BEN FELT EMPTY, in the literal sense. He poked at his belly button, at the organs beneath, which were producing no new miracles. As he understood it, his liver was filtering; his gall bladder was storing bile the liver produced during the filtration process; his intestine was connecting the in and the out; and in between, things got broken down with acids. None of that was new. He was the very same machine he had always been.
He followed along with the Miracle of Life by reading books, day-by-day updates of exactly what the spine was doing, what mucus was gathering where. The sacks of air and fluid and the creation of the liver, the urinary tract, the brain. Ben taped pictures of developing fetuses up all over the house. They were on the bulletin board over the dining room table, where receipts and coupons used to go. The black-and-white photographs of soft new heads and still-webbed feet covered the refrigerator. Soon they occupied frames beside the bed, replacing the pictures of friends and parents and vacations. Annie watched her husband remove the evidence of their lived lives in favor of the ghost of their future child. The only remaining photograph of fully formed human beings was of Ben and Annie on their honeymoon, lying in the exact shade of a palm tree, hot white sun inches away from them on every side. Annie would tell herself the story of that day—how they had to move every few minutes to keep up with the shade.
“We are still a family of two,” Annie said in the dark while they waited for sleep.
“How else can I prepare for being a father?” Ben asked. “You get to prepare quite literally. You are growing her for us.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” Annie joked, tugging at the elastic of his underwear. “And I can’t still. Let’s be in-love parents. Let’s be parents who kiss all the time.” Ben let her feather his neck with her lips, and he put his hands on her belly.
“Not in front of the baby,” he said.
“You still love me?”
“Unequivocally.”
Annie woke up early in the morning and wrote her dreams down, a thing she had never done before. She addressed them to the baby, like letters. Dear Baby, they went. Over on his side of the bed, Ben pretended to sleep, listening to her shuffling pen and thinking of writing letters to the uninspired mess in his abdomen. Dear Guts, another day, another day.
Ben went to work assembling a crib. He was sorry when he was done that the place his daughter would sleep came off a shelf with a hundred others like it. He was sorry that her view would be of bars.
“I want to build something myself for the baby,” he said to Annie, as she sat with her feet on an upturned bucket in the yard. “What will she need?”
“She’ll just need us at first. I don’t think she’ll be that into furniture.”
“Annie. I need a job to do.”
She smiled. “Why don’t you build her a little table,” she said. “I think little girls like to have little tea parties at little tables.”
Ben liked the idea of a table where his daughter could put teacups if she wanted, or if she was another kind of kid—dirty socks or eagle feathers or stones. She could lay a cloth down and hide underneath. So he went to the beach and gathered driftwood. He imagined that it had come to him all the way from Asia, or floated up from a ship, sunk into the deep muck someplace. He hugged it to his chest, wet and salty.
• • •
THE TABLE WAS UNEVEN AND TIPPY, but Ben liked it and he called his wife in to see. Her face colored up. “That thing is practically made of splinters,” she said. And then, leaning hopeless against the wall, “Do you have any idea how delicate her skin will be?”
Ben brushed his hand over the rough wood. He walked over to Annie, lifted her red sweater up and touched the side of her rib cage, recorded the texture of the skin in his mind. “Two thousand times more delicate than that,” she told him. He pulled her sweater back down and nodded. He turned the table upside down and kicked the legs off one by one.
Ben threw the wood back into the ocean. He took his shirt off and threw it into the wind. He took his pants off and threw them too. It was cold out, windy spring, but he jumped into the bubbling waves and floated on his back with the dead table parts, hoping the ocean might continue to churn them all smooth until they were splinterless and appropriate for new skin. The gray sky fell toward them.
When Ben got out of the water and retrieved his clothing—his pants were spread out on the sand like they were trying to run away and his shirt stuck on a pile of seaweed—he noticed that, along with the tiny raised bumps of cold, the skin on his chest looked like a checkerboard or a grid.
He called Annie. He was shivering and his breaths were short. He explained the problem and they met in the hospital parking lot. He wore a winter coat and a pair of pajama pants he found in the trunk. She sat him on the hood of his old Datsun and he pulled his shirt up to reveal six perfect squares separated by half-inch-deep channels.
“Well,” Annie said carefully, “there does not appear to be any redness or irritation.” This was a practiced voice, a parenthood-ready voice. “It doesn’t look broken,” she added, optimistically.
“Nope, it doesn’t look broken,” he agreed. She swished her hand up and back, feeling the ridges.
• • •
THEY WAITED FOR TWO HOURS in the emergency room, where they read all the homemaking magazines.
“What did you eat?” Annie wanted to know.
“You think this is food related? You think this is from some bad chicken?” Ben snapped.
“It’s from something.” She opened her magazine and paged loudly.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She nodded. “You look like someone’s ready to build a city on you. Property lines all set to go.”
The nurse who finally called them in gave the battery of tests very slowly, glancing up at Ben’s new feature every second or so, nervously. She fetched the doctor without bothering to make cheerful small talk. They could hear her on the other side of the curtain: “He has moats . . . He has squares.”
The doctor had the nurse take a picture of him posing with the couple. In it, he made a serious face. A magazine-cover face. But he had no advice, only a tall pile of referrals. In the coming weeks, Ben and Annie scheduled appointments with the heart doctor, the dermatologist, the orthopedist, the cancer specialist, even the ear, nose and throat guy.
Annie woke up the following morning with her arm over her husband’s side and she felt, extending out from his body, a warm, hollow box that seemed to be attached to Ben’s chest. She screamed. She probably woke the baby, swimming in her pool of warm body fluid. She definitely woke her husband, who looked down at his chest and saw a section of it sticking out, a drawer. He sat up. He was barely awake, right out of a dream about an escape from a pack of dogs. He closed the skinless bone drawer with some difficulty, as it was quite stiff. In order to open it again, Ben needed his nails since it had no knob. None of these actions hurt. Ben looked up at his wife in her blue flannel nightgown. She was staring at him with wet eyes. “Look” was all he said.
• • •
BEN AND ANNIE packed up for a medical appointment in the afternoon, but it was one they already had: the ob-gyn, for Annie. While her feet were up in the stirrups, she asked the doctor if she had ever happened to see someone with a drawer coming out of his chest. The doctor did not answer, because she thought it was the beginning of a joke.
“Have you?” Annie asked again.
“No, why?” the doctor said, waiting for the punch line. But Annie just started to cry.
The waiting room was empty except for Ben, who had unbuttoned his shirt and sat there opening and closing his drawer. He had a small butter knife, taken from the dish rack this morning, to help him get it started until his fingers could fit inside and pull. He was smiling, running his fingers around the rim of his polished new cavern.
Ben reached over to the magazine table and picked up a pamphlet about STDs. He read through it and tore out a picture of a happy couple who were STD-free since they had been careful and followed the pamphlet’s directions. In the picture, the man was wearing a bulky cable-knit sweater and was giving the girl a piggyback ride. Her brown hair streamed behind her and they were both laughing in a clean, sexually responsible way. Ben folded the picture up into a little square and put it in his drawer. He closed it most of the way, leaving enough space to get his fingertips in. He grinned and looked around the room. He opened the drawer a little and peeked in at the paper square. All that was visible in the dark of his own body were the man’s white teeth.
Ben got up and gathered items. A yellow plastic magnet of the letter N from the kids’ corner and a miniature lounge chair from the dollhouse. He tried a pen that said Women’s Center West and had a picture of a uterus, but it was much too long so he put it back. He went into the bathroom and found, inside a closet, extra supplies. He took three Q-tips, one tongue depressor and a square of gauze. The tongue depressor had to be broken into thirds. He put them all in his drawer, happily. He sat down on the closed toilet seat and arranged his inventory alphabetically, starting with the picture because he decided to name the man Aaron. So it went: Aaron, chair, gauze, N, Q-tips, tongue depressor parts one, two and three.
Annie walked out into the waiting room with the doctor and looked around. No husband. She called. No answer. Figured he was probably in the bathroom. “Ben,” she cooed. “Are you in there?” Ben buttoned his shirt, composed himself, opened the door.
“The doctor thought she might like to take a look at your chest,” she said.
“I think it’s fine. I think I just have a drawer now,” he replied.
In a voice sculpted for use on a three-year-old, Annie pleaded gently, “I’m sure you’re right. Would you let her just take a peek? Please?”
“I think it’s fine,” Ben repeated. “I think I just have a drawer now.”
Her face became a square of irritation. “Pull up your shirt, Ben.” She glared at him. And then sweeter: “We’ll go have a coffee after this. At that place you like.”
“I will pull up my shirt, Annie, but I think everything is fine. After this, I’m not showing my drawer to anybody else.”
She breathed slowly and put her hand on her belly. “I’m not going to yell at you. Not in front of the baby.”
The doctor rubbed her hands together, excited, when he began to unbutton.
“Oh, goodie,” Ben mimicked.
• • •
OVER THE NEXT THREE DAYS, the one drawer was joined by five more. They were small, about two inches square, and pulled out halfway, seeming to have mechanisms that stopped them there. They were stiff and did not slip open when Ben bent over to pick up a fallen napkin or clean the shower drain, but were not watertight, so it was important that he dry each cavity out to keep it from getting dank and moldy inside. He used a washcloth followed by a Q-tip for this job, and the process extended his morning routine by six minutes.
Annie bought some apricot exfoliant, which she used on both her face and his chest, to polish it. The bone was bright white. Ben asked her to rub some of her cocoa butter ointment onto him because he found it soothing, though he had no actual feeling there anymore.
“This stuff is for mommies who don’t want stretch marks,” she told him.
“As soon as they start making a product for me, I’ll switch.”
He just liked the act of it, watching her long fingers rub the yellow goo in circles. She tried to pretend that she was not worried. At night she laid her ear up to his back, hearing the same heartbeat that she used to listen to in his chest. “I need you. We all three need you,” she whispered. “Please don’t stop beating.”
In the evenings Annie still practiced Lamaze and did prenatal yoga with the women in her Mothers to Be group. She and Ben read through the shelves of books on child rearing, learned what to expect at each month of development post-birth. The cooing, the lifting of the head, the ability to wiggle on purpose—these were all things they could look forward to. Ben continued to attend birthing classes with her, but she caught him touching his own chest as often as the other dads touched their wives’ round bellies. She’d elbow him. “Ben. Pay attention to my deformity now.”
• • •
THOSE FIRST ITEMS from the doctor’s office stayed. Ben came to think of Aaron, smiling from his pamphlet, as a friend and unfolded the paper occasionally to whisper hello. He didn’t like the girlfriend as much and she never got a name. More things were stored in the drawers, too. He put a travel toothbrush and mini-paste in one and carried it around all day long, taking it out to use in the morning and before bed. His collection expanded to include loose change (useful, except that he didn’t want to open himself up in public, so he ended up running out to the car anyway); a miniature jar of good mustard they’d bought on a trip to Germany; his father’s pocket watch, which hadn’t run in years; the ring he had bought his wife when they were first together: a round piece of amber set in silver. This he had stolen out of her jewelry box, but so far she didn’t seem to miss it. He folded some paper towels up and lined the drawers with them so that the items inside did not roll around noisily.
When Annie and Ben went to the video store or the bank together, people placed their hands on Annie’s stomach whether they knew her or not and asked the same set of questions: “When are you due? Do you know the sex? Any names picked out?” She answered politely while her husband stood by, ignored completely. Once, after an old lady had gotten her questions answered, Ben patted the protrusion and said, “Good sperm I’ve got. Good strong sperm, swam right up there and tunneled into that egg. Y chromosomes all over the place.”
The next morning Ben went to the toy store. He picked out a soft doll for his daughter, one wearing a flowered dress with her string hair in two braids. At the register he said, “I’ll also take one scoop of those tiny babies.”
“You want the white ones or the black ones?” the woman asked.
“Well, maybe half a scoop of each.”
The woman pushed her silver shovel into a basket and drew out a pile of bright pink bodies, and then into another basket, this time culling brown bodies. She poured them into a paper bag, tied it up with a twisty and handed it to him. Sitting in the car with the windows up, he took his shirt off and dropped babies into every drawer of his chest.
“Will you all need names?” he asked. “Each and every one?” He looked at the plastic bodies, who did not answer him. “Let’s take it slow,” Ben suggested. He decided to name one baby Archie after his first dog and placed Archie in Aaron’s drawer, introducing them. To the rest he said, “Everyone can have a name who wants one. Just hang in while I think of some.”
Even Annie adapted to the new feature. On their way to a party, she told him, “I’d rather not take a purse—could you carry my lipstick?”
Ben started to put the silver tube in his pants pocket, but she shook her head. “I’m not good enough to get inside?” she asked.
“I don’t like to think of them as a convenience,” he mumbled.
“Ben,” she said, “I’m carrying our baby around for nine months.”
He felt the weight of the tube in the drawer all evening, like a bullet lodged there. They chatted with separate islands of people about politics and giving birth and new restaurants. Ben watched his wife across the room, resting her hand on her stuck-out body, laughing. He watched her make her way to the dessert table and the drink table. She was lovely, drifting like a boat around the bay of this room. He would happily have blown into her sails, but they billowed already. When she wanted to touch up her lips though, she took Ben by the hand and slipped him into the bathroom. She unbuttoned his shirt.
“Kiss me now if you want to,” she told him. Her finger was hooked over the lip of his open drawer.
He put his hands on her belly. “Look what we do to each other,” he said.
She smiled, big and warm. “There turn out to be rewards, after all, to the empty spaces in our bodies.”
“So do I always end up half-naked when you want to powder your nose?”
“See? It’s not so bad to be my husband,” she said. He put his lips against hers and held as long as she would let him, then sat on the closed toilet while she turned her lips, a wide expectant O, red. For the rest of the night, the tube was not a bullet but a hook, a hook with a long, shimmering line to Annie’s mouth.
• • •
BEN’S ONLY REAL COMPLAINT was that the drawers were difficult to open. They limited his movements, too, but that ended up being a plus since his posture was suddenly perfect. But the opening and closing of the drawers was an issue. In the second month of the drawers, while Annie was out, Ben went to the hardware store and bought ten (in case some got lost) matching brass knobs, the smallest ones they carried. He threw in a chocolate bar and a bag of cotton candy with a picture of a clown on it, even though he knew that it was gross to buy cotton candy in a bag at the hardware store.
In the car on the way home, he took Aaron out and placed him on the passenger seat. “These knobs are going to be great,” he explained. “We’ll be able to use the drawers better now, open them and close them. They’re attractive, too. These are nice-looking knobs.” Aaron did not respond, but Ben was sure that he was behind the project one hundred percent.
Ben got his tools from the garage and made himself a cup of coffee and drank it while he ate the cotton candy. He laid the brass knobs out in a circle on the kitchen table in front of him. The truth was, he was nervous. He didn’t know if the process was going to hurt. After his snack, he took some deep breaths and got out his drill. He took his shirt off. It was an awkward position, looking down at his chest with a power drill facing into him. He couldn’t get a good angle on it, so he went to the mirror by the front door, where his wife always took final stock of her outfit and hair, one last check before she entered the world. He tried to line the bit up centered in one of the middle drawers, second row from the top. He went for it. It did not hurt in any measurable way, except he was aware that he was making a hole from the outside of his body to the inside. He winced as he worked, saying ouch out of habit and ritual, out of respect for his body, although he felt almost nothing. He screwed the knob on. It looked nice and shiny against the white bone.
Just as he was beginning the second one, Annie came blasting in the front door with no evidence of the groceries she had gone to get. She went straight for the bathroom, where she threw up. Ben tried to go in and help her but she cursed at him, and he waited quietly outside the slammed door.
“There is nothing you can do to help me!” she yelled. He tried the door and tentatively pushed it open when the handle twisted.
“Are you OK?” he asked with his eyebrows tight together. She was on the floor with her head on the closed toilet lid.
“Do I the fuck look like I’m OK?” she panted. And then right away: “I’m sorry. But also, fuck you.”
“Can I get you something? I thought we were done with the morning sickness.” His voice was eggshell thin. She looked up at him for the first time. Her face fell flat. She looked desperate.
“I must have eaten something. What did you do to your chest? What is that thing?” He was happy for the change of subject and proud to show off his work.
“It’s a knob! It’s going to make it much easier to get them open and closed.”
She thought about it and then shook her head decisively. “No. It won’t work. It’s going to look like you have a disease. Everyone will be able to see the balls.”
He smiled. “You don’t want everyone seeing my balls?” When she did not laugh, he considered her point. He kicked his left foot with his right foot. “Shit!” he yelled. “Why does it matter? Can’t I have things sticking out? What are you so worried about?” He knew he was going to lose this one. She knew it too, so her response was measured.
“There’s nothing we can do about the drawers. The drawers seem to be there for good. But we can control how obvious they are, and I’m sorry, Ben, but you can’t have little balls sticking out. You’re going to look like a robot with all sorts of buttons and toggles. No. Just, no.” He looked like he had lost something important. She got off her knees slowly and moved closer to him, leaned against the sink. She put her hand on his face. “We’ll figure something out. To make opening and closing easier.”
Ben took the travel toothbrush out of his chest and prepared it for her, wetted and pasted. While she brushed, he sat on the edge of the sink and held his hands silently on the hidden baby. “You are still the only miracle here,” he whispered, though it was his wife he wanted to say it to.
• • •
BEN EMPTIED OUT the contents of his chest.
“Look what you’ve got in there.” Annie smiled. “Look at all those babies. Diversity, I like that,” she said, laughing.
Ben was embarrassed. “I bought them. I haven’t named them all yet,” he said.
“I’m sure you have time. What if we make little half-moon-shaped holes at the top of each drawer. Enough to put a fingertip in?” Annie asked.
Ben smiled. “I like that you called them half-moons.”
“I’ll need a lot of light. Go and gather lamps.”
Ben sat on the dining room table, shirtless under the light of every lamp in the house placed around them on chairs, on the floor and the oval table. Everything in the room was made important by all that light: the dining table inherited from a grandmother though not well liked; the chairs, cheap and unmatching; the bulletin board with the collection of fetal images, those beans of babies in various stages of growth. The rest of the house was heavy, dark.
“How can this not hurt?” she asked. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I promise it won’t. What if I read a story to you while you work?”
“No, I want you to watch me, to make sure I do it right.”
Ben watched while Annie made the first cuts. He talked to her to keep her calm. “The baby has all of her toes already,” he said, “teensy little nails even. She has her fingers and hands.” His voice was deep compared with the high tink of the chipping bone. The pieces landed around Annie’s feet like gathering snow.
Ben’s neck became sore from watching his wife work. “The baby would like to know if she can have a pony,” he said.
“Don’t make me laugh,” she said, smiling.
“The baby would like to know if she can stay over at her best friend’s house and if she can have twenty dollars and if she can have a little brother or sister.”
“Yes, on all counts,” Annie said, and stood to kiss her husband, his chest wide open.
After she had made rough notches, she sanded them down. Even though Ben had no feeling in his chest, the vibration of the sandpaper went all the way though him, making his organs itch. They took breaks for this reason. Annie sat up on the table next to him, both of them kicking their feet like children on a tall bench. He pressed his hands on the baby. “What do you think about this strange family you’ll belong to?” he asked her. She did not kick back.
“Have you ever tried to take one of the drawers out?” Annie asked carefully.
Ben shook his head no. “I do wonder what’s in there. Same as you, I’d guess, and we don’t propose to take you apart.”
“No, we don’t. Let’s leave them in.”
“I would rather. If it’s all right with you.”
When they were finished, Annie had made six holes in her husband’s chest. He tested them out, one at a time, until all his drawers were open and his chest looked puffed out. “You look like a peacock,” Annie said. “A proud peacock.” Annie put Ben’s collection back into his body. The piles of babies, the mustard, the tiny toothbrush, all of it. The two of them stayed in the dining room under all the lights and talked about baby names. She suggested mostly old-fashioned names like Annabelle and he suggested mostly names beginning with C, like Clarice.
Ben brushed Annie’s hair with his fingers, which came away wrapped in a few golden strands. Annie pulled them off and laid them in a drawer already populated by brown and pink babies. The glisten of her hair disappeared into the dark of Ben’s body.
“Can I keep those?” he asked.
“Those are yours,” she said.
Annie stuck the tips of her fingers into Ben’s new moons. Her arms hung like two sturdy bridges across the space between them.