Ladies and Gentlemen by Adam Ross

Author:Adam Ross [Ross, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, American, Short Stories, Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
ISBN: 9780307270719
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2011-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

In the Basement

We were at Nicholas and Maria’s house, watching the video of their ultrasound. They’d decided they didn’t want to know the sex of the baby before it was born, so the technician had edited the tape for them. But Maria was finishing her residency in internal medicine, so perhaps there were clues in the image only she could see, something about the shape of the fetus’s winking heart that indicated a girl, or a rhythm to the dusty blood flow that revealed a boy. If she guessed, she didn’t let on. She serenely watched it, as if conducting a conversation with her child, cataloging all the secrets and stories she would tell, the bedside songs she would sing, the mistakes she might prevent. We sat in their living room. It was winter in Nashville and we’d had a week of snow. It was snowing even now. In the mornings I woke to a world of uniform grayness, the trees on the powdered hills bristly and charred, the sky as colorless as the screen in front of us.

I found the ultrasound disturbing. I’d never seen one before and the unborn child seemed to me a mutant creature, barely human. The figure was so striated that it was like looking at the fossil of an embryo, as if the fetus was carved out of bone. It lay at the base of a cone of light, feet up, hands curled near its mouth. When it moved you could see ribs fanning along the axis of its spine, reminding me of the sinuous skeletons of snakes. As the technician moved the probe over Maria’s belly, orbiting the child, the image took on a funhouse-mirror quality, the baby’s face suddenly elongated like a Munch painting, its eyes two enormous dotted sockets, its head distinguishable as two separate interlocking parts: jaw attached to skull, skull arching over the eyes like a centurion’s helmet.

“That’s the brain plate,” Maria explained. The fetus seemed to stare out at us from the television, then twitched convulsively and came to rest again.

Nicholas said he thought it was a boy. He sat on the couch next to my wife, Carla. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen, and when he said this he stuck out his hand and gestured, laughing. “It is,” he insisted, as if it were self-evident, as if proclaiming it made it so. “Look at it,” he said. “Look at him.” And suddenly I saw a clear resemblance to Nicholas in the protruding brow, the discretely prominent chin, the distance from the mouth to the eyes suggesting the same small nose that Nicholas had. And I thought, Of course it’s a boy. Of course Nicholas would exercise his will even over Maria’s womb. And of course Maria would have a son when she needed a daughter—an ally against Nicholas and this life in which he surrounded and enclosed her.

“Let’s turn this off,” he said after a while.

“All right,” Maria said, picking up the remote to pause the tape.

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