No One Is Talking About This (29)
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Oh, she dared the geneticist to try to tell her who Proteus was. She dared him to hold out his thick, miracle-roughened, eminent hands and mime the changeable water slipping through them, there and then not there. If he did, she would slap the table with all her might and say, “Who do you think you’re talking to? I was a mythology girl.”
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The baby was the first and only case that had ever been diagnosed in utero. The excitement in the room was as palpable as an apple, for the tree of knowledge had suddenly produced an orange. “Still,” the doctors urged them finally, “don’t go home and look this up.” That was the difference between the old generation and the new, though. She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die.
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“But the simulation is 3% more efficient when bad things happen to good people!” a user named BaconFetus wrote on a forum where they were avidly discussing another Proteus case, this one a woman whose legs had grown back after being amputated. “And look on the bright side,” someone responded. “Like hey! More legs!”
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People went to pinewood shacks at the edge of town, she told the baby, as she played brass music to her sister’s stomach. People went to nightclubs and slouched together between palms, and slid silver flasks out of their back pockets. It was a terrible age, she told the baby. The best players were black and it was Jim Crow. The best players were Jewish and it was World War II. But the horns played past some eternal curfew; the horns lasted as long as anyone wanted to dance. The horns seemed to say, I am here, I am here.
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An art therapist showed up at the house, sat at the kitchen table, and began unpacking her pens and pastels and watercolors with the pretty irrelevance of a girl poking a daisy into the barrel of a gun. “Art?” she wanted to cry out. “You think art can help with this, you fucking hippie?”
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Her sister clinging tight to her at midnight, her belly molten-hot like the center of the earth, the breath pouring out of her like the atmosphere of Venus, planet of love, and saying, “Maybe . . . she will help us . . . find out about things.”
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Her sister spoke of them often, the Numbers; she spoke of how often things go right, how human replication was a machine for things mostly going right. When considering the vast waterfall of data in the baby’s exome sequencing, for instance, it was impossible not to think that there was some power of gravity, a magnet, that the drops of mercury mostly flew together, the flock cohered into a single wing. The Numbers, mostly, did not get sick, stayed well.
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She could try to pray. She could put on a white nightgown, kneel down, and fold her hands—though she doubted that her cries would be heard, considering how recently she had written in the portal that jesus was a thot and a hoe.
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“I cannot see the good in this,” her mother whispered in the small sheltered airspace of the car, where they had taken to having controlled mutual outbursts as soon as they left the house. Her shoulders rounded once more over the steering wheel, same shape as her grandmother’s hump. Last night they had watched slides and eaten popcorn, and amid the warm glowing agates of 1976, she had seen her teenaged mother walking toward the camera in a bathing suit, with the same flat stomach her sister had had, before—standing at the window in nothing but a Bengals hat and a thong.
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This is what happened: they knew someone. They knew someone at the hospital and so the tall stack of her sister’s paperwork rose to the top like cream. When the Ethics Committee signed off finally on a thirty-five-week delivery, the female doctor, in silk headscarf and rose-gold Michael Kors watch, the doctor who might now be barred from the country, the doctor who was not allowed at any point to mention termination, the doctor who must have felt a ping in her lower belly the moment we lost the Supreme Court, the doctor actually wept.
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She thought of women in grape-dark business suits with their hair pulled back, testifying in front of Senate committees. The faces of the senators were always comfortably closed against them, like doors on a federal holiday. Because the worst-case scenarios had happened to them, the women must have done something to deserve it. They knew nothing about this period when we were inside the great biceps and just before it flexed, when we were not yet the people it had happened to.
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Dark stock photo of an elderly ob-gyn crouched between a pregnant woman’s legs, eating a large and luxurious sandwich.
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All along the walls of the hospital were memorial tiles, which must have been cheap enough that even poorer families could afford them. Excusing herself from the waiting room, she would sneak out to the corridors and obsessively photograph the tiles, many of which included terrible drawings. Ronald McDonald giving a thumbs-up—to what? She shivered. A frightening large toad named BIG BILLY. A picture of a baby in a full feather headdress, dead in the year 1971, when that sort of thing was still fine.