Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

You ponder this, then say, as if it were your own idea:

All we’re doing is fulfilling her dream, is your point.

My point is no harm, no foul.

You sneak a peek at her and then look back at the Mitsubishi wide-screen television and hold out the remote like a raygun to turn down the volume.

She gets what she wants, you say in the new stillness, beginning to incorporate this information into your field of perception, and we get what we want. No one’s hurt. Nothing bad happens to anyone.

Everyone’s simply more hopeful than before.

You ponder this as well, then turn to her and say:

One can almost think of this as the dictionary definition of a white lie.

Plus, well… plus it can’t exactly be unsaid once it’s said, can it?

It would devastate her, you say.

It would be ten times worse than never having said it in the first place.

You ponder this, too.

So we’re committed, basically, you say after a while.

The Olympic skier halfway down the jump, says Andi.

Because there’s nothing else we can do, really, is there?

Nothing at all, Andi says, reaching for the remote. No.

Or, say, the way your mother called one morning to let you know your father had coughed up a clot of blood during the night.

The way you stood at the picture window watching Andi pruning shrubs in your front yard in northern New Jersey, listening to your mother explain, her voice agitated.

Andi in jean cut-offs and an old t-shirt.

A blank old t-shirt that said nothing.

The turnpike tinging the sky brown-yellow like the skies in old photographs.

The way, when she noticed you watching, she stood and smiled, first wiping something from her left cheek with her gloved right hand, then arching in a luxurious stretch.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was , Diane Arbus once said.

The glistening entrails of a small bird in a handkerchief.

That red, you imagined, standing there.

That white.

Andi smiling into the cloudy sunshine, eyes shut, enjoying the faultless day.

Enjoying the apparently faultless day.

Now opening her eyes again and beginning to walk toward you framed in the window, into the process of aging.

THE REAL IS EXACTLY LIKE THE UNREAL, only more aesthetically disappointing.

Take this ultrasound.

What purports to be this ultrasound.

It is precisely what it purports to be.

You know this because you locate it on an obstetrics web site, download it, and, besides changing its format from jpeg to photographic negative, you leave it exactly as you found it: gray and grainy, poorly cropped, interpretively indeterminate.

It is precisely what it purports to be, assuming the obstetrics web site is an obstetrics web site and not, say, an artist’s web site masquerading as an obstetrics web site.

You can never really be sure, of course.

To the untrained eye, to your eye, it is impossible to tell whether the subject is a boy or a girl, what its state of health might be, why it has unfurled from fetal curl into sea-turtle crawl.

It is so imperfect as to seem deliberately staged.

An observation which puts you in mind of a story you once read on another web site, which may or may not have been accurate:

Years after he became a superstar, Joe Cocker fell on hard times and returned to his rough neighborhood in Sheffield to regroup. One evening he went down to the corner pub to have himself a pint. No sooner had he raised the drink to his lips than someone at the other end of the bar told him to knock off with the Joe Cocker act.

I’m not doing a Joe Cocker act, Joe Cocker said. I’m Joe Cocker.

Bollocks, mate, said the man at the other end of the bar. Lay off. It’s fucking pathetic.

It’s not bollocks. You’re looking at Joe Cocker hisself.

If you’re Joe fucking Cocker, another patron joined in, then sing us a bit of the blues. Go on. Sing us “Delta Lady” or whatsit.

I don’t sing anymore, Joe Cocker said.

Sod off, you sorry fuck, the first patron said.

I won’t sod off, replied Joe Cocker. I’m him. I swear blind. I just gave up with the music bit a while.

Shall we show ’im some real Joe Cocker, then? asked the second patron.

Right, said the first. Let’s.

And so they dragged him into the alley behind the pub and beat him senseless for looking so much like himself.

Yet in that small translation from jpeg to negative the ultrasound becomes something more than an ultrasound.

Change its context and you change the codes you employ to read it.

Change the codes you employ to read it and you change its essence.

Essence perhaps being too strong a word.

Even though its surface details have not altered, the ultrasound becomes modified in complicated if difficult-to-articulate ways.

Gray and grainy, say, becomes interestingly textured. Poorly cropped becomes richly suggestive. Interpretively indeterminate becomes abundant with meaning.

In that instant of translation, simple documentation eases toward composition.

One must always tell what one sees , Charles Péguy once said. But above all, which is more difficult, one must always see what one sees .

For more than a decade after you were married, Andi and you discussed the prospect of children diligently and on a fairly regular basis.

You took the matter seriously.

You did not joke around about it any.

Have them, you decided, and you are doing nothing more nor less than making a bid to perpetuate your own genes.

Have them, and you are attempting to produce another human being over whom by default you have earned the right to exert blanket control for five to thirteen years, moderate control for five to eight more, and minimal if frequently surreptitious and psychologically damaging control for decades to come.

Do not have them, and you are making a bid to perpetuate your own selfishness, denying a certain sort of citizenly responsibility.

Do not have them, and you are evincing a puerile repudiation of maturation.

And yet you could not shake the feeling that children are not so much children as a breed of defective adults.

They do everything adults do, that is, except they do it much worse.

Being as they are, for instance, noisy, messy, and egomaniacal.

Noisy, messy, egomaniacal, and cruel, combative, recalcitrant, näive, needy, histrionic, uninformed, opinionated, untruthful, insecure, moody, amoral, and physically and emotionally destructive.

Neither you nor Andi ever especially liked being around them, either.

You never knew what to say or how to behave in their presence.

Plus, Andi whispered, turning to you one night in the middle of a northern New Jersey movie theater in the middle of a lightweight spoof about the wacky adorable things kids do, I don’t want something alien growing inside me.

You glanced over at her, mouth stuffed with artificially butter-flavored carbohydrates and fiber, to see if she was pulling your leg.

She was not.

Swallowing, you whispered:

Fair enough. But experts on Oprah say that motherhood is all about nurturing and joy.

I don’t want something forming inside me that literally makes me sick, day after day. Sciatica. Vomiting. The unstoppable need to urinate.

She helped herself to a handful of your popcorn.

Constipation, she added. Varicose veins.

The young couple behind you shushed you.

Andi turned in her seat and shushed them back.