After Action Report

Isupposed that the technician was about to ask, “Would you like to know the sex of your baby?” because that is what these technicians always say in movies. Then, with a smile, we would both defer to the mother’s preference to know the baby’s gender. But the technician didn’t say those words, and I had no practiced deference to act out a response. Instead she said, “I don’t see a heartbeat.” Perhaps someone can say a phrase so often it is impossible to feign gravitas in their speech, words worn down like tread on a tire, and I’m pavement underneath wheel. The words “heart” and “beat” fell with a bland effect, and it was clear we were supposed to register the two syllables on our own. Her words and their meaning felt like an administrative oversight; if she could see it, then the baby would be alive. Maybe it was a matter of opinion, like the way a painting can or cannot be pretty depending on who is looking at it. But the towel, handed over my wife’s tummy, suggested we were done with the examination, and that there would be no more speculation. The non-heartbeat discovery would have to be followed by a surgery. I wiped the bluish fluid off of my wife’s stomach, and the two of us—just the two of us—left the room. This wasn’t the first time I had seen something die or already dead through a screen and a sensor. Through high-frequency sound waves and signal processing, I had spent most of last year watching insurgents exsanguinate on some arid plain. The baby, the insurgent—both came across in grainy white pixels, too inhuman to regard with empathy. If you didn’t like what you saw, you could toggle frequencies, infrared heat, low-pass filters to eliminate shadowing, residual movement. Then, finally, there was resolution “OFF” if you had totally lost patience with the show. We didn’t have funerals then, and we wouldn’t have a funeral now. There was nothing in the traditional sense to bury, just a long list of non-persons with serialized alphanumeric indicators and perhaps a DNA sample to confirm, in the future, that the same person wasn’t killed twice. Maybe this was revenge. Our grief was compounded in the lobby. Families exited the maternity ward with their babies like consumers carrying so much sleepy merchandise. The hospital ombudsman told me that we are a cute couple, and that we would be “OK.” I felt a cynical pang of grief for all the ugly couples. It was not a bad thing to hear kind words now, even if they were