Humans are the only creatures who can tell a lie, to others and to themselves. Mother once told me that. Obviously she set herself as a perfect example.
A lie: Mother quickly forgets about Frank. Dubious proof: a rapid succession of unlikely lovers. But to be brutally honest, at her age, her only options are young Latino and African immigrants who take advantage of her, then move on. This is her latest relationship, and it’s going to be her last. Newly arrived from Brazil, probably twenty-five years old. A walking stereotype, a Carioca with six-pack abs and the insouciance of one who knows he is young and beautiful and desired.
I catch him sucking her nipple in the kitchen one afternoon. I watch them in silence, observing how his lips perfectly pucker over the rosy aureole, the expert way in which he flicks his tongue over the tip of the nipple and sends her swooning, giddy with pleasure.
They fuck boisterously, their moans so painful they seem in the throes of death. My room is just next to hers. I can hear everything, even the sullen, throaty endearments after sex, the obligatory shower, the furtive departure so as not to wake the kid.
Sometimes we go out to places that he likes. He doesn’t know much. He’s been in the country only a few months. Mother always tries to show how much she appreciates everything he suggests. We go to half-price movie matinees in rundown theaters uptown in the city, where cockroaches crawl over the stale popcorn people dropped on the greasy floor.
Sometimes we sit till sunset at the Cloisters. Whenever Mother goes to the bathroom, her boyfriend and I sit in silence, staring at the river. Once he tries to break the ice and says, “You hate me, don’t you?”
“I don’t feel anything for you,” I reply.
When Mother comes back she asks how we two are getting along. He says, “He’s a very precoscient kid.”
“Yes,” Mother agrees. “That’s what he is.”
They buy food and stuff and share it like conjugal property. He never stays too long, but his visits always transform her. She moves gracefully, as though she’s picking up the last gestures of a dance. She smells different, always a scent of almonds and musk.
I never find out what his name is, and never ask. (That’s not entirely true. She may have told me his name. I may have chosen to forget.) He is writing all over the blank slate that she used to be, recreating something foreign out of the emptiness that she has become. A creature whose voice has acquired an unfamiliar lilt, whose smile evokes joys so private they shut everything out. One of these days, he is going to stop creating her. That’s what I think. And when that happens, she might disappear without a trace.
Instead he’s the one who disappears. He finds someone with less age and more money. He stops coming over. There is no way for an affair like that to end except the way it does—hackneyed and predictable as a primetime telenovela on Univision.
Then she goes crashing back to earth and becomes the one I have known all along. And once again, somber with loneliness, sitting by my bed at night, she enchants me with her lies: the blood of Europe and Asia and Africa in you, and the ships swaying on the open sea.
* * *
Another lie: Mother loves her job.
She neither loves it nor hates it, and I feel the same way. It is simply the only kind of work she knows she’s good at, having had a lot of experience working with Frank.
When my mother comes back from Manila, she finds all of Frank’s personal belongings gone, his half of the closets empty. The only reminder of his presence is a series of phone messages, a bright red 8 blinking on the answering machine. She doesn’t want to play them back, thinking they’ll be that helpless woman’s voice again, or the usual anonymous nonmessages. But she takes a deep breath and presses the button, and listens to eight consecutive messages from the Life Crusaders who have finally decided to speak up, threatening to blow up the clinic. Poor Frank, she says to herself, run out of town by a bunch of crazies.
With Frank out of her life, she realizes this one thing about herself: she doesn’t know anything except what she’s learned from him. She is his shadow, and where does a shadow go when what casts it has gone?
But she picks up the work when she comes back. She can do it on autopilot. Years later I realize why. She was hoping that when he came back, everything would be as he had left it. The break in their narrative would be seamless.
* * *
I stand beside her, beaming a light into the cavern of a young woman’s uterus. Mother cuts up the fetus and with a forceps slowly plucks the pieces out. I hold up a tray for her to deposit the mangled bits.
It’s an emergency, Mother’s part-time assistant can’t come in, and I’m the only one around. I turn out to be an excellent nurse. I ask only the right questions. I know when to hand her the right instrument. I am fastidious and efficient, distant but not indifferent: the terrified young mother finds my presence surreal, but also somehow soothing, like a little angel.
When it’s over, I collect the pieces in a trash bag to throw in a furnace in the back of the clinic. I peer inside the bag before I do so. There are tiny, barely discernible parts that seem not quite human. The lacerated prototype of a hand, the impossibly minuscule fingers, still conjoined by a slimy web. And a small skull, squished like the head of a fish and marbled with blood and mucus.
I pick up the skull and examine it against the light of the fire. There are small veins showing through the translucent bone, like the beautiful imperfections one finds in certain stones.
* * *
Feast of the Assumption. In certain gnostic scriptures, God fucks Mary through one ear and her child is born out the other.
My mother always told me a virgin birth was possible, and she was living proof. I’m not stupid. Being Mother’s angelic assistant at the clinic has dispelled any romantic notions I might have had about fucking, or how babies are born. As I grow older I realize that statement was supposed to be a joke. Then I get it, and Mother and I have a good laugh.
I get it, and her lullaby of fictitious origins has become no more than that, a foolish childhood song. As I grow older the stories take a U-turn and Mother feels it is time to explain how someone like me really came into the world. Not in a test tube, which has some kind of futuristic glamour to it, but through a baby factory in some hardscrabble barrio halfway across the world. My birth helped pay off someone’s debts. On that account there weren’t going to be any secrets.
“Did someone want to get rid of me?”
“What do you mean, Jordan?”
“Did my mother want to abort me?”
“That wasn’t going to happen. Because you were meant to be mine.”
“But it could have happened, right?”
“No. Because you were special.”
“How?”
“I came to get you. I came at the right time. We were meant for each other. That’s why your birth was marked by man’s footprints on the moon. A million years from now—”
“There must have been a million babies born that year. Are we all special?”
“Yes.”
