The Invisibles

by Hugh Sheehy

  Hazel had read this much on the Internet, and she milked the sound of the words until she realized Kornblum and Riley were waiting for her to speak. She being the pregnant one and all. She looked into their eyes and announced that she was feeling uncharacteristically brave. “I thought all the stuff I read was written by crazy people on the Internet,” she said. “But maybe some of it was by sane people on the Internet.”

  Riley nodded energetically and declared that he agreed with the women, and then he rubbed and massaged the knots in Hazel’s back for a long, quiet time.

  That evening they called their parents and told them to expect to become grandparents in the spring. Hazel’s parents opened a bottle of wine and stayed on the line until well after they were drunk and talking seriously about heading out to a bar. Riley’s parents, lower-intensity people, conveyed their blessings after a round of happy sniffles. When it was over Hazel and Riley set their cell phones aside to charge and opened the windows to let in cool night air. On the street, strangers called out to each other in drunken voices. Above the streetlights and the airplanes the moon was dissolving into blackness. The curtains moved with a life all their own.

  Eight weeks. She had a big blue folder stuffed with lists of off-limits activities and substances. One page named herbs she had never heard of, black cohosh, blue cohosh, ma huang, thuja. There were known poisons, like wormwood. Had she ever been in the same room as wormwood? Had she ever been within a mile of these things?

  Riley said the absinthe they drank in Amsterdam derived from wormwood. “You remember, the green liquor we drank on our honeymoon,” he said, his grin indicating arousal. Sex was forbidden while she was bleeding, and these past weeks he was constantly grinning at her, hoping for good news. He pressed his thighs together. “It was on fire? The stuff that made us fuck like monkeys?”

  “I thought that stuff was called booze,” she said. “I thought it was called love. Or lust. And what do you mean, derived? I didn’t ask for the etymology.”

  There were herbs on the list that surprised her, things she liked and would miss, aloe vera, ginger, parsley. “I feel like I can’t even have parsley on the plate,” she said, “or I might pick it up and chew on it. Just while I’m talking. You know how I am.”

  Riley knew how she was. He put his arm around her and offered her a drink of the lemonade from a tall glass promoting a science-fiction film with the image of a famous imaginary robot pointing a laser gun at her. “We’ll have to tell all the waitresses,” he said. “No parsley.”

  She said that wasn’t enough. They were forgetful, daydreamy types. They would have to avoid diners for the next seven months. It was a painful decision for people whose favorite meal was breakfast. “We’ll never eat in a diner again, just yogurt at home,” she said, starting to cry, wondering if the guilt was hormonal. “And we’ll never have sex ever again. No more breakfast, no more sex.”

  She wanted Riley to say it was worth the wait, but he was tired of her indirect apologies and sighed to indicate this. It was the end of the second annual quarter, and he was beset by deadlines for the earnings projections it was his job to calculate. All day he sat rigidly in a cubicle, staring into a tiny laptop screen, using calculations and computer models to predict the future of the companies that paid him to pretend he knew the future so they could make decisions and then blame him if it went poorly. The last thing he wanted when he came home was a pouty wife, especially one who was imperceptibly expanding and bleeding on and off. Hazel gloomily pictured herself growing fatter in the coming months, eventually spilling out of her sweatsuit, hiding from the daylight. She thought a good wife would use this time to go down on her husband or something, but she feared that might be bad for the baby. Her nose pressed his arm, and her tears dampened his sleeve. He patted her shoulder and refused to complain. He was a good husband. His armpit smelled like roadkill, but she decided against mentioning it.

  Nine weeks. Three more and the first trimester would end. This did not mean they would be out of the woods, said Dr. Kornblum. It meant they would be out of the first trimester, the statistically grim woods where eighty percent of miscarriages occurred. Dr. Kornblum said she was confident that at that point, the odds would favor them even more.

  “Even more than they do now,” she hastened to add. She smiled calmly. She was about the same age, early thirties, with long brown hair and with her first name, Natalie, sewn in cursive on the breast of her white coat. She spoke in the steady, measured tones of a surfer who long ago abandoned her board for a doctor’s coat and a stethoscope but still remembered how to be cool. She was unflappable. “The heartbeat is steady. It could be stronger, but we see growth, which is promising. In a few weeks maybe things will be better. Why don’t you come back in two or three weeks? Don’t be afraid to call me at home.”

  Outside the clinic, women pushed strollers with heavy-duty rotating double wheels. These reminded Hazel of off-road vehicles. The stroller makers had thought of everything. In the strollers, the babies lay protected from sun and public by visors and layers of soft pastel-colored blankets. The mothers wore sunglasses and yoga pants, and Hazel wondered if they would acknowledge her existence and even smile at her, once her pregnancy showed. She speculated that the women might all be going to the same place.

  “To do baby yoga,” she explained, jealous because all forms of exercise increased her bleeding, and she sometimes thought she might have to sit very, very still for the next seven months. “They have that, you know.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Riley.

  It was breakfast time, but they felt safe eating in this part of town, where there were no diners, only expensive restaurants more likely to serve kale than parsley if they used garnishes at all. They went into a narrow café with a painting of a naked East Asian woman on the wall. Her breasts, areolas, and nipples were twin trios of concentric circles, and the woman peered over them, at anyone who happened to look, with neutral eyes, as if to dare the looker to question whether she was art. Their granite table was so narrow that Hazel was careful putting her elbows on it, which was the impolite but comfortable thing to do. The menu offered many kinds of hamburgers and salads served with various forms of protein chopped up on top.

  Riley grimaced and sighed through his nostrils over this misfortune. He disliked hamburgers almost as much as he disliked salads. Yet time was limited. He had to get to work and start looking at his computer so that he could invent the future. He chose a sandwich with enough dressings to totally conceal the beef patty from his taste buds. When the food came, everything looked too small. “Why isn’t this easier?” he said. “Growing up was supposed to be the hard part.”

  “I think the only easy part is college,” Hazel said. “And maybe your twenties. You’re not already tired of the baby, are you?”

  “I’m tired of many things, but I’ve yet to meet a baby.”

  “Maybe I should stuff some gauze up there,” Hazel said.

  “I’m tired of the clinic. All those pictures on the wall. Babies in baths, babies superimposed on fake movie posters, and I have yet to meet one of them,” he said. “How much do you want to bet that most of those kids don’t even look like that anymore?”

  “They do seem crazy about babies,” Hazel conceded. “Some people just want to work with that stage of life, I guess. Just like you only deal with a certain type of grown-up.”

  “I deal with reality,” Riley said. “Okay, pretend reality that gets taken seriously.” He dropped his half-eaten hamburger on his plate and scowled down at it. “I bet many of those children are much older now.”

  Ten weeks. The living room had become a museum of congratulations cards. Who knew this many people still considered them friends? Not Hazel. There were handwritten notes here from people she’d last seen near the end of college. And some of the cards from Riley’s historical cohort came from the wives of men he casually referred to as shitheads. She opened the cards and set them on the floor like dominoes and knocked them over in de
signs, hearts and arabesques and a four-point star. She built a house. She photographed these things and posted the images online at a social networking website. Right away, unemployed acquaintances sent little notes informing her how creative and talented she was, and she began to think she was dealing with crazy people on the Internet. When they began to congratulate her on her pregnancy and ask her personal questions about her development, she deleted the pictures and closed her account. She sat in the living room feeling vaguely soiled. She feared she had been very close to turning into a crazy person on the Internet.

  Riley came home, and she made him talk about names.

  “How can we?” he said. “We don’t even know the sex.”

  “How many contingencies does your software allow for when modeling industry futures?” she said. “There are only two possibilities here.”

  “I should never have told you what I do.”

  She began to name the names she liked, and Riley rejected them one after another. Samantha, Fred, Claire, Donald, Tabitha, Lawrence, Heidi, Benjamin, Wilma, George, Genevieve, Brad.

  “How many vetoes do I get?” he said.

  “Unlimited,” she said. “You’re an executive power. How do you like David?”

  Riley liked being an executive power. “David’s all right. Let’s put it on the Maybe list.”

  “There’s a Maybe list?”

  “Shouldn’t there be? Have you thought this through?”

  Hazel had a confession to make. “I have a confession to make,” she said. “I already have a name for him.”

  “Him?” Riley looked cross for a moment. “Did Kornblum call while I was at work?”

  “No, I just have a feeling.”

  “Oh.” Riley was happy again. He was confident that he knew all about her feelings. “What’s your name for him?”

  “Henrik,” she said.

  “That sounds to me like a Viking name.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think of him as a little seafarer, setting out from a distant country.”

  “You’re very strange,” Riley told her. “If I had known how strange you really are, I would have knocked you up much earlier.”

  “Henrik’s the Viking,” Hazel said, “which makes us the peasants watching for him on the sea.”

  Eleven weeks. Something was wrong. The ultrasound technician’s jaw had clamped tight, and her eyes studied the screen intently. She mumbled something about looking at Hazel’s ovaries, then turned the probe. Images shifted to dark on the screen beside Hazel. A large pale torpedo shape moved across the screen, and then another did. Riley’s forehead bunched with frown lines. Did he know an ovary to see one?

  Hazel was going to ask a question, but the technician moved quickly, printing the photo, telling them to return to the waiting area. “Dr. Kornblum will be with you momentarily,” she said and went quickly through the curtain and out the door.

  Hazel was afraid. “Usually they let you listen to the heartbeat.”

  “That woman,” Riley said, “was a total bitch. The way she looked at us? Sheesh.”

  Hazel tried to believe this. She could see Riley trying, too. But there was so little evidence that the technician had been a bitch that they said nothing as they waited, first in the waiting area, and then in a consulting room, where Hazel sat on the patient’s bed and Riley sat in the doctor’s wheeled chair and they both studied a poster with an illustration of a baby gestating in its mother’s womb. The baby was packed and contoured around the woman’s organs, and its eyes were closed like the eyes of a sleeping koala. Hazel wished the time would stretch out into an eternity of waiting, but soon she heard Dr. Kornblum coming down the hall. The doctor knocked, came in smiling at them, and shook their hands. Riley surrendered her chair, and then the doctor opened a folder she had brought and, without consulting it, began to speak.

  “As you recall, you’ve been having some bleeding, and we were worried about the heartbeat,” she said, looking first at Hazel and then at Riley, intent and focused, as if she were selling them a car. “We wanted the heartbeat to be stronger. It should have been. But we waited, hoping for the best because sometimes some bleeding happens in the first trimester. It is not normal but neither is it uncommon. Today we can see that there has been no more development since your last visit. The technician could not find a heartbeat.” Dr. Kornblum was looking squarely at Hazel, reaching out and then placing her hand firmly on Hazel’s shoulder. The hand was surprisingly light, and Hazel reached up and covered it with her own, as if she were in a position to give comfort. Dr. Kornblum continued to study her, unmoved, and Hazel supposed that Kornblum had been a doctor for some time now and could not be talked out of what she was telling them. “I am so sorry that this happened to you. What happens next is that your body will have to expel the material. You’ve been bleeding, which tells us that your body has been trying to do something for a while.”

  “Okay,” said Hazel. She was crying, but only slightly. She looked at Riley. He leaned rigidly against the counter, arms tight across his chest, his stare inward, as if he had become bored and begun to daydream. He lifted his fist to his mouth and sank his teeth into the skin beneath the knuckle of his index finger.

  Dr. Kornblum pulled a tissue from the dispenser in the wall and handed it to her. “These things happen at random, usually as a result of a genetic abnormality. It is likely that this embryo carried some form of what we call mental retardation, something like Down Syndrome. Whatever is wrong prevents it from developing further.” Her warm hand squeezed Hazel’s shoulder. “It was probably retarded or something like that.”

  Suddenly the doctor was talking in a lighter, faster voice, saying something about options. Options? The word turned in Hazel’s mind like an oddly shaped rock. Apparently there were decisions to be made. Dr. Kornblum could give her pills to take at home before she went to bed, in the hope she would wake up bleeding heavily. Or she could have a procedure, right here in the clinic, first thing tomorrow morning. Dr. Kornblum would perform it herself. She promised it wouldn’t hurt a bit. “I’ll give you some Valium to relax you,” she said. “I have an instrument that will vacuum out the material.”

  Hazel’s queasy pregnant feeling was worse than usual now, like she might vomit. Maybe this was what people meant when they talked of motion sickness, which had always seemed made-up to her, even though she knew those people couldn’t all be lying. She considered what the doctor had said. She disliked pills, and the thought of coming all the way back in the morning felt like an invitation to climb a mountain tomorrow. Besides, she was no longer sure she liked Dr. Kornblum after what she’d said about Henrik being retarded.

  “I want to go home,” she said. “If it’s going to happen, let it.”

  Riley thought she should have the procedure performed. He said so when they got back to the apartment and were standing in the midst of the cards from all the people they would now have to tell to forget about the baby, and from a percentage of whom they would then have to accept condolence cards. The procedure, Riley said, sounded not only harmless but quick, and she could be free of that thing by tomorrow morning. That thing. She wanted it gone, didn’t she? His eyes were dark and tearful, and he was very angry suddenly, though not with her. He was angry with Henrik.

  “The little fucker tricked us,” he said with a grown man’s unintentionally comic sadness. “It never meant to come out, just to waste our time and lie to us. I wish it was already gone.” He sat down and got out his phone and began to send text messages to coworkers, telling them he would be working from home. By the time he had gotten out his laptop and turned it on, he had calmed down somewhat. His face looked drained and tired. It was 9:43 in the morning. He asked if he could cook her some breakfast.

  She was starving. “Get takeout from Mack’s,” she said, referring to the diner up the street. She ignored his baleful eyes and wrapped a blanket around herself. She could not believe what he had said about Henrik, who may have been dead, but who was nonetheless part
of them both. “Go on and order,” she said. “You know what I like. But get some dessert, too. I could eat a horse.”

  Twelve weeks. Henrik was nearly half an inch long. Sinking in the water, falling into his red underwater cushion, he looked like an unbaked piece of pie dough. Hazel wondered whether she should call Riley. There was no point in it. He would close his laptop and come home, and then he would simply be here, too. It was better to let him work, finish a strong day’s output, and return in the evening to news he would find a relief. She looked a last time into the swirled water. Henrik had been the last to turn against her. She closed the lid and pushed the lever.

  The water washed Henrik down the pipe through several floors and a spider-infested basement, and then down a larger pipe, where he joined a river of sewage. The water was foul but swift, and he moved along unimpeded. Other rivers spilled in constantly, creating a communion of waters. He came to a whirlpool, plunged through a crack in the ceramic, and shot out into cleansing salt water. Without anchor he drifted gradually upward, among the dark shapes of aimless fish, passed a shark’s dim eye, and whirled among pearly mullet until the surface lay just above, a blanket of shimmering sunlight. The ground beneath him fell away into blackness, and then there were no more fish, only the ceiling of light pressing down in steady ripples. Gradually the light vanished, and he was enclosed in a darkness that seemed never ending, until the light returned gradually. This process repeated itself many times. He came to a place where leafy green lianas hung from the surface, and the water was very still. Thick eels swam around him, their mouths smiling as they came together, coupling in spirals. One day the seaweeds and the eels were gone, and the water was colder, and the ceiling of light came and went as it had before. This happened so many times that Henrik lost count, even though he had nothing to do but count, because he had never learned numbers. He moved among tremendous masses of rough blue ice and found himself drifting in a frozen maze with giant skeletons trapped in its walls. His tiny black eyes, preserved by cold, watched the ceiling of light that had become constant. The light was brilliant and warm and had a carefree existence there on the frigid water that encouraged anyone who saw it to daydream. The dream of light stretched on and on, until it was collapsed into a single moment as Henrik was jolted from this state, snagged by a warm, faster current. One day, as harpoons plunged into the blue around him, he saw a great black whale break loose of their barbs, leaving ribbons of blood to drift toward the light as it dove hard into deeper blackness, never to return. He hovered over shipwrecks and coral reefs, saw the bones of broken ships, and one day he entered an ancient city where mermaids adored him. Some nights he settled gently on the headboard, just as Hazel dropped off to sleep.