Nice Big American Baby

She thinks she can see a dark shadow through the taut translucent skin of her belly. She can see his hair growing long and black.

Her body is adaptable. Her skin stretches, her bones shift, her blood feeds him. When people see her they are amazed, but she is not; she has seen it before, the lengths the body will go to to preserve itself, to cling to life.

Big American baby, she thinks. Nice big American baby. It is her mantra.

She carries him for three years. Three and a half. She becomes a legend, then a joke, with the border guards. They wave to her as she creeps past, cheer her on, drag her back at the last minute.

Don’t you think he wants to come out by now? people at home say to her.

He’s safer living in my belly than in this wretched country, she says, though she has been so single-mindedly set on her mission that she has taken no notice of external events. War, famine, peace, prosperity: it is all the same to her. America is the only option, the only ray of hope.

She carries him for four years.

Big American baby. Nice big American baby.

She has in her mind pictures of hot-air balloons attached to bicycles, fanciful flying machines. Some days she imagines she will simply lift off the ground and float over, suspended by the power of her will alone. Hers and her son’s. Or she imagines that she is invisible, intangible; she breezes across the border. The air, it seems, is the only thing that crosses freely.

Her son is so big, she imagines he fills her completely, his arms fill her arms, his legs fill her legs. She is a mere skin covering him, like an insect’s carapace, soon to be flaked off and shucked away.

She’s too tired to speak now, just pants and whistles through her teeth. The words rattle in her head.

Nice big American baby, someone chants. Not her. Him. The voice of her son gurgling up from her belly. Muffled and airless but undeniable.

My son’s first words, she thinks, smiling proudly at a shriveled bush. You hear that? No baby-talk preliminaries, no babbling or lisping. My son: so precocious, so American.

One day, as she is panting out her mantra and picking her way across the sand, a border guard appears: suddenly, as if he sprang up out of the ground. He carries the usual gun, wears the usual impenetrable sunglasses, has the regulation sweat stains blooming from his armpits. He takes her arm. She obediently turns around and begins walking back. She does not want him to start pushing her, getting rough; the baby might come out.

But to her surprise she finds him pulling her forward, forward across the magic invisible line. Forward, toward the magnificent city that hovers like a mirage in the distance.

“Come on, little mama,” he says. “You’ve had enough.”

When she closes her eyes she sees the hospital of her dreams, a white sparkling grand hotel. When she opens them she sees speckled ceiling tiles, masked alien faces. She can’t feel a thing; she’s a floating head. It’s finally happened, then: her stubborn impatient head has taken off and left the slow body behind somewhere to gestate, egg and nest all in one.

“My son,” she says.

“He’s coming,” they tell her. They have to operate. “There’s no way he’s fitting through the usual door,” they tell her.

She sees a foot kicking. It’s as long as her hand. She hears a stupendous, deafening roar. The foot catches one of the masked doctors on the chin and sends him flying backward into the spattered arms of another masked figure.

Her balloon head is bobbing near the ceiling now, borne on the baby’s howls, but she’d swear she can hear, interspersed with the empty cries, bellowed words. I want, the baby demands. Give me, I want, I need, I deserve, I have earned.…

She sees rising up out of her tired body a sodden mop of long black hair. She sees grasping fists.

She hears—and surely she must be dreaming now—she hears the scrape of a rubber-gloved hand rubbing a sore chin and a doctor’s voice saying, “Now that’s what I call a nice big American baby.”

Empty, deflated, she sits alone in the back of the van. She hears weeping somewhere, mingled with the sounds of tires on asphalt. It must be the driver. It can’t be her. Can it? Impossible. There’s nothing inside her to come out, not a drop. She’s hollow, she’s still floating, they forgot to reattach her head to those rags and remnants that were her body.

“But it’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Wasn’t that the whole plan, give birth and leave him here with a new set of folks?”

“I never even got a chance to hold him.”

“He’s too big for holding already. He could hold you.”

“I had things to say. Stories to tell him.”

“He heard them. He was listening, all those years when you talked to him. He’ll remember.”

It’s the voice of the Hopper man; she’s not sure if he’s the man driving the van or if the voice is inside her head. It doesn’t matter.

“I want to stay,” she whispers. “He’s mine.”

“You can always have another.”

3. after

The prospective parents had applied for a newborn baby, so they did not know what to make of the walking, talking child they visited at the temporary foster home. The adoption agent assured them he had been born only a few days earlier. “I have his birth certificate right here,” she said.

Maybe children these days grow up faster than they used to, the hopeful parents told themselves. We should have studied the child development book more carefully, they thought.

They did not voice their doubts, fearing they’d reveal their inexperience, their ignorance. One slip of the tongue and their application would be rejected.

They felt intimidated by the adoption agent, who handled babies as carelessly as basketballs, and also by the foster mother, who had eight children in her charge.

The prospective mother had been looking forward to the cuddling, burping, nurturing years; she’d been gearing herself up for sleepless nights of colic and lullabies and martyrdom. The child before them, calmly regarding them with large brown eyes, was already far beyond that stage. Yet there was something so appealing, so desirable, so eminently wantable about him that both prospective parents found themselves smitten. They had to have him. He sat on the carpet knocking one block against another, seemingly bored, covertly watchful. They both felt a quickening in their hearts: the anxiety of bargain hunting—the sensation that if they did not get him immediately, someone else would come along, perceive his value, and snatch him up.

When they brought him home he ran through the house pointing at things, wanting to learn their names. “Microwave,” they said. “Piano.” “Baby monitor.” “Treadmill.” “Shoe tree.” “Television.”

They were charmed by his curiosity. Privately they fretted over the way he stiffened whenever they touched him. He was remote, as patiently tolerant as a teenager suffering the whims of unhip parents.

He just needs time, they thought, to get used to us.

What does bonding mean, exactly the new mother wondered. She thought of the unknown woman, the biological mother who’d carried the boy inside her body for nine whole months, and realized she was jealous.

The boy was too well-behaved, too precocious, too perfect. It made them nervous. His perfection made him seem vulnerable, ripe for spoiling. Doesn’t it seem like the perfect, angelic little boys are always the ones to get cancer, get hit by cars? the mother thought.

He never made any mistakes. If there were mistakes to be made, they’d be made by the parents. So they washed everything twice, planned educational vacations. The pressure was excruciating.

He’d been their son for over a year when he told them about the face.

He appeared at their bedside in the middle of the night, white and glowing in his astronaut pajamas. “Can I come in?” he said.

They relished the moment, kissing him, tickling him, tucking him in between them.

“Did you have a bad dream?” the mother said.

“There was a face in the window,” the boy said, and described glittering eyes and shining teeth and a wiry net of hair, long fingers scrabbling at the sill and warm breath that seeped into the room. A sad face. It watched him for a long time, he said, not moving.

“It isn’t real,” the father said. “It’s only a dream.”