"A Lover in Utero"

"A Lover in Utero"

They say the pain is so intense is because your cervix is actually stretching. One doctor compared it to a turtleneck sweater being pulled over the baby's head, shoulders, and entire body. The worst part of it, however, is the fact you're completely aware of it all: the sterile smell of the clinic mingling with the swampy odour of your own bodily fluids, the bright collection of halogen lights above your head, clustered together like the compound eye of a giant bug, the masked faces of space-aliens that go by the names "Dr. Bradley" and "Dr. Gunther." Those names dangle in front of my face on clinic-issued lanyards. Gunther's smacks me in the forehead once or twice as if to knock sense into me and say, "Shame on you!"

Shame on me, indeed. Here I am, putting myself through a 24-hour boxing-match with my own womanhood for nothing but a hazy, far-fetched goal. "It might not even work. Human cloning has never been done before now," they told me, "and with DNA this old, the stem-cells might be unextractable." Their warnings fell on ears deafened by obsessive obstinance. It was that exact sort of brutal, painful infatuation that lost me many close contacts, parents included. When they heard I was doing this, they refused to speak to me ever again. They erased me from their memories and address-lists, cringing about my being so selfish as to produce them a single heir that wasn't of their flesh at all.

I gave up my (and their) dreams of being a literature professor to do this. The oaken halls of Oxford took a backseat to the teal and gray tiling of this government clinic. I'm an experiment; a fat, pregnant guinea pig with my petite white feet and swollen ankles in faux-leather holsters. My legs are spread wide to the flash-bulbs of countless media photographers. The clicking of their cameras goes foggy as if they were suddenly three feet underwater. The sound of the protesters outside becomes clear as a bell. This is unnatural. This revival of the dead is as sacreligious as any variety of voodoo from the deep-south marshes.

Although it seemed only a stolid, lab-coats-and-goggles experiment to the clinic, it was a thousand fitful dreams-come-true to me. The company was glad to find a willing volunteer who meet the qualifications. They were even more pleased to hear that I didn't want money... only the child. They didn't care what happened to the product of their labor (or mine), much like an orchard doesn't care what happens to their apples, as long they get money out of it. As long as they could prove that it was possible to clone a healthy, normal human-being from the tattered double-helixes inside a collection of hundred-year-old barbershop-clippings, they were satisfied.

However, the clinic seemed reluctant to help me when I demanded to choose my child. They would willingly engineer a designer-baby for a couple of discriminate yuppies, so I figured it shouldn't be any different for me. They said they wanted to clone "a harmless genius," a painter or a poet, maybe. They outlined these conditions for me carefully, so I wouldn't choose to birth a baby Adolph Hitler or Vlad the Impaler. My genius fit the mold exactly. The Smithsonian was even willing to give up a portion of the meager amount of his hair that they owned (the surviving descendants refused outright). It was a beautiful day when they inserted the syringe, full of clear liquid and a clutch of cells too small to see without a microscope. I could feel it in my guts that the man I loved would be back eventually and he'd only have me to thank for it.

I gasp. It feels as if I'm having an asthma attack. Bradley responds to the terrified look on my face, telling me it's entirely normal. His words don't carry the loving hint of comfort that normally comes with time spent in a delivery-room. Instead, it sounds as if he's giving me a grim diagnosis. Nine months to live. Four months to live. Two months to live. One week to live. Twenty-four hours to live. Mere minutes to live. This isn't the same to them as it is to me. No matter what they think, they still don't want it as badly as I do. I'm ready for the end. I push and strain. It feels as if my entire world is existing inside the life-cycle of a star, if millions of billions of years were to be played in the frame of a single second. Everything blooms in a burst of halogen and neon pyrotechnics, complete with a deafening soundtrack of speech and machinery. Then, my world has shrunken to the size of a pinhole. I have tunnel-vision, and my hearing consists of only my breath and the shrill birth-cries of my (and Jane and William's) child. He's alive, that's for sure.

Suddenly, it's all over. The contractions, the sickness, the pregnancy in itself. Nine long months later, and we're both free. He's returned to the world by way of a single young literature student. Gunther wipes my forehead with a rough blue towel as the world comes back into focus. Nobody's cheering, nobody's feeling anything other than a scientific sense of accomplishment. Nobody even shouts the customary, "It's a boy!" I watch as a screaming, flailing wad of flesh is carried out of the room. I see a large quantity of dark hair wetly clinging to the child's head. He looks like any newborn baby, at this point. I have to remind myself that it will take 28 years before he looks anything like he did in the old black-and-white photographs.

I'm still pleased, if feeling a little sinister. No longer is he just a blip in Europe's history, a wax figure in the writer's secton of Madam Tussaud's. He is a living, breathing creature of flesh-and-bone, for me to worship and cherish as I've always wanted to. I will raise him right; I will cultivate a lover from the ground-up. I'll be the black-sheep of the human race, but the loneliness will do us both good. I will be the only one he shall have feelings for; I shall be the center of his love-poems and fables. I am his mother and his future-wife, the fantasy of an Oedipus-Complex incarnate. I am beaming as they hand me a pen to sign the birth-certificate, and I do. The time, the date, and the name of the clinic are typed a clean quarter-inch above the alotted space on the document. They all appear as meaningless hieroglyphics to me, cowering in the shadow of the words above the line labled "Name." That's all that matters to me, the longing, sighing literature-student-turned-incestuous-lover. The name that belongs in history books now rests on the birth-certificate of a child that came from my womb:

"Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, The Second."