"Gigantic"
“Here,” the doctor said, handing me a tiny, squalling, red thing, “it’s a boy. A healthy baby boy.” That word—“healthy”— I’m sure the doctors said it thousands of times over thousands of other girls and boys. That day, in the days before, and the days that followed.
Healthy—none of us knew any different.
He had a wrinkled, monkey-face, all contorted, purple from exertion, but cute. I saw my father in his face. My husband, too. I saw my own eyes, whenever his would open. Jacob, we called him. He was on the big side, for babies, eleven pounds. That size runs in my family.
Yes, he was big for a baby, but even so, he was so small, this tiny, fragile thing compared to all our ungainly adult bulk. As I cradled my little son, my husband reached out to touch him. For a second, Jacob stopped his wild screaming. The feeling of something electric passed over us all, like a jolt of static. I saw, I’d swear, a kind of blue fire dance down Jacob’s back, then disappear.
I still love my boy. Despite all that happened. I guess it’s being his mother. But I think I understand what he—what they did, the why of it. If you weren’t a parent, I don’t know if you could.
Back when we still used to talk about it we’d get to a point in the discussion when my husband would take his glasses off, put them back on, then take them off again. He’d rub naked eyes, put the glasses back on a final time. Then he’d open his mouth as if he had found something, just the right thing to say. But nothing would come out, and our talk was at an end.
All that fussing with the glasses, it’s a nervous affectation. If he didn’t do that, he’d bite his nails.
I’d wanted a natural birth, a home birth, especially for my first. But after a serious talk with mother, I embraced my practical side, and when the time came, off to the hospital it was. I held on to the pain as long as I could, then called out for the epidural.
Someone might think less of me for taking the easy way out, to medicate away the pain—but consider how much of the rest of our lives is already so unnatural, we are fighting against the natural state of everything, which is to be at rest. We focus on the visible, the apparent, the outstanding. The gigantic.
It’d be so easy to blame that epidural, or, later, childhood vaccines for our calamities. Others certainly did. And all the data in the world wouldn’t convince them otherwise. As much as scientists tried, they found their research bulletins ignored, except whenever something came out that supported that suspicious dread people were feeling. In the end, the scientists were right about almost everything, not that it mattered. Of course the epidural, the vaccines—they were quite safe, after all. Safer than most things. It’d been proven again and again.
Sally, my best friend, had had a natural birth about a week before Jacob was born. It was at her home in a blow-up tub, with midwives circling around her. She was a trial, for sure, as a friend. Everything had to be this big production. So often it was all about her. But I had to own that she’d been there for me, for real, when my husband and I were going through our issues, before Jacob.
But her stance on vaccines almost broke me—she wouldn’t have them for Henry. After a while, I bit my tongue. You need a friend in this world.
We sat in the kitchen with our mugs of tea while the babies babbled on in the living room, in their netted pen, toothlessly gumming their harmless, plastic toys.
“Henry is so big,” Sally said. “Jacob, too.” They were plump, substantial little things. “It must be good nutrition.”
“It’s not nutrition,” I said. “It’s bio-identical hormones in our water supply. Plastic leaching in the sun, idiots flushing expired prescriptions. There’s really nothing to be done.”
Sally turned her head to the window, a late-morning light bursting through, and added, “And whatever your husband uses to keep the lawn so lush and green.”
I laughed and raised my palm up in front of my eyes. “See no evil, hear no evil,” I said. I’m no tree-hugger type, but it had begun to bother me, all this stuff people do.
Anyway, I’d read the baby books—Dr. Spock and the like—in hard copy: I still believe in holding things in your hand. It keeps you from that frantic feeling of over-information when most of it is useless anyway. Our big chunky babies were healthy and normal, and there was nothing to worry about.
And that’s what our pediatrician said.
Do you think there’s a god, you know, a consciousness who metes out punishment where it’s due? Each sin in life recompensed with a corresponding ill? I wonder sometimes. You know, that feeling. This thing, some evil thing, happened because I have done something wrong. Of course it’s not true. Every wrong is not recompensed, nor is every wrong so wrong as we imagine. But maybe a whole people can be wrong.
Our pediatrician said, “Your child’s in the 120th percentile; he’s very big. But it’s nothing to worry about.” Noticing the way he stroked his salt-and-pepper goatee, and looked at me as he said it, I wondered if he had heard something unflattering about me from one of his colleagues.
I’m not sure I remember the chronology exactly: that’s when it all happened very fast. A few weeks after the next visit, our pediatrician called.
“Someone from the NIH is here,” he said. “They want to see Jacob’s records. They’d like to interview you, too.”
Not long after he hung up, Sally called. “Did you get a call from Doctor Bob, too?” she asked. She was always on a first name basis with everybody. “What’s the NIH?”
“The National Institutes of Health,” I said.
“Are you worried?”
“No—there’s nothing wrong with my baby,” I said. “He’s a healthy boy.”
My baby, in his walker, gurgled, and slapped at the air. He barely fit in it. In fact, he swelled out of it like the top of a muffin. He wasn’t fat—he was big. I touched my chin. There was nothing wrong with him.
Before I had even gotten a chance to talk to the NIH men, it was all over the news: “Prize-Winning Babies,” like blue-ribbon calves from the fair.
My parents were kids in the ’50s, when we strove to super-size everything to beat “the Commies.” Children were stuffed full of glistening corn, heart conditions were treated with steak and butter, and animal feed suffused with antibiotics was found to grow chickens, pigs, and cows faster and fatter. Although sociopolitical condition had changed a lot since then, the ideology had gotten into our blood, and it couldn’t be gotten out of it.
The NIH men, in mismatched suits under white coats from the hospital and visitors tags, sat with me while young Jacob slapped blocks together at our feet because I couldn’t get a sitter for him.
They asked a laundry list of questions. Where was I born, and where had I lived? What did my husband, the father, do? Where was he from? Then more personal questions: Where was Jacob conceived? Any trips or travel while pregnant? We talked for about an hour, recording everything and scribbled notes. Then they weighed and measured Jacob. The man who lifted him to the scale had to bend his knees to get him on it.
Then “Doctor Bob” came in with his clipboard, and sat straddling the chair in front of me. I asked about Jacob’s heart.
In circumstances of dwarfism or gigantism—any change from the regular human pattern—our organs are stressed. Somewhere I read that in the large land mammals, the internal structures of the body are not just scaled up, but every organ and bone has to be adapted to the extra strains from gravity. It’s not so easy to get big.
“Not to worry,” he said. Jacob was perfectly ordinary, though larger in every way.
It shouldn’t be possible, but there it was, there was absolutely nothing wrong with him, or the others, though we’d have to continue to monitor. The doctor said he’d have to leave the why and how up to the scientists, or—he looked straight at me then in a very irritating way—other purveyors of wisdom.
I am sure I looked askance.
If you squinted your eyes in Jacob’s direction, blurring out the blocks and the other scattering of normal-sized but too-small toys, the legs of the adults that seemed thin around him, he looked like any normal child. His lips pursed, then went slack as he concentrated on making the blocks, momentarily, stack. I wanted to hold him to me, smell the back of his neck.
“In the ocean,” the doctor was saying, “crustaceans will grow without ever stopping, you know. They just get larger and larger with every molt. Lobsters will get to six, seven feet long, if they live long enough.” His eyes bored into me. “I haven’t seen your husband here with you, lately,” he said. My husband had to work during the day. “Doctor Bob” reached out to put his hand on my knee. I guess a gesture of comfort? I slapped his hand away.
“My son’s no lobster!”
It wasn’t long before the triumphalism over blue ribbon babies turned into national unease. The optimism of the jumbo-sized America decayed in the unrest of the ’60s and the malaise of the ’70s, metastasizing into diabetes and heart disease in the ’80s and ’90s. Now, it wasn’t just my baby, or Henry, or a crop of babies in town. Every baby seemed, suddenly, to be growing at the top end of the chart.
In the small towns, in the cities, from the East Coast to the West, up in to Canada. Gradually, on the news, we heard from Mexico, then from Europe. In rural China. Everywhere
Jacob crawled through our house on chubby arms hunched like a giant tortoise. We had to put him in adult diapers. When we drove anywhere, he rode without a car seat because he wouldn’t fit in one. I couldn’t lift him, so we had to put him in a dog harness that was expanded to the last click. I’d coax him this way or that. Stairs were no obstacle to him. We were anxious for, and dreaded, his first steps.
He was babbling his first words: “Dada! Mama!” But they came out of his mouth a deep baritone. The effect was odd. The strangeness spread to our sex life. I couldn’t touch my husband; the idea of intimacy now made me sick.
Gigantic growth was all anybody talked about. People called in on the radio, complaining, paranoid. Everyone had theories. Aliens had done it, preparing us for the next “ascension”—of what they wouldn’t say. It had “biblical parallels,” and was hinted at in the apocalypse. I never could quite figure out where. Or, it was because of “the gays.”
The President came on TV and gave a speech. The best minds were on it. Every week there was a new commission, a new report. It was cosmic rays, climate change, chemicals accumulating over generations, or one of a hundred thousand other theories.
Regardless of the cause, every week Jacob grew bigger. A lot of our furniture wound up snapped to pieces and put out for the municipal trash. A five-foot tall toddler bleeds a lot. After a little tumble into a dining chair that splintered it, I held a mint-green towel to his fleshy thigh and watched a crimson rose soak outward from my two hands.
Some people stopped having children—they cost too much to feed.
It was apparent that this great expansion was an irreversible product of modern life. Gradually we stopped talking about it. We couldn’t change it, and there was a feeling that, somehow, people would adapt. The news shows drifted slowly back to the normal nightmares of crime and accident. Of course, everything took on a new twist since houses, furniture, fixtures, and life were not adapted to kindergartners that stood seven feet high.
We made do. We ditched the station wagon for a pickup truck. Not exactly legal, for him to ride in the back, but Jacob was conscientious, and extremely well behaved. The school set up classes in the gymnasium. There was talk, if the situation got worse, of circus tents. We sat Jacob down and told him he’d be staying downstairs for the time being, where the ceilings were tall enough for him to stand—“For now,” my husband said. We contemplated how we might tent over the backyard for more living space.
There was no computer for Jacob when he reached the age for it. His hands were just too big to type.
At night, I read to my child fairy tales. I sat beside him, and had to hold the book up, craning my head toward him. The light from the lamp reflected bright off the pages, but began to fade before it reached his face. Only his eyes stood out in the dark, their great white orbs as big as softballs. His favorite story was “The Ugly Duckling.” I put my hand on top of his, it looked like a doll’s hand. In retrospect, maybe I should have guarded him more.
All the tech companies were racing to accommodate the needs of our growing children, but it took a few years to get things to market. Transportation was a huge problem. The first and second graders couldn’t fit in the school bus at all. The school rented an open wagon, and a tarp for when it rained. We quickly ran through our savings accommodating to Jacob’s needs, and maxed out our credit, but the biggest expense was food. Jacob would eat, and eat, and eat.
In the suburbs, things were a little easier, but in the cities it was chaos. Subways could hold only a few of the crouched children in each car. The crammed roadways couldn’t take the extra traffic in trucks, gridlock was the norm. There were always shortages of food.
At ten years old, my darling boy looked like any normal kid, except he couldn’t reasonably fit inside our house. We used rope and tarps to make a shelter for him in the yard—my husband’s ingenuity. At first it was fun, but in the winter, we struggled to keep Jacob warm. By twelve we were able to find a few books his size, but almost nothing else was large enough for him to read. We bought the biggest TV we could afford, and he’d stare at it listlessly with one hand under his chin, then get up and go for a twenty-mile walk.
We tried. We all tried. Every state had its initiatives, things they funded, trying to help. But somebody without children was always going on about budget deficits and inflation. We needed to spend less, parents should just be more self-reliant.
Inflation.
Things weren’t growing. It just seemed like the entire world was getting smaller.
I remember back when we’d bought our house. We had been renting, but it was time to settle down, to get real. There were two houses on the block we’d looked at, and I so wanted this one, with its majestic oak tree out back. That was something grand. We overpaid for it.
When Jacob leaned against the oak, it creaked.
Air travel was impossible. Existing tracks for trains served for a while but now couldn’t bear the weight of moving kids in big open cars. Sometimes Jacob would carry us to the store, sit outside, and wait.
“Are you sure,” Jacob boomed down at me one day, “that you’re my parents?”
“You look just like your father,” I yelled.
Just like, and yet, not.
Each sneaker was made from five cows. I could fit my thumb into the valley that whorled around one of his fingerprints.
Jacob got bored with school. “They don’t teach us much,” he said. He was always hungry, no matter how much we heaped up in wheelbarrows for him.
It would have all been okay, I think. It really could have been. Except for what. Who can say. Maybe it never is okay.
“You’re not my parents,” he said. “You can’t be. Look at how small you are.”
He got angry one time and busted every window in the back of the house.
The school principal called our home one afternoon. “I’m trying to talk some sense into the boys,” he said. “They don’t seem to listen. I don’t think they can hear me. They should be thinking about college.”
I laughed like a madwoman.
A week later the stock market crashed.
There were supply problems, and it was hard to get enough for Jacob to eat. Some of the kids resorted to taking things, which made it worse. Teenage vandals knocked over power lines. Half the time, a quarter of the town was dark. Most of the houses were already turned inside out. When we both lost our jobs, it felt anticlimactic. I had been surprised we’d made it this far.
“I’m going,” said Jacob. “It just sucks here.”
I had a whole speech prepared, and it spilled out of me. It must have sounded like the incoherent ramblings of an ant, if it reached his ears at all. I started out yelling it, then my voice got hoarse, dropped to a whisper, until only silence passed my moving lips. I began to sob. But he was already gone.
We had plans to make things better. He would have seen. Except we hadn’t really, had plans, how could we? Nobody can plan for this.
I am his mother. I love him. Nothing else should have mattered. But, in the end, you always have to let go. Our children had humored us as long as they could.
There were bands of them, taking everything that fit into the crook of their gigantic arms. The government was talking about using the military, but you couldn’t strike everyone, everywhere. After the power grid and vast swaths of the communication networks went down, things were pretty much done.
Then some kids grabbed handfuls of parents and roasted them over a house fire for lunch.
You can be sure my husband and I were out of there, then. We took what we could and hiked north, to the Poconos. In the distance on clear days you could see lots of trailing smoke from the settlements on the plain, and the big hulking shapes of our progeny, ranging through it.
One could adapt to almost anything, I felt, but things had changed so fast. In the birth of our child we had lost ourselves, and the world didn’t look like it had when we were finally coming out of it.
But I still love him, my boy. Though he is lost to us. Or are we lost to them?
Sometimes, even, when I look at my husband in the light of the fire, his shadow flickering on the wall of the cave, I’ve started to think, what if we had another one—what if we had another kid?
