“Ah good. Don’t eat it.”
“Okay I won’t.”
The clench relented, and Qi lay back again with the baby on her chest. The babe was goopy but breathing, eyes open then shut, tiny hands clenching Qi’s fingers, mouth already groping aimlessly around.
“Should I try to feed her already?” Qi said.
“I don’t know. It seems quick, but I don’t know.”
“What, you’ve never dealt with a newborn before?”
“No!”
She smiled, a smile he had never seen before, which seemed only right. Relief—immense relief—that was that smile. Cosmic relief. He smiled back and patted her on the head. “Good job, mom. Let’s get her cleaned up a little, maybe wrapped in a towel, and then just put her there on you where she can latch on if she wants to. I think she’ll probably do what’s right for her. We all seem programmed to do that.”
“Do you think?”
Carefully he wiped some of the fluids off the babe and Qi’s arms and chest, using yet another towel wetted with warm water. They were devastating this shelter’s linens. “There you go. Best I can do right now.”
“It’s good. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
Actually Fred had been thinking she was the weirdest little creature he had ever seen, on par with a possum or an aardvark. He said, “Yes, very beautiful.”
Qi laughed, a little bit out of control. “Okay, she’s going to be beautiful. Ah God, I hope she doesn’t turn out to be some kind of gibbon.” A sudden spasm of fear squeezed her face, like a late contraction. Aha, Fred thought: welcome to parenthood!
“Gibbons are great,” he said. “She’ll be fine.”
“Maybe. Maybe so.” Suddenly she was weeping.
“It’s okay,” Fred said, brushing her hair off her forehead. Both women needed more cleaning up, and so did their bed. He went to the sink and soaked some more towels. “She’s going to be fine.”
Fred got them as cleaned up as he could, and gave Qi some pain meds he found in the shelter’s first aid box. She tossed them down and drank three cups of water. He lay down on the other bed, and briefly all three of them fell asleep.
When he woke he had to pee, so he went into the little bathroom to do that. As he was finishing he heard Qi cry out desperately, “Fred! Where are you!” and he rushed out to her, heart thudding in his chest.
“What is it?” he exclaimed, imagining trouble with the baby.
“Oh there you are!” she said, twisting to look at him. “I thought you were gone!”
“No,” he said, nonplussed.
She reached out and grabbed him by the hand. “You’ll stay with me?”
“Of course.”
“Good!” She heaved a great juddering sigh. “Because I need you.”
The baby girl was wrapped in a towel and lying across Qi’s lap. Now she woke, and Qi shifted her up and she began to nurse like a kitten, eyes closed as she sucked rhythmically and hard on Qi’s breast. “Is she getting anything?” Qi asked.
“You’re asking me?” Fred said. “What does it feel like?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anything’s coming.”
“There must be. Look, you can see a little milk come out of the nipple after she comes off.”
“Good.” She grimaced at one little bite as the babe latched on.
“Does it hurt?”
“I guess a little. Actually, after what just happened, I don’t know if anything will ever hurt again.”
“They say you forget.”
“I hope so.”
At a certain point the baby peed and pooped into her towel wrap, and Fred realized he would have to cut up some towels to use as diapers. Possibly the already bloodied towels could be washed out enough to make them suitable for diapers. He began to think about optimal shapes for a diaper. Some kind of triangle, or maybe an X. The babe’s first stool was black and tarry, and he worried there might be something wrong with her. She had been through a strange nine months. It seemed like the possibilities for problems were very real. And there would be no way of knowing about a lot of them for a long time to come. And she did look odd, somewhat like the baby primates he had sometimes watched in zoos.
But they were primates. Kissing cousins to the other primates, with obvious family resemblances, especially when newborn. Actually this girl looked nothing like other primates, he was just fooled by her size and the redness of her skin; she even bore a resemblance to Qi in the shape of her mouth. She would be fine. Hopefully. There was no way to know, and no point in worrying about it now. This last thought seemed like something he could say to Qi, if she brought it up again. But then he stopped himself. Worry about it later—never a welcome piece of advice, now that he thought of it. When you suggested to people who were worrying that they worry about it later: that was never well received. He finally saw that. He even saw why it might be that way.
“What are you going to name her?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What about the, you know, are you going to, I mean, is there any place for the father in all this?”
“Oh I don’t want to talk about that.”
He watched her for a while. “Are you sure?”
“I am sure. It was a mistake.”
“Well—”
“It was a mistake!”
“Okay.”
While the babe slept on Qi’s chest, they started listening to Qi’s radio feed. Everywhere the crises were still ongoing. At first this seemed strange, then they realized that only a day or less had passed since they had last paid attention. In the US, Congress had finished nationalizing the major banks, and the markets were in free fall. Currency controls had been slapped in place to keep dollars from fleeing to other countries or into cryptocurrencies. Demonstrators and some legislators were demanding a universal basic income, guaranteed healthcare, free education, and the right to work, all supported by progressive taxation on both income and capital assets. Supporters of this program were in the streets; opponents were calling it a catastrophic mutiny of the irresponsible half of the citizenry. Media had so much content to report there was hardly time to froth over it. But it seemed still that armed violence caused by all the disruption was minimal. People were in the streets, but mainly to celebrate a return to democracy, or object to it. It was hard to shoot such crowds.
In that fundamental sense, it was the same in China. The army and security forces were so far holding off, taking their positions and then remaining in place without further actions. It looked like the strategy used in Hong Kong was being tried again: just wait until people got tired and went home. No more May Thirty-fifths. Whether it would work this time no one could tell. Many people were in fact leaving the big demonstration in Beijing. Recently another manifesto had appeared on every screen in the country, a botware storm that again appeared to have originated within the Great Firewall. In stilted antique language, reminiscent of Mao Zedong or Sun Yat-sen, or even Confucius or Laozi, the previous iterations of reform lists had now become the Seven Great Reforms: return of the iron rice bowl, legal standing for the ecologies of China, reform of the hukou system, an end to the Great Firewall, full equality for women, an end to gross income inequality, and the return of the Party to the people.