Telegraph Avenue

mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and formerly enormous XL meat lover’s special, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, and ham, all of it gone but crumbs and parentheses of crusts left by the boy, brackets for the blankness of his conversation and, for all the man knew, of his thoughts, Titus having said nothing to Archy since Gwen’s departure apart from monosyllables doled out in response to direct yes-or-nos, Do you like baseball? you like pizza? eat meat? pork?, the boy limiting himself whenever possible to a tight little nod, guarding himself at his end of the sofa as if riding on a crowded train with something breakable on his lap, nobody saying anything in the room, the city, or the world except Bill King and Ken Korach calling the plays, the game eventless and yet blessedly slow, player substitutions and deep pitch counts eating up swaths of time during which no one was required to say or to decide anything, to feel what might conceivably be felt, to dread what might be dreaded, the game standing tied at 1 and in theory capable of going on that way forever, or at least until there was not a live arm left in the bullpen, the third-string catcher sent in to pitch the thirty-second inning, batters catnapping slumped against one another on the bench, dead on their feet in the on-deck circle, the stands emptied and echoing, hot dog wrappers rolling like tumbleweeds past the diehards asleep in their seats, inning giving way to inning as the dawn sky glowed blue as the burner on a stove, and busloads of farmhands were brought in under emergency rules to fill out the weary roster, from Sacramento and Stockton and Norfolk, Virginia, entire villages in the Dominican ransacked for the flower of their youth who were loaded into the bellies of C-130s and flown to Oakland to feed the unassuageable appetite of this one game for batsmen and fielders and set-up men, threat after threat giving way to the third out, weak pop flies, called third strikes, inning after inning, week after week, beards growing long, Christmas coming, summer looping back around on itself, wars ending, babies graduating from college, and there’s ball four to load the bases for the 3,211th time, followed by a routine can of corn to left, the commissioner calling in varsity teams and the stars of girls’ softball squads and Little Leaguers, Archy and Titus sustained all that time in their equally infinite silence, nothing between them at all but three feet of sofa; and the parrot flew on, noting the potent sensory hum of Chimes General Hospital, baffled by the bright blast of humanity the hospital emitted, of which one soft electron pulse was being traced just then by the LCD display and ticker tape of a fetal monitor in one of the nicest LDRs on the fourth floor, an upscale Marriott feel, white curtains, plum walls, Pergo floor, the CTG a thread of lightning, a quickly sketched line of mountain peaks, a drumbeat metered on a mixing board, the dad and the mom holding hands beside the bed watching it, though the word “holding” could not really suffice, for they were engaged in more of a sumo move, a fighting hold on each other, waiting and watching the monitor as, on the other side of the door, not quite audibly, the attending, Dr. Bernstein, told the two midwives with evident regret that he would have to go in there and get the baby out, news that did not come as a great shock to either midwife, since each had seen the printout, and each knew how often hospitals act with precipitate caution, confounding impatience with efficiency, but each stunned nevertheless now that they were obliged to go back into the LDR and gravely disappoint their patient, the mom, whose first child had also come by emergency caesarean and who had been working and visualizing and chanting and Kegeling and meditating and undergoing hypnosis and submitting her perineum every night to be lavishly oiled by the dad with jojoba oil, readying herself for a Vaginal Birth After Caesarean like Beatrix Kiddo readying herself to take revenge on the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, until her identity, her sense of purpose, seemed to have become subsumed, against the advice but with the sympathy of the two midwives, in the successful passage of her child through her cervix, and who broke down crying when she saw Gwen and Aviva come through the door with tight non-smiles upcurling the corners of their mouths, just flat-out came unglued smack in the middle of a long contraction, the dad fighting to keep his eyes off the fetal monitor as Aviva explained that since the baby, having in its wisdom declined to engage its head with its mother’s pelvis, was beginning, after twenty-two hours of labor, to show signs of fatigue, they would all have to abandon their considered and wishful plan and concentrate on what the baby needed right now, an argument that rarely failed to re-lash a laboring mom to the mast of her purpose and produced its intended effect, the mom nodding as the contraction let go of her, Gwen nodding, too, but saying nothing, avoiding direct eye contact as she had done ever since she first determined, so many hours ago, back in the bedroom of the little bungalow on Ada Street, that the baby was floating, perched too high in the womb, stuck at a fetal station of minus three, running a small risk of cord prolapse that the Berkeley Birth Partners ordinarily would be inclined to take, carrying on with the mom’s plans for her home and vagina while they waited for the floater to descend, and even in the cloud of her pain and regret, the mother was not too far gone to notice how squirrelly Gwen was acting, and to wonder if perhaps Gwen felt herself to be somehow responsible for the turn things had taken, if her calm and supportive but somewhat reserved manner betokened some personal failure, or if perhaps Gwen secretly believed a C-section was unnecessary, had not wanted to transfer to the hospital, but for some reason felt like she could not speak up and so had to knuckle under to hospital policy, to her partner, even though the truth might very well be that floating babies were born at home all the time, all around the world, and turned out healthy and fine, but before the mom could ask Gwen what was going on, why she and Aviva did not appear to be on speaking terms except when some exchange of information became necessary, the room filled with strange new doctors whose air of consequence struck the dad as profound and frightening, while a team of nurses got busy with the magic act of converting the birthing bed into an operating table that was rolled through the door, trailing the dad, who had hold of his wife’s hand so tightly that Gwen was obliged to separate them, saying, “Okay, honey,” saying that it was time to let the mom turn this baby loose, then helping the dad into his scrubs and mask, getting him ready for the brief and relatively honorific series of duties whose execution would devolve upon him: cutting the umbilicus, taking pictures with his digital camera, rooting for good Apgars while his child squirmed under the french-fry lights, he, with Gwen and Aviva—the only three people in the building, the city, or the world, apart from the mom, who cared whether she gave birth through her vagina or through a slit in her belly—reduced to the three least powerful people in the room, an air of dreamy impotence permeating all the proceedings for the dad, who at one point, after the baby was hauled by the armpits from the hole in the mom, a girl at once entitled Rebekah with a K that would encumber her for the rest of her life, made the grave error, just as the doctors were reassembling his wife, of turning his head—he was supposed to be watching his daughter feel light, air, and water for the first time, the first day of creation—and saw things on the other side of the operating room that no husband was meant to see, blood-orange welter of Betadine and placenta and golden fat and chicken-white membrane, but in the end, apart from a disappointment that would linger for years in the mom’s heart like a burnt smell in a winter kitchen, everything was fine, a grainy fading vision of the smiling dad with the swaddled floater in his arms the last thing the mom saw before she closed her eyes, exhausted, down a pint, woozy, wheeled into the recovery room beside a tall slit window that gave onto a dazzle of implausibly green and blue afternoon, where the mom conked, and where she remained, still fucking whacked by some formidable opiate, when Gwen came in, stood by the bed, clasped the mom’s hands in both of her own, Gwen’s cool palms destined to linger afterward in some underlayer of the mom’s memory and then, minutes or centuries later, when the mom opened her eyes again, just before she turned her head from the afternoon dazzle of the window to greet her daughter and see about rustling her up a little milk, the mom saw a flicker of red in a live oak tree beside the parking lot, a savage red, a bird, a parrot! that stalked along a limb of the live oak, looking as if it were talking or even singing to itself, gathering itself together with a hint of fussiness and then regaining the sky, bearing for the herded hills with their pied coats, fixing a course that carried it over the duplex on Blake Street in whose master bedroom another father and son lay watching something together in lieu of conversation, side by side on the bed, propped up by pillows, faces lit by the screen of a laptop computer that the father balanced on his abdomen angled so that if they lay very close together, they could both get a good view of the movie, one of nine discs that Julie had dug out of the blaxploitation section at Reel Video and brought home by way of research for his Tarantino class at the Senior Center, this one, Strutter (1973), starring the current fugitives from the Bruce Lee Institute in the full flame of their youth as a gun-toting, ass-kicking, frequently coupling double shot of funky magnificence, Luther Stallings cast as the ex-marine Vietnam vet trained to the point of artistry in techniques of stealth, infiltration, and hand-to-hand combat, then court- martialed and dishonorably discharged after he intervened to prevent a (white) captain from raping a hamlet girl, set loose with his commando skill set in the world of banks, pirated art collections, shipments of bullion and jewels, who is stalked (the first film in the projected trilogy being an avowed blaxploitation twist on The Thomas Crown Affair) by the leggy, implausibly monikered, and scantily clad insurance investigator Candygirl Clark, who must betray him to collect her paycheck, the son delighting in the movie’s overall ambiance of insouciant cheapness, his father in its evocation of a time, a year, 1973, marveling at a string of little bits of the past (two-tone red-topped mailboxes, long rows of telephone booths in bus stations, old guys, routinely lounging