The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  Just then, Vera came between the benches and tapped Marguerite on the shoulder to whisper something. Marguerite nodded, then told Isabel, “Debbie’s bleeding. We have to go.”

  Debbie lay in the bed in the birthing room, breathing quietly. Vera was adjusting the pillow, and Carl sat at the bedside holding her hand, his wooden chair creaking slightly as he leaned forward. The floorboards were still icy; the electric heater was just beginning to take the edge off the cold. The fetal monitor read the baby’s heartbeat at a steady one-fifty, no problems there. Isabel watched, then got up and stepped out to get fresh towels for Debbie.

  In the hallway, Marguerite whispered to Keith, “She’s got to deliver, now. She’ll need a unit of blood soon.”

  “Too right,” Keith agreed. “Let’s go: the IV, the sutures, the ether—”

  “Not ether. She’s six weeks early; ether might endanger the baby.”

  “The baby won’t survive anyhow, under these conditions.”

  Marguerite gripped his arm. “Thirty-four weeks—that baby will live, you hear?”

  Keith returned her stare, then looked away. “You’ve got no caudal or epidural agents. Nor the equipment; we’ve discussed this.”

  “There’s lidocaine.”

  Keith put his fingers to his lips, an invisible cigarette, then exhaled slowly. “Lidocaine in the abdominal wall. It’s been done, but it still hurts like hell.”

  The thought of abdominal surgery with only local anesthesia made Isabel feel nauseated, and slightly faint.

  “You ask Debbie,” Marguerite told Keith.

  Keith reentered the birthing room.

  “Start the IV,” Marguerite told Isabel. “Give her the first unit of blood now.” Then she called through the doorway, “Vera, please fetch us water from the cistern. We’ll need cold water, heated water, and wash water.” Fortunately the cistern was full.

  While Isabel inserted Debbie’s IV, Keith wheeled in the operating table, which Nahum had built specially for the hospital many years before. Isabel’s skin tightened involuntarily; the sight of that table brought back difficult memories, especially of Aaron’s last days.

  Vera returned, carrying three pails of water. “Good,” said Marguerite. “Isabel, get that basin to ninety-eight degrees and keep adjusting it, hear?”

  “Yes, Mom.” She poured together hot and cold, squinting at the thermometer until it read correctly. This basin would serve to warm the newborn.

  Marguerite was passing out the surgical gowns and gloves and counting the suture packs. Isabel stared at the pile of sutures as if it were a heap of gold. She had never seen so many catgut sutures used at once.

  “The autoclave must be done,” called Marguerite.

  Vera went out to fetch the sterile instruments from the autoclave. Keith and Carl lifted Debbie onto the operating table, then they moved the bed to the wall to make more room. Marguerite set up a curtain crosswise over Debbie to shelter the operating area. Debbie’s face was pale, and her eyelids fluttered rapidly. But her look was steady, and she nodded to Carl as she held his hand.

  The smell of stale blood was becoming noticeable. Isabel looked at the window, although they probably could not afford to open it and lose the heat.

  There were angelbees outside—not just one or two, but a cluster of them, perhaps a dozen of the floating moons. Why so many? Did they know that something would be different about this birth?

  Vera returned with the instruments wrapped in towels. Keith tried to open them, but then he snapped his gloves off. “It’s no good; my fingers are bloody ice.” He plunged his hands in the pail of hot water. When he was done, Isabel checked the thermometer in the baby basin and added some more hot water.

  “Check her blood pressure one more time,” Marguerite ordered.

  Isabel applied the cuff to Debbie’s arm. The readings were a bit low, but in range.

  Already Keith was wiping the skin, toward the base of the uterus. “A low transverse cut is best,” he muttered. “Let’s hope the placenta’s not anterior.” If the placenta lay too far forward, and he cut into it, Debbie would bleed to death.

  Marguerite was applying the anesthetic. “You should be getting numb now, Debbie. The baby will come out real fast. Afterward, for the stitching up, we’ll give you ether.”

  Debbie nodded. Carl’s fingers were red beneath her clenched hand.

  “Relax, as best you can,” Marguerite advised quietly. “Your breathing should help.” To Isabel, she added, “Ready to strip and clamp the placenta?”

  Isabel nodded. This part she had done before, for the birth of Benjamin Weiss. While Keith would do the cutting and stitching, her mother and she would handle the newborn as usual.

  The blade entered the skin. It sounded rather like Anna Tran snipping denim for her sewing. It made Isabel’s hair stand on end to see skin being cut that way. Beneath Keith’s fingers she mopped up the trickle of blood, while Debbie’s breaths came shorter and faster to manage the pain which the anesthetic did not completely cover.

  “Keep breathing; you can manage.” Carl’s voice sounded higher than usual.

  When the abdominal wall was opened, Debbie cried out several times. Then, quicker than Isabel had anticipated, a miniature person was dangling from between Keith’s fingers, the tiniest baby she had ever seen. She grasped the cord and stripped the extra blood back to the baby, then clamped twice and snipped.

  “You’ve got a daughter.” Marguerite took the baby, syringing out her nose and mouth. Debbie was weeping softly, relieved but still in considerable pain.

  But the baby was silent. Her mouth and eyes were closed, and her limbs hung limp.

  “Breathe, will you.” Marguerite suctioned the nose and mouth, then massaged her face and chest. Then she plunged her into the waiting basin of warm water.

  The tiny face grimaced and choked, then emitted a squeaking cry, and the arms and legs flew out straight. Her color started to pink up, though her fingers were still blue. Isabel stared, transfixed; it was almost as if a dead person had come awake.

  “She’s beautiful,” cried Vera. “I’ve never seen such a lovely newborn.”

  It was true, her head was perfectly round, not misshapen from travel through the birth canal. Her arms and neck had deep folds filled in with white vernix, but the surface of her skin was smooth without a blemish. Que vous êtes belle. Carl came over and touched her hand; the tiny fingers grabbed tight the tip of his own.

  “Sutures, please,” called Keith.

  Isabel hurried back to the operating table where Debbie was being sewn up, asleep now under ether.

  “She’s barely four pounds,” Marguerite estimated, still supporting the baby’s head with her hand.

  “She won’t maintain temperature,” said Keith as he tied the sutures. “You could keep her in the plate incubator from the lab.”

  “You could keep her taped to Debbie’s chest all day,” Marguerite suggested to Carl. “She’ll be kept warm, and convenient for nursing too.”

  “Debbie will have to watch this incision,” Keith warned. Isabel continued to hand him the sutures.

  When the operation was done, Isabel stole away again to see the baby, now asleep wrapped in blankets while Carl held her. “Her head is so round,” Carl mused. The shiny hairless scalp was almost as round as an angelbee. The fontanel, the diamond-shaped patch of skin where the skull plates had not yet fused beneath, was larger than usual due to prematurity; at just the right angle, you could see the skin move up and down with the heartbeat.

  Then Isabel saw something not quite right. There was a small spot, at the crown, where the skin had failed to close. The spot was white, like the bones beyond the Wall.

  “Mom, look at this. Is that the bare skull?”

  Her mother turned to speak; but Carl snatched the bundle away. “I don’t care what it is, do you hear?” His voice was unnaturally high, and his face had gone white. “Whatever’s wrong—you won’t kill her.”

  Vera, too, was staring
at Marguerite, her mouth open, her eyelids fluttering with terror. Isabel looked from one to another, completely bewildered. What had she said? Why would they expect such a thing of her mother?

  “The baby’s fine,” Marguerite insisted soothingly, “just fine. The scalp will close in time, there’ll be a bald spot, you won’t even notice. For God’s sake, Carl.”

  The room was cleaned out, and Debbie was sleeping with her baby. Marguerite stopped and rubbed her forehead. “You’d better turn in, Isabel.”

  Isabel looked up. “Mother, why did Carl…say that? Why would he think such a thing?”

  Marguerite sank into a chair. Her shoulders drooped, but her eyes were alert again. “He was worried sick; one always is. It was all right this time, thank God.”

  “But what if it wasn’t ‘all right’?”

  She paused, withdrawn in thought. “Perhaps I go further than I should. Certainly further than I was trained. But, God knows, we have so many defects since the Death Year. The minor ones, like Benjamin’s heart murmur, we cope with. The severe ones—we haven’t the funds nor the staff to maintain them.”

  “But you’re a Quaker. You can’t just…”

  “What would you do with a baby born without a cerebral cortex? Or its spine open halfway down? Or a heart defect that would kill it within a year?”

  “But how would you know that? You’re only a doctor; how would you know for sure?” She thought of the tiny graves in the cemetery, supposedly stillborn.

  Marguerite shook her head slowly. “Somebody has to decide. I’ve always prayed it wouldn’t be me. Now at least Keith is here, so it will no longer be me alone.”

  “What about Peace Hope?” Isabel shook uncontrollably. “Would you have killed her?”

  Marguerite hesitated, and Isabel remembered, who else had delivered Peace Hope, after all? “I—I thought of it.” Marguerite swallowed, and her throat constricted. “Just a knob of a head with a trunk, like a clothespin doll; who wouldn’t have thought of it? But then her eyes—I looked at her, and she looked back, do you see? She must have been the most alert newborn I’ve ever seen.”

  “But you thought of it.”

  “What do you think it’s like to be a doctor? Wasn’t Keith ready to write off that baby to save Debbie?”

  “You wanted to kill Peace Hope! You’re a murderer, just like Dad!” With a choked sob, she pounded downstairs, grabbed her jacket and bicycle and headed outside.

  Isabel huddled with Peace Hope under the blanket in Peace Hope’s bed, the air cold enough to freeze the drinking water in the pitcher. The candle on the desk sent bizarre shadows bouncing over the walls, and the odor of beeswax came over in waves. Isabel swallowed, her tongue swollen from sobbing. Her head ached from exhaustion, but she knew she could not sleep.

  Peace Hope sighed. “Poor Dr. Chase. I always wondered what it must be like.”

  “But she tried to kill you. Don’t you hear what I’m saying?”

  “It might have been better if she had.”

  Startled, Isabel turned her head beneath the blanket. “You can’t say that, Scatterbrain. You can’t really mean it.” She thought uneasily, it was hard to imagine life without arms and legs. Yet it was even harder to imagine life in Gwynwood without Peace Hope.

  “No, I don’t really. Not most of the time, anyway.” Peace Hope smiled briefly, and her head turned out of the shadow. “How did your mother take it, when you found out?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Isabel had not really thought about this. “She’s still a murderer.”

  “Well I don’t know. That’s a bit simple, I think.”

  “It’s the truth.” But Isabel was beginning to think she did not quite know what the truth was anymore. She pressed her hand over her aching forehead. What would Keith say, she wondered. Marguerite seemed to think that Keith would do the same, that he, too, could take a life and call it kindness. That was not how it was supposed to be. The “milk of human kindness” was supposed to prevent murder, not excuse it. She remembered Teacher Becca in high school, reading aloud from Macbeth and from Midsummer Night’s Dream, making the voices of witches and fairies come alive. Her eyes filled with tears again.

  “The truth is, your mother saved the baby,” said Peace Hope. “A good thing it came out okay. I’ll bet your mother sure is relieved.”

  She winced. In fact, Marguerite must be worried sick after Isabel had run off into the night. She would not get to sleep, and she needed sleep after the ordeal of that operation.

  Isabel turned over and buried her face in the pillow, but it was no use. “I guess I’d better go home.”

  The moon waxed nearly full above the house as Isabel pulled up on her bicycle, the headlamp sending its pulsing light across the familiar drive. The house was dark. Several angelbees still hovered outside the room where Debbie had given birth. Isabel paused at the sight of the hateful creatures, thinking that with inhuman blindness they had caused the Earth to be poisoned, cursing the birthdays of all who came after.

  Upstairs her room was empty and quiet except for Peewee’s wheel. Outside the closed window she could see her two followers, one angelbee, then another, their eyespots staring toward her. One of them was close to the window, much closer than usual. It was the daughter cell, the one with the rounded eyespot.

  As Isabel caught her breath, an idea came to her. Quietly she closed the bedroom door. She turned on her fluorescent study lamp, which would not scare them off because its light was mostly “cold.” Then she went to the window and pushed it up, with some effort as it had been closed since summer. Then she stepped aside.

  Slowly but surely, the angelbee meandered toward the window and moved inside. Isabel rushed back to the window and slammed it shut again.

  The angelbee floated before her dresser unhurriedly, rotating its eyespot down. It seemed not to care to stay away from her; in fact, it moved toward her, until its eyespot nearly touched her nose. She raised both hands and brought them together. The tips of her fingers caught the bright globe.

  Its surface felt dry and taut as a drumhead; she had the sense of something trembling beneath her fingers. With a surge of anger, Isabel pressed her hands inward as hard as she could.

  Her hands collapsed in. There was a flash; a wave of pain burned across her face and hands. She screamed and fell to the floor, holding her face in her hands. Before her eyes all was blank, not the black of night, but an empty grayness, like the face of a granite tombstone before it was chiseled.

  “Light, turn on the light!” Isabel screamed. “Please, a light!”

  She heard the door open, and voices, and hands reached her; her father, her mother, somewhere nearby.

  “A light—please, somebody…”

  “But the light is on,” her father’s voice told her.

  XVIII

  ISABEL SAT IN the examination room, where Marguerite and Keith had spent hours examining her eyes, pushing, probing, shining lights which she could not see.

  “Flash blindness usually recovers within hours,” said Marguerite out of the grayness. Isabel figured it must be midday by now, although she could not bring herself to ask.

  “That’s not it at all,” said Keith, his voice coming from farther off. “Her skin shows no sign of superficial burns. Some substance from within the punctured angelbee must have poisoned her retina.”

  At the sound of that, Isabel felt a cold shock, and her head reeled.

  “You don’t know for sure yet,” Marguerite said quickly. Keith did not say more.

  “There must be other cases?” Isabel asked, trying to recover her calm. “Surely it’s happened before?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” said Keith. “I never heard of anyone who grabbed a space cockie barehanded. When somebody pops one with a rifle, the sleep-fog pours out of the Pylon until it fills the city. After three days people start waking up, but the fog takes weeks to dissipate completely.”

  “The angelbees never kill humans?”

  “Not directly. You ge
t traffic accidents in the fog; people get run over by bikes.”

  “My eyes,” Isabel said. “Why retaliate against eyes?”

  “Angelbees act like eyes,” said Marguerite abruptly. “Looking, spying; but they never touch us.”

  “Maybe they are just eyes,” said Isabel. “Maybe they take off their arms and legs, like Peace Hope, and leave them inside their spacecraft.”

  “Eye for an eye—that’s a good one,” said Keith with a chuckle. “Nobody’s ever looked inside a spacecraft and come back to tell what’s there. I can see it, arms and legs stacked neatly in a row—”

  “No—the spacecraft-thing is itself the arms and legs!” Isabel exclaimed. “Angelbees and it, in radio contact, just like the fetal monitor with its sensor.” The idea mushroomed in her mind, exploding with possibility. Was the “spacecraft” really an organism, something like a crustacean with an exoskeleton? One of those spiders in the Life book had looked like a lunar module. The new picture of Earth’s masters came into focus: not a myriad of legless angelbees, but a few central “keepers” with invisible tentacles of radio waves…

  Everything was still invisible to Isabel, she recalled again with a shock. “How are the tests coming out? Did you find what’s the matter yet?”

  There was silence. For an instant Isabel panicked, thinking, what if she had lost her hearing, too?

  Marguerite said, “The tests are done for now, Isabel.”

  The tests were done, and there was no answer. She might be blind forever, for the rest of her life. Blind like Becca.

  Isabel groped her way back to her bedroom, running her hand along the walls. Then she ran her hand across the worn old coverlet onto the grainy wood of the bedstead. Warmth suffused her arm, and she knew it must be sunlight from the window. How odd it was to feel her body set firmly in her old, familiar room, while within her head her mind spun helplessly in blank emptiness.

  Suddenly she squeezed her eyelids shut. If only it would get darker, that would mean that at least some light had been getting in. But the grayness did not change. The inaccessibility of dark was nearly as appalling as the absence of light.