Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Inside the cab I reached for her hand. What exactly had happened? I did not know. Does this mean, I asked myself, that back in the surgery, somewhere in that surgery, in some plastic bag or some disposal bin, imprinted with words like organic matter , is that where something is, something that isn’t a child but was the focus of a vision of the future, my vision, that had already acquired my love, not earned it, not deserved it, a love that went back through me, through generations upon generations of evolution? Can I ask what they did to you? I said to her.

I had an ultrasound, she replied, and then they gave me a pill and I have to take another one in two days.

Another ultrasound?

Another pill.

The road headed back north, and as we crossed the river I looked out onto the ribbons of silver twisting across the water, and I felt I was witnessing a time I would remember. But as the city’s murmur rose about us, her hand slipped away. Her hand slipped away, and I knew that this child would follow me all the days of my life.

Am I not entitled to grieve? Am I not entitled to my emotions? Are we to be held responsible for the deepest feelings over which we have no dominion? In any civilized criminal law, our state of mind alone is never enough to condemn us: There has to be an act. But does morality judge us for our feelings?

You don’t have to justify anything to me, Zafar.

This is what I was asking myself. And by not saying anything before, I believed I had lost the right to speak afterward, the right merely to express my feelings, which were not about regret but were in the nature of mourning.

* * *

Do you know what a period is made of? Actually, do you know what a tree is made of?

A tree?

To be precise, do you know where the stuff a tree is made of — where that stuff comes from?

Is this a trick question?

There’s nothing misleading in the question.

It gets its nutrients from the ground, I said.

A tree is mostly made of wood and wood is mostly carbon, which is why it’s burned for fire. Where does that carbon come from? Trees take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and breathe out oxygen. Photosynthesis strips out the oxygen — the dioxide — in carbon dioxide and releases it into the atmosphere, but what about the carbon? The carbon remains in the tree and the tree grows. In other words, trees grow out of the air.

I did not know that.

I read a story somewhere in which a woman said that when she was an adolescent coming into puberty, her mother, Boston Irish, explained to her that a period was the body crying because a child was not being born.

That’s horrible.

Do you know what a woman’s period is? What the stuff is?

Isn’t it the placenta?

It’s the endometrium. The placenta is formed only when a woman is pregnant. The endometrium is a membrane lining the uterus. It keeps the walls of the uterus from sticking together.

Well, there’s something else I didn’t know.

Nor did I, but six months after the termination I did some research. I told you that I asked Emily if she’d heard from you. We were in a cab. We were on our way to a restaurant, and while rooting about for her powder kit, she let slip she hadn’t spoken to you since I was in hospital. Let me tell you what happened in the restaurant.

Near the end of the meal, Emily’s phone rang and, as always, she stepped away to take the call. I sat sipping the coffee, with an eye out for the waiter to ask for the check. At the next table were two women, in their midthirties I guessed, though I didn’t see them face on. They were sitting not opposite each other but at an intimate right angle, with me behind them. I overheard only a snippet, when one woman said with urgency in her voice: You know you have to decide soon. You can’t take the pill after nine weeks. They just don’t let you, and after that things get a lot more complicated.

Because of overhearing that, I did some research and some arithmetic. It came down to knowing how to count and knowing where to begin counting.

* * *

Emily had had a medical abortion. She said it herself, that’s what it means to have an ultrasound and a pill one day and another pill two days later, and there was no reason for her to lie about that. And I was there when the cramping started, when she holed herself up in the bathroom. I’ve thought about why she didn’t lie at that moment, when I asked her what had happened in the clinic, and it seems plausible enough to me that she was preoccupied when I asked, too preoccupied to think through the ramifications of what she was sharing. And perhaps she was implicitly relying on a man’s ignorance of the workings of a woman’s body, not to mention the ins and outs of such medication.

When she told me she was pregnant, I calculated she must have been seven or eight weeks into the pregnancy, and by that reckoning she would have been fifteen weeks pregnant when she had the termination. But in the U.K. in 2000, doctors couldn’t prescribe the abortion pill for pregnancies over nine weeks. So she was lying to me about the gestation.

Couldn’t she have simply been mistaken?

Only if she was mistaken when she told me but not mistaken when she spoke to the doctor. Even if she was only mistaken, the question arises why she didn’t correct my misapprehension on any of the many occasions it was manifest.

Of course. I see.

The next question is: Why would she be lying about the gestation? First, she couldn’t have got pregnant after I came out of hospital. For one thing, one week after I came out she told me she was pregnant. That’s almost certainly not long enough to get pregnant and miss a period in order to find out you’re pregnant. You see, the window of fertility is roughly speaking a six- or seven-day interval centered on the fourteen-day mark.

What fourteen-day mark? I’m not as smart as you; you’ll have to go slowly.

You’re smart, all right. You just haven’t given it as much attention as I have. Fourteen days after LMP.

LMP?

The first day of a woman’s last menstrual period.

Okay. I’m lost, I said.

If she missed her period, continued Zafar, took a pregnancy test, and told me she was pregnant all on the very same day, she would have had to have become pregnant at least ten days before that day. But I was in hospital until seven days before she told me. Put another way, if she and I had had sex the day I came out of hospital and she got pregnant as a result, she couldn’t know for at least ten days, at the earliest, that she was pregnant, which means she wouldn’t have known for at least a further three days after she actually told me. Do you see?

I assume you’ve worked the numbers.

Actually, that’s exactly what I did. I put together a spreadsheet to stress-test the numbers.

Are you serious?

I’d be stupid not to. I had to be sure.

So you got her pregnant before you went into hospital?

We had sex two weeks before I went into hospital. I was in hospital for five weeks. She had the termination eight weeks after I came out. That’s a total of fifteen weeks. She had a medical abortion which, as I say, means that she could not have been more than nine weeks pregnant when she had the termination. In other words, I couldn’t have got her pregnant before I went into hospital and in fact no one could, not before I went into hospital. But we can narrow down the interval even more. Remember, she carried the baby for seven weeks after she told me she was pregnant, and it was one week after I came out of hospital that she told me she was pregnant. Which means she must have missed one period before then — if she’d missed two, she’d have been at least six weeks pregnant when she told me and she wouldn’t have been given a medical abortion four weeks later. If you do the arithmetic, making sure to take account of the fact that she’d missed one period but not two when she told me, and the fact that the clock on a pregnancy formally starts on the LMP, then the conclusion is that she conceived at some time during the second week I was in hospital, give or take a few days. I know what you’re thinking.