Happy Mutant Baby Pills (20 page)

“A
re you the husband?”

Nora was now vibrating on the gurney. They were shoving an IV in her arm. I handled the paperwork. Watched them prepare to whisk her off.

“Are you the father?” the nurse asked again.

“No,” I said. (Awkward.) “Just a friend. I'm not the father. We live near each other. She needed a ride.”

I spoke in a lowered voice, concerned. Though mostly my voice was low because I did not want Nora to hear. Did I love her? Of course I did. Do. Though that moment feels like the proverbial lifetime ago. I have done some very bad things for her, and with her, and—even though I was acquiescing, not initiating—
to
her.

But never mind.

I saw the RN consulting with a doctor at the elevator. Imagined, in that way you do when you're high, that what I thought they were saying they were really saying. Nurse: “Doctor, there's something here I think you should see.” I watched the man in the white coat lean over, and then raise his face gravely: “What is this,
Citizen Ruth
? She's
huffing
.”

Of course, this was just in my head. For all her aspirational toxicity, Nora looked like a healthy mom-to-be.

In truth, probably nothing of what I thought was said was said. Still, I had to wonder.
Had
I wiped off the gold smudge-ring around her mouth? Paranoia is just heightened awareness of possibly unlikely, possibly inevitable consequences. Or leaky adrenaline, depending. This was no longer about capitalist fallout. This was about not getting arrested. She was too far along to turn away, and the sourpuss admitting nurse did not hide her opinion on the matter.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Let's Review!

Okay. Breathe.

For the second time: Did we think about the child?

Of course. We both wanted her to be comfortable. And yes, I know how that sounds.

We weren't delusional. We knew what people would say. (As I've said.) What they would accuse us of. But the backlash was part of it. The more blowback, the better. The louder they—they being everyone: media, preachers, lawmakers, moms—screamed about what we'd done, the louder we'd scream that it was being done to us. We wanted editorials, hate mail, talk-radio rants, ultimate recognition for the sheer horrific rightness of the point we were making. However horrific the means of making it.

THIRTY-NINE

End Times

The birth itself is a blur.
It all happened so fast.
Isn't that what people say? That or
Time just stopped.
Actually, time did not stop. Time disappeared altogether. Everything happened at once, as if the event collapsed in on itself. One second we were in our humble domicile, consuming baby defectors, the next we were in the car, the ER, the elevator, the delivery room. The baby wanted out. Early. I can't say I blamed it.

Maybe, unlike Mom, the little polluted thing had some instinct for survival. I don't know. I do know that once Nora had her feet up in stirrups, and the nurse handed me pale-blue scrubs and booties, I barely had time to blink before the doctor shouted for Betadine and a second RN, gripping Nora's shoulders at the head of the bed, started chanting. I saw her momentary hesitation, eyes Velcroed to Nora's German shepherd Daddy tattoo. The dripping fangs. She willed herself to look away. Cleared her throat. “Okay, now, push . . . go ahead. It's like making a bowel movement. Push . . . Go ahead . . . PUSH!”

So vast and nurturing was the nurse's charisma, under those hospital fluorescents, that for one fleeting instant the whole process seemed somehow . . . wholesome. Normal. Even
life-affirming
. (Not a word I've ever used.)

Nora's screams I knew—I was the
only
one who knew—did not come from the traditional and well-documented searing pain of childbirth. Or not just. As the baby was crowning, and seconds later when the doctor eased the baby out, I saw, with shock, the same thing she saw. Her little girl had been born. Alive.

It was perfect.

FORTY

New Life

The horror.

The doctor pulled out the newborn, still attached to the umbilical cord like a Macy's Day float attached to a guide wire, and held her up. Red-faced, bloody, what turned out—after they snipped the cord and weighed her—to be six pounds, six ounces of squiggling, placenta-soaked mohawk. “Lanugo?” Nora asked hopefully, eyeing the mini Wendy O. Williams look-alike. The born-with-mega-hair syndrome was one Nora anticipated with fondness. “Nope,” the RN replied. “Some babies are just born with a big do. Lanugo's when they actually have fur on their back.”

“You mean . . . ” I could see the words stick in her throat like sticks. “You mean, she's normal?”

Nora turned to me, stricken, as the new nurse, a tiny redhead, lifted the tiny creature and placed her on Nora's full and plangent right breast, to suckle. This was when I noticed the milky drop oopling from her nipple. Oddly indistinguishable from sperm and, inappropriate as I sensed the sensation was the instant I felt it, insanely hot. Here was Nora, devastated and suckling, her all-but-cleaved vagina just now being cleaned of blood and feces, and all I wanted to do was fuck her. Out of nowhere I remembered my late mother's favorite insult, yelped incessantly at me and my long-since OD'd brothers: “What were you, raised in a barn?”

There was one hopeful second, after the initial shock, when little Nico's outsized genitals gave us hope. (Did I mention that Nico was now her designated name? Nico Mutando. We both thought it had a ring.) Her girl lips swelled with the pink, protuberant shock of orangutan ass. “Oh my God!” Nora exclaimed. She tugged at her hair and wrenched her head from side to side, barely able to contain what I knew to be joy. At least this part of her mission was accomplished. The coverage could commence later.

Misinterpreting the New Mom's relief for torment, the doctor reassured her: “Oh, her lady parts? What you're seeing is completely normal. They'll go down in a day.” In other words, temporary mutation.

And that was that. Nora wept. For the first time since I'd met her. After this, she was inconsolable.

S
o that's what happened. The thing we never expected. A perfect baby.

Nora was carried out screaming.

A
n hour later, a policewoman stood guard outside the door, doing a word find. Apparently, after Nora's outburst, the doctor decided to test her. And contacted the law enforcement liaison about the magic ingredients they found in her blood system. By chance I heard part of the call, which she made from the nurses' station, when I was coming back from the men's room. Apparently, Nora's state of extreme inebriation constituted a violation in and of itself. Depraved indifference . . . Reckless endangerment . . .

All this I overheard in snatches, pretending to tie my shoe.

I knew, then, that we needed to make a statement about our intent to make a statement. Something on the order of
The child you see here is suffering, not from the action of her parents, but from the inaction of our government, which has subjected her—and millions of others, born and unborn, just like her—to unchecked chemical and pharmaceutical pollution from time of conception. And before.

The problem was, she wasn't suffering. The baby was fine (except for those temporarily eye-popping genitalia), and the only pollution the medical and law enforcement people cared about was the individual kind: drugs and booze. Institutional poisons didn't count.

At the moment, when by all rights I should have been falling on my sword, protecting my beloved, my junkie instincts took over. I became what I always was: a survivor, not a martyr.

I knew it the second another cop, a brush-cut, gym-muscled sergeant named Muskie, grabbed me by the arm and asked me what I knew. At which point my true nature, displaying all the nobility of a rat in a basement corner, revealed itself anew.

“Me,
Officer
? I don't know a thing. I just drove her here. We're neighbors. I'm just a friend . . .” And so on.

D
id I feel bad? Of course! I knew they were going to take her away. But what good would come of them taking
me
away?

I know it looks cold, I know it looks like betrayal. But really, how can I help her if I'm inside, too? It's like how they tell you on airplanes to put the oxygen over your own mouth first, so you can then help your child. Nora will have plenty of time to write while she's in there. Perhaps this was the best outcome of all.

I
wanted to whisper to Nora, to tell her all this. But with the cops there, and the doctor and nurses all milling around with crossed arms and talking in low voices, I needed to pretty much stand out in the hall and act sad and perplexed. (That first policewoman, I later learned, wasn't even there for her. They were posted to the maternity ward—
every
maternity ward because of the prevalence of baby-snatchers in the past five years. Only two months before, a twenty-three-year-old Christian lady, distraught that her own child had been lost in a miscarriage, had showed up at this very hospital and tried to grab a newborn. Which explained why, as soon as they snipped the umbilical and wiped the blood off, they snapped a little ankle bracelet around the baby. As if she were a tiny felon. If someone so much as carried the creature within five feet of an exit or elevator, an alarm would sound. Talk about your Nanny State.)

So much about this would have made Nora indignant, fired her up. But she was still trying to make a bigger point, the one we'd wanted to make all along, the one, because of the baby's premature arrival—and its unnaturally non-mutant condition—we would now not be able to document and distribute, and inflict upon the world. I could hear her through the closed door of the hospital room. Yelling. For me. Her voice cracked with desperation.

“Tell them, Lloyd, tell them!”

This prompts the lady uniform to regard me, again, with naked suspicion. Unless I'm off my game, perception-wise, and it's simple disgust. Interrupted by brush-cut Muskie, who steps out to tear open a spearmint Chiclets, pop a few in his mouth, and snort at the lady uniform, “Honest to Christ, you wouldn't believe what I just found.”

He offers her a Chiclet. They keep staring at me.

“She's just a friend,” I repeat. “I drove her over.”

Knowing, even as I say it, how much Nora needs me. How much, right now, more than anything, I need some heroin to obliterate the reality of what I'm doing, that very moment, to stay free and do more heroin. To blot out awareness of my own betrayal. Needless to say, I'm fooling no one. “I just drove her over. She okay?”

“Lloyd!” Nora screams again. This time Muskie and the policewoman turn toward me. The policewoman nods toward the door. The others watch to see how I'll respond. I manage a shrug and open the door enough to pop my head in. I try to look contrite. “I'm sorry, Norma, I really am.”

“It's Nora, you shit!”

I shrug. It's all theater now, designed to just get me out of there.

“I think she's hysterical,” I say, with as much compassion as I can.

I
walked halfway down the hall without looking back and could still hear her screams.

I didn't know, in that moment, what they were going to do with the baby . . . The—this was finally confirmed—beautiful, healthy, bright-eyed, squalling baby. Cute enough for Gerber. Who wasn't mine. Wasn't the Dow Chemical CEO's, either. Who was, if the letter I received some months later from Nora is to be believed, her stepfather's.

I
'm not proud of myself. I'm not going to lie. I'm no sociopath. That's the problem. I have a conscience. I may have walked free. But I feel very, very bad about it.

A
nd the baby? I had Jay make inquiries. Discreetly. She's still okay. No word that she glows in the dark. Seriously, she's fine. (And if, ten years from now, it turns out she can repel fleas, is that so bad?)

The worst side effects are the ones we don't see. Some people don't acknowledge their own feelings. They don't cry when their mothers die. They just drive into utility poles for a few years. Become heroin addicts. (But maybe that second thing is because they like heroin. You can't blame Mommy and Daddy for everything.)

I
don't know if what I felt for Nora was love. But it's as close as I've ever gotten. We were crime partners. And we made love a lot. (Or something like it, just a little more chemically depraved.) A tiny butter knife slices more skin off my heart every time I think about her. I guess you could say she made me hate myself on a higher level.

As they say in the rooms of everything Anonymous, if you want self-esteem, commit estimable acts. And vice versa.

For better or worse, some of us wash up more familiar with the vice than the versa.

 

Epilogue

I visited Nora before she died. Up at Lartewell, in Walla Walla, the hospital for the criminally insane. The leukemia would have been enough. There was also the pituitary adenoma, and the Cushing's syndrome, a metabolic disorder caused by overproduction of corticosteroids by the adrenal cortex. Plus the alopecia. The Parkinson's, the pancreatic neoplasm. There was more than that wrong with her, to tell you the truth. Things in her brain.

And all of it, all of it, in the end, testament to how ironically—if futilely—heroic this woman was. Every impactful disease she had worked to protect future children from—by attempting to induce it in her own child—she acquired herself. Thereby protecting her own child. Saving it, effectively, from
her
. A staggering gesture for the nine people who heard about it. Of course, there are websites; you can find some Nora stuff out there, if you poke around . . . You can find the
SCUM Manifesto
, too. But that hasn't exactly made Valerie Solanas a household word, despite the biopic.

Did I mention I found out her last name? Nora
Hoylits
! Funk was fake.

Even now, sometimes, the copy pours out, by itself, like vaguely embarrassing fever sweat coming off an engorged carny barker.
Was she satanic? Was she a saint? Meet the woman who willingly absorbed our national effluvium—the toxic givens that the rest of us absorb unknowingly, unwillingly—to save us all. A profound gesture! Profoundly unnoticed, beyond the delivery room
where she birthed her polluted child.

(And so on . . . Just listen to that prose!
Grandiosity—side effect of inner tininess?
)

The joke? Ultimately the menu of national poisons in Nora's nervous system was of less concern than the tracks on her feet. What Officer Muskie'd stepped out to tell the policewoman about, when I was skulking in the hall playing Concerned Neighbor. Shooting between the toes, it turns out, fools no one.

J
ay, Riegle, and I met again, in Calvary Way, a Christian recovery center. Founded and run by Pastor Bobb. The dating thing was history; now that shopping and Facebook were as rehab-worthy as meth and bourbon, the big money was back in rehabs.

We are all good Americans. In permanent re-recovery, freer than we deserve, with lifetimes of savage, happy amends ahead of us.