How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  And what about the mother? What if the fetus sets up shop in your Fallopian tubes instead of your uterus? Or right over the cervix, blocking the way out? And how will you handle eclampsia during the pregnancy? How about hemorrhaging during the birth? Infections after? Pulmonary embolisms? Other complications we haven’t even thought about? You will not have the supplies you need to save the birthing mother if something goes horribly wrong. And—just to be clear—when you don’t save her, she dies.

  To summarize in another way: If you try to have a baby on Mars, we don’t know what will happen to you, and we certainly don’t know what will come out of you.

  Apples

  This is how Jenny gives birth on Mars.

  First of all, it starts at night, while I’m asleep in the bunk dome.

  When Stefan wakes me—Stefan and Roger heard her first and woke the rest of us, yelling “The baby—the baby’s coming”—I look around for something that I couldn’t name or identify if I saw it, and then, abandoning that something, I zip on out to Jenny. Who is sitting on a chaise longue in the common room and not looking the way I expected her to look. I expected her round face to be sweating, a drop of sweat at the tip of her nose, another at the tip of her chin. But she looks the same as she did when we all went to bed. Too big for her shirt to handle, and disheveled in her open bathrobe, her hair all over the place, but not like a person rolling a boulder uphill at all.

  “Are you—?” I say, pulling up short a few feet from her and losing track of the adjective or noun I wanted.

  “I just had a contraction,” she says.

  A little bit I feel like I’ve been hit in the head with a frying pan. I was dreaming something very hazy and fluorescent and now here I am in front of my Jenny, who has had a contraction. Contraction, I think. Contraction, contraction, contraction. It’s like the hazy fluorescence has followed me into the room.

  Trixie, because she is one of our medical doctors—we have other, less relevant kinds of doctors, too, including me—slips past me in a flash of dyed-maroon hair, almost blood-colored, and starts checking on things. First she looks on and under the chaise. “Looks like your water hasn’t broken yet, eh?” she says.

  Jenny shakes her head no. “Not that I know of,” she says.

  “Oh, you’d know, babe,” Trixie says. “You get a pop, and then it’s here comes the flood.”

  Nicole, all seriousness, says, “How long ago was the contraction?”

  Jenny frowns in a thoughtful way. “Right,” she says. “I should have made a point of looking at the time. Well, a minute, give or take.”

  “Okay,” Nicole says.

  Roger and Stefan and I stand there dumbly, in the sense of stupid as well as in the sense of mute. And then I go all the way over to Jenny, who is obviously not surrounded by a forcefield, and I sit next to her and hold her hand. “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “This is it,” Jenny says with widened eyes.

  “Wow,” I say. This is a wow situation.

  “Well,” Nicole says.

  “There’s probably going to be a bit of a wait, Mum,” Trixie says. She has a tablet out to keep track of the time. I can see the numbers accumulating already.

  My mother used to make up stories about my birth. She told the stork one when I was very little, although we didn’t live in a house with a chimney. She told something like the Moses one when I was a little older and had been to some family Passover Seders, and in fact we did live near a river that I suppose I could have floated down, if we’d had a seaworthy basket. She told one where she found me in a cave—“A nice cave,” she would say. “Not one of the run-down ones.” When I was a teenager and being difficult she downgraded the quality of the cave. My mother also told a story of me being very tiny at first, like a seed, and just blowing in through an open window one spring day. And it’s true, anyway, that I was an April baby.

  But my favorite family birth story wasn’t mine—it was the one I was told by Lil, my fiancée on Earth until . . . well, it was the one her mother had told her, and Lil described it to me. Her mother said she’d grown Lil in her garden. Next to the carrots. That, when it was time, also on a nice spring day, she’d taken hold of the greens that showed above ground and that were attached to Lil’s head underground, and she’d yanked her daughter right out of there. And until she saw Lil’s face she’d expected her to be a carrot herself, or at least a turnip.

  Mostly Lil’s mother grew flowers, apparently, not vegetables. But it was still a nice story—for Lil, and then for me.

  Actual births are of course not this magical. There are no baskets to float in, and no babies waiting to be lifted from the soil.

  The contractions are eighteen minutes apart at first, which they tell me is a normal amount to be apart when things are just getting started.

  “The best thing for now is to distract yourselves,” Nicole advises us, as though it’s both of us giving birth. “Things won’t really get started until there’s about five minutes between contractions. They’ll be more intense, then, too.” And then she looks at Trixie and the others. “And we probably ought to get back to our bunks. There’s going to be plenty to do soon enough.”

  Trixie gets an aww face, like a kid told that she has to wait until after dinner before she can have dessert. I know she’s particularly invested in this birth. But then she gets a hold of herself and nods. “Too right,” she says. Meanwhile, Roger scratches the pale strands on his balding head in a dazed sort of way, and Stefan looks scared, as though Jenny might suddenly explode.

  “Wait,” I say. “So, this is all based on how people give birth on Earth, right?”

  Nicole nods and makes a face that says she sees where I’m going with this. “Well, yes,” she says. “But as far as we know everything’s working the same way as it does on Earth.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  Trixie squats down to our level. Her maroon hair is somehow more jarring than the bright hair she usually has, but somehow her vivid goodwill is steadying. “Guys, what we’re expecting is that the contractions are going to get closer together over time, and longer, and more intense. It could take hours. If anything different happens instead of what I just described, anything at all, wake us up.”

  “Okay. It could take hours,” I say. “Martian hours, right?”

  Jenny gives my hand a communicative squeeze. The truth is that Martian hours are only a little bit longer than Earth hours, technically. How long they feel is a different question.

  When they’ve all gone back to the bunk dome, Trixie walking out backward as though she can’t stand to take her eyes off Jenny, saying things like “Take a spin around the room, watch a movie, cuddle a bit,” then it’s just me and Jenny.

  “It’s just you and me,” I say, trying to affect a calm voice.

  “Plus one,” she says, pointing at her belly.

  “Well, almost,” I say.

  The people at Destination Mars! included an extensive and strange electronic handbook on each of our tablets, with chapters on all kinds of things—how to cook on Mars, for example, and ideas on how to decorate the habitation center, and how to handle radiation exposure, and what comes in the communal stockpile, what kind of people shouldn’t even apply to go to Mars, and why we aren’t supposed to have sex here. That section—Section 4—is a hard one to reconcile with Section 34, which is about how to not get bored on Mars. Especially when one of the people with you on Mars is Jenny, and she’s sitting right there, being Jenny right in front of you. But it’s there, and even though the handbook is labeled “unofficial”—it was apparently written as a sort of pet project by the eccentric person who founded Destination Mars!, and who in my opinion has a touch of a God complex—we really weren’t supposed to have sex. The section says, sex may feel good now, but it’s probably going to feel terrible later, when a deformed baby is produced—and when it dies, al
ong with the mother, in childbirth. It’s one of the most strongly worded sections of the handbook.

  Jenny and I spend the next little while walking around the common room. She leans on me a little, which is nice. I don’t even think she really needs the support so much as she likes it, which is even more nice. Still, I’m pretty tense.

  It’s not a big common room, so after a few laps we expand to include the dining room and kitchen, and also the workroom in back and the greenhouse. Still it’s not very big, but it’s bigger than the common room by itself. The scenery also changes more. We look at chaises longues and orange side tables, and we look at our circular dining room table that can be reshaped into whatever shape we want it to be, though we’ve never actually reshaped it, and we stop in the bathroom for Jenny to pee, and then we look at our microwave and our fridge, and we look out the windows at Mars, which is dark right now, and we look at Stefan’s station in the workroom, which is orderly, with one small machine open on his table, ready to be studied, and we look at Trixie’s station, with its mini-fridge and its vials of water samples and soil samples and gas samples, all of which have come up sterile, every single time—it’s not easy for Trixie, whatever a person might think from watching her bop around—and we stop in the greenhouse and stand in the rich and humid air, heady with oxygen.

  The room that reminds me of Lil, who grew gardens like her mother.

  Jenny keeps having her infrequent contractions.

  After a while of walking, we sit down again, and we watch a movie on the common room screen. Here on Mars we have every movie ever made in the history of the human species, up through and including movies released this last Friday, but we watch All of Me for some reason, which is a decades-old movie about soul possession, but comedic. Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin.

  Jenny leans on me on our chaise longue and we watch. It’s pretty funny. And every once in a while she has a contraction—she gets to the point where they’re about twelve minutes apart—and those are kind of intense, but when those aren’t happening sometimes I doze, and sometimes she dozes, and every once in a while one of us says something like, “Well. Isn’t this something?” And we mean all kinds of things by that.

  According to my father, there was a lot of blood when I was born. My mother’s blood. According to him, the doctors became concerned. They became concerned that I was going to die, sure, but also that my mother was going to die. Well, not really, in that they would have probably saved her—but they were worried, I guess, that they would have to save her.

  My birth came out fine for everyone. But things don’t always come out fine.

  After All of Me we do more walking, and we eat a snack or two, and then we get on a Steve Martin kick and watch The Jerk, which is hilarious, though again we do each fall asleep briefly through various parts of it, only because we’re already very tired. And then we walk some more, and take pee breaks, and snack breaks, and there are contractions, in which Jenny leans on me for actual support and I wonder acutely if everything’s okay, and then the light slowly comes up outside the windows on Mars, and the others start to wake up back in the bunk dome.

  Trixie is up first, bouncing into the common room like someone from that manic Australian kids’ show The Wiggles that she sometimes watches for nostalgic reasons. “How’s the Jenny?” she says.

  Jenny, still leaning on me a bit, gives Trixie a dutiful thumbs-up, and then we do a full check-in: time between contractions (ten minutes at this point), baby’s heart rate (130, fine), dilation (progressing nicely), et cetera. Everything’s fine, it seems. Assuming that Earth measurements are relevant here. At all.

  And then Nicole’s out with us, and Roger and Stefan peek shyly in, too. Roger’s eyebrows seem permanently raised in astonishment. And Stefan looks basically freaked.

  “Hey, Stefan,” Jenny says to him. “Do you want to listen to the heartbeat?”

  After a moment of hesitation, he nods silently. And Trixie hooks him up, and he gets to hear it.

  “It’s like a metronome,” he says, stunned. “Like a fast little metronome.”

  Jenny pats him on the arm. I don’t know how she always knows what to do, but she does always know what to do.

  The day goes on from there in a sort of normal and sort of very abnormal fashion. As in, there’s breakfast, in which we pretty much sit at our circular dining room table and where most folks eat their normal thing—Stefan his rye bread and cheese, Trixie her sugar cereal, Roger his Cream of Wheat, et cetera—but Jenny’s not hungry for the moment and only has a single scrambled egg, and that at Nicole’s insistence. After that, Roger and Stefan go off to work—Stefan has some electrical stuff still to do, I guess, because our lights have been flickering again over the last few days, though there seems to be a sudden reprieve today—and Nicole and Trixie try to focus on whatever they’re supposed to be focused on. Jenny is clearly the big game in town, but everybody does manage to give us some space, which is not easy, let me tell you, in a Martian habitation center.

  It’d be nice to go outside for a walk, but Jenny can’t fit into any of the spacesuits, which I know has been making her a little bit bonkers for the last trimester. So instead of going outside we sit on the couch and watch Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, which is funny but maybe not as funny as some of Steve Martin’s other movies. Though perhaps more artistically ambitious. We debate about that a little. Also, at one point, Jenny says, “What kind of person do you think we’ve made?” which would be a sweet question from most people, but in Jenny’s case is a frightened question, because Jenny’s sister was not well. And bipolar disorder is somewhat heritable.

  Jenny’s not worried about the birth the way I am; she’s worried about what the birth will produce. And then we’re both worried about whether it’s right of us to bring a life into the world if the world is Mars. Between her and me, we have all the possible worries covered.

  Eventually, at lunch, Jenny and I have whatever we have—it’s hard to even know what we’re eating—and all the others have what they have. We try to talk about normal things, but mostly it’s about contractions. Jenny’s down to seven minutes between. I do not love the contractions. Jenny says they feel like squeezes; from my perspective they look like pretty tight squeezes.

  “Seven minutes? Aces,” Trixie says. And she supports that assertion with a thumbs-up.

  “It’s coming,” I said.

  Trixie smiles. “Sure is, Dad.”

  It’s really coming—like headlights coming at us.

  Then everybody goes back to whatever they were doing, and we turn on Three Amigos! and then turn it off again, and try Roxanne instead, which is pretty good, as far as I can tell through my preoccupation. At one point, Jenny, who is still leaning on me and is currently between contractions, thank God, sits up and turns to me.

  “Hey,” she says. “What are you thinking about?”

  I go blank. What I had been thinking about, I don’t want to say: Lil. “What are you thinking about?” I ask her instead.

  “I’m thinking that we’re about to become a real family,” she says, tearing up a little. “And I hope we’re going to be an okay family.”

  Which means she’s thinking about her sister again. I stroke Jenny’s hair, look into her silver-gray eyes. “We’re going to be fine,” I say. “We’re going to be fine.”

  When Jenny turns back to the TV, I try very hard to breathe calmly.

  At some point that afternoon, when everybody’s more or less hovering, Stefan points out something that we all already know but that we don’t always think about. “They’re filming this whole thing,” he says, pointing up at one of the cameras in the corner of the ceiling.

  We look up at the camera. Jenny is in labor and that’s going to be edited into an hour-long-segment format, and Earth is going to get to watch the first baby ever born on Mars—if everything goes well.

  “Hey,” Trixie say
s. “You know what I’m thinking about?”

  And we know, because she has a certain look on her face that we recognize.

  “I wonder how this is playing back on the old blue planet,” she says.

  Sometimes we do follow the way we’re talked about back on Earth; Destination Mars! warns against the practice because they feel it could, in the words of the handbook, affect your mental well-being. It can be disconcerting to see one’s life turned, through editing—and, dare we say, manipulation—into a narrative. And even more to see how people react to that narrative. Which is a fair point. Trixie once came across a reference to herself as “a fun supporting character” and “a bit of color,” and she was pouty for days. That was what first got her talking in my office, and which opened the door to deeper things; nobody sees herself as a supporting character in her own life. Plus that “color” comment was probably mainly about her hair and all her colloquialisms, but it might have also been a little bit racist; hard to say for sure. Anyway, similarly, Nicole didn’t enjoy discovering that she was seen by one entertainment blog as “a strange mix of house manager and military police.” Never mind that Trixie was popular in Australia and the generator of many great memes throughout the internet or that science-minded black children all over the world had posters of Nicole in their bedrooms—still those stray unflattering comments stung. I had that in mind when Roger learned that on Earth he was called, surprisingly frequently, a nebbish; I, as the closest thing to a local Yiddish authority, made some editorial adjustments and told him that meant “nice guy.” But I don’t think he believed me. From the look of him, he’s been working out a lot lately. Stefan and Jenny, meanwhile, have almost completely avoided reading about themselves, and I mostly have, too. Not because Destination Mars! told me to, and not even really because I’m afraid to find out what they’re saying, but because Earth is very far away—I left it behind on purpose, after all—and it’s hard to care a lot about what anyone there is thinking.