“Donovan,” she said, half pleading, half insisting, but looking me straight and hard in the eye the whole time, “we simply have to do it, and to hell with the laws. They’re ridiculous and anachronistic anyway.”
I had only been in the door two minutes, surprised to find she had beaten me home from work today. Normally the city records office closed at five, and she would be back in the apartment by quarter to six, more often than not one to two hours before I’d get there. Catherine spent her days issuing and tracking government identification cards, processing property tax payments, and managing a myriad of other bureaucratic processes that usually had her pretty strung out by the time she got home. At least a couple of nights a week I made a point of managing my afternoon patient load so that I could be here by five thirty, make some dinner arrangements, and get an early start on a relaxing evening for both of us. I expected to be home before her today, but a bad wreck on the freeway had added an excruciating hour to the drive. I wasn’t certain how much she’d beaten me by, but it was pretty apparent she’d been here for some time already, stewing on her favorite current issue, waiting to sucker punch me as soon as I walked in the door.
I opened my mouth partway, preparing to respond, but then paused, drew my lips together again and turned away from her, stepping instead to our apartment’s large bay window. Looking out over the city that meandered about beneath our building, I inhaled slowly, held in a lungful of the apartment’s perfectly filtered air for longer than was comfortable, then exhaled slowly and heavily before turning back to face her.
“Catherine . . .” The faint wail of a siren cried far off to the north and then faded away. “Catherine . . . look . . . think of the position you’re putting me in . . . us . . . in. Just think for a minute. PNEs are illegal as hell. Christ, we’ve been through this. You may as well ask me to help you carry out a hit on someone. We couldn’t possibly get into any more trouble for it.”
She was four weeks pregnant with our first child, after many months of trying that had included one miscarriage and a couple of false positives. The year had been an emotional roller coaster for both of us, but had been particularly hard on Catherine, what with all of the associated physical travails to accompany her seemingly relentless mental anguish. Now that this pregnancy looked well on its way to a successful outcome, she had shifted her attention to what our daughter would turn out like.
Pre-Natal Enhancement procedures had been technologically feasible—straightforward in fact—since long before I had entered med school twenty-six years earlier. It was only a decade or so ago that the right-to-lifers, having finally given up on their original crusade, latched onto PNE as their new raison d’être. The resulting heightened awareness of the procedure, combined with a couple of very publicly botched cases and twelve years of an ultra conservative federal administration, and suddenly one day seven years ago we had awakened to find a new constitutional amendment on the books—number thirty-four to be specific—forbidding any and all PNE procedures on naturally conceived children. Synthetics had been exempted, since they were enhanced from the outset, but it was hands-off everyone else.
Because it was a federal crime, the penalties were harsh—draconian some said: abortion of the PNE child and sterilization for the woman, decertification and a hefty prison term for the doctor (or, God help the woman, anyone else) caught performing the procedure. Still, as with all things illegal but in high demand, there existed a vigorous underground market for PNE procedures. And, though my wife was totally unaware of the fact, as indeed was everyone I knew, I had, for the past two years, been a willing participant in that market.
“She’s your daughter, Donovan. For God’s sake, do you want her to go through life being average? How can you not want the best for her?” Catherine reached out and laid a gentle but imploring hand on my shoulder. “It’s a chance to give her the advantages she’ll need. No one should be denied that.”
I returned her gesture, doubly, by firmly placing both of my hands on her shoulders and gazing into her face with all of the intensity I could muster. “Put aside the medical aspects of this for a moment—the fact that success is not a hundred percent guaranteed. You are talking about a federal crime. What kind of favors are we doing for our daughter if she gets aborted, her mother ends up maimed and disgraced, and her father lands in jail without a career? They’re detecting maybe twenty-five percent of these cases now, you know. Christ, Catherine, I’ve had to do two ster-ops this week already . . .”
I swallowed hard and turned back to the window, uncomfortable with the simultaneous vision of my wife’s face and the sudden recollection of the sterilization operations I was obliged to perform as part of my OB/Gyn professional medical portfolio. Every government report indicated that the PNE rate was rising, as were the interdiction and prosecution rates. All it took to detect that the procedure had been performed was a nominal pre-natal genetic screen by the woman’s gynecologist. Any doctor who detected a case and didn’t turn in his patient to the authorities was liable for sanctions nearly as severe as the physician who had performed the original PNE. It was rapidly becoming an ugly social dilemma, pitting medical professionals against ethicists and politicians in a fight whose outcome no one could foresee. For the moment though the rules were clear—the sanctions unambiguous. I loved my wife, and I loved our unborn daughter. But I was also more than a little fond of my own life, my career, my reputation, and my freedom, and I was not prepared to risk throwing it all away for the possible future benefit of a child who, given her parent’s income and genetic make-up, was likely to turn out just fine anyway.
Which raised an obvious logical and ethical conflict—one that had caused me a few sleepless nights in recent months. If unwilling to take such a chance with my own family, what had compelled me to take the same risk for others? For that was precisely what I had spent the past two years doing. Catherine didn’t know it. My professional colleagues certainly didn’t know it. I had shared an Ob/Gyn practice with Cliff Biederman for fourteen years and he had no clue. For damned sure, the government didn’t know it. In fact, they had an affidavit, locked away in some bureaucrat’s office, bearing my signature, stating that I swore to uphold the law and to not only not perform PNEs, but to do everything in my professional power to identify and turn over to the authorities anyone who did. The feds hit you with that one before the ink was even dry on your med school diploma. So far as Catherine knew, I was just another upstanding baby doc who played by the rules, but who was well networked and might just know where to look to find someone else qualified and willing to perform the procedure she so badly wanted. Irony, tragedy, comedy—all rolled into one simple little dilemma. None of which answers the original question. Why others, but not my own?
As high as the odds were of being found out under random circumstances, the chances of being caught in our case were significantly higher. One of the rules of the game was that no woman married to a physician could use her own spouse for primary pre-natal care. The government felt, not without reason, that the temptation would be too great to skirt the rules if the wife had easy and confidential access to an in-family medical professional. For that reason, all such women were obliged to obtain an independent physician, selected at random from a city directory. In addition, the fact that Catherine was married to not just any physician, but an OB/Gyn, meant that special scrutiny was given to her case by said independent doctor. All of which meant that she was virtually guaranteed to receive the genetic screening whose result would, in more than half of the cases, depending on the thoroughness and skill of the geneticist, reveal any pre-natal chicanery. Long story short—going through with this procedure meant a better than fifty-fifty chance of being found out, which would have been disastrous for all three of us.
But these arguments still did not explain my willingness to perform the PNE procedure for others. Let’s just say that socialized healthcare, in an era of government-enforced cost cutting, does not exactly result in medical professionals enjoying the sorts of lifestyles common back in the good old days of private practice. Add to this the fact that a single PNE operation, which involves, at most, seven or eight hours of work, routinely pulls in ten percent of a doctor’s annual salary—tax-free—and you begin to see the attraction.
Since both parties—doc and patient—were at such tremendous risk, there were other precautions that had become a standard part of PNEs. Doctors ensured that patients came from a suitable background—no medical staff in their immediate families, no criminal convictions or other records that would attract governmental attention. And to truly satisfy the paranoia of all concerned, no one ever knew the real name of or laid eyes on anyone else involved in the transaction. The necessary interviews and discussions took place across opaque partitions. The embryo implant process took place with the patient masked at all times. Discoveries only happened when people got sloppy, or extremely unlucky. In nearly two years though, I had never had a single patient outed. I had though done plenty of government mandated ster-ops, but always with the patients of other less careful PNE docs.
“Catherine,” I said, turning back to face her disappointment—she never got angry, only sullen or let down when she failed to get her way. “I love you. I love our daughter. But look at us, look around,” I said, sweeping my own gaze around our enormous, well-accoutered apartment. “This kid’s going to have every advantage she possibly can. You have to forget this PNE madness. It’d be the end of everything we’ve worked for.” I stepped toward her and tried a consoling hug, but got no response. She only turned away and walked silently into the kitchen.
“Blue,” Ms. ‘Smith’ said (they were all Mr. or Ms. Smith) from the far side of the translucent mylar partition. “I think we’d like blue eyes.” You got a very hazy image of the client’s head on the other side of the partition—just enough to reinforce the illusion that you were speaking with an actual person. But mostly it was just the woman’s voice—almost always it was women who did the specification session. I’d spoken with maybe five husbands during the entire two years or so that I’d been at this. The men were either scared, or, perhaps, just didn’t care all that much about the attributes of their children. But the women certainly cared. The risk they were taking and the money they were paying were enough to ensure that they cared.
I cannot say that I really did though, at least not in the medical sense of the word. No one could argue that I was curing disease, easing pain, extending anyone’s life. Still, with a minimal stretch of rationalization, you could argue that I was making life better for the inchoate child, assuming of course that we weren’t caught. What I mainly cared about was the money, which, while offensive on the surface, I had long-since justified to myself as the means by which I made life better for my family.
“Blue it is,” I replied. “If you tap the color chart on the monitor, you’ll see a pallet of blues. Find something you like and just tap it twice with the stylus. Read me off the code also, if you would.” All of the client’s choices were encoded directly into the computer, but I took the extra precaution of having them dictate their choices to me. Keeping a manual checklist and then doing a crosscheck later against what had been entered into the computer allowed me to ensure there would be no mistakes. Once the genetic build-up was completed, there was no modifying things. A last-minute change order meant a whole new embryo and a hefty surcharge. If the change was due to an error on my part, I ate the extra cost.
There was a lengthy silence from the far side of the curtain, and then finally the distinct sound of the stylus tip tapping the computer screen. “Let’s do AA1685-G. That’ll match his grandmother nicely.” I read it back to her and noted the choice on my order form.
I of course also followed what the client was doing through the simple expedient of having connected two monitors to the processing unit. Once she had completed her entry for the baby boy’s eye color, it was time to move on to the non-physical attributes. “If you tap ‘Preview’ down on the lower left, you can get a quick look at all of your eye, hair, nose, and other facial choices on a generic model. Just tap one of the numbers to the left of the preview button to select a simulated age.” By completing a DNA screen on both parents before the interview, the computer did a decent job of simulating the child’s likely appearance. This template could then be modified in real time to incorporate each of the cosmetic selections of the parent.
The number of programmable attributes was limited by nothing more than the size of the client’s imagination and bank account. It was possible to buy features a la carte, but given the trouble, expense, and risk that the family went through, most found it easier to start with one of about a hundred package deals. These ranged from the most basic hair and eye choices, up through a mind boggling assortment of variables. Particularly popular were the pre-formatted body, temperament, and intellect packages. If you weren’t especially keen to spend hours selecting more than three hundred individual attributes, you could simply choose, say, the ‘self-confident jock’ package for a son, or the ‘demure scientist’ package for a daughter. A package choice got you started by preselecting all of the variables in your price range, but then allowed you to tweak each one as you liked.
There was no predicting how it would go with a parent. Some seemed intent on cloning themselves or another family relative—others went for almost direct opposites of their own body style or mental capacity, perhaps a tacit indictment of their own life’s outcomes. One thing though could be counted on almost universally. Nearly everyone spent more money—upgraded their choices—once they found themselves in the interview chair. There were countless people taking out second and third mortgages on their properties, just so little Johnny could have extra perfect teeth or another twenty points of IQ. It required almost no selling on my part. I simply pointed out all of the choices and no self-respecting parent could resist loading up on anything they thought would give their child an edge in life.
“Perhaps we should talk about social skills,” I suggested, after giving a respectful few minutes for Ms. Smith to scan through various age simulations of her incipient son.
“You know,” she said, apparently ignoring my comment, “I’m thinking we should darken up the hair a little. Now that I see it with the blue eyes, it could be a bit much.”
“Keep in mind that the default gradient is going to darken anyway as he gets older—just like natural hair. If you’d prefer, it’s a minor change to program unchanging hair color for life.”
“Gosh,” she exhaled, audibly overwhelmed with the options before her. “It’s all so much. I thought buying a car was bad!”
“Well, look at it this way—unlike your car, these selections will last for more than a hundred years, so your investment of time now will be rewarded for a long time to come.”
“Tell you what,” she said, after another half minute of cogitation, “let’s leave the blonde tone as is for the first ten years, and then do three gradient tone darkening in each of the years from ten to fifteen. After that we’ll leave it as is. If he still doesn’t like it, there’s always dye, right?”
“Fair enough,” I replied, instructing her how to move backward through the hair menu and update her new hair choices.
It really was a very daunting experience, and second-thought callbacks were the rule rather than the exception. We always started with the physical stuff, because as difficult as that was, things really got interesting when we started on mental attributes. You could work with standard intellect, but that was relatively straightforward—everyone wanted their child to be as smart as possible. Trouble was, there were more trade-offs here than in the physical work-up. It was one thing to say make them intelligent. But then you started working on the mutually exclusive attributes. Do you want an artistic type, an engineer, or a lawyer? Outspoken or demure? Good with languages? That’ll cost you some quantitative ability, I’m afraid. It was all selectable—the genes had been identified decades ago. It was just a question of turning them on and off in the right combinations.
Ms. Smith did better than many. She was in and out in less than three hours, and only spent fifty percent more than she had originally budgeted. She was, though, not looking forward to sharing the financial implications with her husband that evening. It was the ultimate impulse buy. Once you got started, who could turn down the chance to do the best for your new son or daughter?
* * *
They spent far more time crying about it than I actually spent doing the ster-op procedure. It would almost have been easier if there was someone pointing a gun at them, forcing them to acquiesce. But everyone knew the drill now, and so no one was forced. It was a risk you took when you cheated the system. And when you got caught, you simply gave up and let it happen. You stood in a line at the back of the courtroom, signed a couple of forms and paid a fee to cover court costs. One form was an admission that you had willfully violated Federal Statute RT2256a—an admission that became part of the public record, just in case any of your close friends or family missed your court proceeding on any of the seven channels that carried them twenty-four hours a day. It was possible. After all, the proceeding rarely took more than five minutes, comprising, almost exclusively, a quick admission of guilt, and some administrative statements by the family court judge. You actually spent far more time waiting in the admin line than you did before the judge.
Once caught, almost no one fought the inevitable. There were really no grounds for a fight. About fifty percent of genetic tests missed a PNE fetus, but there were no false positives. If the ‘gen-screen’ revealed the presence of a PNE fetus in your womb, that was it—case closed. And it was damned difficult to argue that you didn’t know how the thing had gotten in there. The rare occasions when a woman did put up a fight, the case became a matter of great interest and coverage by all of the court networks, which only increased the woman’s infamy. Add to this the additional legal cost and the more than ninety nine percent ultimate conviction rate for litigated cases, and the net-net was that almost everyone fessed up and took their punishment.
The second form that you signed in the back of the courtroom was an affidavit swearing that you would voluntarily undergo an abortion and ster-op procedure within thirty days, and, to add insult to prodigious injury, you agreed to pay for the procedure out of your own pocket—not nearly as much as you’d wasted on your PNE, but not exactly cheap either. Successful completion of the operation was then verified by a second independent doctor, and the appropriate paperwork submitted. Failure to comply within the thirty days meant they came looking for you and at that point it got both physically and financially ugly—fines and forced procedures, perhaps jail time if you were really uncooperative. About one in a hundred women ran, and about one in ten of those succeeded in staying hidden until the baby came full-term. The law became somewhat odd on these relatively rare occasions. The woman was still liable for fines and subsequent sterilization, but the government took no action against the PNE child, arguing, reasonably, that the newborn had had no active role in the affair.
The woman did not, of course, return for her ster-op to the doctor who had done the PNE in the first place. In the vast majority of cases, the doctor was already in custody (the woman almost always gave up the doctor) and busy dealing with his own enormous legal travails. Instead, the woman sought out one of numerous Ob/Gyn doctors who were licensed to perform the ster-op procedure. Some, not many, chose not to offer the procedure, presumably as some sort of minor protest over a procedure they found reprehensible. The government oddly seemed not to care—there was a more than adequate supply of willing physicians. Many, myself included, held the as yet unfounded view that doctors who refused to do ster-ops were probably noticed somewhat more by the bureaucrats. This contributed to a widespread belief in the wisdom of at least nominally offering the procedure, even if you then limited the number performed through the simple expedient of a perpetually busy schedule.
I wasn’t especially keen on the procedure myself, what with my conducting a fairly brisk PNE trade under the table. Still, I did one or two ster-ops each week, just to keep up appearances. It bothered me to kill the child. It bothered me much more to sterilize the woman. And, law be damned, I could never bring myself to charge them afterwards.
It was nearly two weeks since the latest discussion with Catherine about her wish for a PNE. Despite my initial dismissal, I had ruminated at considerable length about possible ways we might pull it off. I had, of course, not discussed any of these with her, not wanting to be in any way encouraging unless I was, by some miracle, able to concoct a scheme. So far I was coming up empty. There were too many checks and balances in the system—too high a likelihood of being found out. The only reason the women I did PNEs for had a decent chance was because they weren’t married to physicians, and they could easily find Ob/Gyns who would look the other way on genetic screening—a luxury my wife and I did not have.
I was still noodling over possible scenarios as I went through the perfunctory process of positioning the ster-op belt on another anonymous naked belly. There were, as always, three others in the procedure room with me, my two technicians and a dauntingly uniformed appointed court officer, on-hand to witness the procedure and certify that it had actually taken place as required. The procedure was foolproof, painless, non-invasive—a miracle of modern medicine. A wide belt, not unlike those old quack things that used to be sold as abdominal fat removers, was placed across the woman’s belly, spanning roughly from the navel to the upper line of pubic hair. It was all automated, requiring about two minutes, during which the women were fully sedated, not because of any physical pain, but because they otherwise tended to be quite agitated at the thought of what was being done to them.
The belt contained a miniature planar CT scanning coil, the signal from which was sent to a computer. In the first part of the process, the CT scanner took thirty seconds or so to map the woman’s reproductive area, and in particular the ovaries and developing fetus. Once the target areas were identified, an array of very high frequency lasers killed first the fetus and then all of the eggs in both ovaries, achieving this in a minute or so by exciting and vibrating the molecules in each structure to the point of destruction, not unlike a microwave cooking a frozen dinner. All of the resulting detritus was simply passed out of the body during the next menstrual cycle. Oddly enough, the procedure was so straightforward that women occasionally did it voluntarily as a permanent birth-control technique. There was next to no skill required on my part, and once I had positioned the belt in place, I left most of the remaining process up to the equipment technician, and stood by primarily to review the final results and sign off on the paperwork once everything was over. Glancing briefly at the court officer, the tech looked in my direction for the subtle approving nod. He had only to push two buttons on the control screen—‘MAP’ to initiate the CT screen, and a minute later ‘GO’ to start the excitation lasers. A disk containing electronic files of the test summary and before-and-after CT repro-images was then taken by the officer, with files kept on record in our office as well, for emailing to whatever other medical or governmental organizations might ask for them.
The women invariably left the office precisely as they had arrived, with a folder of paperwork and tears in their eyes.
It took three weeks, but I finally figured it out. Three weeks of talking to myself. Three weeks of staring out my office window, doodling on notepads, eliciting frustrated sighs from my office staff as I daydreamed while they were trying to tell me something important. The job wasn’t exactly brain surgery, so I had plenty of time to dwell on how exactly I could fulfill Catherine’s wish without writing myself a ticket to federal prison. It was beautiful—perfect—so obvious it had proven supremely elusive. All we needed was a surrogate. I was an Ob/Gyn for God’s sake—my own custom-made bevy of potential surrogates, most of whom were in my office anyway because they were either already pregnant or wanted to be. All we needed was one who would agree to carry our child to term—the now seven-week-old fetus was easily moved from Catherine to the surrogate. The secret ingredient—I was the woman’s primary care physician, so no genetic screen needed to take place unless she or I wanted one. As a side benefit, Catherine would forego the inconvenience of gestation and the annoying pain of actual delivery. A quick scan of my patient records had revealed at least a dozen potential women. I needed only to convince Catherine of the benefits of allowing someone else to do the grunt work.
I spent my lunch hour culling the list of candidates down to three whose personal and financial situations would make them highly likely to accept our offer. A light afternoon schedule then allowed me to rehearse and rerehearse the sales pitch I would use at home that evening. Catherine was a little old-fashioned sometimes, and might object to the surrogate idea. It was tough to project—we had never discussed such a thing before.
I was still running it over in my head as I walked into the ster-op room. My techs had already done all of the usual set-up work, sedating today’s unfortunate woman and covering her from the chest up with a masking enclosure made of the same material I used to shield my PNE interviewees. They were both still waiting there when I came in, along with the court officer, whose hand I shook perfunctorily, recognizing him vaguely as one who had been here for another procedure two weeks earlier. The equipment technician stood next to the stack of devices that monitored vital signs, controlled the CT scan and laser devices, and corroborated when the procedure had been completed. The assisting technician was there partly in case I needed something handed to me or adjusted—an extra set of hands—but mainly as an additional legal witness, a third party to watch over the proceedings and to counter-sign all of the paperwork afterwards.
The room was small. I’d never really paid much attention before, but it seemed to push in on me at that moment. It was already late afternoon, and the sun was streaming in through the room’s only west-facing window. Difficult to say whether the discomfort I felt was trepidation over what I was planning for that evening or just general displeasure at the prospect of performing another government mandated sterilization procedure.
“Everything’s ready, doctor,” the assisting technician said, smiling wanly as she handed me the ster-op belt and plugged the steel-braided fiber optic connection cable into the monitoring computer. I accepted the belt and moved to the woman’s right side so that I could see the control monitor as I positioned the belt across her exposed abdomen. She was thin, with cream-white skin that did not see much sun. Her only clothing was a pair of light blue panties whose waistband came to within two inches of her navel—something suitably conservative for a somber occasion.
I could not say why I was so focused on the details of this particular case. I had long since lost count, but I had certainly performed this procedure more than two hundred times in my career, never once enjoying it, but doing it because I felt that I had to. There was, I suppose, a fitting sort of circularity to my professional life, half of it spent offering clandestine PNEs to women who only wanted the best for their families, the other half punishing those who were careless or unfortunate enough to be caught doing it. It had occurred to me in the past that the pain I felt doing ster-ops was a sort of odd penance inflicted on me because of the choices I’d made in life. The extra regret for this case was perhaps a balancing punishment for what I was preparing to agree to that evening. To make Catherine happy, I needed to feel unhappiness, discomfort, perhaps even a measure of grief.
Such thoughts ran through my mind for perhaps thirty seconds or so before I became aware of the uncomfortable silence, the others waiting for me to get on with things. The belt was hanging limply in my right hand. “Sorry,” I said to no one. “Guess I zoned out for a moment there . . .” I stepped forward and reached out to place the belt across the woman’s exposed abdomen and it was then that I noticed the tattoo.
Five years into our marriage and things had gotten a trifle stale. We were both working too hard, There were no children tying us to the house, but we had figured that the newness of the union would be enough to keep things fresh between us. We had figured wrong, and so to celebrate our fifth anniversary, we had taken a two-week trip to Acapulco—nothing especially exotic, just a forced couple of weeks of relaxation during which there would be no excuse for us not to spend time together. It worked well actually, and we swore to repeat the trip every year thereafter, a commitment we had done a decent job of keeping.
During the initial trip we had both gotten a little daring, a little weird perhaps, what with the free-wheeling atmosphere, the alcohol, and the ready availability of any number of temptations. I had thought at the time, wouldn’t it be an excellent reminder of our renewed commitment to each other if we got tattoos—matching ones. We could bond in the initial pain of creation, and then see the symbol of our experience on each other forever after. We had flipped through screen after screen of potential designs, eventually hitting on a gender-neutral one that we both felt suited our personalities.
It was a small dragon, its serpentine body twisting impossibly around itself. The blood-red scales comprised a level of detail we thought impossible to render on human skin, and yet, when it was over—two hours for each of us under the computer-controlled needle—the design was an astonishing recreation of the original template. It was a symbol of virility, or so the brief description on the screen had said. Mine was on my upper left arm, hers on her upper right thigh—hidden beneath shorts, very obvious when wearing only panties.
“Doctor? Is there something wrong?” The voice of my assistant startled me out of my second reverie in as many minutes. There was nothing special about the panties—Catherine did all of her own lingerie shopping, and I was not the sort of man to pay attention to such details, no matter how intimate the occasion. It suddenly occurred to me how inappropriately difficult it was to say with certainty that this was not the body I had lived with for the past nine years. So many women sought the same general shape—thin waist, gracefully flaring hipline. Those who couldn’t pull it off naturally were only a surgeon’s visit away from achieving the optimum effect. Other telltale details lay beneath the sheer cotton of the panties, details beyond the discernment of a doctor, OB/Gyn or not—in a room occupied by three other witnesses.
So there it was. The nearly naked lower half of a woman wearing panties I may or may not have ever seen before, perfect untanned skin, and a tattoo that precisely matched the one currently pulsing on my upper left bicep, the bicep that was at the moment holding suspended over her belly a belt that would kill a developing child and sterilize her for life.
I began to rationalize with what I hoped was sufficient speed and insouciance to not rouse the suspicions of those in the room with me. The three weeks since our discussion would have been more than enough time to seek out a doctor willing to perform a PNE, do the procedure, and then be found out and prosecuted for it. God knew the system moved with cruel efficiency once the discovery occurred. A little over three weeks, twenty-three or four days. We had been together nearly every one of those days, breakfast, dinner, bed. Had I turned on a television in that time? Listened to a radio news show? You wouldn’t hear about an individual case unless you watched a court channel at just the right time. What about our friends, family? Who had I spoken with in that time? No one had said anything, obviously. Could I have worked so hard that I had not meaningfully interacted with anyone other my staff and wife?
It seemed incredible—unbelievable—that she could have done such a thing, been so stupid, so careless with our lives. Yet so cunning in hiding the result from me. And the final coup de grace, coming here to my office for a forced procedure she knew me to be capable of. That would be no accident. With direct access to the entire database of city records, she could easily have created a false identity for herself before seeking out a PNE doctor. But that would have been easily found out once she was caught. PNE convicted women were perfectly free to choose whoever they liked for the ster-op, just so long as it got done in the prescribed period. So why come here? It was either an act of ultimate revenge—revenge for saying no to her. An act of ultimate consequence for her, but none for me other than my own internal vivisection at the task that now lay before me. Or perhaps it was a cry for help. Surely I would recognize her on the table. Somehow I would come up with a last-second solution that would save her from herself.
It felt like an hour, the additional minute that I stood there, the ster-op belt hovering above Catherine’s—how could it not be?—abdomen. So little I could do. No subtle shifting of the panties for an additional morsel of evidence for or against. No peering over the opaque partition for a glance at the sedated face. No postponement of the procedure—all equipment in perfect order and ready to go. Just three witnesses, each wondering in their own way at the sudden hesitation of the attending physician during what should be a routine procedure, the sudden if subtle onset of thin glistening sweat beads across my upper lip and forehead.
Was there a way to stop this? To postpone it? Fake it perhaps? Think, man. Think! My mind raced. “Hand me a sterilizing swab please,” I said, with calmness I did not feel, to the assisting tech in what felt like an utterly transparent bid to buy a few seconds of time. I accepted the gauze pad from her extended hand and turned the ster-op belt over, gazing intently at it as though having found something unexpected on the entirely smooth and perfect undersurface. Without further explanation or eye contact with anyone in the room, I turned and laid out the belt on a small utility table that ran along the wall. I glanced up at the clock as the second hand seemed to bend perceptibly before clicking from one mark to the next. Drawing the gauze pad along the inner surface of the belt in a completely superfluous repetitive motion, I madly ran over potential scenarios in my mind. A periodic faint beeping sound issued from the control equipment stack that measured Catherine’s vital signs.
Hard to say in that moment whether it was the stress that got to me, or fear, or something else entirely. I did not remember anything other than a field of tiny sparkling lights before my eyes as I slowly sank to the floor, thinking to myself this wouldn’t have been my first choice of action, but it might work out okay. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in response to an impossibly bright light shining in my left eye. Shaking my head I lashed out instinctively with my hand, striking something hard and then hearing a clattering sound as something flew into the corner of the surgery room.
“Looks as though he’s all right,” came my tech assistant’s voice, whose hand I had just struck, and whose pupil test light I had inadvertently flung past the ster-op table and underneath the control equipment rack. “Sorry, doctor. Thought we’d lost you there for a moment . . . Take it slow,” she continued, in response to my wavering attempt to rise to a sitting position.
“What the hell’s going on?” I managed to mumble, rubbing my temples and trying too soon to stand. I made it halfway before dropping onto one knee as the blood rushed. With one technician on each arm, I managed to stand, steadying myself on the ster-op table—the empty ster-op table. “What happened,” I repeated, a bit more firmly, but still leaning against the table. Things seemed out of kilter. The silence—no beeping equipment. The noticeably reduced light in the room. And the empty ster-op table.
“We were kind of wondering ourselves,” the equipment tech replied. One minute you were looking over the ster-op belt, and the next you just checked out, keeled the hell over. Lucky thing you fell slow, or you’d’ve cracked your head good on the floor.”
“How long . . .” I asked, stepping to the single small window, looking out at the sun as it neared the horizon.
“Hour and a half or so. Looks as though you’ve been working a little too hard, doctor. You might want to try a day or two of R and R.” I stepped back from the window and turned to examine the room one more time, the events of the afternoon slowly refilling my head.
“Doctor, we’re fixing to shut it down for the day. Doctor Biederman picked up the last ster-op, so if you’re solid enough to drive yourself home we can call it a day.”
Ster-op? Biederman? I was still pulling recent events back together as I sank again into the chair next to the utility table. “Or I can drive you back to your place if you’re still feeling groggy,” he continued.
“What are you talking about?” I said, a good bit too loudly. “What ster-op?”
“The last woman. Your four o’clock ster-op procedure. You passed out just as you were getting started. It’s no problem though—Doctor Biederman had an opening. He finished up, turned in all the paperwork. Everything’s cool.”
“BIEDERMAN?” Like a flash it was all reassembled. The four o’clock ster-op. The blue panties. The dragon tattoo. “What did Biederman do?” I was standing again—shouting at startled faces. They perceived they’d done something wrong, but hadn’t a clue what it was.
“Doctor Biederman . . . he was free. She was already prepped and sedated. The court officer said it was okay. We called Biederman’s office, took her down in a gurney on the elevator. Everything’s fine. He was done in fifteen minutes. Signed off on the paperwork. No problems. Doctor . . . Is everything all right? You sure you don’t want that ride home?”
My throat suddenly became very dry, a lump developing that would neither rise nor fall. Uncertain what to do, how to respond, I walked slowly across the empty room and toward the back door of the operating room, pausing momentarily at the door.
“Thanks guys . . . I’m all right. I’ll drive myself. Thanks for . . .” and leaving the thought unfinished, I started down the hall toward my office. Halfway down the corridor the tech’s voice came again.
“Take care of yourself, doctor . . . Oh and hey, this is your early night. With a little luck there’ll be no traffic and you’ll still beat your wife home. Get her something nice for dinner. She’ll love you for it!”