Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [88]
“You are a silly man,” Anna scoffed.
And lo, at midnight, I awoke to the words I dreaded hearing.
“My water broke,” Sylvia said.
Men, I discovered, are hardwired for this moment. There is no lingering here. The sleep just dissipates. Every pore of my being was devoted to getting Sylvia out of the house pronto and into the arms of trained professionals. I was on the phone a millisecond later.
“Dr. Brown?…Is that you?…You have to wake up…Hello?…Dr. Brown? Sylvia’s water broke. The baby’s coming.”
“Well, you better bring her in, then,” said Dr. Brown groggily.
Moments later we screeched to a halt in front of the hospital, a brand-new private hospital. “First World Care in a Third World Setting,” said the brochure. Or something like that. Planned before the coup, the modest hospital—elsewhere it would be called a clinic—had been designed to lure the patients in the South Pacific who might otherwise choose to seek medical care in Australia or New Zealand.
“Hello? Anybody there?”
I shook the security guard awake from his kava dream.
“My wife’s having a baby!” Sylvia stood calmly holding her belly. “Is Dr. Brown here? Is there a nurse?…Do you speak English?”
He did not.
“Baby,” I said, pointing to Sylvia. “You know? …Waaa, waaa.”
The security guard shuffled off to get a nurse. Meanwhile, Sylvia was overtaken by a contraction. Her fingers dug deep into my arm. Oh, god, I thought. “Uh…okay,” I panted. “Um…deep breath…uh…now exhale.”
Finally, the nurse arrived, and soon we found ourselves in the birthing room, awaiting the arrival of the doctor.
At 4 A.M.—4 A.M. again!—Lukas emerged into this world, bawling and screaming.
“He looks like you,” said the nurse. Frankly, like all newborns, he looked like the creature from the Black Lagoon. But what a wonder he was.
THERE IS BEFORE AND AFTER. And the change is startling. One day, you go to sleep with the reliable expectation that when you next arise, a new day will have begun. And then—after—you go to sleep, having first spent a long while cooing over the little angel slumbering in the crib next to you, and suddenly, from the depths of your dreams, you find yourself hurtling toward the ceiling, shaken to the core by the ferocious wail of a hungry infant.
“Wha…who…what’s going on?” I sputtered, once I’d pried myself off the ceiling fan. After Lukas was born, Sylvia had remained in the hospital for four nights, attended by a platoon of nurses. Our boy was one of the first babies to be born in the new hospital, and Sylvia and Lukas were treated like celebrities. I had spent those first days in the hospital and my nights at home. Now, finally, the whole family was together.
“He’s hungry,” Sylvia said as she rose to get the howling baby.
“Well…what should we do?”
“Feed him, of course.”
“Okay,” I said. The baby continued to wail, a cry that pierced my soul. I wanted, more than anything, for the baby to be happy, to know that we were there for him, and to realize that while he might be out of the womb, he remained in a cocoon of love. Also, I really wanted him to stop crying. Even my bones rattled.
“What can I do?…Maybe you should hold him like…Or try…”
Breastfeeding was still a new experience for both mother and child, and while Sylvia remained serene, Lukas grew impatient. I sensed that he wanted his umbilical cord back.
“You know what you should do?” Sylvia said as I fluttered anxiously around her.
“Tell me. What can I do?”
“You should have a Nicorette.”
Unsurprisingly, the cold-turkey method had not worked for me at all. The baby’s not here yet, I had reasoned in the months since we’d arrived in Fiji, which meant that I could still…smoke. Yippee! But he was here now, and I quickly stuffed a wad of Nicorette in my mouth, seeking to get a grip on my frayed nerves.
Eventually, of course, like all parents, I grew accustomed to the midnight wail. After Sylvia fed him, Lukas would be handed over to me so that he’d have a warm shoulder to spit up on. Whereas once I had been repelled by the smell of vomit, now I took