ABSORPTION by Sarah Scoles
Lauren sat on the toilet and stared between her legs at the “easy digital early result one-step rapid pregnancy test.” The bathroom’s fluorescent light hummed down at her, and she wondered if the noise could be heard inside her uterus, or if sound waves were smoothed by the amniotic fluid before they reached the not-quite-a-baby’s not-quite-ears.
At this point, Lauren asked herself only one question: What am I? Thirty. Michael’s wife. A biologist. A smart woman. A voting, tax-paying resident of West Virginia, as of one month ago. These were all facts, all equally true, but when she asked herself, “What am I?” the only answer her mind gave was “I am pregnant.”
Lauren heard those three words as if they were spoken by a chorus of barely verbal toddlers. She imagined fifty short, fat, thin-haired beings wobbling toward her, chanting in unison, “I am pregnant I am pregnant I am pregnant,” their arms outstretched in a gesture that could have been affection if it hadn’t looked like menace.
She took the offending white stick and stomped on it, threw it at the medicine cabinet, picked it back up and torqued it in half. She put the two pieces in her underwear and felt the tepidity of plastic against her skin. Something about it was comforting. The sensation was so inhuman.
“Can you feel that, collection of cells that will become a person?” she asked, and pressed the pieces against the place she estimated was the center of the womb. “Your meiosis made this stick change colors.” She was placing a kind of original sin upon the proto-baby’s head. In this case, existence.
When Michael had said he wanted a child, Lauren had replied, “I want you to want to have a child with me.” It was true: She had blushed at the thought that he desired to commingle chromosomes.
Michael smiled the way he always did when he thought she was being coy, and she hated him a little bit for not knowing that coyness was something of which she was not capable.
Lauren believed that the problems in her marriage were rooted in Michael’s inability to make observations about her, which she found strange, given that he devoted his life to observing. He worked at a radio astronomy observatory, two and a half hours from any road with a speed limit above forty-five. All the highways in and out and around the telescopes were made of banked hairpins and road kill, one necessitating the other.
Michael still put mayonnaise on the sandwiches he made Lauren, even though she once took the glass jar from his hand, set it on the ground, stood one-footed atop its lid, and said, “You are packaged colloidal fat, and when I smell you on my bread, bile creeps up my esophagus.”
Michael laughed and said, “Come down from there and try this delicious roast beef bialy.”
She did not tell him that she was serious about the mayonnaise because if he continued to slather her bread, she could continue to strike it against him, and then she would not have to lay the blame for her emotional distance somewhere else.
So Lauren added “mayo” to a mental list of Michael’s missed opportunities, a list of little things that she had kept since the beginning of their courtship. And it was a courtship, and he was the courter and she the courted, in good, old-fashioned, parlor-room style. This was the way it had to be, as he was infatuated with her inaccessibility, and so was she.
So when Michael said, “Let’s make a child,” it was not surprising that Lauren thought of the sex, and would later think of the pregnancy, as a biological experiment: something about which she should remain objective, curious, and distant.
She had tried not to look at Michael’s face when he finished his part of the child-making, but she could feel all his tiny organisms struggling at her cell barrier. She knew exactly when the strongest, or at least the most strategic, waved its unicellular victory flag and defeated her. She could feel the two seeds multiplying, taking over, expanding.
She had not worried, still did not worry, about the things potential mothers should: will this baby have fifteen toes, will this baby hate all the good books, will this baby become an accountant, will this baby eventually murder a woman and leave her in the woods beside a little-traveled highway?
Lauren had looked over at Michael’s felled penis. She hated the way it was so vulnerable, so unapologetically external.
She hit it. Michael laughed and said, “Be nice, Mom!” a name she still could not imagine applying to herself, though she was now in the same bathroom with a positive pregnancy test.
As soon as Michael came home, and she showed him the pink stick, he said, “West Virginia is a great place to raise a child!”
“I don’t think anyone has ever said that before,” said Lauren.
When Michael had been accepted to the observatory’s post-doctoral position, Lauren had not said no. When she thought of denying him his right to live far from civilization and study things few people knew existed, she decided that there must be sacrifices. Sacrifices were, after all, some of the most important things people made for each other, and she wanted to be an important person for Michael. Perhaps this was the way. She had looked over his shoulder at the watermarked acceptance letter, put her hand on his, and said, “We will go.”
“But what about your work?” he said, grasping both her shoulders in both his hands.
“Your job is only for two years,” she said. “Besides, I can write all those papers I’ve been meaning to publish.”
He kissed her and then went to the store for champagne. “To life!” he toasted, when he returned. “To our life!”
Our life, Lauren repeated in her head. Our plural life singular.
Though Lauren did not hide the fact that she placed parsecs between her husband and herself, Michael believed that this distance was just a spore around her surely ocean-deep emotions. Lauren’s stoicism, Michael thought, was further evidence of her brilliance, so he did not mind. Once, right before they had sex, he said, “Do you have Asperger’s?” and when she replied that she did not know, he said, “I think you might,” and kissed her.
Sometimes, Lauren opened her eyes so wide it looked like she had a thyroid disorder, and she said things like, “Studies in a number of vertebrate species have shown that the first step in anteroposterior patterning of the nervous system is the specification of forebrain identity.” At those times, Michael closed his eyes and listened to the erudite polysyllables, and he felt glad that she shared her passion with him. He labeled this passion “love,” both on his part and on hers.
At night, they curled against each other, and Lauren often clung to him in the way that a koala grips a eucalyptus tree. She liked the humidity of his skin, and the infrared radiation it put out, and the way his legs twitched while he fell into Stage One sleep. She wanted to feel as close to him as he felt to her, and since she knew that her brain was incapable of this, limbically, she pressed herself against his unconscious body and willed their skins to graft together, merge on the genetic level. They could be a symbiotic organism, a monstrous diploid animal with eight limbs, two minds. This was the only impossible thing she allowed herself to believe in, this co-creature. The mixing of blood and tissue, the literal breaking down of barriers: this was the only way she could be married, in the oldest-fashioned sense of simply being joined, connected.
Although there were eight telescopes at the observatory, the smaller seven were mechanical eye candy – only one mattered. It mattered because it was the most useful.
Most of the astronomers lived within a two-mile radius of the telescopes; almost all of the houses had been built and were owned by the observatory. The area was self-contained, like a commune, though unlike a commune, it was not self-sufficient: Day trips to the nearest grocery store, an hour and a half away, were a source of entertainment. The town with the stores had a mall that was really a strip mall with an Army recruitment center, a nail salon, and a two-screen movie theatre. Observatory families packed their cars with coolers for refrigerated goods and, when they got to “the city,” smiled through the tinted glass at billboards for Arby’s roast beef sandwiches and Wal-Mart’s low prices.
When Lauren and Michael first arrived at the observatory, Lauren realized that the chain businesses they had passed hours before were the nearest ones. Though she did not consider herself materialistic, the world seemed very far away.
Not having seen their house yet, they stopped at the town’s gas-station-essentialist-grocery-store-kitschy-souvenir-shop to pick up the first dinner of their West Virginian life. Lauren fingered the marbled t-shirts with silk-screened wolves howling in front of American flags, and Michael picked out several canned soup options and a bottle of grape soda. They each held a handle of the grocery bag as they walked to the car. Michael pressed the seek button on the radio, and the tuner rolled around the dial twice before settling on a station of static. They smiled at each other, and Lauren said, “Let’s go home.”
Home was a modest house that was part of a square of other modest houses that were occupied by astronomer families. Wherever Lauren was, she had no place for the community, so she figured it was only fair that, this time, the community didn’t really have a place for her.
“They weren’t lying when they said that radio-emitting devices were restricted,” Michael said. He punched some buttons on his cell phone, sighed, and turned it off. The phone was useless – no service, no outside signals coming in. The observatory tried to eliminate any manmade noise that would be picked up by the telescope, as it interfered with the data.
Their house contained a conventional oven, a refrigerator, and a television with no cable. The U-Haul behind their car contained boxes, mostly full of bound and unbound papers. These were the seeds that would grow into their life.
That night, Michael and Lauren sat on the floor and drank the soup straight out of the cans, switching with each other every so often. Lauren had never felt closer to Michael than she did then, cut off from everything else. She thought that she and Michael might have been, for once, equally alone.
A week after Lauren discovered her pregnancy, she and Michael were invited to the dinner at the director’s, Ann Shearer’s, house. Matt, her husband, handed them a channel guide pamphlet immediately upon arrival.
“We have satellite!” he proclaimed in a cavemannish voice.
“I was tired of only being able to watch sitcoms,” said Ann. “The laughter and unlikely marriages got to be too much.”
“Go ahead,” Matt urged, pointing at the pamphlet. “Choose a music station.”
After a moment, Lauren said. “Nine fifty-six. Cashmere.”
They all had a good laugh at the adult contemporary station’s name, and the soft sounds of mid-range singing accompanied them to the dinner table. Midway through the meal and all the way through a bottle of wine, Michael’s neck was splotchy, and he said, “Lauren is pregnant.”
Ann shook Michael’s hand and smiled congratulations as if to say, “Nice job passing on those genes.” Matt smiled at Lauren’s stomach for the rest of the evening, increasing his blatancy with each glass of cab sauv that slid through his circulatory system.
“Sex?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?” Lauren said. She thought, Yes, that was how it happened.
“What sex is the baby?”
“I don’t know,” Lauren said.
“We don’t know yet,” Michael said.
“Our kid’s a teenager now,” said Ann. “Not really a kid at all. He’s at the mall tonight. Jack.”
“He doesn’t like to play anymore,” said Matt. “It would be nice to have a kid who wanted to play.”
“Surely you get to, though,” said Michael. “What do you do while Ann’s playing astronomer?”
“Well, I was a lawyer,” Matt said. “But telescopes don’t really need lawyers.”
“I’m a biologist,” Lauren said.
“Yep,” Matt said.
Cashmere filled the airwaves; the collection of cells continued to pull blood and vitamins down its tube. Lauren wondered when it would have taken enough to kick so she could feel it.
“I tell you what this place needs,” said Ann. More quietly, embarrassed that her segue needed amendment, she said, “Well, what it used to need. Anybody know? Anybody? A structural engineer! Do we have a structural engineer in the house?”
Michael laughed and sheepishly raised his hand. A joke. He made jokes.
Ann stood up, centering the attention so that she could tell a story about the first telescope.
One day it just collapsed. Fell apart and to the ground. No warning. Someone was in the control room, a brick building underneath the telescope’s dish.
“The guy was in the bathroom,” said Ann “Opened the door, came out, and there’s just telescope parts all around him. Just like that.”
“They sell pieces of it in the gift shop,” Matt said.
“Won’t they run out?” asked Lauren.
“People don’t want them, anyway,” Ann said. “Most people just want to know if we’re going to find aliens and if we have extraterrestrial stuffed animals with embroidered observatory logos.”
“Do you?” Lauren asked. “I’d like to purchase one.”
“You know the SETI researchers are crazy, Lauren,” said Michael. “I’ve told you that. One of them only eats food made of potato products.”
Matt said that wouldn’t be so bad, and Lauren agreed, and Matt said that wouldn’t be good for the baby, and Lauren agreed. Ann, unamused, took Michael into the other room to talk about definitely not aliens.
After a few moments of silence, Matt said, “Would you like to play checkers?”
You’re a little bit like me, Lauren wanted to say. Isn’t that all anyone is looking for?
“Maybe aliens are a little bit like us,” she said instead.
“Maybe they are among us,” said Matt. “They could look just like you.”
Lauren jumped her checker out of the way of Matt’s.
That night when Michael fell asleep, Lauren took the car and drove down 64 to the nearest town, to the caves where the high school kids drank Zima and whiskey and kissed. When she got close enough, she turned the car off and watched the kids come in and out of the caves, spilling their drinks on each other as they passed. Eventually, the kids drove themselves home, where they slept and would wake up and then, later, would sleep and wake again. Lauren had no feelings about their illicit behavior, no rush of protective neurochemical instincts. It was a shame, she thought, but not a surprise.
The front door did not creak when she returned, and the microwave did not shine a time, because there was no microwave. As Lauren slid into bed with Michael, she thought about the two other bedrooms in the house and wondered what, besides walking-talking beings, she could fill them with. She imagined one papered with small-circulation newspaper clippings about alleged UFO sightings, the other converted into an indoor Mendellian garden, a green room. She could live in these two, do whatever she wanted in front of their backgrounds, and step into the hallway only to cross between them.
She could sleeptalk to the soil, wake to a tendril twining itself around her fingers, roll over and steal the covers and not hear a sound from anyone. The room would take from her only carbon dioxide.
In their marital bed, where Lauren had forgotten she was, Michael’s black socks touched her bare leg, and his hair stuck in striations to his forehead.
Lauren wanted to wake him and stop him from looking so defenseless and confess that she had no urge to caress the parasitic organism she was hosting. She wanted him to say that it was okay, because he was someone she could believe.
She couldn’t, though. She could only want to. Her feelings for Michael were based on this desire for things. If she wanted to talk to him intimately, if she wanted to let him be part of her, it was almost as if she did and he was. Almost.
Lauren got up and walked to the kitchen, removed a permanent marker from the junk drawer, and drew a rocket ship flying into her belly button. “If you want to be an astronaut, you should actually be one,” she said toward her stomach. “You know, when you have enough brain cells to have free will. And astronaut is a stand-in. If you want to be a blank, you should be one.”
She had heard that some potential mothers put headphones against their stomachs so that the baby is born with ears and brain already primed for the complexities of classical music and Shakespeare, or Stephen King and black metal, depending. If it is possible for the unborn to absorb the audio, Lauren thought, then why not the visual? So she drew something she wanted the child’s life to be that hers was not, hoping the image would seep through her skin and imprint itself on the embryo.
When Lauren got into bed, she whispered, “I made something for the baby,” and pointed at her abdomen, or her “thorax,” as she sometimes called it when she wanted Michael to touch her. He did not wake up.
In the morning, after Michael had gone to work, Lauren walked outside and took many pictures of the telescope, but none could elicit the same emotional response as the metal structure itself, with its full steerability, its thousands of panels that automatically adjusted to disturbances to make sure that the telescope did not literally bend out of shape. Its one hundred-meter dish looked up at the sky, collected information from wherever it happened to be pointed, and sent this information to be processed.
Lauren envied the telescope. It looked alien, but also strangely organic, rising up against the treed mountains, almost as if it had emerged from the earth’s crust after some bizarre tectonic movement.
She considered going to see Matt, asking if they could listen to some eighties rock on the satellite TV stations. Maybe reminisce about some cultural experience they had in common. She did not, however, know how to make this casual afternoon companionship a reality.
“Hi, Matt,” she practiced at the mirror. “Hey. Matt.”
It sounded all wrong.
Giving up, she grabbed the permanent marker and a camera and walked out the door and toward the observatory, crouching behind bushes so that Matt would not see her and sense her failure.
She walked toward the astronomers’ rec center, planning to take one of the communal bicycles and pilgrimage to the telescope. She did not see anyone, and no one saw her. The employees usually stayed in the offices, Faraday-caged, their personal radiation reflecting off the walls onto other walls.
When Lauren got to the bicycles, she chose the one with the highest seat, though this made reaching the pedals slightly awkward for her joints. She started down the path to the telescope, her legs and toes fully extending each time the pedals swung down.
Lauren liked being where no one knew she was – it felt anonymous, illicit, like she could rip off her clothes and scream the names of all the organic compounds she knew, and no one would care.
As she traveled past the defunct, decommissioned telescopes, Lauren imagined that they were snapshots of the developmental phases that led up to a functional telescope, an astronomical version of the inaccurate models pro-lifers use at rallies to show that “a baby is a baby is a baby.”
Lauren knew that this wasn’t true: zygote is not a fetus is not a baby, just like the 50-foot telescope was not the Geodetic telescope was not the Precision Timing telescope. Lauren, pedaling past them, watched as they grew legs, sprouted arms, opened their eyes, and screamed, “Mama!” out of their receivers.
They wanted things from her. She pedaled faster, but their screams seemed to be coming from a place that did not recede. Mama, she thought. That’s not my name. As she accelerated around the curves and over the bumps, fleeing from telescopes no one else seemed to be scared of, she began to feel happy, and, she realized, aroused.
She had heard about this physiological phenomenon, mostly through anecdotes about housewives and their affairs with stationary cycling machines; though she did not want to be categorized with these women, she continued to move back and forth along the banana seat. She tried calling it different names – Ohmichael, Ohmatt, Ohann, Ohseat. She found none of these particularly exciting, and then she whispered, “Lauren.”
She continued to say her own name, with increasing volume and frequency, until she and the bike fell into an oblivious tangle of metal and flesh in the grass at the top of a hill, next to the big telescope.
Through the neurochemical haze, she thought she felt her contractions turn into the wrong kind, thought she felt a pre-limb being pulled through her tubes. She tried to push the intruder back up. “Not now, thing,” she said. “Ascend.”
How strange, to have shared a climax with something that didn’t even know what “climax” meant. She had never felt more connected to anyone than she did then, to it.
When she got home, she took out the Sharpie and drew a name tag on her abdomen. “Don’t forget who you are,” she said, “when you are someone.”
When Lauren got back to the house, Michael was home early and in a strange mood. He chased her with his arms outstretched and his hands positioned in a way that made it look like he was holding an ostrich egg. He grabbed at her midsection. “Can you feel it?” he asked. Then, “Can I feel?”
“No,” Lauren said. “And yes.”
He put his fingers flush against her shirt, and then he rested his ear above them. “I can’t feel anything,” he said.
“Neither can I,” she replied, willing his fingers to push through her skin and into her warm insides, where they could wave hello to the small thing.
Though she knew it was impossible – the cells were not even eraser-sized yet – Lauren imagined that she felt them kick.
She shouted, and Michael jumped. “What?” he said. “What is it?”
“I thought I felt something,” she said.
That night, Lauren again left while Michael was sleeping. She took a bike, swiveled past the closed gate, and headed toward the end of the telescope trail. She could smell the plants’ consumption and release, and she coveted their cell walls.
What did she have to keep her together? Millions and millions of plasma membranes – skinny, small things that sounded cheaply made – and, on the outside, a layer of skin that was always in the process of falling off. It seemed inadequate, and she could feel herself evaporating, her cytoplasm leaking out into the world, her reticula crawling off into the woods, and her skin, empty, collapsing to the ground to be passed tomorrow by the tour bus, from which patrons would stare, repulsed by her husk.
What would happen to the embryo? Would it, too, evaporate? She imagined it disengaging from her body, swimming through the air and up into space. It would surely find some other source of nourishment.
When Lauren got to the telescope, she leaned the bicycle against the support pillar and listened to the whirring of the motors. She knew that back in the control room, an astronomer was controlling the telescope’s movements, telling it where to look and what to analyze, but since she was below the dish, it would never find or understand her. She stood there and waited for it to crack and crumple.
She wanted to climb up the stairs, walk to the middle of its surface, and position herself against its smooth, white panels. Her body might skew the data at first, but maybe, eventually, the telescope would absorb her, its atoms fusing with her atoms into some new hybrid molecule. Lauren and the telescope could both, as one, look up at the sky and see strange things and tell Michael about them.
“Do you have anything to say about that?” she said, her voice directed down at her stomach. “Would that be okay with you?”
Lifting up her shirt and taking out her marker, Lauren drew one more picture next to the others. She pedaled home and went to bed in the bathtub.
When Michael entered the bathroom in the morning and saw Lauren sitting bow-backed against the bathtub wall, awake and staring at the door, he said, “Oh, Jesus, you didn’t flush it, did you?”
“No,” she said, pointing to her thorax. “It’s still hiding out in here.” She lifted up her shirt and showed him. “These are the things I want it to have,” she said. “These are the blessings I am bestowing upon my posterity.”
Michael traced his finger over a rocket ship, a name tag, and a stick person looking out the window of a doorless house.
“No one even tries to get in its house,” she said. “They all know better – it’s impenetrable.”
Michael lifted her up, pressed against her so hard that she thought she could feel the thing smashing against her vital organs. How would this room fare if the rest of the house collapsed?
“So it’s okay, then,” Michael said, rocking them, the three of them. “It’s okay.”
Lauren closed her eyes and did not answer and tried to imagine the cells dividing, being one and then being two. Parts of her DNA crossed over and recombined with parts of Michael’s DNA. The best and worst parts of each of them were getting all mixed up. Spindles connected centromeres, connected them to each other, to something new.
The alien inside of Lauren would form and flip for months, and although her respiration and circulation would sustain its development, it was a thing, a living thing, doing its living beneath her surface, and she would be glad when it pushed through. She would be glad when those three hundred-fifty baby bones were out of her.
“Greetings,” she would say to it. “Greetings, Earthling.”
She turned to Michael. “Greetings, Earthling,” she said.
“Greetings,” he returned.
Sarah Scoles’ stories have appeared in Fringe, DIAGRAM, Booth, and SNReview.