Embryo

Elena Sichrovsky

S ometimes I pretend that I was born.

I lay on my bed, pull my limbs in, and tuck my head down into what’s known as the fetal position. I’ve seen enough ultrasounds to know the term is an apt description of how a fetus lies in the womb. (Of course I have no umbilical cord. I twist my blanket into a long rope and position it at my navel.)

My chin dips down to my chest. I count my heartbeats, imagining how the rhythm of my heart’s valves might have sounded in the beginning. Was it hesitant: a composer tentatively releasing the first notes of his composition? Was it fragile: delicately growing in strength second by second? Was it bold, thunderous, from the moment I began?

(I emailed my manufacturer before, asking them this very question. I never got a reply. All I received was an automated message reminding me to file my weekly report on time.)

Eventually the joints of my bones start to ache. My body is protesting this charade; it knows it is a lie. I have never been wrapped in the buoyancy of amniotic fluid or explored the edges of the sac with tiny fingertips. I can’t return to a moment I’ve never had.

I was never small. I never grew. I look in the mirror in the hospital staff room, trying to imagine my face at a half or quarter of its current size. Using my hands I cover up my forehead and cheeks so that my eyes are the only part of me reflected in the mirror. Eyes don’t change size drastically from birth; maybe if I stare into them long enough I can catch a phantom of what my infant form might have looked like.

My hands drop and my fingers travel down to my stomach. I pinch and knead at the rolls of flesh. How pinked was my skin when it was still new and raw from the womb? Would diapers have given me a rash? Would the brush of baby powder have tickled my cheeks?

(A body that is born replaces its cells every seven years. Other people go through reincarnation again and again without even realizing it. The only way my cells will ever change is if some part of me malfunctions and needs to be replaced.)

My pager beeps. A patient needs me. Humans need me.

I don’t know what that’s like, to need someone else to care for me. Babies can’t feed themselves for the first year of their lives. Most of them can’t walk or talk during that time either. They are held. Does it feel strange to be held? Does it feel like your limbs have disappeared or ceased to function? Or do your appendages somehow feel tethered in the embrace?

I go to Room 302 and change the IV drip for Mr. Collins. He has stage four lung cancer. He thanks me for helping to keep him alive. We both know he won’t be for very long. He just wants to be able to meet his first granddaughter.

T here’s a blank space on every hospital form for the patient to write their birth date. Once, when I was still in training, a patient said that he didn’t remember his. I wanted to help him, so I suggested that maybe he never had one. The nurse reprimanded me later for making light of a patient’s condition. I wasn’t trying to be funny. I don’t have a birthday either. I thought he might also be unborn but was too embarrassed to say so.

I was produced in the form of a mid-twenties female. For the first two years of my life I bought a cake on the first of every month to make up for the birthdays I never had. Now I usually get a cake to coincide with whichever patient has the most immediately terminal illness, so they won’t have to celebrate their birthday alone.

When the patients in the pediatric wards celebrate their birthdays we have to blow up balloons for them and wear small paper hats. I asked the head nurse if it’s because balloons are in the shape of the amniotic sac, so it reminds them of the day they broke out of that sphere and into the world. She looked at me for a long moment and then laughed, and said “No, but that’s really good. You think a lot about these things, don’t you?”

Then there was the time the medical interns got into a discussion about astrology and star signs. I was in the cafeteria eating lunch at the table beside them, and they wanted to know what I thought about only dating someone with a compatible star sign. I said, “Well, what if someone doesn’t have a star sign?”

They stared at me strangely, and one of them whispered something to the other. Then the tall blond boy said, “I guess you’re like one of those Uno cards that can be whatever color you want.”

If I could choose, I would have a birthday on the second day of July, because it’s the middle day of the year. But then my sun sign would be Cancer. And I would rather be a Scorpio. I read once that when scorpions can’t find food, the mothers will eat their babies. I like that. It must feel warm to go back inside your mother’s belly; you can be held from every side.

M r. Collin’s daughter Carmen is here for an ultrasound today. She wants to see her father afterwards, so I wheel her towards the elevator. On the way she lists different potential names for her daughter and asks me which one I like best. I choose the ones that start with the letters of my name: Y, N, or A. She says that her wife likes O and H names best.

“Did you try asking the baby which one she likes?” I say. I’ve seen older nurses in the maternity ward suggest this to patients. It seems important to encourage a connection between mother and the child in the womb.

Carmen smiles wide, showing her teeth. “No. I should try. Here.”

We are inside the elevator now. Carmen is in the wheelchair and I’m holding the handles. She takes my wrist and pulls my hand towards her belly. “I’ll say the names, and you tell me if she kicks.”

I feel a pulse against my palm when Carmen says Orla.

Carmen laughs and says she’ll need to tell her wife about this.

I never want to wash my hands again. I have made contact with a human who is existing inside another human. But I get called to change a patient’s bedpans on the next floor. Reluctantly I squirt a splash of soapy bubbles into my palm and rinse the soft imprint away.

T hey don’t allow me to hold the babies when they’re born. It’s a crucial clause in my contract. Humans are always worried about errors with individuals like me. I am not permitted to physically handle children under the age of three, or seniors over the age of eighty, or feeble patients.

I’ve assisted in thirty-five births. I’m frequently called on duty in the pediatric ward. The hospice patients are part of my regulars. Most of my time in the hospital is spent caring for those at the beginning or end of life, both of which are phases I have not and will never experience.

I can never say “when I was little” or “when I’m old”. I don’t have stories to tell from my childhood, or a retirement fantasy to discuss with friends.

(There are two others like me in this hospital. One of them works in the morgue, so I don’t see him often. The other one is a janitor. I tried asking her before, if she has the same questions I do; if she yearns for the past and the future that doesn’t exist for us. She said that she’s cleaned up enough sick children’s waste and geriatric vomit to be glad that she’ll never be one of them.)

Two of my friends – nurses with whom I work the rotation most frequently – once played a drinking game with me. They told me stories from their childhoods, and their friends’ childhoods, and their friends’ friends’ childhoods. I was supposed to pick and choose from their stories to create my ideal childhood. Any time I said “I’d want to experience that” they took a shot.

They were completely drunk within the first hour.

I wanted it all. I wanted the misery and the joy. I wanted the parents who set early curfews and the ones who left the house key under the porch mat. I wanted parents who spooned instant macaroni and cheese from tins and those who went to the farmer’s market every day. I wanted parents.

C armen’s due date is two weeks away. She has already checked into the hospital because of concerns about her age, but she also wants to be close to her father so he can be there for the birth.

Mr. Collins just suffered a severe bout of pneumonia. He’s still in the ICU, and Carmen asks me to wheel her down to watch him through the glass window every day. If I don’t have anywhere else to be during that time, I like to stay with her and listen to her tell me stories about Mr. Collins. How sharp his wit and sense of humor used to be. How he’s endured a childhood of war and poverty and disease. How she’s convinced that he can pull through this one too.

“My wife loves the name Orla, by the way.” Carmen tips her head up to look at me. “We’re going with Coline for the middle name, named after—” she nods towards Mr. Collin’s prone form “—him.”

I try to imagine what my children or grandchildren would say about me. They could talk about my diligence at the hospital, or recall stories about my patients. They might talk about those interns and that Uno card joke. Or they’d laugh about how I helped Carmen choose her baby’s name.

(If I could have children, that is. I am not built to function in that way.)

Carmen rubs the swollen roundness of her belly. I want to touch it again, to feel close to a diminutive existence that I can never carry. But she doesn’t offer, and I don’t ask.

Y our purpose is to serve, to benefit humanity however your employers see fit. Your function is to sustain life, to prolong it, to accommodate it. You are created to bring mankind into a kinder, better future.

That’s from page seventeen of the manual I had to memorize after my first test run. I quote it every six months when the maintenance inspector comes to the hospital for my routine check up. Most of the staff in the hospital already know what I am. The nurses, the doctors, the patients, they all say it doesn’t make a difference to them. They say things like “you’re basically one of us” and “honestly it must be nice” and “I don’t even notice it really”.

(Of course they don’t. They have a life cycle that runs in a perfect circle, instead of a single line sitting in the middle of the page.)

O rla Coline is born one week early. She’s six pounds, seven ounces. She was born en caul, which means she was still in her amniotic sac. It looked exactly like the balloons I had to blow up for the children’s cancer ward. The doctor had to break the sac open and pull the baby out before she could take her first breath.

Orla has Carmen’s eyes, blue as a forget-me-not blossom.

Carmen’s eyes don’t shine like that anymore. Carmen died ten minutes after giving birth due to an internal hemorrhage. I find this out because I’ve been called to clean the room and bring the body down to the morgue. Her wife has said her goodbyes, has placed Orla on the still chest for one last comfort, and Carmen’s mother has wept over her for a good twenty minutes.

I take a moment to compose myself before going into the room. I recall the manual and my training. I don’t let my professionalism waver. (I don’t think about Carmen grabbing my hand and pressing my palm to her belly, or the small crease of laughter in her eyes when she’d talk about her daughter.)

Then I remember Mr. Collins. I wonder if he knows. I want to go check on him in the ICU, or at least find out if he pulled through – if he gets to meet his granddaughter after all – but the other nurse is rushing me along and won’t answer any of my questions. She leaves me alone with Carmen’s body while she goes to help another patient down the next hall.

Carmen’s room is thick with the odor of blood and feces. There’s a blanket over her spread legs. She’s wearing a pale turquoise hospital gown. I start to adjust the bed to make it easier to roll her body onto the gurney. Then I see the amniotic sac in the waste bin in the corner. The sac is torn in two pieces, but still makes a full globe when I hold the halves together. I pick it up slowly, rubbing my fingers over the slippery outside layer before sniffing the edges.

It smells like iron and urine.

I take a deep breath and then lower my head inside. Closer. Until my lips are touching the pool of liquid at the bottom and the walls of the sac are around my cheeks.

(I close my eyes and pretend that I’m a fetus, no bigger than the size of a fist. I’m swimming in here, the first place I ever exist, a place created by my mother’s own body. A sanctuary.)

When I lift my chin up there’s a trail of the yellow fluid running down the bridge of my nose. I stick out my tongue to catch the drop. It tastes terrible. But it’s what every human tastes before anything else, even their mother’s milk.

My hands are slick when I move over to Carmen’s bed to wipe my fingers dry on the sheets. The blanket slips off her knees and I see the spread of blood-soaked sheets beneath her. The hem of her gown is riding up, exposing her thighs. Her vagina looks wider than the average woman’s. The outer labia seems torn, too. I reach to tug down the hem of her gown, but then I pause.

(How might it feel to emerge from the birth canal? Is it a torturous squeeze? Or soft and swift, like laundry falling down the metal chute?)

I glance towards the door. It’s still closed.

Carmen and I face each other again. Her eyelids are closed. I close my own eyes and bow my head. Then I push my fingers inside her. First one hand, then the other. I cup them to mimic the size of a baby’s head and then I slowly pull them back out, noticing the pressure from either side. It’s a tight fit, even with my fingers that can bend and flatten to make the exit easier.

Blood trickles along my fingers as I insert them inside her again, going in deeper, up to my wrist. When I pull them out there’s a soft whoosh of air releasing. My skin is soaked in red – her red – her existence. Carmen died, but she brought a new person into being. Once upon a time she, too, was pushed out of a birth canal. She has completed the cycle. She’s begotten what she was given.

She is whole.

Tears prick at the back of my eyes and I cover my face with my hands, forgetting that they’re covered with blood. I breathe hard into my palms; I breathe in the scent of Carmen’s death, as if I can borrow some of the value of her life.

The door remains closed, shadowy footsteps swimming past the stream of light beneath.

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