I couldn’t tell you how long things took from there. I sort of sank into the pain, once I knew there was no possible way to make it go away. I felt like it was a little space I inhabited. Other people existed outside of it, moving around, but they couldn’t reach me. It was like being very high—that feeling of existing in multiple dimensions. I sort of oscillated between my own little pain world and then the world of everyone else would rise up for a moment before I went back under alone. I tried to think about how I’d wanted this. It was me who’d wanted the baby, me who’d convinced Jimmy on that train in Bali that it would be better to do it soon. He’d said, “You’re getting at least five years ahead of me here.”

Everything was so mixed up. I lay there, the nurse pushing her knuckles into my back as I moaned, and tried to imagine what I was thinking on that train. I’d been drinking a lot of red wine. I wanted to make love all the time. It had all been very romantic. How absurd.

The baby came, of course. William was born. It was very early in the morning. Jimmy was holding one of my legs, which I didn’t want at all, but the doctor told him to go there and no one was in any position to argue. The doctor told me to look down with the last push and I watched his head come out, then the rest of him, which just slid down, slippery like a fish, in a way that horrified me, making me realize how much of my body had come apart by then.

That’s the point where most women probably stop telling their birth story, but for me, the next part is even worse. I thought I’d feel very strong afterward, but I was just immediately very tired. I didn’t even care about holding William. It’s scary now to think if we were in the wild, no society, just him and me experiencing all that pain, I might’ve left him in the woods to starve the way some animals abandon their young.

They said I had to deliver the placenta, but I couldn’t feel anything to push anymore. I thought I was trying but they said I wasn’t. They told me I had to try harder. When it still didn’t come the doctor had to remove it by reaching his hand all the way up. I guess they usually put a woman out for it, but they only upped the dosage of the epidural for me. I don’t want to think about his hand inside of me. I tried not to look but it was impossible, the nurses were holding me down, my eyes roving everywhere, trying to escape the unbearable pressure.