Authors: Delia Sherman
I can't help it; I bite him.
I bite him right on the underside of his arm, in the meaty part just shy of his armpit. He tastes like very good Volpi salami. His shriek joins that of the dragons, higher pitched, and I release him. He jerks away from me, pivoting to show one of the nurses the damage I have done. My husband has my other hand in his, and he bends to put his mouth close to my ear.
"Don't do that, honey,” he says. His breath is coffee stale and the only familiar thing in the room. I can see the gray in his razor-stubbled cheeks.
My obstetrician turns one head to frown at the fracas the dragons are causing, and one of the orderlies reaches over my open belly to adjust the light, and another takes a swipe at one of the dragons with a mop head.
"Don't,” I say.
Orderly and dragon face off, baring teeth at each other. The dragon clings high in one white corner, scrambling with its talons to find a claw hold. The frill around its head extends, threatening, and the orderly responds by puffing out his chest and swinging a (mercifully empty) galvanized waste bucket by the handle in widening circles, like a mace on a chain. Nurses dodge. A metal cart falls over with a clang, scattering gauze and tubes of ointment.
"Don't,” I insist, loud now. “Leave him alone, cut it out.” The other dragon takes refuge under an incubator and spits sparks at the neonatal specialist who takes it upon himself to chase the creature out with a surgical tool.
"You're frustrating them,” I warn, familiar with the signs of incipient temper tantrum. “You're not giving them good choices,” I say. The neonatal guy ignores me and jabs at the dragon with a pair of silver forceps. There will be fire soon, and blood.
I have been known to go into paroxysms of panic over the sight of a spider, or a worm-white cicada struggling out of its shell. Once a week, I get into a sweat contemplating death by automobile, a scenario in which I imagine my sternum penetrated by a steering column while the radio continues to play a Steely Dan song. The sound of a single wind chime from the neighbor's yard on an otherwise still summer night can make my mouth go dry and rob me of sleep. I know exactly who my husband's coffin bearers will be, in spite of the fact that he does not want a coffin, he wants ashes and an urn, but whoever heard of urn bearers, and anyway, I'm determined to die before he does. Since my daughter was born, my nightmares no longer end in my death. My nightmares begin with my death, and they deal in the details of my girl's miserable existence as an orphan in, for some reason, the streets of Victorian London.
Everything is just so fucking fragile, you know?
Flat on my back, skinned, unable to move, I recognize fear that, for once, is not mine, although very like.
"Call Security,” says one of my OB's heads, just as the dragon under the incubator lunges and draws blood from the hand of the neonatalogist. A sweet-looking young nurse gives a little scream, and the dragon high in one corner gives off a puff of flame that sterilizes the instruments on the surgical table. The OB's fingers are singed, but she remains calm and involved in her work, peeling away layers of my belly, digging for gold. “Call Security,” she repeats.
Security, I think, will have crew cuts, and guns. Security will walk in and smell blood and see my fatty tissue gleaming yellow, and they will want to
fix
everything. They will be in uniform. They will think they know what's best.
I lift my head and shoulders from the table. “NO!” I bellow, monstrous and wounded, like Grendel's mother.
Grendel's mother is never properly described, except that she is something like Grendel, only worse. I am worse.
"NO!” I roar and bawl. “
No
Security, Security makes
no
one feel secure,
no
one's calling Security, if Security comes in here, I am calling the whole thing off, so everyone just calm the
fuck
down! And that includes you two!"
The dragons close their mouths with a snap. Everyone freezes except for the nurse who is cleaning the wounded doctor's hand, and the other nurse who is bandaging the wounded anesthesiologist's arm, and my OB, who has made it to my uterus.
"
These are mine,
” I tell the room at large. There is a heart monitor pinching my finger like a clothespin, and I use it to point at the dragons. “No one touches them, or I will sue for malpractice."
All eight of my OB's eyebrows rise at this, and she concentrates on unzipping my womb.
"You twoâ” I address the dragons, “âneed to understand that you are a scary couple of motherfuckers and you can't fly off the handle every time you get spooked. There is
work
going on here. Stay out of the way and let people concentrate."
Before the dragons can so much as sulk, the thin wail of infants interrupts the momentary silence, and suddenly everyone is moving.
I glimpse only a flash of new pink before four doctors converge on the squirming things, carry them to the other side of the room, cover them, suction them, and rub them with what seems unnecessary vigor.
One of my dragons is still cowering up in the corner, held at bay by a distrustful orderly. My husband strides forward, St. George, snatches the janitorial bucket from the surprised man's hand, and throws it down at the foot of the operating table, just in time to catch the steaming placenta the OB has tossed away. The dragons slide out of their defensive postures and slink casually toward the bucket.
My husband stops by my monster head, puts my stretched mouth back into place by kissing it, scrapes the scales off my face with his unshaven cheek, and then goes to take a look at the infants. As he examines them, I cannot see the expression on his face.
I turn my head and close my eyes, listening to the OB hum in four-part harmony while she sews me back up. I try to rest, and concentrate on the pulling and pushing sensations somewhere in the vicinity of my navel, as I am threaded back together. I breathe, as I have been instructed.
Something warm is placed on my chest, and something else, bundled, in the curve of my neck.
I can feel their wet breath on my skin.
When I open my eyes, the first things I see are the dragons, in the corner, snouts thrust into the big galvanized steel pail, eating the smoking afterbirth. I lift my head and turn away from them.
I study my sons. They glow like miraculous larvae.
I push back blankets and categorize all their parts.
I can smell my blood on them.
I do not flinch.
My first discipline is theater.
I've written and read many press releases for theatrical productions, and I know that if you want to appeal to the widest possible audience, you have to define the work in no uncertain terms, with simple, broad adjectives.
I also know that in order for theater or art of any sort to be interesting and alive, it has to tell the truth.
Or some form of it.
I know that truth is subjective: difficult to define and almost impossible to explain with simple, broad adjectives.
I know that every time I try to define myself I become tongue-tied.
I can't even explain to people what it is I do for a living.
I write in the small spaces between being a teacher, a performer, a mother, and “a middle-aged, mildly anxious white female,” which is a definition I once read on my chart in a neurologist's office.
"Afterbirth” is autobiographical, of course, but one has to be careful these days, so I call it a story.
If dragons show up in an otherwise banal hospital delivery room, what can I do?
If they're honest dragons, they stay put, making the story difficult to define and therefore a tough sell to any known market. The dragons don't care. They're not there to appeal to the widest possible audience. They're there because they really mean it. I see them in color, in far clearer detail than I see my husband or my children in the story, which may be why I occasionally find myself in a neurologist's office, sneaking a peek at my chart when she leaves the room.
Stephanie Shaw
David J. Schwartz
People always get my origin story wrong. I wasn't “born in an explosion,” I
am
the explosion; if I'm the chicken, the bomb was the egg. It's just that no one's ever taken responsibility for laying it. Anything else blows up, anywhere in L.A., and the gangs and factions fall all over each other to take credit, but someone takes out the craft services tent on the set of a minor erotic space opera and no one says a word.
One hundred and twenty-one people died; I know because I killed them, but also because parts of them are still with me. Their souls, maybe. They're kind of ... suspended, I guess. Like me. It's kind of a hard thing to talk about. Most of the 121 hate me, and they withhold themselves from meâincluding the bomber, whoever it was. It's exhausting, being hated. Hating yourself. On the other hand, without all that rage I'm pretty sure that whatever I am would have burned out by now.
Not knowing who the bomber was used to bother me more than it does now. It was a real problem for Marty, my agent. Before he signed me, we spent an hour going around the question of whether I was Muslim. Marty doesn't like Muslims. He didn't like the fact that I spoke Arabic and Farsi, but then it turned out I spoke Hebrew, too, so he didn't know what to think. He wanted to see all the evidence files from the investigation, but they haven't even let me see those. He was like, “Do you worship Allah?” I told him I'd never thought about it. I was four days old at the time. Then he's like, “Do you
feel
Muslim?” Sometimes Marty is really stupid.
I would fire him, but Marty keeps me working, and as long as I'm working, the Trinity doesn't bring out the hoses. Besides, he was Phil's agent, too. Phil Lima is my writing partner, and my best friend.
I never knew L.A. before the war, with its club music, its price-tag elegance, and its plastic charm. You can still spend a few thousand for a pair of shoes, here, but that's got more to do with inflation than with any designer's name. You're better off resoling what you've got or buying off the black market. Not that I have to worry about shoes, myself.
Phil knows all about the black market. Screenwriting wasn't bringing in a lot of money, the way things are, so Phil had his hands in a lot of things. If he'd been caught, he'd have been in deep trouble; the Trinity will put you to work at the desalinization plants if they catch you smuggling. Phil says there was an agency that handled smuggling, and immigration, too, but they were Homeland Security, so they're landlocked in St. Louis with FEMA. After Justice captured L.A., the attorney general placed everything under the jurisdiction of the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF. That's the Trinity. There's still an LAPD, but they mostly handle security and take orders from whichever acronym is standing closest.
I'm fuzzy on all the history and the way the old USA worked before it splintered into a hundred-odd pieces. Everyone tells a different story. Sometimes it was the drought that led to the war, sometimes it was the strikes, sometimes it was the election protests. Phil tries to give me the facts; he says you have to know a lot about the world if you're going to write about it. But the war is one thing that the 121 all have an opinion about, and we can't have a conversation about it without every single one of them jumping in to share a theory, not to mention reminding me how much they hate me. As if I could forget.
I'm not much of a writer, on my own. I don't know much, and a lot of the things I
do
know, I don't even know that I know. The 121 have a lot of life experience, but most of them are too busy hating me to share it. Sometimes bits seep through. I know things that I shouldn't. I know how to drive a cement truck, and how to light a scene that's supposed to be in the dark, and twenty-seven different recipes using chorizo sausage. I speak fifteen languages that I know of. Most of this is passive knowledge, not active. I have no idea it's there until it comes up.
Still, I learn things from them. They're kind of like parents, I guess. Except I don't really like to think of the bomb or the people who built it as my parents, so I'm not quite comfortable thinking of the 121 as my family. A family with one really bad egg, maybe.
After I didn't burn out and dissipate into smoke and ash, I needed a name, so I called myself 121 in their honor. Marty doesn't love the name. Sometimes he'll tell the casting agents that he calls me “Hunter,” which he doesn't, because I hate it. Marty thinks Hunter sounds like an old Hollywood name. Marty thinks there's still a Hollywood.
Today I'm working on a DEA film about a kid who falls in with a rebel gang and plans to smuggle his family up the coast to the Free Cities. Only he has to sell drugs to make the money for it, and a rival gang tries to steal the drugs. They get into a shootout, and a little girl gets killed. The ship he finally puts his family on is destroyed in an accidental explosion. That'll be me, in the credits: Accidental Explosion.
If the details of the plot sound sort of vague, that's because they are. They'll film about forty different versions, one for each of the major ethnic gangs in the city. But they'll use my footage in all of them.
Sometimes I like working, but this job is pretty dull. For one thing, they're filming in black and white. The director says it makes the characters easier to empathize with. That's important, because the purpose of these films is to convince people that as shitty as it is to live in a place where most of the drinking water is recycled urineâand even that's rationedâyou're better off waiting to be discovered at the salt docks or with the salvage crews than trying to leave.
So I roil and billow and all that, and they film me from multiple angles to milk it for maximum dramatic effect, but it's all in monochrome. I'm better in color. The first film I was on, the director wanted a look that was “less smoky, more flame-y.” He said all the white and black smoke was boring, and he asked if I could do more in the yellow-to-red spectrum. I'd never tried it before, but I discovered I could. It's something I practice now in my spare time, trying out new color patterns and progressions. Being able to feel beautiful helps a little with the self-loathing.