ten little fingers, ten little toes
The newborn would be dead, soon. Jake stood outside the glass, watching his son slowly dying under a heat lamp. Isolated, as if contagious. His wife, Tish, slumped in her wheelchair,facing slightly away. The prognosis was clear; Jake wheeled Tish back to her room. The nurses brought the infant in and left them to it. They took turns holding him. The baby died in her arms. He looked like one of those super-realistic dolls, but with a little weight to him. He was soft. Limp. Cold.
This time was supposed to be different. This time they made it through to viability. They waited a little longer to be sure, but then they announced the pregnancy, had a baby shower, made up the nursery.
Still, it happened. Again.
There was no sign anything had gone awry until Tish’s cervix shortened and dilated. Dr. William Warren, the OB/GYN for the most recent pregnancies, ordered an emergent cerclage. From that point, Tish was on bed rest and monitored. Dr. Warren had considered this ultimate outcome—twenty weeks in, after an ultrasound. Even then, he wasn’t sure. He was in no hurry to deliver more bad news to a couple he had already seen through the past three of their eight failed attempts to carry a child to term. And he wasn’t going to add stress to the pregnancy with an MRI. It was too late to terminate, not that they would have.
Once the baby was born, still premature despite the measures to bind Tish’s cervix, he followed up on his hunch. Even after a perfect APGAR score of 10 at 1, 5 and 10 minutes, Warren ordered a transillumination. Hydranencephaly. Confirmed.
The grief counselor told them they were lucky. That the baby was lucky. He didn’t livelong enough to suffer. Blind and deaf and completely devoid of consciousness. Living in only the strictest sense of the term; running on the brain stem’s autopilot. Breathing, heart beating, swallowing, reflexes. A quality of life below “Miracle Mike, the Headless Chicken.”
This, without even considering all the other side effects and complications. The palsy, the seizures, the emotional and mental toll it would take on the parents. Loving someone who would never know they even existed, let alone love them back. He was born premature enough that his odds of surviving very long were already low. He lived long enough for them to hold him. For him to grab his father’s finger and squeeze. Long enough for the ink to dry on his birth certificate before they had to fill out the death certificate. Long enough to say goodbye, but not long enough for all that other bad stuff. The staff gave them a newborn photo and footprints pressed in ink with a lock of hair taped to the corner.
Not long enough to suffer. Just long enough that there would be an obituary and a funeral. How lucky.
They named him Evan. He lived 32 hours. They buried him in the family plot after a small service of close family and friends.
So lucky.
#
Patricia Marx and Jacob, her husband of ten years, considered themselves distinctly unlucky. Hapless if not hopeless. Tish and Jake had an otherwise idyllic life. She had family money; he had a six-figure income. They had both attended and thrived at Yale, where they met in their Junior Year. They stayed together through grad school and the years after. On the cusp of thirty, as a matter of course, they married. By most any measure, their lives had been perfect. They lacked for one thing. Kids. That’s where their winning streak ended.
For nine of those ten years, they had both been in fertility treatment. From traditional to trial. Nothing biological was wrong with either one of them. He was potent, she was fertile. One after another, rare and improbable complications and conditions emerged. They had six failures in six years. They had grown accustomed to keeping news of the pregnancies between them. The seventh had gone twenty weeks. Far enough along to move from“miscarriage” to “stillborn.” Progress.
There was a lot of tension in the first few years. It strained their marriage. They turned from fighting each other to fighting the problem. Instead of cleaving them apart, it cleaved them together. Long after most couples would have chosen a surrogate or adoption, or given up, they had persisted. The battle became a habit and that habit became an addiction.
By the time they were pregnant with Evan, they were a fertile fighting force. Jake joked that he could smell ovulation in the air, like some primal primate. The reality was they had become a baby making machine. Their home was a command center. If the blocked out calendar and whiteboard weren’t enough, there were apps. A rigid regimen. They didn’t need red wine and music to get in the mood. They just needed their phones to ding and trigger a passionless Pavlovian coupling. Lacking foreplay, driven by shared and singular purpose.
When they got pregnant with Evan, they switched lanes from preconception to prenatal. When they hit the six-month mark, they were ready to share the news. Tish was always thin framed and kept herself fit and would not be able to hide the bump any longer.
This time, they had thought, would be different.
#
As with any addict, they couldn’t break the cycle. Within two weeks of Evan’s death, they were back at The Institute. Well beyond even deciding to try again, this was routine. Their co-dependent compulsion. Once Tish could drag herself out of bed and face the sun, they were in the car. Was there anything they could have done different or better? Were they both still fertile? When should they start trying again to conceive?
This was one of several dozen facilities in the franchise. The Gestasia Institute for Fertility and Reproduction. The largest of its kind. Full-spectrum services. From simple prenatal care to in vitro fertilization; from surrogacy to adoption. This was a full-on, for-profit operation, and from a fiscal point of view the Marxes were good business.
Even so, Dr. Sharon Rivvers, their newly assigned REI, advised them to stop. Even though science was on their side. Even though, statistically at least, each prior tragedy made them less and less likely to suffer future tragedy. For their own mental health and well being, for the sake of their marriage, it was time to consider other options. Hell, even Dr. Warren had given up and referred them to Rivvers. He was retiring and the running joke in the commissary was that the Marxes had broken him. What Rivvers knew from the case notes, whether it was openly acknowledged or not, was that this was their marriage. There were no other options for them. She sighed and slid a folder over to the Marxes.
“I’d wait twelve to sixteen weeks.”
The Marxes had a stack of these, they’d been with it long enough for a corporate merger
and a logo change. They didn’t bother opening it for almost two weeks.
#
“What’s this? Did you make an appointment?” Tish held the note out to Jake.
Sundays after 7PM. South entrance, #2791.
Scrawled on yellow sticky note, stuck inside the folder. That’s all. Less of an appointment than an open invitation.
Today is Sunday, she thought. She hadn’t even considered opening the file; she wouldn’t have opened it today if the note hadn’t fallen loose and slipped out. It was all the usual brochures and helpful tips. Blank calendar pages for tracking her cycle and entering her temperature and half a dozen other things she had either memorized or automated. Nothing she needed or was ready to even see. And this. Jake took the note.
“Nope. Someone probably made themselves a note and it got in here by mis-” but her coat was already on.
“It’s after seven, now.”
#
They pulled up to the complex. It was very different at night and on the weekends. There were a few cars in the lot. Some security and maintenance vehicles. The buildings were dark.
Jake drove around to the back of the building. The front facade, by design, looked like part of a well-endowed, state of the art fertility facility. There was a fountain. Topiary. Two stories of mirrored glass created an atrium that covered the glossy, marble lobby. The lobby held more topiary and yet another fountain.
The south side of the main building was far less inviting. The first three stories didn’t even have windows. The upper stories had small, utilitarian windows. It looked more like a long wall than anything. There was a series of steel doors, each with a yellowed light above it. None of them labeled or numbered.
Tish was holding the yellow note in front of her like a divining rod.
“There. That one has a keypad. I bet this is a key code and not a suite number.” They stopped at the third door.
“This seems really… off-the-books, doesn’t it?” Jake wasn’t sure why they were here.
Still, it wasn’t the weirdest thing she had ever asked for, postpartum. He parked the car, headlights flooding the sun-bleached, red steel door. They approached and punched in the code from the paper.
The door buzzed and they walked inside. It was pretty un-ceremonial. Once inside, they were in small room. Linoleum, cinder block, a small window to an unattended reception desk. Before Tish could push the little doorbell, the second door buzzed and the lock clicked open. The office reminded Jake of his advisor’s office in college. Small. Cramped. His advisor’s was smothering. Papers everywhere, no sign of an actual desk under the clutter. A hyper-literate hoarder.
This was austere. Sparse. Either someone hadn’t moved in or was ready to leave at any moment. The desk was empty, except for two flat screen monitors. Somehow this emptiness
made it seem even smaller. The cinder block walls were bare. There was a whiteboard, but rather than dry erase marker, there were sticky notes. In columns, by color. Even if you could read the handwriting, it was a shorthand only the author would comprehend.
There was a window that looked into a lab. The lab looked even cleaner and sterile and organized and more, well, like a lab.
Skinny, pale, black tee-shirt under a black zip-up hoodie. Black-rimmed glasses that seemed too big for his freckled face. Tousled red hair. Who the fuck was this kid?
“So, my name is Garrett Morgan. I doubt you’ve heard of me and if you have, it wasn’t good.”
They hadn’t heard of him. He was a prodigy. A polymath. An autodidact. A felon.
His claim to fame was that he had infected a strain of human DNA with a virus. Not a contagion within the DNA itself. Machine code tucked into the digital mappings hosted in a genome research lab. When read and interpreted, it would infect the whole system.
Which it did, he took over the whole cluster, stole all the mapping data. Had he not taken the credit he would have gotten away with it. Had he not been so far ahead of the genome team, he’d be in jail.
“Since all that, they’ve had me hacking things in a different, more productive way. It pays the attorney’s fees, but it’s not what I’m interested in. And that’s where we can help each other.”
They walked out into the long hall and to a wider observation window into the lab.
“We do a lot with stem cells. Most of that happens two labs down, we have our embryo farm from the clinical work upstairs. IVF and ICSI work, mostly. Couples, not unlike yourselves, who preserve eggs and embryos, right? So, what happens to these extra eggs and embryos when there’s been a successful pregnancy? Some of them are preserved for future implantation and procedures. Some are held indefinitely in a kind of escrow and still others come to me.”
Morgan pointed to a series of what looked like lava lamps in the center of the lab. he slid
his thumb on the screen of his smart phone and they were lit from within. The far left seemed empty. The far right contained what looked more like a fully formed fetus.
“What I do with them, in a way, is an extension of what landed me here. I tweak them. I grow them in here, but I can only take it to a point. There are legal and ethical issues that I couldn’t give a fuck about; there are practical limits.”
Morgan swiped his finger on the phone screen again. There was a lone table, with what looked like a wine fridge on it. Inside it, a light came on. Suspended in the center, in a vacuum-sealed bag, appeared to be a baby in the second trimester.
“Artificial wombs have come a long way. But not far enough. The fetus still has to begin in the mother, after enough time, we can sustain it in the lab, like that.” He noticed the look of concern on Jake’s face, “That’s a sheep, by the way. No one has tried to get that far with a human baby. Even if they did, it would only be useful for highly premature infants. There’s no substitute for a healthy womb.”
Jake stepped back from the glass. Tish had her face against it. It struck Jake as an inversion of their posture when Evan lay dying in a NICU incubator.
“You… want to grow me a baby? In there?” she looked at Morgan.
“It’ll start in there. Your egg. His sperm. But we’ll finish in there.” He pointed at her belly. Her arms folded in a natural cradle around it. Though his mind was a field of waving red flags, Jake didn’t bother to object.
They return to Garrett’s office.
“Recall, I said that we could help each other? Well, this is the part of the story where we make the exchange.” He launched a program on his office computer.
Jake recounted the obvious. “We’ve paid a good amount for this, already.” He didn’t just mean the money.
“This is a different type of exchange. A trade.”
The flickering florescent lights went out, the computer screens glowed with matching boot screens. SNIPR in red letters on white. This was replaced with floating windows of code and formulas. Two projector beams cut the darkness and created a hologram in the center of the desk. Throbbing animations of a dozen embryos. Zygotes growing, cells splitting, fetuses forming. The camera zoomed in on one of the models and markers within the individual cells glowed, mostly green with the occasional red. A small device on one of the computer monitors fired a laser drawn keyboard onto the surface of the desk.
“There are two phases, the first part is pretty status quo and without much controversy. You can screen for certain characteristics that we can predict with complete accuracy. Like, boy or girl.” Embryos with red indicators go dim, leaving several green.
“Gene selection—looking for and screening against single-gene diseases like sickle-cell or cystic fibrosis—that’s phase one and while it’s not exactly routine, it’s non-controversial, it’s considered somatic therapy, for the most part. There’s no one who is going to stand there and tell you that you have to select the embryo that will have muscular dystrophy, for example. PGD, polygenic scoring, a lot of which is just mitigating risk, right? Still, no one is making babies this way. Not yet. Because it leads to the gray areas like chromosome disorders. Screening against, say, Down Syndrome, or a dozen other disorders you haven’t even heard of.”
Hovering before them was a spinning dual-helix model of a DNA. There were smaller, two-dimensional terminal windows open around it.
“What I’ve been working on is taking my genome project hack and turning it into something a bit more useful. I’ve moved beyond simple gene splicing into gene editing and synthetic DNA.” As he hits the virtual keys, different parts of the helix fly off and new pieces fly in.
“Moving from therapeutic to enhancement—from somatic to germline—so the enhanced traits can be passed down. See, if I were to take a cell from your body, flip a few switches and put it back in and make you free from Huntington’s, that’s a procedure not far off from cosmetic surgery, at least from a currently accepted practice and ethical point of view. But what about preventing diabetes and heart disease and auto-immune deficiencies in the unborn? Or turning the odds against cancer and Alzheimer’s? To me, gene editing is even more ethical than gene selection. You’re not casting off otherwise viable embryos, you’re just taking one of them and making it better. The best it can be.”
The twirling helix was turning gradually, piece by piece, fully green. Jake opened his mouth to speak and sat back, hand over his mouth, staring at the animation.
Garrett leaned in. “Look. I know your history. If you could go back a year. If you were sitting here in my office. Would you pick the fetus that you knew would be born brainless and doomed—if he lived—to a life of suffering? Dooming you right along with him? No. You wouldn’t. No one would. I’m not interested in gene selection. I want to prove gene editing works. I will help you. If you help me.”
Jake could feel Tish’s gaze. He was all the way in, or all the way out. “Can I still get a vote on the name?”
“You can decide it all. Down to body odor. How much sleep will he need, what’s his metabolism, how good is his eyesight? Better than 20/20? Gay or straight? And for other, more complex attributes like say athleticism and intelligence? You can stack the deck in that direction. The only variable factors will be nurture. The environment you provide. But this kid will be born on third base.” Morgan grinned, “Now… do you want him to win a Nobel? Or a Pulitzer?”
Tish smiled at this. “She… could win both.”
Morgan tapped a key and a bit of text on screen toggled from XY to XX.
“See? You already made your first choice.”
The Marxes left the lab and as they pulled their car back from the building, another pulled up. In the rearview mirror, Jake could see a woman moving to the door of the lab. She was wearing a loose dress, but he could see she was very pregnant. She banged on the lab door with both hands, screaming.
Jake turned to remark about this to Tish but saw her faint smile and stopped. Her arms still cradled her figurative baby bump. She hadn’t smiled in months.
#
This wasn’t going to be cheap. The Marxes had already exhausted insurance means and
were well out-of-pocket on the expenses to date. It was also deep in a gray area of ethical
behavior on all sides. Various treatments and techniques and tools aside, all the pregnancies until
now were standard, natural conception. They were world class fetus makers. Getting to the finish
line was the issue. It was time to hedge their bets a little with the best science and technology
money could buy. Or stop.
While the harvesting of her eggs and his sperm would be standard front-of-office stuff, and fertilizing multiple eggs to implant in the womb was also well travelled road, everything that Morgan would be doing in his semi-terranean lab was as Jake deemed it weeks before: “really off-the-books.”
Tish had tapped into her trust, which was ample. This was what she wanted, there was nothing stopping her.
This time would be different.
Jake may have been on-the-fence for phase one but was firmly against this second phase. He had said as much with his silence on the ride home.
They had time to drink it in. Tish’s ovaries would have to be stimulated, eggs would have to be harvested, embryos created, gene selection alone would take a few weeks to profile that many embryos, but they had to come to a decision—did they want to edit? To make these choices?
A few days after the meeting with Morgan, Jake was as ready to register his concern and Tish was just as ready to rebuke it.
“Doesn’t this seem a bit ‘master race’ to you?”
“I would think, after what we’ve been through, you would want to have the best chance atva normal life, with a normal baby.”
“How is this normal? Look, I’m all for the screening against deformity and disease. But… I don’t know.”
“And I don’t get the master race thing. Who doesn’t want their baby to be smart? This isn’t eugenics or ethnic cleansing, Jake.”
She was oddly prepared for his “Nazi” line of attack. Obviously, it had occurred to her, she had just already rationalized her way around it. Jake wasn’t there, yet.
“Look, I understand how-”
“No. You. Don’t”
And there it was. Sure, there was no way he could understand what it was like to carry a life inside you for nine months and lose it and he knew that. Of course he couldn’t know the true depth of that pain, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t empathize with her desperation. It didn’t mean he didn’t feel anything, and he didn’t like the way this marginalized and invalidated his own pain and used it as a cudgel against his opinions.
He resented this implication that he didn’t suffer any loss or suffer enough to have input on the matter and further resented that she would play this card to win. Her body, her choice. Case, and bathroom door, closed. In his face.
And so it went for the intervening days between the initial orientation and when they would return to make their choices. They generally stayed out of each other’s way. Jake remembered when they were designing their loft.
“The key to any successful marriage is ‘his ’n her’ bathrooms,” he had said. “Let’s leave something to the imagination.”
In fact, the whole floor plan had evolved from this notion of divided space. His and hers, work and life, public and private. Years prior, Jake had kept the entire top floor of a warehouse district loft project. Upscale living in an area in transition. They looked out over Skid Row, with its bums and junkies sleeping against the high steel fence that protected their cars and guarded the entrance. The reality was, all it protected was the view. In one direction, the glossy towers of downtown to the opposite, you could see to the ocean. If you looked straight down, the fence blocked the sidewalk-level dereliction. This was one of Jake’s first developments and having failed to sell all of the lower units before build-out, they decide to keep the top level. A modern work-life-space solution for the busy couple on-the-go. All the marketing could only convince so many people that this was at the beach head of the blight rolling back. What Jake knew and all developers and speculators knew, was that there was always a bubble and it was always bursting. They best they could do was move it around. They turned that bad luck into an opportunity. Jake could now work from home and Tish ran her family foundation from their new penthouse lair.
Where the floors below were divided into six lofts or eight studios, sold off to hipsters and newly IPO’d engineers, and the affluent kids of their affluent backers, this one was all theirs. The first story with its concrete floors and overhead doors was split into artisanal bays for let. One was occupied by Waylon, who had come out of his semi-anonymous life to collect on a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Though it was not clear why a politically subversive street artist needed a two thousand square foot studio—he was always elsewhere being, well, politically subversive—the rent was paid a year at a time. Another bay was briefly used by Függer to record their reunion and re-break-up album. The owners on the second floor were glad when they left and an EDM producer and his obsessive sound proofing took over the space. The third bay was a metal sculptor who specialized in huge feats of balance. The nose stinging smell of hot slag hung low in the courtyard by his window.
They shared the bedroom, but they had dressing rooms and bathrooms to themselves. He had his office; she had a library. These spaces had walls, but no ceiling. Open all the way up to the steel trusses a half-story above them, the original catwalk still spanning the beams. Eight thousand square feet is a lot for two people to fill. Increasingly, they spent more time in their own wings. Even with the tall, wide windows and the hipped sky lights, it was always dark. The high ceilings and open common area were always sort of empty feeling and now, under the gray Autumn skies, they grew cold.
Darkest and coldest, was the nursery. It was a relatively small annex off of the master suite, but somehow cavernous. A vacuum trying to fill itself. A black hole, collapsing the world in toward it.
Jake knew his only say in this was to not participate. He could simply refuse to give over a sample. His body, his choice. He also knew that would drive Tish away. She had her mind made up and his recalcitrance would be a terminal betrayal. Though he could never admit it, even to himself, this was all he had at his disposal to keep her. As sick as that made him, the idea of living without her was bilious.
Their relationship over the course of several years had been forged in common cause and tempered in tragedy. Just as their love life was supplanted by the mechanics of baby making, their shared hopes and dreams had been supplanted by this singular goal. Maybe that’s what he resented most of all, at least he was important to prior efforts. The actual physical act, even as it became driven by clocks and cycles, was at least physical.
If they went down this road, they were essentially removing all they had left between them having any semblance of a healthy and functional relationship. The creeping sense of unease was rooted as much in his distrust and ignorance of the science as it was in the requisite confrontation of the truth of what they had become.
Nothing.
#
After hyperstimulation, Tish produced thirty mature ova. One thousand additional oocytes were harvested, vitrified and stored.
The eggs were fertilized via ICSI. Pregnancy professionals that they were, the Marxes went thirty for thirty in the petri dish, producing thirty zygotes that were fast becoming viable embryos.
Tish and Jake arrived for the ultrasound. Dr. Rivvers issued the standard disclaimers and assurances as she greased up the transducer. The three of them watched in silence as the live image emerged on screen. Rivvers moved the probe around. At first, there didn’t appear to be an
image at all. The video seemed like a scrambled TV signal.
16
Rivvers switched out the transducer for the transvaginal wand.
“Sorry…”
Tish laid her head back and inhaled sharply as Rivvers worked the wand inside her.
“So that is still there.” Jake teased; Tish gripped his hand.
“Stop. It.” She tried not to laugh, shut her eyes and squeezed out a tear.
“Okay… now we’re getting something. There. See?”
Tish turned her head to the screen and saw her growing baby, who turned as if on cue and seemed to look back out at her from the screen.
“Aaannnd there’s the heartbeat.” Rivvers hit a button, the sonogram rolled off the thermal printer. “Next time, we’ll go 3D. You’ll be able to see some finer detail and facial features.”
Gretchen was a full-spectrum doula. She wasn’t just a labor partner; she was a pregnancy life-coach. She moved in. She would be there throughout the pregnancy and for a few months post-partem. Jake was pretty sure she was security for The Institute. Home care kept Tish squirreled away and out of their lobby.
This wouldn’t help bring Jake and Tish closer. Having someone in the house is a built-in
excuse to decline intimacy, as is, of course, being pregnant.
“I’ll need to set up in here. I have a cot.” She and Tish look at Jake. “Oh. Yeah, I can use the pull out in my office.”
Jake had made his office up among the catwalks, in bones of the old control room. He built a new iron staircase up and a brass pole for quick trips back down. He left the original foreman’s mezzanine at the other end and set up a small lounge space. From these beams, he could see down into every room except the nursery, which had a drop ceiling.
He noticed, from up here, you could see how staged it was. You could see the stud walls
behind the living space facades. It looked like the set of a TV show.
Gretchen hugged Tish, Jake could hear her cry. Gretchen stared up at him.
#
Six months in and Tish is losing weight when she should be gaining. She is gaunt and pale, the supplements do nothing, when she can even keep them down.
Dr. Rivvers is on her way. Jake is pulling up to Garrett’s office.
Garrett can’t help, he only knows how to do what he did, it’s too late to abort.
“It’s probably just some microchimerism,” Garrett says, handing Jake a bottle of water. “Sit. Drink. The mother can get some of the baby’s cells and DNA and kind of absorb them.”
“So the baby is sick? And it’s making Tish sick?”
“No, I mean, I would hope, if anything it will help. Look, I’m going to level with you. SNIPR doesn’t just implement your choices, it learns from your choices and makes new choices. It’s- it’s a virus.”
Jake is going to punch him or scream or both.
“It’s good a virus, and its working on Tish. She will come out of this with-” Garrett’s virtual screens pop open on his desk and his smartphone sounds like the alarm on a submarine diving. “Go, it’s Tish, she’s in labor.”
On the way out, Jake remembers the woman beating on Garrett’s door. She looked like Tish, all belly and bones.
He pulls into the gated lot, he can hear Tish screaming from upstairs. He takes the freight elevator; it has a speed control lever.
He slides around the corner into the bedroom, Rivvers is covered in blood, Gretchen struggles with Tish to keep her laying back.
“Where the fuck have you beeeeen!” As she screams, Jake can see Rivvers snip the
perineum. Something immediately breaches.
“We need room, everything is coming at once.” No sooner said than it all does come out, all at once. Riding a small flood of blood and viscous fluid, is a pulsing flesh pod. Dense fibrous tissue in the shape of a dormant corpse lily.
Rivvers lays it into a shiny steel basin and rips into it with a hook scalpel.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Jake is frozen against the wall. Tish looks dead.
The doctor uses a small cavity spreader to hold this muscle sack open and—with far more delicacy—slices open the inner membrane.
The absolute cattle stampede of a labor seemed over in seconds. Now, minutes seem to pass as Gretchen uses a bulb syringe to clear the baby’s sinuses and mouth. Hours seem to pass, before she starts crying. Tish looks up and smiles before passing back out.
#
They named her Emily Jane. She was born three months premature, but at a full and healthy birth weight. Tish was doing great, too. Spectacular in fact.
Now that Gretchen had moved out, Jake was back into the bedroom and close to Tish. Her quickening and preternatural ability to sense when Baby Emily had to eat or needed a fresh diaper before she cried meant Jake never had a sleepless night. Still sexless, but never sleepless.
She was now completely barren. The delivery, that prehistoric womb, the whole ordeal. Her entire uterus had come out along with everything else. Nevertheless, she looked ten years younger. Her skin, her muscle tone, her eyes shone with that light Jake hadn’t seen since college.
All the doors opened after that. Jake was able to land another warehouse and had already pre-sold the top-level loft spaces. Then things turned, again.
The first time it showed its power, was playing peek-a-boo. Tish would cover her eyes and say “Ahhhh boo!” and the baby would giggle uncontrollably.
Tish hides her face.
“Ahhh boo!” and giggles ensue.
Hides her face.
“Ahhh booo!” more giggles.
Hides her face.
“Ahh-“ but the baby is gone. ”Jake? Jake!”
She hears the baby giggle, from above. Tish looks up to see Jake on the catwalk outside his office, confused, holding the laughing baby.
“Oh my God! Jake!”
#
The second warehouse project is slipping behind schedule. Tish has been gone all day. The baby is screaming on the monitor. Not fussing, not crying, just straight to screaming. Jake runs to landing outside his office and looks, he can’t hear the baby from the nursery, she must be okay. He goes back inside and just as he sits at his desk, the screaming on the monitor starts again, he stands up, slides down the brass pole and stomps to the nursery door. Nothing. She is sleeping. He is halfway back up the stairs, when he can hear her in the monitor, he jumps over the rail, slams open the door; still nothing. He yanks her monitor off of her dresser and smashes it on the floor out in the main living area.
He has finally made adjustments to the project schedule that put him back on track when Tish comes home and yells for him from downstairs.
“Jake! The baby!”
“She’s fine! I just checked on her and she’s fast asleep!”
Tish gets to the baby, her diaper is full, her face is purple from the exertion of screaming, she hasn’t been fed.
“What’s wrong with her face” Jake is suddenly in the door of the nursery.
“What?” Angry. Incredulous.
“You don’t see that?”
“Yes, Jake, she’s red from screaming in here all day while you hide up in your crow’s nest.” Tish sees the smashed monitor in the hall, gathers the baby up and pushes her way past Jake and out the door.
#
Jake had been spending more time on site at the new building. Tish moved the baby into the bedroom and hardly left at all. It was clear he should return to his pull-out in his office, which was at least a step above his Plan B, which was to sleep in the trailer at the job site.
When Jake pulled in, Waylon’s overhead door was open and he was working in his studio. It was rare to see him there, or anywhere, really.
“Is that Baby Jesus on the cross?” He hadn’t been sure in the weeks prior that he saw the
things he saw.
Waylon stepped back and looked. He was working on a spray paint template that was, indeed, a crucified Baby Jesus.
“It’s like… abortion, but through different eyes. The pro-lifers say, ‘would you abort Jesus’ and really… we did, kinda, right?” Waylon is well pleased by his explanation.
“Yeah, 120 th trimester abortions are murder. No arguments there.” Jake turns to leave.
“You ever hear about Jesus as a boy?”
Jake could barely remember the stories of Jesus as an adult.
“Um. Nope.”
“He’s like, a kid, right? But he’s already Jesus. He’s a powerful little Demi-God, and he’s out on the playground but he’s a little kid in his head and these other kids don’t know he’s Jesus, yet. Some other kid is like ‘hey, look at Jesus, talking Aramaic with his old ass sandals, he’s-whatever mean shit school kids said in Nazareth’ and so Jesus smote him. Right? Like kapow. The kid’s parents were all ‘holy shit, you monster’ and so Jesus struck them blind. Kablam. ‘Can’t pick me out of a line up, now, snitches’ and Mary was like, ‘we need to look at home schooling.’ That’s why we don’t know anything about the early years. Can you imagine the wrath of puberty Jesus?”
“Guess he was the first Millennial,” Jake said.
Waylon just laughed and went back to spray painting.
#
Jake hasn’t been out of this office all day. Waylon is an idiot, but he can’t help pondering the thought experiment this poses. If you didn’t know Jesus would become Jesus, would you still let him get away with the things he did before even he knew who he was? How different would the Antichrist’s childhood be?
He can hear her giggling on the monitor. But hers is smashed. Then the screaming. Not the baby, it’s Tish. He hasn’t heard a noise like this since labor. He is downstairs and to the door before he even has time to think about going. The door is locked.
“Tish!”
She is screaming from inside. He slams his shoulder on the door, but it’s like a weight is against it. He slams into again and again. He grabs the knock and shakes and the door flies in, dragging him with it and to the floor.
The baby’s mobile is floating freely above him and all the toys in her room and Tish. Tish is spinning in the center of it all, still screaming when she can. Her nose starts bleeding from the centrifugal force, spraying blood on all four walls. Jake stands and grabs at Tish.
“No! Get out of here!” her hands flail and scratch his face.
Three floors below them, the sculptor begins overstoking his blast furnace. He doesn’t know why, but it doesn’t seem hot enough.
Jake jumps up once more and this time catches her leg, but he is forced into the air over the crib, his weight pulls them both off axis and the wobble until his feet catch off of the ceiling and they are both flung into the wall of the nursery. Everything falls around them.
Jake stands and goes to the crib. Its gone. Jake hears it giggle from outside and above. Jake is on the stairs, now the catwalk, its floating before him. Hovering in mid-air. Its face. Tish would see it now. The deformities were back. Jake reaches out to grab it and falls. A half story plunge
through the coffee table below.
The sculptor has shut his furnace door. It creaks under the strain of the heat within.
More giggling. He drags himself to his feet. His ribs feel broken. It’s up on the mezzanine. Jake grabs a knife from the kitchen counter and goes to the ladder beneath the mezzanine. He can barely lift his leg to the first rung when he feels light all over. He’s levitating upward. He turns slowly in the air as he rises. Tish. She’s holding her arms above her head. She is doing this. She can do this, too. Is it controlling her? Are they connected?
“Tish, how-“
And with a swift, downward motion, she slams Jake to the floor. Up again and into the mezzanine and the floor, again. The bolts from the old steel platform pull slowly from the wall.
Tish balls her fist and pulls. The platform pulls away and crashes down, pinning Jake to the floor.
The blast furnace blows. The wave knocks open the cinder block wall into Waylon’s studio
and the paint and paper and canvases and thinner go up like a secondary charge. The fire spreads
easily from there up to the apartments on the next floor.
Jake can see Tish bundling the baby up and climbing out the fire escape.
#
Jake felt the heat moving from his extremities to his core and burning its way up to the back of his neck, flowing out as if the base of his skull lay on a floor drain. Burning his skull like fever, converging there and boring its way out the back of his head, circling and spiraling down to a pinpoint somewhere deep in the darkness; in contrast to the swelling pool of blood flowing out and away from his body, boiling at the edges from the heat of the fire on the floors below.
In the end the police would sift through the debris. They would find the apartment in shambles but more or less intact, somehow balanced on the burned-out matchsticks of the building beneath it, Jake’s cremains in a sticky, black pool of cooked blood. They would compile the evidence. Analyze the spatter patterns. Isolate the fluid and tissue samples. Catalog and collate.
Ultimately it would be the footage found on the nanny cam that told the story of a sick man on a rampage. They don’t see the game of peek-a-boo, they see jake dangling the baby off of the catwalk as Tish screams from below. The see Jake tying the baby down, locking her away in the nursery, smashing the baby monitor. Flinging a bloodied Tish around the room and finally into a wall. Trying to kill his infant daughter while his wife nearly died protecting her, before falling off the mezzanine. They wouldn’t see Rivvers and Gretchen hacking the baby out of Tish as Jake recoiled in horror and slid down the wall. They wouldn’t need to—or even want to—look for Tish or her baby. They would see mother and child escape safely. They would assume she was in hiding and might not even know Jake was dead. For both of those things they would be glad. They would look back into the death of the doula. They would blame Jake and Jake alone.
The evidence would be boxed and stored, and when they extracted the DNA to store it and perhaps one day cross reference it against unsolved crimes—due not only to the secretive nature of Garrett’s work, and the privacy laws around surrogacy, adoption, IVF and egg donation, but to the fact that such systems wouldn’t be integrated—they would not see matches against the thousands of zygotes cloned from Tish and Jake’s original specimen.
Viable, healthy, perfect embryos. Propagated anonymously to the hundreds of Gestasia Institute branches, partners, and affiliate labs. All of them fully infused carriers of the SNIPR virus, headed by truck and train and ship and plane, all over the world.