Bomblet

On the day that 100 Russian schoolchildren were murdered, Sylvia became pregnant with a bomb.

At first she didn’t trust it, on account that she looked and felt the same. Still, she had her suspicions. Female intuition. Something was off. She thought maybe it had to do with the schoolchildren. She was not a Christian but growing up in the West had inured her to certain beliefs.

One was about the importance of self-sufficiency.

Another was about destiny and faith. When someone dies it makes room for someone else to be born. When God shuts a door he always opens a window. Etc, etc.

She went to the doctor. The doctor did a sonogram. Sylvia looked at the outlines of her uterus and the spot in the middle. The spot was the size of a marble and blurry enough to be insignificant at first, but when she heard its heartbeat-tick tick tick tick tick-she just knew.

She stuck close to home for the first few months. Most of the time the ticking did not bother her. She had played in the high school band. It was like having a snare drum inside your stomach. About once a week she would let out a single, high-pitched scream. If she was out when it happened, running errands or window shopping, she would hurry away from wherever she was. At home she turned up the volume on CNN. Grape juice cures cancer. Scientists clone glow-in-the-dark pigs. Literary genius jumps off a bridge. There are far crazier things happening in the world, she thought, and the headlines corroborated this.

#

She stopped screaming, taught herself how to work through the pain by clamping down on a plastic knife. She bought a box of 500 plastic knives and filled her purse with a dozen at a time.

She sought out information. At the public library there was a special room for women only. The books were arranged by size. Poetry, fertility rituals, an encyclopedia of cats. Nothing interested her-the closest was a book called Revolution From Within. It wasn’t about what she wanted it to be about.

She signed up for a natural birth class. The teacher gave tips on breathing, relaxing, thinking soothing thoughts. She thought about chocolate, a spoonful of pudding filled with explosives. Kaboom! In her mouth.

She went on a fast.

When she felt lonely she struck up conversation with strangers on the street. She preferred old women. They told their own stories about giving birth, all with a common theme: on a flotilla as French battalions marched into Cairo; the night before the People’s Army entered Chengdu; daybreak, December 1941.

They clapped their hands in delight when they pressed their ears to Sylvia’s stomach.

What a healthy heartbeat, they said. Boy or girl?

It’s a surprise, she said, imagining a giant birthday cake where a person jumps out of the frosting.

#

She embraced being pregnant. She wore shirts that hugged the curve of her belly, showed off her belly button. She felt sexual and had a lot of sex. Willing men were easy to find. She turned down the volume on Nic Robertson or the mannish brunette with the syrupy voice and assumed the position. Sex with them was like taking the stairs. She paused to regain her breath, looked up at the television reporter smiling, extolling the good citizeness of the effort.

#

In the seventh month, she booked a redeye to Shanghai. The doctor advised against it. She was not fit to travel. But she had heard on the news about the city’s rapid growth, how every day a new building shot up from the earth. The buildings had names like Everlasting Tranquility and Garden of Life. She felt the baby growing inside her, as determined as a skyscraper. She wanted to be with this feeling, and the more she focused on it, the more the obsession turned into a commitment that was like love.

The airport was empty, static. She walked through the terminal like a pregnant woman, shoulders back, belly forward.

At the security gate, she sent her carry-on through the x-ray machine, then followed it through the metal detector. An alarm sounded. A guard asked her to back up and walk through the metal detector again.

It must be my little bomb tripping the machines, she said, a bit too casually. The guards swarmed, all five sets of black and blue uniforms. One of them, a woman, swiped a wand at different parts of her body. Arms, torso, in between her legs. The wand beeped frantically.

Ma’am, please do not move, ma’am, the guard said, and when she did, the guard yelled, Ma’am!, clinging, in times of distress, to formality and protocol.

The female guard continued to give instructions. Please spread your arms. Please turn around. Please spread your legs. It was all desperately polite, an adult game of Simon says. Sylvia shimmied her feet shoulder width apart and bent over. Blood dripped down her legs.

She was rushed to the hospital where the same doctor who had given her the sonogram wheeled her into surgery. She lay on the gurney and stared at the overhead fluorescent lights. Every time she blinked one would disappear and an identical one would reappear. In this way she was suspended in time.

She stayed awake during the surgery, calm and alert. She couldn’t speak, otherwise she would have said to the doctors, please, be careful, this is a precarious situation. Are you an expert? I need an expert.

#

Both Sylvia and the baby survived. The baby, two months premature, was hooked up to machines. Sylvia spent every waking minute in the nursery, sitting on a rocking chair that the nurses had put by the crib, wearing a shawl because-post partum-she always felt cold. The baby looked fragile, unsafe. There were so many tubes and wires. She followed them as they wound around the tiny body, not knowing which ones were essential, which ones meant to terrify.

She asked the nurse to give the baby a name. The nurse said, Let’s wait a month, until the baby gains its strength, until we figure out just what kind of baby it will be. Sylvia’s eyes darkened. She asked if there was any hope, if she could tell, behind the network of tubes and wires, if there was any human resemblance at all.