STELLAR NEBULA

(BIRTH)



In the beginning there is Adina and her Earth mother. Adina (in utero), listening to the advancing yeses of her mother’s heart and her mother in the labor room, vitals plunging. Binary stars. Adina, swaying in zero gravity. Térèse, fastened to the operating table. The monitor above the bed reports on their connected hearts: beating heart, heart, beating heart, beating. Térèse’s blood pressure plummets as Adina advances through the birth canal; she has almost reached Earth. At this moment, Voyager 1 spacecraft launches in Florida, containing a phonograph record of sounds intended to explain human life to intelligent extraterrestrials.

It is September 1977 and Americans are obsessed with Star Wars, a civil war movie set in space. Bounding to the stage after hearing her name, a Price Is Right contestant loses her tube top and reveals herself to a shocked Burbank audience. In the labor room of Northeast Philadelphia Regional, no one notices Térèse’s plummeting blood pressure. Something lighter and more conscious detaches and slips beneath the body on the table, underneath the floor and sediment, landing in a corridor of waist-deep water. Behind her, unembodied darkness. Far in front, over an expanse of churning waves, a certain, cherishing light. Térèse wants the light more than she wants health, more than she wants this baby’s father to become a shape that can hold a family. She forces one leg through the water then the other, trying to paddle herself like a vessel.

* * *

The contents of Voyager 1’s record were chosen by Carl Sagan, a polarizing astronomer who wears natty turtleneck-blazer combos and has been denied Harvard tenure for being too Hollywood. Carl and his team have assembled over a hundred images depicting what they decided were typical Earth scenes: a woman holding groceries, an insect on a leaf. The sounds include Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” the sorrowful cries of humpback whales, and recordings of the brain waves of Carl’s third wife. Footsteps, heartbeats, and laughter. Destinationless, Voyager 1 will travel 1.6 light-years: farther than any human-made object. At a press conference Carl says that launching this bottle into the cosmic ocean is intended to tell “the human story.”

* * *

The astronomers hoped to include the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” but Columbia Records asked for too much money. It’s hard to make human beings believe in things.

Also not included is 1977’s top hit “Barracuda,” though every story hummed that year over the upholstered dividers of United Skates of America or yelled between cars pinned atop Auto World pistons or delivered through the eldritch mists of Beautyland’s perfume section is told over the twinned guitars of the two-sister band from Chicago. It plays on the radio in the nurses’ station at Northeast Regional. A speck of Panasonic rustle between songs.

* * *

The current is too strong; Térèse makes no progress. The light remains distant. She cries out. The fright of a huge suck pulls Adina through to big white. Térèse regains consciousness under unfriendly lamps, baby on her naked chest. The baby is too small. Her skin and eyes appear lightly coated in egg. She is placed under a phototherapy lamp. Lit blue-green by the mothering light, yearning toward its heat, she appears other than human. Plant or marine life, maybe. An orchid or otter. A shrimp.

* * *

Adina: noble

Giorno: day

* * *

Térèse watches through the nursery window as her new daughter fails to reach the light.

Adina will hear this story several times in her life and in her imagination Térèse will wear a strapless red corset and capelet like Ann Wilson on the cover of Little Queen, only Sicilian, and with roller skates, humid late-season wind blowing through the doors. Her hair will glisten darkly with Moroccan oil, too coarse to relent to the popular feathering style.

In reality, Térèse has been arranged into a wheelchair by the nurses, feeling retracted to Earth by an unkind thread. The collar of her hospital gown falls beneath her collarbone. Her baby unrolls a tiny fist and she thinks of her unchained friends, Adina’s father among them, on their way to the club. She is too tired to realize that pursuing him is following the promise of a dead star. The nurses chat about the Price Is Right contestant. Did it on purpose, one says. The first part of Térèse’s life is over. He will never again beg to hold her perfect nipple in his mouth. She will never again be wild Térèse dancing on the lit floor at Bob and Barbara’s. Her parents will not support her. She is this tiny baby’s mother, mother, mother. The she in Adina’s head.

In Adina’s imagination, her mother will gaze through the nursery window, electric guitar chevroning behind her. In reality, Térèse is perforated by exhaustion, parentless, barely returned from death’s corridor. Even the hospital gown refuses to help; its foolish smile exposes half a perfect breast.

* * *

But the womb is Adina’s second lost home. The first has already tumbled three hundred thousand years away. A planet in the approximate vicinity of the bright star Vega, in the northern constellation of Lyra. Intelligent extraterrestrials have sent their own probe in a form and to a location no academic—not even Carl Sagan—could anticipate.

It is an interstellar crisscross apple sauce. Two celestially significant events occurring simultaneously: The departure of Voyager 1 and the arrival of Adina Giorno, early and yellowed like old newspaper. If like a newspaper Voyager intends to bring the news, this baby is meant to collect it, though no one knows that yet, including her. Even as the spacecraft breaches the troposphere, the delicate probe stretches her fist toward a heat lamp in the pediatric ward of Northeast Regional, having just been born—or landed—depending on perspective, premature. Wriggling, yearning, recovering in heat, full head of thick black hair, at the moment she is still mostly salt and feeling.

* * *

This family, trying, lives across from Auto World in Northeast Philadelphia. Their apartment comprises the bottom floor of a two-unit brick building attached to another brick building, attached to another brick building, and so on, et cetera-ing down the highway. These are starter row homes. This is a starter family. The complex’s lawn, newly mowed, emits a pleasant fecund smell to the cars speeding by and to Adina’s father, where he crouches, glaring at a screwdriver. If he keeps his city job they’ll move to the suburbs where within years he will not rent but own an unattached house. They’ll have a yard that’s only theirs, a grill, a tree, and enough space for each family member to do things alone. There is no solo activity in the row home across from Auto World. Being a father is alien to this man but he’s trying. Today, he will use metal to add wood to wood and produce a swing, the way a man plus a woman and baby makes a family.

Each row home is designed like a cadaver lying flat on a table: at the prow of the apartment is an abbreviated entryway that normally holds Adina’s kicked-off boots and her mother’s neatly arranged work pumps, hallway like a throat leading to the open kitchen, the torso a family room big enough to hold a couch and a half-moon table covered in the open faces of their books, a fart of a bathroom, two small back bedrooms. Wood paneling. Everything possible painted beige. In front of Auto World a flying man twists and gyrates, making Adina and her mother giggle as they pull into their driveway.


Copyright © 2024 by Marie-Helene Bertino