Red Clocks. Leni Zumas

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СКАЧАТЬ the guy from that band,” says Dr. Kalbfleisch.

      “Wow,” says the biographer, bothered by how sexy he’s become.

      “Shall we take a look?” He settles his leather on a stool in front of her open legs, says “Oops!” and removes the sunglasses. Kalbfleisch played football at an East Coast university and still has the face of a frat boy. He is golden skinned, a poor listener. He smiles while citing bleak statistics. The nurse holds the biographer’s file and a pen to write measurements. The doctor will call out how thick the lining, how large the follicles, how many the follicles. Add these numbers to the biographer’s age (42) and her level of follicle-stimulating hormone (14.3) and the temperature outside (56) and the number of ants in the square foot of soil directly beneath them (87), and you get the odds. The chance of a child.

      Snapping on latex gloves: “Okay, Roberta, let’s see what’s what.”

      On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the shrill funk of an elderly cheese and one being no odor at all, how would he rank the smell of the biographer’s vagina? How does it compare with the other vaginas barreling through this exam room, day in, day out, years of vaginas, a crowd of vulvic ghosts? Plenty of women don’t shower beforehand, or are battling a yeast, or just happen naturally to stink in the nethers. Kalbfleisch has sniffed some ripe tangs in his time.

      He slides in the ultrasound wand, dabbed with its neon-blue jelly, and presses it up against her cervix. “Your lining’s nice and thin,” he says. “Four point five. Right where we want it.” On the monitor, the lining of the biographer’s uterus is a dash of white chalk in a black swell, hardly enough of a thing, it seems, to measure, but Kalbfleisch is a trained professional in whose expertise she is putting her trust. And her money—so much money that the numbers seem virtual, mythical, details from a story about money rather than money anyone actually has. The biographer, for example, does not have it. She’s using credit cards.

      The doctor moves to the ovaries, shoving and tilting the wand until he gets an angle he likes. “Here’s the right side. Nice bunch of follicles …” The eggs themselves are too small to be seen, even with magnification, but their sacs—black holes on the grayish screen—can be counted.

      “Keep our fingers crossed,” says Kalbfleisch, easing the wand back out.

       Doctor, is my bunch actually nice?

      He rolls away from her crotch and pulls off his gloves. “For the past several cycles”—looking at her chart, not at her—“you’ve been taking Clomid to support ovulation.”

      This she does not need to be told.

      “Unfortunately Clomid also causes the uterine lining to shrink, so we advise patients not to take it for long stretches of time. You’ve already done a long stretch.”

       Wait, what?

      She should have looked it up herself.

      “So for this round we need to try a different protocol. Another medication that’s been known to improve the odds in some elderly pregravid cases.”

      “Elderly?”

      “Just a clinical term.” He doesn’t glance up from the prescription he’s writing. “She’ll explain the medication and we’ll see you back here on day nine.” He hands the file to the nurse, stands, and makes an adjustment to his leather crotch before striding out.

      Asshole, in Faroese: reyvarhol.

      Crabby says, “So you need to fill this today and start taking it tomorrow morning, on an empty stomach. Every morning for ten days. While you’re on it, you might notice a foul odor from the discharge from your vagina.”

      “Great,” says the biographer.

      “Some women say the smell is quite, um, surprising,” she goes on. “Even actually disturbing. But whatever you do, don’t douche. That’ll introduce chemicals into the canal that if they make their way through the cervix can, you know, compromise the pH of the uterine cavity.”

      The biographer has never douched in her life, nor does she know anyone who has.

      “Questions?” says the nurse.

      “What does”—she squints at the prescription—“Ovutran do?”

      “It supports ovulation.”

      “How, though?”

      “You’d have to ask the doctor.”

      She is submitting her area to all kinds of invasion without understanding a fraction of what’s being done to it. This seems, suddenly, terrible. How can you raise a child alone if you don’t even find out what they’re doing to your area?

      “I’d like to ask him now,” she says.

      “He’s already with another patient. Best thing to do is call the office.”

      “But I’m here in the office. Can’t he—or is there someone else who—”

      “Sorry, it’s an extra-busy day. Halloween and all.”

      “Why does Halloween make it busier?”

      “It’s a holiday.”

      “Not a national holiday. Banks are open and the mail is delivered.”

      “You will need,” says Crabby slowly, carefully, “to call the office.”

      The biographer cried the first time it failed. She was waiting in line to buy floss, having pledged to improve her dental hygiene now that she was going to be a parent, and her phone rang: one of the nurses, “I’m sorry, sweetie, but your test was negative,” the biographer saying thank you, okay, thank you and hitting END before the tears started. Despite the statistics and Kalbfleisch’s “This doesn’t work for everyone,” the biographer had thought it would be easy. Squirt in millions of sperm from a nineteen-year-old biology major, precisely timed to be there waiting when the egg flies out; sperm and egg collide in the warm tunnel—how could fertilization not happen? Don’t be stupid anymore, she wrote in her notebook, under Immediate action required.

      She drives west on Highway 22 into dark hills dense with hemlock, fir, and spruce. Oregon has the best trees in America, soaring and shaggy winged, alpine sinister. Her tree gratitude mutes her doctor resentment. Two hours from his office, her car crests the cliff road and the church steeple juts into view. The rest of town follows, hunched in rucked hills sloping to the water. Smoke coils from the pub chimney. Fishing nets pile on the shore. In Newville you can watch the sea eat the ground, over and over, unstopping. Millions of abyssal thalassic acres. The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do. Today its walls are high, white lather torn, crashing hard at the sea stacks. “Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.

       Central Coast Regional H.S. seeks history teacher (U.S./World). Bachelor’s degree required. Location: Newville, Oregon, fishing village on quiet ocean harbor, migrating whales. Ivy League–educated principal is committed to creating dynamic, innovative learning environment.

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