He went into the adjoining bathroom, closing the door to give her privacy—this man who was about to peer between her spread legs. Hannah was grateful nonetheless for his discretion. She folded her skirt neatly, laid it on the chair and then tucked her panties beneath it, another gesture of decorum she knew to be ludicrous under the circumstances but couldn’t help making. Being naked from the waist down made her feel dirtier somehow than if she were completely nude. Hurriedly, she got on the table and covered herself. Forced herself to say, “I’m ready.”
THE PUNISHMENT TONE sounded, jerking her back into her cell, back into her bleeding body. It all comes down to blood, she thought, as she took the tampons and the wipes from the compartment and used them. Blood that comes out of you and blood that doesn’t. Mechanically, she cleaned the floor, flushed the stained wipes, washed her hands and changed her tunic, making no attempt to shield her nakedness. And when it doesn’t, when you wait and pray and wait some more and still it doesn’t come … She lay down on her side on the sleeping pallet, wrapped her arms around her knees and wept.
HOW MANY DAYS HAD SHE been here? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? She didn’t know, and her ignorance made her anxious. There were gaps of time she couldn’t account for, moments when she seemed to wake from a sleep she suspected had never occurred. She came out of these spells sweaty and hoarse, with a mouth full of cotton. Had she been talking to herself out loud? Raving? Revealing something she shouldn’t have?
She tried to stave off the spells with reading and pacing, but increasingly she felt too listless for either. Her reflection in the mirror had grown gaunt. She had no appetite, and she’d developed the ability to tune out the punishment tone to the point where it was just a distant, annoying whine, like a mosquito flying past her ear. She’d stopped taking her daily showers and her body smelled of stale sweat, but even this was a matter of indifference to her. Her usual fastidiousness had vanished along with her energy.
When she was lucid, the thing she feared most was that she’d said something to betray Raphael. The police had picked her up in the parking lot after a call from a suspicious neighbor, but Raphael had been long gone by that point, and as far as she knew they’d never caught him. She’d given them a false description, waiting until the third time they interrogated her before pretending to break and describing a slender, blond man in his thirties with an Earth First symbol tattooed on his right wrist. What Hannah didn’t know was that the neighbors had seen a heavyset older man leave the apartment. Once the police caught her lying, they were merciless. They questioned her repeatedly, sometimes harshly, other times with an unctuous concern for her welfare that a first grader could have seen through. She stuck to her story, against her lawyer’s advice and despite her father’s entreaties. She would not betray Raphael, with his earnest handshake and sad eyes.
She could have, though. He’d certainly told her enough about himself for the police to identify him. When he’d finished and was cleaning up, and Hannah was still woozy from the painkillers, she’d asked him why he did it. What she meant but didn’t say was, How can you bear to do it? By that point, Raphael had had more sips from the flask and was in a talkative mood. He told her he’d been an OB/GYN in Salt Lake City when the superclap pandemic broke out (the crude slang term discomfited her; in her world, it was always referred to as “the Great Scourge”), and Utah became the nexus of the conservative backlash (“the Rectification”) that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The decision had been cause for celebration in the Payne household, but Raphael spoke of it with anger, and of the Sanctity of Life laws Utah had passed soon afterward, with outrage. Even more abhorrent to him than the lack of exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s health was the abrogation of doctor-patient privilege. Legally, he was bound to notify the police if he found evidence that a patient had had a recent abortion; morally, he felt bound not to. Morality won. When he got caught falsifying the results of pelvic examinations, the state took away his medical license, and he left Salt Lake City for Dallas.
Hannah had been eleven when Texas passed its own version of the SOL laws. Not many doctors had openly protested, but the ones who had were vociferous. She could still remember their impassioned testimony before the legislature and their angry response when the laws, which were almost identical to Utah’s, inevitably won passage. Most of the objectors had left Texas in protest, and their like-minded colleagues in the other forty states that eventually passed similar statutes had followed suit. “Good riddance to them. California and New York can have them,” her mother had said, and Hannah had felt much the same. How could anyone sworn to preserve life condone the taking of it or seek to protect those who’d taken it, especially when the future of the human race was at stake? That was the third year of the scourge, and though no one close to Hannah had caught it, they were all infected by the fear and desperation that gripped the world as increasing numbers of women became sterile and birthrates plummeted. The prejudicial nature of the disease—men were carriers, but they had few if any symptoms or complications—hindered efforts to detect and contain it. In the fourth year of the pandemic, Hannah, along with every other American between the ages of twelve and sixty-five, went in for the first of many mandatory biannual screenings, and by the time the cure was found in the seventh year, there’d been talk of quarantining and compulsory harvesting of the eggs of healthy young women, measures that Congress almost certainly would have passed had the superbiotics come any later. As distressing as the prospect had been, Hannah was well aware that if she lived in a country like China or India, she would have already been forcibly inseminated. Humanity’s survival demanded sacrifices of everyone, moral as well as physical. Not even her parents had objected when the president suspended melachroming for misdemeanor offenses and pardoned all Yellows under the age of forty, ordering that their chroming be reversed and their birth control implants removed. And when he’d authorized the death penalty for kidnapping a child, Hannah’s parents had supported the decision, though it went against their faith. Child-snatching had become so endemic that wealthy and even middle-class families with young children traveled with bodyguards. Hannah and Becca were too old to be targets, but their mother still glared at any woman whose eyes rested on them too hungrily or for too long. “Remember this, girls,” she’d say when they encountered one of the childless women who loitered like forlorn ghosts around playgrounds and parks, in toy stores and museums. “This is what comes of sex outside of marriage.”
And this, Hannah thought now, studying her red reflection in the mirror. She’d been so certain of everything in those days: that she’d never have premarital sex, never be one of those sad women, never, ever have an abortion. She, Hannah, was incapable of such terrible wrongdoing.
It still surprised her that Raphael hadn’t seen it as such. In his mind, it was the SOL laws that were wrong, and those who espoused them who were guilty of a crime. His deepest contempt was reserved for other doctors: not just those who’d supported and enforced the laws, but also those who’d remained mute out of fear. When Hannah asked him why he’d stayed in Texas instead of going to one of the pro-Roe states, he shook his head and took a swig from the flask. “I suppose I should have, but I was young and hotheaded, saw myself as a revolutionary. I let them talk me into staying here.”
“Who?”
Raphael froze momentarily and then turned away from her, visibly agitated. “Her, I mean, my wife—that’s what I meant to say. She’s from here. She wanted to be near her sister, they’re very close.” He fumbled to close his bag, and Hannah didn’t need to see the bare fourth finger of his left hand to know he was lying.
She felt a dull cramping sensation in her abdomen and clutched it involuntarily.
“You can expect quite a bit of cramping and bleeding for the next several days,” Raphael said. “Take Tylenol for the pain, not ibuprofen or aspirin. And stay off your feet as much as you can.”
He went to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. “The money. Did you bring it?”
“Oh. Yes. Sorry.” Hannah looked in her purse, took out the cash card she’d bought that morning and handed it to him. He thrust it into his pocket without even checking the amount.
“Lights off,” he said. The room went black. Hannah