Posted by AlOmega on October 08, 1999 at 19:59:36:
Hi all,
This is more of a moral tale and the possibility of some changes in the future if certain politicos really get in power. Interestingly enough I also suspect that although change can happen, business will always depend on the bottom line.
Anyway here's my latest. Enjoy.
The Disappearence of Josie Andrew
A new childe floats in my section today. He’s number B88-12 and feeds from tube 28 about halfway up.
From his chart, he’s an early second tri who weighs less than a pound. That’s all I need to know.
His mother was cranked.
Tube 28. The number echoes in my thoughts like a distant police siren in the middle of the night. I came to
the office this morning ready to sing. Now I want to do anything else. It’s not B88-12’s fault though, and I
try hard not to blame him for my sudden foul mood.
The uterine chamber is a bit over four meters in diameter and three meters high. It sits in the middle of the
darkened office, its three-finger-thick Plexiglas sides held together by evenly spaced steel rods. Filtration
hardware is crammed into its base, a half-meter-tall section of dusty black motors and tubes that smell faintly
of warm machine oil. An aluminum hand-ladder mounted to the chamber’s side leadsto the insulated
stainless cap, complete with a round hatch for fishing kids out at birthing time.
Inside, the children float in synthetic amniotic fluid that’s a corn-surup gold. Vertical columns of soft
lighting illuminates the chamber from withing allowing for proper monitoring. But all that stuff doesn’t
radically alter the children’s growth process. Occasional bubbles rise through the fluid, weaving their way
through masses of arms and legs and tiny heads with closed eyes and open mouths. I put my palm against the
Plexiglas where B88-12 floats. The chamber is heated by elements that rise from the floor like brittle
stalagmites - or perhaps like iron rds in a medieval torture chamber.
Warmth flows into my hand.
Ninety-six children float in my chamber today.
The steady throbs of heartbeats resonate through speakers embedded in the stainless caps - false sounds of a
nonexistent mother. They echo in the morning silence. The vibrations are suppose to make the children
comfortable. They work, I guess. But the hearbeats ring hollowly inside me today. A taste of desperation
coats my mouth.
I smile diespite the paint this child unwittingly brings me. “Good morning, Kyle,” I says. That’s the name
I’ve given to B88-12. Kyle Lincln. I gaze into his tightly scrunched face and say his name three times to
myself. I’ll remember that. I was never good with equations or history or economics or anything else like
that. But I can put a name to a face.
I pull my hand back, the heat of the chamber lingering like a stolen kiss. Kyle Lincoln is curled around tube
28, fingering its connection to his belly.
Josie Andrew was on that tube yesterday.
A sour ball forms in my stomach. Josie’s DNA scan must have turned up something this time. He was only
five months along, far too early for birthing. As usual, no paperwork is on file concerning Josie’s
whereabouts. Nothing to indicate he was ever there. Nothing tying him to feeding tube 28 or letting anyone
know he needed extra vitamine K in his diet.
Nothing to say he used to smile when I sang to him.
Returning to my desk, I see a memo on my screen, the Calvin Birthing Center logo - the intertwined CBC
done in royal blue and gold - in the corner:
I’m certain everyone knows the Federal Child Care Commission will be here tomorrow to perform their
annual licensing review. We know everyone is aware of how important this process is to our future. The
auditing team will be looking for examples of our company’s desire to care for the infants in our charge and
our compassion for their rights as human beings.
Please take a few moments to review your records to help us put our best face forward....
I click the memo away, think ing Josie.
He was a big child for his age, nearing three pounds. He often sucked on his thumb, rubbing his lips around
the knuckle and feeling the bone that had already formed underneath. Josie’s smile, instinctive or not, made
my heart soar. I’m certain it wasn’t my imagination that the other children seemed to gravitate toward him,
too. Touching him idly, seeming to want to be close to him.
I began singing to him two months ago.
That evening had been rainy, I remember, and I hadn’t wanted to leave. Nothing at home for me anyway
and after thirteen years with the company, the chamber had begun to make me feel uncomfortable in a way
that was somehow important. The day shift had already left, and the night crew was still gathered around
the cafeteria, trading whatever stories they usually traded. I stood in the empty lab that evening staring at
the children as they floated in golden fluid
A memory flashed. Me as a kid, standing next to my father in the morning while he shaves, my eye-level
coming to the edge of the sink. I tiptoe up to see shaving cream and black whiskers floating on the surface
of the water. I remember him singing to me. His voice deep and comforting, a warm, woolen blanket of
sound that makes me feel safe to start my day.
********
I couldn’t tell you why, but standing alone in the chamber that night and gazing at the pool of lost children, I
started to sing a song my father sang to me.
”You are my sunshine, my only sunshine...”
And Josie smiled, stopping when I stopped and smiling again when I started. His reaction stirred something
inside me, something I had lost years ago. From that point on, I made it a habit to sing him a song every
morning when I came in, and again every evening before I left. Josie never failed to respond. For the first
time I found myself looking at the roster of prospective parents wondering who might make my new friend a
good home. At one point, I even thought about...
But that’s past me, I know. Fanciful thinking at best. Kyle Lincoln feeds from tube 28 now.
The Republican government after Bush took abortion away, saying we would not kill as a society. I’m not a
politician. I don’t know if this is right or wrong. I’m a technician in a birthing center, a man who does his
job without asking too many questions. All I know is that the government has given us a new procedure,
prebirth delivery, so that a fetus that would have been aborted can live and grow in birthing chambers.
But this same government says we cannot “play God.” We understand, but cannot change. The law says
we must test for genetic makeup to protect prospective parents and employers, but the same law says we
cannot modify or alter the children’s fate if the tests are positive.
For the thousandth time I ask myself why I am doing this. My skin tingles and my head hurts. Then I think
of the landlord shaking his fist under my chin, the refrigerator that sits empty in my kitchen. The money
don’t come in fast enough as it is, and a man nearly 35 and without a degree doesn’t easily find a job in this
day and age.
Still the memo clings in my memory like the smell of landfill.
...our compassion for their rights as human beings....
I wonder what defect Josie inherited that signed his death warrant.
********
I was 22 when I took this job. Linda had just told me we were having a baby, and I was shaken to by roots.
I need a reasonable cash flow, and six semesters at the local community college had pretty much let me
know I wasn’t going to get a degree in anything. Not knowing what else to do, I took the job at CBC.
At first the kids seemed to be shells waiting to be filled, dangling from their umbilical tubes like apples
growing from brances on a tree. My work was low level, takiing getal readings and making feeding
adjustments based upon what the other techs told me. I was a floater available for anything from janitorial
cleanup to the midnight shift.
My first dumping occurred after two weeks.
I’ll admit I was naive. I had no idea what my boss meant when he said it was time I had a chance to “go to
Kelley’s”
Vicky and I loaded plastic bags into the back of a pickup truck. I remember the smell of the diesel engine
idling as we loaded black garbage bags into the back. The bags were heavy, and they made ugly slick
sounds over the rumbling of the diesel as they hit the flatbed. Their bright yellow plastic ties looked like
artificial butterflies against the black bags. I worked hard that night, grabbing two sacks at a time and
hauling them aboard, trying to show off.
Yes, I was married. But I was young and Vicky was an attractive woman in her own way - slim and short,
with brownish-red hair that curled past her shoulders and the heady air of worldly experience.
Vicky told me to get in. The cab smelled of stale cigarette smoke and wintergreen air freshener. She threw
a wrinkled blue bandanna onto my laped and laughed at my befuddled expression.
“Just you wait. You’ll be glad you have it,” she said.
Kelley’s landfill was south of town. Vicky stopped the truck and opened the padlocked entrance. I
remember thinking it was odd she had the key. At the time, the idea of the company paying someone to
look the other way had never even crossed my mind.
The truck’s wheels crunched over metal and plastic. Headlights sliced erratically through the mist, exposing
dead refrigerators and piles of refuse. There was no wind. I gagged agains the stagnant odor. Vicky tied
her bandanna around her head and drew it over her nose. The voice of experience. I quickly did likewise.
It took fifteen minutes of driving to reach the right spot.
With the headlights off, the landfill was suffocatingly oppressive. We climbed into the back. For several
minutes we flung sacks out into the inky void. One by one, they disappeared into the darkness, landing with
wet impact amid the rest of the city’s waste.
We made small talk on the way back with me fantaxizing that Vicky would stop the truck and suggest we do
something I’d regret later. Didn’t happen, of course. Fact is, I don’t remember even being curious about
what was in the bags that night.
The next day, however, I noticed we were missing two children from my chamber. When I asked my
supervisor about them, he grew quiet, then said simply, “They’re gone. If you want to keep your job here,
don’t ask again.”
My stomach burned like I had swallowed a handful of burrs. Something in his tone remeinded me of the
chill of nighttime air on my bare arms as I threw plastic bags into the landfill.
A month later Linda miscarried.
She morned for several weeks, but I’ll admit I felt relieved. We had never talked about children before we
married, and I never found the right time to tell her I am steril. The child had to have been someone else’s/
I thought I loved Linda enough to forgive a single mistake - or maybe I was too embarrassed to own up to
the truth. Whichever, I figured shed never had to know. Her miscarriage let me off the hook and meant I
didn’t have to face that problem.
For days after that, I would stand before the children and watch them float and grow becoming real people.
I began noticing how each one was different and began naming them. Seeing them in this new light made
me feel timy, small.
The chamber held from fifty to a hundred children at any one time. Professors. Bus drivers. Waitresses.
Football players. Engineers. Every chamber was priceless, the future of the world.
That was when I realized I wanted to be a father.
When I suggested that maybe we could adopt, Linda yelled and screamed at me telling me I was stupid to
think we could just “buy another dog to replace the one we lost.” We drifed further apart over the next six
months. When she turned up pregnant again, we both knew it wasn’t my child.
She packed and moved in with the guy the next day and that’s the last I ever saw of my wife. It’s okay
though. An uneducated man like me is probably unfit to be a father anyway.
In the meantime, I’d gone back to Kelley’s three times.
********
You know of course that its illegal as hell to kill a fetus, regardless of its genetic makeup. Goes back to
when the Republicans won the 2000 election. Conservatives finally managed to legeslate out Rowe v.
Wade. So now companies like CBC take babies that would normally be aborted and raise them to term. But
notwithstanding that, the company kills them to boost profits. They know that a childe with multiple
sclerosis aor AIDs or Huntington’s disease is never going to earn out what it costs to raise them.
Everyone knows this except, apparently, the FCCC. Or they turn a blind eye to it.
I sit at my desk and think of Josie Andrew. My heart sinks and I find it nearly impossible to breath. I have
to leave.
The door is heavy, its knob cold against my hand.
I slip out to the hallway and press ;my back against the steril white wall. My breath comes in thick lungfuls.
I’m 35.
I’m unmarried.
And I will never be a real father.
I feel the presence of every child that has disappeared from my birthing chamber without record. Their tiny
fingers gather around my throat. Josie’s face lingers behind my closed eyes and I realize I cannot live with
this any longer.
Josie Andrews is dead, robbed of his chance to make an impression on the world. Is there a worse fate?
I can only think of one.
I’m 35, I think again. No one knows I even exist. I’m as good as dead, as dead as Josie Andrew.
I turn and race down the long white hallway. The air outside is December cold. I go to my car and start the
engine. There’s something I have to do.
********
Razor wire lines the top of the chain-link fence. It catches light from the full moon and gleams gun-barrel
blue. The rotting stench is thick as gravy.
I stop my car in the shadows across the street and look at my watch . Ten minutes past one. The car door
creaks as it opens. I shut it quietly. To the left is a run-down body shop. To the right is a barren field
littered with dried husks where corn may grow next spring. The only sound is the wind whipping in from
the northwest. Despite three swearshirts and a jacket, I shiver. Donning my work gloves, I walk to the
fience. Tools jangle softly as I move. The flashlight beats against my thigh, and the wire cutters are cold on
my hip. I reach for the surgical mask wrapped around my neck and pull it ove my nose. It cuts the scent so
it’s almost bearable. A thin layer of frost coveres the galvanized iron of the fence.
The wire cutters are awkwayd. I slice vertically through the fence, opening a slot nearly two meters tall.
Using heavy pliers, I pull the fence backward at the bottom to leave a triangular opening. Tossing the
cutters away, I slip quietly into Kelley’s landfill. The grass is dead, tall and coarse. My boots whip through
it with harsh tearing sounds. I crest a hill and look at the land fill - a scene that looks postnuclear.
Broken shards of the world are scattered across the hillside, skeletons of human need. Moonlight underlines
everything in stark black shadows. I follow the same path I’ve driven so many times in the past. How many
black bags have I thrown into this void? Pink and brown faces from the chamber stick in my mind and for a
moment my breathing fails me. Still I move forward. Kelley’s is a large landfill.
I’m certain it’s my imagination, but the ground grows more slippery as I go, and soon I feel I’m skating on a
layer of grease and grime. O maybe blood and gristle. My stomach churns acidic. I’m glad I’ve not eaten.
In something under an hour I arrive at the place. I’d know it anywhere, surrounded by black mounds that
seem to close over the area, protecting the world from the wickedness of the deeds I’ve committed. An
ominous silence covers this artificial valley. The ground here is slick, wet with frost. For the first time, I
reach for my flashlight and expose the area before me - an area I’ve never really seen before.
A bulldozer has pushed everything into large piles. Burial mounds, I think, remembering a slice of my
American history from that community college. Still, they can’t hide what I have come to find. Black
plastic bags are buried in the refuse, almost hidden from sight. A single yellow twist tie blazes vividly in the
beam of my flashlight. Suddenly I am colder than I can ever remember being.
Josie Andrew is in one of these bags. I can feel it in my bones. I set the flashlight at an angle to illuminate
my work and walk to the mound of garbage. It is maybe four meters tall.
I put my gloved hand against the pile and climb to the top. A torn screen door is the first thing to go. I fling
it away with both hands and it flies into the night like a girant silver Frisbee. A soggy mattress. A rusting
roasting pan. The work warms me.
Blood pulses through me, filling my body, my heart thumping proudly against my chest. I am here to find
Josie, I tell myself. His lifeless body will speak to the FCCC auditors in ways more eloquent than I ever
could. I am here so he can make his mark in this world.
And maybe I’m here to begin making my own mark.
Perhaps again it is my imagination, but suddenly I hear another heartbeat, smaller, faster. More of a rasping
swish swish than a solid thump thump. It’s a sound I’ve heard a thousand times before. A
fetal heartbeat. Josie Andrew.
Without realizing it, I find myself singing.