Obsoletism is a short story I wrote a few years ago, mostly as a challenge to myself to see what I could do. It started as a diary piece, and then turned into the dialogue below (so maybe short story isn’t the best definition, but I’m going with it for now.)
As far as fiction goes, I don’t really believe in final drafts, and having a look at this, there’s still some changes I’d make if I were going back to rework it now. But I’m not going to.
This is also just the first part of it. If people enjoy it, or want to know more, I’ll post the rest later on.
***
What do you want to know? I don’t really know where to start.
Well, how did you feel? When it all began?
It should’ve been the best day of our lives. I suppose it was, in a way. I guess that explains the stupid grin. There was something about Dr. Adams that just put Jane at rest. I didn’t get it myself, but it was hard not to go with it, with how she felt. She likened him to Santa Claus or something like that, something about the beard, the glasses, eyes that just seemed to absorb everything around them.
Had you heard of him before you were invited to meet him?
Honestly? No, neither of us had. I think it surprised Dr. Brooks, to be honest…
This would be your fertility specialist?
Yeah. She’d always seemed a little bit warmer to me than Adams was. Maybe it was just the fact that whenever we went to see her, she came out to meet us in the waiting room. Adams? He’d let his secretary show us into his office, where he’d always be reading a book of some sort. Always old-fashioned, something leather-bound with yellowed pages. Don’t ask me what, could’ve been anything, but I think it was all about the show with him. Same with the office itself, it was all a stark contrast to the rest of the hospital, more wood and wallpaper, you know? Then again, I guess when you’ve a Nobel-prize-winning geneticist on staff, you give him the pick of offices, right?
What did he have to say to you?
Well, it was always the same, really. There were a lot of figures. He was always talking in numbers, letters, all medical speak that we both only half-understood and wholly forgot a few minutes later. It was always the same, whenever we visited his office, lots of that science talk, just waiting for something obvious that we could pick up on. Just something small, in amongst the slides, diagrams, videos, all those things that made no sense. To be honest, even if I could remember what he’d said, I’d make no sense in trying to tell you. It’s weird. Brooks was always a lot more…well, she spoke to us, not at us, you know? We were more than just a day’s work to her. It’s not like we weren’t grateful to Dr. Adams. For everything. He just didn’t connect in the same way.
And how was your wife at this stage?
Well, she was quiet. Okay, that was pretty standard Jane, especially after everything that happened, but she’d barely said two words to me all day. She’d been a bit…well, irritable for a few days beforehand. A bit sick too. I think we both knew why, just neither of us wanted to say it. That morning was no different. She’d been up half the night feeling sick, and her skin was clammy even as we were in the office, her hand around mine. Dr. Brooks was the only one who noticed that she was a little bit off. I suppose it was her job, really.
She was in there too?
Yeah, Adams couldn’t do something like this alone. It was really her job to break the news to us. We’d been seeing her for a few years, so he couldn’t really take all the glory. Looking back now…maybe it was just his way of shaking off some of the responsibility though. Still, I remember what she said nearly word for word. How couldn’t I?
“We managed to repair enough of the initial damage to make the implantation a success.” She’d smiled, leaving just enough of a pause to let it sink in. I remember Jane’s hand tightened around mine at the time, didn’t think it was possible for her to hold my hand so tight. “All things going well,” she said, we’d be parents of a baby boy before the end of the year.
And…sorry for interrupting you there but…how did you react? You said Jane knew…?
Yeah, she knew; we both did. But it was something completely different hearing it said out loud. Even more when it was someone else, a doctor, making it official. I couldn’t stop grinning…even now I’ve got that stupid look on my face, I know. I’m surprised Jane managed to keep it together. She cried all the way home, but she kept a brave face on her when we were in the office.
Brooks had a few scans that she’d taken the day before, and she used Dr. Adams’ computer to show us. He was tiny. I couldn’t even make out the shape that was Bobby, he was so small. She told us he was healthy, everything was going fine so far. Even apologised to us that she couldn’t have broken the news when we’d last seen her. That’s the kind of doctor she was.
Adams launched into the science straight away though. My work was really done at that stage, I didn’t have much to do, but Jane would have to attend genetic therapy sessions every week first, then every two weeks to be sure that the baby wouldn’t reject my DNA imprints.
I don’t think either of us heard any of it, really, at least not that time around: we’d heard it all before anyway, it was just a formality. I could tell Jane was about to cry. I think I was too, really…certainly, I wasn’t able to keep it in on the drive home.
I can understand if you’d rather not go on?
No…no, I just…I want to get things straight, right in my head before they just start spilling out. It’s hard to think back on all this stuff, you know? You’ve probably read all the stories about what happened, I don’t think I need to go into it. Hell, all you need to know, you’ll probably find by just typing Jane’s name into any search engine, there’ll be some reference to what happened. But all the information in the world can’t actually describe it, you know? Just how much she changed after her parents’ murder. Well, I say parents, but that’s forgetting Dave and Karen as well.
That would be Jane’s sister and her husband?
Yeah. I think the fact that Karen died too was just as bad as everything else. Maybe even a bit worse. They did everything together. I…you can’t find a way into that kind of relationship. A twin sister is kind of untouchable. Great as me and Jane were together, I could never hope to…get her the same way as Karen did. And I don’t think Jane would have wanted me to either. Well, not before, anyway. Afterwards…well, Jane was inconsolable. As you can expect. The doctors had to sedate her nearly every night for the first week afterwards, and…she just never slept the same after.
It must have been hard for you too though.
Yeah, it was. I never left her bedside that week, didn’t even go home to shower. Just slept in the armchair by her side. It was all I could do to be there for her. But every time any of her friends or colleagues or even the rest of the family came in…I was just there, sat in the corner. The fiancé who didn’t come home early enough to stop anything. The fiancé who had to work late on a Halloween night. They thought that was rich. Her aunt demanded to see security tapes from the office, suspected I might have done it myself, especially when there were no tapes. At the very least, she accused me of having an affair instead of working late.
I don’t know how much they blamed me for not being there, but they couldn’t have blamed me any more than I blamed myself. Aside from her aunt, there were no outright accusations, not even any filthy looks. But I guess when you’ve a guilty conscience, nobody really needs to say anything. Nothing could make me feel worse than I already did. I was digging this pit underneath myself, just about ready to drop into the deepest darkest depths of hell possible and the only thing keeping me from falling was the hope that Jane would pull through.
She was so brave. So so brave. Throughout all of it. It was hard to watch her go through it all, her recovery, the police investigation. Even the trial. She was relieved when they found him, but just watching him in court, showing not the tiniest bit of remorse, this thing that even now doesn’t deserve to be called a man, swaggering around with his cheap suit, his shoulders back and this stupid smile on his face…god, I don’t even know how she did it. Watching her made it worse for me. All that time, all I wanted to do was scream. Cry. Shout. Hit something. Hit him. I kept it quiet for her, and I think she knew it was just an act, but she appreciated it.
She called you her ‘rock’ afterwards, didn’t she?
That was it really. I was there to support her, but…I don’t know, have you ever lost someone that close to you?
Um…no.
Well I can’t really explain it then, but…there was just this void in her that I could never fill. All I could do was cover it up, maybe distract her from it for a little bit, but every single time any little thought reminded her that void was there, it turned into a big gaping hole.
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