the fact is we’re in a world war right now. Each nation is out for themselves. The blood of these terrorists has value—you’re the one that alerted us to that fact. Fine. Okay. The top of the food chain is going to take your advice into consideration. But what happens after that? Some technologies aren’t ever going to be shared. This is the big shakeout. Governments are going to fall, some countries are going to go under. We have to accept that. Did you see the Africa stuff?”

“It was too depressing, so I stopped looking.” Riots are being reported, more and more each day as several countries start to implode. A bombing in Pretoria. Another in Khartoum.

“No …” Barrigar stops. Looks over to him. “Shit … I’m sorry, Sam. I’m sorry. That’s very inconsiderate of me. How’s everything, uh … going?” He is a handsome man, well groomed. The kind of man who can model a shirt at any age. Not a hair out of place. Ex-Marine, Watterman remembers someone has told him.

“Oh … she’s sleeping. No change. ‘No change’ is good, I guess.”

“Well … I don’t mean to cram work down your throat.”

“We’re all going crazy in here, I guess,” Watterman says.

“Life in a submarine,” Barrigar agrees, nodding.

“We gamed all this, but it’s not the same as living through it.”

“No, Doc. No, it isn’t. Not the same at all.” Barrigar suddenly sits back and taps his half-touched glass down on the table. “I can’t do this … you want another?”

Sam looks at the glass for a long moment. “I haven’t decided how far off the wagon I want to fall.”

“ ’Night, Doc … Big day tomorrow.” Barrigar sighs and heads out of the patio.

F
or a tiny girl, Paulina Pravdina is surprisingly strong. She has endurance in those thin little muscles. In the old system she could have been a gymnast, or a flyweight kickboxer. Instead she had been lured to the West and ruined. Beaten and raped by men who regarded her as livestock. Drugged, and enslaved. The pregnancy was a lingering reminder of that time. But she had dreams, she said. She was looking forward to the responsibility of it. She and Nadja both knew it was going to change their lives, that it was going to hurt and be hard, but Paulina was set on keeping the child.

A few hundred laps of the house later, Paula’s water breaks and Daria finds a mop and follows behind the sisters, drops back and rinses it out in the tub, and then does it again, stepping around the girls each time they come through.

“We’ll all be leaving soon, don’t worry. I know it’s a bad neighborhood, but … maybe we can all go to Hollywood together …” Nadja is saying as they go by.

Paulina’s pain is increasing. She can’t tolerate reclining in the bed, and even sitting hurts. When she tries, she has to get up and stalk around angrily like a pint-sized naked female sumo wrestler, calling out
“… Haaaaaaaahhhh!”
as she moves through the house.

Daria does everything that is required and more. Laundry begins right away. She searches for soothing music on the radio while Paula cycles around. It is not until a contraction almost buckles her knees that Paula allows Monica to move her back onto the bed.

“You’re doing good now, honey …” Monica croons. Daria has cold towels to put across Paula’s forehead, has draped a scarf around the lamp shade to reduce the room to a rosy glow.

The world has come down to a still point, a still point for Paula’s birthing of her baby. This is all there is. And no interruption from the outside world will be tolerated, for tonight Brush Creek is in a state of grace.

Monica, her hands encased in latex gloves, begins to examine Paula. Daria turns away, out into the hall.

Nadja squats down so she can see up between her sister’s legs. “Ohhh …” she murmurs, wondrous. Daria looks back in. Paula’s huge vulva is red and stretched, blood smears her thighs and the sheets. Paula sags back against the pillows and groans while Monica’s fingers explore.

“Sing a little song … it helps …”

“I don’t know songs. I’m not a singer,” Paula groans.

“Everybody knows some kind of song. Go ahead …” Monica encourages.

Nadja looks up at her sister and smiles and then a slow loping melody comes out of her. Something from their childhood. A song to make children happy. Paula has her eyes closed but she smiles. When her breath comes around again, she joins her sister. Daria sits down in the old chair next to the lamp, and when the chorus starts she tries to join in and learn the Russian lyrics. Nadja translates:

“That’s good …” Monica says. “That’s good … Get me that mirror, Nadja. You want to see?” Paula gasps and nods, and they turn the lamp to get more light so that she can stare at the hand mirror’s reflection of her distended genitals.

“That right there,” Monica says, pointing to a gray sliver at the heart of her vulva, “that’s the head right there.”

There is a little ripple of laughter and Paulina sprouts tears and goes into a big contraction, and Monica just holds her hand and smiles. Nadja picks up the song again, and so it goes.

The first time Daria gets a look at the clock, it is after three in the morning.

Brutus and Zeno have come over and set up on the front porch. One by one, the women take breaks from Paula’s bed and go out there to wait in the cool with the boys. They have taken up their positions outside, talking, telling stories about the shooting over on Olive Street. It’s good to have them around to go and get things. Brutus has parked his Pontiac backwards in the driveway so he’ll be able to get out easy. The boys sit and sip from their beers and fall silent and wince and shake their heads at Paula’s noises, the lyrics to the Russian lullaby now having deteriorated to a series of trembling groans.

Monica takes a break and comes out on the porch, standing up straight, hands on hips, rolling her neck around on her shoulders, bones popping from fatigue.

“Not too much longer, I don’t think,” she says.

“That’s good …”

“Everybody comes in like that, more or less …”

“I was a cesarean.”

“Maybe that’s why they called you Brutus.”

“I think it might have been.”

Monica takes one long look at the street and goes back in.

Daria is tired; everything is running together. That’s what happens when things are too much for her, she is learning. Her mind erases things as they happen, life shifts from one flash frame to another, and she isn’t quite sure of the order of events or how she’s
arrived wherever she is. Just a series of still pictures, she thinks. Then she rushes back inside and digs her camera out of her pack, goes back to the bedroom, and grabs pictures of the sisters smiling at the lens between contractions. Monica does another internal, pronounces everything in order …

Then everything moves fast.

The pain takes over the person once called Paula. She is but a passenger in her own private jumbo jet of pain. Out of her head. The nursery rhyme has become blurred rhythmic shouts, punctuated with attempts to catch her breath. They embrace her now; Daria does too, because as poisonous as her touch might be, this is a more terrible and more dangerous crisis, this making two people out of one, and she and Nadja hold the little sister on either side, her fingernails puncturing their skin as she growls and then subsides into whimpering.

Paula begins to negotiate, to plead. Please can the midwife give her a little shot? Help her out with the pain? Please? “Call the hospital,” Paula begs. “Call the hospital, call the hospital …”

“Can’t do that now. You got to have this baby right here. You’re doing good …”

Another great low groaning.

“Now you can push? Push a little more. Can you do that, honey? Can you feel … when it comes again?”

And it does come again, and she groans again, the sound low and unbelievably loud coming from the tiny Paulina … and then she’s gritting her teeth and pushing, pushing.

“
Good
 … that’s good. We’re coming along. Take a big breath now, get yourself some oxygen, and do the same thing this next time coming. Just like you did before. Get ready now …”

Tears. Blood. As if Paula is going to explode each time it comes. “That’s good, that’s good. Coming out now … I got the head … this next time. Here it comes, this next time.
Big
push now … That’s right … that’s
good
 …”

Suddenly, after all that time, a wet purple animal slithers from Paulina’s vagina, and she groans and falls back.

“That’s it, girl … that’s it!”

“Oh … God …” Paula groans, and tries to see.

“That’s everything! That’s it! That’s your little … 
boy
,” says Monica.