Future Home of the Living God(17)

“Didn’t anyone come with you?” one asks.

“The baby did.”

“Just pull your shirt up,” says another in a gratingly musical voice. I am on edge because who wouldn’t be? And also, I am suddenly self-conscious about being so alone among these strangers. Apparently other women bring friends, maybe even a husband.

A brawny curly-headed blonde helps me onto the table and I tuck my shirt up underneath my breasts. The doctor, tall and businesslike, unsmiling, enters and shakes my hand. He sits on a stool next to the swivel chair just at my right thigh, where a technician, another young blond woman, but sinewy, more serious and formal than the first one, touches a keyboard, adjusting a computer screen.

“Let’s get going,” says the doctor.

The technician puts a dollop of clear gel on my skin and holds the probe like a fat pencil. I know the probe contains traducers that produce and receive sound. The machine is already producing sound waves at frequencies of 1 to 20 million cycles per second. Impossible of course to hear. Propped on my elbows, I watch as the computer interprets the signals bouncing off you, a modest white mound in the dim air.

“This will be cold,” says the technician, but it isn’t very cold. I put the attendants out of my mind. My pulse jumps. I am thrilled to be exactly here. I decide that I have come alone on purpose, in order to meet you in the privacy of my heart.

The technician moves the wand carefully, stopping twice. “There you are,” she says as she discovers you. She rotates the traducer to one side of my stomach and keeps moving it. At first there is only the gray uterine blur, and then suddenly the screen goes charcoal and out of the murk your hand wavers. It is detailed, three-dimensional, and I glimpse tiny wrinkles in your palm and wrinkle bracelets around your wrist before your hand disappears into the screen’s fuzz. There is something about your hand, just a feeling, and I am upset for a moment. Just a hand—but a sense of clarity and power. I want to get off the table. I want to say Enough, no more, but at the same time I want to see you again. The way you waved, just that second, and disappeared—I am so overcome that I can hardly breathe.

“Can you tell the gender?” I ask. “Can you see?”

But nobody in the room is listening to me, nobody hears. I see the arch of your spine, a tiny white snake, and again your hand flips open, pressing at the darkness. The technician touches out knee bones, an elbow. Then she goes in through the thicket of your ribs. The heart, she says. I see the hollows of the chambers, gray mist, then the valves of your heart slapping up and down like a little man playing a drum. Your whole heart is on the screen and then the technician does something with the machine so that your blood is made of light moving in and out of your heart. The outflow is golden fire and the inflow is blue fire. I see the fire of life flickering all through your body.

I whisper, or sigh, and I want to cry out. The room yawns open. I have the sensation time has shifted, that we are in a directionless flow of time that goes back down infinite tunnels and corridors, as if this one room in the hospital has opened out onto the farthest stretches of the universe.

“Can you do that again?” I murmur, but the doctor is very intent now, pointing and nodding.

“There,” he says, and the technician clicks something.

“Can you tell if I have a boy or a girl?” I ask, louder. But no one answers. The technician is intent, focused utterly on what she sees. They are inside of your head now, peering up from beneath your jaw and then over into the structure of your brain, which I see as an icy swirl of motion held in a perfect circle of white ash. It looks to me as though your thoughts are arranging and rearranging already, and as I imagine this I also know that there is something wrong, something off. The atmosphere has changed; the doctor is silent. The picture is fixed. They are looking at it, and looking. They will not stop looking.

“Boy or girl?” My throat is scratchy and dry. I see nothing on the screen, now, just white marks. Still, they can’t seem to take their eyes away until I cry out, I actually yell.

“What the fuck do I have?”

They both turn and I see that they were trying to think of what to say to me.

“We’ve got one,” says the doctor in a careful voice. I hear the rustle of the technician stepping closer. The doctor’s eyes are wide and staring.

A crack opens deep inside, a dark place, and fear seeps into my heart. I am suddenly extremely calm.

“It’s Down syndrome or some kind of virus or a throwback . . . something bad.”

“No, absolutely not.” He smiles now, reassuringly and even with some excitement. “It’s all of the measurements. The skull, the vertebrae, the bones, the hands, all of the measurements.”

I swear I see the glimmer of tears in his eyes.

“Measurements? What does that mean?” I ask.

The doctor takes the hand of the eager-looking technician and gently draws the wand away from my body. He is a kind man, I see now, a blurrily normal man about my Songmaker father’s age, with a square, worn face and blue eyes lighted in the screen’s glow.

“What that means is we need to keep you here,” he says. The doctor casts his eyes down and sends the attendants away. Once they are out of the room, he thrusts a copy of the ultrasound into an envelope, throws it at me. He jumps away feverishly and tells me to get dressed.

“Hurry,” he says.