Siah - The Temz Review

Azimuth

By Rowan Siah

Content warnings: Self-harm; coercive sex

The spa tickets were a demotion in disguise.

You had been bumped from ‘Loving Friend’ to ‘The Surrogate’ for a week at an underwater wellness getaway. Adrian had agreed that you carrying his and Greg’s child was a favour and there would be nothing more to it. But he didn’t reject your offer to pitch in for the flashy baby shower he had thrown the week before. And now this. Accepting the tickets made you feel cheap, a blow that was only lessened slightly when he told you it would just be the two of you. No Greg. You relish this rare exclusivity as the submarine dips lower, the discoid windows brushing up against some anemone. Through the maze of orange stumps, the underwater hotel peeks through. The exterior of the hotel is bone white; a strange light seeping from out from inside. Nautical luminescence. You wonder if mermaids will come swishing out at reception. The lustful murderous kind, rather than their Disney caricatures. Hold your breath during the first few minutes of descent, only gasping when the baby kicks you hard in the ribs. Third time today. Adrian glances over at you, pressing his mouth into a thin line when you clutch at your belly.

“We’re almost there.” He slips an arm around your waist, just as the submarine docks outside the hotel lobby.

Huddle close. “Being underwater gives me vertigo. And I’m already short of breath.”

“You’ll be fine. There’s more than enough oxygen in the hotel. They use a pump. And there are probably ventilators all around.”

“It’s not the air I’m worried about.”

A cold restlessness brims over you when the last shaft of sunlight winks out, crushed by a new lucent, asphyxiating blue that is neither bright or dark. You blew a goodbye kiss to Andromeda at the start of the descent, praying that it wasn’t a premonition. An older couple nods in your direction, and you realize what Adrian’s arm around you looks like to prying eyes. A pair of newlyweds about to spend their honeymoon at a secluded resort. In those few seconds, you are a person again rather than a portal. A portal that funnels life from the unknown into our earthly plane. You charade their misunderstanding with fervour, nestling closer to Adrian and pressing your cheek into his shoulder. When you approach the front desk, Adrian lets go of your hand, pulls out his phone and dials Greg’s number. They chatter on about the last few intolerable hours they’ve spent apart and the many more they will have to endure, while you fold your fingers over the gargantuan tumour that tethers the three of you, rearranging the pleats of your skirt to cover the anneloidic veins protruding out of your thighs. They look like something out of a body horror film. What a spectacle you’ve become.

The counter staff serve lotus tea, which you spike with your secret flask of vodka. No detox for you in here. You’ll swallow poison in increments so that it can’t be detected in the bloodstream. Grin with teeth when the staff congratulate you. Smile for real when Adrian takes your hand and holds it to his chest, soft cashmere against your knuckles. The room is intimate. Soft lights and oak wood. Gold damasks the mid-eighteenth century wallpaper. The jacuzzi tub in the ensuite bathroom is filled, bubbling water flecked with red roses. A large queen bed. There had been an early bird discount for newlyweds and Adrian had taken advantage of that. You dip a hand into the sage-scented water. It’s a little too hot for your liking. It’ll turn your skin salmon pink and broil the baby into temporary slumber. Your ribs are aching from its pummels. You’re due in two months. In two months, you will be obsolete. In two months, you will have lost.

Adrian ransacks the mini fridge and tosses you a seltzer. “Chic room, huh? Although I would have gone with teak for the desk. Hey, check this out.”

He pulls out a remote from the bedside drawer and presses a button. The black screen obscuring the floor-to-ceiling window rises, revealing a thick wall of sturdy glass, the only thing keeping the ocean out. Three-spot dacyllus. Two-toned chromis. Colors so bright that their exoskeletons are almost visible. The smooth pallor of Adrian’s face undulates under the writhing shadows, obscuring different parts of his face so that he looks like a new person with each ripple. This was a mistake, a freakish reversal of the natural order. You are in a tank, being observed by hostile fish in their free natural habitat. You’d give anything to see the sky, a ritual before bed. You can only fully exhale while basking in the light of dead things. A crackle from eons ago, carbonating the black, reminding you of your insignificance. Throughout your life, that’s what you wanted to be. A face in the crowd. Until you met Adrian. You agreed to be his surrogate because you had convinced yourself that biology would intervene midway through the pregnancy and he would fall for you instead. That the lure of a nuclear family would overpower innate sexuality. But then there were the papers. The discussions of how to eradicate you from the child’s life after it was born. You would be a walking threshold. A non-mother. A virgin with an estranged child. Pregnancy wasn’t more a phenomenon than it was a stubborn bloat. A solid puking session might cause you to deflate. It was endless catatonia. It was being held hostage in your own body. Morning sickness morphing into midday lethargy slipping into twilight derangement. It was being devoured alive by a mute ball of energy. It was a lassitude that made you turn around to check if your shadow had waned, or doubled.

“Gen, you alright?” he asks.

“I’m fine. Just tired.” You curl into bed. Prop a pillow up behind you and fold the sheets over your thighs for good measure.

When he doesn’t respond, you roll onto your side to look at him. His shirt is off, fingers halting on his belt buckle when he catches you staring. He ducks into the bathroom when you don’t avert your gaze. Undress him with your eyes as he turns away. Fantasize about the confectionary zest of his sweat-pearled skin on your tongue. Listen to the faucet run as the baby starts up its occultist drumming, from your soul rather than womb, each tiny blow getting louder and stronger, usurping the sound of your own heartbeat. Reach for the phone. Order room service. Lobster thermidor and Black Forest cake. Eat with your bare hands. Then flick the tray off the bed so Adrian comes stumbling out half-naked at the noise, rubbing your back and purring comfort into your ear as rivulets of soap run down his bare chest, inches away from your face.

You curl into him that night. He spoons you from behind, a hand resting lightly over your belly. Recall the many childhood sleepovers when he had snuck into your bed at midnight, slipping under the covers with a flashlight and a catalogue of male underwear models. You told your best friends in middle school that he had taken your virginity, when all you had really given him was a hall pass and a stolen key to the soccer team’s locker room. You hovered as he made out with guys in alleyways. Winced as he chewed gelatin thongs off male strippers at clubs. Dissociated as he palmed the leather-encased crotch of a cowboy in thigh-high boots who sashayed around him practically nude on his twenty-first birthday, magma spreading so fast in your chest that you turned around and dry heaved into the sink, covered it up with a laugh, then remembered that it was you who organized the party’s theatrics just to see him smile.

The baby kicks again and you gasp. He cracks open an eye.

“I think there’s something wrong with the baby,” you say. “It never sleeps.”

He sits up, ruffles his hair. “There’s a therapist here who’s an expert on maternity. Go see her tomorrow.”

Nod and kiss him on the cheek. Close your eyes and enter the void.

Plain corridors run into whiter ones turn into emptier ones. When they branch out into one with transparent walls, your brain short circuits for a moment, before realising that it’s glass. You’ve wandered back into the aquarium section of the hotel. A buzzing starts in your skull. A shark shimmies up behind you and you slam a hand against the glass, shoo it away with a flick of your wrist. But it stays, watching you with gleeful and taunting eyes.

The therapist’s office smells like marjoram and honey. She’s blonde with a meditation tape voice, and the complex sculpture on her desk is a cyclical channelling of water up through rising notches, only to tip it back down through a slide in the back. A maze made up of cul de sacs. Wave away a glass filled from it. When you look carefully, the structure appears to be bolted into the table, some mechanism underneath funnelling purified seawater through its base. You notice that under her desk, there is a pipe system funnelling the crystalline water from the sculpture to other parts of the hotel, possibly to be used to for the dishwater or sinks. You stare at the steady stream. Water and skin are similar in that they are seamless. There is no way to distinguish each droplet from the others. No way to calculate each droplet’s time in the light, before it streams back into the darkness, out of sight.

“How long have you experienced these sleep disturbances?” she asks, pen and note pad at the ready.

“Around the start of the second trimester.”

“Any strange or recurring dreams?”

Feign a smile. “No.”

She gestures towards the table. Remove your robe and lie flat on your back. She rearranges a syzygy of hot stones on your belly. The four Galilean moons resting atop the child: Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. She tells you to think of happy things. So you think of the last Valentine’s day you spent with Adrian.

Before Adrian met Greg, the two of you spent every Valentine’s day together, albeit as friends, dining in restaurants built for couples. Your hand scooted across the table, almost knocking over the flute of prosecco, twining your fingers with his. Adrian stuck three fingers in his mouth and whistled at the hot French waiters, much to the horror of the other patrons. He ordered roasted grouse with velouté soup and aperol spritzers, one dish at a time at twenty minute intervals, just so a different waiter came around each time.

“Are you ever not cruising guys?” you muttered.

“Are you ever trying to be subtle?”

“Overboard.”

“It’s who I am.”

“We could give it a shot, you know. You and I. Would it really be so bad?”

“Gen, please. We’ve been through this. I’m gay, not bi.”

“I’ve tried every dating app. Set ups. Fucking Match dot com. I haven’t met anyone that makes me feel the way you do. Like I’m on my knees digging into soil with my bare hands and I’ve got dirt smeared all over and I’m sweating my ass off but I keep at it. Because there’s something I desperately need to find and I know it’s there. But I don’t know what it is.”

“There’s a word for that. It’s called lust.”

You could have slapped him. “Do you have to cheapen everything?”

“I’m just putting things into perspective. You’re lonely, so you’re extrapolating. You’ve done that since you were fifteen.”

“See? You know me,” you said.

He leaned back and took a long drag of champagne, shoulders loose. You couldn’t settle for another guy. Be one of those housewives who water gardenias behind picket fences and stand in line for pork chops and wear floral aprons and ribbon their anger into their shapely midriffs. You never wanted that for yourself, but for him, maybe. For him, you’d be anything. You didn’t know if you were lonely or sad or both and whether terming it melancholia would be overdramatic. He took your hand in his by way of apology, massaging your fingers in a way that was almost comforting. Then he made a face and you realised that he was just inspecting your five-week-old manicure.

The therapist cakes your face and body with a mud mask. It isn’t relaxing in the least. It feels like being buried alive, then exhumed when she rinses your body off.

“There.” The therapist smiles. “That should calm the baby.”

“It might act up again later.”

“Pardon me if I’m overstepping any boundaries. But you seem quite apprehensive about the baby’s arrival. Was it planned?”

“Yes. I’m a surrogate. For my friend.”

She casts you a look of surprise that ebbs into pity, a flash of honesty that makes you want to confide in her. Tell her that nothing about this feels right. But you don’t. There is no plausible way to articulate your terror of being unbarred, exposed. Your body being ripped open from the inside as the little terror pitchforks its way out.

The therapist hands you a robe, then sits down at her desk and starts typing away on her laptop.

“I’m booking you in for a birthing class tomorrow. Maybe attempting a ‘dry run’, if you will, might ease your apprehensions. You can get your…friend to accompany you.”

“I’ll be fine on my own.”

“Also, I’m going to prescribe a dosage of lorazepam for the next few nights.”

“Okay,” you say.

“Genevieve?” A hand on your shoulder. An unknown man in athleisure wear.

You are in a large studio, face down on a yoga mat. At least twenty other expecting mothers have their heads turned towards you, hands cradling their bellies like you could rip out their contents. Eyes narrowed like you’ve ruined the sanctity of the space by blacking out. Your throat is burning as if someone has shoved a flaming pike into your mouth. Reach up to scrabble at it, but your fingers come away with a cord. Your charging cord for your phone. From everyone’s faces, you must have wrapped it around your neck. And…pulled. It all comes back to you now. During the meditation session, the baby started tapping against your ribs, this time in Morse code. It told you that you would bleed out. That you wouldn’t survive the birth. You roll up the cord calmly and shove it back into your bag. Mumble an apology. Fold your limbs into a lotus position and shut your eyes.

Adrian corners you by the restaurant when the class is over. He’s breathing hard, furious in a way that’s almost intimate. You’re glad that you could still rile him up, make him see how precarious the whole situation is. That he could still lose everything.

“Goddamnit, Gen. What the fuck was that? A relapse?”

“I blacked out.”

“Were you trying to kill yourself?”

“I don’t know.”

He runs his fingers through his hair, artfully livid. “You’re due in two months. I’ve only asked you for one favour in the two decades we’ve known each other. You owe me this. Once the kid is out, I don’t give a shit what you do.”

Something in you seizes at that. You pull out a penknife from your purse, tease the blade along your wrist, along your collarbone. You lean in close. Close enough that you have to stop yourself from nibbling on his earlobe.

“A lot can happen in a month. I’ve been drinking since the first trimester. Just a shot here and there. Nothing that could have really affected the baby. But what you said hurt me. So much so that I feel like a bender might be on the horizon.”

He grasps your hip, hard enough to bruise. “What do you want?”

You stand on your tiptoes, and press your lips to his.

That night, you slip under Adrian’s sheets and take off your nightgown, your naked body hot against the cool bamboo sheets. He doesn’t tell you to leave. Rather he lets you get on top of him, runs his fingers over your breasts and thighs. Slips off your underwear and slides two fingers into you as you gasp into his ear. A shark swims up to the glass. With each buck of your hips, it slams itself against it.

You wake gasping, in a pool of sweat. Clutch your stomach. The bump has vanished. You wonder if it all has been a dream. But Adrian is lying next to you, shirtless and sound asleep. Leap out of bed. Search frantically. Upend the drawers. Tear through the sheets. Pull your nightgown over your head to examine your stomach. True enough, pale flat alabaster. That little runt. Where could it have gone? Grab the remote and press the button to lift the screen. Clasp a hand over your mouth to muffle your scream. Between the schools of clownfish, a premature fetus drifts past, spins in a slow arc then dips out of sight.

Rowan Siah (she/her) is a writer from Singapore. She has a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing and is currently working on a short story collection and a novel. Her work has appeared in Room Magazine.