Welcome to Wherever You Are

When you first got there, to the detention center, I was afraid you would forget: the feel of bathwater (that feeling of calming suspension, like in a womb!), the way Miami smells of salt, what it feels like to run for miles and never hit a wall or fence. I was afraid captivity would shape you into something new and unrecognizable. I was afraid I would bear witness to a turning point, look back and think, That was the moment that shaped your life into disaster, or worse, I was the one who caused disaster.

Assuming the 'expats' survived, that meant they would be people, which is a complicating factor. When dealing with refugees, especially en masse, it's better not to think of them as people. It messes with the paperwork. Nevertheless, when the expats were considered from a human rights perspective, they fit the Home Office criteria for asylum seekers. It would be ethically sparse to asses nothing but the physiological effects of time-travel. To know whether they had truly adjusted to the future, the expats needed to live in it, monitored by a full-time companion, which was, it transpired, the job I'd successfully interviewed for. They called us bridges, I think because 'assistant' was below our pay grades.

They planned to cross near midnight, when it was most difficult to see shapes moving through the woods, when invisibility was a virtue and a gift. Once they went across they would be arrested, then officially questioned by the Swiss guards before being turned over to the Red Cross. There was only one answer to any of the guards' questions: I fled because I feared for my life.

'If for any reason I had to drop out, I would support you, but only if that's what you want. It's occurred to me I haven't asked you.' He'd clearly rehearsed this speech, it wasn't a spontaneous thought, and it was the first time I knew he was seriously considering it.

Back in town, none of the people I talked to seemed a bit surprised. The thing is, though, they really believed. The whole town believed. You're not from here, but you will have to learn the folklore to really understand these people. This case. You have to learn about the Ol'Hige. It's a Caribbean version of a vampire story. She's an old lady who sheds her skin like a snake and drains the blood from newborn babies. Or sometimes she steals their breaths makes mothers believe their babies died of natural causes.

Sarah sank against the wall, beneath the sign that did not say HERTZ but instead the restroom one that said MEN. Her eyes were starting to mist. She closed them, and when she opened them again she shook her head and sighed. 'This,' she said, 'is why God invented the fetal position.'

As for myself, I didn't believe in hell or an afterworld of any sort. What netherworld could be more nether than this one? I believed the afterlife was, as an atheist might tell a child curious about heaven, the memories of other people. How my mother would have hated that! To cede control to other people's brains, when her own brain was what she trusted. Still, she loved being thought about. 'You know,' said the man on the other side of my window, the one who'd fucked up in Tenerife, 'that's how it is. Do you know what I mean?' 'Yeah.' 'But do you know what I mean?' My mother distrusted memoirs and I wasn't interested in the autobiographical and for a long time that made things easy. But writers change even if mothers don't. (Mothers change plenty. Don't trust a writer who gives out advice. Writers are suckers for pretty turns of phrase with only the ring of truth.'

I had a child so that I could experience the most that this earthly plane offers up to us. I wanted to feel the most of my body. I wanted to experience new levels of love. I got all of that, and more than I bargained for. The outer reaches of love, where it hits the limit of our understanding, where it merges into the Universe; a love whose seeming ability to transcend time reminds use that we do not even know what time is. I would live a million lives to be this child's mother again and again. I would roam as a ghost and protect his earthly body until he joined me- I mean, I will, Goddess willing, that's exactly what I'll do. My body is now changed forever, and so is my psyche, my capacity for love, my connection to the cosmos and to the depth of my ignorance as to what it all means. What is this experience, this earthly plane, these bodies? Motherhood is psychedelic.

Roberta wanted her children to feel comfortable among nonwhite people and in an environment where money did not flow. She wanted them to learn that the world did not revolve around them- even though, quite often, it did.

The silence was eerie up in the hills in the dark of night. The few houses quickly built up were still shells of themselves, uninhabited. Streetlights that hadn't been wrecked by the fire glistened like tiny stars against a moonless sky. Two silhouettes approached a house on tiptoe, unnecessarily. Only the raccoons and owls were up at this hour. They got spooked a couple of times, stepping on a wrench that clattered loudly against the cement, tripping over an abandoned plank left by the construction crew. The soles of their shoes pressed their imprints silently into the mud. Their eyes adjusted to the dark, and they looked at each other only once, nodding to confirm they were still in this. And then they went ahead, setting small piles of dried leaves and sticks about, nothing one wouldn't expect to find here any day. Meant to appear natural. Accidental. Then one by one, they lit them on fire.

David did fine enough, but not for New York; he never broke a hundred K a year. Fred's career, from the outside, looked good to great. She wasn't famous, wasn't wealthy, but at the right bookstore in Manhattan, a bookseller might recognize her name at checkout and give her his employee discount, and she'd feel a little thrill for half an hour. Some years she made okay money; some as little as ten grand. She'd worn a dress, received an award, but you couldn't flush the toilet or do the dishes in their apartment if someone was trying to take a shower with hot water. They had to walk six blocks to wash their clothes. Fred hated that she couldn't just appreciate the life they'd built together, hated the achy, desperate part of her that lingered too long outside the full-length windows of the brownstones on all the blocks on her walk home.

There had been a moment, on the second night after the babies were born, when I had sat in my hospital bed looking out of the window. Across the East River was Roosevelt Island and beyond that the power station in Long Island City. It is an arresting view; the river, the expanse of sky, the cooling towers in the distance. L. had come and gone for the evening. I'd had my dinner and would be alone until a nurse came in at three a.m. to give me more pain meds. The night before, I had felt my mood crash in just the way my lawyer had warned me, a dread so vast- what had I done? How would I manage?- I could only turn my face to the wall and hope it would pass. The next night it was gone and I sat looking across the water, the sky darkening while somewhere two floors beneath me, doctors looked after my babies. After two weeks in the NICU, the babies would be discharged with a clean bill of health and L. would come to drive us all home. Phyllis would move in, and a month later, move out. I would cry from lack of sleep and frustration. On nights like this, I would lie looking out at the apartment block opposite, wondering if dawn would ever come and if the babies, both still under four pounds, would ever get any bigger or sleep for more than three hours at a stretch. During the day, I would watch TV while they slept, and cry at the slightest hint of cruelty or violence on-screen. I would produce too little milk, then too much. My dad would fly in and hold the babies for the first time and the joy of his joy would be one of the great moments of life. L's son would come down every day to kiss the babies, and on the weekend, the three of us would spend two nights upstairs. Oliver would come, Dan would come, and Phyllis would come back, three days a week, but there would never be enough hands. I would love the feeling of being in a bubble with my babies and occasionally fear I'd go mad from it. People would go overboard remarking on how much the girls looked like me, something I enjoyed but also sensed was an awkward effort to obscure the fact of the donor. In fact, one did look like me and one looked to startling extent like my mother, with the same hair and eyes and planes of her face, although they both have dimples and long lashes, neither of which comes from my side. More than anything, they look like themselves. There would be moments of the purest, whitest terror, when one seemed to be choking on her spit-up and the other slipped from hand in the tub. I would blame L. for not coming downstairs enough and blame Phyllis for coming in late. Then I would go upstairs and long to be home alone with my babies and breath a sigh of relief when Phyllis left for the week. I would watch in utter shock as my children fell in love with L. and my love for her son tangled up with my love for my babies and lost the last of its tentative air. There was no word, still, for what we are to each other, but it felt solid, and implacable, and real. Across the river, the lights in the apartments of Roosevelt Island went on and I felt a baseline within myself rising. There would be hard days and harder nights. There would be a million decisions to make, large and small. But that night, looking out from my hospital bed, I felt only the certainty of the room and my stillness within it, the future pressing in with a force I returned. At six a.m. the next morning I went downstairs to see the babies. I was still shuffling at a forty-five degree angle, my smock open at the back, huge hospital pants poking out and grey hospital socks pulled up from my sneakers. As I walked in, the nurse look up and smiled. 'Hey, Mama,' she said.