Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

  She lived three years in a one-room apartment in Rabat with no refrigerator and one window. She could not wear shorts or skirts and could not go outside with her hair wet. Some days she spent the whole day in her kitchen, reading detective novels. Her letters from that time were several pages long and Herb would read them again and again, leaning over the dashboard of his truck.

  There are two kinds of pigeons here. There are the thick-looking ones, rock pigeons, the ones we see back home. They moan on the roof at night. But there are also these other pigeons with white patches on their necks. They’re big birds and gather in huge wheels and float above the rooftops, dark and gleaming, turning up there like big mobiles made of metal. Some mornings crows divebomb them and the pigeons will start shrieking and from my bed it sounds like little airborne children shouting for help.

  She never mentioned her parents. Once she wrote: No one here wears seat belts. Another time: I hope you’re keeping bags of salt in the back of the truck. That was as close as she came. Eventually she attached herself to a Peace Corps initiative and began working with blind women.

  More than once in those years Herb stopped outside Destinations Travel in downtown Laramie and watched the four-foot plastic Earth turn in the window but could not bring himself to buy an airplane ticket. They had been dating only four months before her parents died. And she had not invited him.

  He wrote his mundane replies: a hike to a lake, a new cereal he liked. Love, Herb, he’d conclude, feeling resolute and silly at the same time. He worried he wrote too much. He worried he did not write enough.

  In 2004, after sixteen months of failing to get pregnant, Imogene tells her gynecologist. He says workups can be scheduled. Endocrinologists can be contacted. Urologists can be contacted. They have plenty of options.

  “It’s not time,” he says, “to despair.”

  “Not time to despair,” Imogene tells Herb.

  “I’m not despairing,” he says.

  They have AIDS tests. They have hepatitis tests. Two days later Herb masturbates into an eight-ounce specimen cup and drives sixty-six miles east on I-80 to a urologist in Cheyenne with the cup in a little Christmas bag meant for office gifts because he and Imogene have run out of brown paper bags. The bag rides shotgun on the bench seat beside him, little Santas grinning all over it. His sample barely covers the bottom. He wonders: Do some men fill up that whole cup?

  The same afternoon Imogene leaves work early to have carbon dioxide pumped into her insides. She has radio-opaque dye injected through her cervix into her uterus and all the way up her fallopian tubes. Then she is wheeled into an X-ray room where a nurse with peanut butter breath and Snoopy earrings drapes a lead apron over Imogene’s chest and asks her to remain completely motionless. The nurse steps away; Imogene hears the machine come to life, hears the high whine of electrons piling up. She closes her eyes, tries not to move. The light pours into her.

  The phone rings six days later. The doctors have discussed the situation. Dual-factor infertility. Imogene gets three words: polycystic ovary syndrome. Herb gets two words: severe deficits. In motility, in density, in something else. Only three percent of his sperm are rated viable.

  Herb’s face appears to crumple. He sets his half-eaten wedge of cantaloupe on the counter and goes into the bathroom and shuts the door. Imogene finds herself staring into the space between the countertop and the refrigerator. There is dust down there, and a single Cheerio. A groan comes from the bathroom. Then a flush. With one hand Imogene gently probes her abdomen with her fingers.

  * * *

  All morning she sits at her computer and drowns in memory. A bus climbs through layers of cold air, mountains the color of cardboard, a phosphorous sky. Gazelles in a courtyard pick through rubbish. Sheepdogs doze on village rooftops.

  “No parents, no husband, no children,” a blind woman once told her. Her gaze was a vacuum. Imogene did not know where to look. “I am a tribe of one.”

  Her computer screen swims. She rests her forehead on the desk.

  “Are you mad? Are you mad at me, Imogene?” Herb cannot help himself: The refrain becomes almost visible, a whirl of haze, like fan blades turning in front of his face.

  “I’m not mad,” she says. Their failures, she decides, were inevitable from the start. Prewritten. Genetic. Their inadequacies, their timidities, their differences from everybody else. She had always been confused, always living far from town, always reading, always saying no to junior high dance invitations. Imogene the Ice Queen. Imogene the Pipedream. Too petite, too pale, too pretty. Too easily scorched.

  “Everything is fine,” she tells Herb during dinner, during Jeopardy! Ten years of trying not to get pregnant and now it turns out they never could.

  Herb develops his own theory: It’s the tires out in the yard. A whole graveyard of them, seventeen metals, sixteen types of hydrocarbons, and they’ve gotten into the well water, the shower, the pasta, and now the poisons are inside their bodies.

  More tests. Imogene has a laparoscopy during which a doctor punctures her ovaries a dozen times with an electrosurgical needle. Herb masturbates into another cup, makes another hour-and-a-half drive to Cheyenne, drops his pants in front of another urologist.

  Wait another six days. Get another phone call. Confirmed diagnosis. Imogene studies herself in the bathroom mirror. She had been thinking she could quit her job. She had been thinking she could start cooking Moroccan food, Tunisian food: an infant strapped to her chest, pots steaming atop the range. Maybe raise some hens. Instead she starts a regimen of glucophage and gets diarrhea for a week.

  This is not real suffering, she tells herself. This is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary. That in every genealogy someone will always be last: last leaf on the family tree, last stone in the family plot. Hasn’t she learned this before?

  After school Herb walks out into the big pasture behind the house and works on the tires. They lie so deep in places, so much dust and snow blown into them, that as he hacks out one, or the pieces of it, he inevitably finds another beneath. Sometimes he wonders if there are tires all the way down to the center of the world. He chops them into pieces with an axe, shovels the pieces into his truck. It’s cold and there is only the wind in the grass, and the ice clinking softly in the cottonwoods. After a couple of hours, he straightens, looks at the house, small from there, a matchbox beneath the sky. The tiny figure of Imogene trudges through the sage, filling her feeders, dragging a five-gallon bucket with one arm, stepladder with the other, her legs lost in the haze.

  * * *

  They agree to visit a fertility clinic. It is eighty minutes away in good weather. Parked nearest the entrance is a Mercedes with the license plate BBYMKR.

  The doctor sits behind a glass-topped desk and draws upside-down. He draws a uterus, fallopian tubes, two ovaries. He draws instruments going in and harvesting eggs. On the wall is a framed poster of a giant vagina and its inner workings. Beside it, a framed photo of three chubby daughters leaning against a Honda.

  “Okay,” Herb is saying. “All right.”

  Does Imogene have any questions? Imogene has no questions. She has a thousand questions.

  “You draw upside-down really well,” she says, and tries a laugh.

  The doctor gives a quarter-smile.

  “Practice,” he says.

  The finance lady is nice, smells like cigarettes. They can get loans. Interest rates are swell. Her daughter did three “cycles.” She points to photos.

  The procedure, including medications, embryo lab, and anesthesiologist, will cost thirteen thousand dollars. On the drive home acronyms twist through their brains: IUI, ICSI, HCG. IVF. A herd of antelope stands in the scraps of snow just off the interstate, their shadows crisp and stark on the slope behind them, their eyes flat and black. They flash past: there, then gone. Herb reaches for Imogene’s hand. The sky is blue and depthless.

  They si
gn up. A box of drugs arrives. Herb unpacks it into the cabinet in their bathroom. Imogene can’t look. Herb can hardly look. There are four different ziplocks of syringes. Vials and pill bottles. Videocassettes. Containers for used needles. Four hundred alcohol wipes. Fourteen hundred dollars of synthetic hormones.

  Imogene’s protocol starts with, of all things, oral contraceptives. To regulate her cycle, the booklet says. She pours a glass of milk and studies the little pink tablet.

  Dusk falls across the range. Herb grades quizzes at the kitchen table. The clouds deepen, darken. Imogene walks out into the yard with her stepladder and seed bucket and the pill dissolving in her gut and the silence extends and the sky dims and the birdfeeders seem miles apart and it is a feeling like dying.

  Each time she hears a syringe tear away from its wrapper, Imogene feels slightly sick. Seventeen days of an ovarian stimulator called Lupron. Then two weeks of progesterone to prepare her uterus for pregnancy. Then vaginal suppositories. If she does get pregnant, eight more weeks of daily injections. Sometimes a little dot of blood follows the needle out and Herb covers it with an alcohol wipe and holds it there and closes his eyes.

  After the shots, he lays out her pills, five of them. She eats toast spread with applesauce before work and swallows the capsules on her way out the door.

  “Tell me you love me, Imogene,” Herb calls from the kitchen, and in the garage, the car window up, Imogene may or may not hear. The Corolla starts. The garage door rolls up, rolls down. Her tires hiss in the cinders. The prairie shifts under its carpet of ice.

  * * *

  Springtime. Imogene’s ovaries inflate on schedule. They become water balloons, dandelion heads, swollen peonies. The doctor measures her follicles on an ultrasound monitor: Her interior is a blizzard of pixels. Nine millimeters. Thirteen millimeters. The doctor wants them to grow to 16, to 20. They root for numbers: 30 eggs, 20 embryos. 3 blastocysts. 1 fetus.

  Halfway through April, Ed Collins, the regional manager at Cyclops Engineering, calls Imogene into his office and chides her for taking off too many afternoons.

  “How many doctors’ appointments can a person have?” He fingers buttons on his polo shirt.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you sick?”

  She looks at her shoes. “No. I’m not sick.”

  The more estrogen floods Imogene’s body, the prettier she gets. Her lips are almost crimson, her hair is a big opalescent crown. Down both arms Herb can see the purple spiderwork of her veins.

  Hormones whirl through her cells. She sweats; she freezes. She limps around in sweatpants with her ovaries stuffed full of follicles and her follicles stuffed with ova. “It’s like having two full bladders,” she says. Before potholes she has to slow the Corolla to a crawl.

  Herb rides beside her with his scrotum throbbing between his thighs, traitorous, too warm. On his desk he has eighty-three protein structure papers to grade. He is fairly sure he will have to charge this month’s house payment on his credit card. He tells himself: Other people have it worse. Other people, like Harper Ousby, the women’s basketball coach, get their ribs sawed open and the valves of their hearts replaced with parts from the hearts of animals.

  Clouds pile up at the horizon, plum-colored and full of shoulders.

  On May Day Herb masturbates into another cup and drives Imogene and his sample to the fertility clinic and the doctor goes into Imogene’s ovaries, aspirating her follicular fluid with what looks like a stainless steel hydra: a dozen or so segmented steel snakes at one end and a vacuum at the other. Herb sits in the waiting room and listens for its hiss but hears only the whirr and click of the heat register, and the receptionist’s radio: Rod Stewart.

  After an hour they call him back. Imogene is shivering on a chair in the RN’s office. Her lips are gray and slow and she asks him several times if she threw up. He says he’s not sure but doesn’t think so.

  “I remember throwing up,” she says. She sips Gatorade from a paper cup. He puts a pad in her panties and unties her gown and pulls her sweatpants up over her legs.

  For three days they want the eggs to grow, one cell cleaving into two, two into four. The delicacy of mitosis: a snow crystal settling on a branch, the single beat of a moth’s wings.

  “I was in Africa,” Imogene says. “There were all these vultures in the sky.”

  Two days later a nurse calls to tell them only six eggs have successfully fertilized, but two have become viable eight-cell embryos. Again they drive to Cheyenne. The doctor installs both embryos inside Imogene with a syringe and a long tube like a half-cooked spaghetti noodle. The whole process takes thirty seconds.

  She rides back to Laramie lying across the bench seat, the sky racing past the windshield. At the doctor’s instructions, she lies in bed for three days, eating yogurt, turning her hip to Herb every twelve hours for her injections, wondering if something tiny is happening inside her, some microscopic spark flaring and fading and flaring again. Then she goes back to work, bruised, still full, an invisible puncture wound in each ovary. She finds herself walking very carefully. She finds herself thinking: Twins? A week later Herb drives her back to the clinic for a blood test.

  The results are negative. Implantation did not occur. No pregnancy. No twins. No baby. Nothing.

  Things between Herb and Imogene go quiet. Invoices arrive in the mail, one after another. For extra income Herb teaches a summer section of general biology. But he is continually losing his train of thought in the middle of lectures. One afternoon, halfway through a chalk drawing of basic protein synthesis, maybe twenty-five seconds go by during which all he can imagine are doctors scrabbling between Imogene’s legs, dragging golf ball—size eggs from her ovaries.

  There are snickers. He drops the chalk. A tall sophomore in the front, a scholarship swimmer named Misty Friday, is wearing camouflage shorts and a shirt with about a hundred laces in front of her breasts, like something a knight might wear under his armor. Her calves are impossibly long.

  “Professor Ross?”

  She chews the ends of the laces on her shirt. Herb’s vision skews. The floor seems to be making slow revolutions beneath him. The ceiling tiles inch lower. He dismisses class.

  Imogene and Herb buy their groceries, eat their dinners, watch their shows. One evening she crouches at the edge of the driveway and watches a mantis dribble eggs onto a stalk of weed, pushing out a seemingly endless stream of them, tapioca pearls in an amber goo. Three minutes later a squadron of ants has carried off the whole load in their tiny jaws. What, she wonders, happened to those two embryos? Did they slip out of her and get lost in the bedsheets? Did they fall out at work, go tumbling down her pant leg, and get crushed into that awful beige carpet?

  Herb tries her in June, and again on the fourth of July: “Do you think we could try another cycle, Imogene?”

  Needles. Telephone calls. Failure. “Not yet,” she mutters. “Not right now.”

  They lie awake beside each other, speechless, and look for patterns in the ceiling plaster. Ten years of marriage and hadn’t they imagined children by now? A fetus curled in an ocean of amniotic fluid, a daughter standing at the back door with mud on her sneakers and a baby bird in her palm? Seventy-five trillion cells in their bodies and they can’t get two of them together.

  Here is another problem: the clichés. There are too many clichés in this, armies of them. Imogene’s least favorites are the most obvious and usually come from the mothers at work: You’re not getting any younger. Or: I envy your freedom—you can do whatever you want!

  Equally bad is the moment at the biology department summer picnic when Goss, the new hire in plant sciences, announces that his wife is pregnant. “My boys can swim,” he declares, and pushes his glasses higher on his nose and claps Herb on the shoulder.

  There is the cliché when Imogene tells Herb (Saturday night, Sunday night) that she’s fine, that she doesn’t need to talk about it; when Herb overhears a student in the hall call him a “pretty ball
sy professor”; when Imogene passes by two receptionists at lunch and hears one say, “I can’t even walk past Jeff without getting pregnant.”

  Stretchmarks, baby formula, stroller brands; if you’re listening for something, it’s all you’ll hear.

  “Tell me anything, Imogene,” Herb says. “But please don’t tell me you’re fine.”

  She keeps her attention on the ceiling. Her name hangs in the space between them. She does not answer.

  The chapter about human reproduction in the textbook on Herb’s desk is called The Miracle of Life. Imogene looks up miracle: An event that appears to be contrary to the laws of nature.

  She looks up fine: Made up of tiny particles. Or: Very thin, sharp, or delicate.

  Herb calls his brother in Minnesota. His brother tries to understand but has problems of his own, layoffs, a sick kid. His brother’s last Christmas card had a photo of a golf hole on the front. Inside it said: The distance to success is measured by your own drive. Happy Holidays.

  “At least you must be having lots of fun trying,” his brother says. “Right?”

  Herb makes a joke, hangs up. A room away, Imogene rests her head against the refrigerator. Outside the wind is flying down from the mountains, and there haven’t been headlights on the road all night, and all Imogene can hear is the whirring of the dishwasher, and her husband’s low sobbing, and the hot wind tearing through the sage.

  Laramie: a film of dust on the windshield, a ballet of cars turning in acres of parking lot, The Home Depot, Office Depot, the Dollar Store, sun filtering through distant smoke, battered men scratching lottery tickets on a bus stop bench. Two brisk ladies in long dresses hold salads in plastic boxes. An airplane whines past. Everything deadeningly normal. How much longer can she live here?