The Argonauts Read online

  It’s very dark now. Harry and Jessica have fallen asleep. I am alone with the baby. I try to commit to the idea of letting him out. I still can’t imagine it. But the pain keeps going deeper.

  At the bottom, which one can’t quite know is the bottom, one reckons. I’ve heard a lot of women describe this reckoning (it might also be called nine centimeters), at which one starts bargaining hard, as if striking a deal to save your conjoined lives. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this, baby, but word is that you’ve got to come out, and that I’ve got to let you, and we’ve got to do this together, and we’ve got to do it now.

  They tell me the baby is facing a weird way, I have to lie on my left side, with my leg elevated. I don’t want to. They tell me twenty minutes this way. I see a collection of hands holding my leg. It hurts. After twenty minutes, he has turned.

  They measure again. Fully effaced, fully dilated. The midwife is ecstatic. Says we’re ready to go. I want to know what will happen next. Just wait, they say.

  at a certain point i woke up. i listened for her breath, which i heard after a moment. much shallower, faster. i became alert, just then the AC unit went on, aurally overtaking the sound of her. this had happened innumerable times before, and it was always a strange bardo for me. would the breath still be happening when the fan went back off? i strained to hear her breath over the grinding of the fan but couldn’t. my torso leapt and sat up to check if her chest was moving. it didn’t seem to be. the AC roared. her left hand puffed the sheet up suddenly, the tiniest, instant halloween ghost. her first movement—a signaling. i leapt to her, to that hand. her eyes were open now, illuminated, looking up, her mouth was now closed, her face no longer tilted, akimbo. she was beautiful. and dying. her mouth was in slow-motion rounding up little bits of earth air for her lungs, or just an echo of that i guess. her eyes were in light and open. she was jutting her chin in the sweetest, most dignified little coquettish juts. she was in the doorway of all worlds and i was in the doorway too. i forced myself not to disturb her, she seemed all at once to know where she was going and how to get there. her map. her job. the goal at hand. i cupped her warm hand in mine and let her go. i told her one more time, you are surrounded in love, you are surrounded in light, don’t be afraid. and her neck was pulsing a little bit? her eyes were looking at something in another place. her mouth needed less air, less often and her chin moving more slowly. i never wanted it to end. i have never wanted infinity to open up under an instant like i wanted that then. and then her eyes relaxed and her shoulders relaxed of a piece. and i knew she had found her way. dared. summoned up her smarts and courage and whacked a way through. i was really astonished. proud of her. i looked at the clock it was 2:16.

  They think my bladder is too full, that it’s in the way. I can’t stand up to pee anymore in the slow-dancing position. They put in a catheter. It stings. Then the doctor comes in, says he’d like to break the water, says it’s enormously full. OK but how. He brandishes what appears to be a bamboo back scratcher. OK. The waters are broken. It feels tremendously good. I am lying in a warm ocean.

  Suddenly, the urge to push. Everyone is thrilled. Push, they say. They teach me. Hold it in, hold in the air, bear down wildly, don’t waste the end of the push. The midwife puts her hand in to see if I need help pushing. She says I am a good pusher and don’t need any help. I am happy I am a good pusher. I want to try.

  On the fourth or so contraction, he starts to come. I don’t know for sure if it’s him, but I can feel the change. I push hard. One push turns into another kind of push—I feel it outside.

  Commotion. I am gone but happy, something is happening. The doctor rushes in, I can see him throwing on his gear: a visor, an apron. He seems agitated but who cares. New lights come on, yellow, directed lights. People around me are moving quickly. My baby is being born.

  Everyone is watching down there intently, in a kind of happy panic. Someone asks if I want to feel the baby’s head, and I don’t, I don’t know why. Then a minute later, I do. Here he comes. It feels big but I feel big enough.

  Then suddenly they tell me to stop pushing. I don’t know why. Harry tells me that the doctor is stretching my perineum in circles around the baby’s head, trying to keep the skin from tearing. Hold, they say, don’t push, but “puff.” Puff puff puff.

  Then they say I can push. I push. I feel him come out, all of him, all at once. I also feel the shit that had been bedeviling me all through pregnancy and labor come out too. My first feeling is that I could run a thousand miles, I feel amazing, total and complete relief, like everything that was wrong is now right.

  And then, suddenly, Iggy. Here he comes onto me, rising. He is perfect, he is right. I notice he has my mouth, incredible. He is my gentle friend. He is on me, screaming.

  Push again, they say a few moments later. You’ve got to be kidding—aren’t I done yet? But this one’s easy; the placenta has no bones. I had always imagined the placenta like a rare fifteen-ounce steak. Instead it’s utterly indecent and colossal—a bloody yellow sac filled with purple-black organs, a bag of whale hearts. Harry stretches its hood and photographs its insides, awed by this most mysterious and gory of apartments.

  When his first son was born, Harry cried. Now he holds Iggy close, laughing sweetly into his little face. I look at the clock; it is 3:45 A.M.

  I spent another 5 hours with her body, alone, with the light on. she was so incredibly beautiful. she looked 19. i took about a hundred pictures of her. i sat with her for a long long time holding her hand. i prepared a meal and ate in the other room and returned. i kept talking to her. i felt like i lived a hundred years, a lifetime with her silent, peaceful body. i turned off the AC unit. the ceiling fan above her was whipping air, holding the space of cycle, where her breath had been. i could’ve stayed another hundred years right there—kissing her and visiting with her. it would have been fine with me. important.

  You don’t do labor, I was counseled several times before the baby came. Labor does you.

  This sounded good—I like physical experiences that involve surrender. I didn’t know, however, very much about experiences that demand surrender—that run over you like a truck, with no safe word to stop it. I was ready to scream, but labor turned out to be the quietest experience of my life.

  If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy. It will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way. There’s never been a human that it didn’t. I guess I’m just waiting to die, your mother said, bemused and incredulous, the last time we saw her, her skin so thin in her borrowed bed.

  People say women forget about the pain of labor, due to some kind of God-given amnesia that keeps the species reproducing. But that isn’t quite right—after all, what does it mean for pain to be “memorable”? You’re either in pain or you’re not. And it isn’t the pain that one forgets. It’s the touching death part.

  As the baby might say to its mother, we might say to death: I forget you, but you remember me.

  I wonder if I’ll recognize it, when I see it again.

  We wanted a longer name for Iggy, but Ignatius seemed too Catholic, and other “Ign” names too-close cognates of undesirable concepts (ignorant, ignoble). Then one day I stumbled upon Igasho, a Native American name, meaning “he who wanders,” tribe unknown. That’s it, I instantly thought. To my surprise, you concurred. And so Iggy became Igasho.

  The spectacle of two white Americans choosing a Native American name made me uneasy. But I remembered that, when we first met, you told me you were part Cherokee. This fact buoyed me along. When I mentioned this to you in the hospital, as we were filling out Iggy’s birth certificate, you looked at me like I was crazy. Part Cherokee?

  A few hours later, a lactation consultant came to visit us. She talked to us for a long time, told us all about her family. She w
as a member of the Pima tribe from Arizona and had married into an African American family, raised her six kids in Watts. She nursed them all. One of her sons was named Eagle Feather, Eagle for short. Her mother had insisted on a ceremony at which Eagle learned to say his name in his tribal language, as Eagle was the white man’s language. I don’t know why I’m telling you guys so much about my family, she kept saying. You were probably passing, but I like to think she had an intuition that something about identity was loose and hot in our house, as, perhaps, it was in hers. At some point we told her about wanting to name Igasho Igasho. She listened, while giving me tips on how to nurse him. Let your boobs be the guide, not the clock, she said. Whenever they feel full, bam!, you pull that baby onto your chest. On her way out, she turned and said, If anyone ever gives you trouble about your baby’s name, you tell them that a full tribe member, from Tucson and Watts, gave you her blessing.

  Later I learn that Pima was the name given to the Othama tribe by the Spaniards. It is a corruption, or misunderstanding, of the phrase pi ‘añi mac or pi mac, meaning “I don’t know”—a phrase tribe members supposedly said often in response to the invading Europeans.

  A few months after your mother died, we got all her papers in the mail. One afternoon I sat on a milk crate outside our storage shed to give them a cursory look, trying to decide where to file them. Amid the mountains of medical bills and threatening collections statements, a certain set of papers stood out—papers with smiley faces and flowery mastheads, exclamation points and carefully handwritten signatures. Your adoption paperwork.

  When you were born, you were Wendy Malone. Perhaps you were Wendy Malone for but minutes, or hours. We don’t know. Your adoption had been arranged prior to your birth, and at three weeks old, you were delivered to your parents, whereupon you became Rebecca Priscilla Bard. Which is who you were for the next twenty-odd years. Becky. In college, you made a loose stab at renaming yourself Butch, though, hilariously, you didn’t really know what it meant. It had just been a nickname for you, used by your father. After you knew, you could tell who was gay by introducing yourself. “I’m Butch,” you’d say, swinging your long blond hair. “No you’re not,” those in the know would chuckle. Then, after dropping out of college and moving to San Francisco, in a Judy Chicago—style rebirth, you renamed yourself Harriet Dodge. After you had a child, you inched toward the state and made the change official: you placed an ad in the paper, filed the paperwork at the courthouse. (Until then, you’d kept your distance from “affairs of the state”: no one had your correct Social Security number until you were thirty-six; you’d never had a bank account.) Over time you became Harriet “Harry” Dodge: an attempt to conjure the feeling of and, or but. Now you are simply Harry, the Harriet a distasteful but sometimes indicative appendage.

  When the New York Times ran a piece on your art in 2008, the editor said you couldn’t appear in their pages unless you chose Mr. or Ms. You’d been waiting your whole life for this kind of recognition; now here it was, but with this price. (You chose Ms., “to take one for the team.”) Around the same time, your ex wouldn’t agree to a custody deal if you checked the box on the second-parent adoption forms that said “mother,” but you couldn’t by law check the box that said “father.” (I judged you then for not having adopted your first son at birth, which would have obviated this torturous second-parent adoption process; to my surprise, I find that now I, too, am unwilling to undertake such a proceeding, vis-à-vis Iggy—I’d rather gamble on national LGBT legal momentum and the relatively progressive state of California than pay $10,000 in legal fees and allow a social worker into our home to interview our children, to deem us “fit.”) When we visited your mother in the hospital, she would sometimes say how glad she was that her daughter was there with her; the nurses would then wheel around the room, looking for her. When we take Iggy to the doctor together now, the nurse always says how happy it makes her to see a father helping out with a baby. I’m certainly doing their team a lot of favors, you mutter. Conversely, there’s at least one restaurant we don’t go to anymore because the waiter had a Tourette’s-like addiction to calling everyone in our family “ladies” every time he so much as deposited a bottle of catsup at our table. He thinks we’re all girls, my stepson would whisper to us in bemusement. That’s OK—girls are very, very cool, you would tell him. I know, he would say back.

  In your early thirties, you went on a hunt for your birth mother. You didn’t have much to go on, but eventually you found her: she was a newly sober leather dyke—quick, articulate, tough around the edges. One of the first things she told you was that she had worked as a prostitute in Nevada. You offered her some probable excuses; she cut you right off, saying she liked the work, and if you got it, use it. During your first phone conversation, you asked about your birth father; she sighed, “Oh honey, I’m just not sure.” But when you met her for lunch at a Chili’s, upon seeing you approach, she exclaimed, “It was Jerry!” She said you looked just like her other child, whose father was Jerry. She had frosty gray hair and wire spectacles, wore lipstick and wide-bottom linen pants. She told you her father (your natal grandfather) had just died and left her a little money, with which she was fixing up a craftsman in San Jose with her on-again, off-again butch lover.

  All she told you then about Jerry was that he was “not a nice person.” Later she said he was violent. She said she wasn’t in touch with him anymore—the last she’d heard was that he was living on an island off Canada with holes cut out of the armpits of his shirt, to air out his shingles. A few years later, she told you he had died. You never wanted to know more.

  Your birth brother, who was raised by his father, has long been an addict—in and out of prison, on and off the streets. He wrote you once from prison, in a style that uncannily echoed your own—the same careening prose, shot through with a meticulousness, a darkness, a hilarity. The last time she heard from him, your birth mother tells us, he had been found unconscious in a parking lot, covered in blood. Once he came to, he called her collect; she didn’t accept the charge. She threw up her hands as she told us this story, saying, I didn’t have the money! But we also heard her saying, I can’t carry him anymore.

  You had your last drink at twenty-three. You already knew.

  It can be hard not to know much about one’s parents. But, you tell me, it can be awesome too. Before you had thought much about gender, you attributed your lifelong interest in fluidity and nomadism to being adopted, and you treasured it. You felt you had escaped the fear of someday becoming your parents, a fear you saw ruling the psyches of many of your friends. Your parents didn’t have to be disappointments or genetic warnings. They could just be two ordinary people, doing their best. From a very young age—your parents had always been open about the fact that you were adopted—you remember feeling a spreading, inclusive, almost mystical sense of belonging. The fact that anybody could have been your birth mother was an astonishment, but one tinged with exhilaration: rather than being from or for an other, you felt you came from the whole world, utterly plural. You were curious enough to track down your birth mother, but after your real mother died, you found yourself unable to answer your birth mother’s calls. Even now, years later, the interest you once took in finding her feels clouded by the memory of your mother, and your ongoing grief at losing her. Your longing to see her again. Phyllis.

  It’s easy enough to say, I’ll be the right kind of finite or sodomitical mother. I’ll let my baby know where the me and the not-me begin and end, and withstand whatever rage ensues. I’ll give as much as I’ve got to give without losing sight of my own me. I’ll let him know that I’m a person with my own needs and desires, and over time he’ll come to respect me for elucidating such boundaries, for feeling real as he comes to know me as real.

  But who am I kidding? This book may already be doing wrong. I’ve heard many people speak with pity about children whose parents wrote about them when they were young. Perhaps the stories of Iggy’s origins are not mine
alone, and thus not mine alone to tell. Perhaps my temporal proximity to his infancy has led me into a false sense of ownership over his life and body, a sense that is already fading, now that he weighs two pounds more than the heaviest baby ever born, and I no longer have the visceral sense, when beholding him, that he ever could have emerged from me.

  The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time. If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one’s undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I love her very much?

  What is good is always being destroyed: one of Winnicott’s main axioms.

  I considered writing Iggy a letter before he was born, but while I talked to him a lot in utero, I stalled out when it came to writing anything down. Writing to him felt akin to giving him a name: an act of love, surely, but also one of irrevocable classification, interpellation. (Perhaps this is why Iggy is named Iggy: if territorialization is inevitable, why not perform it with a little irreverence? “Iggy: Not a good choice unless you’re planning for a rock star or the class clown,” one baby names website warned.) The baby wasn’t separate from me, so what use would it be to write to him as if he were off at sea? No need to rehash Linda Hamilton in the final scenes of The Terminator, recording an audiotape for her unborn son, the future leader of the human resistance, before she sets off toward Mexico in her beater jeep, storm clouds gathering on the horizon. If you want an original relation to the mother/son dyad, you must turn (however sadly!) away from the seduction of messianic fantasy. And if your baby boy is going to be white, you must become curious about what will happen if you raise him as just another human animal, no more or less worthy than any other.