The Best American Essays 2014 (20 page)

I got together with Cox on my first night in town. He sent a chauffeured car to pick me up—every Westerner I met in U.B. had a car and a driver—at the Blue Sky Hotel, a new and sharply pointed glass tower that split the cold sky like a shark fin. When I arrived at his apartment, he and a friend, a mining-industry lawyer from New Jersey, were listening to Beyoncé and pouring champagne. The place was clean and modern, but modest: for expats in U.B., it's far easier to accumulate wealth than it is to spend it. We went to dinner at a French restaurant, where we all ordered beef, because seafood is generally terrible in Mongolia, which is separated from the sea by its hulking neighbors (and former occupiers) China and Russia. Then they took me to an underground gay bar called 100 Per Cent—which could have been in Brooklyn, except that everyone in Mongolia still smoked indoors. I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange. I ended the night early.

When I woke up the next morning, the pain in my abdomen was insistent; I wondered if the baby was starting to kick, which everyone said would be happening soon. I called home to complain, and my spouse told me to find a Western clinic. I e-mailed Cox to get his doctor's phone number, thinking that I'd call if the pain got any worse, and then I went out to interview people: the minister of the environment, the president of a mining concern, and, finally, a herdsman and conservationist named Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, who became a folk hero after he fired shots at mining operations that were diverting water from nomadic communities. I met him in the sleek lobby of the Blue Sky with Yondon Badral—a smart, sardonic man I'd hired to translate for me in U.B. and to accompany me a few days later to the Gobi, where we would drive a Land Rover across the cold sands to meet with miners and nomads. Badral wore jeans and a sweater; Munkhbayar was dressed in a long, traditional
deel
robe and a fur hat with a small metal falcon perched on top. It felt like having a latte with Genghis Khan.

In the middle of the interview, Badral stopped talking and looked at my face; I must have been showing my discomfort. He said that it was the same for his wife, who was pregnant, just a few weeks further along than I was, and he explained the situation to Munkhbayar. The nomad's skin was chapped pink from the wind; his nostrils, eyes, and ears all looked as if they had receded into his face to escape the cold. I felt a little surge of pride when he said that I was brave to travel so far in my condition. But I was also starting to worry.

I nearly canceled my second dinner with the Americans that evening, but I figured that I needed to eat, and they offered to meet me at the Japanese restaurant in my hotel. Cox was leaving the next day to visit his family for Thanksgiving, and he was feeling guilty that he'd spent a fortune on a business-class ticket. I thought about my uncomfortable flight over and said that it was probably worth it. “You're being a princess,” Cox's friend told him tartly, but I couldn't laugh. Something was happening inside me. I had to leave before the food came.

I ran back to my room, pulled off my pants, and squatted on the floor of the bathroom, just as I had in Cambodia when I had dysentery, a decade earlier. But the pain in that position was unbearable. I got on my knees and put my shoulders on the floor and pressed my cheek against the cool tile. I remember thinking,
This is going to be the craziest shit in history.

I felt an unholy storm move through my body, and after that there is a brief lapse in my recollection; either I blacked out from the pain or I have blotted out the memory. And then there was another person on the floor in front of me, moving his arms and legs, alive. I heard myself say out loud, “This can't be good.” But it
looked
good. My baby was as pretty as a seashell.

He was translucent and pink and very, very small, but he was flawless. His lovely lips were opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world. For a length of time I cannot delineate, I sat there, awestruck, transfixed. Every finger, every toenail, the golden shadow of his eyebrows coming in, the elegance of his shoulders—all of it was miraculous, astonishing. I held him up to my face, his head and shoulders filling my hand, his legs dangling almost to my elbow. I tried to think of something maternal I could do to convey to him that I was, in fact, his mother, and that I had the situation completely under control. I kissed his forehead and his skin felt like a silky frog's on my mouth.

I was vaguely aware that there was an enormous volume of blood rushing out of me, and eventually that seemed interesting too. I looked back and forth between my offspring and the lake of blood consuming the bathroom floor and I wondered what to do about the umbilical cord connecting those two things. It was surprisingly thick and ghostly white, a twisted human rope. I felt sure that it needed to be severed—that's always the first thing that happens in the movies. I was afraid that if I didn't cut that cord my baby would somehow suffocate. I didn't have scissors. I yanked it out of myself with one swift, violent tug.

In my hand, his skin started to turn a soft shade of purple. I bled my way across the room to my phone and dialed the number for Cox's doctor. I told the voice that answered that I had given birth in the Blue Sky Hotel and that I had been pregnant for nineteen weeks. The voice said that the baby would not live. “He's alive now,” I said, looking at the person in my left hand. The voice said that he understood, but that it wouldn't last, and that he would send an ambulance for us right away. I told him that if there was no chance the baby would make it, I might as well take a cab. He said that that was not a good idea.

Before I put down my phone, I took a picture of my son. I worried that if I didn't, I would never believe he had existed.

 

When the pair of Mongolian EMTs came through the door, I stopped feeling competent and numb. One offered me a tampon, which I knew not to accept, but the realization that of the two of us I had more information stirred a sickening panic in me, and I said I needed to throw up. She asked if I was drunk, and I said, offended,
No, I'm
upset. “Cry,” she said. “You just cry, cry, cry.” Her partner bent to insert a thick needle in my forearm and I wondered if it would give me Mongolian AIDS, but I felt unable to do anything but cry, cry, cry. She tried to take the baby from me, and I had the urge to bite her hand. As I lay on a gurney in the back of the ambulance with his body wrapped in a towel on top of my chest, I watched the frozen city flash by the windows. It occurred to me that perhaps I was going to go mad.

In the clinic there were very bright lights and more needles and IVs and I let go of the baby and that was the last I ever saw him. He was on one table and I was on another, far away, lying still under the screaming lights, and then, confusingly, the handsomest man in the world came through the door and said he was my doctor. His voice sounded nice, familiar. I asked if he was South African. He was surprised that I could tell, and I explained that I had spent time reporting in his country, and then we talked a bit about the future of the ANC and about how beautiful it is in Cape Town. I realized that I was covered in blood, sobbing, and flirting.

Soon he said that he was going home and that I could not return to the Blue Sky Hotel, where I might bleed to death in my room without anyone knowing. I stayed in the clinic overnight, wearing a T-shirt and an adult diaper that a kind, fat, giggling young nurse gave me. After she dressed me, she asked, “You want toast and tea?” It was milky and sweet and reminded me of the chai I drank in Nepal, where I went backpacking in the Himalayas with a friend long before I was old enough to worry about the expiration of my fertility. It had been a trip spent pushing my young body up the mountains, past green-and-yellow terraced fields and villages full of goats, across rope bridges that hung tenuously over black ravines with death at the bottom. We consumed a steady diet of hashish and Snickers bars and ended up in a blizzard that killed several hikers but somehow left us only chilly.

I had been so lucky. Very little had ever truly gone wrong for me before that night on the bathroom floor. And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me. I was still a witch, but my powers were all gone.

That is not what the doctor said when he came back to the clinic in the morning. He told me that I'd had a placental abruption, a very rare problem that, I later read, usually befalls women who are heavy cocaine users or who have high blood pressure. But sometimes it happens just because you're old. It could have happened anywhere, the doctor told me, and he repeated what he'd said the night before: there is no correlation between air travel and miscarriage. I said that I suspected he was being a gentleman, and that I needed to get out of the clinic in time for my eleven o'clock meeting with the secretary of the interior, whose office I arrived at promptly, after I went back to the Blue Sky and showered in my room, which looked like the site of a murder.

I spent the next five days in that room. Slowly it set in that it was probably best if I went home instead of to the Gobi, but at first I could not leave. Thanksgiving came and went. There were rolling brownouts when everything went dark and still. I lay in my bed and ate Snickers and drank little bottles of whiskey from the minibar while I watched television programs that seemed as strange and bleak as my new life. Someone had put a white bathmat on top of the biggest bloodstain, the one next to my bed, where I had crouched when I called for help, and little by little the white went red and then brown as the blood seeped through it and oxidized. I stared at it. I looked at the snow outside my window falling on the Soviet architecture. But mostly I looked at the picture of the baby.

 

When I got back from Mongolia, I was so sad I could barely breathe. On five or six occasions I ran into mothers who had heard what had happened, and they took one look at me and burst into tears. (Once this happened with a man.) Within a week the apartment we were supposed to move into with the baby fell through. Within three, my marriage had shattered. I started lactating. I continued bleeding. I cried ferociously and without warning—in bed, in the middle of meetings, sitting on the subway. It seemed to me that grief was leaking out of me from every orifice.

I could not keep the story of what had happened in Mongolia inside my mouth. I went to buy clothes that would fit my big body but that didn't have bands of stretchy maternity elastic to accommodate a baby who wasn't there. I heard myself tell a horrified saleswoman, “I don't know what size I am, because I just had a baby. He died, but the good news is, now I'm fat.” Well-meaning women would tell me, “I had a miscarriage too,” and I would reply, with unnerving intensity, “He was
alive.
” I had given birth, however briefly, to another human being, and it seemed crucial that people understand this. Often, after I told them, I tried to get them to look at the picture of the baby on my phone.

After several weeks I was looking at it only once a day. It was months before I got it down to once a week. I don't look at it much anymore, but people I haven't seen in a while will say, “I'm so sorry about what happened to you.” And their compassion pleases me.

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. Sometimes, when I think about it, I still feel a dark hurt from some primal part of myself, and if I'm alone in my apartment when this happens I will hear myself making sounds that I never made before I went to Mongolia. I realize that I have turned back into a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone.

Most of the time it seems sort of okay, though, natural.
Nature.
Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses.

FROM
A Public Space

 

1.

 

My first encounter with
before and after
was in one of the fashion magazines my friends told me to subscribe to when I came to America. I duly followed their advice—I had an anthropologist's fascination with America then. I had never seen a glossy magazine, and the quality of the paper and the printing, not to mention the trove of perfumes waiting to be unfolded, made me wonder how the economy worked for the magazine to make a profit, considering I paid no more than a dollar for an issue.

My favorite column was on the last page of the magazine, and it featured celebrity makeovers—hairstyle and hair color, for instance—with two bubbles signifying before and after. I didn't often have an opinion about the transformation, but I liked the definitiveness of that phrase,
before and after
, with nothing muddling the in-between.

After years of living in America, I still feel a momentary elation whenever I see an advertisement for weight-loss programs, teeth-whitening strips, hair-loss treatments, or even plastic surgery, with the contrasting effects shown under before and after. The certainty in that pronouncement—for each unfortunate or inconvenient situation, there is a solution to make it no longer be—both attracts and perplexes me. Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as doubtful as traveling to another place to become a different person: altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one's self: even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

 

2.

 

A few years ago I was about to go teach a class when an acquaintance, who lived across the country in New Hampshire, called my office. She had traveled to a nearby city. I talked to her for no more than two minutes before telling my husband to go find her. He spent twelve hours with her, canceled her business appointments, and saw to it that she flew back home. Two weeks later her husband called and said she had jumped out of her office on a Sunday evening. He asked me to attend her memorial service; I thought for a long while and decided not to.