The Y Chromosome

by Leona Gom

  “Research,” she said. “Research, research! Into what’s gone wrong with spermatogenesis.”

  I almost said, “Maybe it’s God’s Will,” but I managed to restrain myself; who knows if she’d have thought I was kidding. It does, after all, make as much sense as anything, God the old Malthusian Fart-in-the-Sky saying, Lo/Ho/Yo! People — it’s been a tranche, really it has, but game’s over, time to let something else have a turn at wrecking the playground, something more purposeful than intelligence — how about, oh, let’s see, Rodentia?

  I pick up the photograph of Linda on my night table and stare and stare into her eyes. Last week I put the photo away in the drawer, but last night I took it out again. Not ready. What a short sweet time we had together, not even ten years. I still turn my head because I hear her step behind my chair, see her walk by me on the street wearing a stranger’s face —

  Report cards. I have to finish my damned report cards. “Jane is a hard-working and intelligent girl and she has a bright future ahead of her especially since she will probably be the only one in it by then.”

  ­* * *

  Sept. 9, 2064

  Elizabeth and Jenny came by after school. Well, I was glad, of course, to see Elizabeth. Jenny went into the kitchen to make herself a sandwich and Elizabeth sat down in the chair opposite me, like a guest, someone paying a formal visit. Well, that’s how it is now. I could tell she was alarmed about the new plants, but she didn’t say anything. Not to my face. But I can imagine her now, telling Jenny, “The old merdehead is definitely over the edge. Did you see the size of that fig? There’s hardly any room to move in there.” Well, maybe that’s the point.

  She wanted to know about school. So I told her: one boy in Grade One this year and he’s —

  “An Artificial?” she said.

  “You know how I hate that word,” I said.

  She sighed. She looked tired. Her hair was greasy and needed to be cut; it hung down over her eyebrows, and I thought it must be like trying to look out from under a fringed cloth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just lab shorthand. If we’d known it was going to become a significant phenomenon we’d have invented a less offensive term.”

  “No one made a big deal about artificial insemination before. You don’t need a goddamned new word now.”

  “It’s just a way for us to keep track. In case some come along who aren’t Artificials.” She sighed. “Unlikely as that may be.”

  Jenny came in and sat at Elizabeth’s feet. I could hear the noises her throat made as she swallowed the sandwich. Fig kept poking her in the neck; it pleased me, sour old man that I am.

  “At least the boys who are left aren’t dying anymore,” Jenny said. “Not the way they were ten years ago. That’s got to be a good sign.”

  I almost had to laugh. “A good sign. Sure. They’re turning out to be sterile — that’s a good sign? Soon there’ll be no babies at all anymore, of any sex.”

  “We’re making progress,” Elizabeth said, scratching her head and then looking sadly at the flakes of dandruff she’d scraped up under her fingernail. “We’ve isolated the problem to one gene. At least now we know where to look. We just need time —”

  “Time’s running out.” Cynics are never original.

  “It’s not Elizabeth’s fault you men can’t reproduce,” Jenny snapped, and, oh, maybe I deserved that, sounding so cranky, but I couldn’t let her win, not after the way she’d said “you men,” so I shouted back something nasty and then so did she, it had the phrase “malfunctioning sperm” in it, I remember that, my abstracted diarist mind always taking notes for later. I suppose we were getting ready to resort to our usual arguments about the parasitic patriarchy when suddenly Elizabeth got up and walked out. We sat there feeling ashamed.

  “We shouldn’t do this to her,” I said, finally.

  Jenny nodded, looking fixedly at the hibiscus, which had taken over the south corner of the living room. “She’s been so overworked. She comes home exhausted. Everybody at the lab is working twelve-hour shifts, or more. And she’s worried about the press conference tomorrow. When they have to reveal that the male Artificials are sterile.”

  “That still doesn’t make any sense to me. Why should they be sterile, if they start out without the gene damage?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenny sighed. “I don’t know. The damage must occur later. No one really knows all the effects of the kind of uv we’re getting now. And the air is so full of crap, just breathing makes your cells mutate. I know damned well they didn’t tell us the truth about Hanford. Or Kalistan twenty years ago. Or the war in Ukraine. Or … it just goes on and on and on.” She picked off a leaf turning pale on Fig and rubbed it between her fingers.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Ignorance was bliss.”

  “They knew what they were doing. It wasn’t ignorance.”

  “But was it bliss?”

  Jenny looked at me coldly, thinking I was being a smart-ass, but I was serious, in a way, wanting to think that people, perhaps even ourselves, had once known a joy, however selfish and hedonistic, that our misery now might be paying at least for that.

  “I bloody well hope not,” Jenny said. She dropped the leaf into the pot.

  The fridge kicked in, spewing out God knows what new toxins for the next generation to discover. We sat there in moody silence for a while, and then Jenny slapped her hands down onto her thighs so hard it made me jump and said, “Well, merde, it’s not the end of the world, yet. We’ve still got the sperm banks.”

  “They won’t last forever,” Elizabeth said. She stood leaning against the door into the kitchen, and her face looked so old and full of pain I almost cried out — she seemed so much like Linda at the end, before she stopped fighting and took my hand and said, “I guess it’s time,” and I told the nurse and she came and took off the bag on the iv and put on the one with the large red stripe across the top.

  I sit here writing and writing. For whom, whose eyes but mine own? There is delight in singing, though none hear/Beside the singer. Sure. Journal writers, I read somewhere, are people lacking in social skills. Yes, yes. I become more hermetic by the day. I should have been a pair of ragged claws; my pencil scuttles across the floors of silent paper. Addiction, compulsion. A nightly ablution, cleansing me of the day’s horrors, of the dark gathering its dirty drawstring around my race.

  I didn’t like the way Jenny picked that leaf off my fig.

  Sept. 10, 2064

  Some of the children were crying today after recess, and I had to give them my little Reassurance Sermon, which is so threadbare a wrong tug one of these days will disintegrate it entirely, let the Naked Truth shine forth. And what’s that? That the world is going mad with despair, that there is no future.

  I saw Elizabeth on the television, standing beside Dr. Kostash. He stared into the camera like someone under hypnosis. When he read his statement his voice was shaking. Elizabeth stayed beside him, still as a photograph, one hand arrested in pulling off the rubber glove on her other hand.

  I had a shower, and then I stood in front of the mirror in the hallway, looking at myself. I touched my penis, watched it flutter like a fibrillating heart. I cupped my testicles in my hands and just stood there, hunched over like a moron, looking at myself. An ordinary man, the last of his kind. I let go of my testicles; suddenly they disgusted me. Failures. Incapable of their one simple function. And then I began to masturbate, until the useless sperm flew at the mirror.

  Well. What a thing to confess. Pepys never did anything like that.

  Before I go to bed I will clean the mirror. Some concessions still to civilization.

  Sept. 11, 2064

  Ron just walked out today, left his coat and everything in the staff room. It’s what we all want to do, just walk out. I don’t know why more of us haven’t, why we come in every day with our dutiful lesson plans and teach the chil
dren, the last of the children, the lessons of history and culture and science, all the things that have brought us to where we are today.

  I phoned Elizabeth. She said they’d been instructed to release a report saying there’d been a breakthrough, in hopes it might ease people’s depression. “Of course, it’s not true,” she said. Of course, I said.

  I talk to my plants. Good, kind, reassuring things. They hold their leaves out to me like cups to be filled with my words. Thou shalt inherit the earth, I tell them. But they know that. They’ve always known that.

  Sept. 12, 2064

  Ron wasn’t in school. His wife phoned to say he was sick. Aren’t we all? What would I do if I had the courage to walk out like that? Go home, the gun to the head, the slit wrists? And let my plants, hunger-crazed, devour me. The woods avenge themselves.

  But the breakthrough news seems to have helped; Clara was actually humming as she made the coffee. I wish Elizabeth hadn’t told me the truth. I alone am escaped to tell thee.

  Sept. 13, 2064

  I finally had to throw out Ivy One today. Couldn’t pretend she’d recover. Euthanasia. The spider mites, I suppose, and old age. She had only two green leaves left. But it was still life. I cried. I actually cried. I murdered your mom today, I told Ivy Two. She just shrugged, callous bitch.

  ­* * *

  Nov. 20, 2066

  Elizabeth and Jenny, bursting with news. A breakthrough, a real one this time, they said. Let’s see if I can remember how it goes:

  “Dr. Kostash had been working on it, but nobody really thought he’d do it,” Elizabeth said excitedly, biting into her apple so enthusiastically juice squirted in the air. “Even he wasn’t sure, that’s why he threatened to lobotomize us if we talked about it outside the lab. But his first child has just been delivered, so there’s absolutely no doubt. Laura Anderson. She’ll probably be showing up in your Grade One class in six years. What he’s done, you see, is combine two haploid eggs to produce a viable diploid zygote, with its full complement of forty-six chromosomes. But of course there are only two X chromosomes, no Y, so the offspring has to be female.”

  “Wouldn’t that produce Turner’s syndrome?” I asked, struggling to follow her.

  “No, no — that’s an XO chromosome constitution. A normal female requires two X chromosomes, even though only one is transcriptionally active in each cell.”

  “Is this like parthenogenesis? Or cloning, something like that?”

  “No, not at all. There are two genetically-separate parents involved here. It’s not asexual reproduction, as genetics defines it. And the process is a lot simpler than cloning. In nuclear transplantation, embryogenesis gets started but tends to stop at the blastula stage, so serial transfers are necessary — we’re still a long way from cloning humans. But this, ova-fusion, Dr. Kostash calls it, requires only the initial implant into the mother. One of the mothers. Dr. Kostash says he could train doctors in the process in a matter of weeks.”

  “Forgive my obtuseness,” I said, “but I don’t see how this is a real breakthrough. I mean, we don’t exactly need more female children. You still haven’t solved the problems with spermatogenesis.”

  They looked at me, coldly, I thought. Then Jenny said, carefully, “What this means is that there’s now the possibility of a future for the human race once the sperm banks are exhausted.”

  “I see,” I said. “And this future would consist only of women.”

  “Isn’t that better than goddamned extinction? Jesus, Dad.” Elizabeth tossed her apple core angrily at the sink. It rolled down the counter and confronted the sugar canister.

  “Yes,” I said meekly. “It’s better than extinction.” I picked up her apple core and dropped it carefully down the organics chute.

  “Maybe it’s just evolution,” Jenny said, forcing a grin at me. “You know. Another one of the big steps, the first fish crawling up onto land.”

  “Evolution. I see.” I took a deep breath, trying it out, mutating, air instead of water in the lungs. It hurt, but it seemed to work. I turned to Elizabeth. “I don’t suppose this ova-fusion business could be used with sperm — some kind of sperm-fusion?”

  Elizabeth smiled. Avuncularly, I thought. “No, Daddy. The sperm is what has the genetic damage. And in any case the males are the heterogametic sex. It — well, it makes it a whole lot more complicated. Now, if you were a silk moth, for instance, you’d be the homogametic sex.”

  “Well, it’s a shame I’m not,” I said. Fish out of water.

  “Look,” she said, impatiently. “It’s not as though we’re stopping our other research. We know ova-fusion isn’t the whole answer. But, Christ, it gives us some time. It gives us at least another generation, more if we ration the sperm bank supplies carefully. There’s such a feeling of renewed energy in everybody at the lab. And we’ve consolidated the viable sperm banks into only the four safest major research centres in the world — including ours — so we can intensify the research and provide better security —”

  “That’s confidential,” Jenny protested.

  “He’s my father,” Elizabeth said. “He won’t tell if he knows it’s privileged.”

  “He won’t tell if he isn’t talked about in the fucking third person,” I snapped.

  “Ah, Daddy,” Elizabeth said. “What would I do without you?”

  And she came over and hugged me. I was so startled I just sat there stiff as a stick, and before I could hug her back she’d pulled away.

  So there it is. I have seen the future and it is women. Well. Quite a concept. The garden, going on without us. This is the way the world ends. T.S. Eliot.

  Nov. 21, 2066

  At school the kids were all so hyper. They’d heard the news even if they didn’t really understand it. I gave up trying to teach. In the middle of Arithmetic I told them all just to scream and run around like crazy people. They did. It was rather fun.

  Place: the staff room

  Time: 12:05

  Bill: I don’t like the sound of it. If God had intended blah, blah, blah.

  Clara: Oh, get fucked.

  Rob: Okay, okay — it’s good news. I guess. But even if by some miracle they can still fix the Y damage, by then women will be running everything. Jesus.

  Eleanor:Sounds good to me.

  Patrick:Will whoever took the printer out of my classroom get it back right now?

  Rob: No, really. Far be it for me to agree with Bill, but there is something rather disturbing about this —

  Bill: Thank you, Rob. Another sane voice at last.

  Rob: It’s meddling in something we really have no right to —

  Clara: Oh, merde! You don’t complain when they’re meddling to try to fix the Y damage.

  Rob: I know. But this is different. It’s creating, I don’t know, a new kind of life.

  Clara: Oh, pifflepoop. Admit it — your objection is just plain old misogyny.

  Rob: Well, think about it for a minute, will you? A world full of nothing but women. Who would seriously want that? You can’t expect us to be thrilled.

  Patrick: I mean it. I want that printer back on my desk by one o’clock.

  Bill: If God had intended women to —

  Clara and Eleanor: Oh, get fucked!

  Prince: Now, now, let’s not get carried away.

  (Where was Adam during this discussion? Why did he sit there like a chunk of cheese and say nothing? Did he have no opinion? Answer in twenty-five words or less.)

  Nov. 22, 2066

  School still the proverbial animal farm today, like supervising eight hours of recess on a rainy day, nobody wanting to concentrate on work. Those little hands waving in the air did not want to say “gravity” or “fourteen” or “frog,” the answers teacher expected — no, they were twitching with, “So the world isn’t going to end, after all, Mr. Markov?” and, “My mom sa
ys no more babies are going to die now,” and, “But there’s going to be only girls from now on? Yuck.” And the funny way the girls responded to that last one, giggling a little and looking, I don’t know, embarrassed? Ashamed? Smug? Afraid? Kind of the way the woman in the bar looked —

  Yeah, right, the bar. Found Clara and Rob arguing in the staff room after school and they’d reached the usual impasse of two intelligent opinions (“Will, too!” “Will not!” “Oh, yeah?” “Yeah.”) so I dragged them off to Bar None for a drink. We had to wander around for five minutes until we found seats, the place was so crowded, mostly men, a few women, everybody arguing about the breakthrough news.

  “The din of inequity,” Clara shouted at me over the noise.

  Even Rob conceded her a smile.

  We gave up trying to talk, just sucked on our drinks and listened to the people at the next table, two men and one woman who sat there fiddling with her coaster and saying nothing.

  “I still think it’s got to be a joke, somebody’s sick idea of a joke.”

  “It’s no joke, they’ve really done it.”

  “So that’s it, then? Men are just supposed to accept this?”

  “Well, we’ve got no bloody choice, do we?”

  “Yes, we’ve got a bloody choice! I didn’t work my ass off at Hardy’s for twenty years so a bunch of goddamned women can come in and take over. No offence, Susan.”

  The woman shrugged, didn’t look up.

  “It goes beyond your job, Dave, you know. It means no more men, ever. Quite a prospect, eh?”

  “Jesus.” Dave banged his glass down on the table so hard we all jumped. “They did this on purpose, somehow. I know they did, it’s some goddamned plot by those goddamned dykes to get rid of us.”

  “What a pile of shit,” Clara said loudly. She was on her third glass of wine.

  “Shh. He’ll hear you.” Rob looked nervously over at their table.

  “I don’t care! He wants us to hear him! Well, here’s to all the goddamned dykes, Dave!” She dipped her glass at the air, took a big swallow of wine. The men at the next table glanced at her, flat, hostile looks. I don’t think they realized she was talking to them; she was just a fat middle-aged woman behaving badly in public.