The quality of our donors is the foundation of our service, with less than 1% of all applicants making it through the selection process. Potential donors are subjected to an extensive medical, genetic, and psychological blah blah
He stopped reading, flipped the page, and signed. His sample, according to the next form, would be tested for sperm count, motility, progression, morphology, and freezing traits. Flip, sign, flip, sign, sign, initial, sign. Compensation will not be provided for this specimen as it is used only for analysis. Balls. Sign.
After handing the sheaf across the counter, Corderoy was conducted through the security door down a hallway and into a room about the size of most doctors’ examination rooms. The solid metal door clicked shut behind him. He turned the lock and felt the heavy bolt slide into place, then he surveyed the room. There were the usual pastel prints of plants and lakes on the wall. In the center of the room, a green pleather chair. Next to it, a sink with hand soap and a paper towel dispenser. The only giveaway that this was a masturbatorium was the large cabinet in the corner with a TV, a DVD player, and stacks of DVDs and magazines. He set down the collection cup he’d been given, then shuffled through the DVDs. Score Island, Latin Sexfiesta, Sorority Sluts 5 . . .
He was accustomed to short preview clips and freebies on the Internet. Actual porn movies? He didn’t want to have to fast-forward through ridiculous plots to get to the good stuff. And the thought that someone passing in the hallway might hear the moans and genital sloshings and flappings. He would have to do this the old-fashioned way.
He picked up a stack of magazines: Club, Penthouse, Playboy, Juggs, Leg Show, Naughty Neighbors, Asian Fever. He flipped through Penthouse. How many other donors had held this rag in their hairy palms? None of the featured sections aroused his interest, and soon he had reached the end of the official content, leaving only pages and pages of advertisements. It brought him back to his first pornographic magazine.
He’d found it half covered in a pile of leaves near a park bench somewhere in New York City while on a family vacation when he was fourteen. He’d rolled it up and tucked it next to his hip, cinching his belt tight enough to keep it from slipping down his leg. He walked around all day like that, several times claiming an injured ankle. His mother very nearly got him into a doctor’s office.
The best stuff in the magazine had been the advertisements for 900 numbers in the back. Variety! Lesbians, spankings, blow jobs, orgies—it was all there, small but plentiful, a cornucopia of options. It never bothered him that some homeless guy had probably jerked off on that park bench while holding the same glossy pages. Why did it bother him now? Perhaps that was the power of one’s first pornographic possession—all previous owners were erased.
Corderoy’s dick was in his hand, but it was half-limp. He had to concentrate. He found a suitable image of a black-haired girl licking the head of a penis and struggled toward completion, readying the sample cup in his left hand. But the magazine kept slipping off his leg, and he had to downshift, readjust, and begin accelerating again. After two failed attempts, he managed to dribble a small pool into the collection cup. It certainly wasn’t porn-star volume, but he really had no idea what a typical volume of ejaculate was. He’d have to look it up when he got home.
Out at the desk, he hesitantly handed the cup to one of the nurses. They were wearing gloves, but the cup was warm, and they would feel that. Then again, they must be used to warm cups.
The receptionist thanked him, handed him a pamphlet that described the next phase of the process, and told him he’d hear back soon. On his walk home, he flipped through it. It seemed to be for prospective buyers. Rich infertile couples. They must have handed him the wrong pamphlet. There was a list of information one could acquire from different donors, for a price:
Short Donor Profile
FREE
Staff Impressions Report
FREE
Donor Essay
FREE
Facial Features Report
$15
Long Donor Profile
$17
Keirsey Report
$19
Donor Baby Photo
$24
Donor Audio Interview
$30
Handwriting Analysis
$25
They’d been analyzing his handwriting? Writing down their impressions of him? He didn’t remember reading that on the consent forms, but he had skimmed them. He looked down at his clothes. There was a burrito stain on his T-shirt. From last week.
• • •
Mani was sitting near the window, smoking next to an overstuffed ashtray, when Corderoy walked through the door.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said.
“You look, I don’t know.”
“Late? Because I’m late.”
“For what?”
He was clueless. She leaned forward and raised her eyebrows. “Late.”
“Oh . . . late.”
“Yeah. Late.”
“So we get a pregnancy test.”
“Will you do it? I can’t leave the house right now.”
“Why not?”
“Hal.”
“Okay. I’m sure it’s nothing. I’ll run down to CVS.”
He left and she inhaled the last quarter inch of her hand-rolled cigarette, burning her fingers. It was probably nothing. It was nothing last time. Maybe it would always be nothing.
• • •
Corderoy stood in an aisle of drugs, under fluorescent lights, soft Muzak bleeding from everywhere and nowhere, examining box after box after box, each claiming to be 99 percent accurate, easy to use, and better than the tests in all the other boxes, each doing exactly the same thing.
He didn’t have a great track record at avoiding pregnancy. He’d split the cost of Plan B several times with his college girlfriend. Worse, he’d knocked up his high school girlfriend despite regular condom use. And he’d thought long and hard about what to say to her: I want you to know that whatever happens, I respect your decision and I’ll be here in whatever capacity you need me to be. That said, I also want you to know that I think it’s in everyone’s best interest, yours, mine, the potential child’s, to not go through with it. We’re broke, inexperienced, and we’d make great parents someday, but now’s not that day. It’s your decision. And I’ll live by it. I mean that, I’m here for you, blah blah blah. He found out later that half his friends had given nearly identical speeches to distraught girlfriends at one time or another. Corderoy liked to believe that he would have kept his word and been the best father he could have been. His high school girlfriend ended up miscarrying.
The cheapest option was the CVS-brand pregnancy test for nine dollars. It made identical claims to the leading brands, Clearblue and First Response. Clearblue was fifteen dollars for the standard version. A stick that you pee on. A plus sign in the presence of hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin). Though the CVS brand was nearly identical, he didn’t want to walk back into that apartment and hand Mani an off-brand test. This wasn’t a thing you were allowed to skimp on. But which Clearblue? There were several varieties. The digital version (more than twice as expensive) boasted extreme ease of use. No symbols or lines to read. It provided the results in words: Pregnant or Not Pregnant. P or not P. It was a logical proposition with a simple truth table.
Pregnant
Not Pregnant
True
False
False
True
But it could easily be more complicated, depending on the truth value of PA (If “Pregnant” then “Abortion”) and of the corresponding truth value of “Happy.”
Pregnant
Not Pregnant
P→A
Birth
Happy
True
False
True
False
True
True
False
False
True
False
False
True
True
False
True
False
True
False
False
True
But he could just as easily imagine the same truth table with reversed H values.
Pregnant
Not Pregnant
P→A
Birth
Happy
True
False
True
False
False
True
False
False
True
True
False
True
True
False
False
False
True
False
False
False
The problem here was that given P or –P, and hence B or –B, he was arriving at both H and –H. Therefore, by reductio ad absurdum, he ought to infer –P. That meant he didn’t even need to buy a test. By the law of noncontradiction, there was logically no way that Mani was pregnant. The only scenario for which he could imagine a definitive H value was if Pregnant was false and Birth true, which made sense only when you were talking about Mary mother of God, the virgin birth, the virgin abortion. Corderoy’s head hurt.
He chose the standard nondigital Clearblue test. He pretended to be checking a text message as the cashier rang him up.
• • •
“Well, what does it say?” Corderoy asked through the door.
Mani often peed with the door open, knowing Corderoy wouldn’t care. But this wasn’t just peeing. It was peeing with additional hardware, and she’d opted for privacy. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like half a line or something.”
“Pee on it more.”
“I’m out of pee,” Mani said.
“You’re just not forcing it out,” Corderoy said. A minute passed. Corderoy heard some tinkling. “Mani?” Another minute.
The door opened. She held the plastic strip up, her face expressionless. There was a big plus sign in the test window. “I’ll just get rid of it,” she said.
“Whoa. Okay. Have you done that before?”
“What? No!”
“Sorry.”
“That’s the best thing to do, right?”
“Definitely.”
And it went on like that for a half an hour. Mani sitting in bed, her legs tucked into her arms, Corderoy sitting on the edge of the bed. He didn’t have to convince her. She had convinced herself, but for some reason, they both felt compelled to reiterate what a correct decision it was, how obviously right they were to make it, how it was not only the best choice but the only choice, right? Right, of course. Do you even have to ask?
48
* * *
Mani spent the next week not painting and not smoking cigarettes and not drinking and not smoking weed and not calling Planned Parenthood. Corderoy left for “school” during the days, so she had prodigious blocks of time in which to do nothing. She couldn’t even watch TV. She could only think about what she wasn’t doing. The many things she wasn’t doing. Which included writing a letter to her Wartime Husband. She could do that. She should.
It was an incredible feat of will to climb out of bed and grab a sheet of paper and a pen, but once she had written Dear Mickey at the top of the page, the words came freely.
Dear Mickey,
I suddenly find myself with child. I never understood that phrase until now. It’s so honest and blameless, that “with.” It’s not heavy like “pregnant” or crass like “knocked up.” It has none of the hand-wringing denial of “I’m three weeks late.” Late for what? “With child.” It has weight without judgment. It’s a soft and full acknowledgment of fact.
You know who the father is. I make myself say that to remember gravity. It’s so easy to go walking on the moon when you have life-altering decisions to make on earth. And there’s really only one option. Right? The pros of doing it are great, the cons of not doing it are enormous. I’m sure at some point you gave some girl the speech that all boys think we’ve never heard before, the speech we start giving ourselves in our own heads—on continuous loop—the moment we find out.
I don’t know exactly why I’m writing you, Wartime Husband, except that it seems like a thing you should know. I’m not asking for advice. The whole thing will be over by the time you even get this letter. And so it seems a little fucked up to send it to you. I don’t want to freak you out or give you extra things to worry about. Maybe writing to you is like flipping a coin. That always helps me make decisions. Not because it tells me what to do, taking away the burden of thinking it through, but because it helps me figure out how I really feel once some outside force pressures me to act one way or another. So, I’m going to the clinic soon. Can you imagine what it feels like to write those words to you right now? I hope you can. I hope you’re safe. Thanks for being my coin.
xoxo
mani
Less than a day after sending the letter, things began to crystallize inside her psyche, and not in the way she had expected. She began to imagine ways it could all work out. Hal’s parents had some money. So did her own. They could help. Who knew what artistic and personal wisdoms she would gain from bringing a life into the world? There would still be time to paint. With babysitters. Baby. She said that word and it sounded so warm, so vulnerable and worth protecting. She remembered that moment in the hospital, her need for morphine, her fear of what it might harm. Baby. A small portrait of herself and Hal together. She was confused and excited about her confusion, and it was overheating her. For the first time in days, she needed to move, to really move.
It was the last day of February and the air was cold and empty of life. The people on the street shambled like animatronic piles of scarves and gloves and coats. Mani cruised past them on her bicycle, wearing only a light jacket, unzipped, letting the violent air caress her. She had been angry that her own biology could trap her in such a way, limiting her future options. She had wanted to rebel against that. But now she was beginning to feel that it was her culture, her friends, her family, her ambitions that were limiting her future options. Raising a child would give her energy, it would redefine time, it would become her art. And wouldn’t that be the true act of rebellion, to say: Fuck it! I know it’s not practical, I
know the world doesn’t need another ego, but I’m doing it anyway. And I will love that thing and the person it will become and it will make me an immeasurably wiser, kinder, better human. A baby was, perhaps, the biggest opportunity she would ever have. How could she so easily pass it up?
Her fingers felt like brittle and useless twigs as she tried to lock her bike up to a pole on Brighton Avenue, across the street from her loft. When she stood up, she breathed hot air onto her fingers and found herself staring into the window of the local dive bar, the Silhouette Lounge. And there, past the Sam Adams sign and the Bruins logo, there was Hal, playing Big Buck Hunter. She went inside.
He had just finished his game and he plopped down at a table, seemingly unaware that Mani was standing ten feet away. He had a tallboy PBR in his hand and several empties on the table. It was five p.m.
“Hello?” Mani said.
“Hey!” Corderoy exclaimed. “You want a drink?”
“What are you doing here?” Mani asked. “I thought you didn’t get out of class until five-thirty.” She noticed that he had a bandage in the crook of his left elbow. He looked pale. “Did you give blood or something?”
“Plasma. What are you having? I’m buying.”
“We need to talk.”
“Let’s talk.”
Mani looked around the bar. It wasn’t a dive so much as a wreck. There were a few sullen construction-worker types at the bar top. Some hipsters playing pool, darts. Megadeth was on just loud enough to be annoying. “No,” she said. “Let’s go back to the apartment.”
“I’m half-full here,” Corderoy said, taking a swig of beer.
Mani gave a weary grunt, then sat down across from him. She took a moment to compose herself. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this,” she said.
“About what?”
She stared at him, unblinking.
“When is the appointment?”
War of the Encyclopaedists Page 36