Gaby: ducking autocorrect.
Gaby: DUCKING autocorrect.
Gaby: [Munch Scream emoji] It autocorrected “Stalin” to “Stalin”
Gaby: OMFG
Gaby: “srsly”
The nurse called Dorothy’s first and last name, which felt excessive and possibly illegal, perhaps even a HIPAA violation, and Dorothy dropped her phone into her bag without saying goodbye. The nurse ushered her to the scale in the hallway, where Dorothy quickly removed her shoes before she could get tricked into being heavier than she was. In the cold, small exam room she was bound with the pressurized cuff, which squeezed and sighed wearily. The nurse—not the one with the streak who had danced into the reception area, but her stocky, brusque colleague, with a face hard as granite—roughly returned the cuff to its handle on the wall, where it again resumed the odd, artificial appearance of a gallery display, and told Dorothy to undress and wait.
The purple robe grazed the tops of her thighs. The short hairs on her legs rose and bristled like a creature readying itself to fight. At the first appointment there had been a circle on the screen, pulsing, like an amoeba. Rog had been there. He had been standing somewhere in the background to her side while the doctor pushed the jellied wand inside. They had silently watched the quivering circle blob around in the moonless dark. It felt eerie and sacred. They were bearing witness to primeval genesis, reactions in the hot swamp, the dark art of cellular division. Dorothy hadn’t known what it was supposed to look like so she didn’t think that anything was wrong. She didn’t necessarily think anything was right, either. She wasn’t thinking about things being right or wrong. It was like looking at a math equation. It signified truth but you didn’t catch the details. It seemed plausible that life would begin this way, as a circle palpitating in the shadows.
Then the doctor pulled the wand out and handed Dorothy a napkin to clean herself with. It wasn’t like she had been fucking a phallus-shaped camera that inconsiderately came inside her, but it wasn’t not like that. The screen went black. We have to wait and see, the doctor said. They should come back in a week.
“Was that not what we were supposed to see?” asked Rog.
The doctor shook her head. She wasn’t sure. It might be that the ovum was blighted or it might be that their timing was off. If the timing was off then everything was fine but they were one week earlier, development-wise, than they had believed. That would explain the shape, or lack thereof. For weeks Dorothy had been anticipating tests, genetics, sequencing, the whole ethical quagmire of defects and norms. But there might not be anything to test.
Her urine had registered pregnancy. The blood draw concurred. The right chemicals were surging. Dorothy did not know whether to respect this chemical optimism or to condemn its stupidity. One had to be pregnant in several ways, it appeared, to be pregnant at all: Pregnancy proper involved the manufacture of hormones and the development of a biosphere as well as the ontogenesis of a life-form acquiring mass, gills, limbs, a frontal cortex, ears, and genitals. A baby grew a distinctively enlarged forehead, tiny hands. But it was possible for a body to thicken and prepare an environment for an organism that chose not to develop. It was possible for a body to be pregnant without a pregnancy developing.
She passed another nauseated week ordering tonic water and lime in a whisper. At the next week’s ultrasound, the embryo had made no progress. There was no head, no fetal cranium, only the same amoeba-like circle. It squiggled with false breath. Dorothy was a week older but the ovum was the same age. Circle of life, Dorothy thought, and then that song was stuck in her head for the rest of the day.
“We need to get it out,” the doctor had said. It.
“What would have happened to me in the time before sonograms?” Dorothy had asked. She always wanted to know how she would have fared in a pre-technological moment. She imagined being poisoned by an embryo rotting inside her while she baked bread, martyrishly, to nourish the five other children who would survive in penury after her death. The doctor said she would probably have hemorrhaged at some point, which might have been dangerous but not necessarily fatal. She said not to wait too long, because she still might hemorrhage.
“Some women prefer to do the procedure here,” the doctor said.
“If I do it at home, will I see a tiny hand or foot come out?” Dorothy asked.
The doctor said no. “Remember?” she added gently. “It’s just tissue.”
So that, in a sense, was the whole problem. The lack of hands and feet.
* * *
—
Now she was back for the follow-up. As promised, no extremities, no “parts” of any kind, had been expelled. Dorothy pushed in and out against the maroon socks that covered the metal footrests. Were they fleece, future ocean waste, and did it matter, and to whom? She lifted a leg to cross over her other leg and some of the paper on the chair came up with her leg and ripped. Was she too damp or did paper always stick to skin? The longer she sat there, the more she felt like an unwitting participant in a sociological study. She had not read the release forms carefully enough. What did they say? Was she supposed to get dressed and leave? There was no clock in the room. It was later than she thought. What did all this waiting prove—was it a test of patience, or was there a moment when a person had to cut her losses and accept that she had been abandoned, God was dead, etc.? She hopped off the table, and while she was crouched down, holding the useless cotton robe against her breasts, aware even in her solitude that the robe would not cover her if she bent too far over, the door opened. Dorothy hadn’t located her phone so she didn’t have to drop it.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” said the doctor.
Dorothy’s doctor had a face like a sunflower, round and bursting open, and a musical voice. Dorothy trusted her more than she had ever trusted a doctor. She was Gaby’s doctor, too. Gaby had been horrified by the doctors Dorothy had seen when she was on her grad student insurance—the student dentists, even the specialists. Once, in the throes of a six-week-long urinary tract infection contracted in a rare period of promiscuity, an off-campus urologist had commanded Dorothy to open her legs, asked her what she did for a living, and then, without waiting for a reply, inserted a catheter. “It’s quicker than having you pee in a cup,” he said by way of explanation, “and less messy.” One leak made it harder to control any others and the tears had rolled down Dorothy’s face, lukewarm and sloppy, and her nose ran, too, as her own urine, no longer under her volition, flowed into a bag, while the doctor scolded her. “Don’t you urinate after intercourse?” he had asked, and Dorothy would never forget the way he said “intercourse,” it was so foul and bleak. The truth was no, she had not leapt out of bed to urinate after intercourse, she had instead enjoyed the feeling of being held by another human being, and this was what she got for it: burning pain and humiliation. She had searched the nurse’s eyes for sympathy, assuming a woman would come to her aid, but the nurse had only frowned and, when the bag was filled with its incriminatingly yellow liquid, sealed it with a loud and authoritative zip. In that waiting room they had not played any music at all.
* * *
—
The ultrasound machine hummed and whined to life. The ob-gyn reached for the lights without standing up. Once she sat down she never stood up. She did everything while stationed on the wheeled backless stool that kept her at, roughly, baby-catching height. It seemed like it would be awkward to be rolling around down there but there was something dignified and smooth in all of her movements.
Again, as she had done on each of the previous visits, she slowly and firmly pushed the jellied wand up into the cavity of Dorothy’s body. Dorothy tried not to clench her jaw but did anyway; she exhaled a little, trying to make more room. On the monitor rustled shadows resembling tangled sheaves of seagrass. These were not clots but they were thicknesses, tissue strands, and they still needed to be co
axed out. They were lingering—malingering, even.
“It will be fine,” the doctor said in her high, musical voice. “If you’re worried, you can come back in for another scan, but it should be fine.”
“You said the bleeding would only last ten days,” Dorothy said. She was trying to be funny but it came out petulant, more accusing than wry, and worried.
“Those are averages,” the doctor said, in a tone that was not condescending but matter-of-fact, free of condemnation, totally forgiving, absolutely accepting. It was the voice of a mother—not Dorothy’s mother, but someone’s mother, or someone’s idea of one. It was the voice of her therapist. Her first one. Not her second one. Her second therapist was not accepting.
“Sometimes it takes longer than ten days,” the doctor added.
The doctor was a human like any other, like Dorothy herself. She could not repair everything that was broken. Her voice and its unanxious capaciousness indicated to Dorothy that the relationship of the average to the individual was mysterious and balanced; to arrive at an average bleed of ten days some people had to bleed much longer. By exceeding the average, Dorothy’s life was intimately connected to it. By bleeding more than average Dorothy was making it possible for others to bleed less.
Voices from the nurses’ desk filtered into the room: who was doing what this weekend, who needed to “leave a sample.” A burst of laughter. Inside the exam room the light was harsh. A framed reproduction on the wall featured a large pregnant woman in a blue tunic holding her potato-shaped head like she was about to pull it off her neck. There was a hole in the middle of her shirt that revealed a purple fetus. The fetus floated head up, in breech. Poor upright baby, born of headless woman!
“Should I have gotten the in-office procedure?” Dorothy asked. “The vacuum?”
“If this were to happen again we would recommend it,” said the doctor, and Dorothy marveled at the delicacy with which she pronounced that “if.” There was no hint of probability, no whiff of omen, no blame. Where did people learn to speak this way, in flat neutral statements? “You’re a bleeder.”
* * *
—
In one sense there was nothing in there. A little snow. Some dust, really. Some uterus dust that needed a good sweeping.
But it wouldn’t be right to call it empty. Empty indicated something clean and hard and final. It looked like a black hole on the screen but Dorothy knew enough to know that the density was sponge; it was soft in there, things got stuck.
The shape on the screen, the shadow, was undeniably Dorothy’s. The wand was inside her and no one else, the sound waves could be bouncing around nothing except her interior walls. And yet the picture felt distant, like the wand was a radio receiving signals from deep space or deep underwater rather than from herself. She was too shallow to have an interior this deep. She felt like an observer of some other reality, looking not into a mirror but through a portal or at the page of an old illustrated book. It was hard to read; it was like a map she couldn’t orient herself to or a medieval manuscript, and she needed someone else to explain what it had to do with her. It was nothing like her favorite scene in The Magic Mountain, of Hans Castorp having his X-ray taken:
And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness—and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him: a hard thing, this ore with which man adorns a body predestined to melt away beneath it, so that it can be free again and move on to yet other flesh that may bear it for a while. With the eyes of his Tienappel forebear—penetrating, clairvoyant eyes—he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. And he made the same face he usually made when listening to music—a rather dull, sleepy, and devout face, his head tilted toward one shoulder, his mouth half-open.
Dorothy did not feel, eyeing the onscreen uterus, vacant of all but a few reluctant bloodstrings, that she was looking at her own death, or a premonition of her death, but something more like a foreclosure—an abandoned or evacuated property. Someone had left in a hurry, a criminal or a deviant person, who had not taken the time to properly clean up after herself. It was a scene roped off with yellow tape, shot by a security camera for an episode of crime television. Of course, Hans Castorp had been looking at bones, so maybe that explained the gravity of his feelings, the concreteness of his epiphany, his sense that he was meeting his own future self. His confrontation was with the very structure of the, his, human form, and with, no less, the hand—the part of the body that reaches out, that is manipulative, active, external, that writes and drives and builds and prays and feeds. The hand. Dorothy was looking at a spongy interior, a disused room, a warehouse for a shell company, a cavern or cave. She knew from her undergraduate education that the shadows projected on the walls of a cave are never to be trusted, that they lack the reality of flesh, and of philosophy. If the womb was a grave it was also a junk drawer. How strange, too, that these images of herself, and the images of the unborn that she had seen on signs growing up, that she herself had glued onto posterboard and reinforced with cardboard, were drawn by sounds. The sounds hit some resistance, some boundary between densities, and bounced back in image. They were echoes that had faces. Hans Castorp had not had to reckon with that synesthetic paradox.
She had chanted while they carried the sound pictures, the aural images, her exuberant preteen voice merging in festival with the grown-ups around her: “It’s a child, not a choice.” Dorothy had never understood how the same women who were vociferous defenders of abortion rights could festoon their refrigerators and social media feeds with fetal photography. It must be that other people were more secure in their power to declare when and whether a life was a human. If you wanted it, it was a baby and you could email it around to your friends; if you didn’t, it was an act of violence to be asked to look at it. Dorothy basically agreed with this position or believed that people had the right to have this position but she couldn’t summon the will to assume it herself. It wasn’t that it was incoherent so much as it was overconfident. And what about the joy with which women greet their pregnancies? Was that protesting too much? Didn’t everyone feel that it was basically disgusting, the way that a parasite burrows inside you, quietly making you ill while it goes about acquiring a soul and the legal status of a human? What kind of loss was it for one of these creatures to fail to progress, and what was the appropriate feeling to have in response?
It awed her, not only the doctor’s proximity to this technology, but the casual way she manipulated the probe and the screen. The doctor had a deep knowledge of the machine’s ways, a practiced ease of handling; she seemed not overly impressed by her power to freeze motion, to turn sound into sight. Unlike a priest overseeing a rite, she had no deep respect or hesitation at the foot of the almighty.
“I’d like a printout,” Dorothy heard herself saying. “A photo.”
The doctor turned to her too quickly to mask the surprise on her petaled face.
“We don’t usually do that,” she said, “in situations like these.”
Dorothy hated to disappoint her but could not give in.
“This might be my only chance for a sonogram of myself,” she said. “Is it an insurance thing? What does it cost?”
The doctor looked sad, like she had expected more of Dorothy—expected her to act in accordance with whatever norms this situation contained. To be disappointed but not grieving, to be interested but not morbid. To understand her situation as a medical event, and not to ask for a souvenir.
But without anot
her word—without a word about expense, or insurance, or taste, or decorum—she tapped some buttons and the computer spat out one grainy dark photo.
“Thank you,” said Dorothy.
The wand slid out and Dorothy relaxed. The doctor flipped the lights back on and Dorothy scooted her hips off the end of the chair. She pushed up from the forced recumbent position.
“Call if you have any questions,” the doctor said, and shut the door.
Alone, Dorothy studied the glossy square of paper. Frozen, it lacked the mystery of the moving image; the trails were dead pixels, was all. She cleaned the translucent goop from her vagina as best she could and threw the wad of tissues in the open trash can; thinking better of it, she lifted them up with a finger and stuffed them into the biohazard can. She dressed and left the room quickly, though not before folding the purple cotton robe. In the waiting room Dorothy felt the eyes of the other patients longing to congratulate her. On the street she joined the crowd, where each one of the people she saw and all the people she didn’t see, the ones scuttling through the buildings above and burrowed on the rails underground, had grown—been grown—inside of a mother. All of these people, every one, they all had begun as a pulsing circle that, within days, sprouted limbs, and later, intentions. They had all been inside the inflatable petri dish of the mother and they had all gotten out. In doing so, all had caused their mothers pain. All had caused their mothers bleeding. Some had nearly killed their mothers. Yet here they were, walking around in their confusion of attire, unsure how to dress for the temperatures that rose and fell without warning, engaged in pursuits noble and unredeemed, these grown-up emergency cesareans, these prolapsed uteruses, these givers of preeclampsia who had, most of them, and remarkably autonomously, all things considered, acquired mobility, language, and the ability to perceive what sensations came from inside their bodies and which were the province of the outside.
The Life of the Mind Page 8
