There were other afflictions contributing to my confusion. Either the room or myself was still alternating between fever and chill, and I was alternately roasted to limpness or frozen to a clench. My belly, somewhere among its other troubles, found room for nausea; I burped and belched repeatedly, and several times had to fight against vomiting. I was still incontinently urinating each time the pain struck, and only by determined muscular contraction not emptying my bowels as well. The spilled urine might have been a caustic; it made my thighs and my groin and my underneath feel raw and chafed and sore. I had developed a maddening thirst, probably because I had sweated and peed out so much of my internal moisture. My hands continued spasmodically to cramp, and now so did my legs, from the ungainly position I kept them in. The contact of the bed against my back was an irritation. In truth, I was hurting everywhere, even at the mouth; it was locked open in such a distorted rictus that my very lips hurt. I could almost be glad when the labor pains rasped through my gut; they were so terribly much worse that they took my mind off the lesser hurts.
I had resigned myself to the realization that my drinking of the philter was not going to bring me any enjoyment. Now, as the endless hours ground on and on, I tried to resign myself to enduring what the philter had brought instead—thirst and nausea and self-pollution and general misery, varied by intermittent jolting pain-either until its power wore off and I was restored to being myself again, or until it besieged me with some new and different miseries.
Which is what it did. When the pains were squeezing out of me no more spurts of urine, I thought my body had finally been emptied of all its fluids. But suddenly I felt my lower self washed by more wetness than I had yet ejected, a flood of wetness, as if someone had upended a pitcher between my legs. It was warm like urine, but when I raised up to look, I could see that the spreading puddle was colorless. I realized also that the water had not come from my bladder, by way of the little female peeing hole, but out of the mihrab canal. I had to suppose that this mess signaled some new and messier stage in the exceedingly messy process of giving birth.
The abdominal pains were now coming at intervals closer together, barely giving me time to get my breath after each onslaught, and to stiffen my preparedness, before the next was upon me. It made me think to myself: perhaps it is your bracing yourself against each pain, and trying to flinch away from it, that makes them hurt so much. Maybe if you bravely met each pain and bore down against it … So I tried that, but “bearing down” in this situation meant exerting the same muscular push as is involved in defecation, and it had the same result. When that particular grinding pain briefly let up again, I discovered that I had extruded onto the bed between my legs a considerable mess of stinking merda. But I was really beyond caring by this time. I merely thought to myself: you already knew that human life ends with merda; now you know that human life also begins in merda.
“Of such is the kingdom of God.” I suddenly recollected having preached that to the slave Nostril, not long ago. “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” I recited, and laughed ruefully.
I did not laugh for long. Though it is hardly believable, things now got even worse. The pains were coming not in waves or pulses, but in fast succession, and each lasting longer, until they became just one constant agony in my belly, unremitting, rising in intensity until I was unashamedly sobbing and whimpering and moaning, and I feared I could not stand it, and I wished mightily for a merciful faint. If someone had leaned over me then and said, “This is nothing. You can hurt worse than this, and you will,” I might, even in that excruciation, have got out another laugh among my sobs. But the someone would have been right.
I felt my mihrab begin to open and stretch, like a mouth yawning, and the lips of it continued to gape wider, until they must have made the orifice a full circle, like a mouth screaming. And, as if that was not torment enough, the entire round of the circle seemed suddenly to have been painted with liquid fire. I put a hand down there, to pat desperately at the blaze. But it felt no burning, only a crumbly something. I brought the hand back to my streaming eyes and saw through my tears that the fingers were smeared with a cheesy, pale green substance. How could that burn so?
And even then, besides the rampaging pain in my belly and the searing fire at the bottom, I could sense other awful things. I could taste the sweat running from my face into my mouth, and the blood from where I had by now gnawed my lips raw. I could hear my grunts and moans and racking gasps. I could smell the stench of my squalidly spilled body wastes. I could feel the creature inside me moving again, and apparently tumbling and kicking and flailing, as it edged its ponderous way through the belly pain toward the blaze below. As it moved, it pressed still more intolerably upon my bladder and bowels in there, and somehow they found more contents to void. And out, through that last extrusion of urine and turds, the creature began to come. And ah, God! when God decreed, “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth,” God did make it so. I had known trivial pains in earlier times, and I had known real pain throughout these hours, and I have known other pains since, but I think there must be no pain in all the world like the pain I felt now. I have seen torture done, by men expert in torture, but I think no man is so cruel and inventive and accomplished in pain as God is.
The pain was compounded of two different sorts of pain. One was that of my mihrab flesh tearing, front and back. Take a piece of skin and rip it, ruthlessly but slowly, and try to imagine how that feels to the skin, and then imagine that it is the skin between your own legs, from artichoke to anus. While that was happening to me, and making me scream, the head of the creature inside me was butting its way through the enclosing bones down there, and that made me bellow between my screams. The bones of that place are close together; they must be shoved apart and aside, with a grinding and grating like that of a boulder going implacably through a too narrow cleft of rocks. That is what I felt, and what I felt all at the same time: the sickening movement and pain inside me, the crunching and buckling of all the bones between my legs, the tearing and burning of the outside flesh. And God allows, even in that extremity, only screaming and bellowing; no swooning to get away from the unbearable agony.
I did not faint until after the creature came out, with a final brutal bulge and billow and rasp of pain like an audible screech—and the dark-brown head raised up between my thighs, slimy with blood and mucus, and said in Chiv’s voice, maliciously, “Something you cannot disown so easily …” Then I seemed to die.
5
WHEN I came back to myself, I was myself. I was still naked and supine on the hindora bed, but I was a male again, and the body appeared to be my own. I was scummed with dried sweat and my mouth was terribly dry and thirsty and I had a pounding headache, but I felt no pains anywhere else. There was not any mess of my body wastes on the pallet; it looked as clean as it ever looked. The room was very nearly clear of the smoke, and I saw my discarded clothes on the floor. Chiv was also there, and fully dressed. She was hunkered down, wrapping a small something, pale blue and purple, in the paper I had brought the hashish in.
“Was it all a dream, Chiv?” I asked. She did not speak or look up, but went on with what she was doing. “What happened to you in the meantime, Chiv?” She did not reply. “I thought I had a baby,” I said, with a dismissive laugh. No response. I added, “You were there. You were it.”