The Wheel of Fortune

“Can you hold this?” a nurse said, putting a plastic oxygen tube in my hand

Julia on Ninth Street

“Can you hold this?” a nurse said, putting a plastic oxygen tube in my hand.

The people we hung out with in New York were either single or couples. No one we knew had children. Our friends and acquaintances were intent on building careers, on keeping distractions at bay, and received wisdom suggested a child would be a major distraction. One could say it was an unspoken tenant of the artworld that having children would derail your career as an artist, but that would be a lie. It was not at all unspoken, it was spoken quite explicitly to me in various sets of words by other artists on more than one occasion. “If a gallery knows you have kids, they will take you less seriously.”

Really? Is the idea that artists must spend their every waking hour drawing from their subconscious or refining some craft? What is the subject matter of such work? Medén ágan says the Oracle at Delphi. Nothing in excess.

The last artwork I created before moving to New York was an ambitious installation and performance art piece about a post-apocalyptic world, The Nuclear House/The Nuclear Family. I had built it, on one level, around the idea of generativity, the beautiful concept coined by Erik Erikson: the ability to transcend personal interests to nurture and guide younger generations. I had not succumbed enough, by then, to the ethos of New York to cast off that beautiful word.

So, when Sheila walked me over to Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn and sat me down on a bench overlooking the gentle surf to let me know it might be time for us to begin thinking about children, I didn’t jump back. Using three qualifiers: “might be” “begin” “thinking about,” was so typical of Sheila: ever the diplomat, ever courteous, ever deferential, but always able to move the needle. It would take me thirty years to figure out that, “would you rather vacuum or scrub out the bathroom?” was an amazingly effective way of saying, “get to work, bub” rather than “I’ll be generous and take the one you don’t want,” which is how I had always interpreted it. So, the surprise was not that Sheila was being deferential; it was that she was being assertive. I had become so absorbed with abstract ideas about creating art objects embodying some sort of ancient fusion of male and female that I failed to see, right before me, the obvious source of those ancient ideas. We dropped the birth control. Nine months later we were standing simultaneously at the two most profound human thresholds: birth and death.

We were in a small room at St. Vincent’s hospital that had been hurriedly fitted out with a bed and some monitors. Memorial Day weekend and all the real rooms were filled. The midwife pulled me closer and turned the child’s head so she could place it into my hands. I looked down at the hair slicked with moisture and could think of nothing but a hot, wet, freshly killed kitten. My arms quaked. Was it exertion or terror? I didn’t know. All I knew was Sheila had been in labor for twenty-four hours and the midwife had moments before announced a fall in the baby’s heart rate and both mother and child exhausted.

The OBGyn who was supposed to be her backup was nowhere to be found, so the midwife was on her own. For hours she had been standing between Sheila’s legs like some kind of snake charmer trying to coax the baby out of its basket, concentrating all the magical power of her eyes on pulling at the little black patch between Sheila’s legs. The head had appeared, the other shore was on the horizon, but the hull had begun to fill with water. Against her better judgment, the midwife had cranked up the Pitocin drip, which only increased the intensity of the contractions. The head had appeared for a moment, but so incrementally it seemed to emerge with each contraction only to be sucked back in when the contraction subsided. Sheila, meanwhile had entered an altered state of consciousness, dragging me along with her; waving her arms in the air and panting, “open, open, open” during each contraction, me joining her in this chant, this ritual bit of conjuring – hoping it might work, not daring to imagine it wouldn’t. Memorial Day weekend, 1986. We’d been living in New York for eighteen months.

A young nurse came in briefly and went back out. Second stage labor had been going on for eight hours. Little or nothing to eat all this time, now nearly eight o’clock of the second evening, the two of us having the life squeezed out of us, me trying to inflate us both again with my own breath as each contraction passed.

The thought occurred to me that Sheila might not make it through this ordeal. I had asked three times about a cesarean section, but the midwife said no. The baby was already in the birth canal. Finally, the head had been dragged into view, left eye bloodshot from a stray desperate finger. She pulled me in close. Now the first shoulder appears, and with the coming of the next contraction, the other shoulder comes out and the midwife slips the baby out and into my hands. A bizarre color. Gray and yellow. Covered with white wax. Eyes closed. Not human. What is this?

Someone said, “It’s a girl.”

Another voice said, “Six o’clock. Straight up,” - a face up delivery - uncommon.

“Time: seven-fifty six.”

The midwife said, “Apgar is five.”

What is it supposed to be?

The midwife took the child and pushed a surgical instrument into my hand.

“Do you want to cut the umbilical cord?”

This seemed nonsensical but I was not thinking clearly, so I took the scalpel and the midwife clamped off the cord. I cut through the bloody sausage casing and the midwife slid the baby up onto Sheila’s stomach. As the midwife held the baby up, the child met my horrified gaze, took one breath and then choked, visibly struggling to get her lungs to fill with air.

“She’s aspirated some meconium,” the midwife said. “Let’s move her over to the operating room.”

And with that, the baby girl, barely glimpsed by the mother, was whisked away.

I looked at the midwife, who had made clear all along her patient was Sheila. “You go with the child. I’ll stay with Mom.” I looked down at Sheila, who seemed only half conscious, unaware her baby was in danger. I bent down, kissed her and left the room.

Out in the hall, I glanced back and forth, not knowing where they had taken my child. A nurse poked her head out of a room to the left, and motioned to me. I crossed the hall in an instant and she handed me a blue paper gown to put over my clothes and blue paper shower caps to slip over my shoes. I jerked them on and went into the room. Three nurses scurried around. One fumbled with a machine with plastic tubes coming out of it. Oxygen?

Another is on the phone, “We need a pediatrician on six. . . Well, find him! … and tell him to fly!”

The nurse with the oxygen says, “Are you the father?”

I nod.

“Can you do this?”

I move over to the operating table. The baby’s skin is the color of duct tape. The nurse hands me a clear plastic tube the diameter of a pencil.

“Hold this up to her face.”

Even in my stupefied state, I understood this to be an exercise in abject futility. The baby couldn’t get air into her lungs, how could she possibly get oxygen out of this tube? The nurse pushed the tube into my hand and stepped away. As she did, I saw her cross herself and then beyond her I noticed a crucifix on the wall –even in the operating room? – and then, the clock on the wall: five minutes after eight. How long can a newborn live without oxygen? I don’t know. If the baby dies would the blow of it kill Sheila as well? I don’t know.

Without remembering having done it, I found I had moved away from the operating table and now sat in a chair against the wall. All I could see were the absurd blue paper shower caps I had slipped over my shoes. What possible purpose could they serve? My face clammy, my head light and sick. Without knowing whether I even believed in God, I suddenly became a supplicant, my head bowed deeply, my thoughts only on the tiny life ten feet from me, knowing that life was now the key to my wife’s existence and to my own. Without articulating the words, without even forming them in my mind, I pled for this small life to be spared, offering my own even, in its place. And as I did, I had the sense of my body becoming distended, like some sort of synaptic silly putty being pulled slowly apart, thinned out until it became almost transparent. This was not an image I conjured; it was happening to me beyond my reckoning. My eyes closed. I saw a veil of viscera, thin, but unyielding. And then I stopped breathing. I expected the viscera to tear, but instead it solidified. And then slowly, areas of it protruded forward and others retracted, creating two sets, identical but for one being a mirror of the other. Still not breathing, I saw the two sets separate from each other – a one-celled mitochondria become two.

I didn’t know what this was about or how long it took, only seconds, I’m sure, but when I looked up, I saw a man in a white coat bending over the child. Is this why I had sat down? The man held the plastic tube that, moments before, I had held. Deep in concentration, he was pushing it into the child’s nose. No one in the room seemed to be breathing. They looked on rapt, helpless, waiting. Then the doctor dropped his hunched shoulders, lolled his head back, and announced that the tube had made it into the baby’s lungs. Relief crashed from the doctor and rolled through the room like a wave, washing out to surround the nurses and me, and almost immediately, the child’s color began to change. My vision opened out from my blue shower cap shoes to encompass the room, the four people standing in it, the gleaming stainless-steel sentinels poised in place, their lights blinking, the small helpless life lying on the gurney pulling pure oxygen, its first, into her little lungs. I looked at the clock on the wall. Eight minutes after eight.

The white-coated man accepted brief thanks and moved off down the hall.

“An anesthesiologist,” one of the nurses tells me, “who happened by.”

No one knew why he had been on our floor, but since the pediatricians never showed up, the coincidence of his arrival had saved the child’s life. I was certain Sheila had been spared in the same act.

For hours, I sat by the acrylic bassinet stroking the baby’s head, carefully avoiding the wires and tubes coming from various places in her little body. I was the soul parent in the large room––the neonatal intensive care unit––filled with identical acrylic bassinets, each holding a baby swaddled in identical white blankets with identical blue and pink stripes. The only difference was all the other babies looked like half-grown chickens and mine looked like a plump turkey; at eight pounds thirteen ounces, she was twice the size of every other child in the NICU. I took small comfort in that, playing over and over in my head the terrifying clock ticking away the seconds, then minutes, as the child turned gray. I was exhausted myself, having been awake for thirty-six hours with virtually nothing to eat. My mind spun––the same sixteen-millimeter projector with no take-up reel. The gray baby…the white-coated doctor…the fretting midwife…the crucifix on the wall…my wrung-out wife. Can any human being survive for twelve minutes without oxygen? Can she survive? What will it mean for her brain long-term? Finally, the midwife came in and sent me home. Sheila was asleep and there was nothing I could do for the child.

“Go get some rest. We’ll know more in the morning.”

Without the energy to object, I stumbled to an elevator and floated along the hallways of the ground floor like a ghost until I came on an exit. Deposited onto Seventh Avenue facing some road construction, I turned south, then east along Eleventh toward the East Village. I had no idea what time it was, only that it was dark. The traffic was thin and each time a car slid by in the night I recoiled and stepped back from the street. The world felt as brittle as a dried seedpod, as easily broken as the first thin layer of ice in a puddle. How could these people be driving with such nonchalance, listening to their radios, arms hanging out of windows? I cringed at every horn, imagining someone about to be hit and killed. Never have I known the world to be more fragile than it was at this moment. I shook from the thought that I had nearly lost this tiny life, this miraculous mixture of Sheila and me. I trembled to imagine we still might lose her. If we lost her, would I lose Sheila, too? At thirty-two, I had not known death and now it was so close I was breathing in its rank exhalations.

The air was cool against my arms. The end of May, it felt more like early morning air than late evening. Has this caused my tremble? A breeze stirred the tops of the newly leafed-out oaks along this nice residential stretch of Eleventh. A barely audible cry came from high in the branches. Some tiny creature calling out for help or calling out to its mate.

Craig (with camera,) Sam, reflected, Sheila, Julia, Pinkney, reflected, Janice