Red Clocks (12 page)

She wipes her wet hands, pulls up her jeans, sits back down on the toilet. During this minute or longer, while the digital display blinks—it will turn into an empty circle or a smiley-faced circle—the biographer sings the egg-coaxing song. “I may be alone, I may be a crone, but fuck you, I can
still ovulate!”

She checks: still blinking.

Woman who is thin and ugly. Withered old woman. Cruel and ugly old woman. Witch-like woman. Stock character in fairy tale. Woman over forty. From the Old Northern French
caroigne
(“carrion” or “cantankerous woman”) and from the Middle Dutch
croonje
(“old ewe”).

Still blinking.

Through the bathroom wall come shrieks of girls whose ovaries are young
and juicy, crammed with eggs.

Still blinking.

What is the total number of human eggs in this building right now?

Still blinking.

How many of the human eggs in this building right now will get sperm pricked, cracked open, to produce another human?

She checks: smiley face!

Bloom of delight in her ribs.

I may be forty-two, but I can still fucking ovulate.

“Hello, yes, I’m calling because
I got my LH surge today—Okay, sure …” Holding, holding. “Yes, hi, this is Roberta Stephens … Yes, right … And I surged today … Yeah … And I’m using donor sperm so I wanted to—Okay, sure …” Holding, holding, bell shrilling; that was the second bell; she’s late for her own class. “Okay … Yes, I’ve got more than one donor in storage, but I’d like you to use number 9072.”

Donor semen is frozen shortly
after collection and thawed shortly before insemination. In between, millions of sperm lie arrested, aslant, their genetic material paused. Tomorrow morning, before she arrives, the clinic staff will thaw a vial of 9072 (Rock Climber Beautiful Sister) and spin its contents in a centrifuge to separate sperm from seminal fluid, wash the swimmers clean of prostaglandins and debris.

“See you at seven!”
she tells the nurse, so excited her throat hurts.

Tomorrow at seven. At seven tomorrow. Tomorrow, in Salem, on a leafy little upmarket street, at the hands of a former tight end, the biographer will be inseminated.

If it is possible for you to come to me, little one, let you come to me.

If it is not possible, let you not come, and let me not be shattered.

She can hardly sleep. Is holding a
jar of some sort of face cream that contains opiates, and is going to cook it and shoot it, and is hunting in her mother’s bathroom for cotton. She needs to hide the gear from her mother. But she also
is
her mother, and the person with the jar is Archie. “What happened to the cotton balls?” he asks. “All gone. Use a filter.” “But I’m out of cigarettes!” says Archie. “Maybe I have some,” says the
biographer.

She wakes before the alarm. Glass of water, her brother’s old green parka, her mother’s bike-lock key on a chain around her neck. The biographer is an atheist, but she doesn’t rule out helpful ghosts.

“Archie’s the charmer,” said their mother. “You’re the wise one.”

She leaves her apartment building in the briny dark, sea crashing, car freezing. No other cars on the cliff road.
Her headlights sweep the rock wall, the fir tops, the black ocean flecked with silver, same road and water the baby will see one day.

7:12 a.m.: Signs in at the front desk. Takes her place among the silent, rock-fingered women.

7:58 a.m.: Nurse Jolly leads her to an exam room, where she strips below the waist and climbs under the paper sheet. Her heart is going twice as fast. Do quickened beats
affect fertilization? In last night’s dream, she—as Archie—planned to shoot up into her chest, left-hand side, because she’d been told a “heart direct” made the pleasure immense.

8:49 a.m.: Kalbfleisch stands beside the biographer’s spread legs and stirruped feet and shows her a vial. “Is this the correct donor?” She squints: 9072 from Athena Cryobank. Yes. “The count on this vial was quite good,”
he says. “Thirteen point three million moving sperm.”

“Remind me what the average is?”

“We want the count to be at least five million.”

He inserts a speculum into the biographer’s vagina. It does not exactly hurt—more of a serious pressure—then he opens her cervix, and the pressure turns teeth clenching. A plastic catheter is guided through the speculum into the biographer’s uterus. The nurse
hands Kalbfleisch the syringe of washed semen, an inch of pale yellow. He injects it into the catheter, depositing the semen at the top of her uterus, near the fallopian tubes.

The whole thing takes less than a minute.

He snaps off his gloves and says “Good luck” and goes.

“Rest for a bit, hon,” says Nurse Jolly. “You want any water?”

“No thanks, but thank you.”

In‑breath.

She is so, so
scared.

Out-breath.

Either this has to work or she has to be matched with a bio mother in the next two months. After January fifteenth, when Every Child Needs Two goes into effect, no adopted kid will have to suffer from a single woman’s lack of time, her low self-esteem, her inferior earning power. Every adopted kid will now reap the rewards of growing up in a two-parent home. Fewer single
mothers, say the congressmen, will mean fewer criminals and addicts and welfare recipients. Fewer pomegranate farmers. Fewer talk-show hosts. Fewer cure inventors. Fewer presidents of the United States.

In‑breath.

Keep your legs, Stephens.

Out-breath.

She lies perfectly still.

In high school she ran for hours every day of track season—had muscles then, had stamina. She competed in the four
hundred and the eight hundred, and though not a star, she was decent, even won a few meets her senior year. Archie, tenth-grader, pressed himself against the chain-link fence and cheered. Her parents sat in the bleachers and cheered. Her mother made celebratory dinners with the biographer’s favorite foods: green-chile scrambled eggs, peanut-butter pie. How she loved the laden table, the lamps, the
spring-night crickets, Mama before she got sick, Archie in his skull T‑shirt balancing a spoonful of pie on his head. In the beam of their attention she was tired and proud, a warrior who had slung her arrow into every heel she aimed for.

If it is possible for you to come to me, let you come to me, and I will name you Archie.

In the car, she opens the ziplock of pineapple chunks, whose bromelain
is supposed to encourage a fertilized egg to implant itself in the uterine wall. It will be five days before the egg is ready to implant, but eating pineapple comforts the biographer. Its sweetness is strong and good against the bitter, spitty fear.

Five days. Two months. Forty-two years. She hates the calendar.

Please let it work this time.

She doesn’t move her pelvis the whole drive home.
Lifts her toes carefully on the brake and accelerator, no thigh muscle. “Hell, you could go to the gym today if you wanted,” said Kalbfleisch after the first insemination, to underscore how much it didn’t matter what the biographer’s body did after a few minutes of lying still on the exam table; but the biographer’s body is going to stay as quiet as it can.

It has to work this time.

She will
sit behind her desk in class without thigh movement or pelvic commotion of any kind; and the eggs will float in the tube waters unjarred, open, amenable; and one sperm-struck egg will welcome a single invading spermatozoon into itself, ready to meld and to split. From one cell, two. From two, four. From four, eight. An eight-celled blastocyst has a chance.

Her parents aren’t religious. Their reasons are pragmatic, they say. Logical. So many people
want
to adopt. Why should people be deprived of babies they will nourish, cherish, rain love down upon, just because other people don’t feel like being pregnant for a few months? When the Personhood Amendment passed, her father said it was about time the country came to its senses. He had
no truck with the wackos who bombed clinics, and he thought it was going a little too far to make women pay for funerals for their miscarried fetuses; but, he said, there was a loving home out there for every baby who came into the world.

Her eighth-grade social-studies class held a mock debate on abortion. The daughter prepared bullet points for the pro-choice team. Her father proofread her
work, as usual; but instead of his usual “This is top-notch!” he sat down beside her, rested a hand on her shoulder, and said he was concerned about the implications of her argument.

“What if your bio mother had chosen to terminate?”

“Well,
she
didn’t, but other people should be able to.”

“Think of all the happy adopted families that wouldn’t exist.”

“But Dad, a lot of women would still give
their babies up for adoption.”

“But what about the women who didn’t?”

“Why can’t everyone just decide for themselves?”

“When someone decides to murder a fellow human with a gun, we put them in jail, don’t we?”

“Not if they’re a cop.”

“Think of all the families waiting for a child. Think of me and your mom, how long we waited.”

“But—”

“An embryo is a living being.”

“So is a dandelion.”

“Well, I can’t imagine the world without you, pigeon, and neither can your mother.”

She doesn’t want them to imagine the world without her.

Ash offers a ride home, but the daughter says no, her dad is coming; retirement means he’s so bored he can pick her up anytime. It is cold, dim skied, the grass on the soccer field stiff and silver. The team has an away game today. She hasn’t told Ephraim.
What if he’s like “Is it even mine?” Or “You made your bed; now lie in it.” They passed each other last week in the cafeteria, and Ephraim in the old-school hat she once adored said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey, how are you?” but he kept moving and her non-rhetorical question was rhetorical. He was probably on his way to put his hand up Nouri Withers’s shirt.

Her bio mother could have been young
too. She could have been headed to medical school, then to a neurochemistry doctorate program, then to her own research lab in California. (What if she’s close, at this very moment, to finding a cure for paralysis?) Keeping the daughter would have meant forfeiting her med-school scholarship.

She doesn’t want the kid to wonder why he wasn’t kept.

And she doesn’t want to wonder what happened to
him. Was he given to parents like hers or parents who scream and are bigots and don’t take him to the doctor enough?

She jumps at the tsunami siren—will never get used to that nerve-scraping howl.

“Only a test, my love,” says Dad.

She turns up the car radio.

“How was school?”

“Fine.”

“Finished the academy application yet?”

“Almost.”

“Mom’s making fish tacos.”

She swallows down a little
spurt of vomit. “Awesome.”

“Earlier today,”
goes the radio,
“twelve sperm whales ran aground a half mile south of Gunakadeit Point. The cause of the beaching has not yet been determined.”

“Oh my God.” She turns it up.

“Eleven of the whales are dead, says the sheriff’s office, though it remains unclear—”

“Remember the stranding of ’79?” says Dad. “Forty-one sperms on the beach near Florence.
My pop drove out to photograph them up close. He said they made—”

“Little clicking sounds while they died.” She knows the gruesome details, because Dad likes to repeat them. He’s told her many times that a whale can be killed by the pressure of its own flesh. Out of water, the animal’s bulk is too heavy for its rib cage—the ribs break; the internal organs are crushed. And heat hurts whales. Greenpeacers
brought in bedsheets to soak with seawater and throw over them; it didn’t help.

But that was 1979. Hasn’t somebody by now figured out a way to get them back into the ocean?

“Can we go down there, Dad?”

“They don’t need the public meddling in—”

“But one is still alive.”

“Are you going to roll it back down to the water yourself? Don’t turn this into a morbid preoccupation.”

“The heart of a
sperm whale weighs almost three hundred pounds.”

“How do—?”

“Me and Yasmine once made a list of how much different animals’ hearts weigh.”

“Yasmine and I.” Dad gets tense at the mention of her. “Don’t worry too much about the whales, okay, pigeon? Otherwise those lovely eyebrows might get tangled up in one another, never to untangle.”

“They’re not lovely, they’re thick.”

“Which is what makes
them lovely!”

“You’re not objective.” She wants a cigarette but will content herself with a licorice nib, for now.

Ash isn’t into the idea. So tired, etc. But she is convincible. The daughter crawls out her bedroom window onto the roof, rappels down the trellis, stands still a full minute in the porch shadow in case any noises were heard. A block away is the blue mailbox, their meeting place,
where she smokes and waits.

Yasmine once asked her why white people are so obsessed with saving whales.

The beach is crowded with people shouting, dogs yapping, cameras popping, rain raining. A TV crew has aimed screeching lights on the whales, a row of twelve, their pewter-gray hides slashed with chalky white. They look like stone buses. The one at the very end is slowly lifting and dropping
its flukes. Each time a fluke hits the sand, the daughter’s thighs tremble.

Humans pose for photos in front of the dead.

A guy has clambered onto a massive gray tail. “Snap me!” he shouts. “Snap me!”

“Get the hell down.”

“Move back, folks!”

“Did the dead man’s fingers have anything to do with this?”

“Who do I talk to about reserving some of the teeth? For scrimshaw?”