“Magazines?” he said, “I don’t think I’ll need those.”
“You’d be surprised,” said the doctor, “it’s not like at home. The atmosphere here is very clinical.”
Then Cecil went into the next room and closed the door with a click. He seemed to be in there a long, long time, and when he came out, he looked sheepish, standing there with the bag. Then he put the bag under his arm, as he’d been told, and held it there against his chest.
The poor guy, Kiziah thought, that’s not easy for him, in a place like this.
Right away, the nurse called back the doctor and the doctor had a look at Cecil’s specimen. He measured the total amount in a small syringe, and then ejected a little bit of it onto a glass slide.
“Volume five cc’s, good,” he said.
The nurse wrote it down on a form.
“That’s lots,” she said to Kiziah.
“We need to look at it right away, while it’s still warm from the body,” said the doctor. “That’s how we judge motility. The more motility, the better, needless to say.”
He sat down at the microscope and focused the eyepiece up and down.
“Hmm, look at this, please, nurse.”
The nurse walked over and looked into the microscope. She had to brush away that long dark hair to have a look. To balance herself better, without sitting down, she put one hand on the doctor’s shoulder. Kiziah noticed her manicured fingernails, smooth and perfect. The nurse looked for a minute and then stood back up then and looked at the doctor and then she looked at Cecil.
“I’m not the expert,” she said.
“Lots and lots of sperm there, lots of them,” the doctor said.
Later, Kiziah wondered why he said it like that. It must be how they break bad news. They perk you up with a spark of hope. Maybe they teach doctors that. “There’s no sign of cancer in your lung, sir,” they’d say, “but of course there is cancer in your brain, your heart, your liver, and your leg and you got a week to live.”
“Take a look now, Mrs. Buffett, what do you see?”
“I could never see anything through those, in school,” she said.
“Oh, it’s easy. These are much better microscopes. Put your eye right here, adjust this, up and down a bit. You’ll see them.”
And it was easy, there were many small head shapes with tails everywhere she looked. Her heart took a leap, like a salmon fighting its way upstream.
“Oh! I see sperm, lots of them! Cecil, good for you!”
Cecil smiled. He was pleased, she could tell.
“Oh yes, there are lots,” the doctor said.
“Yes,” said the nurse.
Now, if Kiziah sold, say, woolen gloves for a living—as once she did—and she opened up a new package of woolen gloves when they came into the store, and she saw, right away, that there were moth holes in each and every pair, what would she say? Would she say to the customer standing there, “Lots of woolen gloves here, Mrs. Whittle, lots of fine wool?” No, she didn’t think so. She’d say, “Oh, what a shame, these gloves are ridden with moth holes. These gloves are eaten up, they’re no good at all, they’re useless for warmth.” That’s what she’d say, she knew that. But no, this doctor said, “Lots of sperm, there are lots of sperm.” Then he paused, the nurse took her look, the doctor looked back down the microscope again, adjusted the eyepiece a quarter-turn, shifted the slide here and there, and then he came out with the truth that he’d known all along.
“But this is not good: none of these sperm wiggle,” the doctor said.
“Wiggle?” asked Kiziah.
“Motility is important. Spermatozoa should move, they should be vigorous, they should be pulsing with life, their tails should thrash as they probe their way towards the ready egg.”
“You mean there’s something wrong?” asked Kiziah.
Again her heart like the salmon leapt in her chest, upriver.
“Look again, Mrs. Buffett, and this time don’t just look for the sperm, watch for movement too.”
That’s when she had her second look, and she saw them all there again but they looked dead. She’d seen tadpoles like that once, in a ditch on Waterford Bridge Road where the water had an oily scum.
“Maybe they’re in a pause,” she said, “catching their wind after that journey they had.”
That was the rose-coloured glasses talking. The doctor and the nurse both laughed, spontaneously, naturally.
“No, I’m afraid not,” the doctor said, “they don’t rest on these slides. After a journey like that, all the way through the seminiferous tubules, from the distant testicles, sperm are frisky. If healthy, they’re like colts out of the barn on a spring day.”
The nurse looked at the doctor and turned to Cecil.
“Mr. Buffett, look at it this way: it’s like you shake up a can of Coca-Cola. The ejaculation of spermatozoa is an energy release, a life force that spews out. Our job as scientists, here, is to measure the effectiveness of that energy release.”
“There’s no sperm in Coca-Cola,” said Cecil.
“Of course not,” said the nurse, “and really, unfortunately, there are no viable sperm, it appears, on your specimen either.”
She pointed to the microscope. The doctor looked about twenty-eight years old. The nurse? Maybe thirty.
“I’m afraid that’s right,” said the doctor. “But a better analogy might be, say, ejaculation is like shaking up or squeezing a milkweed pod, shaking it, squeezing it, watching the million seeds fly everywhere into the wind. Catch those seeds, look at them under the microscope, that’s what our job is like.”
He looked at the Buffetts, hoping they understood. Of course they understood.
“But wait, milkweed’s dry,” said the nurse, “and sperm itself is carried in a liquid propulsive medium.”
She laughed gently and shook her hair again. She was standing right beside the doctor, her right hip pretty much touching his left shoulder. Cecil stood on the other side of the room, and Kiziah could see how deflated he was, downcast. He had his brave face on, though, but she could tell. She probably had the same face on herself. She loved him, she always had.
“Well, let’s put it this way then,” said the doctor, “to be successful, the procreative act has to have living seeds. And lots of them, Mr. and Mrs. Buffett, lots of them. Millions, millions, hundreds of millions. Active spermatozoa are the living seeds of homo sapiens. Unfortunately, this sample of Mr. Buffett’s is severely deficient in that department.”
The doctor put his hand on the nurse’s back, and he left it there for a second.
“If you put a red tomato on the floor,” said the nurse, “and then you hit that tomato as hard as you can with a sledgehammer, then you have wet seeds flying all over. High speed. That’s what the male fertilization process is like. Sperm are ejaculated at twenty miles an hour.”
“That’s a good analogy,” said the doctor, “but for the fact that the explosion of seminal fluid happens, usually, within an enclosed space, the female vagina.”
“Of course,” said the nurse.
They seemed to be talking to each other now, rather than to the Buffetts.
“That’s why condoms,” said the doctor.
“What? Condoms? What’s that got to do with this?” interjected Kiziah.
“Condoms prevent pregnancy,” the doctor said.
There was a pause.
Then the doctor looked at Kiziah and said, “What I mean, Mrs. Buffett, is that young unattached people, people attracted to each other, wear condoms for protection from disease as well as for the prevention of an unwanted pregnancy. This is of no concern for you today, for you and your husband, because we are in a fertility clinic, the purpose of which is quite the opposite. The nurse and I have mentioned condoms only to contextualize the whole fertility process, as we understand it. No doubt you have used condoms in the past.”
“Not for two years,” said Kiziah.
She felt numb inside. All those dead sperm.
“You, a married couple, trying to get pregnant, Mrs. Buffett, should not concern yourself with condoms. Condoms are for single women.”
The doctor and nurse glanced at each other. Maybe Kiziah imagined it. Cecil had his back against the wall, by the door.
“Let’s go, Kiziah,” he said.
The nurse broke away from her satellite position around the doctor, crossed the room and patted Cecil on the shoulder.
“There, there,” she said, “we never give up on just one sample.
Come back next week, Mr. Buffett, try again. Results like this, it could be a fluke. It could be better next time. Make an appointment at the desk.”
“You mean do this again?” asked Cecil.
“No relations for three days, then try again. It’s the only way to be sure of the diagnosis.”
“Diagnosis?”
“Well,” she said, “I’m afraid, if we get the same results again, we diagnose male infertility.”
“Seedless red tomatoes you mean,” said Kiziah, “we smash your so-called red tomato against the ground with your so-called sledgehammer and nothing of much use flies out.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have made those comparisons,” said the doctor.
“Maybe not,” said Kiziah.
“It’s how we help people understand. Male infertility is common.”
“It’s how you belittle people,” said Kiziah.
The nurse formed her lips into a tight line. The doctor stood up. Kiziah took Cecil’s arm and they left the clinic and walked out into the parking lot. Three days of abstinence and then another sperm count? They could do that, she figured, even for those unfeeling health so-called professionals. Fuck them. She and Cecil didn’t have much choice. Those two were the only ones in the city dealing with those who didn’t yet have babies.
On the way home, Cecil was quiet behind the wheel. He didn’t whistle Whiskey in the Jar and he didn’t whistle the theme song from Titanic.
“What do you think, honey?” she said.
“I’m sorry about all those dead sperm, Kizie, that’s what I think.”
“It’s not your fault, you heard what they said. It’s common.”
“My sperm are duds. They’re useless.”
“No, no, not useless. You never know. Now we take three days off, next week we try again. Like the nurse said, sometimes it’s better.”
“She’s a piece of work, that nurse. And we had five days off this time.”
“Five? Three. It was only three.”
“Well, five, three, what’s the difference? I’m supposed to go through that rigmarole again? I don’t think so.”
She smiled at him, leaned over, tapped his thigh.
“Cecil, it’s the only way, for us.”
“I’m not going back there, Kiziah. There’s no way. That’s it. The doctor, the nurse, they laugh way too much. I could have died back there.”
Wait a minute, wait a minute she thought. She turned in her seat and looked right at him.
“Cecil, when you went into that little room, the sample room?”
“Oh Kiziah, please.”
“Was there anyone else there, Cecil, any other men getting their samples at the same time? Any chance of a mix-up?”
“God no, I was there alone. They had a latch on the door for God sake. A lock inside.”
“Were there any other jars? Sperm jars?”
“Empty ones lined up by the toilet. Empty ones on a ledge. Empty ones.”
“Cec, maybe, when you finished, I bet you put that little bottle with your sperm sample down somewhere.”
Cecil thought about what he’d done.
“That’s true,” he said, “I had to put it up on the ledge, to do up my belt. So what?”
“Well maybe that’s when the mix-up happened. You put yours down, you picked up someone else’s, someone’s full of dead sperms, duds, leftovers from before, cold as ice. No wonder they didn’t move.”
Cecil was quiet. He thought about his wife, how much she wanted a baby.
“That’s not impossible,” he said, “maybe that’s not impossible. If they have no standards of cleanliness or scientific rigour, Kizie, if they have no fail-safe procedures, if they should be disbarred from the practice of medicine, that is possible.”
There you go. She could find the silver lining anywhere. That’s why he’d fallen for her in the first place. Nothing got her down for long.
“There was a switch of sperm, Cecil,” she said.
He thought about the other two girls he’d had sex with before Kiziah. Neither of them ever got pregnant either. There were lots of times they could have too, times they got carried away and did not use condoms. They thought they were lucky then, not to have had a baby come along, mess up their lives.
“I mean they even switch real babies by accident sometimes. Let alone sperm. I read about it,” said Kiziah. “Missus So-and-So, down the steps of the hospital with her brand-new little baby, happy as a clam. Then three months later, the phone call comes. Bring that baby back, there’s been a mix-up.”
Cecil said nothing. He knew the dead sperms under the microscope were his. The bottle he’d taken back to the doctor was warm at the bottom, the warmth surprised him, it came up through the palm of his hand and made him feel like an alien, like he didn’t know much about anything at all. Particularly about himself.
“We’ll go back, Cecil, we have to. Do it again. Make sure it’s your jar this time, keep hold of it, don’t ever put it down.”
“Okay,” he said.
But he knew he’d never go back to that place, never have another one of those tests, never masturbate in a closet, never hear that doctor and that nurse mock them both while he stood there, shamed.
“You know what they’ll say to us, next time?”
“No, Cecil, what will they say?”
“They’ll say ‘Take any kind of fruit you want, Mr. Buffett, grind it up in a Cuisinart, throw that mess of seeds into a pressure hose, a hundred million seeds fly out,’ and then the nurse will say, ‘Oh and the tighter the landing space, the warmer the better,’ and those two will look at each other and laugh and she’ll throw her hair around. To hell with them.”
“All you need is one or two alive, I think, Cec. They can take those, pull them out and use them. There’s test-tubes, they got their ways.”
Kiziah already felt better. Again she thought about the unlucky mothers who came down the stairs outside the hospital with the wrong baby. She thought about Cecil coming out of the sample room, smiling this time. She saw herself nine months later lying on her back in the delivery room, bright lights up above, and she squeezed Cecil’s hand because of the pain coming through her in waves. Now there were different doctors, nice doctors with green masks hovering over her like they were the best friends she ever had. They didn’t tell jokes, they cared for her. Sweat poured off her face and trickled down the side of her neck. She was born for this. So what, it hurts. “Push, push,” the nurse said, and then there was the baby coming out. “It’s a boy! It’s twins!” Who’d think of that? That didn’t show on the ultrasound! How crazy is that? Then they held the two babies up by the feet, and gave them a smack on the bottom and they all started to cry, including Cecil. So much for the dead sperm, she whispered into his ear as he bent down to give her another kiss, what did those scientists know anyway?
She couldn’t wait for it all to happen. That night she cozied up to Cecil who was lying there, quiet on his back. She moved herself up against him and wiggled back and forth against his hip.
“What am I?” she said.
“Beats me.”
“I’m an egg just out of the ovary. Grade A plus-plus.”
It was a dark night and she couldn’t see his face so she lifted herself up to look.
“Let’s wait the three nights,” he said, “give me a chance. That’s what the doctor said.”
“Let’s do it now too. For fun.”
“Kiziah.”
“Ce
cil?”
“Kizie, I’m tired out. I’m sampled out. There’s a limit to what I can do.”
He turned away from her. There was a cold spot on her shoulders where the sheets pulled away.
All those spermatozoa, they couldn’t have been born dead, they couldn’t have been lifeless from the word go. Something happened, something sucked the living spirit out of them, something beat them down, flattened them out, grew the two heads, the two tails, caused the slow or sudden death that made them useless. Maybe he had his limits, Cecil, maybe he was tired and worn out and disappointed but there were no limits for her, for Kiziah Buffett. She’d have her baby no matter what. She was on a mission. She fell asleep with that in mind.
Two days later she almost made a mistake. She was in the Honda Civic, alone, and she nearly got killed on the highway. There she was, she had the accelerator put to the floor, all the weight of her hip and her leg on it, pushing hard. Nothing much happened. There was no acceleration. No roar like a tiger from the engine, her body wasn’t drilled back into the upholstery. In fact, she was hung out to dry in the passing lane, with fog closing down in front, zero visibility, the truck beside her full-blast full of steel rods whipping up spray all over her windshield. So she had a quick choice to make: keep this up and get killed, or pull back. She put on the brakes and backed off just in time because a cement mixer came by the other way. She could have been a bug on the grill.
“Useless car, not really safe,” she said that night to Cecil.
And what did he say? “It’s good on gas. You need to learn self-control.”
“I could have got killed, Cecil. It’s got no guts, no get up and go. No safety reserve.”
“It’s a great car, it’s good on gas, it has re-sale value. You should never have tried to pass under those conditions. You have to learn.”
That was all he said, and it was obvious to her that he did not see, in his mind’s eye, his wife, Kiziah, out there in that car, the car gasping in the passing lane, the cement mixer coming her way, disguised by fog, ready to kill her. He didn’t have the imagination to see it and feel it, to vibrate with it the way she did.
So she said, and she knew she shouldn’t, “Cecil, day after tomorrow’s the day for the next sperm count. You got to go for that.”
How Loveta Got Her Baby Page 11