Auto-Pilots

by Melissa Boberg

I finish my sandwich before I board the plane, because unlike Flannel Shirt in the aisle seat next to me, I am a normal fucking person. He deepthroats his tuna and soft, wet sourdough. It triggers a chain of horror inside of me. The smell moves down from my nasal glands into the deep roots of my stomach. There, it greets the little inhabitant sitting in my uterus. Though I know that at six weeks she ultimately has nothing, I imagine that she has hands. I imagine that she is pushing the vomit like a boulder up the hill of my throat. I swallow. She seems angry. My little Sisyphus. I try to calm her down. I do not want to vomit. I do not want Flannel Shirt to think I am rude.

Maybe he has a good excuse for bringing fishy, slimy saran wrap on an overbooked flight to Florida, I reason. This is how the little uterine squatter and I communicate.

She is unmoved. Who in their right mind wears Timbs to Orlando, she insists.

She is apparently now a fashion critic. I’ve taken to calling her Dee. Dee is always showing me new traits. It’s like she’s already a teenager, the way she sits on an arsenal of premeditated insults about people. I’m trying to make her kinder.

For a recently dumped person, I am doing fantastic. That, and I stand by everything I’m doing by flying to Orlando. It’s justifiable. If not, at least it’s quick. I will fly back to Santa Monica tonight. A round-trip journey in one day; the first and last time Dee will ever be on a plane. I’ll be dropping her off later today in a bin at Lucy’s office.

It’s because I love you, I remind her. I sort of love Flannel Shirt, too, right now. I watch him crumple up the plastic wrap in his fist. He writhes around beneath his seatbelt. I can tell the free sodas they dole out to us economy customers are really going to mean a lot to him. It’s hopelessly endearing. It’s like he’s a baby on the inside. I imagine his family. I decide he’s visiting them, and that’s a big deal, because he’s the youngest brother and clearly the favorite. They’re Floridians, just like Colin’s family; I can tell. Colin’s not really a Timbs guy, but like Flannel, he radiates a certain from-Florida thing: you just know when a man has had close brushes with alligators.

Flannel is a very beloved man, I decide. There will be a whole crew waiting at the airport for his arrival. Bummer that I won’t be able to catch a glimpse of them. Flannel will have to wait through baggage claim, and I am traveling with only my handbag. I brought four granola bars. I am on a very tight schedule.

Colin has not spoken to me in seventeen days. I think about him anyway. I do so relentlessly. He’s always there; when I’m on a plane, or I see a plane, or I see the sky, or I see the ground, or I remember that I’m pregnant, or I look down at my hands. It’s not my fault, especially not today. Planes are Colin’s thing. He’s a pilot, and not one of those pilots who’s also a person. He’s a pilot and he’s fully insufferable about it. It’s one of those things where I know he’s the most annoying person in the world and I want to be the only person who can take it. I hang onto his every word like he’s the monkey bars at a playground and I’m a kid with weak arms trying not to fall. Every time he meets new people, he tells them the same story about his aviation license instructor, Laos.

“Is flying planes like driving cars?” nineteen-year-old Colin went, first thing, first day he met Laos. His dad was driving away in the background. Colin’s dad is a villain in all of the Colin folklore. He is also a truck driver.

Laos went, “No.”

His thing is that driving cars is primitive, transitory, merely oriented towards avoiding death. It mechanicalizes an urge to survive that is already there and boring and human. To fly planes, however, is to curate so light a touch that you mimic what a good autopilot ought to be, to shrink into your own autopilot shadow. A pilot transcends boundaries of the heavy-handed human condition. Laos didn’t necessarily call Colin’s dad a Neanderthal, but the implication was plenty. Teenage Colin was nearly wet with envy and respect. He really describes it like that. He really calls himself “wet,” and I sit there and smile and ask one of the twenty-one-year-old, corseted girls next to us at the bar, “Isn’t that amazing?” and she looks at me politely, like she’s nervous I might call her mom.

The rest is history, baby, I say to Dee. This is after we have run through the narrative but before the plane has made any movements. There is so much time to kill.

Dee perks up to ask questions. Bouncing off the inside of my ribcage is the little head that she does not have. Is Daddy flying this plane, she asks, the one right now? She’s curious like a toddler suddenly, instead of moody like a teenager. She changes ages rapidly. I prefer when she goes in reverse.

No, I tell her, and that’s for the better.

Dee does not respond. I try to entertain her by thinking about Laos. I wonder what’s become of him in the decade since Colin was nineteen learning to fly planes in Florida. One of the things I know about Laos is that he considers work as a commercial airline pilot to be the ultimate mark of a sell-out. I figure he’s off somewhere, doing backflips in miniature helicopters over soccer fields in South Florida, loudly begging his hands to just become robots already.

Even though Colin, unlike his mentor, is a sell-out commercial airline pilot, I know he’s not here, either. I know this because I know he’s never going back to Orlando. His whole family lives there, and Lucy does, too. He is to his company as a bubble is to a can of soda, and he has very little control over where he goes on a given day, and still I know he’s never going back to Orlando. He’d probably give me all kinds of shit if he knew I was heading there. I’ve told you it’s a dark place. How would you feel if I up and went to the site of all your family’s shit, huh?

Via air, Santa Monica to Orlando is about four and a half hours. Right now, that time already feels like an endless well. Dee is nauseatingly impatient. I’m a little sick of entertaining her. I want her to be happy and pleased for her last couple of hours in existence, like she’s going blind and I’m somebody taking her to see the Eiffel Tower or something, but it’s overwhelming. I feel my organs in my throat. My throat has its own miniature skeleton. I think my throat-legs are going to give out. Everything feels final, like the end of kindergarten.

Dee’s hands are pressed at my esophagus. She harnesses the sandwich I ate in my car this morning. She threatens to send it rocketing back up out of my mouth. It’s aggravating how easily she has gotten my body to work on her behalf. It is like her teammate. It has never been mine.

I want Dee to know that I am not stupid. I have heard of morning sickness. I have heard of pregnancy brain. I have heard of the consequences of letting your boyfriend convince you that condoms taint the experience for him, it’s like having sex with a traffic cone, come on, come on, it would be like a birthday gift. But these are just not things that I imagined would happen to me. It feels unjustified. I am always careful, diligent, running through the regress and calculating the numbers, keeping the score. When I think about it, everything is Lucy’s fault.

There was the way Colin laughed that one time at the brush of my hair against his naked thigh like it was a reference to an inside joke made with somebody who is not me. The way he never shut up about how Lucy was on the pill, why don’t I give it a go? Well, I always said. Well, it seemed to work great for her and her perfect body and her naturally floral-scented hair. All I know about her now is that she works in OB-GYN in Orlando, where she and Colin grew up having sex on pool decks and getting engaged at nineteen. She made me want a stomach transplant. Not to mention a skin transplant, liposuction, a complete surgical overhaul. Had it not been for all that then maybe Dee could have stayed home, nice and warm in the theoretical. I am hoping that is where aborted cell-clumps go. Straight back to the theoretical, unmaimed.

Nobody, not even Colin, knows about Dee. I only found out about her a few weeks ago. There are things even I still don’t know. Genital indicators of her sex are still months away from manifesting. I like the idea that her life will end before it starts. Never physical, never gendered, she’ll always just get to be a blob of metaphorical girl. It’s a part of her essence. When I found out about her, I couldn’t just throw the stick into a regular garbage can, so I wrapped it in a tissue blanket and put her into the tin of bloody tampons in the stall. It felt like sending my stick into a community. It was like a classroom of metaphorical girl blobs, and I said make some friends. I did not stay long enough to examine the community. I do not enjoy the sight of smeared periods. I am not insane. Then I patted my stomach and left the pharmacy.

I started seeing the visions on the drive home. Dee in the backseat. A little pink pin on her backpack. I ensure the pin has my phone number on it, just in case, and I drop her off. Dee prances into her elementary school with a sincere enthusiasm for life. Hopelessly optimistic. She is never the problem. The problem is the school itself. Inevitably, it is full of monsters. All of my ex-boyfriends teach there. My ex-boss from my first job at Dairy Queen is the principal. He fired me when I was sixteen for sleeping through a shift. Then there’s my mother. I don’t know what she’s doing here, her colossal fear of planes apparently cured to end up in California. She stands beside that one girl I kissed in college. I compartmentalize her as confusion, mostly, but her presence in the school hallway suggests otherwise. She looks fleshy. She looks real. She looks a little bit beautiful. With my mother, she surveils the hallways, noting whose shoes are dirty.

The exes speak about me like I am not there. This is something they are very familiar with doing. “She was really weird about sex,” one says.

Another goes, “You know, she took the breakup really hard. I even threatened a restraining order, but eventually she just gave up on it.”

Colin delivers his line. “I was never clear on whether or not she cared about me until I broke things off. Then, she seemed obsessed. She can’t find the median of normalcy, and it’s not looking like she ever will.”

“Give her another chance,” little Dee argues back. It does not resonate with anyone in particular, and everyone else is taking notes.

The one girl-kiss pipes up. “Narika is really careless with people’s feelings,” she says. “I don’t hold it against her, but it’s true.”

“That adds up,” ex-Dairy-Queen-boss agrees. “She’s a deeply irresponsible person.”

Dee turns to my mother next, her own grandmother. I can imagine just how Mom looks. Back impossibly straight. Skin pulled taut and smooth around her chin and collarbones. She presses her palms into one another, hard, like she is praying or like she was halted abruptly in the midst of applause.

Mom addresses me directly. My presence here is a faint and theoretical outline of itself, but she recognizes it. She expects it to be ever-listening. “My daughter,” she says. She does not need to clear her throat. Her voice comes out like silk. “You are a lot of things. Very few of them are good. I fear that you do not know that.”

Dee is only an elementary schooler. Into her notebook, she copies down what she hears, scribbling flowers and stars around the words.

“We didn’t trade violence, Narika,” continues Mom. She stares right at me. I am a ghost in a public room and she is a medium. “But we had our own kind of war, didn’t we?”

Dee turns to face me, too. The details of her face are largely invisible. What comes across clearly is the pity. Where her eyes should be, I see big bowls of pity. “And you don’t know how to do anything but replicate that,” Dee says. She pauses. She asks with a little optimism, “Do you?”

The plane starts to take off. I am grateful for the physical jolt. Flannel gives me an excited little smile. I lap that little attention up like milk. I want to be invited to his family’s Thanksgiving. I smile back.

Well, that was dark, says Dee. Want to burn that school to the ground?

I laugh aloud. My chest swells a little. Flannel gives me a confused look.

“I’m pregnant,” I tell him, and we laugh like that explains it.

#

Lucy’s private practice is white on the outside. As soon as I step out of the taxi, everything feels and smells sterile, like a morgue. The image of dead bodies riles Dee up, ready to hurl.

Please no, not here, I beg Dee. Not on the pavement like this.

She listens and crosses her arms, and I can breathe.

Thank you, I say. I feel guilty for something.

Above the entrance, a logo is embossed onto a giant plaque and christened by a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. It is a frightening spectacle. I think for a second about Lucy’s childhood, her mom holding her up in front of Magic Kingdom, those ears too big for her soft infant head. I bet she tells people Orlando was a wonderful place to grow up.

I cross my fingers that Lucy’s mom is an evil cunt and I walk into the office. The receptionist is wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears herself, which is disturbing. I tell her my name.

“Here to see Dr. Corcoran?” she asks.

I nod. She tells me to have a seat. I do.

Ten minutes pass. I am called back by a nurse. She has an identification card pinned to the left chest pocket of her scrubs. Her name is Mallory. Mallory walks me to a patient room.

“Is Dr. Corcoran nice?” I ask her.

“Best of the best,” she informs me.

We know, Dee says. She rolls her nonexistent eyes. She is the most loyal ally I have ever had. I debate asking Mallory if there are any resources to preserve Dee in utero forever. I would turn my whole body to jelly to do that.

“She’s going to make you feel very safe about the whole thing,” Mallory is still talking. “If you’re having any second thoughts, let me know. I’d be happy to talk through them—”

“I’m not,” I say. I tell her thanks, anyway.

“Very well,” she says.

She helps me take off my shirt. Then my pants, then everything else. I step into an open-backed gown. I get about five seconds of peace before my nipples start to chafe against the fabric.

See? I would never survive breastfeeding, I tell Dee.

She stays quiet. Mallory hands me a clipboard of paperwork and lays me down. My feet go into the stirrups. “Your doctor will be here soon.”

These are my last minutes with Dee. I do not want to make them any harder than they need to be. I draw my name carefully on the paperwork. My social security number I inscribe like an autograph. A lot rides on whether or not I connect the triangle at the top of the number four.

What would your handwriting look like? I ask Dee. Then, we are both silent. I doodle a heart on the page. I am trying to decide how I feel about the state of Florida. The only adjective coming to mind is balmy. I wonder if Colin ever carved his and Lucy’s initials into a tree.

Dr. Corcoran knocks twice and then enters without waiting. Immediately, I recognize her as Colin’s. Her hair is curly and blonde and voluminous, eyebrows supple and bushy and overstated. It is like she got the same sack of skin as the rest of us, and then womanhood just started bursting out of it. She is like a splatter painting of femininity. It is effortless and luscious and intoxicating. I really hope her mom is, like, demon-level.

Lucy pulls clear gloves over her tiny, knobby hands before she even greets me. Her coat is white. It does not have any Mickey Mouse memorabilia attached. This I find incredibly annoying. Colin will not remember me as his most beautiful ex. Nor am I his smartest. But the fact that I do not even get to be his most normal ex is a betrayal of huge proportions. Lucy has gone to medical school and been his prom date and she has not left me one goddamn thing.

“Good afternoon,” she says. “Narika, yes?”

She talks warmly and professionally but not clinically. I can tell that if I asked her a question, she would give me a slow, thorough, thoughtful answer. She reaches toward my body for the clipboard and pen. Up close, I can see just how prim and tiny and manicured her hands are. It makes me want to steal her knuckles. I want to wear them as my own. This is because I want dainty hands but also because it seems hard for her tiny little baby hands to have to carry knuckles around all the time.

She goes on talking. “I understand you’ve been through an initial briefing of the process over the phone. I want to ask if any further questions or concerns have arisen for you, and if you’re still certain that this is the best idea for you and your family—”

“Still certain,” I tell her. “I’d like to get started.”

“Sure,” she says. “Let me just do a brief examination to see what we’re working with.”

She levels her face with my vagina. Through her face mask she breathes into me a minty cold wind. If I asked her for a piece of gum, she would probably give me one. In my mouth, not my vagina, obviously. My vagina does not have teeth. I am enraged at Colin. It is the most vicious rage I have ever felt towards him. Lucy paws and prods at me. She is smart and charitable. I wonder what their sex was like. I wonder what their car rides were like. Colin probably talked her ear off. On and on and on about the transcendentalism of flying passenger planes from Cancun to Newark and back. All the while, Lucy was all of this. Who else but God and Lucy get to touch metaphorical girl blobs all day? I wonder what they feel like. I wonder what Dee’s little figure will feel like to hold.

You’re clean, I remind Dee, in case she gets offended by the latex.

“Can you relax for me?” Lucy asks.

That whole Laos story, such bullshit, right? I want to ask her while she works. I’ve tried to get the meaning, but I think all it is, really, is just bullshit, no?

Lucy tugs her gloved hands out from inside me. The exit rip is worse than the entry. There is nothing in her hands, not even blood, and she takes off her gloves. “Let’s try an ultrasound.”

Dee, I say. Are you hiding?

I’m where I’ve always been, she tells me. She sounds annoyed, which I would be, too.

Sorry, I say.

“Sure,” I tell Lucy.

She pulls the gown up and lays a towel over my naked lower body. The fabric is smooth and soft. I want so badly to tell her that Colin has seen me like this, too. We are not as far apart in our lives as she might think. For example, I know that she let Colin go condom-free on all major holidays. Thinking about this makes me squirmy. She spreads cold jelly onto my stomach. I let her work. I breathe in and out. My belly is mountainous and round. I inhale and my toes disappear.

Lucy connects the cold condiments spread all over my midsection to some machine. She traces figure eights across my stomach, using some robotic little pawn. The pawn is hooked up to wires that are hooked up to a big machine, beeping repeatedly. I stare at Lucy. Beep. I anticipate recognition in her eyes. Beep. Wow, I imagine she will say. That is the most spectacular baby I’ve ever seen in this place.

Lucy does not take to acting in accordance with my script. Instead, she takes sharp breaths. She puts down the pawn. “How far along did you say you were?”

“Six weeks,” I tell her.

“At six weeks, we would see something here.” This is an explanation. She gestures to the screen on the machine. “I don’t see anything. That could mean one of two things.”

I say to Dee, Can you believe this?

“The first answer is that your timeline might be confused,” Lucy tells me. “So you could be pregnant, but very, very early. Not even six weeks along yet, no visibility. We can have you take another pregnancy test, and if this is the case, there are pills available. No procedure necessary.”

“I took the test six weeks ago,” I say.

“Well, I don’t want to assume anything,” says Lucy. “But false positives do happen, so the second alternative would be that you’re simply not pregnant.”

“That’s impossible,” I inform her.

“Okay,” says Lucy. She is officially pissing me off.

Isn’t she supposed to be a doctor? I say to Dee.

Lucy’s perfection melts into incompetence, all over the floor, and Dee and I watch the remains smear the tiles. “I’ll go grab a test for you. It’ll give us results within ninety seconds, and we’ll go from there. How does that sound?”

Lucy does not wait for me to tell her how that sounds. She leaves the room. Dee and I await her return. It is just us.

Look, I’m sorry about all this, I say. I promise it’ll be over soon.

Dee is not responsive. The silence in my body echoes.

I love you, I say. I have a nasty habit of saying stuff like this to fill silences. This time, when I know it’s true, the post-love silence sounds significantly worse. I start chanting. I love you. I love you. I love you. I’m almost yelling as I go. I love you! I love you!

No knock this time, Lucy opens the door. She rips me away from being able to keep chanting. I hope she feels guilty for it. For the whole mess she originated. One of us ought to.

She hands me a pregnancy test. It’s a normal, no-frills one. With a finger point, she directs me to the adjoined bathroom. “Would you rather look together, or alone?” she asks. “Either way, I’ll be here to discuss the next steps with you—”

“Thanks,” I say.

I stand up and the towel over my genitals falls to the floor. Lucy bends to pick it up. I let her. I go to the bathroom. Leaving the door open, I unwrap the layered plastics around the little test and pull it out. My fingers get tangled in the wrap. I am stuck. I shake my hand. The plastic does not fall off. I shake it again. I am violently pissed off. I want to find whoever approved this packaging. Clearly nobody in Florida cares about the environment. Lucy is on thin ice with me. I might come out of this whole thing just as jaded as Colin. I want to rewind time to be in his bed again, agreeing when he calls her a whore.

I hold the stick between my legs and pee. Lucy watches. She looks relaxed. It is almost like she is my friend. I like that version of things better. The one where we’re in the pharmacy together in Santa Monica. The one where I’m the only one on planet earth who finds Colin charming. The one where the test is positive. I scream at the result, and we laugh. I ask her what on earth I am to do, she tells me she’ll be here for me every step of the way, we hug, we celebrate. The one where I tell her I’ll name my daughter Dee. You’ll make an amazing mother, Lucy tells me in that version, and in it, I believe her. I hold her hand and we leave together. We go get pizza or something. She is my emergency contact.

“Have you ever been to Santa Monica?” I ask her while I finish peeing. I place the test down next to the sink.

“No,” she says. “I have an old friend who just moved out there a few years ago, though. Have you been?”

“I live there,” I say. I smooth the gown down over myself and start lying. “With my boyfriend.”

“Oh, lovely,” says Lucy. Lovely, I repeat to Dee. I animalize Lucy’s voice when I do it. I make her sound like a monster. “Are you staying in Florida just for the season, or?”

“I’m actually catching a flight back in a few hours.”

“Oh,” she repeats. “Lovely.”

Lucy walks closer to me. She is staring, clinically, down at the test. I can see what she sees. I do not want to look. I do not look. Her hand is on my shoulder. Her sightline is direct at the counter and the test. Then it pans over to me. To the hill of my stomach. Back to the result. She implies I should look. I refuse.

“Narika,” she says slowly. Her face is so close to my ear. Insufferably close and I consider pushing her back. I keep my hands to myself, but I consider it. I do. “I empathize with the confusion you must be feeling,” she keeps saying. “On the plus side, this saves you any procedures today, which might be a relief. I can help you back to the room, and we can discuss setting you up with some birth control strategies. I’d hate for a scare like this to happen to you again.”

We leave the bathroom together. I don’t look at the test on my way out. Not even one glance. Lucy yaps about the pill. It’s almost like I am Colin. That’s what I think about, hearing her talk like that. With no Dee in me I might as well be Colin. I dress myself. I make my way to the door. Lucy is still yapping. Intrauterine devices and Nexplanon and she must really be an idiot if she thinks I could look at her for another second longer.

“Thank you,” I say. I fancy myself quite hospitable for still saying that, what with everything she has robbed me of. “But I do have to catch that flight.”

“Narika,” she says. I wish I had not told her my name.

“Please,” I say. I push my way to the door.

“My phone number is on the pamphlets in the office,” she tells me. She is practically calling after me as I leave. “Reach out to me if you want to reconnect about your options—”

I am already on my way out. Through the hallway, I am quick. The receptionist in Mickey Mouse ears is calling after me. Can I check you out? she’s asking. She’s looking at me like I’m the insane one.

I do not stop. This makes me feel very cool. I have places to be, or something.

#

Security lets me into the airport. They do this despite the fact that I am three hours early for my flight. I sit in a waiting area, thinking about ordering a vodka soda. I have not had one in six weeks. I do not have an assigned gate yet. I do not sit directly next to anyone. I am not insane. I am not falling asleep, but then I am.

Colin has a starring role in my dream sequences. Colin and I at the dentist, Colin finally taking me to a family Thanksgiving, me running a traffic light and Colin a pedestrian I almost plow. Dee is an extra. She peers out from behind one of the dental cabinets. She still does not have real eyes. She is like this in all of my dreams.

She does not have eyes when I wake up, either. She is not there at all. A man has taken the seat to my left. He is wearing a suit and reading a book. I tap him on the shoulder. “How long was I out for?”

“Beats me,” he says. He gets up.

I think about patronizing one of the abundant airport stores. I think about buying Colin a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. I’d spring for a custom stitch on the back, too, one that would go, in cursive yellow yarn, Love, Narika. I’d mail it to him when I get back to Santa Monica. He would love that. He would think I had officially lost it.

Out of one of the stores comes a sweaty dad in sneakers and a teenager with headphones in her ears and a mom, bag of cashews in hand, straggling, trying to get somebody to talk to her. Teenager stays steps ahead of her parents, like it’s the natural order of things. She holds a shopping bag in her hand, like her fingers just got glued to the bag and so holding it is her life now. She is so nonchalant. A dutiful faux autopilot. She just walks around being Teenager and one day she will just be Adult, just like her Cashew Mom, and she will be fine the whole time and I will feel ten years old forever, and I will turn thirty next month and I will wonder how it is that anybody has done anything.

Neither Teenager nor Cashew looks at me. Sweaty Dad eyes me for a second and I want to fling him off the top of a building, the pervert.

I am not holding anything in my hands. They fidget relentlessly. I am drumming on my kneecaps or I am cracking my oversized knuckles or I am running my palms up and down the sides of my legs. Move-y, sometimes Colin would call me. You’re always so move-y. I liked how it sounded like movie. I took it like evidence that I was alive. Then he would place his hand over mine to stop me. Or he would pin me down just to show me he could. That was the evidence that he loved me.

My ex-neighbor from the left seat is at the bar. I watch him for a few minutes. He wraps his thick hands around a tall, frothy beer. They raise the cup from the counter to his mouth like they are operated by a motor. Counter, mouth, counter, mouth. I wish more than anything that somebody would do something.

Melissa Boberg is a writer based in New York City. Her fiction publications are indexed at www.melissaboberg.com