No-I

"You are not a mother," said the man in the white coat, and he raised a reprimanding finger—not at me, precisely, but at the swollen belly I had long since ceased to regard as wholly my own.

His junior colleague flinched visibly at the word. That is among the first lessons taught within these walls: the word mother is a protected trademark. It belongs to women with flower subscriptions and oak nursery furniture. We are called carriers. Climate-controlled production environments in biological form.

My tongue, as ever, moved more swiftly than my better judgment.

"Did you hear me call myself a mother? And since when has my abdomen become the official addressee—"

The head nurse—known among the residents as Akela—entered with a force that belied her size, stepping smartly past the man in the white coat. Her uniform was the brown of old medicine. Coarse hairs grew from her nostrils; a translucent moustache shadowed her upper lip—not a statement of principle, merely an oversight of hygiene.

There were two stains upon the otherwise virginally white interior of the Factory: its treatment of the women in its care, and Akela.

"…absolutely nobody…"

She had already begun her sermon, but my interior life, being the only terrain I still possessed in full, continued on quite independently. Her excessive bodily hair was to blame.

"Repeat what I said," she commanded.

The product delivered an offended kick against the inner wall of my stomach.

Habit, that most faithful of companions, spoke on my behalf.

"According to Article 12, Section 4, a hen is strictly forbidden from speaking to staff, visitors, or product."

"Precisely. This constitutes your second official warning. A third—"

"—will result in the hen receiving fifteen per cent less commission for the successful completion of the product," I murmured, in a guilty and contrite tone that caused me to laugh, inwardly and without pleasure.

There was no outside world for us any longer.

* * *

Peace had returned to my room. I took up an information leaflet from the bedside table.

Across its cover, in letters of an aggressively cheerful disposition, it declared:

Building Future Happiness Together.

For the sake of clarity: together ≠ us ≠ you and I.

There was no I to be found within that together. I became a no-I.

I regarded the leaflet again and considered how much more honest it would be to simply print:

Incubator for Rent. End Product Cannot Be Returned or Exchanged.

I was briefly amused by my own advertisement.

* * *

Before we proceed, a number of definitions are required.

1. Hen: the body of the person responsible for the completion of the product.

2. Product: the infant delivered from the hen upon the conclusion of gestation.

3. Purchase-parent / purchase-father / purchase-mother: the buyers of the product.

4. Parent / father / mother: the buyers of the product from the sixth month of pregnancy onwards, provided fifty per cent of the purchase price has been remitted.

5. Mummy / Daddy: the buyers of the product once labour has commenced.

Note: this graduated system of nomenclature was introduced so as to prevent buyers from forming emotional attachments prematurely.

There is, concealed within this arrangement, a detail of law of exquisite cruelty: the instant the buyers become Mummy and Daddy, full legal responsibility for the end product passes entirely to them.

Even should it be stillborn.

Even should it be born in ill health.

I found myself, for a moment, almost inclined to hope.

* * *

I sat upon the edge of my snow-white bed and stared without interest at my feet. A product drains one thoroughly. The floor was nearly as white as the sheets, though the grout between the tiles had turned grey—a third blemish upon an image that aspired to perfection.

"Breathe steadily," the man in the white coat said to no one in particular.

At his direction, I raised my blouse. The gel was cold. The monitor came to life.

The image of the developing product appeared. A smudge. A vague outline of a human being.

But I was not a mother.

The contents did not belong to me.

"A strong heartbeat," the man in the white coat observed, to the room at large.

Behind him, the purchase-mother had crushed her husband's hand in her grip. He wept. She did not—not yet. She was conserving her tears of happiness for the moment the product was officially received.

I startled as a hand pressed firmly against my face, turning it from the screen. The ungainly junior doctor possessed more backbone than I had credited him with. I was not permitted to observe the contents of my own womb.

Article 14: Emotional attachment between the hen and the product is strictly prohibited.

As though anyone has successfully instructed blood to keep its distance.

The purchase-mother leaned forward.

"May I?"

She did not wait for an answer. Article 12 forbade me from providing one in any case. Besides, the household could not absorb further unpaid invoices. She touched my belly with two fingers.

Not roughly—that would have been easier. Tenderly. That was considerably worse.

Something shifted beneath her fingertips. Only a little. Just sufficient.

"He recognises me," she whispered, almost reverently.

I directed my gaze at the ceiling.

He kicked again. Harder. He was registering his objection. Promising, but imprudent.

* * *

At home, everything smelled of detergent, dampness, and the sound of lungs labouring against themselves.

My mother sat at the kitchen table, damp from a recent coughing fit, holding an unlit cigarette. Since the diagnosis, she carried cigarettes as other women carry rosaries: for appearances, for faith, for the comfort of superstition.

"Well?" she asked.

"Well what?"

I was not disposed toward kindness. My life had been shaped, in no small part, by her unhealthy choices.

"How did it go?"

I glanced sourly at my stomach. "What do you expect?"

I opened the refrigerator. There was cheese wrapped in plastic, three eggs, and half a cucumber dissolving slowly into wrinkles.

My mother was looking at my stomach. Not at my face. No one looked at my face with any particular attention any longer.

"You ought to drink milk."

"You’re not my mother."

"You need not like it. You need only to be useful."

The words appeared to startle her the moment they left her mouth. For half a second the room went dark behind her eyes.

"I meant—"

"I know what you meant."

We ate bread from mismatched plates. My mother cut the crusts from her sandwiches—a habit preserved from the years when I was small and still belonged, in the conventional sense, to someone.

The product will never belong to me.

"Have they paid?"

"The first instalment."

"Then we settle the oldest hospital bills first."

We. Even at home, we carried a meaning that grammar had never anticipated. The word contained no warmth here. Only invoices.

The baby turned slowly in my belly. Deliberately.

Beneath the table, I placed a hand upon my stomach, only to still him for a moment. He kicked against my palm.

Article 32, Section 1. Once the pregnancy becomes visible to the outside world and perceptible to the hen, the hen is under no circumstances permitted to touch her abdomen, as doing so may foster a false sense of attachment.

And yet I could not help myself. An umbilical cord connected us in the most literal sense. How much more attached could we be?

But at home there were no articles. And so I allowed my hand to remain against a part of him.

It felt lovingly criminal. And confusing—surprisingly confusing. For in this life I did not exist as part of a together. Contractually, I was forbidden from touching my own abdomen. Contractually, I was permitted to call him only product—not he, not him.

And so a non-I kept a criminal hand pressed to her own stomach, which contained a product that would never belong to the non-I, yet somehow continued to produce carefully suppressed emotions, and eyes that insisted on filling with water.

* * *

In the seventh month, the mother began telephoning every day. The word purchase had quietly separated itself from purchase-parent, presumably so that the arrangement might sound less precisely like what it was: the unlawful sale of a newborn child from the womb of a woman who, under financial compulsion, would give birth to a child she would never be permitted to call her own.

"How is he feeling today?"

"I cannot say. I am not permitted to feel the product."

A silence settled over the line. For a moment it seemed she had, at last, apprehended the inhuman nature of the enterprise.

"Have you had any coffee?"

"Of course not."

"No black tea?"

"None.” Though I did consume an entire bottle of whisky.

The sentence rested briefly on the tip of my tongue—just long enough for me to imagine her fear. I did not say it.

"Have you been under stress?"

I looked miserably at the three final notices affixed to the refrigerator door.

“No."

Another silence. "Sometimes we feel so entirely powerless."

That word again. We. It no longer applied to me in any form I could conceive.

"That must be very difficult," I said. And I meant it sincerely.

* * *

By the eighth month, I read the contract folder again from cover to cover.

Article 22: Separation after birth. Article 31: No physical contact unless medically required. Article 34: No further communication whatsoever, save in cases where the product was in acute medical distress and the hen's presence was deemed necessary.

Nowhere did the contract explain what one was to do when a child fell into hiccups beneath one's ribs in the middle of the night. Nowhere did it explain how to bid farewell to someone who had not yet arrived.

* * *

My mother's condition worsened. The stairs to the bathroom now claimed twenty minutes of her diminishing strength. The oxygen cylinder hissed constantly—like a balloon released before it has been tied off.

"You must not make difficulties after the birth," she said one afternoon.

Something cruel rose in me—something about mothers who lease their daughters to wealthy grief; something about usefulness; something about milk. But she sat there so reduced in her armchair, that unlit cigarette pressed between two fingers, that the cruel sentence remained lodged in my throat.

"I had no choice," she said.

I set down the dishcloth.

"That is the burden of the poor. We call every necessity a decision."

My mother closed her eyes. For a moment I believed she was about to offer an apology. Instead she said:

"I did not choose you either."

The words sealed my lungs. I struggled for air.

I had not been chosen. Even the non-I did not belong—not truly, not anywhere.

* * *

Labour began on a Thursday.

In the taxi to the Factory, I sent a single message to the emergency number: Started.

Six minutes later, the mother telephoned. "We're on our way." I ended the call.

The delivery room was violently bright. My body took possession of itself with a vulgarity I could almost admire. No thought survived intact. No agreement remained pertinent. Only breathing. Tearing. Pressure. A voice assuring me I was doing well, while I was engaged in something unmistakably terrible.

Mummy and Daddy waited behind a curtain—a new policy. "For the emotional safety of all parties involved," the coordinator had explained.

All parties. I bore down and reflected that I was not a party. I was simultaneously the suffering object and the cooperating object. Quite a challenge for a non-I.

Then he arrived.

Abruptly. Like a cut of meat dropped upon a butcher's scale—though the butcher's meat is generally the more presentable of the two. The product was a slippery and furious reality. He screamed his small lungs raw immediately. Small. Raw. Offended. Defiant.

Those lungs still have a chance, I thought—and was surprised by the sudden ferocity of the resentment the thought carried with it.

Something broke behind the curtain. The mummy. I knew it by the way her sob apologized for its own existence. Her order had arrived. Almost.

The nurse looked at me. Only for a second. It was the most dangerous second of my life.

"Would you like to see him?"

I was not supposed to. Perhaps the nurse had children of her own. Perhaps she had witnessed too many women leaving the room with empty arms and a final payment that always arrived too late to prevent the bailiff or the repossession notice.

I nodded.

She did not place him upon my chest—that would have been too much. Instead, she held him beside my face, wrapped in a white blanket.

He was ugly and perfect. His mouth formed a small, furious line. He was already disappointed.

I laughed once. Then wept so quietly that no one was required to acknowledge it.

"Hello," I said.

He stopped crying.

"What is his name?" I asked.

No one moved. The mummy stepped around the curtain. Her face had been broken open—not beautiful, but real.

"Silas."

I did not repeat it. I did not dare place the name inside my mouth.

* * *

Afterwards, they brought tea—as though tea has ever restored anything that matters.

Beneath the sheet, my stomach lay collapsed, like a fallen soufflé. Like a room abandoned after a celebration to which I had never been invited, though I had been required to provide the evening's principal attraction.

The coordinator entered with papers. "Whenever you are ready."

I signed with a trembling hand. Not from doubt. From blood loss.

* * *

That night I heard weeping in the corridor. Not Silas. A primal sound, from a young woman. Then: "No. Please. One minute."

I climbed from the bed. My legs no longer felt entirely mine—which, in the legal sense, had probably been true for some months.

A girl stood pressed against the wall. Younger than me. Almost still a child. Her hospital gown was stained a lethal red. Blood ran down her legs and struck the floor.

She looked at me. Eyes without life. A body beyond repair. Not pleading. That was the worst of it—she looked at me as though I were the sole remaining witness.

"She fell out," she said. Her voice dissolved. Her breathing was shallow. "She just… fell out."

The coordinator turned. "Return to your room."

I remained precisely where I stood.

"Where is she?" I asked the blood-soaked girl.

"Gone. They picked her up like a rag doll and carried her away."

We did not run. Women who have recently given birth do not run. They limp. The most humane nurse in the Factory hurried toward us.

"Ladies, please. You both need rest."

"Why are you walking with me?" the bereft girl asked.

Because someone must, I wished to say. Because today I saw a child cease crying at the sound of my voice. Your child is gone. Gone before she could begin.

"I have no idea," I said. "Perhaps I am hormonal."

"Will you stay with me a while? So that I am not alone."

So that the non-I is not alone, I thought briefly.

I nodded.

My body was already beginning to fail me. All I possessed was a warmth that had not yet gone cold.

The kind nurse arranged a second bed in the room of the girl who now had nothing. For hours we lay together on her narrow mattress. Shared grief—for a living child I would never know, and for a miscarriage that would never become a product.

"With a miscarriage I receive no payment whatsoever. In two days I shall be on the street. With nothing. With no one."

I stroked her arm, looked at her, and said nothing. What could one possibly say?

* * *

The oxygen cylinder was gone from the sitting room. That was the first thing I observed.

Upstairs, my mother lay in bed, her mouth slightly parted. The unlit cigarette rested upon the bedside table. Beside it stood a photograph of me as an infant, cake smeared cheerfully around my mouth.

I sat upon the edge of the bed. She woke.

"Did it happen?"

"Yes."

"A boy?"

"Yes."

"Thank God."

I chose not to observe that God had not been a signatory to any agreement.

I waited. For regret. For tenderness. For something that was too late and yet might still come.

My mother breathed with difficulty. "Did you see him?"

I nodded.

"Foolish," said my mother.

I laughed—not because it was amusing, but because it was precisely the sort of thing she would say.

"Yes," I replied. "Very foolish."

She reached for my hand.

We sat that way until the darkness filled the room. Without forgiveness. Not yet. Perhaps never.

Her fingers were light. Too light. As though her body had already begun its departure before the rest of her was prepared to follow.

"You were a beautiful baby," she said, after a long while.

I looked at the photograph. "That is not an apology."

"No."

The word cost her dearly—more, perhaps, than sorry would ever have cost. Perhaps it was all she had remaining: a non-apology, a hand extended, one sentence that did not wound.

* * *

The hospital invoices continued to arrive. The commission for the delivered product was insufficient. My sacrifice had never been a choice. That is the burden of the poor: we call every necessity a decision.

There is a child named Silas.

There is a woman who calls herself his mother.

And sometimes—very occasionally—I permit myself to think:

My Silas.