Everything

In the 1970s, scientist discovered the ozone layer was depleting, sparking a mitigation effort that could only succeed by international cooperation. Atticus’s father, Wolf, was on the team that was tracking the effort when they discovered that the hole in the ozone layer was the least of their problems. This is my rough draft of part of the first chapter of the new effort, tentatively titled “Everything.” That working title attests to two things about this piece: I’m attempting to make this appealing for literary readers as well as genre fiction readers. More important to you, though, is that the plot devices in this piece will impact very literally everything in the known universe…and possibly more. It’s an ambitious work that will take months to years to finish. Like every work of fiction, the story has to begin somewhere. And here, we start with a happy couple undergoing a routine pre-natal visit.

There are as many stars in the sky as there are sands at the beach, and as many types of beautiful children—all worthy of love.

Gold-embossed script etched these words across the bottom of a framed poster clinging to the burnt-orange wall of the patient examination room. Against the blues and blacks of the poster’s quasi-Van-Govian background, that sentence, coupled with a similarly embossed star, exuded almost a spiritual aura. The words whispered truth in that subdued, confident way that defied refutation. Dr. Conrad felt the same sensation every time he visited room 231, as though something miraculous were about to happen. The second thought he always had was how once he fully entered the room, the poster disappeared from the patient’s view, blocked by the door’s arc and trapped behind his white coat.

“Are you the doctor?” the woman seated on the patient bed asked, as though his coat and explicit nametag, along with the bulging clipboard, were not hints enough. He checked the board.

“Nancy Beichner?” the doctor asked. He nearly stumbled as his heel caught on a tuft of the bright orange shag carpeting layered over the ground. Dr. Conrad cursed under his breath as he recalled the former co-worker who’d latched onto that trend. Thick carpeting was meant to provide a more “homey” feel to expecting mothers. Bryce Conrad wasn’t certain that the carpeting projected “home-ness,” but a handful of old rust-colored stains attested to the fact that it definitely absorbed body fluids…and defied cleaning. He licked his dry lips as he teetered on the edges of his toes struggling to regain his footing without launching his clipboard toward his new patient.

“You’re getting close, I see,” he said, letting his eyes fall to her baby bump, jutting out with a thin inch-wide strip of pale cream-colored skin showing between a bright-white top with tiny flowers decorating each intersection of threading, and overly-tight bell-bottom pants that most women seemed to wear since the seventies began. “First child?” he asked.

Nancy nodded. Her frantic eyes followed him as he approached her with his hand extended. After considering it for a second, eyes flicking between his hand and his hopefully jovial smile, she lay her hand in his with all of the daintiness of a Southern debutant.

“Bryce Conrad,” he said, as he shook her hand gently. “You can call me Dr. Conrad.”

“Hi Dr. Conrad,” she said, offering a weak smile. “I guess you know my name. I go by Nancy. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”

“Certainly. So…Nancy, why are you here today? I understand you already have a doctor to help manage your pregnancy, is that right?”

“Dr. Stockhart,” Nancy said. “She…no longer practices. There was that—”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I remember. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

He wanted to smack himself in the forehead. Stockhart had shocked all of them when she’d killed herself via drug overdose, from the looks of it, intentional. And he should have remembered that because the woman’s name was right there on the same page as Nancy’s name.

Great job, Bryce, he chastised himself.

Another man’s throat-clearing was followed by a slow shuffling sound. The unexpected company caught Dr. Conrad’s attention, drawing it toward the same door through which Dr. Conrad had just passed. Someone, a male someone, lingered there, pacing in small, slow circles. It didn’t seem as though the man had noticed the doctor’s entrance.

“I haven’t felt them kick,” she confessed. “Not for two days. I just wanted to know if—” She trailed off without completing the sentence, but Dr. Conrad got the gist of it: concerned mother-to-be checking on their child. This should be a simple, routine checkup, though it was curious to him why she felt obliged to bring the gentleman along.

“Is this your husband?” Dr. Conrad asked loudly, in a thinly veiled effort to stop the man’s pacing and draw his engagement to the discussion they were about to have about the couple’s unborn child.

“Yes,” she said, motioning to the man with her head as an embarrassed flush waxed crawled up her neck into her features, then drained again slowly from the high cheekbones of her diamond-shaped face. She turned toward the man, eyes oozing adoration, “he’s my one and only. Wolf, this is Dr. Conrad.”

The disinterested husband didn’t turn, or even acknowledge. That gave Dr. Conrad time to examine him without consequence. The man had the chiseled facial features of a male runway model, though his body was so thin and short that his head seemed a touch too large for him, lolling at times atop his neck. When the man nodded absently at some thought only he knew, he reminded Dr. Conrad of wobbler toys, with their disjointed heads bobbing up and down. And he wondered vaguely what the woman’s interest in this man actually was.

The man muttered something Dr. Conrad couldn’t hear, causing the doctor to swivel his head for a more direct gaze where he noticed that the man’s eyes had snagged on something. At least, the man’s movement ceased and he seemed to stare at the poster now, despite it being mostly concealed between the door angle and the doctor’s positioning. The man now studied it with near fatalistic intent, shifting his weight hungrily back and forth as the completely impractical carpet attempted to swallow the glossy corefram shoes that peaked out beneath his army-gray wide-hemmed slacks that touched the floor on either side of their pointed toes. 

The doctor turned his attention to the stack of papers fixed to his clipboard.

“First thing, from what I see here, the baby is fine,” he said. “Sometimes they just don’t feel like moving. And…it looks like…you’ve had an ultrasound recently?” he asked. “Has anyone gone over it with you yet?”

Nancy shook her head. “No, not yet. We don’t—didn’t want to know the sex.”

“And now?”

“All this time I didn’t know what to call them, whether a little boy or a little girl. They might have been dying and I didn’t know. I think I need to know, Dr. Conrad.”

Dr. Conrad flipped a couple of pages, and sure enough there was a copy of the ultrasound image. He examined it for a second, then lifted his eyes toward the woman, followed by a quick eyebrow raise toward the still-pacing husband. “Are you certain?”

She bit her lower lip as she followed the doctor’s gaze toward her husband, whose back was now fully to her. A mischievous grin floated across her face as she glanced to the side, then nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Mrs. Beichner,” he said softly, looking at the blobby black-and-white image, and squinting. He flipped a page. No hints from the ultrasound tech. He flipped back. “Uh…Mrs. Beichner,” he stuttered again, trying to interpret the ultrasound blurred in precisely the wrong places. The sex of the child was either male, or a female with overly pronounced sexual organs. He rolled the dice in his head. Odds of the child being intersex were roughly just under two percent, and there was nothing to be done anyway, at least by the woman right then, if that was the case. His lips formed a thin line as he thought it out. “It’s a boy,” he said softly.

“Are you sure?” Nancy asked, clearly picking up on his hesitation.

“I’m sure,” he said, and then again: “I’m sure. A healthy-looking, happy, baby boy.”

The look in her was fluid, and difficult to read after that. The emtions written across the face of the hopeful mother oscillated between pitious, drooping exhaustion, and unrestrained joy. He sought to bolster the latter by pointing out the things in the sonogram that he could see more clearly.

“Ten fingers,” he said with a smile as he stroked his graying beard, “and ten tiny toes. A perfect little boy. You should be a happy mama.”

She smiled at this, flashing a couple of perfect white teeth between lips just a shade too dark red to be natural.

“Did you hear that, Wolf?” she asked. Dr. Conrad assumed that Wolf was the husband’s first name—unusual, but not the strangest he’d heard. “Table” was the strangest, given to a little girl by a couple of hippies who were neither aesthetically beautiful, nor seemed disciplined enough to care for a newborn. He shuddered to think what had happened to that child, born only a handful of months earlier.

The fact that his child was male didn’t change Wolf’s attentitiveness. He seemed disinterested, or perhaps even preturbed, as his pace quickened. Nancy asked Dr. Conrad once if he was absolutely sure that it was a boy. The man continued to pace as the doctor explained that yes, it was a boy, and in the ultrasound, you could just seen his forming penis protruding just barely above what the doctor assured her was a scrotal sack. It may not have been. And honestly, could have been a smudge on the ultrasound created by a careless tech. Dr. Conrad would have a visit to the ultrasound department to make after he finished up with the Beichners.

“You wanted…a boy…right?” the doctor asked, careful to leave emphasis off of every word. His question finally stopped the father’s pacing for long enough to respond. “A girl,” the thin man murmured beneath his dark reddish-brown mane, without directly acknowledging the doctor’s existence. Wolf ran his fingers through his prematurely-graying matching red moustache and muttered something to himself that Dr. Conrad couldn’t make out. But he’d had enough of the man and turned his focus back to the woman.

Nancy reminded the doctor of his own mother. It wasn’t her features. The woman’s dark black hair, coal-black, looked nothing like his late mother’s golden locks. Nor did the woman’s roundish face match the Nordick features that the doctor’s mother had passed on to him, with his hawkish gray eyes and sharp cut chin. But the way the woman gazed toward the Dr. Conrad’s clipboard, still opened to the ultrasound image, as though she’d already met the child, and was ready to love him no matter that he wasn’t the girl that they’d been expecting.

In a similar respect, the man unfortunately reminded the doctor of his own father, down to the disinterest that the men shared toward anything familial. In a future the doctor could have predicted, the misery that he’d felt at his father’s hands for so many years would soon be visited upon the man’s offspring. Caught offguard by his own emotions, the doctor slipped slightly, staggering from the weight of churning memories.

The entire room went black. To Dr. Conrad’s surprise, the impact on the soon-to-be family was minimized to only an interruption in the father’s rapid pacing. Nearly a minute passed in total darkness in the windowless interior room, before the lights slowly warmed their way back to blinding brightness. 

Nancy looked up at her husband, her eyebrows furrowed into a tent of worry. There was something between them, the doctor could see now. If he had to guess, and he did because in no way was he going to ask about that look, a shared secret lingered between them, one so intense that it may very well have been the only thing keeping their relationship together. But, Dr. Conrad reminded himself, I’m still not psychic.

“What was that?” Nancy asked, likely about the faltering lighting, her disproportionate fear transforming the soft husk of her voice, rending it into a pitch that bordered on squeal.

“Nothing,” Wolf muttered, though he stood transfixed, as though listening for the next thing to happen. When nothing did after another fifteen seconds, Bryce Conrad saw something flicker away behind his eyes. Dr. Conrad addressed Nancy, determined to deflect some of the anxiety of the moment with a bit of levity.

“Well, at least there’s nothing to worry about with the baby. He looks as healthy as he should be, and your workup seems better than normal. You are a natural at this,” he stated boldly, then, “Now our lighting on the other hand, seems like it could use some work.” Dr. Conrad let out a low chuckle, but neither Wolf nor Nancy joined in.

Despite not playing along, the expectant mother did seem less worried at his words, and eventually offered a small mercy smile in gratitude. The man seemed more concerned at the doctor’s words, somehow. His pacing resumed and his stare at the door intensified until the doctor surmised that maybe he was less thinking of leaving, which he could have done at any time, than waiting for someone else to arrive, although the doctor couldn’t imagine who it might be the man thought would interrupt them. As though he’d thrown the question haughtily at the universe itself, the universe answered. The door bursted open and three men in dark suits entered abreast each other. Had they been any more abreast of each other, they would have gotten stuck in the doorway. The woman looked up at the man, her frown back and deepening.

“Work?” she asked.

“Work,” he responded gruffly.

“Do you have to?” she asked, tears gathering in her eyes. “This is our time, to celebrate our baby. What could possibly be so important to take you away right now?”

The doctor almost gasped at the reprimand he hadn’t expected. He shoved his glasses up over his hooked nose and listened to the argument unfold.

“You knew when you—” the man said.

But that wasn’t it. Whatever secret it was between them, it was stronger than his disinterest, and stronger than her resistence.

“—married you. I know. Go then,” she said, though her resignation bore within it a tinge of disgust. “Service your masters.”

“You know my service is to save—”

She sighed. “I know. I know. Just…I want some time for us too. You can’t save the world all by yourself, Wolf. There must be someone else you can lean on, so you can spend a little time with your family?” Her hand moved to her belly, and rested there.

To the doctor’s surprise, the man snapped into the conversation. Wolf knelt beside her and took her hand in his own, an awkward move given that she was currently sitting on a patient’s bed, and so her knees were about even with his face. He did it anyway, lifting his hands above his shoulders to reach hers.

“I love you,” he said, not breaking eye contact. Dr. Conrad watched her shoulders sag after Wolf’s declaration, but she didn’t respond. Dr. Conrad presumed that the battle for his attention had been going on for a while. The man stood, turned quickly with a militaristic pivot,  gave a quick look back, and followed the interlopers from the room. The woman once again reached toward the sonogram image, apparently having already forgotten about the man in favor of the son she would one day get to raise. She smiled, but it seemed to take effort, and Dr. Conrad no longer believed the unadulterated join her mouth projected as her fingers made contact with the clipboard. 

“My boy,” she said with glassy eyes. Her fingers brushed against his little head. “My beautiful son.”

Dr. Conrad gave her a sympathetic touch on the shoulder. Her hand lay atop his a moment later, pressing his fingers down on her shoulderblade, slipping his index finger perhaps unintentionally toward her bare clavicle of the wide-necked shirt. By their touch, he discerned her too-rapid pulse as her heart forced the blood in her veins to move faster, faster, to flee some unknown danger. That touch revealed anxiety, fear, and hope all wrapped up into the nearly inperceptible vibration of the woman’s slender neck. She squeezed his hand once before she dropped her hand back down to her baby bump again, humming a tune he could feel in the vibration of her skin more than hear.

The lights flickered once more and her hand found his again, gripping fiercely. Something in the changes in the light scared her. To him it was just the faulty electrical wiring of an old hospital that many said needed to be demolished and rebuilt. To her, there was something else in it. Maybe she was a spiritualist, and maybe it was a ghost she feared, letting her imagination steal her common sense. Or perhaps it was that shared secret again, that thing that locked this clearly negligent husband into a life with a woman deserving of so much more.

He was projecting again. Dr. Conrad pulled his hand away slowly. This wouldn’t be the only woman in his Denver office in nineteen seventy nine who would trigger his protective instincts. He couldn’t save them all from poor life decisions. And he was only one doctor. Whatever fear gripped her now, he knew, it would be nothing compared to the fear of trying to protect a curious infant, a life force so dependent on her that her neglect could kill him in minutes. Whatever fear she now felt would pale compared to that, but as well, he knew by his own three children at home, whatever love she thought she knew now would be a drop in the ocean of the new depths of love she would experience as well.

It was his turn to sigh as he turned to leave the room. The lights flickered again, and he saw her hand go up to where his had been, but his fingers were no longer there. She turned, confused, toward him as he flashed an apologetic smile.

“The nurse will be in soon,” he assured her before he turned toward the door, shut tight after Wolf’s exit. Across the top of the painting were those familiar words he knew by heart, or so he thought. Something seemed off as he looked on. The star clinging to the top, he’d thought, had been a six-pointed star of David. But the one he now saw only had five points, the type of star a child might draw in a second grade art class, complete with uneven points drawn in the same gold, but with the stroke a child might also use. He scrunched up an eyebrow at it. More likely, he told himself, I was mistaken before. This sentiment was comforting enough until he read the words again:

There are as many types of beautiful children as there are stars in the sky—every one as beautiful, inside and out.

Could I have been so wrong about that? he asked himself. Bryce Conrad rubbed his eyes. He casually blamed exhaustion as he worried the door open, before stumbling slightly from the thick carpeting onto the linoleum flooring.