Hatched (16 page)

Tom described this scene with great detail, proclaiming that it was his own decision to break out of the womb, since it was becoming far too noisy. When he had first heard this story, Ted, always the most cynical of the three roommates, had told Tom that in fact his parents were just trying to get rid of him, and thought to drown him. Tom’s reaction was swift and brutal. He had stood up, and threatened to kill Ted where he sat. Steve, who was trained in martial arts, was put on high alert, ready to lash out to both Tom and Ted, if only for the excuse to display his wares. Principles, the inner ability, and parameters, the event that led to their being manifested in a particular way.

When things calmed down, Ted learned why Tom had reacted so fiercely and, not for the first time, or the last, regretted his well-honed sarcasm. Tom continued his story. There had been no cause for concern. Danielle was due in two weeks. But then, in the midst of what seemed a perfectly normal childbirth, as Tom peered into the world that awaited him from the warmth of his mother’s core, her blood pressure suddenly plummeted, and as the doctor’s hastened Tom’s exit, she died. Rommel was not in the room during the labor, and so when the doctor emerged he uttered just a few carefully chosen words: “We have saved the child.”

Rommel stared into the doctor’s eyes, searching for meaning. He could not understand why news of the birth of his child would be conveyed in such a fashion.

“We have saved your child, sir.” Hesitation. “But not your wife. Not your wife. I’m so sorry.”

Rommel stood in the hospital hallway, a few steps away from the door to the operating room where his son hollered, while his wife slept the eternal sleep, never to enjoy motherhood, never to live with Rommel in Meycauayan, never to fulfill the dreams they had whispered and called out during their long hours of lovemaking, never, never to be together again. Never.

All of this had occurred in a way that betrayed what Tom’s father thought of as “the plan.” The plan predicted that Rommel’s family would enjoy perfect happiness upon this earth. And there had never been reason to ever believe otherwise. Everything had always gone according to plan, confirming its existence, until everything didn’t go according to plan. How was it possible that his beautiful, passionate, powerful, magnificent, young wife should die giving birth to a beautiful baby boy? And how could she die when every possible medical service was available in this modern, sprawling American hospital? Nobody knew, nobody could convey to Tom’s father what could have gone wrong that day, except that there were some inconclusive studies about the virus that she carried and the fate she endured.

Whatever it was, on that day she died, and so, too, did whatever dreams Rommel had for Danielle, for the family he would build with her, for the jewels and joys with which he would shower her. She died. And after that day, Tom was all that his father had left, and Tom’s father was intent upon holding onto him, if only for his own survival, if only, indeed, until he could relinquish his parental responsibilities and rejoin his wife. Tom’s father came to believe that the plan did indeed exist, but it had elements that he’d misunderstood, most notably the one that said it was to be fulfilled in the other world.

Tom’s description of his youth was forever some odd combination of what he remembered, and what he’d added to those memories. “I never got to know my mother,” he had said. Ted felt sick to his stomach. “And I never had a sibling.”

Steve, hardly the sentimentalist, had spoken for himself and for Ted, though, when he said, spontaneously and without any hesitation, “Tom, you’ve got us. You’ve got us, Tom.”

This seemed to all of them a monumental announcement, uttered on that college evening in the depth of the night. But Steve was also the pragmatist and the clearheaded thinker, serious and tender when the situation called for it. “Why did you come here?”

“Here?”

“Why did you come to the United States? Why here? Your father . . .”

“Georgia. I don’t think I could ever go to Georgia, because it’s where my mother died. And my dad couldn’t be there either, but needed time before, well, returning home, and so did I, since I had some kind of jaundice or something. Anyhow, instead of staying near the hospital, he got into his car and drove to the next biggest town—Nashville. Someone who had seen him grieving in the waiting room, an African-American pastor, or priest or minister, told him about a place of healing and calm in a little community in Nashville right near some projects, downtown. My dad went there and stayed for two weeks. He once told me that it was the safest place he’d ever been, a place of love and healing. He, I don’t know, I think he got to know a bunch of people who lived in those projects, especially some of the kids, and he said that without them, and without me, well, anyhow. He waited for me to get better in that little community, and because of that community he loved the United States. He said that those kids were what the United States could be, and the hospital in Atlanta was what it had turned into. Atlanta was cold, sterile, private, corporate, murderous, and he had experienced the opposite in this little community in the Nashville hood.”

“Did he ever go back there?” asked Steve.

“No, he never did. He said that he’d bring me there, but, well . . .” He paused. “It’s funny guys,” continued Tom, emboldened by their closeness, “I feel like my memories are a weird combination of stuff I remember and stuff I made up about things I did with my mom.” He paused. “I feel like it was all my fucking fault.”

Ted and Steve had rushed to Tom’s emotional rescue, to no avail. No matter what they said, and no matter how hard Tom’s father had tried, Tom inherited the guilt for the death not only of his mother, but also the sister, the brother, the amazing family that the plan had promised his father. In Tom’s mind, he had committed original sin: he killed his maker. And to punish him, the universe had conspired to murder his own sister, his own brother, his entire family, a family that was never given the chance to be conceived. It was so unfair.

Worse still, Tom, totally unaware of his actions, had murdered his own mother in the painful labor that she had undertaken in order to expel him from her garden. This alone had earned him a tainted place upon this earth. For years, this is the weight that Tom carried with him, in a childhood that was tainted by absence and sadness and unfulfilled dreams, especially those that his father described to him as being unfulfilled, aborted. Tom would also learn from his classmate’s mother that his father had folded back into himself after her death, spending his next fifteen years a recluse, rarely leaving the homestead, never taking another wife, or even lover. And so Tom came to inherit the guilt for his father’s symbolic death as well, realizing one day that not only did he know nothing of his mother, but that he’d also never really known his father either. He lived with a pale embodiment of a man, a father, a husband, someone who could have been.

When he was old enough to discuss such things, Tom learned that his father harbored ever-greater resentment for her death, not towards Tom, but towards Atlanta, towards Georgia, towards health care, and, moreover, towards everyone who is involved in the perpetuation of the health care business for their own enrichment. But he also had this strange American Dream, connected to Nashville, a vision of all that was so healing for him there, and all that could have been had she only survived, had she only given birth amongst that little community instead of in one of those gleaming hospital towers that perpetuates inordinate spending by sickeningly wealthy people.

And so Tom’s father felt that he and his deceased wife, and his son Tom, had all been stripped of the great and exciting plans for what was to be his grand and august family by, of all things, a fancy hospital in America. Tom heard this repeated endlessly as he grew up, although he had no experience of whatever his father meant by “august,” because they had always lived together modestly, and his father, other than gardening, seemed to quite literally have no interests, no passions, no friends, no pastimes. Tom’s father fed his son, helped him off to school, stayed at home, greeted him upon his arrival home at the end of each day, cooked modest dinners, read quietly in the evening, and went to sleep. This was quite literally all Tom had ever known about domestic life, and he assumed, wrongly, that on this account he had come to know all that there really was to know about his father.

In time, though, the story of his mother’s death grew more complex and troubling. Through scattered bits of information that emerged regarding that fateful day, Tom learned that the hospital in which his mother had died had been identified as treating black and white patients differently, to the detriment, of course, of black patients. Medications that could have been used for her condition were not prescribed, experts who understood the effects of the virus she carried were not consulted, and, despite Rommel’s resources, financial and otherwise, precautions weren’t taken in advance of the labor that could have saved her life. And so her death gave birth to a sense of outrage in Tom, and learning about the circumstances of her suffering provided him with the desire to learn more about what had happened to his mother; and then, as a mixed-race black/Filipino boy, he sought to understand what it meant to be an ostracized person in America, and why it was that even people with his father’s resources were subjected to marginalization on the basis of race. Both of these messages resonated profoundly in Tom, feeding his passions and his obsessions.

What happened at the end of his father’s life proved that much remained unexplained, to the very end, even as it did explain Tom’s hand-stitched, custom, Italian-leather jacket with lamb’s wool lining. Tom’s father had explained to him early on that he had a chosen spot on their land where he was to be buried, and, presciently, he died when Tom was seventeen and still living at home. The instructions for burial were so precise that without the slightest hesitation, and even before he could begin the process of grieving, Tom set out about to bury his father. He had been specifically instructed not to call a doctor if his father died at home, and, because his father had died of what was evidently a massive coronary, there would have been no possibility of Tom taking any useful steps to save him. And since doctors, hospitals, medication, and the whole industry of preserving life weren’t realms upheld with any enthusiasm by Tom or by his father, the decision to remain mute in the face of a medical emergency wasn’t difficult to take.

And so when Rommel entered cardiac arrest and then died at home with his son, Tom knew that he had to simply follow the preordained instructions. He knew to simply go to the chosen spot and dig a hole, in which, sans casket, his father was to be buried. He was strangely calm. He had always assumed that his father would indeed die at home, because there was no alternative plan in the event that he was anywhere else, and he also imagined that he’d have no chance at saving him, since no set of procedures were set out for such an eventuality in the meticulous instructions that Tom’s father had provided for his demise.

After the burial, the story went, Tom was to leave Meycauayan and travel to the United States. But how, and for what purpose? His father had not explained anything to him, but the details regarding burial were so precise, and the preparations had been discussed for such a long time, that Tom barely even asked himself a single question about what he was meant to do after his father was safely beneath the ground. For a young boy provided with instructions for burying his father, all of this was theoretical anyway, so he never bothered to ask questions. Nobody, or almost nobody, expects their parents will die, until they do. But his father did die. Tom followed his father’s wishes, as had been ordained. The plan continued.

And so on the evening of his father’s death, Tom bore witness to the horror of it all as though he was witnessing a preordained event from afar, powerless. Tom watched almost impassively as his father grimaced and choked for air, because there was nothing to be done. Mercifully, the grasping and choking quickly gave way to profound calm. Tom stared at his father, he watched him die, and then he watched him grow rigid. He felt sadness, and he felt relief. This was the way it was supposed to be, the way he had been told it would be. This was part of the plan. Tom had tried to explain this to Ted and to Steve on numerous occasions.

“My dad died precisely as he was ordained to. I never had to leave him, because he left me, not even a month before I was supposed to leave him, to come to The States, to come,” he had paused, “to New York.” And now here he was, and the three of them, friends in college, were all there together. “And someday, I will go to Nashville.”

After the convulsions stopped, Tom had approached his father, bent down, and put his ear to his sunken chest.

Silence.

He took his wrist and pressed his thumb upon the spot where gushing blood could be perceived as a murmur and a pulsation.

Nothing.

A few moments later, Tom was obediently carrying the inanimate remnant of his own father upon his shoulders, as though he was an unwieldy sack filled with, what, bones? Flesh? Tom refused to feel, and chose instead to act. For suddenly his entire connection to this house, this town, this country, and to the past as he knew it, was now nothing more than the dead weight of his own father—dead, weight.

Tom went to the prescribed spot, hunched over as though he bore the very burden of his whole world upon his shoulders, and, when he laid his father into the ground, he released that weight and passed it onto the surface of the earth. For the first time he felt grief, and the misty evening blurred and drifted. Life as he knew it was forever changed, and two gigantic teardrops formed and plunged down his face to the waiting soil.

It was done. The earth was now ready to be entered.

Tom penetrated the spot that had been designated for this event, and with the force of youth and the duty of a son he began to dig, as the crumpled and stiffening form of his father observed him, motionless. Tom worked hard for his father, preparing the earth to accept his weight. He prepared a nest, a foundation, a crater, a wound in the earth’s own flesh as wide and deep enough as Tom’s maker, his family, the provider of his life, and the designated messenger for his burden and earthly toil.