Finally, a nurse had the good sense to see that my heart rate was dropping like a dirty bomb, and Mama was white and trembling. Still, the doctor said to “wait and see.” Until Lucy Fortune got a hold of him. Lucy had given birth to every one of her children at home, and she knew that her daughter Effie — the toughest of them all — wasn’t one to cry and moan and make a royal fool of herself over a simple thing like childbirth. So, with Lucy’s persuasive hands gripping Dr. Dickey’s collar, he agreed to look into the situation more closely. Within minutes, there was a frantic team of people jabbing my mother with needles to knock her out and give her blood transfusions, while another doctor told Dickey to get out of the way while he did an emergency C-section. And five minutes before M*A*S*H — Mama’s favourite show — started, on what would be declared World Toilet Day some twenty-five years later, I entered the world. At which point, Mama almost left it when the hemorrhaging didn’t stop.

Somehow, we both made it out of my birth alive. Mama came out of the ordeal with her midsection sliced from arsehole to appetite, a harrowing story to tell, and a low-key bitterness that the new M*A*S*H episode she missed was about her favourite character, Father Mulcahy — and I came out of it with a lingering sense of guilt over how much trouble I caused her right from the get-go.

I wonder if someday Daktari Christ MacIsaac will feel faintly haunted by that same spectre of guilt over what’s happening to his mother. Char’s been diagnosed with severe postpartum psychosis. What other explanation is there when a woman hitchhikes home from her high school reunion with her baby in tow after squirting a cop in the face with her breast milk? And then gleefully tells the trucker who picks her up that she’s a celestial being who needs a ride to the edge of the civilized world, where she will merge into The Oneness and deliver mankind into the Cosmic Climax. And then, when she gets dropped off on the highway down by the gas station, walks to Peggy’s house, where she goes into the yard, strips naked and shimmies halfway up a sixty-foot oak tree, proclaiming her barely five-month-old baby to be Icarus. With wings of light and love.

Allie was the only one sober enough to drive when Peggy called me. We got there just in time. Char had the sleeping baby in his sling, dangling from a branch, as she loudly, insanely sang “Rock-a-bye Baby.” The first responders tried to appeal to her sense of reason. To rationality. To the risk. Things Char never gave a shit about at the best of times.

Gimp had a better idea. He told her that he was the maker of baby Icarus’s wings, and that he’d made a mistake. The wings weren’t ready. If baby Icarus tried to use them, he’d perish. Char appreciated this critical information. She let Gimp climb up a ladder to where she sat perched. She placed the baby in his waiting spastic arm, watched him climb down the ladder with her child, then climbed down herself. Gimp spoke to her slowly, gently, followed her into Crazytown, took her by the hand, and led her into the back of the waiting ambulance. Meanwhile, I was useless as tits on a bull, standing there trying not to pass out or puke at the thought of witnessing a baby killed by his mad mother. Allie stayed in the car until it was all over.