Red Clocks(72)

“You are a very ignorant white girl,” said Yasmine.

She counts every tile in the upstairs bathroom so she won’t think about it.

Saturday morning she reminds Mom that after the aquarium she’ll spend the night at Ash’s—see you tomorrow. Yes, she packed her retainer.

When Ash delivers her to the church parking lot, it seems Ro/Miss is not in the greatest mood. Cold faced, quiet. The daughter offers money for gas and Ro/Miss rolls her eyes. How will they find topics for conversation? Thankfully Ro/Miss turns the radio on. The daughter sinks down in the seat as they drive through town: what would it look like, a student in a teacher’s car? Think about Newville gossip, not about the procedure.

Passing a logged hillside, gashed and barren, the stumps like headstones, the daughter sees the shining fir floors in her house. Smells smoke on herself. Chimneylina. One day she’ll quit, after she’s gotten her marine-biology degree and is working in cetacean situations. Her future will include a study of whale-harming toxins dumped by humans into the sea. A trip to the Faroe Islands to disrupt the slaughter of pilot whales, who are technically dolphins. A trip to a Japanese temple that sings requiems for the whales’ souls, gives names to the fetuses inside the captured mothers.

She digs both thumbs into her belly, house of the tufting, clumping, unnamed infiltrator. Please let them not leave it sitting around in a bucket.





The motto of the Royal Society of London: NULLIUS IN VERBA. Take nobody’s word for it.





THE BIOGRAPHER


Mattie’s directions bring them to a quiet narrow street in southeast Portland. Flat-roofed ranch homes, yellow lawns. The house they want is hidden by vine-clogged chain link and a live oak dangling with metal figurines. The front door can’t be seen through the bushes. The fence gate is padlocked.

“Let’s go around back.” The biographer trudges ahead, up the gravel driveway. Between the garage and the house is a high wooden gate, locked as well.

“Did I mess up?” says Mattie. “I double-checked the address five times.”

“Let’s knock, at least.”

Before either of them can, the gate opens. “I saw you on the security cameras,” says a young woman with long-tailed cat eyeliner, ink-swirled arms. “You’re Delphine?”

“Yeah,” says Mattie. “And this is my—”

“Mom,” blurts the biographer. They’ll take better care of her if the mother is watching.

Mattie stares red-faced at the ground.

“I’m L. Let’s get into the van.” The woman nods at the garage.

“Van?” they say together.

“We don’t do the procedures here at headquarters. We use temporary sites that keep changing. For safety reasons. And I need to ask you to wear masks during the drive.”

The biographer laughs. “Are you serious?”

L. drags up the garage’s roll door. “Yeah, we take the surveillance state and male-supremacist legislation pretty seriously. Call us crazy.”

“No, it’s fine,” says Mattie.

“Seat belts, please. Then I’ll give you the masks. Did you lock your car?”

“Aye, aye!” says the biographer.

Mattie turns from the passenger seat to give her a little frown, and the world is flipped, the order reversed.

The cotton eye mask feels absurd. The van’s windows are tinted dark already. But the biographer wishes not to embarrass Mattie further.

“In your phone intake,” says L., “you estimated you’d be about twenty-one weeks by now?” The van rattles over a speed bump. “Under optimal conditions, a late second-trimester abortion would require a minimum of two days, to dilate your cervix adequately before the evacuation, but these are not optimal conditions.”

A bedside manner almost as delightful as Kalbfleisch’s.

L. goes over a few more things—ultrasound, sedative, anesthesia. The biographer scarcely listens: she would really love to be elsewhere. The best she can do is be a body near Mattie, a body able to drive her home. At the word “speculum” she flinches, feeling the many specula Kalbfleisch slid into her. She counts her in?breaths, counts her out-breaths.

Mattie has no questions for L.

Cash only. Pay after. No forms to sign, for obvious reasons, but they do keep confidential patient records, using aliases.

“Delphine, your name for our files will be Ida.”

“Okay,” says Mattie.

“Hey, Mom,” calls L., “any questions back there?”

“Not right now,” says the biographer.

They take off their masks and step out of the van into the overgrown backyard of a bungalow. The sky is high and quiet. L.’s hands on their backs, hurrying them. Next to the screen door hangs a piece of wood painted with black letters: POLYPHONTE COLLECTIVE. The biographer strains to summon her Greek mythology. Polyphonte—Aphrodite—Artemis?

L. opens three locks with three keys and ushers them into a bright, purple-walled kitchen that smells like chili. Books, spice jars, pots of cactus, a boardful of yellow peppers in mid-chop.

“Upstairs,” says their ferrywoman.

A bedroom’s bed has been replaced by an exam table whose stirrups wear red knitted socks. Next to it stands an ultrasound machine. For an eerie beat the biographer thinks it is she who will climb on the table, press her heels into the stirrups, wait for the blue-lubed wand to read the shapes inside her. You will feel a slight pressure.