Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

  When Mr. Fivey found the scar oil in Lola’s purse, he pestered her until she admitted going to Ms. Percival about the burn. Hadn’t that been a better idea than going to Umpqua General, where they might ask questions? Mr. Fivey didn’t agree. He saw a bonkers witchy-woo too deranged to graduate from high school who had no business ministering to his wife.

  Lola went to pack her suitcase. She planned to drive to New Mexico (she has a friend there who makes piñon kokopellis) to think things over.

  Mr. Fivey came into the bedroom with a glass of vodka and the bottle of scar oil. He had crushed up (she learned later) several tabs of colarozam and mixed them into the oil. He handed her the oil and said, “Drink.” When she said no, he slapped her. She drank. And chased the oil with the vodka. And got so wasted that on her way to the kitchen, she fell down the stairs.

  She was not—nor did she believe she was—pregnant when she consulted Ms. Percival. That was the last thing on her mind.

  Has she ever been pregnant?

  Once, thirteen years ago, before she met her husband. She would prefer not to talk about that.

  Why is she recanting her previous testimony?

  This question makes her quiet. The judge has to remind her she is obliged to answer.

  Finally Lola says, “Because I’m done doing his laundry.”

  They wait in the transition room while the jury deliberates. The lawyer’s assistant brings in a box of chocolate-covered blueberries and says, “Fortitude?”

  The mender tastes: delicious.

  Lola didn’t say: I’m recanting because it wouldn’t be fair to make Gin Percival spend seven years in prison. Barely mentioned Gin Percival at all.

  The lawyer is scratching, as usual: wrists, ears, the back of his neck.

  “Eczema?” says the mender.

  “Bedbugs,” he says. “Courtesy of the Narwhal Inn. My apartment in Salem now has them too. I’m on my second fumigation.”

  “I know some good banishments. If I get out—”

  “When.” He lifts his arms to air out the drenched pits.

  “Where will Lola go?” she asks. “She can’t stay at home.”

  “Her attorney said she’s already moved to her parents’. The question remains, where will Mr. Fivey be staying?”

  The mender eats the last blueberry. “You mean, which cell?”

  When the jury foreman rises, she shuts her eyes.

  “Ladiesanjinnelminnuv.”

  “Haveyoureached.”

  “Have yeronner.”

  “Whatsayyou?”

  Stop shaking. You’re a Percival.

  “We find the defendant—”

  Descended from a pirate.

  “—not guilty on both counts.”

  A whoop from the audience. She is shaking too hard to look, but it sounded like the voice of the pissed-off library lady.

  She takes the lawyer’s damp hand.

  In the first fairy tale Uncle taught me, a glass splinter in the eye would make all the world ugly and bad. I have such a splinter now. I see Harry’s name on my paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and curl with rage. It is mine but no one knows. They know the facts imparted, which have more value than my small self; yet with this splinter lodged in me, I can’t rest. I would like to run up to Sir George Gabriel Stokes at the Royal Society and show him my finger stumps and say, “I gave these in exchange for my facts.”

  THE DAUGHTER

  Friday night she scours the Math Academy website, rereading the seminar descriptions and inserting her own face into photos of nerds laughing around tables. If she even gets in. The application was hard. All the nominees will have top grades and test scores, said Mr. Xiao: “You have to stand out. Make yourself come alive in the essay answers.”

  How do you see mathematics figuring into your future?

  My future will include

  Math will be important in my future because

  In my future, I see

  I notice there is a pun in this question

  If she gets in, she plans to take the seminar on recursion. Self-similar structures. Variability through repetition. Fractals. Chaos theory.

  Think about fractals, not about suction and sloshing tubes and the term-house door smashed open by a cop’s battering ram.

  She won’t be sixteen for almost a month; she wouldn’t be tried as an adult. But even non-adults can be sent away.

  When Yasmine operated on her own clump, most termination houses didn’t exist yet. It was right after the federal ban had gone into effect. To help the ban take hold, the attorney general ordered district attorneys nationwide to go after the harshest possible sentences for seekers. Send a message. Girls as young as thirteen were incarcerated for three to five years. Even the daughter of Erica Salter, member of the Oregon House of Representatives, was locked up in Bolt River Youth Correctional Facility. A message had to be sent.

  A day before the self-operation, Yasmine said nobody could know she’d been pregnant, and if the daughter told anyone, she wouldn’t speak to her ever again.

  “I’m not giving them another reason to think I’m not smart.”

  “Why would anyone think you’re not smart?”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “No,” said the daughter.

  “You are a very ignorant white girl,” said Yasmine.

  She counts every tile in the upstairs bathroom so she won’t think about it.

  Saturday morning she reminds Mom that after the aquarium she’ll spend the night at Ash’s—see you tomorrow. Yes, she packed her retainer.

  When Ash delivers her to the church parking lot, it seems Ro/Miss is not in the greatest mood. Cold faced, quiet. The daughter offers money for gas and Ro/Miss rolls her eyes. How will they find topics for conversation? Thankfully Ro/Miss turns the radio on. The daughter sinks down in the seat as they drive through town: what would it look like, a student in a teacher’s car? Think about Newville gossip, not about the procedure.

  Passing a logged hillside, gashed and barren, the stumps like headstones, the daughter sees the shining fir floors in her house. Smells smoke on herself. Chimneylina. One day she’ll quit, after she’s gotten her marine-biology degree and is working in cetacean situations. Her future will include a study of whale-harming toxins dumped by humans into the sea. A trip to the Faroe Islands to disrupt the slaughter of pilot whales, who are technically dolphins. A trip to a Japanese temple that sings requiems for the whales’ souls, gives names to the fetuses inside the captured mothers.

  She digs both thumbs into her belly, house of the tufting, clumping, unnamed infiltrator. Please let them not leave it sitting around in a bucket.

  The motto of the Royal Society of London: NULLIUS IN VERBA. Take nobody’s word for it.

  THE BIOGRAPHER

  Mattie’s directions bring them to a quiet narrow street in southeast Portland. Flat-roofed ranch homes, yellow lawns. The house they want is hidden by vine-clogged chain link and a live oak dangling with metal figurines. The front door can’t be seen through the bushes. The fence gate is padlocked.

  “Let’s go around back.” The biographer trudges ahead, up the gravel driveway. Between the garage and the house is a high wooden gate, locked as well.

  “Did I mess up?” says Mattie. “I double-checked the address five times.”

  “Let’s knock, at least.”

  Before either of them can, the gate opens. “I saw you on the security cameras,” says a young woman with long-tailed cat eyeliner, ink-swirled arms. “You’re Delphine?”

  “Yeah,” says Mattie. “And this is my—”

  “Mom,” blurts the biographer. They’ll take better care of her if the mother is watching.

  Mattie stares red-faced at the ground.

  “I’m L. Let’s get into the van.” The woman nods at the garage.

  “Van?” they say together.

  “We don’t do the procedures here at headquarters. We use temporary sites that keep changing. For sa
fety reasons. And I need to ask you to wear masks during the drive.”

  The biographer laughs. “Are you serious?”

  L. drags up the garage’s roll door. “Yeah, we take the surveillance state and male-supremacist legislation pretty seriously. Call us crazy.”

  “No, it’s fine,” says Mattie.

  “Seat belts, please. Then I’ll give you the masks. Did you lock your car?”

  “Aye, aye!” says the biographer.

  Mattie turns from the passenger seat to give her a little frown, and the world is flipped, the order reversed.

  The cotton eye mask feels absurd. The van’s windows are tinted dark already. But the biographer wishes not to embarrass Mattie further.

  “In your phone intake,” says L., “you estimated you’d be about twenty-one weeks by now?” The van rattles over a speed bump. “Under optimal conditions, a late second-trimester abortion would require a minimum of two days, to dilate your cervix adequately before the evacuation, but these are not optimal conditions.”

  A bedside manner almost as delightful as Kalbfleisch’s.

  L. goes over a few more things—ultrasound, sedative, anesthesia. The biographer scarcely listens: she would really love to be elsewhere. The best she can do is be a body near Mattie, a body able to drive her home. At the word “speculum” she flinches, feeling the many specula Kalbfleisch slid into her. She counts her in-breaths, counts her out-breaths.

  Mattie has no questions for L.

  Cash only. Pay after. No forms to sign, for obvious reasons, but they do keep confidential patient records, using aliases.

  “Delphine, your name for our files will be Ida.”

  “Okay,” says Mattie.

  “Hey, Mom,” calls L., “any questions back there?”

  “Not right now,” says the biographer.

  They take off their masks and step out of the van into the overgrown backyard of a bungalow. The sky is high and quiet. L.’s hands on their backs, hurrying them. Next to the screen door hangs a piece of wood painted with black letters: POLYPHONTE COLLECTIVE. The biographer strains to summon her Greek mythology. Polyphonte—Aphrodite—Artemis?

  L. opens three locks with three keys and ushers them into a bright, purple-walled kitchen that smells like chili. Books, spice jars, pots of cactus, a boardful of yellow peppers in mid-chop.

  “Upstairs,” says their ferrywoman.

  A bedroom’s bed has been replaced by an exam table whose stirrups wear red knitted socks. Next to it stands an ultrasound machine. For an eerie beat the biographer thinks it is she who will climb on the table, press her heels into the stirrups, wait for the blue-lubed wand to read the shapes inside her. You will feel a slight pressure.

  “This is Delphine and her mom,” announces L.

  “I’m Dr. V.,” says a small, beautiful woman in a green medical smock. “I’m gonna take care of you, okay?” She looks South Asian and sounds like the ladies from Queens who live at Dad’s retirement village. “Let’s get started with your vitals.”

  “Have you done many of these before?” asks the biographer.

  Dr. V. wipes back a strand of silver-black hair. “Thousands.” Wraps a blood-pressure cuff around Mattie’s biceps. “I worked at Planned Parenthood for almost twenty years. Until the day they shut it down.”

  Mattie says, “You can go now, um, Mom.”

  Their providers are skilled. They do not charge a shit ton.

  She wants Mattie to be happy. To be safe. To be free from suffering.

  Also: she can’t stand her.

  She hates her for getting to experience the twenty-one weeks of pregnancy she’ll never get to experience herself.

  There are millions of things the biographer will never do that she doesn’t pity herself for missing. (Climbing a mountain, cracking a code, attending her own wedding.) So why this thing?

  She came prepared to wait, brought a stack of tests to grade, but faced with the prospect of all day in this room of wicker couches and zebra pillows, hot bean smell blowing in from the kitchen, the biographer feels itchy. She wanders into a front hallway, where posters and pamphlets describe the other services offered by the Polyphonte Collective. Sliding-scale mental-health counseling. Sliding-scale legal services for women who are unhoused, undocumented, battered, addicted. Free childcare during court appearances. Cop watching at protests. This house must be their headquarters. It was the first address, in fact, that was a decoy.

  The largest poster says:

  REPEAL THE 28TH AMENDMENT!

  SIT IN / RISE UP FOR REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

  FEATURED SPEAKERS:

  REP. ERICA SALTER (D-PORTLAND)

  & DOCTORS FROM WOMEN ON WAVES

  MAY 1, OREGON STATE CAPITOL

  Up through the gummy darkness in her chest, through the self-pity and resentment, poke thin stalks of gratitude. The Polyphontes aren’t just shaking their heads.

  She starts to read blue books, pen in hand. The events that led up to the American Revolutionary War included. What about events on the second floor? Is Mattie scared? Three main causes of the war were. Should the biographer go and check? The colonists really hated taxes—and still do!

  From the coffee table she picks up a graphic novel about women in the Cretan resistance during World War II. Dark-eyed schoolgirls and crones in cartridge belts lug packs of ammunition up craggy mountainsides. They shoot at German parachutists as they land. They don’t just sit there watching.

  The biographer falls asleep with her face in a zebra pillow.

  Dr. V. shakes her awake. “Time to go, Mom.”

  “Who?”

  “Delphine’s fine. All went well. You can be on your way.”

  The future baby, the kid-to-be, her own—

  It was never yours.

  “L. will drive you back to your car. The sooner you’re gone, the safer everyone is. Let’s see—she’ll be loopy for a bit, from the painkillers. Bleeding is expected, including clots. She can take ibuprofen for cramps. No alcohol, tampons, or sex for at least a week. She’s Rh-positive, luckily, and won’t need an immune globulin shot. She should be doing a course of antibiotics, but the Collective can’t afford them and we certainly can’t write scripts—so keep an eye out, okay? Any fever above a hundred, take her straight to the ER. Is this your bag?” Dr. V. passes the biographer her backpack and gestures to the door. “They’re waiting.”

  In the kitchen Mattie sits bundled in her peacoat, drinking a glass of water. She looks sleepy and bleary and younger. Seeing the biographer, she grins wide. “Well,” she says, her relief unmistakable, “that happened.”

  L. can’t drop them off fast enough. The midnight street makes chirring sounds. Are they being surveilled from a parked car?

  “You hungry?” The biographer helps Mattie negotiate the seat belt.

  “Nix nought nein.”

  It comes to her: Polyphonte was one of Artemis’s virgin followers. Punished by Aphrodite for—something.

  No cars follow them out.

  The police probably don’t even know the Collective exists.

  Unless she’s being stupid. Naively ascribing common decency to people in power, as she did before the Personhood Amendment showed all of its teeth.

  Aphrodite made Polyphonte fall in love with a bear.

  WE NEED COP WATCHERS ON MAY 1ST, said a flyer in the front hall. PLEASE VOLUNTEER!

  Don’t be stupid anymore, she once wrote in her notebook, under Immediate action required.

  By the time they get to Newville, it will be almost three a.m.

  After giving birth to twin bear sons, Polyphonte was turned into an owl.

  Is this even the right road?

  “Miss?” comes a drowsy little voice.

  “Yeah?” She thought this road was taking them to the highway access ramp, but it just keeps going, ramplessly.

  “I’m sorry but I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Can you hold it for a little while?” The biographer strains to read a sign, faint
in the dark. Could there be one goddamn streetlight in this city?

  “Well it’s actually kind of an emergency unless it’s another feeling from the, you know, and I don’t actually need to but it feels like I do?”

  Please don’t let them be lost. Her phone knows nothing.

  The Canadian government is funding a new search mission for Lt. Adolphus Greely and his men. Their survival is not assured: resupply ships have failed to reach the expedition two years in a row. A steam-powered icebreaker named Khione leaves from Newfoundland in two months. I will be on that boat, I promise you.

  THE DAUGHTER

  The heart of a Canada goose weighs seven ounces. Of a caribou, seven pounds.

  The daughter’s own heart weighs nothing. Not tonight, at least—no blood in it. All her upper blood is down, replacing what’s gone. She’s got on a pad and thick sweatpants, and has spread a towel across Ro/Miss’s bed. The towel is beige, but a stained towel seems easier to pardon than a sheet. The pad is a little blood diaper. At home there’s a picture of her baby self getting changed, fat legs in the air, and Mom, wipe in hand, making a face at the camera.

  Are you mine?

  The daughter is emptying.

  She saw no bucket.

  It feels weird to be in a teacher’s bedroom. Like eavesdropping. This room doesn’t give much away, though. No posters or stereo. The only thing on the wall is an old-fashioned map—the kind with dragons drawn in the waves—of the North Pole. On the dresser, two framed photos: her parents, must be, then a younger Ro/Miss next to a handsome guy in a skull T-shirt. Boyfriend? Ex-fiancé?