Our Andromeda (6 page)

Love comes from ferocious love

or a ferocious lack of love, child.

A
to
and a
from,
and an urgency,

a barefoot sprint in the high snow

for the only sagging shack in sight.

No doctor runs through the winter

woods at midnight to bring placebo.

But when he does it's just too late—

the house all fevered, grief the very

gifts of milk and stew and hearth

offered anyhow. How many tree

limbs are amputated by the self-

important sudden surgery of a gale—

those same limbs tortured further,

re-galed, as spirit-dancing fire?

But the trees don't experience it

the way it seems to me, like how

all that individual snow clumps

together because it is lonely

and trusts its kind. To be home

is to go somewhere, is velocity,

the same urgent comfort

of your name. You'll lack nothing,

child, and I will never let you go.

There are no hiding places left, Cal.

Every dark space isn't really dark

but pinkish black, flesh and oblivion,

filled with me, with us, deathly

and breathless and holding on, skin

about to split and give us away.

Is it better to run? Run down

the street—the floating red hand

that means
don't walk
looks

like a heart. But I'm too afraid.

If we just close our eyes truly enough,

believing hard, no peeking, we can

be invisible. Don't let him find

us, Cal. Don't let him find us again.

When we get to Andromeda, Cal,

you'll have the babyhood you deserved,

all the groping at light sockets

and putting sand in your mouth

and learning to say
Mama
and
I want

and sprinting down the yard

as if to show me how you were leaving

me for the newest outpost of Cal.

You'll get the chance to walk

without pain, as if such a thing

were a matter of choosing a song

over a book, of napping at noon

instead of fighting it. You'll have

the chance to fight every nap,

every grown-up decision that bugs

you, and it will be a fair fight, this time,

Cal, in Andromeda. You will win.

In Andromeda there would be no

sleepy midwife who doesn't know

her own weakness, no attending

nurse who defers like a serf

to the sleepy midwife, no absent

obstetrician, no fetal heart monitor

broken and ignored, no sloppy

hospital where everyone checks

their own boxes and only consults

the check marks when making

decisions that will hurt us, Cal.

None of those individual segments

will be there in Andromeda,

no segments to constitute the worm

that burrowed into our bodies

and almost killed us. The worm

that is supposed to return us back

to Earth is supposed to come after

we die, not when we are giving birth

and being born. But even in the Milky

Way, we did manage to get you born;

and I will never forget the spark,

the ping of mind, the sudden gift

from nowhere that told me what I had

to do to push you out. I had

no force left in me but a voice

in my head, “Love. Love!” A command.

The kind of love we cannot understand,

so concentrated that had it been made

of blood it would be compressed

into a pure black diamond

as large as a galaxy and as heavy

as a crushed star.

The eye would explode from looking at it.

The mouth would attach itself

like a leech and fall off, dead.

LOVE. Over and over that voice told me

what to think and do and what to use

and finally, it worked.

It cracked me open with the muscle

of a Roman god's shattering

fist and it was the god of war or the sea

called in for the emergency, on alien

wires by some Andromedan operator.

That is how you were born.

You were hardly alive, hardly you,

horribly slim-chanced. I blacked out

hard but I heard you were blue.

That voice that told me what to do

came from Andromeda. It's the only truth.

There wasn't a soul in that hospital

room told me a single thing anywhere

near as true. It was Andromedan

love that delivered you.

Wait till you see the doctors in Andromeda,

Cal. Yes, the doctors. It's not the afterlife,

after all, but a different life.

The doctors are whole-organism empaths,

a little like Troi on
The Next Generation

but with gifts in all areas of the sensate self.

Not just mental or emotional empathy

but physiological. The doctors know how

you feel. They put their hands on you

and their own spleen aches, or their spirit

is tired, tendon bruised, breast malignanced,

et cetera. The patient's ills course

through the doctor's body as information,

reliable at last. There are no misdiagnoses

or cursory dismissals as if the patient

were a whiny dog who demands another

biscuit. Or shooting in the dark like good

Dr. Shtep in the
NICU
, when you were

trying to begin living, who asked me

whether I had taken street drugs. What else

could explain your catastrophic entrance

into the human fold of the Milky Way

but the gross ignorance and disregard

of me, not her colleagues? Not even a god

we'd never share. The doctors there

are more like angels are supposed to be,

when they breathe you can sleep peacefully.

You might be surprised to hear that illness

occurs on Andromeda. That the field

of medicine is still a necessary patch of land.

Did you think I was telling you a fairy tale,

Cal? Trying to get some religious parables

into your already impassioned childhood

and indoctrinate you toward the obligations

of heaven? I am not. People still get sick

in Andromeda, and woe and death

and grief arrive each day like packets

of mail through a slot in the door.

How could it be otherwise? It is life,

after all. And despite what the religious

on Earth try to prove, no one can choose

life. We can only choose choices.

People get sick in Andromeda.

The difference is that people taking

care of the sick don't pretend

they know what they do not

and cannot know. In Andromeda,

everybody knows what they

need to know. Even doctors,

even patients. Even, yes, insurance

companies that don't even use

the word “claim,” certainly not in the form

of a form, in their business,

because it's just rude and heartless

to hurt further a hurt person by making

them shout in the wind, wondering

whether their pain will be approved, deemed

real, awarded validation in the form

of not bankrupting the sufferer instantly

with avalanching bills. They know that there.

We don't even need to pack our bags,

Cal. I can't be sure but how much

you want to bet they have better bags, too?

You'll learn to read so much more easily there,

Cal! You'll be able to see the letters

better in that atmosphere.

Maybe their alphabet has twenty-six, or maybe

thousands like Chinese characters.

It won't matter because your vision

will delineate even the finest fifteen-stroke

pictogram and you will laugh and laugh

at how the letter O looks like an open mouth

in your old language. How childish that will

seem! Your beautiful eyes may change color

with all the perfect seeing you do.

Maybe we'll miss the aqua ring around

sandy-colored irises flecked with gray and green,

little tropical islands studded

with prehistoric boulders and effusive flora,

encircled by rich, bright ocean.

Perhaps the new air in Andromeda will turn

them into brown and gray buildings,

a city in which to flick on all the lights

in a skyscraper so you can read

so far into the night I call from the next room:

“That's enough, Cal. The book will still

be there tomorrow. Time for sleep.”

And yes, Cal, you can roll your eyes at me,

your frumpy old mom with her wacky

ideas. I do believe in Andromeda.

You don't have to. I'll believe hard enough

for the both of us.

Because it's all my fault, you see.

I'm the one who joined that cult

of expectant mothers

who felt ourselves too delicate

and optimistic to
entertain the notion,

as if I were inviting it to an unpleasant

afternoon tea, of something going wrong

with the birth of my child. Like so many

others, I thought it wouldn't happen

to me. In a way, it didn't happen to me.

It happened to you. And because

I wouldn't invite the terrible guests

into my psyche for goddamned tea,

I wasn't careful enough. I thought

my experience of childbirth

was a consideration. I thought

I was playing it safe by having the Best

Midwife, one who truly understood

the beauty and horror of childbirth

and who would take my side

in the ordeal (I didn't know that meant

she'd take my side
against you!
)

and who would be like a sister

to me, an expert sister and nurse and doctor

and goddess of natal wisdom

all in one, with the extra precaution

of planning to deliver in a hospital,

in case the tea-guests arrived

without invitation. I thought the hospital

was a real hospital, too. That it knew

what it was doing and had a legal

and moral obligation to know

what it was doing. I thought that

since I was so healthy, and you were

growing so beautifully, and all the tests

and charts and balances were perfect,

that I was doing everything right.

I was arrogant. I was selfish. I wanted

to do it all correctly as if I were building

a model birdhouse at summer camp.

I was wrong. I was wrong to see the other

new mothers sighing over their sore

perinea and healthy infants

and believe that I would be like them.

Since when have I ever believed I was like

anyone else? Only when it served me,

Cal. I can blame just about anyone for what

happened to you, but ultimately it was my job

to get you into this world safely. And I failed.

There is no other way to look at it.

The other day I was walking down Court Street

in my neighborhood and saw a mother,

her child in a stroller. We were all stopped at

the same corner, waiting for the light

to change, to cross the street.

The mother was craning her neck to the left

to watch for cars, her stroller pushed out

so far ahead of her it was already

in the street, ready to go, when an unseen car

zipped fast past us, dangerously close

to her child, and the first thing the mother did

was turn to me and say, panicked,

“Did you see that? He didn't even have the light!”

But I couldn't feel any sympathy for her.

In fact, I recoiled from her safe and lucky outrage.

It's not the driver's fucking job to ensure

her child grows up safely. She could be right

and the driver wrong and her kid dead.

Two out of three is what happened instead.

She should hold him a little tighter

than usual and not waste this lesson

on being angry at a car. But I said nothing,

and, disgusted, wasted my own anger on her.

I suppose I could blame God. That's what cowards

do, the lazy. Like people who pretend to be

so abysmally unskilled at cooking

that someone else feeds them throughout life.

Those people are always the pickiest eaters,

have you noticed?

But let's say I won't eat potato or dairy and I can't

tolerate onion, eggs or wheat,

what exactly would I be blaming God for?

A mistake, misjudgment, an oversight (a word

that has always amused me, its simultaneously

opposite meanings) or utter cruelty?

Weakness? Naptime? Drunk driving?

Vengefulness? Power-madness? Experimenting

with karma, playing with matches,

autopilot? Stupidity, quotas, just taking

orders? Mixing up the card files Comedy

and Tragedy? An inept assistant who

has since been fired? Poor people-skills?

Forgetfulness? Had a headache?

A cover-up? Setting things in motion so that

this poem would be written? Overworked,

underpaid? The system being broken?

Technical difficulties? Couldn't find remote?

Track-work, electrical storm, hurricane,

prayer-lines jammed by the devout,

new policies, change of direction within

the administration? On vacation, paternity

leave, sick leave, personal day, long-term

disability, short-term disability, layoffs?

Who am I to underestimate God in this way?

To imply he's some bumbling Joe,

working stiff trying to do an honest day's work?

I mean really. Who knows his workings?

If I don't know what to blame him for,

how can I blame him at all?

Perhaps there was never a flaw in the first place,

no mistakes. Perhaps God is perfect,

utterly blameless. He is what he is. Evil.

The gods of Andromeda, however benevolent,

cannot answer unless called.

They don't operate like Milky Way God,

who doesn't answer at all,

who is always busy offline, jetskiing

on our waterbodies, our handsqueezed

oceans of salt water, competing in dressage

though he always spooks the horses.

In those days when I would call and call

into the stupid air, if I ate something

sweet I would begin to cry, overwhelmed

by how small comfort had become.

So you see, Cal, we're not in particularly

good hands here. Not mine, helpless

and late, not even yours,

tiny, graceful stations the train lines

keep skipping though we've all

been waiting in the rain.

We will find our kind in Andromeda,

we will become our true selves.

I will be the mother who

never hurt you, and you will have your

childhood back in full blossom,

whole hog. We might not know

who we are at first, there, without

our terrible pain. But no flower

knows the ocean.

The sea can never find the forest,