Free Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman Page A

well.
    There’s a different young man behind the hotel desk. Pradip’s of Indian descent, but English, born and educated here, he tells me. He’s just out of hotel school and likes Culture Club and Bruce Springsteen. He’s also wearing a soccer scarf. I settle into a new room but one with an abject style similar to the other as well as an absence of what Jessica would call beauty. It’s smaller, darker, and cheaper because it’s in the basement and has a half-view of the street, of shoes and socks, of calves and ankles, of the bottoms of canes and umbrellas. I’ve taken it by the month though I may move to a bed-sitter, or to Jessica’s. She’s invited me. After her youngest sister leaves.
    Jessica laughs when I confess to being the underground woman. The baby, a boy she’s named Caleb after her great-grandfather, rests in her arms, while her sister, Sarah, watches. Grimly I think. I missed Caleb’s birth, a painful one, by three weeks. He was premature. Quite, Jessica says, with an English accent. She’s holding an exceptionally small English or British baby in her arms. He won’t need, as Jessica did when she was settling here, to register as an alien—and then marry to ensure his right to stay. He’ll have the chance for dual nationality. Which the Americans, Jessica goes on, don’t offer. Everyone’s so nervous about their origins—being American isn’t solid as a rock, not Plymouth Rock, she laughs. Sarah, the youngest sister, turns her head away, annoyed.
    With Sarah out of the room, doing the shopping and buying several pints, not quarts, of milk, Jessica whispers that a very strange thing happened in the hospital. She heard a voice, a disembodied voice, like an angel or spirit. It didn’t speak in the normal sense, but she felt visited by or attended to by some soul, just before giving birth. It was, she felt, a good omen, an extraordinary prelude to Caleb’s arrival. Jessica’s even written a poem about the experience. She feels it may have been Charles visiting her or someone who was dead. She delivers this story in hushed tones, a stage whisper that carries eerily in the bedroom. A ghost story. Jessica trained, I learn, years ago, to be an actress and occasionally does performances which she writes. Holding her baby, she’s subsumed in motherhood which may be a good role for her, one she’s had experience with, having been the eldest in a family of four.
    Of course, Jessica remarks beatifically, you think I’m mad. Then she gazes into Caleb’s eyes. They’re bonding. I don’t think she’s mad. Caleb’s so tiny the idea of nationality seems foolish. His minuscule fingers and toes curl and uncurl feebly, spittle and drool ooze from his wet button mouth. Caleb might grow up to be a monster on the order of Gilles de Rais or Ted Bundy. Or, since he’s British, Jack the Ripper or the Yorkshire Ripper. He has the possibility of becoming a Kim Philby or a Mahatma Gandhi. Or Steven Spielberg, for that matter. But perhaps this is very American, to imagine all this, this range of possibilities. Home on the range. Jessica looks as if she’s about to sprout wings and fly around the room. A study of maternity, like a
Madonna with Child
by Bellini, this dyad is similar to a painted one I saw in Venice in that church where the English brothers, Alfred and Paul, first came into view.

Chapter 14
     
A State of Flux
     
ISTANBUL
     
    Cengiz is in the café across the street from the Blue Mosque, or Sultan Ahmet. I’m sitting with the Professor, a ubiquitous figure in the café. An aged American, he lives in a van outside the café and is unkempt and bearded. Cengiz comes over to our table and kindly offers the Professor a chicken from his farm in the city. The Professor asks him to join us. Cengiz is, the Professor tells me, a chicken farmer and a poet. Cengiz relaxes, maybe basks, as the Professor proffers his condensed biography. Then Cengiz asks me why I’m here in Istanbul, alone. I stare at his