incubation // Ola Rydzewska
Week Twelve
I walk up the stairs towards my flat. The staircase is cool, but the wooden handrail feels warm in my palm as I grip, pull, and then shuffle my hand upwards with each step. Large windows overlook the landings between each floor. On the second one, I stop to rest. My fingertips touch a green pane of cathedral glass, and it feels like unsettled water. Over the years, colorful offcuts have replaced the original glass.
On each landing, I inspect the plants: first, a fern, then a ficus, a peace lily, a satin vine. They live in pots made out of plastic bottle halves. The brown and black soil mingles with pale yellow roots, tangled and unruly, and they push against the clear walls of the incubator. Below each black stone windowsill, a radiator, and next to the radiators, small watering cans. I use one to water the peace lily, hoping to revive it despite the weak autumn sun.
When I finally reach the fifth floor, I’m out of breath. My fingers throb, hot and swollen, as I unlock the door, squeeze into the shared hallway, and then struggle with my front door. This body feels heavy and, once inside, I sit down on a stool in the narrow corridor. Strangely, the pregnancy has made my muscles feel drained, and I’ve developed a generalized feeling of fatigue.
From the semi-darkness of the corridor, I look into the living room and watch the last rays of sun moving through the net curtains. I rest, too lazy to take off my coat. Sweat builds up on my upper lip and my underarms itch. Through the clothes, I touch my stomach. It feels hard, rigid and lumpy. I try the exercise the doctor gave me and begin to massage it in circular motions. I imagine what my baby might be doing now, twisting and kicking, drinking the fluids.
I walk into the kitchen and approach the new cabinet squeezed into my dated setup between the sink and the table. It’s white and covered in bright, reflective stickers. Warnings and instructions, temperature gauges and pressure sensors. It has a chart with ticks and crosses, for every visit, phone call and measurement. I move slowly, still hot in my coat, my glasses foggy from the humidity in the room.
I think about my mother.
We are watching TV, and I’m fourteen. On the news, they announce one of these new machines. She snorts and shakes her head, looks at me worried, as if she knew that the machine would stand in her kitchen one day. Though it’s no longer her flat, every time I open the machine I hear her voice admonishing: green fingers, greener brain.
My baby is inside the machine, healthy and growing.
Today, I’ve been wearing my pregnancy suit, and I went to see the photographer. Luckily, he was a man and not interested in feeling the baby kick. The photos will be a nice souvenir for her. An important memory. Though of course, the model of the machine will be listed in the birth records.
As I undress and remove the heavy pregnancy suit, I look around the living room. The pictures on the walls remain the same as when my mother was alive: a rabbit embroidered by my grandmother, a black-and-white photograph of my great-grandparents’ wedding, a broken cuckoo clock, two dusty chains dangling down from it. She would find no complaints, no changes, no imprint of me except for a few fashion and pregnancy magazines scattered on the heavy-handed coffee table.
In the bedroom, I put on my pajamas and look at my mother in a small mirror.
Before I head to bed, the baby needs tending, so I check the tubes and the fluid containers under the sink. It all seems to be flowing well. They say you should keep a nose out for strange smells, usually the first sign that the mechanics are breaking down. Tonight the kitchen smells clean and dry.
I take a quick peek inside to see you floating in the artificial womb bag, suspended from a chrome hook. There. You’re real. You’re a shadow of a person, fainter than a memory.
Week Twenty-One
I take the blue tram to work. The ride is bumpy, and the cold November wind whistles through gaps where the window seals have given way. I can feel the faint cold stream on my cheeks, but my wool coat keeps me warm. The weather is always an issue: frozen, humid winters and dry summers, cold sweats and salty cankles. As I look out at the passing city, I can see it’s locked up, and people are gestating indoors until the New Year in March.
When I arrive at the Institute office, the other girls are already at their drawing tables. I’m five minutes late. I check my card, and someone has punched me in, so I hang up my coat and rush to my station.
The technical drawings have been particularly tricky these past few months.
When working on an extensive Children’s Complex like this one, we usually follow the master plans from the central office, perhaps moving a bench here or there to account for the local topography. This one is different. It started with flipping the design back to front, to adjust for the hilly terrain. Then, more and more additions started to appear on sticky notes and memo cards. We found annotations and directions, adjustments, or ripped-up designs. A job that should have taken us two weeks has now been going on for months. The boss had never been this creative before.
Today, during tea break, we gossip about the fathers’ room idea he has added in, mostly because we don’t know any men who would want to use one. We giggle and laugh, trying to suppress the noise, so much so that our cups jiggle and clink against the saucers.
Back at my desk, I look out at the inner courtyard and gardens, which are surrounded by the concrete structure of our Institute. Though the building is tall, it looks squat as it stretches for hundreds of meters in a snail-like spiral. I watch the office dioramas on the other side, follow people’s tiny movements as they go on with their typing and filing. Someone looks back at me, but I don’t recognize her.
The vast spaces of the Institute can make you feel vulnerable and exposed. Sounds bounce like unstoppable ping-pong balls along the vast tiled corridors, and I feel far from my soft, cramped flat.
***
In the afternoon, when the rain stops, the boss’s wife comes into the office. She makes herself a cup of coffee and walks around the workshop floor, looking at our drawings, asking questions. I think she must be lonely lately; she’s been coming in more often.
A new maternity dress adorns her swollen belly and then flows steadily towards her ankles. I recognize the pattern she’s wearing; the same one is sitting on my bedside table. She looks very beautiful, very glowing, very edible.
We chat a little, and she tells me she’s been giving her husband ideas for the Children’s Complex. She smiles shyly and says it casually, but I can tell she cares because she scans the schema on my desk to see if any of her suggestions have made it onto the plans. It seems to me that she is too emotionally connected to her ideas, not rigorous enough. People have many ideas, but not many of them would make for an efficient life. When the boss comes out to chat to her, I can see the same softness in his eyes and realize that the project will continue for much longer.
As they walk off together, the wife turns back to me and says, “I’m sorry, I hear you’re expecting too. Husband told me your date, and it’s close to mine.” She smiles. “Though of course, yours is set. Must be nice to know.” I smile back. She seems excited. We’re both smiling at each other for a few seconds. My stomach stirs uncomfortably.
Week Thirty
Cavern of my heart, my precious stone, how I watch my baby grow. I can’t feel you, but I can see every tiny detail, as your fingernails start to appear and you develop sweet elbows. You’ve been a world onto yourself from the beginning.
Now that she’s bigger, quite big, like a papaya, I have more work to do. The door is allowed to stay open longer, so that I can make notes and even take photos. I have them developed at the other end of town, where they won’t care who I am as long as I leave a nice tip. Some studios still take issue, call it interfering with biology or god’s plan. They say that it’s not natural, with that annoying emphasis which makes me want to smack them.
I’ve tried to make sketches, too, and descriptions, in case you want to find out in the future what it was like. Though maybe you won’t like that.
When I was a small girl, people would get angry about different things too, things that seem pretty normal, so normal they are natural. In the school yard they used to call out after me: test-tube baby. So, I thought I had grown in a tall glass container, long and slim, my face squashed against the clear glass, uncomfortable but adapting.
I water you, check the pipes and the levels on the gauge. I refresh the chemicals in the purifying box, say a few words of encouragement, of superstition, add salt. I pour water into the tank with the red label, to be cleansed. I look at it swooshing around, sucked from the bottom into the filter. I’m still leaning over the tank, between the kitchen table and the fridge, my shoulders jammed in and my hair hanging down over my face. Gravity builds up saliva in my mouth, first pressing against my teeth, then steadily seeping through to my loosely held lips. Spit slowly oozes out of my mouth, long and stringy, until it gains momentum and drips into the opening below.
I anxiously wonder if some of me will reach you.
***
A few days later, I’m running errands at the shopping center when I see my boss’s wife again. We walk around together, though she doesn’t know that. I’m a few steps behind, looking at her through glass shop corners and between chrome pillars. Loud announcements bounce around the center, and I hope to stay hidden in the noise. My grey coat blends in with the marbles and the metals. Wearing my pregnancy suit, I imitate her walk, the cadence of her legs as she moves. Today, she seems uncomfortable, heavier, laborious, and very unlike herself at the office. I allow myself to feel uncomfortable; I curse my heels when I see her flat, misshapen boots, and I feel tricked and relieved.
After a while, she goes out front and grabs a taxi. I walk over to the bus stop.
My pregnancy suit is filling up. Each week I add a small wheat bag to the front pouch. Sometimes I warm the pouches up in the oven for a relaxing sensation on my abdomen.
Week Forty
Birth is scheduled for Wednesday, so on Tuesday after work I make the necessary preparations. I rewatch the educational tape one more time, though each step is already ingrained in my mind like a lively parasite. As I play through the middle section, where the new baby slides out of the sack, the image flickers and stretches, red and purple aberrations mar his small face. The tape is stretched out. It would seem I’m not the only one who has rewatched this section over, and over, and over.
A film night with some friends in high school comes to mind. I remember leaning in to push the tape into the VHS player, so close to the TV that the static grabbed my hair and pulled it towards the screen. Giddy for a female-friendly adventure film, my friends were close behind me.
An image. A woman’s frightened face. A man wearing a white face mask. A big belly and unrecognizable body parts and red blood.
After a few seconds, we realized that someone must have swapped stickers on the black plastic casing of the videotape and returned it to the rental store. It was a woman giving birth.
We watched the film, fascinated. The baby came out with a scream, a scream of the mother, and then, as if infected, the child screamed too. We were frightened, and when I looked around the room, I could see tears wetting my friends’ cheeks, the same wetness on my face.
I don’t believe my baby will cry when she’s born; at least she shouldn’t, according to the instructions. She will enter my world happier, content, peaceful.
***
On birth day morning, I warm up the flat with an oil heater so that her transition is as gentle as possible. Spring has begun, and dust swirls in sunlight. When I look around the living room, it suddenly feels dirty and oppressive. I get the vacuum out of the cupboard and run it around the flat, aggressively bashing into table legs and the settee, but all I seem to achieve is more dust rising into the stuffy atmosphere.
The narrow corridor, the long living room, the matchbox bedroom, all conspire against me. Despite months of preparation, I failed to transform this space into something beautiful and new that would be worthy of my baby. And now there is no time to get rid of the garlic smell, to get a nicer brand of soap.
The midwife arrives just in time to save me from descending into insanity.
She’s reassuringly process-focused and follows the script from the video with no deviation. I surrender to the motions and, even in my tight kitchen, we deliver my beautiful baby. She is serene. I cut the umbilical cord. The midwife hands her to me wrapped in a soft cloth.
The three of us are quiet as we sit on the settee during the two-hour watching period. A stack of pamphlets and notebooks has appeared on the table. She must have laid them out when I was distracted doing the first feed—reassuring instructions for a bright future.
***
She is in bed now, and we’re home alone. The kitchen floor is messy and wet, so I mop it with detergent. I latch the door of the machine, ready to be taken away and sterilized. I pull the plug, and the artificial womb whizzes to a halt.
Silence, for the first time in months. My eardrums rest, and then, a scream.
Ola Rydzewska is a writer living in London. She grew up in Poland and in Wales, and you might spot hints of that in her writing.