The Y Chromosome

by Leona Gom

  “All right.” She watched Delacour walk to the door, the long strides she took, the way she carried one shoulder a little higher than the other, the way her short black hair curled at her neck, and she was wrenched with such love for her she almost cried out.

  “I might be late,” Delacour said, her hand on the door. “You don’t need to wait up.”

  After she had gone, Bowden wandered around the apartment, picking things up and then setting them down again. She would decide on little chores, but by the time she went to do them she would find herself in a room with no idea what it was she was there to do. Finally, although she really had no appetite, she left the apartment and went down to the dining room, a large room on the main floor, which served the Red South section.

  Not many people were left in the room, but two of the doctors she worked with and who lived in her section called her over to their table, so she ate with them, trying to become interested in their conversation about the new thermal machines. She kept thinking about Delacour, the way she’d looked when she put her hand on Hythe’s shoulder.

  She refused the doctors’ offer of a game of springball after supper and headed to her apartment. She walked outside, inhaling deeply the fresh wet air. It was still raining a bit, a thin misty rain so fine it seemed almost to be falling up from the ground.

  Back inside, she went into the bathroom and shook her head over the tub. Flecks of water flew against the tiled walls. She took off her clothes, watching herself in the mirror. I don’t look old, she told herself, not really. I look the way I am supposed to look. She ran her hands down her body, the heavy breasts with the large brown nipples, the right breast slightly larger than the other; the waist still slim; the hips and thighs that flared out too generously, perhaps, with too much dimpling flesh…. Annoyed, she turned from the mirror — why was she evaluating herself like this, against what standards? I look the way I am supposed to. I am not supposed to look twenty.

  As she tossed her damp clothes over the shower rail, something fell from her pants pocket. She jumped back, alarmed, seeing a large leggy insect, a spider; but then she remembered: it was the clump of pine needles. She picked it up from the floor, the needles limp but, with the damp, releasing a sharp clean smell into the room. She set it on the counter.

  She finished hanging up her clothes on the rail, pulling down Delacour’s teacher’s-robe, which for some reason was hanging there. Impulsively, she put it on. It hung almost to her ankles, but otherwise it was surprisingly comfortable, loose and light. It must, Bowden thought wistfully, make the wearer feel safe and confident, concealing all trembling flesh, deflecting the physical judgments of the world. She took it off and hung it in its usual place by the front door and put on her own robe, an old red one with the elbows nearly worn through but of which she had grown too fond to replace.

  In the centreroom she turned on the entertainments guide, but nothing that scrolled past her on the screen particularly interested her, although she paused on the news runner about the Middle East droughts that were turning the region into the same huge desert Africa had become. The birth rate there, the runner noted, had, unlike in most countries, dropped to considerably under replacement, whether by choice or because of the difficulty of reaching Cairo Hospital it didn’t say. Tomorrow, Bowden decided, she would go to Management and tell them to raise her world-welfare tithe above the obligatory twenty-five per cent.

  Perhaps she could persuade Delacour to do the same — her basepay assessment was higher than Bowden’s, after all, and it was time she became as involved in the future as she was in the past. Well, that was hardly fair — granted, Delacour found the local government consensus meetings tiresome and gave her proxy vote to Bowden more often than she should, but she had also been one of Leth’s world-government representatives for five years. She had worked harder than anyone to resolve the Argent-Brazil disputes.

  “In the good old days,” she’d told Bowden cheerfully, “the males would just have had a war and killed each other off. Presto.”

  “Don’t joke about it,” Bowden said, shuddering.

  “I know, I know,” Delacour sighed. “Peace just takes so damned much time, that’s all.”

  Bowden programmed in some audio and left it playing on low and went to pick up her book. As she walked past the table at the entranceway she glanced at the books and papers and vidspools Delacour had left there when she came home. She noticed two large, odd-shaped binders, their pages plasti-proofed, that she hadn’t seen before. Curious, she picked one up. Stamped in large letters on the cover were the words, Warning. Pre-Change Original. Do not remove from Archive. She set it down, alarmed. She had learned even as a child the importance of preserving ancient documents, since so few survived the Change. But that was Delacour for you, she thought with a flare of anger, treating the rules as though they were made for someone else. There was no reason Delacour couldn’t be using a copy instead of the original.

  She picked up the heavy binder again, her fingers trembling. She’d never actually held a Pre-Change Original before. But if the pages were plasti-proofed, perhaps it wouldn’t matter as much if she looked, so long as she was careful. Delacour would be pleased, she thought wryly, my taking an interest in history. She opened the cover. The Journal of Adam Markov. Volume 12, it said on the front page.

  The Journal of Adam Markov. She'd heard of it before, when she was in school; they’d read excerpts of it, but she couldn’t remember much, only that it was kept by someone who had lived in this city, across the deepcoulee, and that it was one of the few journals still in existence that chronicled the Change, and from the point of view of a male. A male: she felt an old and unexpected shudder run through her. The male will get you, the male will get you. She could still hear the giggly cries of her playmates when she began her kilometre-long walk home alone from kindergarten, through the woods made suddenly sinister by their echoing voices. And behind every tree, around every bend in the path there he would be, the male, the monster, and even if she evaded him he would follow her home and climb into her dreams and she would awaken screaming, unable to tell her mothers the nightmare, so terrifying was it, so beyond description.

  She took the journal with her to the armchair and sat down. She looked at it for several moments, lying there in her lap, and then, hesitantly, and with great care, she lifted the cover. She noticed that Delacour had, starting at about the middle of the binder, stuck pieces of orange paper in at different places. Bowden opened the journal at the place the first orange paper was inserted.

  The handwriting was clear and strong, with a pronounced right-hand slant and unusually large loops to the upper letters. Bowden ran her finger along one line, tried to imagine Adam Markov himself writing those words, on this same page she was holding.

  She began to read. Then she turned to the next marked page and the next, although sometimes there were whole years between the markers.

  THE JOURNAL OF ADAM MARKOV

  Volume 12

  Sept. 4, 2053

  Even worse than last year. I should have been prepared for it, but how can you be? Ten years ago the Grade Twos alone were enough to split into two classes. And to see the ones who were missing — I was nearly goddamned crying when I read the Grade Three roll and kept seeing the names that were gone since I had them in Grade Two just last spring — Jeffrey Lukas, deleted between Christine Engels and Jason Markowski; Johnny Pivato, deleted between Owens and Reimer; and at the end, Paul Wolski, his name not even removed, just crossed out by the secretary this morning because he died last week. Not even from a real sickness, but from some infection in his knee, which he’d scraped playing football and which never got better. A scraped knee — what sort of a thing is that to die from? I felt like throwing the roll book across the damned room.

  But, no, I am the teacher; I am the one who’s supposed to be strong and to give them answers, to prepare them for a future we’ve corrupted fo
r them.

  The boys all look so listless. Wan, that’s the word — wan, something sucking the life out of them, their immune systems just shrugging and not kicking in. Little Eric looks like a skele-ton. He’ll probably be dead by the end of the year. My God — how can any of us stay sane and watch the children dying?

  The girls are different, too — they huddle together at noon hour like a cageful of frightened rabbits. When I come in and find them playing normally they stop and look at me guiltily, as though they’d been caught laughing at a funeral.

  So I was drunk when Elizabeth came home. I had a right. I was pissed; she was pissed off. Ha, ha.

  “Dad,” she said, her most irritating voice, sounding twelve instead of twenty-two. She picked up the sherry glass and set it down hard in front of me, as though I hadn’t seen it.

  “And how was your day?” I smiled at her avuncularly. What a nice word. Avuncularly.

  “Oh,” she said, dropping her briefcase on the table and sitting down in front of me. “It was bad, was it?”

  “Only five boys. That’s in all three grades that are in my room now, only twenty-one altogether, and only five boys.”

  I think I may have started to cry then, and she came and massaged my shoulders, and I must have stopped, because I remember peeling the potatoes and cracking the eggs for the omelette and I wasn’t crying then.

  Over supper she told me something about Jenny, but I didn’t really listen. There was a silence and I realized she’d asked me a question. I said I was sorry.

  She sighed, crossed her knife over her fork in that meticulous way she’d learned from Linda, like someone carefully crossing her legs. “You never listen to me, Daddy,” she said.

  “That’s not fair. Merde. Of course I listen to you.” Oh, my, yes, didn’t I sound righteously indignant, though? When she’s right — I don’t listen to her. I don’t understand her life, so I don’t want to hear about it. I’m a selfish bloody bastard. I don’t know how she can stand to live with me.

  She picked up her plate and took it to the sink. “Jenny’s coming over later,” she said, her voice neutral. “We’re going out to play a game of tennis.”

  I’ll bet that’s not all you’re going to do, I almost said, but I didn’t, thank God, I had that much bloody sense.

  It’s late. To bed. I’ll be hung over in the morning. But I keep writing and writing, my words slithering their pathetic story across the page, thoughts looking for a way out, and I give them only scribbles on a goddamned paper.

  Sept. 5, 2053

  I just felt such rage at Bill in the staff room today I could have smashed his damn head onto the table. He sits there and tells us that the boys are dying because it’s all in God’s Great Plan, and the righteous ones will meet again in heaven, and we should rejoice, all that bullshit, it’s God’s Will. And the others all roll their eyes and make jokes, Clara exclaiming, “God’s Will! I didn’t know he left one! Am I in it? Can my lawyer get a copy? Must be public domain by now, right?” and so on, and usually I’d have been right in there, adding my bit of smut, but something in me just snapped today, and I stood up and started screaming at him; I really felt like grinding his face into his fucking lunch bag. Prince came over and took my arm and said, “Now, now, Adam, that’s not very nice, come on, calm down now.”

  So everybody sat there looking embarrassed and/or terrified, and then they tiptoed out of the room as though I were a land mine they might step on.

  “We have to respect each other’s opinions,” Prince said, patting at my arm.

  So now we have two lunatics on staff. Three if you count Prince.

  I didn’t even see Elizabeth tonight. Just a note saying she wouldn’t be home for supper, and it’s almost eleven now and she’s still not back. I hope she’s at her lab. I hope she’s finding a cure for everything.

  Sept. 6, 2053

  I just tried to read one of Elizabeth’s reports she brought home from work. “Sexlinked Immunodysfunction Syndrome.” What a pretty name they’ve given death. I couldn’t understand a damned word: even the grammar seemed alien, not just a separate vocabulary but a whole new syntax. It amazes me Elizabeth can understand all this, can write like this. The amazement of every parent when what used to chew at your pant cuff and call you Dada grows up smarter than you.

  The parents of the Reynolds boy in Grade Five with the bad bronchitis are taking him to some faith healer in Tucson. Well, why not?

  Sept. 7, 2053

  Robert asked me at recess, “Am I going to die, Mr. Markov?”

  So I made myself laugh and answer, “No, of course not. Not for a very long time.”

  And he looked at me with his old man’s eyes and said, “I think I am, Mr. Markov. My brother says we’re all contaminated. From the bombs and the dead ozone and things. He says human beings are finished.”

  Robert, Robert. What did I answer? Some lie, some placebo. Human beings are finished. When I was his age the big secret older brothers told to disillusion us was that there was no Santa Claus. No Santa Claus, no human beings.

  At the staff meeting after school Prince had an item on the agenda that was about how would we please not call him Prince anymore, his name was Douglas, and Prince for Principal was a cute joke, but really the board might think it was disrespectful and wasn’t it becoming just a little —

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Clara snapped. “I’ll call you any damned thing you want, let’s just get this fucking meeting over with.”

  “That’s not very nice,” Prince said.

  “I’m sorry,” Clara said. She leaned over and put her head between her knees and sat that way for about ten minutes. Four lunatics on staff.

  ­* * *

  Oct. 23, 2053

  I was right about Eric. His mother came to me after school today, crying, and said she was taking him out of school. “What’s the point?” she kept saying. She cleaned out his desk, and when I came to help her she hit at me, as though I were responsible. I went and sat in the staff room. A little while later she came and knocked at the door. I told Clara to tell her I’d gone home. I can see I actually have a bruise on my arm from where she hit me, a round, fist-sized purpling stain spreading under my skin.

  I showed it to Elizabeth. “Look,” I said. “One of the mothers hit me today.”

  She thought I was making a joke. “Oh, you probably deserved it,” she said.

  Oct. 24, 2053

  Elizabeth brought home the latest annual birth-rate figures.

  “Look at this,” she said.

  “What?”

  She pointed to the male birth-rate. “This.”

  “It looks fine to me.” It was in the hundreds of thousands somewhere.

  “It’s not fine. It should be a hundred times that.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head grimly. “Look.” She pointed at a graph on one of the scrolls of paper she’d strewn on the kitchen table. Her finger traced the monthly drops in the past year. I watched the locus move down, down, to where it hovered an almost invisible distance from the x-axis, at the bottom, the zero mark, the flat line on the cardiograph that meant death. Extinction.

  “Why?” I said finally. “What’s happening?”

  “Your little spermies just aren’t making boy babies anymore,” she said, with something she must have intended as a laugh.

  “Maybe your little eggies just don’t want us,” I said.

  “They want twenty-year-old frozen sperm, apparently.” She rummaged around the printouts and pointed at some other graph. “They just don’t want this modern stuff.”

  “Why not? What’s wrong with it?”

  Elizabeth sighed and picked at the paper. “I don’t know. But whatever is causing this must be the same thing that’s making the boys die. And that involves basic and Y-specific chromosome damage, Dr. Kostash ha
s proven that. But we don’t know how, or why. And now it looks as if it’s killing them even earlier. At conception. Or at least by the fourth month.”

  “The secretary at school had a miscarriage last week.”

  Elizabeth lifted her hands slightly in the air, then let them drop onto the table as though they were too heavy for her arms to hold. “I knew miscarriages were up again, but I didn’t know they were so male-concentrated. It seems to be on such a huge scale now —”

  “Hard to believe that fifty years ago we were desperate about how to control overpopulation.”

  “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.”

  We were quiet for a while, staring at the papers again, the masses of numbers, written by machines indifferent to interpretation, implication. I turned the pages over, trying to understand, to not understand, I don’t know.

  “Look at this,” I said finally, pausing at a page that listed the sex ratio. “Live births, female: 98.7%. Live births, male: 1.2%. Live births, other: 0.1%. What the hell is ‘other’?”

  “Someone like me, maybe,” she said. She folded up her papers abruptly and took them to her room.

  I should have said something. But merde, what the hell does she want me to do? If I say something about her and Jenny, it sounds critical. If I don’t, it sounds critical.

  But what’s there to say about anything anymore? The future grips us like a vise. In every path/Man treads down that which doth befriend him.

  Oct. 25, 2053

  In the papers today, big headlines: Male birth-rate plummets. But Elizabeth came home all excited because her lab has had a big chunk of money diverted to genetics from nephrology because of it.

  “They were stinking mad over at nephrology, I can tell you,” she said, biting eagerly into her vegetable-crisp. I didn’t like seeing her gloat like that.

  “So what are you supposed to do with all that money?”