We came to the island—the smallest in the deep Pacific archipelago—because it was named for hope. Like so many other women who’d already been through the usual rounds of hormone shots and come up empty, I’d heard that there was a doctor on Espero who was doing something different. That for a price there was still a chance.
The formerly unnamed and uninhabited island was built around this doctor’s practice. Situated in the regulatory limbo of international waters, Espero was a glass and neon paradise with an understory of saw palmetto, grape and hot house roses—a contemporary temple to the gods of the fertile fuck. In shop windows and the lobbies of rapidly erected hotels screens looped scenes of hetero soft-core and flashed advertisements for couples needing uterosimulator rentals—or those in the market for top-quality spunk—interspersed with happy, laughing gay and lesbian couples lifting their children proudly into the blue, blue sky.
Every bit of it, particularly the moist and languid heteros, made me want to hurl. The thing is, to get to this point—to take the 36-hour yacht from O’ahu after the cross-country flight with three stopovers—you have to be desperate. You have to have exhausted all other options. You have to have stared, every fibre and follicle screaming, at the prospect of your barren future. You have to have decided, ultimately, that it was worth everything to escape that fate. I’d made that decision. My paid lover, whatever else he was thinking, had signed the contract. But even having made my decision, the island seemed to me a carnival of failure. We were just the latest clowns to arrive.
***
The itinerary directed us to spend the time before our in-take appointment consuming oysters, attending the regularly sanitized private film-screening booths, enjoying complimentary erotic massage. The florid descriptions of each of these items was followed by an asterisk directing us to a fine-print warning against orgasm—male or female—before our injections. Reserve your energy, the fine-print said. Refresh your minds and bodies with alternate activities, but keep your focus.
“How about a swim?” my lover suggested. I paid him to look pretty and deliver the payload, not to tell me what to do. But he excelled at that first point—with a body both sculpted and soft and lips that I imagined speaking to every part of me—so I didn’t remind him of our agreement. Despite the contractual barrier between us, I came to know him through his body. When he was disagreeable, it was my own impatience that was to blame. The potent cocktail of hormones and uncertainty had made me frustrated, anxious, all exaggerated fists and teeth. But more often than not, he was an impish smile and the strong cradle of his arms wrapped around me as I wept. I hadn’t paid for that. That was just who he was.
On the beach, my lover disrobed and walked beside me into the water. When the waves reached our knees, he lifted me out of their reach. With my legs around his waist, I buried my face in his hair, took in the sand and salt smell of him.
“I like you,” he whispered. But before he could say more, I bit his ear and released my knees, sinking until I felt him hot against me. This man had fathered children. Dozens of them. I was privy to that information as part of our arrangement. But I still wondered how he did it again and again. How he got hard for all of us. Did he have a subdermal med-pump on slow-release? A patch on some part of his body I had not yet explored? I attributed some kind of secret hormonal slurry for my lover’s admission. Or it was a part of the game he played with himself and nothing more.
Our mouths gasping into each other, we tumbled into the water. Emerging with hair and salt in my eyes, I understood the blur of water and sun as the turn and pulse of my lover’s jaw. The tension in him I knew well.
“Don’t you dare,” I said, laughing. “Not yet.”
At the time, I interpreted his straining body—the way he twisted as he kept his grip tight, the way he pushed toward and away from me—as passion. But the ocean was having its way with us, pulling us into its current and drawing us further from shore. My lover went under and surfaced panting for air. He gasped and strained, his arm around my waist. There was a moment when I was frightened, when I felt the cold ocean loosen my lover’s grip. But the island’s heady atmosphere and the ridiculous notion of flirting both with death and a man in legal bondage to me demanded a levity that seemed to contravene the ocean’s current.
When we crawled out of the water, it was like a pair of early tetrapods heavy not with bone but seawater. My jaw ached with the fatigue of our impotent pantomime and with coughing the water from my lungs.
“We almost died,” I spat through the saline and saliva that now tethered me to land. I didn’t need to look at my lover to know that he recognized the irony of the situation. As he stood and brushed the sand from his knees, his breath rattled with the water still inside him.
With my shoulder blades digging into the sand, I turned and retched. Something was caught in my throat. A word, a curse—or something else. I swallowed to keep it inside. That was one directive I could follow: keep it in, grow it, birth it. Whatever it was.
***
In our shared room, we showered separately. The water came from the sea—there was no other water save for that from the island’s desalination plant—but it felt significant, anyway, to turn a tap to summon heat and wash away that which had almost killed us.
I didn’t bother to dress. Sitting on the edge of the bed with my legs extended, I listened to the water fall from my lover’s body. When he emerged in a cloud of steam, water pooled in the indentations of his clavicle and dripped from his half-hard cock.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” he said.
I turned on the bed and pulled my knees to my chest, imagining myself—because such fantasies somehow made it easier—a ragged feral cat who’d been topped by half the males in the colony, but would take another for the privilege of pushing more mewling felines out into the world. My lover primed himself in the crack of my ass before pushing himself into me like a brutal tom, locking me into the tearing hope that this time it would take.
“You okay?” he asked, positioning his thighs tight to the backs of my legs. I nodded. There wasn’t anything he could do about the nylon stitching of the hotel duvet scratching my cheek with every thrust. The rest I was used to.
Behind me, my lover’s throat constricted around a sound I at first interpreted to mean that he was close, that our love making would be over soon. That he’d gone as far as he could go. He would pull out and we’d lie beside each other on the hotel bed breathing each other down. But the sound erupted into a coughing fit that shook his body and mine. He gripped my waist and pushed hard again and again and again as he coughed, the sound increasingly deep and wet.
“Stop if you need to, it’s okay,” I said into a wad of blankets. “We’ll go again later.”
As he coughed and coughed, my lover’s body shivered as if with warring sensations, each with its own merciless immediacy. When he came, he retched a warm, gelatinous glob of saliva onto my right arm. In the midst of the opaque mass was a clear plastic sandwich bag, twisted into the shape of his throat.
***
At the doctor’s office, I recognized others from the yacht. Despite being on the boat with them for three days I’d never learned their names. It had seemed already too much to know intimately the look of hollow-cheeked desolation. To know through each utilitarian verbal exchange the inescapable feeling of finality. I knew they recognized those things in me too and I could barely stand it. I wanted to be more than this.
In the waiting room, a screen on every wall played the orientation video. The same spooning heteros and baby-cradling gays as on every billboard. Men and women frolicking, nearly-naked, in an aquamarine ocean. Bodies rocking against each other suggestively. I knew that those couples were actors who slunk back to their basement bachelor pads the moment they got their cheques. I knew that the ocean was more of a thick grey these days. I knew these things but I couldn’t help but lean into that display of happiness, coveting it for my own. My lover’s hand on my arm couldn’t bring me back to a sensible reality.
“When was the last time you had potentially reproductive intercourse?” The nurse looked up from her clipboard when I didn’t answer right away.
“Yesterday,” my lover said.
The nurse frowned. “Didn’t you read the literature?” She wore a button-down and pencil skirt combination that was perfectly tailored, emphasizing ratios of indelible fecundity. Heels that were completely inappropriate for her profession.
“Yes,” my lover said, glancing at me. “We couldn’t help it. Surely one time—”
“Don’t nurses usually wear clogs?” I asked.
“What? Oh, the shoes? They’re just for intake. I only wear them when we’re welcoming new patients to Espero. We’re running an experimental operation here. We have an image to uphold—a fantasy, if you will. Some couples opt for a male nurse. I can check that box on your form if you like?”
I shook my head, but when we were ushered from the anteroom into the doctor’s office proper I saw that checking any such box would have been entirely redundant. The doctor, too, was a prime specimen of superior breeding or surgery—it was hard to tell which. I looked around the room for some sign of his credentials but was met only with photos of him with the models and actresses who’d been so pleased with his services that they’d become spokespeople for the clinic.
The doctor barely spoke. But his over-worked apathy oozed sex. I wondered if this was a box I’d unknowingly checked on my intake forms—that male indifference got me wet. I watched his jaw move through the details I’d entered into my application and shivered when he pronounced me infertile and a prime candidate for his procedure.
“It’s environmental,” he said. “We have plastics leeching into the soil. From the soil we get synthetic compounds in the food chain. Studies show that these compounds can interfere with endocrine function on the hypothalamic-pituitary axis. Some people are more sensitive than others.”
The doctor handed me a script. “The injections will provide a protective coating, insulating receptors and regulating hormones. You might notice some side effects. Hyper-emotionality, stress, anxiety, but nothing compared to traditional fertility treatments. Some even report elevated arousal. Report to the administering clinic. You will have walked by it as you left your hotel. There’s an entrance in the lobby. You don’t even need to get dressed.”
As I stood up to leave, I examined the slip. Tomorrow morning. 10 am.
“In the meantime, walk around the island. Take in the sights. Again, I recommend abstinence until tomorrow at which point you will need to perform every few hours. You might consider resting up.”
***
The next morning, my lover and I held hands as we left the clinic, exiting onto a boardwalk cut through basalt. The wooden walkway drew us down to the beach, where I hoped to be distracted from the throbbing injection site in my left arm. Was it my imagination—prompted by the doctor’s warning and the near-interminable net scouring I’d done the night before our first appointment—or had my left tricep developed sentience to become an angel on my shoulder? A terrible angel that rolled its many eyes at the thought of my lover’s tongue and hissed details about the sexual escapades of the six-winged in my ear. The pain in my upper arm radiated throughout my body, channelled into a strange, desperate heat between my legs.
“There’s something going on down there,” my lover said as we took the stairs to the beach. Not far from the lowest platform, spread out over the white sand, was a group of about twenty people mostly clustered in pairs. The smaller groups were focused on four people bent over a dark shape on the shoreline. As we drew closer, the sibilant sound of waves on sand was interrupted by bouts of weeping.
“Hey,” a man called to us as we approached the closest groups. He was young and tanned. Shorter than my lover, but with well-defined muscles in his arms and legs. I wondered who was paying him. What his success rate was. “Do either of you have any pliers or tweezers or something?”
Ever-ready, my lover pulled a multi-tool from his back pocket and flipped it into the desired configuration. The man took it and hurried back into the nucleus of the crisis. When we closed in behind him we saw him bent over a hawkbill, pinning it to the sand. The turtle didn’t fight the man’s weight; the only evidence that it was alive at all was in the way its tongue probed languidly at the curved beak. At the creature’s other end, the skin of the animal’s cloaca stretched taut, spasming around the smooth white surface of an egg.
“Someone hold her head,” the man with the multi-tool said as he crouched in front of the turtle. Placing my feet on either side of her, I cupped the base of the creature’s neck and pressed it gently into the sand. When I nodded assurance of my hold, the man clenched his teeth and drove the pointed end of the pliers into the animal’s right nostril. “There’s something in there,” the man said, grimacing as he twisted the pliers deeper. “There’s a keratinized mass inside the right nostril, near the back. She’s suffocating. Probably has been for a while.”
Between my feet, the turtle convulsed. A cream-white egg rolled across the sand. I felt that pulse and expulsion deep in the cradle of my hips and knew, somehow, that I was losing something precious.
The man gripped something inside the turtle’s beak and pulled. The creature’s eyes rolled and her tongue jerked back into her throat. Her cloaca contracted with the pressure of another burgeoning egg. What had it done to the eggs to be formed inside a dying body? Was the conjunction of nesting behaviours with the turtle’s last laboured breaths a grasping at life? Or bringing more death into the world? My throat closed mute around these questions.
“Hold her steady,” said the man with the pliers. The muscles in his forearms rippled as he gripped the pliers and twisted. Out of the turtle’s right nostril, he pulled a plastic fork, streaked with blood.
***
The voice of pain which at first had radiated out from the point of injection in my left arm, now coursed throughout my body, conversing with my organs, my limbs. Every part of me screamed through the birth of a new idea: that plastic fork had been mine. That plastic fork had touched my lips, had been gripped in my hand. I didn’t know when. Maybe on a family picnic in childhood. Or in my car on the way home from work two months ago. I had put this plastic to my lips. It fed me. This plastic fed me and suffocated another.
“It’s been two hours since the injections,” my lover said. He sat on the sand beside me, his legs stretched out in front of him. How could I bear to touch him when my hands still vibrated with the convulsions of the turtle’s obstructed pharynx. “We’re supposed to—” he paused. “Every two hours, you know.”
I stood and brushed the sand from the seat of my pants. After the turtle died, the man had used the blade of my lover’s multi-tool to cut into its body. The creature’s skin had grown over the plastic it ingested, had made refuse a part of her. There was nothing to be done, so we used our hands to dig her eggs deep into the cool sand.
As I shimmied out of my pants and shrugged out of my shirt, I didn’t look at my lover. The ocean waves were cold and gelatinous against my shins, knees, the tops of my thighs. The angel on my shoulder cried out for me to wait, to go back to the shore where the sand was warm, where my lover would tend my body as it should be tended. But I cut through the waves, slicing through the ghostly tendrils of plastic bags. My lover soon caught me, took me up in his arms, cradled me and coaxed me with his lips. But I was becoming something else. Something that could not be touched. Another ghostly tendril.
I dove away from him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, the ocean’s excreta on my tongue.
***
That night in our room, I lay on my back like a hard-shelled creature, plied with plastic and upended in a storm of remorse. As my lover thrust to climax inside me, I wove the sandwich bag between my fingers, clutching it as he grimaced and shivered through his pleasure. It was still wet. I squeezed its liquid out onto my palm, feeling my lover’s convulsions in the base of my spine. His come would pool and unfurl inside me like ribbons of plastic. Celebratory and funerary. It was a triumph of biology that we were here at all, fucking through our death throes. My belly filling with plastic as surely as my womb prepared for life. That which touched my lips would suffocate another. My lover’s lips. Our child’s.
But with the same certainty with which I knew that that goddamned fork had been mine, I knew that this cycle could not continue unabated. A child would be born. My child would be born with the tines of a plastic fork for teeth. A sandwich bag for lungs. A hawkbill’s egg for a heart.
