How do people do this? you ask. How do they make it turn out all right in the end?
Organic kiwi-and-strawberry or organic pineapple-and-banana juice.
Which one is unimportant, to be honest.
Next day you experience psychosomatic morning sickness.
The sensation is both exhilarating and disconcerting.
If you think hard enough about it, your breasts hurt.
You want to use the word boobs to refer to them.
My boobs are humongous, you want to say. Humongous and achy.
Andi cancels a PR shoot for a Mexican restaurant in Moscow and stays home to look after you. She brings you a plateful of crackers and sits in a rocking chair beside your bed, reading to you from her library books.
When you are taking an iron supplement to stave off anemia, she reports, your bowel movements will become darker and harder than usual.
Should I know this? you ask, palpating your nipples.
Playing classical music may lead to more complex brain development in fetuses.
Then again, it may not.
By the fifth month, your fetus will begin to turn head over heels in your uterus like a weightless scuba diver.
Your nipples will begin to drip small amounts of clear or yellowish fluid called colostrum as a sign your body is preparing for breast feeding.
Should I know this? you ask again, palpating.
Leg cramps.
Leg cramps and hemorrhoids perhaps being the worst.
Colostrum can dry into a crust and should be washed off with warm water since soap and alcohol dry the skin and contribute to making your breasts sore.
Leg cramps, hemorrhoids, or swelling of the face.
Wear a cotton or absorbent pad in your bra.
Unless severe headaches, blurred vision, flashes of light, sharp abdominal pain, relentless vomiting, the appearance of blood vessels protruding from the rectum, or the sudden escape of fluid from the vagina are the worst.
From beneath the light sheets, you explain to Andi that you are horrified.
Horrified and intrigued.
It is not an either-or distinction.
You feel like you are picking your way through a zone of trespass, yet cannot stop inching forward.
This is the special knowledge most fecund people possess, isn’t it, you say.
The esoterica of parenthood.
Andi rises from the rocker and puts John Coltrane on the stereo, peels out of her kneeless jeans and extra-large blue pin-striped button-down cotton shirt, disappears into the bathroom, reappears with a handtowel, and crawls under the sheets with you.
She hands you the towel and you reach over and rub her nipples.
Mmmmm, she says. That’s nice.
I’m glad, you say.
All this talk of generation. It’s like a… it’s like an intravenous.
A life shot. Yes.
You roll each nipple between your thumb and forefinger, stretch each to the side, massage her breasts with a delicacy you have never wholly investigated before.
You use your mouth.
Your mouth and your tongue.
Eyes closed, you speculate on what your whiskers must feel like on her skin from her point of view.
The frequencies in the room recollate.
Gravidity, Andi is saying somewhere above you. Fetation…
You massaging, contemplating these radiant words.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
THE UNREAL IS EXACTLY LIKE THE REAL, only more sincere.
Take this shot that purports to be of a very pregnant Andi taken by a very pregnant Andi.
A self-portrait, presumably.
In point of fact, she finds it in a book at the university library and brings it home for you to work on.
The original is luscious with color.
Color and density.
If you touched it, you imagine, it might stick to your fingers.
It portrays most of a blond woman’s head, the lower part of her face buried in elbow crook, eyes shut, asleep, the large swath of crimson sheets on which she lies.
That white.
That red.
Her hair fanning out behind her, forming a curve that echoes the curve of her spine, which echoes the curves of her visible shoulder, wrist, elbow, breast, buttocks, shocking belly.
You take it back to your office and scan it into Adobe Photoshop.
Throw it from color into grayscale.
Crop out the woman’s head, most of her hair, airbrush away the rest, zoom in and re-crop to highlight that belly, resize the whole into the dimensions of a conventional snapshot, save the file, transfer it to a Zip disk.
You ask University Photographic Services to translate it into a negative which you drop off at the local one-hour service shop on your way to a local café.
After a cup of coffee, you return to pick up the finished five-by-seven.
Sitting behind the wheel of your Trace in the parking lot, air conditioner exhaling continuously, you study the results.
Watchful not to smudge the glossy skin, you cant it this way and that, admiring the subtle commerce of light and dark, its exultation of feminine flexures, its well-proportioned human warmth.
Photography is the reality, Susan Sontag once wrote. The real object is often experienced as a letdown.
Sunrises, that is, look corny to us nowadays.
Weddings sappy.
Car crashes lack emphasis.
All because of chemical compounds.
All because of chemical compounds and photosensitive surfaces.
We learn to see ourselves photographically: to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph.
All because a Frenchman, Joseph Niépce, spread bitumen across a metal plate one day in 1827 and then exposed the plate to the view out his window for nearly eight hours: an amalgam of ill-defined geometric shapes reminiscent of a proto-cubist painting by Cézanne (who would not be born for another dozen years) that suggest nothing so much as the heavy walls of a prison.
Thereby generating a one-of-a-kind image which was precisely what the public did not want.
The public, it turned out, wanted reproducible shots instead.
William Talbot obliged them in 1835 by making negatives which could then be transformed into positives.
Millions of silver salt crystals breaking down in light.
Over and over.
Over and over and over again.
Every camera a dark chamber.
Every camera a mouth.
Talbot patented the new and improved version in 1841 under the name calotype.
From the Greek for beautiful mark, beautiful outline, beautiful form.
You do not know any Greek.
But still.
Within five years, a German photographer had invented a technique for retouching the negative, making the beautiful mark more beautiful than the original.
The first impulse after imagining the photograph, naturally, was to imagine a way to make it deceive.
To make it deceive more completely.
Afterward, the popularity of the camera soared.
You buy a chain saw and study the safety guide.
At the northern edge of your property, you locate a small stand of dead lodgepole pines and go to work felling them for an additional three cords of winter wood.
The gaudy drone reminding you of a bantam single-engine plane.