Slicing Peppers

I slice the red pepper and pile strip upon red strip into my bowl. My 11-year-old son is pacing the floor, telling me everything about large numbers. Googol, googolplex, Graham’s number, a number called BigFoot, a number called Sasquatch. I am trying to listen in the way you do so children feel heard and validated, but only pieces of his words land in my consciousness. The rest bounce off and join the stray pepper seeds scattered on the granite. Uh-huh, uh-huh, I say, That’s so cool. 

My knife saws a jagged circle through the pepper’s polished vermilion skin with a delicate crunch and pop. The hooked green stem comes off easily in my fingers to reveal a hollow, pink cavern, a high-ceilinged ballroom filled with the mingling of seeds, each one latent with possibility. This pepper has traveled seemingly unscathed from Mexico without a hint of the travel weariness one might expect of a delicate fruit that has journeyed thousands of miles to my Chicago kitchen. It is brilliant beneath my scalpel. As the light from the bell pendant shines down like a surgical lamp, the pepper lies raw, open, and spilling.

I am cutting peppers but not cutting peppers, listening but not listening. My mind is still on the pregnant Ukrainian woman from last week’s front page photo. I don’t know her name but I have memorized her image. Her ashen, ghostly, bloodless face—expressionless. Her heavy body, a vessel laid out on a stretcher being carried across broken branches and rubble. Soldiers in black, bulletproof vests and heavy boots surround her in place of nurses in clean, white smocks. Yellow squares of insulation and broken medical equipment are falling out of the bombed maternity ward. Blood is drying and caking above her eye, around her hip, at her stockinged feet. The trees are leafless from winter, limbless from bombing. Her swollen, bloody belly, a red giant pulsing with life, filled with feet and fingers, elbows and knees, soft, wet hair. A heart red and racing, a wrinkled thumb already soothing an anxious mouth. Eyes that cannot yet blink, ears that know only the loud whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of its mother’s rapid heartbeat. Can an unborn baby hear the crack of explosion or only feel the violent rupture in its soft bones?

The pepper is filled with dozens of tiny, white seeds, which themselves are filled with embryos, the possibility of new life depending on where they land. Sometimes a pepper even grows within a pepper. Nobody knows quite why it happens that the pepper spontaneously springs into life before it’s even planted, but it grows within, protected by its mother, needing nothing more than her cool, red belly to germinate and grow.

I imagine that last week the young Ukrainian mother sat folding a new stack of burp cloths and smoothing the fitted sheet around the crib mattress. When the Russian bomb hit the maternity ward, something small became large around her, brilliant in all its fierce destruction, the intense pressure forcing glass out of windows and walls out of frames. There were so many sounds at once; could she even register the snapping, shattering, and cracking, the heave and moan of a building rupturing, bursting, collapsing into dust as her insufficient hands dove for her belly?

Mom, a googol is 10 to the hundredth power, which is trillions of times bigger than the number of hairs on every human’s head. And googolplex is 10 to the googol power. Each step to get to Graham’s number is indescribably larger than the one before and there are 64 steps to get to Graham’s number. If you wrote down every number in Graham’s number on the tiniest slip of paper and pasted it all over the Earth, the planet could not contain it. It is that big.

Wow, I say without even looking up, That’s pretty big.

I read today that she gave birth to her lifeless child less than half an hour before she died. Her broken body could not sustain life; her womb, a grave. Did she cry out in anguish? Did the men who carried her? And how is it that more than five thousand miles away, I, too, am still shaking from that blast?

Mom, are you even listening to me? Can you even imagine something so big? It hurts my brain to think about it.

When I look up at him, his eyes are wide with disbelief, and I notice that he is gathering more freckles across his nose and up around his wide, blue eyes. I still remember his cheeks at birth—pink and bare, soft and warm. I kissed them endlessly. The sun has painted him every year. There are so many freckles now that they all seem to be running together; after 11 years, they are uncountable.

I touch his face gently, scooping his soft cheeks into my palms. Surprised by my sudden attentiveness, he gives me a soft, side smile.

 BigFoot, Sasquatch, googolplex. What is the word for her grief and my gratitude?

Yes, I’m listening. The earth cannot contain them. It hurts my brain too.