Do not cut the child before its first bawl has ended,
before its first full sated suckle; it will lack all effectiveness
for the imprint to be confused with the suffocation and then
that first traumatic breath, and the promise of relieved distress.
Wait.
Wait until his eyes track shape, until they seek out the familiar
tone of the comforting coo, and eerily other eyes; wait until
digits flex and grasp, with the straining orbs, until after that
magnificent font has christened its glorious profusion of nerves.
Then, before any interceding trauma,
Take him from his mother’s breast and roll him down the chill
hallways; strip his swaddles from him, lift him naked
into the antiseptic air of the operating theater, and fit that bottom
into its polished, stainless steel depression. Fix him with lights,
And shackle him,
So that those new and strange instruments cannot reflexively
flail into the sphere of activity around that stranger instrument,
with padded, baby-sized, nylon-and-velcro straps for each hand
and foot. Splay him on the cold table, and daub oils on him.
The ritual takes
One woman—whose voice is not too dissimilar from those
familiar tones already known, comforting and close, whose,
occasional, reassuring touch, to forehead and shoulder is
warmth, to aim that light and mockingly intone a phrase,
That will be
With him, all his life, a prelingual trigger of the betrayal of
that quavering perfect maternal third that is also the interval
of derision, words which will be parsed and re-parsed even as
grammar and vocabulary are learned: “Watch the birdie!”
Or such nonsense—
And one man—bearded, broad, self-evident manliness, to
wield the blade, deliver the quick incisive pain, tear loose
half of all those filthy, irresistible nerves, while conveying
his authority to perform this act, and his pleasure in it—
Let him laugh,
A deep, masculine laugh, just after she speaks the phrase, and
with the slicing blade’s stroke! Let them both laugh, together,
at the blood-font, at the straining, bound baby limbs, to seal it,
then talk knowingly, low, beyond the patient’s field of vision.
It is complete.
That scar will always remind him to toe the line, although it
is not his toe that, phantom, silently screams there, and he will
not remember it, or will remember only enough to populate
fantasies of alien submission: He will hear the phrase, and fear,
And obey.