Red Clocks by Leni Zumas (38)

Mattie’s directions bring them to a quiet narrow street in southeast Portland. Flat-roofed ranch homes, yellow lawns. The house they want is hidden by vine-clogged chain link and a live oak dangling with metal figurines. The front door can’t be seen through the bushes. The fence gate is padlocked.

“Let’s go around back.” The biographer trudges ahead, up the gravel driveway. Between the garage and the house is a high wooden gate, locked as well.

“Did I mess up?” says Mattie. “I double-checked the address five times.”

“Let’s knock, at least.”

Before either of them can, the gate opens. “I saw you on the security cameras,” says a young woman with long-tailed cat eyeliner, ink-swirled arms. “You’re Delphine?”

“Yeah,” says Mattie. “And this is my—”

“Mom,” blurts the biographer. They’ll take better care of her if the mother is watching.

Mattie stares red-faced at the ground.

“I’m L. Let’s get into the van.” The woman nods at the garage.

“Van?” they say together.

“We don’t do the procedures here at headquarters. We use temporary sites that keep changing. For safety reasons. And I need to ask you to wear masks during the drive.”

The biographer laughs. “Are you serious?”

L. drags up the garage’s roll door. “Yeah, we take the surveillance state and male-supremacist legislation pretty seriously. Call us crazy.”

“No, it’s fine,” says Mattie.

“Seat belts, please. Then I’ll give you the masks. Did you lock your car?”

“Aye, aye!” says the biographer.

Mattie turns from the passenger seat to give her a little frown, and the world is flipped, the order reversed.

The cotton eye mask feels absurd. The van’s windows are tinted dark already. But the biographer wishes not to embarrass Mattie further.

“In your phone intake,” says L., “you estimated you’d be about twenty-one weeks by now?” The van rattles over a speed bump. “Under optimal conditions, a late second-trimester abortion would require a minimum of two days, to dilate your cervix adequately before the evacuation, but these are not optimal conditions.”

A bedside manner almost as delightful as Kalbfleisch’s.

L. goes over a few more things—ultrasound, sedative, anesthesia. The biographer scarcely listens: she would really love to be elsewhere. The best she can do is be a body near Mattie, a body able to drive her home. At the word “speculum” she flinches, feeling the many specula Kalbfleisch slid into her. She counts her in‑breaths, counts her out-breaths.

Mattie has no questions for L.

Cash only. Pay after. No forms to sign, for obvious reasons, but they do keep confidential patient records, using aliases.

“Delphine, your name for our files will be Ida.”

“Okay,” says Mattie.

“Hey, Mom,” calls L., “any questions back there?”

“Not right now,” says the biographer.

They take off their masks and step out of the van into the overgrown backyard of a bungalow. The sky is high and quiet. L.’s hands on their backs, hurrying them. Next to the screen door hangs a piece of wood painted with black letters: POLYPHONTE COLLECTIVE. The biographer strains to summon her Greek mythology. Polyphonte—Aphrodite—Artemis?

L. opens three locks with three keys and ushers them into a bright, purple-walled kitchen that smells like chili. Books, spice jars, pots of cactus, a boardful of yellow peppers in mid-chop.

“Upstairs,” says their ferrywoman.

A bedroom’s bed has been replaced by an exam table whose stirrups wear red knitted socks. Next to it stands an ultrasound machine. For an eerie beat the biographer thinks it is she who will climb on the table, press her heels into the stirrups, wait for the blue-lubed wand to read the shapes inside her. You will feel a slight pressure.

“This is Delphine and her mom,” announces L.

“I’m Dr. V.,” says a small, beautiful woman in a green medical smock. “I’m gonna take care of you, okay?” She looks South Asian and sounds like the ladies from Queens who live at Dad’s retirement village. “Let’s get started with your vitals.”

“Have you done many of these before?” asks the biographer.

Dr. V. wipes back a strand of silver-black hair. “Thousands.” Wraps a blood-pressure cuff around Mattie’s biceps. “I worked at Planned Parenthood for almost twenty years. Until the day they shut it down.”

Mattie says, “You can go now, um, Mom.”

Their providers are skilled. They do not charge a shit ton.

She wants Mattie to be happy. To be safe. To be free from suffering.

Also: she can’t stand her.

She hates her for getting to experience the twenty-one weeks of pregnancy she’ll never get to experience herself.

There are millions of things the biographer will never do that she doesn’t pity herself for missing. (Climbing a mountain, cracking a code, attending her own wedding.) So why this thing?

She came prepared to wait, brought a stack of tests to grade, but faced with the prospect of all day in this room of wicker couches and zebra pillows, hot bean smell blowing in from the kitchen, the biographer feels itchy. She wanders into a front hallway, where posters and pamphlets describe the other services offered by the Polyphonte Collective. Sliding-scale mental-health counseling. Sliding-scale legal services for women who are unhoused, undocumented, battered, addicted. Free childcare during court appearances. Cop watching at protests. This house must be their headquarters. It was the first address, in fact, that was a decoy.

The largest poster says:

Up through the gummy darkness in her chest, through the self-pity and resentment, poke thin stalks of gratitude. The Polyphontes aren’t just shaking their heads.

She starts to read blue books, pen in hand. The events that led up to the American Revolutionary War included. What about events on the second floor? Is Mattie scared? Three main causes of the war were. Should the biographer go and check? The colonists really hated taxes—and still do!

From the coffee table she picks up a graphic novel about women in the Cretan resistance during World War II. Dark-eyed schoolgirls and crones in cartridge belts lug packs of ammunition up craggy mountainsides. They shoot at German parachutists as they land. They don’t just sit there watching.

The biographer falls asleep with her face in a zebra pillow.

Dr. V. shakes her awake. “Time to go, Mom.”

“Who?”

“Delphine’s fine. All went well. You can be on your way.”

The future baby, the kid‑to‑be, her own—

It was never yours.

“L. will drive you back to your car. The sooner you’re gone, the safer everyone is. Let’s see—she’ll be loopy for a bit, from the painkillers. Bleeding is expected, including clots. She can take ibuprofen for cramps. No alcohol, tampons, or sex for at least a week. She’s Rh‑positive, luckily, and won’t need an immune globulin shot. She should be doing a course of antibiotics, but the Collective can’t afford them and we certainly can’t write scripts—so keep an eye out, okay? Any fever above a hundred, take her straight to the ER. Is this your bag?” Dr. V. passes the biographer her backpack and gestures to the door. “They’re waiting.”

In the kitchen Mattie sits bundled in her peacoat, drinking a glass of water. She looks sleepy and bleary and younger. Seeing the biographer, she grins wide. “Well,” she says, her relief unmistakable, “that happened.”

L. can’t drop them off fast enough. The midnight street makes chirring sounds. Are they being surveilled from a parked car?

“You hungry?” The biographer helps Mattie negotiate the seat belt.

“Nix nought nein.”

It comes to her: Polyphonte was one of Artemis’s virgin followers. Punished by Aphrodite for—something.

No cars follow them out.

The police probably don’t even know the Collective exists.

Unless she’s being stupid. Naively ascribing common decency to people in power, as she did before the Personhood Amendment showed all of its teeth.

Aphrodite made Polyphonte fall in love with a bear.

WE NEED COP WATCHERS ON MAY 1ST, said a flyer in the front hall. PLEASE VOLUNTEER!

Don’t be stupid anymore, she once wrote in her notebook, under Immediate action required.

By the time they get to Newville, it will be almost three a.m.

After giving birth to twin bear sons, Polyphonte was turned into an owl.

Is this even the right road?

“Miss?” comes a drowsy little voice.

“Yeah?” She thought this road was taking them to the highway access ramp, but it just keeps going, ramplessly.

“I’m sorry but I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Can you hold it for a little while?” The biographer strains to read a sign, faint in the dark. Could there be one goddamn streetlight in this city?

“Well it’s actually kind of an emergency unless it’s another feeling from the, you know, and I don’t actually need to but it feels like I do?”

Please don’t let them be lost. Her phone knows nothing.