“Nine. You see the light above you on the top of the water, shifting and sliding.”
Her breathing slows and steadies.
By the time I reach one, she’s floating just above the bottom of her imaginary pool, hypnotized. I warm shea butter between my palms and massage it gently over her swollen breasts, which are about five times bigger than they used to be. Keeping her in the deep meditative state of semiconsciousness without fear and anxiety requires me to keep talking about the quality of light, the sensation of the water against her skin, recycling over and over her own store of soothing images which she dug up in a hypnotic trance with the therapist who taught us. In the six weeks that I practiced hypnotizing her almost every evening after work, made her do it even when she was tired or queasy, Isabella told me more than once that she knew from the first moment we met that I was actually good, though it was almost impossible to see. Since the big surprise of her pregnancy and our shotgun wedding, I have felt better than I ever remember. I don’t feel like a cad anymore. I feel like a decent guy.
A contraction racks her body, drawing her mouth tight and coiling her fingers into fists. She does not moan. Jotting the time on a notebook, I say, “You are relaxed, riding a wave in a warm bed of seaweed, cradling our baby, riding the wave closer to shore. Look up at the moon.”
Isabella tilts her head back and opens her eyes, which look distant, and stares unfocused at the ceiling.
“Now follow the moonlight down to the water.”
She moves her chin slowly down until her blank gaze reaches her feet.
“Watch the light playing on the water, puddles of white against the darkness.”
As the contraction seems to stop, I make another note. “Now you are floating between the waves. The sea is calm. You are tired, your eyelids heavy. As you wait for the next wave, just close your eyes and take a little nap.”
Isabella shuts her eyes and her breathing becomes more shallow. Asleep, her head falls to the side.
This is real. It’s finally happening, I think with a rush like a line of good blow or more like I was eight again on Christmas Eve. I stand up and stretch my arms toward the ceiling, then touch my toes and throw my legs back, moving through a yoga sequence. After months of classes three times a week, when I stand now my spine is straight, as if I’m dangling like a skeleton from a wire attached to the top of the skull. I’m not crooked anymore. Isabella has a theory that there is a connection between the straightness of your spine and your moral health. She made an honest man out of me. I don’t have to tell lies anymore. I watch the second hand sweep around my watch. After six minutes her cheek twitches and I kiss her forehead and whisper in her ear, “A wave is coming. When you open your eyes, you will feel refreshed and relaxed, calm but full of energy.
Open your eyes
.”
They open and brush past my face without seeing me to fix on the ceiling.
“The moon is hanging peacefully in the sky, big and round as your belly and as serene as you feel.”
She moans as all at once the uterine muscles wrench upward, peeling the mouth of her womb wider.
“Float on the wave. Let the sound of your breath surround you, the sound of the wind across the water.”
I talk and talk from four in the morning till nine, sometimes making her sleep between the contractions, sometimes walking her around the bedroom, which we have covered with sheets of plastic to protect the sisal carpet. When her waters break and the waves have been hitting every three minutes for two hours, we decide it’s time to go to the hospital.
“You’re ten centimeters dilated.” Dr. Duva kneels with her hand inside Isabella, who’s sitting with her legs spread wide on a birthing stool, a half-doughnut of an ancient Egyptian design. “I can’t believe you were eight when you got here. Most women come screaming into the hospital at three. I love women like you. I hate that whole epidural thing.”
Isabella smiles wearily and just manages to nod.
As the doctor stands up, I whisper to Isabella, putting her to sleep.
“Can you knock yourself out like that?” Dr. Duva asks. “Looks like you could use it.”
Yawning, I shake my head and take in her oval face and thick curly hair and large athletic build. Her big hands remind me of a Russian basketball player who used to toss me around like a Raggedy Andy doll, and out of old habit I start to imagine the good doctor beneath her white lab coat, wonder if that is the stirring of my shadow, the Elvis impersonator waking in his coffin. The doctor says softly, “I gotta say that this hypno-birthing thing makes the man do more than just pacing the room.”
“Now she’s in the transition stage?” I whisper, thinking I would like to hypnotize her and tell her to take off all her clothes and deliver the baby buck naked.
“Yes, the contract—”
“We don’t use that word because of the painful connotations,” I say softly. “Call them waves.”
“Now the nature of the waves changes,” Dr. Duva says, nodding. “Instead of pulling up to open the womb, they push out to expel the baby.” She leans over and studies Isabella’s face, which lies against the shawl around her naked shoulders as she squats on the stool, napping. I study the fabric of the doctor’s baggy surgical pants stretching over her powerful haunches with a wistful feeling like a retired explorer gazing at a map of exotic lands he will never experience in the flesh.
“Pretty amazing,” Dr. Duva says. “How did you hear about it?”
It takes a second to understand, then I say, “My brother’s into hypnotherapy. He found a woman in Westport on the Web and gave us the first session. He kept bugging me until we went. We thought it was all New Age bullshit until she showed us a video of tranced-out women in labor and the babies sliding out like seal puppies. For centuries women have been conditioned to expect overwhelming pain. It’s a matter of reprogramming through visualization. Like professional athletes—”
“
Aaah . . .” Isabella throws her head back and stands up in a half-squat like a sumo wrestler.
“You and the baby are surrounded by ferns,” I start, “soft ferns of all—”
“Shut up, Harper,” Isabella barks. “I’m about to have it.” She has a fierce light in her eyes, sweat glistening on her face. The muscles in her arms and legs are sharp and taut. “
Aaaah.”
Dr. Duva kneels in front and I kneel behind Isabella.
Isabella collapses onto the stool and looks up at me like it’s the best high of her life.
“Wait until your body tells you to push,” Dr. Duva says. “You’ll get a strong spontaneous urge to push. Just go with it.”
“
Aaaah
.” Each time the waves hit, Isabella comes off the stool into a cocked squat and screams like a warrior running into battle, then whispers, “Come on, come on, come on, contraction.”
Panting, back on the stool, she gasps, “Okay, cool, cool, cool.” Then a few seconds later she is back on her feet. “
Huh. Huh. Huh.
”
Leaning around her side, I see what appears to be a hairy turd protruding out an inch between her legs.
“Why is it going back in?” Isabella moans, falling back on the stool.
“That’s what it does.” I stroke her back lightly in a circle with my fingertips. “Out two inches and back in one.”
“
Oooooo
,” she moans very low, leaping to her feet. “It’s not coming.”
“Yes, it is,” Dr. Duva says calmly. “Push now. Show your man!”
“Oh, please come out,” Isabella pleads quietly.
I glance over her shoulder and can see only a puddle of blood on the floor.
“
Uuh huh, uuh huh, uuuh
.” Isabella sounds like she’s taking a huge dump.
“Here he is,” Dr. Duva says. “He’s gorgeous.”
I come around to see her cradling a tiny boy, smeared with a blue-white wax, with a head of bright red hair. His eyes are closed and for a second my stomach drops, thinking he’s stillborn, then the doctor spanks his bottom and his eyes open and seem to lock on mine, though I know that he cannot see me.
Something overpowering, an emotion purer than any I have ever felt, surges through me and I realize that this is the true definition of love at first sight, that I would throw myself in front of a train to save the little guy, that I could never fuck Dr. Duva or any other woman because I would never want to hurt
him
. I kiss Isabella, tell her, “You are a giant, a god,” as she pulls the baby to her breast. Already it’s not about her, it’s not about me, it’s all about him. Looking at his miniature face, I am not alone. Like coming around a corner to the edge of a bottomless cliff, the new vista of the years ahead, the prospect of guiding my son into the world, is suddenly unsettling, and I see that every parent does the best he can. We all start off groping in the dark.
“T
he masters’ mile! All milers forty and over!
” The starter shouts through a megaphone, “
Last call for the masters’ mile
.” Several forty- and fifty-something guys whom I’d pegged for middle-distance runners jog toward the starter. They’re hard to tell apart, with their clipped hair and stoic expressions, wearing minishorts and sleeveless T-shirts on their slender frames, with their glaring tendons and veins like rope. Self-conscious, hanging at the back of the six as they present the numbers pinned on their chests to a man in a baseball cap who writes on a clipboard, I look down at my cutoff sweats and paint-speckled T-shirt and tell Rachel, “I feel like the Stranger.”
“Sloppy is good on you. Long hair is cool. They are not cool.” Rachel smiles happily. “You’re undercover.” She looks around the high school stadium where there are more competitors warming up on the field inside the track than spectators dotting the empty stands. “Very esoteric. Not like big ten-K runs or marathons.”
“A subculture within a subculture.” I grab my foot behind my back.
“Nervous?” Rachel asks.
“
Mmm hnn
.” I nod. “First time on a starting line in a long time. I keep telling myself all that time since wasn’t a waste.”
Rachel shakes her head impatiently. “What do you remember most about the last time?”
“I knew I was going to win. The race. In life. The world was at my feet.”
“Look down at your feet. It’s still there.”
I show my number to the man in the cap and take the position in the seventh lane. I smile at Rachel, who seems to be the only girlfriend in the vicinity. “The stranger in the outside lane.”
“You’re going to run ’em all in the ground.” Rachel stamps my cheek with a lipstick kiss and backs away.
Two guys lift their legs high like prancing horses, one bends over, touching his toes, another stretches one leg behind him as if on starting blocks, while the one in the inside lane jiggles one foot a few inches off the ground, then the other, as if shaking shit from his shoes. Balding, inscrutable, he resembles the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
“Hi,” I say to the guy next to me, probably the oldest. He has a thin gray mustache. “What sort of time do you run?”
Surprised to have his little personal ritual interrupted, he drops his thigh from his chest. “I’ll be lucky to keep it under six minutes.” He has a strong country accent. “The man in the first lane, he’s the one who sets the pace.”
“How fast?” I shake a little tension out of my arms.
He’s opening his mouth when the starter says, “Runners on your mark.”
You’re going to win. You’re going to push through the pain.
I look along the red rubbery track to the white lane lines merging at the curve.
“Set.”
I raise my hands to the line.
“
Go!
”
Angling across the track to the inside lane, I find myself out front and slow down, letting the favorite pass me as we enter the curve. Following his red shorts and T-shirt, I gradually pull away from the sound of the other ten soles slapping the track. In Baton Rouge people used to ask me, Why do you run? I’d say, To get back to my primitive self. On the plains of Africa early man spent his days chasing prey on foot. Twenty-five years later, I’ve got a real reason: To keep from going crazy. To structure my life. To burn up the anxiety and regret which pop up each day like weeds that will never go away, no matter how many times you pull them because it’s impossible to rip out the roots. If I miss a day of running—no matter how many hours of hard work in the garden or how much organic produce I’ve delivered to restaurants and stores around Nashville—I feel slightly nervous, off-kilter. Dr. Price has me on a minimum dosage of lithium, since none of the next-generation mood stabilizers work for me and the drug that works in concert to make a successful therapeutic combo is running. Maybe a daily dose of endorphins keeps me from slipping into depression, while the lithium keeps a lid on the mania. In the fourteen months that I’ve been running daily I’ve felt more comfortable with myself than since I was a star student and athlete in high school, in those twenty-two years that seemed so long while they were happening but now feel like a bad dream.
Hanging behind the favorite isn’t so hard. Gliding smoothly along in his ultralight clothes and racing flats with my breathing like a mosquito in his ear, he wonders if I’ll take him or fall away. I’ve got no clue myself as I haven’t raced a mile on a track in so many years. After building a foundation of eight-to-twelve-mile days for ten months, I started training for the mile by alternating distance days with speed work, killer quarter-mile and half-mile intervals until I can hardly walk—and then a light jog on the seventh day, all on the fields and roads around Cage’s Bend.
“Sixty-three!” the starter yells Putin’s split, then mine, “Sixty-four!”
“Go, Cage!” Rachel yells.
If he maintains the pace, he’ll run a 4:12 mile, two seconds faster than my best time in high school, ten seconds short of the masters’ world record. Clearly I’m pushing him beyond the envelope, which means I’m also in danger of burning up. Surprised that it’s not that painful, I cut back and fall three strides behind him. Midway around the curve, he’s fallen back to me and I ease up again, deciding it’s safer to conserve energy than take the lead. A light headwind is blowing up the back straight. I draft off him, staying right on his heels. The burning starts suddenly in my calves and the bottom of my lungs. For a few strides I think wildly that I’ve gone out way too fast and I’m about to crash, then I scold myself, Remember the way you ate the pain? In the curve I find my old racing stride, the extra quarter inch that came only in competition, and on the straight I feel the forgotten sensation of floating like an antelope.