Master Class

by Christina Dalcher

  Lissa pipes up. “And it went on for decades, right up until 1979.”

  I fight my way to my feet, taking the folded paper from my sleeve. “No. You’re wrong. It’s still going on.”

  If there’s a thin strand of light in this room where Ruby Jo sits lost in thought and Lissa presses a cool cloth to my head, it’s the documents I found earlier this afternoon. None of them points to a solution as final as the eugenics committee’s proposal of elimination. This is when I push the women away and go back to the kitchen table; I page through the appendix of Lissa’s book. My eyes float down to number nine on the list and I will them to focus, concussion or no concussion.

  What I read in Martha Underwood’s office fits perfectly with the ninth remedy proposed by the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders’ Association:

  Neo-Malthusian doctrine, artificial interference to prevent conception.

  Ruby Jo has been quiet, staring out of our barred window toward the larger building across the grounds, and this time I’m the one asking if she’s all right.

  “Sure. Just thinking there ain’t enough room for all of them,” Ruby Jo says without turning. “The dormitories are large enough to handle a few hundred boys and girls each, but not much more. And I haven’t seen any signs of construction on the grounds of State School 46. Then again, it’s a big country. They could always build new schools. Or—”

  “Or not. They could stifle population growth,” I say, smoothing out the page I stole, closing my eyes and trying to picture the other sheets of paper, recalling the salient terms. “But everything I saw smacks of sterilization—permanent contraception.”

  Lissa nods, expressionless, waiting for me to go on. The hardness in her eyes tells me she can handle it.

  I hope I can. I take a deep breath, slide a sheet of notepaper toward me on the table, and draw a line vertically from top to bottom. In the first column I write the heading Fertile Stage; in the second, Pre-Fertile Stage. “Premenstrual girls are in the second category,” I explain. “Everyone else is in the first.”

  Again, a nod. Lissa gets it.

  The second part is trickier to explain, so I simplify. “If you want to prevent conception in fertile women, you have two main choices: surgical or chemical. Surgical is riskier—not that I think anyone gives a shit, but they might care about the cost and logistics of opening up millions of abdomens just to tamper with a pair of tubes. Chemical sterilization is easier. Less risk, less time, less cost. And it’s just as effective.”

  Lissa wants to know how it works. I’m not sure I want to tell her. The thought of someone pushing a bunch of quinacrine hydrochloride through my cervix with the intention of burning my insides is too gruesome to articulate. But I tell her anyway. “The idea is to initiate sclerosis in the uterus.” I draw her a quick sketch of an isosceles triangle with the acute angle pointing down and circle the upper two angles. “Here and here,” I say, tapping the right and left sides with my pencil. “So you end up with scar tissue forming—”

  “At the juncture where the Fallopian tubes enter,” Ruby Jo interrupts from the window. “It’s basically a barrier method. But a permanent one.”

  Lissa is still all business. “Side effects?”

  I blow out a massive puff of air. “Cancer. Ectopic pregnancy. Uterine damage. Central nervous system fuckups. Burning in your vagina. The stuff was banned after a few test subjects suffered uterine perforations and went into septic shock.” The thought makes me shiver. “Not a nice way to die.”

  “Reversible?” Lissa says. She’s gone a shade paler now.

  “Not without invasive surgery.” I tap the left and right edges again. “And you’d have to undo the scarring on both sides because you can’t predict which ovary is going to produce the egg that ends up fertilized. But yeah, it’s technically reversible. So is messing around with gene drives, I guess, but that’s newer research.” I explain, as simply as I can, the technology behind altering trait transmission from parent to offspring through genetic engineering. I don’t add that there’s plenty of room for screwing it up, especially when I remember Alex’s paperwork noted the insertion method as “TBD.” It might as well have said “No fucking clue yet.”

  By the time I’m done walking Lissa and Ruby Jo through selective gene propagation and DNA tampering, through the manipulation of genetic patterns that can be passed down from one generation to the next, it’s four o’clock.

  Time to go see Alex. Time to find out what I have to trade for a ticket out of State School 46.

  “You have to find a way, Elena,” Lissa says. “I’d do it myself”—she looks down at the flat front of her uniform—“but something tells me you’ve got better odds. I’ll stay here and write up something for you to take with you.”

  When I leave, she’s at the table drafting notes, her mouth moving and vocalizing as she works through our talk.

  FIFTY-NINE

  I reach Alex’s apartment door feeling more like Mata Hari than a demoted biology teacher in her early forties. Ruby Jo straightened out my hair, unleashing it from a ponytail holder and arranging waves of blond over my shoulders, fixing them so they lay in long curls above my breasts. One look in the mirror and all I could see were those horrible Q tails waiting to trap some unsuspecting failure and whisk it into state school hell.

  I’m hoping the curls and the breasts and the makeup will be enough.

  A girl in my fourth-grade class was the first person to tell me about sex. She had a big sister who had filled her in on everything.

  “And the boy gets all hard and then he sticks it in you,” she said, as we nestled into sleeping bags in her parents’ den. I went wide-eyed at this revelation. “And then he shoots this stuff out and it’s all over. No big deal. Except you don’t want to get pregnant.”

  To me, it sounded like an enormous deal. It sounded disgusting and terrifying at the same time. “Has your sister done it?” I said, not really wanting to know, but this seemed like the grown-up thing to ask, something she would like.

  “Not yet. But two of her friends almost did. They’re fifteen.”

  That night I lay in my sleeping bag, unable to stop thinking about this new, unexplored territory called sex. My friend told me where they put it, and I let my hands find that place, careful to not rustle the sheets in case she woke up and caught me. Certain things, like teaching yourself about sex for the first time, are better done without interruptions.

  None of what I discovered that night sounded appealing, let alone possible. Years later, when Joe and I went at it in the backseat of his Mustang, I discovered it was possible, and more than appealing, if I was with the right man. But the idea of Alex’s hands and mouth on me, the thought of him pushing into my body, takes me back to that age of sexual latency and fills me with dread.

  He offers me a drink when I step inside, a small crystal glass of neat Scotch. I’m thinking I might need a few of them.

  “So,” he says. “What shall we talk about?” Alex takes a seat on the sofa after inviting me to sit across from him in one of the Eames chairs.

  I take a sip of my drink and let it fill me with warmth. Direct is probably best now. “I want you to help me get home. With my daughter,” I say, crossing my legs, letting some skin show.

  His lips curl into a smile, but the smile doesn’t reach the other parts of his face. Cold, calculating eyes stare back at me, leveling themselves with mine. Not even a glance down to my legs.

  Forty is a strange age, a milestone. A time to sit down and think about life. Growing older never bothered me, and I always thought the few wisps of gray at my temples lent a scholarly sort of air. I dyed them, of course, at Malcolm’s suggestion. “It’ll take years off your life,” he said. About a thousand times.

  I still run and do the weights routine at my gym, I haven’t yet acquired that dreaded middle-aged band of fat around my waist, and what
ever skin-care nonregimen I’ve been on for the past decade seems to be working. But forty hit me hard. It just didn’t hit me as hard as the realization that Alex doesn’t seem to give a shit about the only thing I have to offer him.

  “There’s a way out of here, Elena. If you want to take it.”

  “Tell me.”

  He leans back, letting the sofa receive him, folding his hands behind his head as if we were two people having a chat over drinks. Casual and carefree. “I need volunteers. For some tests I want to run. Tell me, and tell me the truth, because I can find out. Are you still menstruating?”

  I feel naked, exposed, the way I felt the first time I went in for a Pap smear, feet up in stirrups, the entirety of me opened up for a doctor to prod at. My voice is a hoarse whisper when I answer yes.

  “Regular?”

  “Yes.” I am, but I know one day I won’t be. I won’t bleed to the tune of a clock anymore. We tell our girls when they start their periods that they’re women. We say trite things like You’re a woman now. Does the converse also hold? At the other end, when nature stops us, do we become unwomen? Do we dry up when we cease being capable of breeding? I’ve always put this question off, and now I can’t put it off any longer. I know what Alex is asking, and what he is about to propose.

  “Good.” He reaches forward for a small book and leafs through it. “I can schedule this for later. Seven o’clock this evening.” It isn’t a question, only an order.

  “You’re one of them,” I say. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  The air in his apartment goes stale and cold.

  “We’re doing good work at the institute. Great work. Another twenty years and we won’t need the state schools anymore. Think about it, Elena. Think about a world where everyone is at the top. No more disease, no more social inequality, no more competition. We’ll be rid of the bad apples.”

  Bullshit, I think. “It’s the fish barrel problem again. Take out the old ones, and you still have the problem. Sameness is an illusion, Alex.”

  He waves a dismissive hand at me. “Malcolm was right about you.”

  “You talk to my husband about me?”

  “I talk to him about quite a few things. But yes. You’ve come up.” He stands, smooths out his trousers, and pours himself another drink. There’s no offer of a second for me. “I’d love to sit here and discuss your marital problems, Elena, but I have to call my wife.” He opens the door, waiting for me to go through it. “Seven tonight. Sharp. Meet me in the lobby. And I’ll arrange to fly you home immediately after.”

  He hasn’t mentioned Freddie. Not once.

  “What about my daughter? I’m not leaving here without her.”

  “You’re the first trial subject,” he says. “After a week, we’ll know more. And then we can make arrangements for your daughter.”

  Make arrangements for my daughter.

  I hesitate at the door.

  “Anything else?”

  “Only that you’re a monster.” And with that, I go.

  When I leave the way I came in, I think about how I came to Alex’s apartment expecting him to put something into me. I didn’t expect he would be taking something out.

  SIXTY

  My flight is only hours from now, a direct hop from Kansas City to Washington Reagan. There will be two passengers: Alex Cartmill and me. The fare? Nothing.

  Well, that’s not true. This flight is going to cost me.

  Alex even arranged a surprise. I got to have an early dinner with Freddie. Just us, no one else, unless you count Alex himself, who made sure I kept the conversation to banalities. Dinner was easy. The goodbyes were not.

  “I’ll see you soon, baby girl,” I say, stroking her back, lulling her into a quiet place. “Very soon.” I didn’t know whether it was true, but I made it seem so, saying it over and over again until Freddie’s grip finally relaxed and we let each other go.

  The monster watched us with icy indifference.

  At six thirty, Lissa walks me through the workings of her pen. “Camera’s at the butt end. Click once to snap a picture, click twice to record. I’ve captured an image of the page we went over this afternoon. No sense trying to take a hard copy of anything with you,” she says. “And I recorded my article. It’s all on the drive. Micro-USB.”

  I’m half listening.

  “Elena.” Her voice is hard. “You need to get this to my contacts at the Washington Post. Bonita Hamilton, if you can. If not, ask for Jay Jackson. That’s it, get it? Those two and no one else. One or the other of them is always there. And, for chrissake, don’t lose this. It’s got everything on it.” She hugs me briskly and turns me over to Ruby Jo.

  “You sure you wanna do this?”

  “No,” I say, my cheek pressed against Ruby Jo’s. “But I have to.”

  She doesn’t ask me again.

  SIXTY-ONE

  When the time comes, I walk through the doors of a building on the far side of the school grounds, accompanied by Alex. He smells of antiseptic instead of Scotch and expensive cologne, and he avoids looking directly at me.

  Inside a room that brings back uncomfortable gynecological visits, there’s another man waiting, a diminutive man in a white coat who instructs me to strip from the waist down and lie on the examining table.

  “There’s a paper sheet for you, ma’am,” he says, pointing to the table. “Just give us a shout when you’re ready.”

  I’m dumbstruck when they leave me. My limbs don’t want to work, refuse to perform the simple tasks of removing my shoes and slipping off my underwear. For several moments, I stand still in the center of this cold and bright room, wanting to run back out into the night. I don’t know where I would go, or how far I would get, but my feet want to run.

  A knock at the door startles me. “All set in there, Dr. Fairchild?”

  No, I’m not all set in here. I’m not all set anywhere. It takes me a moment to find my voice.

  “Just a minute,” I say. The words come out in a hoarse whisper, and I search the room for another door, a window, an air-conditioning vent. Any escape that will carry me out of this and back to the apartment with Lissa and Ruby Jo.

  How strangely one hell becomes a sort of heaven.

  Another knock, but this time the voice isn’t the pleasant little man in the white coat. It’s Alex informing me I have exactly one minute. One minute to decide whether to let this monster have his way with me.

  My hands move on their own, working one leg at a time out of jeans and a pair of silk panties I bought to tempt Malcolm once, back when tempting him was still a thing I wanted to do. I clamber up on the examination table and unfold the sheet that will hide my lower half, both protecting me from being seen and protecting me from seeing. Every motion is automatic, dictated by some part of my brain that can only think in future images: Freddie on a table, Anne on a table. The woman I am tells me to run, but the mother inside me makes a different choice. The only choice, really.

  Maybe I say “I’m ready.” It’s possible I don’t, but the door opens all the same, and Alex walks in, followed by the much shorter, much less handsome man. They’re a striking contrast, one perfect silver school poster child and the other not.

  “You may feel some pressure,” the short man says as his hands disappear under the sheet and he begins prodding me with latex-covered hands. “Here’s the fundus,” he says. “Anteverted seventy to eighty percent. Ovaries appear normal.”

  While he fingers my flesh from inside and out, I get a close-up of the embroidered name on his lab coat. It reads Mender in light blue script. Nurse Mender. How fucking ironic can you get?

  A steel tray is on the table next to my elbow. On it is a pouch, one of those sterile tear-apart envelopes I’ve seen during doctor’s visits, the kind that hold specula and swab sticks, single-use paraphernalia. Alex snaps on a pair of latex
gloves, tears the pouch with a practiced gesture he must have done a thousand times, and slides a foil packet of poison from it.

  The label says mepacrine hydrochloride. I know this is the International Nonproprietary Name for the same drug I found in Alex’s paperwork. What I don’t know is how I snap a picture of it on Lissa’s pen camera without being seen.

  I cough. “Could I have a glass of water before we start? Please?”

  Nurse Mender smiles at me. “Of course, dear.” And he leaves the room as Alex turns to his phone and I wiggle my right hand free of the paper sheet, holding my breath.

  Click.

  Alex’s head snaps up and the smile fades from his lips. “Problem?”

  “No. Just felt my arm falling asleep,” I say.

  Then his hand is on me, under the sheet, working its way up along the inside of my thigh.

  My eyes widen. “Stop.”

  He stops, but only to lock the door. When he comes back, he leans in, close, and I can smell the aftershave and pipe tobacco underneath a heavy layer of soap as he takes off his gloves. “Are you as cold a fish as Malcolm says you are?” One hand is back on my leg now, skin to skin, the other pushing me down into the examination table. “I’ll bet you aren’t.”

  The paper sheet crumples as I jerk myself to one side and swing my left hand out. Alex catches it in midair, as if my fist were a foam ball, not flesh and bone and nerve. It hurts. It hurts like hell. “Let me go.” Again, my voice is small, weak, thin. I try again, and Alex laughs.

  “I’ll let you go. All the way to Washington.” He releases my hand, goes to unlock the door, and turns to the sink to scrub. The water runs and runs and runs, and it seems like he’s trying to scrub me off of him. Then, with dry hands, he pulls on a fresh pair of latex gloves. “I could hurt you, you know,” he whispers in my ear at the same time he tears the wrapper off a plastic speculum. “I could puncture you or make your insides burn. I could do all kinds of things, and you wouldn’t even realize it until it was too late. I could make you disappear.”