* * *
■ ■ ■
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.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
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.
* * *
■ ■ ■
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.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“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.
* * *
■ ■ ■
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.
* * *
■ ■ ■
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.
* * *
■ ■ ■
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.
* * *
■ ■ ■
How far did a word have to travel from its source in order to become unrecognizable? Spellings of the word baby that the portal had lately cycled through: babey, babby, bhabie. Middle English had seen similar transformations: babe, babee, babi. Yet in every variation, the meaning shone through, as durable as a soul, wrapped in swaddling clothes.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Raw almonds in the waiting room, and then a cry in the operating theater, and the photographers from Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep crowded all at once around her sister and brother-in-law, to take stunning black-and-white photographs of the baby before she passed away. But she didn’t, and she didn’t, and then she unfurled like a wet spring thing and was alive.
“I believe she will come out and I believe she will cry,” the grotto-green neurologist had told them, alone of all the doctors.
She remembered the peculiar onrushing pain of the portal, where everything was happening except for this. But for now, the previous unshakable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone.
* * *
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All the worries about what a mind was fell away as soon as the baby was placed in her arms. A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world. The baby, like a soft pink machete, swung and chopped her way through the living leaves. A path was a path was a path was a path. A path was a person and a path was a mind, walk, chop, walk, chop.