Abbott Awaits (7 page)

Because of the weak dial-up connection tonight, the Internet video of the stranger's sonogram loads slowly and plays haltingly. The image is grainy and blurry. Nevertheless, after viewing the clip six or seven times, Abbott can pretty clearly see that the fetus is sobbing. The narrator, a professor at the University of Auckland, explains that the unborn child, twenty-eight weeks old, is responding to a vibro-acoustic stimulus (or a loud noise, if Abbott understands correctly). The narrator, nine thousand miles from Abbott, points out the rapid phases of inspiration and expiration, the three augmented breaths, the heaving chest, the tilt of the head. When a fetus cries like this, researchers call it fetal crying. Two hundred days, roughly speaking. “Wait,” Abbott's wife says later, “it can cry before it can breathe?” Abbott lies completely still. He has never been so vibroacoustically cautious. “Even the chin quivers,” he says.

Abbott means no harm. His daughter is frightened of spiders, even the kind called daddy longlegs, and Abbott is attempting to relocate the spider by gently grasping one of its legs. His daughter is weeping and running in circles, and so perhaps he rushes the job. The leg comes off. These things are as thin as hairs. He is not at all surprised when the seven-legged spider makes a swift escape through the grass. He is surprised, however, when its recently severed leg
also
escapes, twitching nimbly across the bright yellow ledge of his daughter's inflatable pool. One must not be rash in ascribing human attributes to a detached spider leg, but the leg does seem to move with determination, courage, and a complete lack of self-pity. And later this day, Abbott, driving home from the Big Y out on Route 9, passes a construction site where an out-and-out
meadow
of two-foot weeds grows on the steep slope of a mound of truck-dumped dirt. The weeds sway and bend for the sun just like real plants. This bogus hillock will no doubt be dozed anon; the grading vehicles are parked on-site, ready. Nevertheless, the weeds just keep photosynthesizing. Their seeds are dispersed carelessly, ingeniously, in the summer breeze. This is
the Holy Land, apparently. They all grow another sixteenth of an inch as Abbott drives past. “
Enough
,” he yells at the construction-site weeds. His daughter sits in the backseat with her pronouns all mixed up. “You want some songs,” she says. “You want a peanut. You want.”

Mornings, Abbott often finds the evidence of his wife's sleeplessness: a used tea bag in a mug, a wrinkled pillow, a novel tossed on the couch. And of course her occasional notes, written on scraps of ripped paper and left by the coffeemaker. Months ago, when they began appearing, the notes were darkly comic, apologetic, tender. They digressed into observation and affection before requesting that Abbott please allow her to sleep in the morning. Often they included the time. The ripped scraps of paper were larger then, and the entreaties frequently ran to the back side of the paper. The notes have steadily gotten shorter, the scraps smaller. Abbott's wife has now nearly abandoned rhetorical flourish, arrangement, punctuation, penmanship, and the small rightward arrow that signifies continuation.
Long night—sorry
. Or, the last time, simply:
3:30 bad
. Abbott has saved all these notes in a manila folder without knowing why. There are three digital clocks in the kitchen—one on the microwave, one on the stove, one on the coffeemaker. They must be awful in the night. The insomniac cannot even take comfort in their small discrepancies because Abbott synchronizes them after each electrical outage. They are unanimous,
imperious. This morning he sees, as he enters the kitchen, the aggressive display of time, as well as that tiny shard of white paper by the coffeemaker. Though he is morbidly curious about the note, he does not by now need to read it to know what it means. His wife must know this too, because the note, Abbott comes to learn, does not have a word on it.

In the basement Abbott presses shirts he will not have occasion to wear for three to four months. Each one has an ink stain, the insignia of his guild. This last wrinkled shirt is gray with two black dots on the shoulder. Abbott has moved into the final stage of ironing, during which he attempts to iron out the wrinkles that he previously ironed in. The monitor hisses quietly on the ironing board, Abbott's daughter having long ago stopped singing a Scottish folk song about a captured Jacobite Highlander who will never again see his true love on the banks of a beautiful lake, and whose soul, after his body is executed by English soldiers, will travel through the spirit world, arriving home in Scotland well before his extant rebel comrade, who will walk home alone over the Earth. The static of the monitor and the sibilant chugs of the iron, combined with the dim light of a dust-covered, low-watt bulb and the stale subterranean air and the metal shelves full of rusty cans of paint and turpentine, make Abbott feel as if he is the sole survivor of a calamitous event in some remote expeditionary outpost. His shirts are beautiful, though, like Gatsby's. They remind him of the purpose of art. He unplugs the iron and pockets
the monitor. He picks up the neat warm rectangular bundle of stained shirts, turns off the light, and begins to climb the stairs in darkness. Somewhere between the bottom of the stairs and the top, he strikes his knee against a metal bracket that connects the railing to the wall. He falls to a sitting position, grips his knee with both hands. His pressed shirts tumble down the dark stairs. The pain is immense, and it does not abate. Rather, it escalates, takes on new dimensions and nuances, opens into meaninglessness. The pain lacks value and context. If Abbott's wife were here, she would turn on the light and say, “Oh, God, ouch. What did you
do
?” She would offer him the ice that he would refuse for no conceivable reason. She would say, “Here, let me see it.” She would look at the knee and, no matter what she saw, she would grimace. The pain would stand for something; it would exist in a sense
for
his wife, for the marriage. It would conceivably lead to some kind of physical intimacy, perhaps right here on the stairs. Abbott and his wife might explore the erotic potential of a serious knee injury. But she's not here and he can't call for her. Or he won't. This pain—his shoulders are shaking, his teeth chattering, as if he has been pulled from an icy pond. Abbott cannot determine if he is nearer the top or the bottom. Ascension, though, is out the question, so he scoots painfully down, over the pile of his ironed shirts. Streetlight enters the room through the small ground-level windows at the top of the basement walls, and the pupils of Abbott's eyes automatically dilate so that he can make out shapes and edges in the dark. He hops on his noninjured leg toward his bourgeois cache of unused furniture. He sees a plastic-wrapped crib mattress leaning against a rocking chair, and he topples it to the ground. Abbott lies down on the tiny mattress, his legs extending far off the edge. The plastic covering crinkles beneath him as he adjusts his body. The smell of mildew makes him feel as if he himself is rotting. He has seen images of spores, magnified many times. When his breathing finally slows, the basement becomes quiet and he can hear the hum of the fan in his bedroom, directly above. He can hear his wife turning in bed. For a few minutes he considers masturbation. A passing car's headlights briefly illuminate the room, and Abbott sees an old flashlight on an old bedside table, within reach. He picks it up and turns it on. Its light is weak and yellow. First he sits up and shines the light on his knee,
which is still vibrating with pain. He fears and expects to see something commensurate with the sensation—chips of bone under skin or a lurid contusion or grotesque swelling—but his fear turns to disappointment when he notices that there is not a mark on it. His knee just looks like the knee of a guy in his late thirties. Next he shines the light on the stairs. The shirts are strewn, as if they had grappled at the top and then tumbled down. Their backs look broken. A blue one has an arm outstretched, as if trying to break its fall, or to reach for something out of reach.

At whom can Abbott be angry? “Another amazing Friday night,” he says to his wife as they clip the dog's toenails in the foyer. Abbott's dog lies compliantly on the tile floor, but his eyes are wild with terror and his limbs are trembling. “It's OK,” Abbott's wife says to the dog. “This won't hurt. You're doing great.” Abbott's knee hurts. He is angry with the dog, though he understands it is unfair to blame the dog for everything. He notices for the first time that there seems to be some kind of rot in the grout between the tiles. “We should brush his teeth, too,” Abbott's wife says. “Look at that brown stuff.” “It's always such a relief when the weekend comes,” Abbott says. “Don't cut them too short,” says his wife. “It's a chance to kick back and blow off some steam,” he says. With a little pep and tonal diligence, these words might possibly convey a tenderly ironic statement of solidarity, rather than a jagged statement of anger poorly disguised as a tenderly ironic statement of solidarity. “One more foot, buddy,” Abbott's wife says. “You're doing great.” “This is why we work so hard,” Abbott says. “It's all worth it when the weekend comes.” Abbott's dog makes a halfhearted attempt at escape, and Abbott pushes him back down to the
floor. “Just relax!” he shouts at the dog. “First of all?” Abbott's wife says. “This is not Friday.” Abbott says, “Fine.” She says, “It's not even close to Friday.” Abbott says, “The point still holds.” “What point is that?” his wife asks. Abbott is not quite sure he knows what his point is. He has a notion, but it's too terrible to say out loud. He pets the dog, examines a paw. “Second, it's not my fault and it's not his fault,” Abbott's wife says, “so don't take it out on us.” She kneels on the tile by the dog, scratching his ear. Abbott has been trying, he realizes, to look down her shirt. “Fine,” he says. “I know.” “And third?” she says, “do you even remember how hard I had to try to get you to go out on a Friday night before we had a kid?” Abbott says, “That's not true,” which is not true. Meanwhile, the developing fetus can hear this whole pitiful encounter, according to the Internet. You would think the amniotic fluid would muffle sound, but it actually amplifies it. For an analogy, it might be helpful to remember how well you could hear underwater in the county swimming pool of so long ago.

Abbott's neighbor's woodpile, against which Abbott pushes his mower this afternoon, is a real woodpile, not a metaphor. Abbott, deep in academic reverie, doesn't even recognize the object, doesn't name it
woodpile
. It's been reduced to its geometry—it exists only in relation to his mower. As he bumps the mower against the edge of the pile, he is startled by an interstitial slithering in the stacked logs. He sees the scales, so vivid as to seem artificial. Numerous times in his professional life, in hallways and department meetings, Abbott has heard the phrase
snake in the woodpile
. It's a stock expression of the paranoid intellectual.
I know about snakes in woodpiles
, Abbott thinks, sprinting across his yard away from the snake in the woodpile,
but what is that snake doing in that woodpile
? This is what it's like living life backwards. He can't catch his breath. Once again he's stunned by the real.

Abbott's daughter has been napping for two hours and fifty minutes. Abbott, a frequent complainer about her short naps, thinks this one has been going on entirely too long. The monitor is quiet, which means either that she is alive and sleeping or that she is no longer alive. He wishes he had been more patient with her, more attentive. He wishes he had been more focused and engaged during all those hours they spent with the beads and the buttons in the family room. He wonders about the last thing he said to her. He thinks it was, “Have a good one.” When he has wrestled and played with her in the family room, he has put his head on her chest and heard her small heart beating. He has wondered what keeps it going and going. Nobody seems willing to admit that the very premise is outlandish. Abbott's daughter's nap is Abbott's time to get things done around the house or run errands or rest or read, but for the past forty-five minutes he has just been sitting at the dining-room table, waiting for her to wake up. There is no good reason to go in to check on her. If her heart is not beating,
then it has already stopped beating
. Going in does not change that. Why enter her room only to confirm a dark suspicion? While there exists
the possibility that she is alive and napping, Abbott should remain outside her room. If the nap lasts five hours, a week, a month, he should sit right here at the dining-room table with the slim hope that she's just very tired. Why not live as much of his life as possible with this hope? Why rush to begin the sorrowful remainder of his days? If she is no longer alive, every second he does not know for certain that she is no longer alive is another second he does not have to live with it. He knows it is best to stay out of her room. When he enters her room, she immediately stirs. She is, and has been, alive. His relief is immediately succeeded by regret and self-rebuke. He does not want her to wake up. He could be reading right now, or taking his own nap. He could be working with wood. He tries to sneak from the room, but his daughter sits up and calls out. “Dad,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “Dad. I'm awake.”