CHAPTER TWELVE

AS WE NEARED the chain-saw sculpture garden, we heard an ancient narrative unfolding: the childbearing wails of Eve. The birth of Isaac.

“Ooooh,” Ros said. “Nasty.”

I patted my pretend-pregnant belly, spread my knees, and guided a phantom baby out of my crotch.

“Baby,” Ros said. “Zombie?”

I nodded. Ros cooed.

When we entered the Garden, Kapotas was sitting with his back leaning against the Tree of Knowledge, munching on Grandpa’s forearm. He turned and hunched over the limb when he saw us, protecting his prize, a dog with his bone. Joan had been busy: There was a boot attached to a short length of broomstick where his foot used to be.

The screen door slammed. Guts ran out and threw his arms around me, pressing his cheek against my belt. He took my hand and led me into the house.

Eve was on the living room floor, legs spread, knees high. Maternity jumper bunched around her waist. Joan sat on the love seat, nurse’s hat askew, ripping a sheet into strips. There was a large pile of sheet strips on the cushion next to her, as if she’d been at it for hours, caught in some loop. She stopped for a moment and blew me a kiss, the minx.

It smelled like burning tires and burnt hair. A burnt-out toaster coil and burnt toast. The New Jersey Turnpike on a humid summer day. It smelled like sucking on a battery.

It smelled like zombies.

Kapotas’s living room was a cornucopia of Americana: porcelain angels, lace doilies, an afghan over the couch, family photos on every surface, “Footprints in the Sand” on the wall, Reader’s Digest on the coffee table, and a giant television presiding over it all like a judge.

I knelt next to Eve. She was a wild animal trapped in this bourgeois cage-there was no rationality left in her eyes, just fear.

“When you see only one set of footprints,” the Lord says in that famous poem, “it was then that I carried you.”

Joan appeared to be out of commission. It was up to me to deliver our child.

Ros popped his head in the door.

“Annie,” he said. “Dead. Maybe.”

Joan fluttered her hand to her bosom; her mouth opened in surprise at the talking zombie. She rubbed her knee. I motioned for her to attend to Annie and she did as she was told. A teakettle whistled. Guts ran into the kitchen and brought back a pan of hot water and towels.

Towels! Water! What was this, 1956? And what were we, human?

Reference Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There has been a seismic paradigm shift. Like when humans realized the earth is not flat but round, and that it circles the sun, not the other way around. Or when Crick and Watson cracked the DNA code and our genetic secrets were revealed. Or when lonely Pluto got kicked out of the planet club.

If death had finally, finally been conquered, how could babies be delivered in the time-honored way?

I peered between Eve’s legs. She wasn’t dilated in the least, her pubic hair was crawling with crabs, and a small brown cockroach was perched on her thigh. Isaac’s palms pressed against her pelvis, his fingernails scratching to get out.

I snatched up the roach and ate it; the shell crunched like popcorn and its antennae tickled the roof of my mouth. It tasted bland, like puffed rice.

If I didn’t get that baby out soon, he’d punch a big hole in his mama, right through her stomach. A mess for Joan to sew back up.

I made a cutting motion. Guts’s eyes bugged out and he shook his head.

Eve thrashed on the garish Turkish rug, which was an arabesque of magenta, black, and gold. I made the cutting motion again, this time with a stern look on my rotten face, and Guts ran to the kitchen. Eve grabbed at the end table and pulled on its doily. A picture of Kapotas on his wedding day came tumbling down.

He and his bride were cutting the cake. It looked like the 1970s-Kapotas had muttonchops and a powder-blue tuxedo with ruffles; his wife’s long black hair was ironed straight and parted down the middle; her wedding dress was a miniskirt.

Oh, the signs that delineate our decades! Our cultural symbols and codes: Beehives and housedresses. Duck tails and bowling shirts. Handlebar mustaches and corsets. Fringed suede boots and tie-dyed T-shirts. Chaps, holsters, and cap guns.

Pop culture and fashion, the British Romantics and deconstruction-it was all I had in life and I clung to it like religion. It used to be enough, but it meant nothing to me now. Dust in the wind.

Like Charlie Manson said: Now is the only thing that’s real.

When Guts returned-scissors and butcher knife in hand-I bent over the prostrate Eve. If I had any breath, I would’ve held it.

Guts handed me the scissors and I held them poised over Eve’s abdomen. Ros sauntered back in and began to sing-croak: “Clowns to the left of me; jokers to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”

Reference Reservoir Dogs. The ear-cutting torture scene. Ros was smarter than he looked. Too bad it sounded like he was at the bottom of a well. Like Baby Jessica, but singing, not sobbing.

I made a tiny cut at the bottom of Eve’s beach ball of a belly, stuck my pointer finger in, and wiggled it.

Isaac grabbed it with his fist. Grabbed it tight and pulled. He was a strong baby, a regular monster. My finger came off.

I only had nine digits left-at least until Joan could put me back together again. If she was all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, then I was Humpty Dumpty. All of us, cracked carnivorous eggs.

I pulled my finger out and looked at the stump. Ros put his hand over his mouth and stifled a giggle. I shook my fist at him à la Ralph Kramden: One of these days, Alice. Pow! Right in the kisser.

Guts scampered to the kitchen and came back with a pair of barbecue tongs.

“Nurse,” Ros said, and I nodded. We would need Joan after all.

Oh, the stench of that birth. A million midnight farts underneath the covers. A fish kill, catfish and musky and gar washed ashore, bellies gleaming in the sun-sparkled shallows.

Joan led Annabelle into the delivery room. What a glorious name, recalling Poe’s dead maiden in her tomb by the ocean:

And neither the angels in heaven above,

Nor the demons down under the sea,

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

She stood erect in the corner, as if waiting for a military inspection. She was still armed, the crossbow draped over her shoulder, guns tucked on either side of her pink rhinestone Hello Kitty belt buckle. I was afraid to meet her eyes, afraid that if I rapped on the metaphorical windows to her soul, no one would answer.

I left the writhing Eve and approached cautiously. Annie lowered her head like a nervous schoolgirl. I put my hands on her shoulders and grunted as gently as possible. She peered up at me through long lashes, and I became a father for the first time that day. Because someone was home. Our Annie was alive. I kissed her once on each cheek, welcoming her to the fold.

“One of us!” Ros said, and jumped up and down, his fringe of golden hair bouncing. He had a mock friar’s haircut, a perfect bowl shape, only the top wasn’t bald but gone completely. So empty a yarmulke would have fallen right in.

“Aaaaaaiii,” said Annie, nodding.

“OOOOOH! AAHMMPPH!” cried Eve.

I took off my tweed jacket, picked up the tongs, and turned my attention back to Eve. I rolled up my shirt sleeves-figuratively. Literally, the sleeves were in tatters. Joan was next to me, hot towel at the ready. Guts positioned himself on the other side of the young mother, caressing her bite site with his finger, which was no bigger than a baby carrot. Eve flailed and her stump whacked me in the chin. I looked up at the ceiling and said a silent prayer before plunging the utensils in.