Inconceivable
by Anne Gisleson

What do you do when you get the thing you wanted most in the world at the same time you lose your world?

When we returned from the drugstore to the Red Roof Inn in Houston, where fellow evacuees sat on ice chests in the parking lot as their dogs relieved themselves in the harsh corporate landscaping, or stared at their useless cell phones in the lobby, I told my husband that if the test was negative, we were going back on birth control. New Orleans was still filling with water and we had no idea if we had a house, jobs, or a city. Then, in the too-bright motel bathroom, the two pink lines appeared with surprising alacrity and conviction, bringing with them a whole new quality to my despair. As I cried in bed, my husband had to remind me that we’d wanted this. That this was supposed to be a good thing? Remember?

Actually, after the levees broke, most pre-Katrina desires and expectations had to be reconsidered, if not completely scuttled. But in this case, it was too late. We had ourselves a holdover from our recent Mexican honeymoon and the various Oaxacan mescals we’d discovered, and though we had just returned from that trip a few weeks before, as we watched the turmoil on CNN from underneath the thin, scratchy comforters, it seemed to belong to a previous, inconceivable lifetime.

By early September, my body and instincts were no longer familiar to me and nor was my world. Normally, the changes in mood, taste and basic biological purpose experienced during pregnancy are somewhat cushioned by the stability of the external circumstances of your life. But not this time. Suddenly, I couldn’t stand the smell of coffee, couldn’t drink alcohol while everyone else seemed to be steadily self-medicating, and my low-grade existential dread graduated to full-blown nausea. Suddenly, my husband, six year-old stepson and I were driving across lunar west Texas, thinking of nothing else but the inundation of our city and where we were going to sleep that night. In a way, I may have reached a sort of state of equilibrium between internal and external disorientation, with hurricane as the fulcrum.

When we returned to post-apocalyptic New Orleans in my first trimester, I was endowed with a heightened sense of smell, a gift from nature to help pregnant women sense what to avoid eating, a bobbing gauge in the near-perfect machinery that is human reproduction. Without electricity, without human care, the city was rotting, and the sweet, oily smell of death undermined everything. The refrigerator removals, the continual disgorging of businesses, the high tunnels of debris piles along the streets—the stench was amplified. At one of the first grocery stores to re-open on the Westbank, though everything looked fine on the surface and they’d tried their darnedest to disinfect, the ghost of decomposition dogged me and I had to cover my mouth to keep from gagging while walking the aisles.

After about a week back in early October, I had what I thought was a classic pregnant woman’s arbitrary public breakdown. In Schiro’s, the one restaurant open in our neighborhood, cluttered amber fly strips dangling in the windows, the lone, weary waitress offered us the choice of “a cheeseburger, a cheeseburger or a cheeseburger.” So much for the cuisine capital of the country, we sighed. Between bites we waved the flies away from our hamburgers, and though I hadn’t been too aware of the music, when I heard the Pink Floyd song “Wish You Were Here,” it transported me so thoroughly back to high school, to a time when the future was vast, amiable and exciting, and not containing things like the near-destruction my city and such epic sadness and loss, that of course the sadness and loss suddenly seemed altogether unbearable. Add the plaintive and accusatory tone of the music and soon my face was experiencing that muscular confusion of trying to cry and chew at the same time.

But really, was it hormonal? How to separate it out? Everyone at the time seemed to be in that same raw emotional state, men as wide open and as liable as women to break down at any moment. And didn’t most New Orleanians experience a kind of morning sickness, every day last fall when they opened their eyes, cleared their heads of the last shreds of sleep and remembered, holy shit….

New Orleans was my home but it was no longer a nurturing environment. Being in a “delicate condition” didn’t jibe with the new vernacular, where “gutting,” “debris,” “breach,” and “curfew” got frequent play. Humvees rattled the pavement and razor wire coiled at certain corners. Downtown, where we live, felt especially and overwhelmingly male, the military, the contractors and relief workers had taken over, put up tents, the neutral ground on Canal Street jammed with huge trucks parked flank to flank.

But after my fifth or so month, as more had people returned to the city thus making it seem just a bit more normal, I embraced my new role as walking symbol for renewal. I was “God bless”-ed on the sidewalk and in sparsely occupied RTA buses. With the proliferation of t-shirts admonishing people to “Defend,” “Renew,” or “Save” the city, I had one made that said “Repopulate New Orleans” curving over my belly. My baby had become a sort of abstraction, part in the drama of reconstruction.

Eight months after the levees broke, I was in the Touro Infirmary where most of my family was born, blind with pain and curled into ball to receive the blessed epidural. The nurse holding my shoulders alternately admonished me to focus and recounted to the anesthesiologist, who had just moved back to town and was about insert a needle between my vertebra, that she’d only gotten $30,000 for her destroyed home in Bay St. Louis. After realizing that really no moment was sacred from the storm’s narrative, over the next few days I began compulsively asking the nurses their stories, which were many and varied. Touro had lost some staff and had hired on staff that had lost their hospitals. Everyone who helped usher our baby into the world had suffered, was still suffering, but neither that, nor the nature of their profession seemed to dampen their pleasure of aiding in the miracle.

On the unnerving ride home from the hospital, past the Convention Center and the frayed crowns of the enormous new palms along Canal street, I kept wanting to apologize to our tiny son about the state of the city, explain to him that it wasn’t always like this and that we were working really hard to make it better. Then, when he was exactly a week old, I read on the front page of the paper about how the Army Corp of Engineers had botched the repair of Industrial Canal, rebuilding the eastern wall 2.5 feet higher than the unbreached western one, thus making our dry, unflooded neighborhood which butts up against the Canal, far more vulnerable than before. As I read in disbelief, that familiar rage ballooning in my chest, I kept glancing down at our beautiful son on my lap, his eyes closed, perfect lips pursed and searching.

Anne Gisleson holds it down in the Bywater, and has done her part to repopulate New Orleans.