the birth and death of one who never was

The San Francisco Review of Books

I was born.

I died.

While being born.

I was stillborn.

I was aborted.

I was never conceived.

The sperm that was to make up half of me slammed against a barrier of latex and drowned in a film of toxins, and the egg that was to be the other half dried up and disappeared in a wash of blood.

The sperm that was to make up half of me, the sperms that were to make up the halves of half-mes, were launched not into my never-to-be-my-mother’s vagina, but instead onto her belly, where some ran down into her navel—the ruins of her umbilical cord—flagellated crazily, piling up on one another, died, and were crushed and absorbed by a tissue wrapped around the tip of my never-to-be-my-father’s index finger.

My parents never met one another.

My parents met one another, but my mom thought my dad smelled like a locker room and so she smiled and frowned, moved away toward the onion dip, and never became my mother.

My parents were never born: My grandparents met one another, but my grandfather smelled bad, too.

My grandmother cut her foot on a chunk of metal in the sand at Coney Island when she was six. She got lockjaw and died without being able to utter any naive but beautiful last words. The chunk of metal was a broken key that my never-to-be grandfather had dropped through the boards of the boardwalk a year earlier, on my never-to-be birthday.

My parents met one another, but then they met others they liked better, and two half-mes were conceived, born, and raised. Someday, maybe (though I admit the odds are against it), these half-mes will meet, fall in love, and fornicate, and an almost-me will be born.

There is the chance, however, that this almost-me will die while being born, will be stillborn, aborted, will dry up in a navel, will vanish in a wash of blood.

There is also, of course, the chance that if this almost-me is born, and survives childhood—doesn’t die of measles, say, or smallpox; doesn’t get hit by a car or fall out a window, or simply walk to school one day never to be seen again (or, to be found, several weeks later, after a massive search, in a shallow grave by the side of the highway that leads out of town—the little body lonely and decomposing while the drawing for Mom, the house scrawled carefully in blue, red, and yellow crayon, hangs silently from its magnets on the humming refrigerator), if none of this happens, no fatal drunk-driving incident on graduation day, no choking to death on a chicken bone in Denny’s while Mom screams and cries and Dad desperately hugs and crushes a stomach, no freezing to death yards from the trail that would’ve led to the safety of a small cross-country skiing lodge, no blundering into a neighbor’s pool, if none of these tragedies occur, if this almost-me survives childhood, makes it through the twisting years of adolescence without hanging his scrawny frame from a rafter in his room with his sad yellow karate belt, if he makes it, there is, of course, always the chance (and again, l admit it, the odds are not on my side) that he will have absolutely no desire whatsoever to write this novel, or, if he does, that the desire will be squashed by a cruel or careless teacher, or will mutate, instead, into the desire to channel these creative energies into something that promises a greater chance of financial gain—plumbing, perhaps, or composing advertising copy for a brand of condoms, or tampons, or facial tissues, or crayons.

And even if this almost-me does decide to write this novel, and doesn’t abandon it after forty pages, say, and gets it published—the first twelve houses declining, the thirteenth saying yes—, it won’t be the same novel at all, and perhaps this almost-me won’t even take me into consideration one bit; perhaps the novel will start out with an unequivocal “I was born,” and march on from there all the way to a neat “Finis.”

In any case, l won’t be there to see it, except, perhaps, as the smallest glimmer of self-doubt in the author’s mind—an unformed but nagging thought in the back of his brain as he steps up to the lectern at a standing-room-only reading and starts to open with a joke. An unformed thought, a doubt that, though disturbing for a moment, is nonetheless washed away by a punch line and laughter, laughter shared by a woman with two condoms in her purse (one of them defective), a woman moving away from the onion dip and back into the heart of the crowd, toward the author.

Or, perhaps the still-forming thought will be aborted just as the novel is being completed, just as the author brings his hand down toward the page, dots a last “i,” pencils a final period. Finis. +