Upside-out, inside-down
Intimacy and isolation in an abortion clinic
In these times of high conflict, we remind ourselves often that two things can be true at once. Really, three or five or a thousand things can be true at once. The truth of individual stories, of complicated and concurrent feelings, of intersecting and coexistent identities, of multiple and multiplying realities. I stand here with this story that I wrote about an abortion I had almost two decades ago, an abortion I wrote about to process my grief and that I fictionalized to separate from it, an abortion that carried deep pain but also agency, an abortion I willingly and freely chose and would do so a thousand times again. And still it was a process full of pain, of loss, of confusion, of isolation. It was a process that felt secret and shameful such that, even amidst a world with choice (though tragically dwindling), we still have such work to do to support women, to validate individuals, to witness their realities, and to share the burden of hard choices. But just because a choice is hard does not mean it should not be a choice. And the world where I would have been forced to carry that pregnancy to term, alone, unsupported by society and its non existent support systems–as so many are forced to do today–would have been worse. I am a reasonably good mother now (I hope), but I would not have been a good mother then. And I would have resented the lack of voice to write the story of my own life.
Further, to live in a world where women are not granted the full and complex personhood to make hard decisions is not a world I want to live in. The way that something feels does not attest to the right or wrongness of its reality, if there is such a thing. Everything is personal at the same time as everything is shared. The more we remove women's agency, the more we disempower them, the more we limit their freedoms, and the more we disembody them, the more we embed shame into their limited palette of existing choices and transform the world into a place where their choices are judged by those who truly have no right to do so. The problem isn’t with the choices people make–it would do us all well to trust these heavy choices, these choices with no clear answers to the people who are the experts on their own lives. The problem is the lack of holistic and humane support for those choices on both sides of a decision–for all the complicated, concurrent realities we live with. Again, it is not the choices which are the problem. It is the way we ask that people carry the process, the feelings, and the consequences all alone–as if life is something to be borne on our individual backs, our own little worlds, boring each of us down into the ground. A world of little atoms, made smaller in their separation, their disengagement from each other imprisoning them in an illusion of fundamental difference. For me, reading this many years later, that is the echo of pain I feel from this piece. I will be curious what your stories are, if you feel able to share.
Upside-out, inside-down
She wakes a half-hour before her alarm is set to go off. Instinctively, she touches her belly. She doesn’t think. She doesn’t have to.
She feels nauseous as she has constantly for the past two weeks. She feels clammy, blurry, indistinct. She keeps swimming unwillingly into her own sea and its waves force her further and further away from shore. The nausea distracts her from emotion. She puts a hand to her forehead and is relieved to think she won’t be feeling so sick anymore. She feels even sicker to acknowledge this relief.
She goes into the bathroom and splashes some cold water on her face. Raising her head, she catches her reflection in the mirror and quickly averts her eyes. Then she tentatively looks back. Then she stares. There is nothing to see there. There is the impenetrability of a glacier carving mountains and valleys out of her face. There is something happening, something changing in the curves and in the hollows of her expressions, but it is impersonal, scientific, responsive only to climate, movement, winds, and time. All of her experiences have accumulated over time like snowfalls. Now, as she looks in the mirror, she sees the weight of accumulation, the pressure of this weight, a thickened mass of compression, of cold. With ice crystals in her eyes and a blue tint to her skin, she turns away. There is no air left in those spaces, only small, isolated pockets of the recollection of a sighing susurration.
She is fully dressed and almost ready to leave when her alarm goes off. It is a strange thing to hear one’s alarm when you already stand ready to leave at the door. It is as if urgency itself is late, lost to time, confused in the muddled moment of its own forgotten anticipation. Time has arrived belatedly. And it sounds in such a hurry, as if it had missed its own dawn. She shakes her head at the inability of life to warn her of anything.
She leaves her apartment and locks her door. It feels like the last time she will ever turn the key in her lock. The hallway is full of rubbery swollen shadows, a spongy mass of murkiness that seems to get caught in her throat as she tries to make her way towards the elevator. Her hand shakes as she presses the elevator button. With blackness bulging in her ears, she tries to listen to the elevator car’s dinging at each floor as it is pulled upwards against its own heaviness. Ding, ding, ding. The cables squeak and echo in the empty shaft. Everything sounds so unsteady and yet it keeps coming closer. The dinging is disconcerting in its confident repetitiveness, like the alarm. It hollows out a space somewhere beyond. She waits for what feels like hours and the sound continues. She must be miles and miles away from earth, so many thousands of stories above the gum-stained, beaten-down, cigarette-strewn, prosaic, archaic layer of sidewalk below. A sidewalk of relics. A sidewalk of memories. A sidewalk of corners, of desertion, of excrement and rain, of lost coins and fallen voices. Then, the middle elevator door opens, and she steps inside. As the door slowly eclipses her view of the hallway, it feels like the last time she will ever set eyes upon it.
Outside, she slides between the cool strata of a late November morning. Or rather, the city moves, and she stays still amidst it. She holds onto stillness and wraps herself inside of time until she arrives at the clinic. She arrives and no time has passed. She steps out the door of her apartment building and then into the door of the clinic. Nothing happens. She does not travel. She sits on the train, pressed up against the wall at the back of the car, in the corner of the car, in the smallest space she can find. Inside of it she makes it smaller. She doesn’t feel herself being jerked and thrown as the express makes its way downtown. She doesn’t smell the coffee and cologne and dried piss and eye drops and old sorrows and melting memories and regretful laments and spiteful odium and unforgivable thoughts. She makes the space so small that time disappears. She has thoughts of cloudy skies, of evaporating up and then falling back down. She has memories of plane-less skies. When she thinks back upon this morning, she thinks of skies that are uncannily silent, of space that opens like a vast mouth above her and doesn’t speak. She remembers the same eerie feeling that played itself out the days after 9/11. She was in the Midwest then, in flyover country, situated amidst cornfields and lakes, harvest and water. The falling of the twin towers was hard to fathom in its impossible reality and in its pained no-space distance. But what was real was the muteness of the sky, a muteness that could not be deciphered for its calm or for its sulk or for its mourning. It was uncommunicative, like death. Thinking of these plane-less skies, she is twice removed from herself–once by time and once by place.
When she thinks of this morning, she thinks of the dead baby swallow she spotted lying on the sidewalk two blocks from her apartment building. It struck her because she could not remember, in all her time in New York, seeing a dead bird on the sidewalk. Its slight weightless body lay with tiny, exquisite grace on the gray nameless sidewalk. She was caught, trapped in a moment staring at the bird, at the tiny perfect bones of its wing, at the breath still swelling its airy lungs. People moved by, the city moved on. Gossamer, diaphanous, its fragility was barely present. It was the kind of fragility that would break your heart, if you listened deep and long enough. And she was caught. She could not see, but she could listen.
When she thinks of this morning, her memory begins at the door of the clinic. Everything seems wrong to her. She has never been to this neighborhood before. She finds the street and it appears to be a strange, deserted alley; it could not possibly be the right place. There is no right place. But she sees the name of the clinic printed in white on the glass of a door to her right. She opens the door and sees a security guard. Or perhaps he is the greeter? What kind of person greets a woman who has come to have a pregnancy terminated? What would he say?
She tells him why she is there. She is glad she only has to say it once. No, he tells her, this is the administrative office; the correct entrance to the clinic is the next door over. Mistakes, missteps. She is going to have to say it again.
She goes into the correct door. It doesn’t feel any better. There is another security guard, this time behind glass in a little booth. Next to him is a metal detector. Waves, waves of nausea. Her lungs filling, water filling her brain and she is submerged in a fugue, one forgetful memory imitating another.
“Yes, can I help you?”
“I have an appointment. My name is Jack –”
“Okay, please let me see your purse. Are you carrying any mace?”
Mace? Why don’t the questions make any sense to her? What is she here for again? Confusion reigns.
He sends her through the metal detector. “Where do I go?” She is anxious and…
“Through this room and then the door at the back.”
She walks through the empty room. They told her on the phone last night that the whole procedure would only take about 20 minutes. The emptiness reassures her.
She enters another room. This room is misshapen and amorphous. It is rather like a hallway, but not so well-defined and leading to nowhere in particular. There are two desks, facing each other slightly askew–adrift and unmoored in the wanting space. It seems possible, if there were people seated at each desk, that they would be talking to each other–sipping coffee and pulling at croissants, trading comments about the weather, looking up and laughing now and again at the memory of a private joke… just between them... but there are no people, no conversations, no private jokes. A woman returns from around the corner and sits at one of the desks. Jack pauses and then heads toward her. Again, she gives her name and states why she is there. The more she says it, the more unreal it seems. The more distance she feels from the small space she had carved out for herself on the train. She speaks and wonders where the voice is coming from… or going.
She signs in and writes down the time she arrived on the sign-in sheet. 8:18am. Twenty-seven minutes early for her appointment. She hopes they will take her early.
She sits down in another part of the nebulous room where there are a few metal folding chairs, a small white plastic table and no magazines. On the wall, there are racks with pamphlets about safe sex, HIV, emergency contraception, and birth control. Everywhere is talk of prevention as if pregnancy too were just another disease. There are two other women there. Or, they do not seem to be women, but girls. Two young, black women in skintight jeans and full make-up. They are dressed and ready for something important. One has her arms wrapped tightly around her chest. The other has her hands in the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt and she is staring quite intently at one particular spot on the floor. No one talks to anyone else. No one makes eye contact with anyone else. The air is tight, misshapen, bent and wrapped like a corset around each of them. Better not to look around too much. Better to keep to oneself. Better to focus on the white linoleum floor as if its polished reflecting surface could generate some lingering afterglow.
She waits. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Her name is called from some other strange corner of the room. She can’t quite place where the voice is coming from. She stands and wanders a bit. There are some cubicles around a corner that she hadn’t noticed before. She enters one of them and hopes the voice emanated from there.
“Jack H.?” They do not use last names here. The personal address becomes impersonal, unrecognizable. It makes her feel like a school child being counted in line after recess. Young, innocent, and premature. An unformed person. Just a first name. This is a baptism of sorts, a baptism of erasure.
The woman checks her ID and her insurance card. Jack expects something more. She pauses, waits for an explanation. The woman gives her back her cards and some papers and tells her to put the papers in the tray on the desk. Jack returns to where she was and looks around. She doesn’t understand where to put these papers, her file so it was. She goes back to the woman who rolls her eyes and points, “Over there, on the desk.” Jack returns a second time and looks around. “Here?” she cries out amidst the emptiness. “On the desk!” Jack stares at the empty desk. There is nothing there. No person, no computer, no desk accessories, no coffee cup; the single thing on the desk is a small wire paper tray. She does not want to leave her file there. It seems unprotected, ignored. No one is going to pay attention to it. No one is going to find it. Or perhaps someone might find it, but not the right someone. What kind of a place is this? Finally, she does as she is told. She starts to go back to the woman, but she barks at Jack before she can get any closer. She tells her to take the elevator to the upstairs waiting room.
The upstairs waiting room. There are multiple waiting rooms, multiple rooms in which to wait, multiple spaces in which to extend time before, time anxious, time wondering, time that should really be hurried along by action. But she boards the elevator and waits as it carries her to the place where she will wait.
The upstairs waiting room is much smaller than the downstairs waiting room. Or perhaps Jack is misjudging its size because of the sheer number of women there. She had assumed she had one of the earliest appointments. But the women sit silently, as if they have been waiting for all of time, lulled into something, waiting as if they had been waiting so long it has become a force of habit. An eerily silent waiting. An eerily silent room of women. As if they have been muffled, or just have no more questions to ask. Their tacit acceptance of emptiness heightens the silence and impregnates Jack with their mute contagion.
Only one or two of them eye her as she tries to find an empty chair in the little room. The others do not take note of her. She is just another number, one that will sink into the traces of time that wash into the room after they have left.
There is no one here to greet her, no one to explain what comes next. There is a nurse or someone at a desk along the side of the room, though she was among those who did not raise her head when Jack entered the room. Jack leaves her chair and goes over to the desk. She asks if she needs to do anything.
“I have an appointment at…” She wants to whisper even though everyone else is there for exactly the same reason. These rooms of constant exposure unsettle her. She wants to tell this woman about those papers downstairs, about why they won’t be able to find them because the ridiculous woman downstairs had her put them in the wrong place. She wants to tell this woman these things. She wants to look into her eyes and see them unfold a new kind of space, a space where there is rest which maintains a constant pulse–a metronome for her existence. She wants to say something secret and important. She wants to find an interval of silence where time remains and secrets have names.
“Yes, we know. Just sit down and your name will be called.”
The room is full of chairs, all folding metals chairs. It is a temporary room and a temporary condition: it can all be swept away at night… cleared out and erased, rinsed and dried, cleansed. Jack has to find a different chair as the one she was in has already been refilled. A strange musical chairs, a strange shifting of bodies as women are called by first name from various rooms or hallways. They disappear, but then they return and sit down again. It is a strange magnetism they have towards one another. They are pulled closer and tighter to each other, coming and going, but never going completely, simultaneously pulling into themselves deeper and tighter, the space within their space shrinking, almost gone already… yes, already there is no space inside for anyone else.
She is always prepared and yet today she is not. She has brought nothing to read, nothing to work on, nothing to distract her from the presence and not the passage of time. But neither have they. If she thought that she was different, she is not. So, she looks down, she finds her patch of floor, she does not say a word, and she waits. And time opens with an acute violence, each minute wounding it anew.
Finally, her name is called. She goes into the room closest to the waiting room, the room that has, in fact, been visible from the waiting room all this time, its door swinging incessantly open and closed. They sit her down, tell her to remove her coat. She doesn’t know what for. She doesn’t know what is happening. She doesn’t even think to ask. Questions have evaporated into the sweaty-palm air. Her body has become theirs as her voice has been lost with all the others in the abysmal void of that upstairs waiting room.
They take her pulse. They take her blood pressure. Someone knocks and immediately opens the door. “Oh yes,” the nurse says and motions her in. Even in the little room, this time and space are not her own. She wonders what space she will be able to find, what time will not be lost to her. The visitor leaves a urine sample on the counter. Again, Jack is confused. Don’t they already know that we are all pregnant?
“Ok, you can go.” Jack is sent back out into the waiting room without another word. Her former seat is gone. She sits down in the front row, facing the wall. She waits and feels nothing, time extending across her senses like a virus.
A nurse who seems to have nothing to do stands in front of them smiling. The smile is disturbingly incongruous and Jack wishes she would leave. Instead, she goes to the TV set in the corner of the room and fusses with a video tape for a while. When she moves away, the film “Akeelah and the Bee” starts to play. Jack has no choice but to watch. It is the story of an eleven-year-old girl, Akeelah, from south L.A. She is naturally gifted with language and words and… They are making us watch a movie about a wonderful, gifted child, Jack thinks. A girl from a tough neighborhood growing up and wanting to achieve against the odds. Who picked this movie? It weighs heavily upon her mind. She can’t get past the girl to the story. A gifted child. A promising girl. Against the odds. Hope amidst hopelessness. For the first time, she thinks about walking away. But her feet are leaden, her body numb, and her physicality too separate from her being to control. She desperately wants to leave. She remembers that she told Javier she would meet him for breakfast. He is waiting for her now… somewhere. Someone is waiting for her. There are consequences.
It is just about now that Jack begins to feel the weight–the imbalance rather. The way that the various rooms of the clinic seem dangerously off-balance in their weight distribution. Her mind transforms into a miniature replica of all of the spaces in the clinic. The chambers form in her brain and she is sucked inside. She feels the emptiness of the two large spaces downstairs–their cavernous echoes, their high ceilings, their empty chairs, their desks with no coffee mugs or blotters, their expanse of air. And she feels the heaviness of the small upstairs–the tiny waiting room packed with women–huddling, hovering–and it begins to fill with water. They sit still as their shoes and pant legs get wet. Soon the water is so high that they are swimming, swimming up to the top of the room gasping for air. It is too heavy up here and no one can breathe and they are all drowning. They are like fish, but dead fish or fish whose gills have been sewn shut. They are like fish out of water that are in water, drowning in water. The senselessness of thoughts strikes them all. There are places where sense does not enter, they begin to learn. And there are places where awareness never exits. They flop around but can’t breathe. Then they don’t flop around at all. They just can’t breathe. There is too much water in the room, swishing around, filling, still coming, more more; the weight is going to break soon–the upper floor is going to crash down upon the emptiness below. Jack can think of nothing but their amplifying heaviness. She can think of nothing but heaviness. Her mind sinks down depths, through layers, deeper, weighted by the room and the ponderous woe of her fellow patients. Presented with the choice between two roles, they chose to be a patient in a clinic, to be worked upon, treated, and ultimately discharged… ends instead of beginnings. Jack is getting lost in the reversals wrapped around her beginning.
She hears her name being called by a different nurse–this one young, pretty but with a sullen and resentful disposition. She is the first person to appear disapproving, critical. She passes judgment on Jack with a sharp look from her sneering eyes. Then she hardly looks at Jack as she leads her away down another hallway. Jack wonders if it is time, if this is the person who is going to… perform on her?
Another small room. “Take your pants off and lie down.” The nurse throws one of those tissue thin paper hospital sheets at her with which she is to cover herself. Jack has never felt more like a piece of meat, a useless hunk of flesh, a body among bodies.
The nurse turns back around and violently jerks the sheet down and pushes Jack’s shirt higher up her chest. She spreads some gel on Jack’s abdomen and takes the probe from the bedside table. The monitor is turned away from Jack. The nurse slides the probe around and stares at the monitor. Jack wants to know. She wants to see. She knows what is going on; what is there to hide? But it is hidden nonetheless. Not seeing makes everything that much more real. Not seeing makes visible the loss and portends the grief that will amplify within her mind, the unseen but echoing waves of an ultrasound, the waves of reminiscence and loss. The nurse is determinedly silent. She leaves the room and Jack hovers, half-naked beneath a sheet of hospital paper upon a cold metal table. Her eyes close for the first time since waking that morning. Her eyes close–hollow and deep, she hears her own sepulchral tunes. Her eyes close and she quickly reopens them, fighting the compulsion to recede, to relinquish hold on cavernous watery silence.
Back in the waiting room. She gets it now. She doesn’t know where she will be led next, but it doesn’t matter. She is beginning to believe she deserves such treatment–to be told nothing, to be nameless, to be merely a body floating in a watery world not her own, to have no choices left.
She cannot reclaim the seat she was in before. The chair where she sat previously in the front row of this strange audience has been filled by another woman, another body. It doesn’t matter; they are interchangeable. The room is so crowded that she has to wait for a few minutes for another seat to open up. This time the seat is in a back row and to the left. She hurries over to claim some sort of territory, to make space under the illusion that it cannot be deleted. The movie is still playing but she has missed large chunks of it and has no idea what is going on. It is impossible to see or hear clearly from this back row anyway. She feels a relief in not knowing. It is only as she sits with nothing else to do but stare at the backs of all the other women that she realizes the oddity of the organization of the room. Yes, an audience. They are lined up in rows, all facing a dead faceless stucco wall, as if they are there to witness a play or some sold-out lecture by a celebrity architect. Yet, they merely stare at the obviousness of the white wall and emit a sort of collective shudder that resembles the pre-symphony chatter of an excited audience, but only grotesquely so. Amidst malformed resemblance, Jack finds herself losing hold on all resemblance… and nothing seems to be like anything but everything seems to be like this room and the thoughts that cloud her sight.
She waits. They wait. Waiting has become the only reality, the only moment, the only memory. The expanse of waiting is painfully amaranthine, an herby growth along the river of bliss. The waiting is this flowering plant, this love-lies-bleeding inflorescence; it kisses the river of their possibility and yet remains sanguinely repentant in its place along the banks. The eternity of this tarrying moment opens up the space for pain to expand. The eternity of this here and now, of this breath-holding forever, of this shameful interval of self-punishment is better, she will understand later, that the knowledge that is to persist.
She sits like this with stillborn thoughts petrified in her mind for most of the morning. Every now and then she looks up at the clock on the wall just to see that time is still moving forward. It is. Her phone is off because cell phones are not permitted, but she can feel it vibrating anyway–this phantom limb reminding her that Javier is calling incessantly, wondering where she is and why she does not answer.
There has been a woman coming in and out of the elevator all morning. She takes women with her and sometimes returns with them. Other times she returns alone. Jack cannot fathom where they could be disappearing too. The additions and losses in the room don’t add up, don’t make sense. The only thing that is maintained is liquid imbalance.
Jack watches as the elevator door opens and the woman appears again. She is tall, slender, and possesses the clandestine fragility and vagabond nature of a weeping willow. Jack is attracted to her billowy grace, but dubious of the transparent expression of empathetic grief on her long sweeping face. It is too candid in this place full of quiet tenuous semblance.
“Jack H.?” The woman speaks her name and the lightness in her voice glints off the surface of their water weight and returns to her unanswered. Jack hears her but it does not seem like a summons. Or perhaps her body has begun to grow into this budding waiting, the pulse in her veins attaching to that of the other women–together, their vines growing into each other and all they don’t want to acknowledge about each other. Reluctantly, warily… nonetheless they have created a sort of web of shallow breath and deepest repentance. Or perhaps she has begun to distrust the kind of tenderness she hears in her voice.
“Jack?”
Jack stands. She is terribly thirsty. No one has been allowed to eat or drink since the previous night. Her thirst guides her towards this willow woman. Her thirst is an acceptable need. Her desire for a patient ear is not.
They get in the elevator and begin to descend. It feels terribly strange to be out of that room. To be moving away from her drowning companions. It doesn’t strike Jack that now would be a normal time to ask questions. She has never seen any of the other girls ask questions. Questions do not belong in their frame of reference anymore. They are guided by a single assertion–this castle built of ashes and dust. A single question entering its gates could melt the illusion to stone. The stone that threatens to plunge to the bottom of their oceanic confusion and weigh their hearts with infinite incertitude.
She just stands and stares ahead. When the woman happens to look over at her, she forces a smile. The elevator opens on the ground floor and the woman exits. Jack follows her. The two desks she saw when she first came in are still empty. There is the smell of cinnamon in the air. Too sweet.
Halfway down the hallway, the woman turns right into an office. Jack follows. She points to a chair and Jack sits down across from her.
“Hi,” the woman smiles gently, her smile generating its own breeze and blowing her hair ever so slightly away from her face.
Jack simpers as if there is some joke being made at her expense. There is great pain in smiling, in pretending to smile.
“From your ultrasound, it appears you are about 6 weeks along.”
Silence. A statement that doesn’t require a response. It just is. It stands alone. She will always be ‘about 6 weeks along.’ Data has passed from nurse to nurse. Data about her. Things she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know herself. That is the only fact she can capably grasp.
“So, you’re facing a difficult decision here.” No questions, just a statement.
Jack looks right into the woman’s eyes and can tell that her own reflect deadness or, if anything, appear quizzical. Haven’t I already passed that decision, she thinks. Haven’t I been waiting all day with all these thoughts clamoring for my attention and subdued them? Haven’t I been processed, tested, lined up, cleared, numericalized, depersonalized? Haven’t I made it to that dead space where I withhold emotion outside of the door as if it’s a deadbeat boyfriend I’ve given up on or even just a frigid, blustery winter wind that I must keep at bay? Haven’t I? Haven’t I?
“Yes,” she responds as if practiced. Jack has always known how to please people. Here, that ability to give whatever response she thinks is wanted or expected kicks in.
“Is this something that you feel you’ve had enough time to think about? Something that you’ve thought carefully about?”
“Yes.”
“And you are aware of other options? Adoption, for example…”
“Yes.”
“You’ve discussed this with the father?”
Slight hesitation. “Yes.”
“Ok, well, we always have these pre-procedure interviews because this is such a big decision to make and we want to be sure that you feel comfortable with what you are doing.”
It is too late for this. I just don’t understand why they are doing this now… why they are asking me these questions now.
“Do you know…? I mean I have been here all morning and no one has ever explained the whole process or what has been going on. Can you just tell me what is going to happen next?” Jack feels far too demanding in asking such questions. What right does she have? What rights does she have? What choices?
“Oh, I’m so sorry about that. I really am. So, after we are done here, you will be going back upstairs. You will be asked to change into a gown and slippers, which I will give you, and you will wait just a little bit more until they are ready for you. Do you want to be under anesthesia?”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it and I don’t think you need it because you are not that far along, but you do have a choice. You can be fully anesthetized if you’d prefer.”
Fully anesthetized. “No.”
“Okay. They will give you some Ibuprofen to take beforehand. It helps dull the cramps. They can be intense. Then after they are done, you will be taken to our post-procedure room just to monitor your blood pressure and other vitals. We will have some crackers and juice for you there. Once we make sure you are okay, we will release you. You have someone coming to pick you up, right?”
“No. I’m just going to take a taxi. I’ll be fine.”
“Well, we really recommend that someone meets you.”
Jack doesn’t want to make a costly mistake now. The psychiatrist is so concerned about this particular aspect–the picking up, the “who” that’s going to meet her after it’s over. It almost seems as though if Jack answers this question wrong that she will be sent home now, not be allowed to continue.
“Oh, I mean, my boyfriend is meeting me. We’ll take a taxi together.”
“You sure he’s going to be here?”
“Yes, absolutely.” Whatever reality had been left comes crashing down on her snow-white lie. She feels the stone. She feels the sandy ocean bottom. She feels both knowing she will never take a pure breath of oxygen again.
“Ok, well, I just need to have you sign these papers here saying that you’ve understood what we talked about and that you understand what you are doing.”
“Okay, yes.” Jack doesn’t understand what they talked about. Jack doesn’t understand what she is doing. She begins to wish she could feel the ache and hopelessness she felt that morning. She feels nothing instead. Nothing is far more frightening, far lonelier. This is the loneliness that will never leave her. This is the loneliness that she will never be able to fully heal. This is the loneliness that will carve the space for her life hereafter. In it–always in it–she must find everything else.
She signs all of the papers that the woman slides across the table. She cannot reconcile these names–medical procedure, interview, legal agreement–with what she senses inside. She is receiving some kind of reassurance from this woman, she thinks. Perhaps… just perhaps. But the reassurance is pulled away again when the woman pulls the final paper back across the desk. Jack knows she is in a space where righteousness doesn’t apply. She feels it deep inside of her. She feels it in her womb, ironically. She realizes that this knowledge is what makes the decision to have an abortion so hard.
The woman sends her back upstairs. Jack feels like she has been gone forever, but the women still sit comatose packing the room, watching the phantasmagoria of their futures projected on the wall in front of them. The lantern burns through each of them, their transparency, casting the shadows of their misty souls into a margin beyond which they cease to exist.
This time she walks past them and into the back hallway where she is met by yet another nurse. This nurse places her hand gently on Jack’s shoulder. Jack feels fragile, like the bird on the sidewalk. This touch has made her so. She looks up and her eyes grow into bird eyes, expanding to amass more space on her head. She sees more colors and fewer shadows. She feels lighter too and wonders if there may be the chance to alight upon a breeze and glide along an airstream, to be carried away. She longs for a migration pattern, for that sense of a journey that takes her somewhere and always back again.
They are in a back hallway, a small dark place. The nurse takes her other hand and places some Ibuprofen in Jack’s hand. She gives her a folded hospital gown and some slippers and asks her to change in the bathroom.
Jack has to wait because the bathroom is occupied. She just assumes it is another girl changing into her gown, but when the door opens another nurse emerges. The pure ordinariness of the nurse just needing to use the bathroom for what it is supposed to be used for makes no sense. This is supposed to be a bathroom being used as a changing room, not also a place where people do routine things, where they go about their day, where they obey bodily demands. Jack peers at her strangely. Her bird eyes are huge now. She can take in the entire room in one glance, the entire clinic in fact.
In the bathroom changing she has a weird sensation. She feels as though she has never read a single book. She feels like she has had sex thousands of times but never cracked a spine, grasped hold of a cover and let words melt into her mind. In reality, reading is like sex to her. It entices her in and she flirts with the first few pages. Her mind gets muddied with someone else’s thoughts, her muscles relax instinctively and she feels tingling in the crook of her elbow. She reads more and then pulls the book inside of her–pulls its language, its moments, its foreignness, its questions, its musings, its subreptions. A book has secrets–secrets that can be uncovered and secrets that remain latent dwelling inside the mind that birthed them, never quite able to pass through the barrier of language. She can accept secrets… secrets of this kind. But now, she can’t seem to remember a single one. She has merely the sense that there are many secrets being kept from her as in a sexual experience with someone you don’t really know, someone who fucks you and gets off on his own climax, then climbs off and rolls over pulling your covers onto his side–leaving you naked and exposed in a confusion of cold.
She is naked and exposed and all this thinking has left her draped in other kinds of secrets–secrets she wishes not to be keeping. She quickly proceeds to put on her flimsy disposable gown and slides her feet into slippers which provide protection from the cold floor, but simultaneously keep her from feeling anything. She puts her shoes and her clothing into a plastic bag and into this plasticity her selfhood is contained and concealed. She exits the bathroom clothed in a transparent secrecy, her sheer gown whispering its airy fragility mockingly against her own.
The room where she now waits is smaller, much smaller–womb like in fact. The women all sit in a circle facing one another, a couple of them using phones that have been prohibited.
“I really wanted to have this one,” says one of the women to another. Jack wonders if they know each other or if the eternity of this day has been their bonding.
“But how am I going to afford it?” she continues as if it is still a conceivable reality. “I have two already at home and can barely afford that. And he isn’t going to stick around for this one either.”
The other woman nods. “This is my second one this year. And it’s not that I’m not careful.”
Jack listens. Yesterday she would have felt at least mild shock to hear this very same conversation. She would have found it hard to believe someone could get herself into this situation more than once, let alone more than once a year. She is still in shock that she is here at all. But she is not fazed by the conversation today. Time has circled these women and spread outward to encompass millions of seconds, hundreds of hours, and many too many years. They have aged in spirit and sunk into the remote crevices of pain. And as time has spread, it has wrought their pain across its expanse into incessant echoes which, traveling across their hearts and coursing through their exhausted bodies, has brought them–finally–to a state of emotional paralysis. Thereby Jack feels no shock. She does not feel, only listens. Perhaps this is the closest she has ever gotten to the pure objectivity she constantly seeks.
Jack watches another woman whisper into her phone and she wonders about her own phone, turned off in her purse. She feels the calls that have gone unanswered. She feels his voice, its concern forming many messages. She wonders what parts of life this experience will toughen her for, what parts of life she will never be able to face.
One after another the two women who were talking are escorted out of the room. New girls enter, looking just as confused as the moment they set foot in this place hours before. The room shrinks, tighter; Jack puts her head in hands, letting it sink down into her lap. She has not eaten or drank for hours. She has wandered through room after room, been touched and prodded but never looked in the eye, been seated next to woman after woman who understands each of her glances, the frequent deep and muted inhalation of breath, the pulling downward in her eyes and the corners of her mouth, the clandestine brushes of her fingertips against her belly, the heaviness of the world that they all carry. Yet she knows nothing. She knows nothing of them, nor of herself. Never in her life have feeling and knowledge been united as if they were familiar with each other, as if the question of which brings meaning is one about which they could just laugh and look upon her, separated from either of them, separated from all the questions with which humans struggle to grasp… save one. And in this one, she languishes in the wilderness of interminable indifference.
She takes the Ibuprofen and swallows it with water from a small pleated paper cup. She notices the delicacy of the cup, the way that it will disintegrate if left holding water for too long. The nurse takes her plastic bag and her purse. She guides her carefully along the hallway and into a room, the room. Jack notices her own heartbeat for the first time since arriving. The doctor is in the room. He makes small talk, literally. His words form in bubbles in the air and pop before she can catch them. He looks in her file and notices that she goes to a prestigious graduate program.
“I went there for my undergraduate degree. Great school.” They have a bond, but wait… it pops before she can grasp it.
There are no more bubbles. The air is solidifying. He asks her if she has any questions.
She is scared. Very scared. She is terrified. Suddenly, all her emotion has rushed back into her body and is shaking her all at once. Wake up, Jack! Damn it, wake up!!
She is petrified. Like a tree.Like a forest. She lies down and points towards the volcano, toward the destruction. She feels the snow of ash weeping upon her back, building into the weight that buries her, replacing her blood with frozen permanence.
“I will be able to have children in the future, right?”
“Well, there is a risk. This procedure could cause permanent damage to your uterus. Though the chances are quite small, I must tell you honestly that that is indeed a real risk.”
He says all of this as if she should have heard this before. From who? He says it as if she should have been listening more carefully. To whom? He says it condescendingly and disapprovingly. He once thought she was on his level, but now it is clear she is just like every other woman that passes through his walls. She just nods. She just nods, the weight of raining ash forcing out the breath she was going to use to say no.
And then she is climbing onto the table. And then he describes how what they are using is like a vacuum and they are going to suck the inside of the uterus clean. And then he tells her how it will feel like really bad menstrual cramps. And then he starts up the machine and at the sound of the noise, she closes her eyes and turns her head to one side. And then the nurse takes her hand. And with the other hand she closes her soul into her fist and imprisons it there. And then her tears are petrified beneath her skin, freezing her insides to feel the ache of this moment forever.
He connects her to the machine and she immediately feels the pulling. It does not feel like menstrual cramps. It is an agonizing physical pain like the whole inside of her body is being sucked downwards, like she has been lacerated vertically up her body and all is being ripped out. She feels the pull of the machine. She feels it sucking out the traces of possibility, the uncertainty with which she was allowed to sleep these past few weeks, the meaning which she immediately wishes she had held onto. It pulls and empties her, leaving her only with regret and the impulsive power of her fears. The very fear that she first felt when looking at the positive lines on the pregnancy test–that very fear, the one she did not recognize and knew she could not trust–that very fear is all that she is left with. And in its embrace, she has never felt more alone.
The procedure takes less than twenty minutes. They were wrong. It is done and the doctor leaves, mumbling something in doctor pidgin. The nurse returns and gives her some paper towels to hold "down there" as she assists her to the recovery room. And this is the picture of the end. Jack hobbles weakly across the hall into a large, light-filled recovery room, one hand holding bloody paper towels between her legs, the other arm pulled awkwardly askance by the nurse, her thin gown sliding forward until the top of her milk-distended left breast is exposed.
The nurse sets her up on a hospital bed, adjusted so that she sits semi-upright. She is exhausted, which is the closest she will come to some sort of relief. But exhaustion is not relief and the bone-weary fatigue is its own kind of punishment. She is dizzy, nauseas, adrift, obscured, temporary and interminable. She is a dark spot on the moon of her own tomorrow, a deep basin where hardened reflections resemble a catoptric chamber–but mirror upon mirror only reproduces the same image with no possibility of change. The miracles of glass cannot transform her. This darkness, her darkness, is a result of ill-preparation for too many impacts, the late heavy bombardment of an antecedent upon a swirling miasma of self.
Another nurse comes over. Jack offers her left arm limply and the nurse wraps a blood pressure cuff around it. She can feel her heart and it is barely beating. The nurse registers a bit of concern as she takes her pulse–it is hovering around 36. Jack can feel each beat, each single explosive reminder of the fact that she is alive. The less the better.
She lays her head back and is about to close her eyes when movement in the hallway catches her attention. They are wheeling a woman into one of the procedure rooms. She has been fully anesthetized and her lifeless state seems both appropriate and deeply disturbing. Inside the room, the doctor flips up her gown to reveal a fuller belly than Jack’s. He gets to work washing his hands, putting on gloves, preparing for an entirely different procedure. Some would say that this is more complicated, more dangerous–is that possible, Jack wonders. Two nurses are present. One attaches an IV to her arm. The other hovers uselessly–an innocuous forest fly whose hidden mandibles can slice apart flesh–before finally noticing the door is still open. She turns and shuts the door with a flourish yet the image hardens in permafrost inside Jack's mirrored chamber.
The nurse returns with saltines and some juice. Jack ingests indifferently, no longer even wondering how long it will be before she can leave. The image of the unconscious girl multiplies inside her head. In her previous life, she would have felt panic, outrage, shock, distress, grief. Now she can only see the image as it echoes and echoes, its silence ringing in her ears, speaking of nothing, filling up the space where emotion should bleed.
She lays still as moments do not pass. Finally, the nurse is satisfied with her blood pressure and pulse. She brings her the plastic bag with her clothing and purse. Jack sits up, fumbles around in her bag for her phone and turns it on. It begins vibrating and does not stop until all fourteen messages have been documented.
In shared humanity,
In choice,
Katie