Babies fertilized in vitro were shown to be just as likely to be born empty.
Babies delivered by caesarean were shown to be just as likely to be born empty.
Meanwhile, the price to adopt a child had soared to over a million.
“Just because you’ve felt your baby moving doesn’t mean that your baby is conscious. Most movements in the womb are involuntary. Or reflexes. There isn’t necessarily any actual control involved,” said a tech with auburn hair, pushing a patient in a gown down the hallway in a wheelchair.
With so few viable babies being born, the number of preemies in residence at the hospital had plunged. The neonatal unit looked like a motel on a dying highway. Full of empty beds.
By the end of that autumn, the hospital admin had decided to downsize the staff of the neonatal unit. Naomi was the rookie. She was first to go.
“We’re grateful for the work that you did here,” the human resources director said, offering her a handshake and a smile.
Naomi didn’t bother applying for a new job. None of the hospitals were hiring for neonatal. She spent the week after losing her job sprawled across the sofa in underwear and a hoodie, crushingly depressed, binging on cream puffs and jelly donuts, watching the television with the curtains drawn. She was so tired of hearing about the phenomenon. Hearing about the phenomenon exhausted her. She kept flipping to shows about the phenomenon anyway.
There was an interview with somebody in a poncho.
“God was like, fine, you’re going to legalize abortion? You don’t want your babies anymore? You only want your babies sometimes? You’re just going to start killing babies at random? Then so am I.”
There was an interview with somebody with beaded cornrows.
“There’s always been this assumption that God is good. Because that’s what our scriptures tell us. But scriptures are just the word of God. We’re taking God at its word. We’re assuming that God never lies. If a man came to your door and told you he was good, and the only evidence he had for that was a book that he had written that said he was good, would you trust him?”
There was an interview with a weather-beaten rancher who had burned a hundred acres of prairie.
“Why burn all of the fields?”
“We’re trying to kill all of the insects.”
“You believe in reincarnation?”
“Been coming around to the idea.”
“What about all of the evidence that humans souls are separate from other animals?”
The rancher grimaced, gesturing helplessly at the blackened stubs of grass.
“I’m willing to try anything at this point. My daughter’s pregnant.”
In the background a hawk flying over the ashes was shot out of the sky by a child with a rifle.
Tad stepped timidly into the living room, covering the mouthpiece on the cordless phone.
“Let’s have dinner with your parents tonight,” Tad whispered.
Naomi looked at him from the sofa. Rama had followed him into the living room, curling around his ankles, purring at his feet. Her parents lived in the hills above the city, in a modern villa with a shimmering infinity pool, with underwater lighting that cycled between shades of neon, violet and cyan and indigo and green. The house where she had been born. Tad liked her parents, but he had never spontaneously suggested having dinner with her parents before, not under any circumstances. He was just trying to help. To get her off of the sofa. To get her out of the condo. She decided to go along with it.
“You can say that we’ll be there,” Naomi said.
She took a long shower. She put on actual clothes. She still looked depressed as hell. Later that night she sat on a chair in the villa, sipping a virgin daiquiri across from her parents. Her parents were religious more out of habit than out of conviction, although the epidemic had inspired a renewed interest in religion for everybody, her parents included, and her mother had set out fresh flowers on the shrine. Her father wore a bright dastar with a charcoal suit. Her mother was wearing jelly sandals with a silk sari. Her parents were much older than she was, almost elderly now, and had no hobbies aside from making money and watching sports. Lately her father had been obsessed with professional paintball. A paintball match was playing across the television on mute.
“You look terrible,” her father said.
“You really do,” her mother said.
“I appreciate you saying that,” Naomi said.
Warriors fist-bumped as paint-spattered enemies fell to the dirt.
“In a way, maybe losing your job was a good thing,” Tad said tentatively, sitting next to her in a cream polo.
“Now you have the ability to travel if necessary,” her father said.
“Now you have the freedom to explore every option,” her mother said.
Naomi stared at her parents suspiciously, sensing a vague implication, a current of conspiracy in the air. Her parents were plotting something, she realized. Dinner tonight hadn’t been spontaneous. Dinner tonight was an ambush. She glanced at her husband. Tad looked nervous. He was in on it. He had been scheming too.
“I hate it when you all make plans about me behind my back,” Naomi said with a scowl.
“Please, baby, just hear us out,” Tad said.
“There’s a place out in the desert,” her father said.
“A special place,” her mother said.
“For pregnant women,” her father said.
“Women looking for some type of assurance,” her mother said.
“The facility is one of a kind. You can think of it as a precaution. We would live there until the baby was born, in order to ensure that it’s born with a soul,” Tad said.
Naomi scowled at him.
“I’m going to have the baby at home,” Naomi said.
Tad glanced at her parents before turning back toward her with a hint of pleading in his voice.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Tad said.
“We’d pay for it,” her father said.
“It’s really very expensive,” her mother said.
“Absolutely not,” Naomi said.
Her parents frowned with disappointment.
“Naomi. There’s a body growing inside of you. You have a responsibility to do everything you can to give it a chance at having a soul,” her father said.
“You’re talking about the baby like it’s not a person,” Naomi said, getting upset.
“We have no way of knowing whether or not it has a soul yet, and without a soul, it’s not,” her mother said.
Naomi stared at the staircase to the basement behind her parents, at the scuff marks rubbed into the wallpaper by the rubber arms of the baby gate that had stood there for so many years. Naomi had been a sleepwalker as a child, awaking in the darkest hours of the night to wander the house with glazed eyes, brushing her hair in the darkness in the bathroom, holding her toys in the darkness in the playroom, sitting in her chair at the empty table as if expecting to be served a meal. Her parents had said that there was nothing to be ashamed of, that sleepwalking was simply a matter of the body waking too soon, before the soul. She remembered how embarrassed she had felt when her parents had installed a baby gate to protect her from falling down the steps while she was sleepwalking, and how furious she had been when her parents had said she didn’t study enough to do premed, and how irritated she had been after dropping premed when her parents had suggested she might like nursing. How skeptical she had been when her parents had arranged the marriage with Tad, a goofy mathematician with a homely appearance. How certain she had been that there was no connection, even up to the very day of the wedding, convinced that the marriage would be lifeless and sad, but how afterward she had grown close to him, and how she had even come to love him. How sweetly and kindly he had cared for her every day since. How much she loved talking to him in bed before falling asleep, when his speech took on a temporary lisp from his retainer. Somehow her parents always knew what would be best for her. She looked at
her mother and her father sitting there on the heirloom divan, at those tired and wrinkled faces, creased with worry and lost sleep.
“Coming to this country was not easy, but we did it, for the future of the family. And now, for the future of the family, this is something we must ask you to do.”
Naomi felt the baby give a faint kick, and she hesitated, taking a breath, and then she turned back toward her husband.
“Could we bring Rama?” Naomi said.
A week later she was in the car, gliding along a desolate highway in the desert, gazing out at the sand and the shrubs and the massive ridges speckled with greenery on the horizon. Heat haze shimmered in the distance like flailing spirits. Rama was curled up on her lap, either napping or pretending to nap. Tad sat behind the wheel in a polka-dot dress shirt, occasionally glancing with a nervous expression at the clock on the dash, as her mother and her father chatted back and forth in the backseat, bantering about cryptocurrencies, both wearing shades. Following the instructions that the facility had given her parents, Tad turned off of the highway onto a dusty unmarked dirt road. For the next hour the car wound steadily through gullies and valleys and canyons without passing a single sign of life. Rocks ground under the tires. Clouds floated above the sunroof. The murmur of soul music playing over the radio gradually turned to static. After finally coasting through a forbidding gate, the car arrived at a gigantic concrete compound with a flock of buzzards perched on the roof.
Jane, the manager of the maternity center, was waiting at the towering doors.
“Welcome to the Oasis,” Jane said.
Naomi was thirteen weeks pregnant.
* * *
In the immense hallway leading from the entrance of the compound into the inner chambers, a mass of faded prayer flags hung from the ceiling, fraying rectangles of colorful fabric, swaying with drafts of air. Jane was middle-aged, sporting a pair of heels with a blouse and a blazer and a hip haircut, and had the lively charm of a circus ringmaster, strolling ahead of the group to gesture enthusiastically at the highlights of the tour. Naomi and the others followed her through an arched doorway into a vast circular chamber, the altar room, where bright sunshine streamed down through the skylight on the vaulted ceiling, casting shadows behind pillars, making the space glow. Shimmery patches of sunlight trembled on the wall, reflecting off the glass in watches and spectacles. The chamber was furnished with over a hundred cots, radiating out from the stone altar at the center, each occupied by a withered body. Pregnant women sat on worn wooden stools throughout the chamber, murmuring together, giggling together, playing singing bowls over the peaceful sound of the life-support monitors, the quiet beeping of the electrocardiographs and electroencephalographs. The monitors stood on bedside tables, accompanied by bottles of pills and bottles of water. Incense in brass urns. Lilies in clay vases. Ancient statues spotted with moss and lichen were arranged like guardians along the perimeter of the chamber. Gods of childbirth. Gods of motherhood.
“A soul may be a spiritual entity, but that doesn’t mean that it’s magic, or can just do whatever it wants. This very epidemic proves that souls have limits, which means that just like an angel or a demon, a soul is still bound by the laws of physics. That’s the key. A soul can’t simply teleport into a new body. A soul has to travel through space and time. What we offer here is proximity. We’re over a hundred miles from the nearest city. And on any given day we have over a hundred dying people in residence here. Many of those people are on life support, kept alive only by machines, and have given us permission to switch off the machines at any time, allowing us to guarantee that at least one person dies here every day. We also sacrifice a number of animals throughout the day. Typically a dove and a lamb at sunrise, a rooster at noon, a peacock at dusk, and a goat at midnight, although if you feel a special connection with another species of animal, we’d be happy to incorporate it into the daily cycle,” Jane said.
Naomi glanced at the stone altar across the chamber, where a ceremonial dagger with a curved blade and an ebony handle rested on a stand.
“You’ll give birth to your child right here at the Oasis, under the care of some of the finest obstetricians in the country, and between now and then every day you’ll be surrounded by freshly departed souls in need of a new body to inhabit,” Jane said.
Jane waved to a pudgy bearded cook in a spattered apron, who walked past the arched doorway carrying a tote bag brimming with leafy vegetables.
“That’s Joaquin, the chef. The food here is exceptional. Bathrooms are communal. Towels are provided. The linens are washed daily. You’ll be given a private bedchamber, although some residents occasionally prefer to sleep here among the dying, which can be arranged upon request,” Jane said.
Naomi paused, watching a pregnant woman with beautiful golden hair, who sat on a stool near a cot, stroke the shriveled hands of a geriatric man with bloodshot eyes and a sallow complexion.
“Come to me,” the woman whispered. “I’ve seen how you smile when you eat cookies. You like cookies. I’ll give you all the cookies that you want. You’ll have the perfect childhood. Disneyland. Malibu. Box seats at the Derby. Summer in the Hamptons. You’ll have a trust fund. You’ll have a sports car. We’ll buy you anything you want. We’re an important family. We have powerful connections. Exeter. Yale. We fought in the Revolution. We had ancestors on the Mayflower. Come to me when you die.”
Naomi felt a sudden chill as the woman with the golden hair turned toward her, gazing at her with a jealous look.
“Naomi, time to say goodbye,” Jane called with a smile, leading the group back toward the hallway with the prayer flags.
Tad said an overly cheerful farewell to her parents, Naomi gave each of her parents a tight hug, and then her parents left the compound, heading back to the city, and she followed him down a hallway lined with rough wooden doors.
The bedchamber was simple, furnished with a full-size cot draped with a beige wool blanket, a dresser, a mirror, a desk with a chair, and a bright salt lamp that cast a warm saffron glow across the room. No window. The door had a sliding lock. The bags had already been delivered. Rama was curled up in a satin cat bed on the floor, drowsing. Naomi sat down on the cot with a creak. Tad was organizing geometry books over on the desk.
Tad noticed her staring at him.
“What?” Tad said.
“You don’t believe in any of this.”
“I never said that.”
“You’re a card-carrying atheist.”
Tad frowned, sitting down on the mattress, wrapping an arm around her.
“I haven’t seen those empty bodies in person like you have. I’ve seen videos though. And it scares the hell out of me. I don’t want that to happen to our baby. I’m willing to try anything. No matter how dubious its science is. No matter how much that it costs,” Tad said.
Naomi was one of a dozen mothers living at the compound. Most of the fathers didn’t have the ability to work from home, and only visited the compound on weekends, or once a month. Tad was the only father living there. He rarely left the bedchamber during the day, hard at work on a new proof in synthetic geometry, hunched over the desk with a mug of steaming coffee. Naomi spent the days wandering the compound alone. While the primary mission of the facility was to ensure the spiritual health of the babies by providing pregnant women with exclusive access to freshly departed souls, the facility was also designed to ensure the physical health of the babies. The daily agenda was wellness. The dining hall was stocked with wholesome nourishment, including freshly squeezed juices that the chef would make on command, pouring shimmers of pink and yellow and red and orange into crystal goblets, grapefruit or mango or watermelon or carrot. In the bathrooms, the rough stone counters were equipped with jars of prenatal vitamins and antacid tablets and gleaming amber vials brimming with fragrant bodywashes and shampoos and exfoliants and cleansers and moisturizers and creams. A maid cleaned the bedchambers and washed dirty laundry. A masseuse offered massages, gently knead
ing the oiled skin of women splayed across towels. A yoga instructor drove in each day to lead yoga classes in the yoga room, strolling between the rubber mats as women held rigid poses. A meditation teacher drove in each day to lead meditation classes in the meditation room, coaching women sitting on embroidered cushions through soothing breathing techniques. Women exercised on stationary bikes in the fitness center, drinking purified water from glass water bottles embedded with colorful hunks of quartz meant to dispel negative energy and impart positive energy and help calm the mind, while others reclined with diaries on the benches in the greenhouse, journaling together in the clean pure steamy air. Jane worked spiritedly throughout the day to ensure that each of the residents had whatever was needed, running to and from the supply room in the manager office to fetch body pillows and belly bands and eye masks and maternity bras and boxes of truffles. If not for being located in a desolate wilderness of sand and shrubs and scorching heat in the middle of the Great Basin, the maternity center would have been heaven. Naomi felt spoiled and lonely. Rama trailed after her sometimes, mewling at residents in passing. Other days the cat stayed back in the bedchamber with Tad, or snuck off to prowl through the compound alone. Regardless of whether the cat was with her, the other residents never spoke to her, just smiled tightly in passing. Emily, the pregnant woman with the beautiful golden hair, was the belle of the compound, always surrounded by happy chattering companions, the center of attention. Emily was tall and slim and elegant, dressing in haute couture garments made from lush magnificent fabrics, with an intense hungry gaze and a harsh angular face that was pretty the way that a storm could be pretty, and wore her hair in fantastically intricate buns and chignons and braids that were as geometrically complex as figures from a textbook. Strands of gold would twinkle in the light as she passed through a room. Packages of new clothing arrived at the compound for her almost daily. The other residents fawned over her. Like her, the rest of the residents seemed to come from prominent families. Socialites, and legatees, and scions, and heirs. Naomi was an outsider. She was the outcast. When she tried sitting with the other women in the dining hall, none of the women ever made conversation with her. When she arrived in the dining hall before the other women, the women sat at tables across the room from her. Emily seemed to whisper about her sometimes, glancing at her as other women broke out into cackles. Naomi became accustomed to eating breakfast and lunch alone.
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