and their OB had scheduled one months before, to fall on a date that preceded her due date by one week, though they’d never made it that far. He didn’t make eye contact with the couples now as he stepped past the desk, though the men were desperate for him to look at them; he could feel it, feel their eyes on him. They wanted recognition, or pity, acknowledgment—I’ve been there, dude, it’s going to be fine—anyway, they wanted something he couldn’t give.
As the men looked at him, angling, the nurses looked away, failing to greet him once he’d pushed the metal panel that admitted him into the private unit through automatic doors. It was clear from their casual laughter and the pauses they indulged in before answering one of his questions, the internal gathering and even impatience they were not afraid to let him glimpse, that they’d made some bargain long ago not to feel. Except for one, Sophia, who seemed to have a different shift each day so that Bruce could never depend on her presence, they failed to smile or exude much palpable warmth. He supposed that, compared with what he needed from them, it was a saner choice to offer him nothing; otherwise they might be consumed, tip into him and be burned up. Yes, that made sense. The room was only slightly larger than the conference room at his office. Tall, metal Isolettes on casters, nubby recliners, and all manner of monitoring machines were its furniture. It was loud; the alarms on the Brady cardiograms rang ceaselessly, printers spat out reading after noisy reading; this was an atmosphere of emergency, as opposed to the hushed haven Bruce had expected. That part, he didn’t hate. It felt appropriate, and he dissolved into the hum and activity as if he were falling into water, negotiating the maze on his way to the corner Ethan and Ben’s crib occupied, a beautiful, light-filled corner, with a view of the East River that might make Bruce laugh under other circumstances, so wasted was its beauty on him and the other occupants of this floor. A developer would kill for this view. Apartment seekers would ransom their grandmothers for it. Instead, Bruce pictured a face like his own as viewed from outside, the sole face visible from behind an acre of glass, pale, eyes fixed on the barges below as they plowed forward, their progress barely discernible except for the crescent of white churn in their wakes.
What he loved: seeing the boys. Only that. The exhale he was able to produce when the boys came back into his sight after his night away from them—another meaningless night he’d already forgotten, had already voided from the ledger of nights. His miraculous boys.
The chair Bruce sat in was gray. He occupied it for about ten hours a day, if you subtracted lunch, and the inevitable perambulations he had to make when the noise filled his head so that it brimmed. He’d written a report in grade school about the Siberian gulag, where guards swaddled their shoes in cotton and trained themselves to move so silently that their very presence contributed to the torturous goal of confusing prisoners as to whether the voices in their heads were actually audible in the pervasive absence of sound. Here it was the opposite, though the effect must be the same; the sound was what pervaded; the thoughts were what you couldn’t identify, because you might have spoken them instead of merely thought them; someone was always speaking here, asking you to repeat your story and repeat, repeat, repeat. Bruce had no idea why the doctors and hospital workers from different specialties couldn’t seem to coordinate information and thus relied on him to stitch the quilt together every time they made their rounds. “Hi, I’m Cassie from social work. So how are the babies doing? Twins, yes?” Cassie would stand there, reading the chart, getting up to speed. Somewhere on the chart was typed the phrase maternal death, though Bruce suspected it was near enough to the bottom of the page that some people never got to it. When they did, he could read it in their faces, and the satisfaction that coursed in his veins then was as powerful as a drug. He wanted Cassie to know every last detail. He wanted Cassie, well-meaning Cassie, on her knees.
Ethan and Ben were okay—improbably okay, though their stay here would be necessary for another week, until the fluid in