She in a baggy gray sweatshirt, jogging pants, and untied sneakers.
Some women, she says, don’t even realize they’re in the first stage of labor, mistaking it for gas.
You propose starting a special bank account for Grannam’s checks, which until now have been sitting under a polished quartz paperweight on top of your dresser.
Babies give meaning to the future, Andi responds.
The aquamarine digital clock on your dashboard says 4:44.
In white letters, Andi’s sweatshirt says: TV: A LITTLE GOES A LONG WAY.
You think about the magic of numbers.
Four four four, you say under your breath.
Pulling onto the highway, you accelerate.
A flow of clear fluid from your vagina indicates the breaking of the membrane or bag of waters that surrounded the baby during pregnancy, says Andi.
Four four four, you say aloud.
Andi ejects the latest Radiohead cassette and replaces it with the latest Poe cassette even though you have only listened to two songs.
She sings along for a while and then explains:
There is no pain. It just feels like a gush of warm liquid.
Except for your Honda, the highway is vacant.
Orange-yellow farm lights dotting the plowed hills.
Andi ejects the latest Poe cassette and replaces it with the latest Weezer cassette.
As the baby comes down the birth canal, you feel as if you have to move your bowels, Andi says.
You descend the steep winding hill into Troy and roll along Main Street.
A dog sleeping under the back bumper of a pickup.
Andi ejects the latest Weezer cassette and replaces it with the latest Avian Virus cassette.
Magritte’s ghost.
You roll by the lumber mill on the left.
You mention you did not know you owned this particular album.
Andi says she bought it last week on an act of impulse buying.
You speeding along the highway again.
Houses bunching together like wildebeests at watering holes in Kenya.
An episiotomy being a small cut made between your vagina and anus to allow more room for the delivery, says Andi.
This is the secret language of the tribe, you say.
A golf course soughs by on your right.
A supermarket open twenty-four hours a day, into whose parking lot you pull.
Engine idling, Andi hops out and the sliding entrance doors phish open.
The light in the parking lot an unnatural greenish-yellow.
A good photograph is knowing where to stand, Ansel Adams once wrote.
A good photograph is knowing where to stand, Ansel Adams once wrote, and Annie Leibovitz once wrote When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them.
Engine idling, you decide to quit your job.
The idea is not in your head, then it is.
What does that sentence mean?
Andi sliding in beside you, bag in hand.
Immediately after delivery, she says, settling back into her seat, your baby is held with his or her head lowered to assist in the drainage of amniotic fluid, mucus, and blood.
Fast-food franchises.
A gas station.
Apartment complexes.
A small bulb syringe may be used to suction the mouth and nose.
Then again, it may not.
I’m going to quit my job, you say.
Andi glances over at you and then back out the windshield.
You veer into the parking lot at Gritman Medical Center and locate an empty space beneath an oak.
An oak or a maple.
In this light, it is difficult to tell which.
People rewrite your identity on your skin.
The aquamarine digital clock on your dashboard says 5:25.
The cord is then clamped, Andi says, the baby dried, drops to prevent infection put into his or her eyes, and warmth insured with blankets, lamps, or a heated bassinet.
Five two five, you say aloud, shutting off the engine, shutting off the lights.
Andi lets out a sigh that is difficult to interpret.
You try to mimic the sound in a show of support.
You sit side by side, facing forward.
It is this easy to change skins.
Andi opens the bag and takes out the first pint of peanut-butter-cup ice cream and a plastic spoon and passes them to you.
The second pint of peanut-butter-cup ice cream and plastic spoon is hers.
She crumples the bag and shoves it under the seat.
Removes the lid.
Dawn gradually granites the atmosphere.
You remove your lid.
The light around you turns livid.
The color of a dirty towel.
Eating, you appraise your surroundings.
Cars slide into the parking lot. People get out. Doors thump shut. People enter the hospital. People exit the hospital.
All at a rate much higher than you might expect for this time of day.
People fingering car keys as they move.
Catching sight of you behind the wheel yet continuing on their way.
You watch them, feeling deep appreciation for such gestures of politeness.
Over and over.
Over and over and over again.
Perhaps an hour later, perhaps an hour and a half, you reach down and lay the depleted ice-cream container on the floor by your feet, start the engine, and begin your longish drive home.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
INSTINCT PUSHES YOU to look through a photo to its referent.
Without practice, without a deliberate act of will, you mistake photography for, say, a porthole onto history or psychology.
Rather than the chemical process it is.
The chemical process or the digital one.
Light-sensitive salts or 0’s and 1’s.
Once you become aware of this, it is almost impossible to forget.
Once you become aware of this, it becomes the thing you think about when you try not to think about it.
Like trying not to think about the breath you are taking this very second.
This very second and then this very second.
Thinking while not thinking.
Thinking as digestion.
Yet even the purported referent of a photo is never really its referent.
Look past the compounds or codes and you discover a kind of imitation of an imitation: a stencil of lightwaves reflected off the world.
Never the original, that is.
Never the thing itself.
Not in the sense, in any case, a skyscraper is a thing in itself.
A skyscraper or a statue.
A skyscraper, a statue, or your hand.
This being the sort of recognition that sometimes makes you want to sit down and cry.
Cry or shout.
The way thinking about Zeno makes you want to sit down and cry or shout.
Zeno and his arrow.
Shoot one into the air, the philosopher says.
Good.
Then imagine its trajectory as a series of freeze-frames.
Photographs.
Eakins’ pole vaulter, for example, or Muybridge’s cantering horses.
Zeno used a different metaphor, presumably, but nonetheless.
What do you see?
You see the arrow stopped, you see the arrow stopped, you see the arrow stopped again.
It stands to reason, therefore, concludes Zeno, that everything is at rest for any interval during which it is at a place equal to itself.
Take your time, he says.
Take as much time as you like.
Therefore the arrow is not really moving, is it?