Carola Dibbell - The Only Ones

She wants to draw my blood and put it in her by transfusion so she will get Compatibility from that.

She hung up.

Janet made Rauden call back and say he’s sorry — you can’t talk to a client like that or they will take their money and go. Well, Rini did get over it, but still. It’s not like anybody knows what to do. Rauden is on the phone to Henry every day.

Janet heard of some guaranteed virgins available in Homer.

Rauden says, Janet, for God’s sake don’t you understand anything? That’s not what it’s about. So now he has to say he’s sorry to Janet too. At least he doesn’t have to say he’s sorry to me, but even if he did, even if he says he’s sorry to all of us, that doesn’t help the main thing.

We cannot find a goddamn Host. I don’t know why they’re even bothering with my Harvest. He already has twelve viables left on ice from the Cahoonzie group that nobody knows what to do with. Rini didn’t work as Host. The virgin didn’t work as virgin. I work as Donor but if Host doesn’t work, none of it works.

And to tell the truth, it looks like it won’t. We went so far and after all that, it’s not going to work.

Then Henry showed up one day with some guy in whiskers with a check shirt and diagrams, Rauden says, I, come along, and we all go to Four Corners and look at what he got. His name was Lucas. He lived in a Quonset at the bottom of a hill with mud, a few pigs and a cow and a shed. He took us in the shed and we checked the thing out.

Henry is looking at the hardware. Rauden is looking at some tubes. Lucas is pretty much just looking at me, but he explains to Rauden, “They pump the stuff in from some cow. You give her shots.”

“What’s the track record?” Rauden asked.

“Last time all four worked.”

Rauden whistled.

“Whose product?” Henry asked.

“Violet 4.”

They all nodded at that, like, oh! Violet 4.

“And how did they come out?” That’s Rauden.

Lucas shrugged. “Alive. Three of them still are.”

When Rauden came back to the Farm he told Janet to track Rini down and get her on the phone. He had a plan.

Well, when you hear what the plan is, maybe you will think this is so open minded, our head blew off.

Even Rini, on the speaker-phone from Toronto, shouted, “This is beyond unethical! Even for cows it is unethical.”

“Let’s not split hairs, Rini.”

“Put Inez on. You would do this, Inez? Did Rauden say how long it’s going to take?”

I said it’s ok with me. The deCon work is freelance. I could pick it up again when this is done. Rauden is mouthing at me, “Pitch her, I,” but all I could think of to say was, “Don’t you want to see what will happen?”

Rini didn’t even know if she did want that. Maybe she didn’t.

You can be sure that Rauden did. At this point, I think he would of gone ahead even without her. It’s true Rini already put some money down but nobody ever signed anything. It was my product. It was his time. It was even his storage. But come on. It’s her child.

He kept on her case. “I don’t say this Host always works, even with livestock,” I heard him explain on the phone, “but the great thing is, it’s technically not alive. So it can’t die.” Then, when he finished coughing, Rauden added, “And then, obviously — it’s not going to run off with the child.”

We all knew why he said it. It was her bottom line. We all really knew she would agree in the end. She was mad with grief. Maybe this plan is not the best one Rauden ever had, but face it. It’s the only one left.

iii

It took about two weeks to get the parts for this new plan and the whole time, Rini is calling two, three times a day to say she changed her mind. “It would not be my genes! It would not be my womb!” She is on speaker so everybody hears. “IT WOULD NOT EVEN BE MY MITOCHONDRIA!”

“Rini!” Rauden yelled back. “It’s an adoption. An open adoption — so goddamn open you can watch the whole nine months through a high-powered scope right up till the kid is goddamn born! But when it is, Rini! This child will be very, very special. Gotta go!” And he’s off to buy a new backup generator.

What will be special, Henry says to me, is if after nine months in that cockamamie hoo-ha Lucas dreamed up, the kid is still alive.

Uh oh. Rini again. She got the same idea.

“What if my child dies before she’s born?”

“We do multiples!” Rauden just got back with the generator. He is wiping sweat off his forehead. “Five. That’s more than I’ve ever done with cows,” he tells Henry and me, “but Rini doesn’t need to know.” Rini already has enough trouble getting behind this hoo-ha plan, without the cow details.

She stopped calling for a while. I think she had some meetings.

Leaves were falling when Rauden drove me to Port Jervis for my Harvest. An even dozen eggs! He just froze them for now. He froze everything — he even had froze the uterus tissue that fell out of me in Port Jervis. He’s going to thaw that for this new thing. It’s going to need a lining. The regular way got a lining. They want to make it as regular as they could. They are even going to mike my heartbeat in.

Rini again. “This is not what we discussed. I do not need all five. Inez must take one.” Remember she was afraid I’ll run off with it?

“Will you give me a break, here?” Rauden is try to find a working BoardokriIt is not real.”e at the Farm.ing to hook up the new generator. “What’s Inez going to do with a child?” But she hung tough and finally he just said fine. Inez will take one child. But he told me don’t worry. It’s never going to happen. Some of them will die for sure, and one of the ones that dies will be the one Rini said is mine.

When Lucas showed up with the last parts, him and Rauden put the thing together in the basement. Remember those little rooms three steps down where I watched him make viables? You go from there down more stairs to a big dark basement room behind a door no one will even know is a door if they don’t already know it is. We been fixing this room for days. They had to rewire and put paint on the walls and floor. They let me help paint. Rauden and Lucas put up a wall inside so it will be two smaller rooms, one what they call a rec room next to the inside room where everything is going to happen, and they put a glassed window in this wall, so you can watch.

They brought in two sofas, six chairs, one card table that Janet did not need. There will also be a monitor like Rauden had when he made the viables. You need a monitor to scope to because what’s going to happen will be very small, at least at first.

Ten viables are on ice to thaw as needed. They will use five, to start. Each will have its own section so he can take out any that die without touching the others, but there was a sort of layer they would share, a track made of plexi, the soft kind. The section walls are plexi too, and the whole thing looked a little like an orange, the sections of an orange, except there were just five sections. They’re not calling it an orange though, or even Host. They call it the tank.

They had a frame for it to hang from, which was on wheels, so you could move it, and there were springs. Henry put a thermometer outside the tank so you could read how warm the tank is. It had to be warm. The lights mattered. It had to be dark in the room. But you had to see a little, so they put in special orange lights. The backup generator worked. The backup for the backup generator worked. It still required manual override in case of an outage, but this is not a problem. Someone would be there all the time.

The Port Jervis stuff is thawed and in place. They set me up on IV and did a few dry runs with my blood.