IMPERFECT EDEN

The Baby-
chapter 1


WAAHHHHHHHHHH, UHHH, UHHHH, UHHH. WAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

It was taking too long. It was noisy in the room and it was hot and her head was throbbing and it was not even out yet. Lorraine’s mouth was dry, muscles bunched and taut like a too full balloon ready to burst at the slightest touch; her thighs tensed for pushing were tiring and there was the crying and crying and…

He could be heard crying before he came out. It was the cry of someone that had been crying for years; lungs now clouded and stained by mucous, lobes refusing to expand as quickly as hours before, so now they slip into periods of rest where all that can be heard is the rough, raspy huffing and the anticipation of the next breath, the next wail.

It was taking too long. It was noisy in the room, voices everywhere, orders being given, directions of push, breath pant flew around her; her own breathing, fell down fast and heavy and clipped over her sweaty body, and still it was not out. Her mouth was dry, her muscles tensed for pushing, were burning and feeling like there were ready to breach the boundaries of her skin and still there was the crying and crying. She felt dizzy and light, “I am losing myself, losing me.” She lightly mumbled, lightly touched tongues to roof or mouth, lips to force the words out. “What did you say dear?” A nurse, the black round faced one with the smile bent over her. “Yes it’s almost over, soon, soon. You can hear him crying already.”

It could have been the rush of cold air that came to meet him as he slid forcefully down between cringing muscles, frightening contractions pushing him out of the warm salty pool he had called home for so long, that brought on the barrage of wails this time. It could have been that he was afraid to see what waited him at the end of the slick tunnel all sticky and lined with round bony protuberances.

Reverend Darling, the babies grandfather, the father of the panting mother, was fond of laying hands on pregnant women’s stomachs and quoting Jeremiah chapter 1, verse 5: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, before you came to birth, I consecrated you. It was his way, as he would say, of laying a sanctified greeting upon the baby before it was born and recognizing it as a soul within the nation of God.

The Reverend wasn’t there, was nowhere near the hospital, had not laid hands, a finger or even eyes on the belly that housed the squawking child, but Lorraine, lying on the table legs cocked open waiting and through the pain of contractions, could hear his raspy voice slicing through the din, cutting into her ears and she screamed louder because of this. The baby could have used such a prayer, a greeting of peace and blessing might have eased the journey between the there, that space where spirits wait to enter the here.

GODDAMMIT, DAMN IT TO HELL! GET IT OUT OF ME- NOW! It hurts, Oh my head hurts. It feels like its tryin’ to come out of my head. GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD NOW!

“Calm down Lorraine, breathe, breathe. Listen to the doctor and do what he says and it’ll be over as soon as possible.” The words echoed and were muddled, they were soft and gentle, too peaceful to be bursting cannon loud, shrapnel sharp on the rolling landscapes in her head. The words carried no weight here, all she could hear was crying; crying coming from somewhere and screaming coming from her raw throat. The hectic pace of the room, the chatter between the doctor and nurses, she ignored. Lorraine had always been adept at blocking out all but what she thought pertinent to her in the moment and at the moment her needs were stopping the pain.
Through all the confusion her father’s voice, coarse and demonstrative kept invading- “suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.” It was slow and painful the words that marched through her head, tears flowed freely from her eyes, but now he was coming. He was coming.

While waiting in some ether-world, some place between blood and bone, earth and Heaven, a place where most souls that stopped through were giving instructions to love the light and the adventures that lie ahead, he was forgotten, overlooked and left on his own with his dreams; nascent and unformed dreams that never reached beyond the sounds that came to him from beyond his watery pallet- his buoyant semi dark room. He had no sub-planted clues to be forgotten and remembered again years later, nothing to tell him what to expect after he arrived at the end of his journey. He was alone here in this watery world, but he knew this harshness and wanted to stay. For him there was nothing before and an uncertain of what lay ahead.
While lying in wait he would dream sounds, hard-edged patterns that he made soft, turned melodic and filled with tastes that fed him when there was little or nothing else there. When the blood that flowed to him was choked of all nutrients he fed himself off of incoming musical sounds. For months and months he had cradled himself to sleep on nothing more than sounds that found there way to him from outside, he was bounced asleep by Latin and Reggae rhythms mixed with the occasional blues rift sent out into the universe from the fingers of some old and hardened down home guitarist that could never have fathomed that he, tucked away inside, not yet ready to see the world with rheumy eyes, could find solace in his licks. The Blues after all were for those that had lived and lost and were bound on living again, not one like himself who, tucked away, in between limb and heart, knew nothing of love and loss; just sleep and wake. His spirit found solace in the sounds, in them he heard things he knew, though he knew not how. He heard the cry of the muezzin, the spiked call of the cantor, he heard the Canticle of Canticles ringing in his head.

The sounds now, were the release and gush of water- crashing waves that left him shivering; the groaning and creaking of walls that in there harshest voices let him know that they wanted nothing more than to kick him out of his imperfect Eden. Screams and shouts of “GET IT OUT, GET THE DAMN THING OUT. FUCK, GET IT OUT!” assaulted his ears, settled in his bones, forced inside of him by the pains made by the red crushing walls.

The sounds now were discordant, baleful and he was afraid. He wanted to crawl backwards, scratch and finger his way backwards, back into his warm, wet world of a room. There was no other place he wanted to be, this was home, warm, close and cozy. But the space behind him was now derelict and barren, the shrinking walls, slick and contracting had closed off his way back, it was if they never wanted him there in the first place and now made it sure that he or no other soul, could ever inhabit that space.

“CUT IT OUT- GET THIS THING OUT- AHHHHHHHHH! DAMN, IT HURTS.”

****** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Staring across the room at her writhing and possessed sister, Desiree checked the time on the big, white, industrial clock on the wall. “Three a.m., what a God-awful time for a birthing,” she thought to herself. As a nurse she knew that this was that special hour that most critically ill patients choose to die…

There was nowhere else he wanted to be, he was in no hurry to leave now. He could feel something tugging, pulling, grasping and fingering through the thick hair that lined his head and forcing him closer and closer to the light. He could hear sounds; voices, softer and less strident, cooing at something in pampering tones that sounded like music, without the waves. But he was being pulled and the waves of noise came back, the rush of red came back, surging down the tunnel pounding his feet and stomach making him cry.

WAAHHHHHHHHHH
“DAMMIT DOCTOR, DO SOMETHING. I AM FINISHED, I CANT DO THIS, CANT DO IT. AHHHHH”

…and she marveled at the fact that early mornings were also the times that a large number of babies chose to make their first appearance into the world, chose to bust through the veil of here and there, that spatial dividing line between the yet to be born place her preacher father would call the “waiting place of souls,” and this world which all to frequently was cold and harsh. So she waited, and stared and thought.

Desiree knew that memory was misleading and at times false, colored by all that a person had went through and touched. She knew that by the time a memory was recalled, it could be filtered through and rearranged by hurt, pain, loss, and even redressed in different clothes to attest to ones new sense of contentment. Under the best of circumstances memories thought Desiree were iffy, but under stress like the moment she was standing in now, memory could turn on misty becoming only haints and shades of the truth; so much so that the truth became so see-through no one could tell what was real and what just shadows.

"GIRL, when you speak to me use a tone of respect. " She had asked why they had to be home so early on a Friday, stated that they were only minutes late. "Girl, don’t talk back to me, don’t talk at me, don’t smart mouth me! I’m not one of those hooligans, one of those thugs you and your sister are used to talking with out there in the streets when your mother and I are away, our backs turned doing something else. NO!"

Hooligans, did he just say hooligans, her brain burst with laughter. His voice slammed her, pinned her ears back, took her legs out from underneath her. She was tired from the walk home from the library with Lorraine. Yes, they had stopped off at a friends house down the street, but so what, it was still early. They were exhausted from the long day at school and now having to stand up under his Friday night tirade was more than she could handle. Always the same his words, his spittle flying through the air tracing their hairlines like watery darts, mother in the kitchen waiting dinner, fried chicken, brussel sprouts or succotash, mashed potatoes and homemade lemonade or sweet tea a throwback to his youthful days. It was always the same, she and Lorraine would stand around and wait for the storm to pass, stomachs growling, the smell of fresh baked bread wafting through the air causing their heads to spin from hunger. It had always been like this

His voice was the hammer and it hit and hit with the ferocity of a pile driver looking to force its way beneath the surface, drive its words so far inside they could never be shaken loose. After seventeen years of this, for it seemed the yelling and demands started the day she was born, either towards her, or her mother who would lean into the words acquiescing to their power or maybe just deflecting them with her calm and steadiness, she was well used to the constant barrage of noise her father put forth; the fire and brimstone sledgehammer monologues suffered daily by all in the household, had come complacent in the face of the pronouncements of damnation of her preacher father.

Her head was bedrock, hard and dense, eventually having only its top layer infiltrated and invaded by her father’s strong words, heavy-handed preaching; but the lower strata maintained its structural integrity. He could never reach her there. Lorraine‘s head though was soft and ethereal, it was like pounding through thin air or into water it felt the vibrations, but was impervious to their effects. Early on she had learned somewhere that instead of letting her head become harder to keep him out, make it lighter to let him pass right through. She refused her father’s wrath entry by not being present. She let the words ripple and vibrate through her being, allowing them just to get wider, less powerful and more dispersed only seconds after they were uttered.

After the age of ten his words no longer caused Lorraine to jump and dance like a puppet under his command; her eyes dimmed a bit upon his arrival and no longer held within the proper amount of fear he asked for as tithe. Reverend Darling being a man so used to being obeyed and given his lead saw this change instantly and refused to let his power slip away to a child, let alone one of his. As if he really had any choice. So he railed at the girls louder, giving specific attention to his youngest daughter. Desiree sat and watched the power play between her sister and their father, the show played out in front of her often, one flailing and spewing his Lord and Jesus laced rants as if the louder he spoke there was the possibility he could find God and or righteousness in the words. The other small, immovable, staring at the man with a look so beyond hate, a look of such pity and scorn that it burned deeper and brighter than anything Desiree had seen in her life. As the oldest, Desiree masked her feelings and continued to play along, obedient to the end.

Now she stood staring at her younger sister as she moaned like one possessed with a spirit and not a quickly coming child. It had only been less than an hour since Lorraine was wheeled into the room and already she could by her breathing and the frantic nature of the nurses and the doctor that the child would soon appear. Against the wall out of the fray, she wondered if things had really happened as she remembered them. If they really got to the place where they were now through the places of her memory. Now with her eyes refocused she tried to picture Lorraine as a young girl to see if she really was the one with the hollow look in her dark eyes that defied logic, she couldn’t remember if her father, although a harsh man, was really as bad as her memory painted him. They appeared like ghost now in her head, of herself she saw nothing. The baby was coming now.

He could feel the top of his head being forced out of an opening too small, yet begrudgingly accommodating to his size. With each push of the surrounding walls he slid further and further away from home- further and further into the light and sounds that he dreaded. He could feel his tiny chest rise and fall faster and with an urgency that frightened; the quickening pace in his center speeding up with each tightening push. The beeps and alarms and clangs, metal on metal, scared him and no one listened to him as he told them to be quiet. So he cried and cried, calling out in the universal language of tears.

‘DAMMIT, IS IT OUT YET, IS IT YET?”

Halfway out, his eyes glued shut with fear, through movements and sounds he read like a bat using sonar, he defined the noises into shapes that appeared to him disjointed and ragged. As he eased the rest of the way out, the sound shapes, standing all around, radiating heat rocked side to side, danced around the spot he was entering. They were waiting for him and with easy strides and jerks supported him gently into the outside away from his warm spaces filled with sound and liquid.

It was cold, the air in the room biting his tender flesh and the harsh lights bouncing off of his closed eyes invading his body. The sounds no longer rippled but bounced like stones off of his head and he cried, till there were no sounds left in him, nothing but gasps then silence.
He felt all alone.

Lorraine, her face flushed, eyes bloodshot and drooping, now laid silent; breathing shallow, arms akimbo, spiked hair that framed her face, wildly displayed across a pillow.
“Is it finished?” she mumbled. No longer feeling the aggressive pains of childbirth she relaxed. “It is finished,” she whispered and turned her head away from the commotion all around her.
“Mrs. Darling, it’s a boy and he is as gorgeous as a girl. Head full of jet black hair and soft features. He’s gonna be a heartbreaker when he grows up. Once we run a few quick tests and clean him up some , you want hold him?” The question was softly rhetorical and lovingly placed before her, the nurse smiling, Lorraine, grimacing. Tired and nonplussed, Lorraine stony and distant, looked at the words as they hung in the air.

‘NAH, I JUST WANNA SLEEP! Leave me alone now and let me rest take him away. Take him. Damn, its over.”

“Have you thought of a name for this darling little boy? A child like this gotta have a special name.”

Lorraine just stared in disbelief, tiredness; sunken eyes cutting around the room, taking it all in- the nurses working on the squirming child a few feet away, the doctor still fumbling between her legs, her sister, a nurse herself, used to being in the midst of the action but now forced against the wall by all the activity watched, happy yet stunned by the birth. Lorraine tried to think of names, but all that comes is silence and blank spaces. She had never thought this far ahead, this moment was never a reality until just now; he was never real until just now with his cries and mewling, the nurse fondling him, his aunt smiling sadly his direction. Through her tiredness she tried to gather up a name from somewhere, but nothing.

“He don’t have no name yet, call him baby. Call him what you want, just leave me alone and let me sleep. It feels like I ain’t slept in ages.”

Now cleaned, weighed and tested and found to be healthy and as normal looking as any baby could be, swaddled like Jesus in the manger, he laid quietly- resigned to his new surroundings. There was no longer any reason for him to cry, the fear of last few hours having left, dissipating under the harsh lights, stopping when the pain of birth ended. All his fear ceased when his young mind realized that there was no returning to the warm, wet place he had called home. He was dry now. He was warm and dry and he felt his past life and lives slipping away, he was slipping away into nothing except what was all around him in the stark white room. His past, that cord that linked him to his mother, to the ether that was spirit, lay wet and slick in a pan somewhere. He was calm and secure now, but it was dry and chafing.

Desiree stood back, neither comforting the baby or her sister. She thought about her parents, it was late, but she should call them soon. But not yet, there was no reason to wake them yet. No reason at all.