The best-written recent speculative fiction: The Words of Dr L by Karen E. Bender
Read the opening pages below
THE WORDS OF DR. L
The sky turned to night as I walked through the city, and the streets emptied in the blue dusk. I imagined the way the other women might walk as they headed toward this pharmacy, a casual, but brisk stride, and I tried to walk as they did, but with care; I did not want anyone to notice me. I was joining the great crowds of women in the country who needed the words.
We were all, in our different cities, pressing forward, faces intent, as though on an errand. We were going to the supermarket. We were going to a meeting. Or that was what we said we were going to do. I watched the tall glass buildings fill with light as they did at dusk, many of the slim towers glowing, inside, a bright, identical pink.
I was at fifty-nine days, and I had until the sixty-fifth day, after which the words would not work. One friend advised me to go to Pelham’s Pharmacy on Olive Street, a place that looked perfectly ordinary and was lit so harshly inside my eyelids hurt. The woman who staffed the counter at the pharmacy on Wednesdays, a woman with short red hair that ended right at her ears, could help direct me to Dr. L, who knew the words. I had not been able to sleep the last couple of weeks, until I had learned how to find Dr. L. At that point my mind had reached a state of exhaustion so that it felt like a damp paper bag. The city echoed, a maelstrom of production, loud, steel girders always being slapped up, and the constant sound of ascension trembled in my throat. The air was gauzy with mist and as I walked, I could see the radiance of the letters PROTECTION atop several buildings, their pale brightness always visible in the dark air.
*
WHAT I KNEW was this: there was a series of words that, if recited in a particular order, would end a pregnancy. An hour or so after the words were spoken, the fetus would stop growing, be expelled, and that was it. There were a few doctors around the country who had been trained in the recitation of these words, and only they could tell you what they were.
The precise order of the words, and the fact that you could learn them and say them and stop the pregnancy in this way, was a new development over the last few years. A psychologist, Dr. L, had researched links between the mind and body, and discovered the exact phrasing, the thought that would stop the fetus from coming into the world. Why did it work? No one knew. Were the words—and the accompanying thoughts—so shocking to the growing cells that when they heard them, they wanted to stop? Were the words so persuasive in their honesty that the body had no choice but to follow along? How did the words make the fetus stop? There were rumors about Dr. L’s research—for how had she known this?—there were murmurings that she was some sort of demon, there were rumblings that she had practiced on herself, that she had ended a few of her own pregnancies for the sake of science; there were other rumors that she had seven children and then, one night in which she was haggard and ruined from lack of sleep, had a thought so sharp and ferocious that it scared any forthcoming babies away. Some said the words worked due to science, some religion, some insanity. No one knew how she had devised this method, but that many women said it was effective.
The advantage of Dr. L’s method was the lack of evidence. The words gathered in your mind, were whispered, and that was that. You could tell others about the loss and they would feel sad for you and you could weep, hands covering your face, receiving sympathy. You could feel sorrow too, but the inside of your heart was clear and pure as a lake.
The words left no visible mark. Your body was emptied. You were free.
No one knew the identity of Dr. L. She had never been photographed and no one knew where she lived. The rumor was that she moved from state to state, telling a few trusted aides the words and the precise way to say them. These aides then told others how to articulate the words, and then were transferred to a new location.
I did not want to become pregnant. I did not want to bear and raise a child. This thought sat in me with a polished certainty, like a gold coin. I was born right before the provisions enforcing motherhood were written into state constitutions, the laws that my friend Joanne and I knew but that we, at first, thought were irrelevant to us, a joke. In college, we were still encouraged to take classes in a variety of subjects. I had, one semester, taken a PE class, and I discovered that I loved how I felt when I ran, how I was fleeing the world for a short time, even if I wasn’t, how I heard nothing then but the sound of my heart and my wavelets of breath. I loved feeling the expanse of nothingness, the sense that inside me was a wide, vast plain. I had been born, I thought, with a peculiar sensitivity to words; at first, those of my mother and the complicated advice she wanted to offer me. Then not just my mother—the school, the city, every institution telling me what to do. The words did not slide off me, as they did with most people; I tried to figure out why some conversations were ones I could just step into and inhabit and why others felt like they invaded me.
There was so much to be said for silence. I felt deeply myself when I listened to that silence, the feeling when no one was telling me what to do, when I didn’t have to beat back the comments of others. The ability to not listen, to inhabit that nothingness, was to be free. Later, at dawn, coaching the girls on the track team, I liked the feeling of telling them how to run faster until that moment: “Until your mind is clear,” I said. I didn’t want to say too much lest I get in trouble. They looked at me with startled expressions, and I could tell which ones thought this was a sad state of affairs, and which ones, I think, understood me. I was glad to have been able to offer them that.
I did not want to have a child. It was as simple as that. Not at the moment we were captured, no. I wanted a moment to be a door, not a trap. And to answer another question that would be asked at a trial, if I were found out: Had I enjoyed the sex that led to this moment, this accident? I had. I did not want to get married. The man lay beside me, breathing hard, and my blood was made of warm, oozy caramel, and that was a moment in which the world was sparkling, languorous, bright. He kissed me deeply, with kindness, he was a nice man, and I had shivered at the way he gently kissed my shoulder, the way he tossed his dark hair. He was appreciative but eager to move onward to other activities. I too wanted the moments in my life to be a series of houses, doors opening and closing, one after another, to live in as many houses as I could design.
More information on the book »
Speculative fiction titles considered this month
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
The Words of Dr. L by Karen E. Bender
When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory
Awakened by A.E. Osworth
Some Body Like Me by Lucy Lapinska
City of All Seasons by Oliver K Langmead & Aliya Whiteley
The Cat Bride by Charlotte Tierney
Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler
Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan
The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
Amplitudes edited by Lee Mandelo
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