Womb of the future - On The Other| David Scribner's column from the Berkshire Other

Womb of the future
2005
By David Scribner

At the Medical Arts Complex the stairs to the Women's Imaging Center switch back down to the belly of the building. That's where the womb of the future was conceived, at the end of a subterranean, fluorescent-lit corridor leading to a narrow, shadowy room. That's where I've been directed after signing in at the admissions desk upstairs.

Inside, there's an examining table covered by a paper sheet. Sticking out of the end of it are vinyl-surfaced stirrups, wrapped with pharmaceutical advertisements, poised stiff and expectant, as if just the moment before the table had bucked off its occupant. Beside the table a large computer screen provides the only illumination, a line of phosphorescent symbols scrolling like a comet's tail across its surface.

The place creeps me out - as if I'm part of a medical experiment they haven't told me about. This is my second time here. People know me as Jacuzzi. That's what I call myself in my column for the local newspaper. Twice a week. And I'm pregnant. Twenty-four columns worth.

I settle myself onto the table, trying not to crinkle the paper sheet, and pull up my sweater to expose my previously trim abdomen rising like an ocean swell that signals a storm still over the horizon. High above me, a web of twisting corrugated conduits appear to be holding up the ceiling.

A matronly attendant, Marie - so says the badge on the breast pocket of her pale green uniform - comes in and bends her form over a keyboard, regarding the screen. From a shelf she takes a large tube, spins off the cap, and says, "This may feel a little cool, dear," as she squeezes a clear gel on my belly. The goo flickers in time with the figures on the screen.

With one hand she takes a black disc attached to the console by a spiral cord and slides it in a circular motion over my slippery skin. It doesn't feel cool. It feels cold, and hard, and distant, as if an alien inside that computer were peering inside me. "I'm snapping pictures," she announces cheerfully. "Ultrasound."

"Don't tell me what it is," I caution her. "I want to be surprised."

Marie keeps the disc slithering, without taking her eyes from the screen. "Old-fashioned. So old-fashioned," she says to herself.

She taps a few strokes on the keyboard with her other hand. I watch a black and white image with a faint purplish tone appear on the screen. Its broad white lines show the profile of a triangular alien head, with enormous eyes, the contours of torso and legs, and it's moving, in and out of focus, a swimming creature glimpsed beneath water's dark surface.

In the corner of the screen there are two logos for the General Electric Company.

"I thought General Electric made freezers and light bulbs," I comment.

Marie's hand pauses on my belly. "This is still a GE town, dear, and GE made this machine," she replies briskly. "You know what they say, ‘Bringing good things to life.'

She resumes her probing. "GE has plans. Big plans. It will mean a renaissance for the city. Just like the old days. The GE." Her gaze is fixed on the floating shapes upon the screen.

"What big plans?" I ask.

She fiddles with some knobs. "You work for the paper, don't you?" she answers. "I recognize you from your picture. You should call the company and get the story."

Just what I had in mind. I enjoy pissing off the news desk by breaking a story in my column.

When I get back to the office, I call GE Advanced Materials. I'm referred to a Steve. He gives me an appointment that afternoon. He's surprised I'd learned anything about what he called the company's "revolutionary" development. "Bigger than Lexan," he gushes. I didn't tell him where I'd heard about it.

I drive to Plastics Avenue. The global headquarters of GE Advanced Materials is all that remains operational of the once mighty Works, where 12,000 men and women manufactured electrical transformers and daily doused themselves with carcinogenic insulating oil.

At the foot of Indian Hill, the Advanced Materials campus lies between a warren of residential houses and a broad lowland swamp. It's anchored by an immaculate burnished building with brick turrets at the corners. At the company gate, I notice as I park my car, workmen are taking down the lettering on a sign for the "House of the Future." They're hoisting up a G; a large green W rests against their van.

I enter Advanced Materials through a looping glass portal several stories high - no raggedness here - and am met by a young man of medium height in khaki slacks and a deep green polo shirt. "We're casual, Ms. Jacuzzi, and I'm Steve," he said, extending his hand. "We're great fans of your work."

His blue eyes cast a glance at my belly, and he seemed to smile to himself. With his tousled sandy hair and trim figure he could have stepped out of the pages of a J. Crew catalog. The lobby is bustling with men and women in sporty attire, as if the entire working world were on a golf course.

He ushers me into his office. Its bank of windows look out upon the row of houses across Plastics Avenue. In the middle of the room iss a round conference table, and in the center of its polished dark surface is a glass pedestal balancing a purple gourd-shaped object that resembled a large eggplant.

"That," declares my host, pointing to the object and grinning like a papa seeing his newborn for the first time, "is going to change the future of mankind, and not incidentally, put this city on the map again. Can you guess what it is?"

"It looks like an eggplant to me," I offer.

He nods indulgently. "It's taken years, countless thousands of hours of research to come up with the materials. It represents a momentous scientific breakthrough. This," he says, cupping his hands in the air around the object, "is one of the technological wonders of the world. This," he repeats, and he seems to swell up with marvel of it all, "this is the womb of the future."

I stare at the eggplant.

"Amazing, isn't it?" he whispers, standing next to me. "In your condition" - and he puts his hand on my shoulder, as we both regard the instrument - "you certainly can appreciate what an achievement this is."

Its shiny black purplish surface gleams with reflected light. I wonder how he'd knows I'm pregnant.

"What you saw at our downtown medical complex represents our first major exploration into the market of female diagnostic appliances - a device to survey the womb," he explains. "But soon, following the precepts of our Sigma 1500 Quality Improvement Program, it occurred to us that we were only scratching the surface of this field.

"What our ultrasound imaging scanners showed us is that while Mother Nature is miraculous and unfathomably complex - and we all do owe her a big debt of gratitude - we could do the job so much better. Let me show you."

The office illumination dims, curtains quickly glide across windows, and as my eyes adjust to the shadows I perceive a pulsing glow within the purple object, disclosing the unmistakable form of a fetus. It is alive. I can see it moving.

I'm stunned - and afraid. I put my hands on my abdomen to make sure my baby hasn't somehow been sucked into that eggplant from the ultrasound at the medical center. I can still feel it shifting about, thank God, but in the presence of that thing on the table both of us no longer seem real.

"We realized we could create a far safer, healthier, and more efficient embryo environment," Steve iss saying. "An advanced environment for accelerated, in-the-womb education."

On cue, the translucent skin of the "womb" begins to shimmer with symbols and pictures. Images are being cast by a projector in the ceiling. The overture to "The Magic Flute" swells in the silence.

"We can display mathematical symbols and formulae on the inner membrane for the young human to absorb if we need to produce a scientist. Sound and musical notation for the musician. Want your infant to speak in iambic pentameter right out of the box? We've recorded the complete works of Shakespeare. Think of it - children in college at the age of 10 - even younger, eventually. Just imagine the increase in worker productivity and longevity, if we can educate them early and avoid those wasteful adolescent years. We're already working on getting the child labor laws updated."

"You think you can replace me," I manage to say.

"Need I point out the advantages to you, Ms. Jacuzzi?" he continues smoothly, as if I were a potential customer who had foolishly purchased a competitive model. "No morning sickness, no unattractive weight gain, no stretch marks. No interference with your social life. You could go on with your journalism career without interruption, as if nothing had happened. We'd take care of the rest. Tempted?"

"What about sex? Real sex? Sex that means something?" I blurt out.

"Naturally, such an invention as this was far beyond one company's resources, even ours," he says, ignoring my question. "We had to enlist corporate partners; in return, their ‘messages' will be projected on the womb's membrane along with our instructional programming, but only 50 percent of the time. Before you is the fruit of that collaboration, a vessel to produce perfectly trained individuals, children born into this world yearning for something they don't have, and who will instantly be able to find satisfaction and relief from their longings in our global marketplace. This model, for instance, was manufactured in our Bangladesh subsidiary.

"We expect to sell millions upon millions of wombs," he concludes. "Cleaner, less painful, more predictable. They're biodegradable, too. Environmentally friendly. To let the world know about our visions for a quality future, we're replacing our outmoded ‘Home of the Future' exhibition with the ‘Gallery of Wombs.'"

He comes up to my side as I stand transfixed before the plastic womb. "Frankly," he confides, "I'll bet we get more visitors than Tanglewood."

"But what about sex?" I demand again.

He chuckles softly to himself. "We're working on that," he replies, and with a genial nudge shows me to the corridor. As we walk through the lobby he hands me an envelope. "Our list of corporate partners," he says.

At the entrance of Advanced Materials, he pauses.

"Impressed?" he asks. "Just wait 'til we roll out the brain."

On Plastics Avenue it was getting dark and beginning to rain. Drops glisten off the vinyl siding of houses across the street from the Advanced Materials complex. I drive around the neighborhood, a tidy web of streets named after states: Connecticut, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Rhode Island. All the houses are plastic coated. I keep driving.

On my third circuit, I park on Massachusetts, overlooking the deserted hulks of GE's once bustling factories. I want to think about what to do with this story. In the distance, the glow of store facades in the shopping center fill the misty sky. I see them in my mind's eye - Petco, Hollywood Video, Home Goods, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Staples, T.J. Maxx, Radio Shack, Starbucks, Home Depot - the same everywhere, one congealed incandescence.

And it suddenly becomes obvious that GE Steve hadn't given me the whole story. They'd already issued the brain.

The baby moves inside me just as my cell phone rings. It's the office number, the tiny screen tells me. I don't answer. I'm reading the list of GE partners, and have just spotted the name of my newspaper.

1/5/2009
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