Free Make Me Work by Ralph Lombreglia

expect,” Dwight tells Rebecca. “You’re overreacting.”
    â€œI’m overreacting?”
    â€œYou’re being considerate. But you’re a little worked up.”
    â€œI’m worked up?”
    â€œAnita’s going to the hospital to have a baby. People do it every day. You’ll be fine, sweetheart,” he says to Anita, though she seems to be going into a trance.
    â€œWalter, you know where Brigham and Women’s is, right?”
    â€œIt’s where all the hospitals are, isn’t it? I think so. Do I?” I ask Rebecca.
    â€œOh, God,” she says.
    The whole concept of a freight elevator takes on new meaning as we transport Anita to ground level in the dark, creaking box. Rushing from the building to open the car for the women, I wonder if Hippie Trash did something psychedelic to the punch upstairs. I’m picking up the world like a satellite dish. I’m hearing everything. I hear the blades of crabgrass rubbing each other in the crummy sand-soil of the concrete planters along the parking lot. I hear the mechanical noises of the belt-sander race. If I had to be up there right now, the sandpaper would shred my brain. As it is, I can distinguish the scrape of every different shoe on the asphalt out here.
    â€œDoes anybody else happen to feel like they’re on drugs?” I say.
    â€œI do,” Anita says.
    â€œDrugs?” says Rebecca. “You’re supposed to be driving the car.”
    â€œI can drive fine,” I say, the way people always say these things.
    We get Anita in the back seat of the Bonneville, Rebecca in there with her. Once I get behind the wheel, I understand what’s happening to me: I have a friend who has become for the moment a creature, a mammalian creature engaged in the live birth mammals are famous for, and I’m sympathizing with that, resonating with it. I’m an animal now myself.
    â€œMusic might help,” Anita says. “Could you turn on the radio?”
    It’s only an AM, and at first all I can find are talk shows—people claiming to have been inside UFOs, telling about having fat vacuumed from their buttocks and bellies. Finally I hit music on an oldies station—Little Eva singing “The Loco-Motion.”
    â€œThat’s good,” Anita says. “I like that song.”
    â€œRemind me what I do now?” I call to Rebecca in back.
    â€œGo down this access road and make a right at the fork. I’ll tell you from there. Don’t go up the ramp onto 93.”
    â€œWhere’s that?”
    â€œRight up there.”
    It’s dark down here below the highway and I don’t see what she means. My skin is screaming thousands of messages at me, and I’m giving birth to a baby in my brain, and the next thing I know we’re rising into the air.
    â€œWalter!” Rebecca cries out. “I just got finished saying don’t do this!”
    â€œI got mixed up. I’m sorry. Let’s not fight, O.K.? Dwight and Anita never fight. We always fight. Plus, I’m having a mystical experience.”
    â€œWell, go back! Back the car back down the ramp and get off!”
    But it’s too late. We’re up there now. The space behind me was the only free slot on this whole merciless highway, and it’s been filled by a car which in turn left a space that has been filled by another car, like one of those puzzles of linked plastic numbers sliding around in a frame. One little mistake and we’re hopelessly locked in a grid.
    Beneath the spectral mercury-vapor light, the traffic is moving in geological time. We need a helicopter right now. I open my door and stand on the frame to look out over the cars. It’s just more of the same, forever and ever. The atmosphere is a kiln where thousands of clay vehicles are baking. Anita can’t stand it, and I have to get back in. Now that we’re not moving at all, the air conditioner is dragging