The Unit (15 page)

22

The following afternoon when I arrived at my training session, I was told to go straight to the clinic. I realized it must have something to do with my pregnancy. Naturally both the listening devices and the surveillance cameras would have registered my visit to the pharmacy and my conversation with Johannes the previous evening.

I reported to reception, and was shown into a small office. Dr. Amanda Jonstorp was waiting there along with Petra Runhede, the director of the unit. They were sitting next to each other behind a desk, Amanda in a white coat, Petra in her dark red suit.

“Sit down, Dorrit,” said Petra with a friendly but serious expression on her face.

I sat down opposite them.

“It has come to our attention,” said Petra, “that you have had a positive result from a pregnancy test.”

“Yes, I have,” I said.

“You will have to undergo a gynecological examination.”

“Of course,” I said.

“We might as well get it out of the way right now,” said Amanda, getting up with a strained grimace that I assumed was an attempt at a smile—and I suddenly felt uneasy, but not about the examination; I had stopped worrying about gynecological examinations, or finding them embarrassing, a long time ago.

No, it was something else, something to do with Amanda’s attempt at a smile and Petra’s forced friendliness, it was something about the atmosphere in the room.

“This way,” said Amanda, and I followed her into an adjoining room with a gynecology chair in one corner, flanked by a low table with a computer, and a high stainless steel table with medical instruments on it. There was a screen in the opposite corner.

“If you go over there and undress up to the waist, I’ll go and fetch the nurse,” said Amanda.

I was lying in the chair with my legs up in the stirrups, spread wide apart. Amanda had one hand inside me, pressing the lower part of my stomach with the other hand. She pressed from both sides, very gently—I imagined that she was cupping the fetus in her hands—while muttering words and phrases in Latin to the nurse. Then she removed her hands and said to me:

“Yes, it does appear that you’re pregnant. Have you been involved in any experiments with hormones?”

“Not as far as I know,” I replied.

“In that case this really is something quite extraordinary, I can tell you. Normally, even if menopause doesn’t kick in until around fifty-five, in practice it’s impossible to become pregnant beyond the age of forty-five or forty-six.”

“I know,” I said.

“In normal cases, that is,” she added.

“I know,” I repeated, wondering how long I would have to lie here in this chair.

“In normal cases,” Amanda went on, still standing between my legs, as if she were lecturing my womb, “the body simply stops producing eggs—even if you are still menstruating after forty-five.”

“I know that,” I said. “Can I get dressed now?”

“Of course. Come next door to see me and Petra when you’re ready, then we can have a chat.”

They were sitting behind the desk again. I sat down opposite them again. Petra looked me in the eye with her sincere expression.

“Perhaps you can understand that this has come as a shock to us,” she began.

“Yes. It’s come as a shock to me too.” I tried to smile.

“You have …” Petra cleared her throat. “You have a choice of two courses of action, Dorrit.”

“What? What do you mean, a choice?” I said. “If you think I’m going to have an abortion, you’re wrong. I will never kill my child, never!”

One of my friends out in the community had gotten pregnant when she was forty-seven, and an abortion had been recommended to her. Her name was Melinda, and when she told me this she explained that all women who become pregnant after the age of forty, irrespective of whether they already have children or not, are advised to have an abortion, “to cover all eventualities,” which isn’t that strange when you think about it, since the risk of various deformities and disorders in the child increases with the mother’s age, as does the risk of premature birth and other expensive complications. If the man providing the sperm is also older, there is an additional risk that the child could be affected by schizophrenia when it becomes an adult.

These increased risks are actually very small for the individual, percentagewise; Johannes’s age, for example, carried with it a 0.0 percent higher risk that our child would become schizophrenic, and the situation was more or less the same with regard to the link between my age and Down syndrome, for example. But the doctors’ recommendation to have an abortion is not primarily about the individual. Children who are born prematurely, or with some form of mental handicap, or who develop schizophrenia as adults, cost society enormous sums of money, and if the overall number of defects and complications can be reduced to a minimum, there are significant financial gains to be made. There must be a couple of hundred children per year in total who end up becoming a complete financial loss to society.

Melinda had been informed—in black and white—how much a decision to give birth to her child would cost society if the child had this or that functional impairment. She showed me the calculations, and they certainly told a very clear story; it was a case of tens of thousands of millions in losses—and that was just for one functionally impaired individual from the age of zero to fifty. Melinda was in despair. She said:

“It’s not that I want to be a burden on society. Of course I want to be needed in every way, and I want my child to be needed—not to be a drain on the community all its life. Everybody wants to live a life of dignity, don’t they? Everybody wants to be respected, and we want our children to be respected too. But I want this child. It’s been created, and it’s living inside me; there has to be a meaning in that. And irrespective of whether it’s born prematurely and might be blind or have some other functional impairment, it’s still a child. It’s still a person. And we live in a democracy; I do actually have the right to give birth to my child.”

But Melinda had had an abortion after all. She already had two healthy children. She was already needed.

But I wasn’t. And I was absolutely determined to give birth to my child, to care for it and raise it—regardless of what condition it might be in. I wanted to live as a family with Johannes and the child. I wanted to live a proper life with deep, interwoven relationships for better or worse, which only death could separate. I wanted to feel real, to feel part of things, and to be honest I couldn’t give a shit whether it was dignified or respectable or whether it cost the taxpayer a whole lot of money. To hell with the taxpayers! I thought. Just as long as I can have my child, my family, my life! That’s why I was immediately on guard with Petra, and why I said that I would never, ever kill my child.

But that wasn’t what she meant; abortion wasn’t one of the choices I had to make.

“You’re not going to have an abortion,” said Petra. “At least not until we’ve taken a sample of the amniotic fluid, which we do have to do, as you will understand. And various other tests—these days it’s possible to detect many different defects and difficulties with the child through relatively risk-free tests. Isn’t that right, Amanda?”

Amanda nodded. Petra went on:

“And we ought to make the most of that opportunity. In view of your age, I mean.”

We, I thought. What we? The only “we” I could see in all this was Johannes and I. But I said nothing, I didn’t want Petra, or Amanda either for that matter, to get the impression that I was somehow unbalanced.

Petra now got to the point, and she was talking quickly, as if to get it out of the way as rapidly as possible:

“Your choice is whether to donate the fetus for transplantation, or to carry it to full term and then have it adopted. The latter is of course the safest option, for the child that is, but it might also be the most painful for you, so think it over carefully. Whatever choice you make, you will be allowed to know something about the people who adopt the child, as with any donation, and if you wish I’m sure we can arrange it so that you continue to receive information about how the child is getting on in its family.”

My mouth dropped open. I thought: Is she stupid? I sat up straight, cleared my throat, and said, clearly and lucidly:

“You don’t understand. I have no intention of giving up this child. It’s mine. Mine and Johannes’s. We are the child’s parents. It is not going to be transplanted or adopted. I mean, we’re no longer dispensable, are we? We’ve become needed.”

“No, Dorrit.
Your child
is—at best—needed.
You
are and remain dispensable. And as for Johannes Alby …”

She broke off. Stared at me—she looked absolutely terrified, all of a sudden, which confused me. Was she afraid of me? I didn’t understand. She took a deep breath and approached the issue from a different angle.

“You must understand,” she said pleadingly. “At your age, Dorrit … how suitable do you think you would really be as a parent?”

“I can’t see that I’d be any less suitable than any other parent. Surely age can also be an advantage? I have considerable experience of life, and self-awareness. I’ve had my fun, and all trace of youthful egoism and self-obsession is gone. And I’m strong and healthy, mentally as well as physically. Not so long ago I was told I was as fit as a twenty-year-old.”

“It’s not just about fitness,” Petra interrupted.

“I didn’t say it was.”

Petra now had red patches on her neck—otherwise she was noticeably pale—and she turned to Amanda, as if seeking help. But Amanda was no help, not to either of us; she sat there in silence, her lips pressed together, looking down at some papers in front of her on the table. Petra turned back to me.

“First of all,” she said, “the lifespan of a human being is limited. For many centuries the average lifespan increased, but it has now remained virtually static for several decades. It seems as if we have reached the ceiling when it comes to how long we can live naturally, and the health risks associated with the drugs available to slow down the aging process have so far proved to be far too great for them to be launched on the open market. And secondly …”

I interrupted her. “This child will have plenty of time to grow up before either Johannes or I fall off our perch.”

Amanda glanced up from her papers and Petra opened her mouth to say something, but I raised my voice and carried on:

“We might not live long enough to see our grandchildren, but we’ll damned well have time to fulfill our role as parents. Both of us. Because even if Johannes is thirteen years older than me, he’s still as full of life as a thirty-year-old.”

By this stage Petra’s face was the color of ivory, her mouth a thin, ashen pink line, her neck as red as if someone had poured boiling water over it. I interpreted her expression as a mixture of intense annoyance and the kind of panic that can affect those in a position of power when they feel they are losing their authority. In other words, I thought I had the upper hand in our discussion, and that Petra was losing her grip and was about to collapse in the face of my solid reasoning. She looked pleadingly at Amanda once again, but Amanda looked away again, down at her papers. Petra looked at me. She swallowed, and then she answered me quietly and slowly, as if feeling her way forward:

“But Dorrit. Have you thought about the fact that you—that both of you—would be the same age as the grandparents of the child’s friends? There is a significant risk that the child would feel different and would be rejected, perhaps even bullied. Besides which, dispensable parents are hardly a good example for a child.”

“There are no dispensable parents, Petra,” I said smugly. “That equation doesn’t add up.”

“The dispensable stamp would remain,” she said.

“What stamp? I haven’t got a stamp. Can you see a stamp?” I spread my hands wide.

“You wouldn’t be good role models,” said Petra, her face still as white as a sheet, still speaking quietly, but now with a slight quiver in her voice. “You would …”

She seemed to respect me, that was undeniable; she definitely seemed to be in an inferior position. I leaned back in the chair and let her talk for a while. But as she talked without being interrupted, her voice became less shaky and muted, and she gradually regained her composure, became herself again:

“You would—in one way or another—become a burden to your child, Dorrit. Something to … be ashamed of. It’s true. It is of course extremely … praiseworthy that you have both created this child. And if
you
can bring yourself to carry it throughout your pregnancy—provided it goes to full term, that is—then all credit to you. Naturally you will not be expected to go through the process of giving birth. A date will be set for a C-section, when you will be completely anesthetized so that you will not have to see or hear anything. The reserve bank authority will thank you in every possible way you can think of. There will be … you will receive certain favors, to put it simply. But—and this is and will remain a very definite ‘but’—we cannot allow you to act as a parent. Unfortunately that is completely out of the question. And when it comes to Johannes Alby …”

She broke off once again, and this time I reacted.

“What?” I said, slowly sitting up straight in my chair again. “What’s going on with Johannes?”

Petra was noticeably nervous. Or was she distressed? Or upset? In an almost breathless voice she said:

“He … he hasn’t told you, then?”

“Told me what?”

She stared stupidly at me. Stupidly and desperately.

“It’s been decided for more than a week,” she said.

“What has? What are you talking about?”

By this point I should have understood what she was trying to say—what she had been trying to say all along. I’m not stupid, I should have realized. But there are certain things that, despite the fact that they are looming so clearly in front of you, like enormous waves, are just too overwhelming, too huge, too crushing for us to grasp.

Petra said:

“I … I really am sorry that you have to find out this way, Dorrit, but at this stage it’s presumably too late for him to …”