Night Watch, Part 6

Just as David was rounding Angela's chin and approaching her neck with the cool compress, he felt a vibration coming from his pocket. It was his cell phone, on which he normally received only work-related calls, or calls from his wife when he was at the grocery store. At quarter to one in the morning it could only be bad news.

He looked at Angela. She had heard it; his phone didn't vibrate noiselessly, it was more like a yoga hum. She made a why-are-you-getting-calls-from-work-when-I'm-having-a-baby kind of face, which he took to mean that he should answer the call.

"Excuse me," he said, and tiptoed from the room.

"David," he said into his cell phone.

"Hey boss, it's Graphite. We got ten sites down."

Graphite was Grayland Wright, whose friends had long ago shortened his name to Graphite. He wore orange hair and black clothes and was the all-night help desk engineer at the small computer services firm that David and Angela owned.

"Have you talked to the hosting company?" asked David.

"They had a spam attack that brought down three servers. They're blaming it on one of our sites."

"We don't have any clients that spam."

Then David heard a loud groan of pain from the bedroom. Graphite had heard it, too. "What the heck was that? Are you at the zoo?"

David made a mental note to tell that to Angela. Later, when she wasn't delivering a baby.

"My wife's in labor. Listen, Graphite, you gotta handle this one. It's one o'clock in the morning. Chances are no one will notice."

"Our online dating client already called."

"Well, that figures."

Victoria rushed from the bedroom. "David, I need your help. The baby's turning a little."

"Man, what are you guys doing?" asked Graphite.

"I'm coming," David said to Angela.

"Graphite, talk to the hosters. Find out why their backups aren't working. This is their problem."

He hung up and tossed the phone on the sofa; he wasn't planning to take any more calls.

Victoria was kneeling on the floor when he entered the bedroom. "Hold her from that side," she said.

David knelt on the bed, next to Angela. He placed his palms flat against the side of Angela's stomach. Victoria then applied stronger pressure on the other side. Angela lay with her head back. David couldn't tell what she was feeling.

"What is it?" David asked Victoria.

"See this bulge? That's the head. I don't think it's lined up with the top of the cervix. I want it going straight down. So I'm just going to massage this side to coax it back into position."

Victoria's eyes glowed with excitement. "Wow, the uterus is really contracting now."

David silently reprimanded himself for not reading more about labor. He still could not comprehend the logistics of the whole enterprise. Imagine the very first woman, giving birth for the very first time. She must have thought she was turning inside out. Angela was looking at her stomach now. Her face had the most intense expression he had ever seen, all focus, all energy, on this one event. True, it was a biggie, as events go.

"I wish I knew more about this," said David.

Victoria talked while she massaged. "The muscles of the uterus are contracting to pull the cervix over the baby's head. Once the baby gets through the cervix, the vagina has amazing ability to stretch to allow the baby to pass."

David gulped. He was learning that in the birthing business, you have to be careful about asking questions: they might be answered in more detail than you needed. The phone rang. Thank you!

"That's my parents," said Angela. "Don't let them come over. They can come to the hospital tomorrow."

David nearly sprinted from the room to the kitchen, where the air was free of scented candles and sweat and another odor that he vaguely associated with Angela after sex.

"Hello," he said into the phone.

"It's Natalie. How's Angela?" Natalie was Angela's mother.

"She's in labor."

"What? Is she at the hospital?" David could picture Natalie's large brown eyes and the loose skin around her mouth and chin. Everything dangled from her: skin, jewelry, clothes, hair. She was an ornate lampshade in a rainbow of colors.

"She's here. It's not time to go," said David.

"Not time! She's in labor, for Heaven's sake." Then David heard her say, probably to Angela's father, "David says she's in labor already, but they're still at home."

He heard Buddy say, "He probably needs me to drive. Tell him we'll be right over."

"That's okay," said David. You had to be firm with Buddy and Natalie Tortorich. They never heard anything the first time, or the second time. He spoke a little louder into the receiver, "We're fine right now. It's not time yet."

"He says it's not time," Natalie said with her mouth turned away from the phone. David imagined Buddy, sitting in a chair in the hotel room, tired from the long drive on the Turnpike, wondering when Natalie will let him go to bed.

"Tell him to call the minute they're ready to go." Buddy said from across the room.

"He wants you to call when you're ready to go," Natalie repeated.

David quickly agreed, knowing that he would not do so. The last thing Angela wanted was her mother at the birthing center. Natalie would freak out, being from the general anaesthesia and cesarean generation. However, that was a problem for later. David hung up the phone and drank a glass of water. He thought about making another cup of coffee. It was going to be an all-nighter. That reminded him of the help desk, and he retrieved his cell phone from the sofa and checked it.

There was a message from Graphite. Instead of listening, he called.

"The dating service is pissed," said Graphite. "They want their server back up A.S.A.P."

"What did the hosting company say?"

"A power outage took down their backup servers at the same time as the spam attack," said Graphite with no urgency in his voice. He was incapable of getting excited about anything. The world could end and Graphite would quietly look for a bug fix.

"Perfect. What a night. What else could go wrong?"

"A bunch of big domains are blocking all emails from our server."

"Why?"

"They say we're spamming."

"Like hell. We don't do spam."

"Actually, they could be right. It seems the dating service sent out two hundred thousand emails a couple of hours ago."

"What?"

"They're running a special."

"That's not a special. That's fucking spam."

"Tell me about it."

David heard Victoria's voice from the bedroom. "David?"

"I gotta go. Stay on top of it, will you?"

"Sure, boss."

David hung up and returned to the bedroom. What else could go wrong?