Above All Was the Sense of Hearing Acute
by Sabrina Tom
Soumya Netrabile, The Black Seeds, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
ABOVE ALL WAS THE SENSE
OF HEARING ACUTE
SABRINA TOM / SEPT 2021 / ISSUE 9
I know—I am difficult to read. My resting expression is placid, the most mysterious. They tell me my eyes are especially plain. Two bowls of brown rice—nothing in them. And yet my feelings are far from simple. My soul, too, is heavy with emotion. So do not presume that I am crazy, for a crazy woman could not feel as I did. Could not see and hear as I did. Could not kill as I did.
It was not personal. I simply never wanted to be like them and—God knows—I had many opportunities. Being smart, capable, and sensibly dressed, it was a condition of every social situation that I be marked as a caretaker. I cannot tell you how many women have tried to deposit a sleeping baby into my arms, or made eye contact with me in line, their loose-skinned, yet surprisingly muscular arms torpedoed around a tantrummy toddler. This assumption of compassion, solidarity. As if I would give it. As if I had it to give.
But no—I was never like that. Certainly not when I started carrying my own child whose presence I despised as soon as I became aware of it. Not because of selfishness. Nor greed. Nor feminism. Like I said—it wasn't personal. It was his eye. Yes! That was it! One of his eyes was pale blue and perfectly clear. It reminded me of a colonist. Like a vulture swooping in and out of sunlight. It unsettled the core of me and rearranged every carefully constructed cell. So I decided to kill the unborn child and be rid of that eye forever.
Patiently—the work required patience. You should have seen just how patient and good-natured I was. The intuition and verisimilitude of my pregnancy. Swaggering down the street. Singing in rhymes and rubbing my stomach. Emoting such endowed divinity that even strangers now responded to my face with familiarity. Good morning English pea, passion fruit, yellow squash, cantaloupe! There was always some fruit or vegetable analogy to work with, adding to the narrative that I was, indeed, no longer merely human but a garden of life. You would have been in awe of my maternal instinct. I wore it like a golden crown. In any case I was wonderfully amusing. The doctors certainly thought so. And this is my point. Would a crazy woman have earned the affection of these esteemed professionals? Would she have the audacity to rhyme trimester with nester? I was able to keep up with these entertainments during all my prenatal appointments. Of course, as soon as the doctor flicked on the monitor and the cold gel splotched my skin, my insides simmered with the slow burn of repulsion, but at every check-up—once a month from the third month to the seventh—the eye was closed. He was so still, only his heartbeat betrayed his liveness. A low, rhythmic sound. There was no need to act then. In this respect abortion was never an option, for it was not the child I wanted to do away with, but his Evil Eye.
During the eighth month I felt a shift. The child who had lain passive with eyes shut was awakening. Late one afternoon, while I was in the kitchen soaking mung beans for a soup, I felt a viscous goo pour down my legs. By the time I tracked it a large pool of blood had gathered at my feet. Ah yes, I thought. It is time. I stepped off the rug and carefully lifted it into the sink. I ran the water with laundry soap. I scrubbed every stain clean. I did not feel rushed; the most important thing was to be thorough. It would be unacceptable to come home from the hospital to a bloody mess. The child was a willing co-conspirator. He allowed me to carry on without protest or interruption. Only once did I feel a small jerk of movement from a place deep in my stomach. It passed quickly and did not repeat again.
I was calm when I arrived at the hospital. As they wheeled me down the narrow hall the light from the overhead fluorescents penetrated each layer of my skin, exposed my connective tissue, turned me inside out. The frigid air circulated through my bones. My blood shivered. Inside the birthing room a constellation of wordless technicians rotated in and out. They moved with methodical precision, setting up the surgical tray, dimming the lights. Someone handed me mesh underwear and a robe made of white paper. I wore it like a wedding gown. I felt handsome and focused, for this was the moment I had been waiting for.
The attending doctor hooked me into the monitor and the familiar figure appeared onscreen. I followed along with the zoomed in anatomy, starting with the most important. Aorta, vena cava, trachea. Cerebellum. The exaggerated fetal forehead. A body floating within the confines of a dark, watery utopia. Aware of so little. And I genuinely felt sorry for the child's innocence. Knowing nothing of the fate awaiting him, or of the world outside that had, once upon a time, been irrefutably stacked in his favor, but had since changed—reimagined by people like me as an uglier and harsher place, sure, but also one that would now hold us as a carrier bag holds the leftovers, a sack for our hung low breasts, ancestral promises, and ninja stars.
At that moment, the camera's focus shifted and there it was. The pale blue predatory eye. Wide open.
It infuriated me. How dare it—
Something else held my attention. A looping crescendo and decrescendo. Muffled. Claustrophobic. The way things sound when you cup your hands over your ears and hold them there.
The doctor looked at me with pity, mouth gaped, though he left without saying a word. Before too long, he returned with a nurse. They positioned themselves at my feet, which they placed into metal stirrups and secured with nylon lashing. I registered neither the belts tightening nor the doctor's attentions. I focused only on the heartbeat, the sound of a transmogrified future, lodged in my womb, in my jugular, in my guts. I could not escape it as long as it was a part of me. I bore down and contracted my pelvic floor, determined to expel it at once. The pain was radical and one-sided. From faraway the nurse whispered something about a stuck shoulder and the doctor sputtered instructions. Nothing they said or tried to say reached me.
I contracted again. My entire body tensed. I was in danger of losing my resolve. I strategized the quickest path to victory, collecting all my resources to get rid of the enemy. I motivated myself. You are stronger than him. A warrior. A general. A sage.
I was at war, all the metaphors at my disposal.
I contracted a final time, exhaled sharply. It came out less as a battle cry than a whimper.
Alala.
The nurse placed the child on my chest and, swiftly, both doctor and nurse left the room. His skin was icy, the color of eggplant. I placed my hand over his heart and counted ten fingers and toes. Oh the blessings of silence. I had killed him. He was truly dead. The eye, closed tight, would trouble me no more.
My thoughts held still throughout this sanctioned newborn ritual, but do not mistake this for madness. Let me tell you exactly what I did next and judge me then. I tended to the corpse. I spread out a piece of cotton no larger than a common face towel, for his body was quite small. (This was a surprise given the epic havoc he had wreaked.) I laid him down in the middle of the cloth. I tucked his hands and feet into his torso, I twisted the umbilical cord around itself, and with everything looking orderly and compact, I wrapped the corners and tied the ends into a knot. Just like a hobo's bindle.
Moving quickly, I approached the wall of cabinets and found ample space on the top shelf of the last cabinet behind the alcohol pads, latex gloves, and antibacterial soap. The bindle, or bundle, though a lumpy shape, showed not a spot of blood or corporeal fluid anywhere, and in its purity rather held its own among these vital objects of sanitation. I closed the door gently and returned to bed, satisfied.
The day was nearing its end. Moonlight filtered in through the window and washed the walls in shades of pale. I lay in bed, a witness to these changes that were both dramatic and undetectable. I felt sleepy but did not sleep. A light rapping on the door announced the arrival of three pink-faced women, one short and two tall. The postpartum protocol team, dispatched by the doctor to assess me. Was I having any feelings I would like to talk about?
I welcomed their company. To be honest it was creepy being in the room all alone. I invited them to sit. There was only one chair by the window, and the shortest one took it while the other two awkwardly leaned against the glass. Could I offer them coffee, cookies, anything to make their visit more pleasant? I was sure they could not see my exuberance, so I sopranoed my voice to sound more amiable. It was a great experience, I trilled. The doctor was professional. This hospital is top notch—here I added an appreciative gesticulation—and so, so clean. I opened the cabinet doors one by one to show them what I meant. When I got to the last cabinet, I lingered on it for an extra beat and then, moved by a sudden outpouring of affection, I grabbed one of the bottles of soap and pressed it against my cheek.
Their friendly nods were a delightful sight. I had convinced them. My warmth had won them over.
They had a few more questions, they soothed. Logistics to go over. I murmured consent as the short one read from a list, but all this forced solicitousness made my head throb. She kept reading. Would you like a chaplain to visit you? Now the ache in my head met a sharp pain in my heart. Still she kept reading. I murmured my best blessings, wanting to put an end to her questions, but what came out was far from agreeable. What was that sound? It resonated off the walls, amassing atmosphere and shape—pulsing, dominating, dispossessed—forcing me to consider that this murmur, this insidious mewl, was not coming from me.
I spun around. Who else was here? I looked out the window, inhaled the sky. The murmur grew louder. I laughed nervously to cover it up, but the echo returned twice as loud. I squeezed my eyes. The protocol team remained as composed as ever. Could they really not hear it? Or were they pretending? Would you like some water? Their calm was maddening. The murmur grew louder. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. The short one's face was hidden in shadow. She reached over to stroke my arm. Her touch was a branding iron. The murmur grew louder. I threw the covers off the bed, flipped the surgical tray. Blood spilled onto the floor and formed a fist-shaped puddle. The murmur grew louder. I stuffed cotton balls in my ears. The women acted as if this was perfectly normal. I knocked, slapped, bruised the walls. Would you like to see a grief counselor once or twice a week? Witches! They really were depraved! Provoking me. Smiling as I suffered. And yet they were nothing compared to that murderous sound. Alala! The relentless invasion of privacy. Alala! Its volume amplifying in the darkness. Alala! For the rest of my life. The murmur that would not, will not, stop. Louder—louder—louder—louder—
The murmur became a record, the record became a story. You are my mother and you will always hear me, even in your deepest sleep. You are my mother and you will never be far from my beating heart.
Sabrina Tom is a writer based in Venice, California. Her work has appeared in The New Orleans Review, Redivider, Hyphen, Contrary Magazine, and is anthologized in The Kartika Review and Overkill. She also co-wrote the screenplay for the short film Moving Into Sunlight.
Soumya Netrabile (American, born 1966 in Bangalore, India) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Netrabile received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BSEE in engineering from Rutgers University. Her current and recent solo exhibitions include Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago, IL); Pt.2 Gallery (Oakland, CA); and Terra Incognito (Oak Park, IL). Recent group exhibitions include Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles, CA); Trinta Gallery (Santiago de Compostela, Spain); PRACTISE (Oak Park, IL); and KARMA (New York, NY). Her work is included in both public and private collections.