Excerpt from Frank City - the birth scene

Okay, I thought, it's for the baby.

I took the money, licked my fingers, and counted the bills. Nine. And five. Sure enough. I tucked the bills into my pocket and walked toward Sixteen Downey and somewhere along the way colors started glowing and the space between footsteps was . . . so very very far . . . and instead of simply walking over the sidewalk I was sharing it on an equal basis with the members of the sidewalk world: the ants running their frantic errands, the flattened paper straw, the cracks like bolts of lightning ripping the concrete heart.... Marvelous, marvelous. A little brown dog with a generous open aura led me to all his favorite telephone poles. Sixteen Downey was immense, a cathedral of life. SarahSun lay on her side on the mattress. She was naked and sweating. It felt like a hundred degrees in there. Star and Moon sat nearby. They were sweating, too. "She wants it hot," Star said before I could ask. If I could ask. SarahSun was truly a Sun, a glowing golden aura. I took off my clothes. Naked we enter. I could see a glowing red pain in Sun's lower back. I laid my hand on it. I could touch the pain. "Push," she said. I pushed with my hand and the red pain dissolved into sunshine yellow. I could see strength in her body as I'd never seen it before; I could see all the rivering forces of her being flowing into a new force, a new soul. The room had a holy spirit. It was the space warp through which a new life would enter the planet. I ran my fingers through Sun's hair. I pushed on her back when I saw pain. I kneaded her skin when it looked tight. I made cow mooing noises because it suddenly seemed right. "Moo," I said in her ear. "Moo moo," she answered, laughing. "Moo-oo," we both sang, as one, in telepathic communication. She rolled over to face me and I lay with her and kissed her lips and touched her electric breasts that shot sparks into my palms; her whole body turned high voltage with sudden shocks of joy as the rushes grew and grew; I saw great visible waves rolling down her body; and Star and Moon without a word took off their clothes and sat at the bottom of the mattress; we all were red as tomatoes and dripping, melting into sweat; it felt like a hundred and twenty degrees with the furnace blasting away in the hall; when suddenly Sun moaned and twisted slightly and splat broke her water bag and shot water all over Moon and Star who laughed and rubbed it into their skin, their hair, while the energy grew faster, closer, until Sun said, "I'm pushing" and "Star, can you see?"

Star peered up her legs and said, "No," and then, "Um-maybe," and then, "Yes oh yes I see the top of his head."

Sun was all muscle.

I had lost my mind somewhere; I was no longer in my body but floating; I was inside Sun; I was up on the ceiling; I was in the baby's body feeling the push and shove and grinding power of slippery darkness, hearing the slurp and suck of my passage until my eyes suddenly popped into light and my unshaped mind heard every little sound as an explosion and I opened my eyes and felt them drawn to an exit sign for the Eisenhower Expressway as the Lincoln Continental slipped out of control and flew over a drainage ditch and I felt metal jaws clamping down on my head, my legs; my eyes shut tight and my feeling went blank and I was floating in a dark universe among galaxies and comets.

Back in my own head, I felt an icy blast of air. I looked at Moon and Star. I saw shivers running down their spines. Sun looked at us in silent question. We couldn't answer. And Sun who had been so calm and strong suddenly screwed her face in agony and screamed, "PRISCILLA HELP ME."

Footsteps in the hall.

Priscilla burst into the room waving her arms and crying, "Oh my dear I'm so sorry Obie come quickly." Priscilla was holding the lifeless blue baby in her hands. The cord was purple with greens and blues. The head was covered with vernix and curly black hair. He lay in those bony old hands, eyes closed, tranquil and peaceable and not of our world.

Priscilla went to work. She pinched his feet and slapped his butt. She bent over in a shower of silvery hair and placed her mouth over his little nose and lips. She puffed air into him in quick bursts. His little chest rose and fell. She stopped. He lay still. She blew again. She stopped.

He lay still.

He was simply dead.

As one, Sun and Priscilla said, "You, Saint." And I put my mouth over his tiny nose and lips. I blew little baby breaths, over and over and over. I got dizzy from blowing but kept on and had no sense of time and suddenly realized that there was no time, that time had stopped, that the entire world was eerily still, that life had suspended in this one-hundred-and-thirtydegree room with Sun Iying anxious on the bloody bed and Priscilla motionless at my side and Star and Moon each with a hand on my shoulder-motionless-and time and life could stop forever unless I could summon an act of pure will and start it moving once more. I vowed in that endless moment that if a life was to end in that inanimate room, it was to be mine.

A tiny foot kicked my chest.

He sputtered and gasped and made snorting noises like a baby pig. As I held him in my hands I saw glowing pink start from his chest and spread red rich blood through his body to his arms and his legs.

I laid him on Sun's belly. He was sputtering and kicking and sensing the new world. I watched as Priscilla cut the cord, and Sun took him to her breast, and Priscilla delivered the placenta. I was trembling. I had come from a faraway place. My mind spun in dizzy decompression. I didn't know where I had been or exactly what had happened or how long I had been there, perhaps only an instant, but I knew I had visited the edge of the known world, and over the edge was something so big and so mysterious and so beautiful that I couldn't even imagine what it was. I knew I had to go back. Had to.

Priscilla dabbed her eyes and blew her nose and slipped quietly back to her room.

I realized that I was crying. In fact, I had fallen totally to pieces. I fell on the bed next to Sun. Moon and Star sat on Sun's other side.

I tousled the baby's astonishing hair. "Hi, Curly," I said.

Sun reached out a finger and speared a tear from my cheek. "Curly John," she said.

Moon tweaked the baby's toe. "Thanks for dropping in," he said.

Star said, "Leave it to a Leo to make such a dramatic entrance."

I said, "May your hands never touch plastic."

Sun said, "Amen."

And now we were five.

Five somethings.