ANONYMOU[S] is a brief series of texts submitted, read, and published anonymously, with the agreement of the author not to reveal themself.
The first was in the office bathroom: you had to shuffle one leg in and straddle the bowl in order to close the cubicle door behind you, the room overlit by blank LED. After aiming in to the small plastic container, it was stuffed into a plastic bag. The drop off was a few minutes walk away, but tucked on the second floor in a corner courtyard, so three separate receptionists had to be asked where it could be handed over. The form asked when the sample was produced, and the last time I’d had similar output. They suggest three days’ abstention; but timings had meant it had only been a day. So when a voice phoned and said my count was low, another was scheduled.
This was round the back of a bus station, next to a tourist shop and a passport office with a long queue out the building. After sidling past three lost tourists with oversized luggage crowded in the doorway, the buzzer didn’t work. Phoning up, among the tourists’ exclamations and traffic, saying aloud only I have an appointment, not what the appointment was for. Once inside, down winding stairs, a woman dressed in nurse scrubs asked why I was doing this then showed me to a cramped triangle beneath the stairs, a plastic pot and paper towel sat on a padded plastic lounge chair. Once finished, I was to place the pot on the small shelf next to the sink, push the Ring bell that was stuck to the doorframe, and leave the building. The tourists were still outside when I left. A report arrived forty minutes later, which suggested my morphology was beyond the ‘normal’ range.
At this point the supplements began. The first was a thick, black pill that my mind, improbably, assumed was made up of sperm. This eventually settled to a sachet of orange powder tailored for the ‘geriatric’ fertility market, and birthed a new morning habit of smoothies to stomach, alongside twenty-three other pills a day that encompassed a wide net of homeopathy, Chinese medicine, and the NHS doctor’s advice to take lots of B9. One small pill lists as its main ingredient semen cuscutae, the seed of a parasitic vine, and semen plantaginis, from an arid shrub.
The consultant that we paid a significant amount to video call for forty-five minutes suggests another test, given that the results so far had been varied. In a building just off Harley Street, after sitting in a waiting room with long stemmed flowers and a fridge full of free water for under a minute, I was shown to a room that had the dimensions of a decent sized walk-in closet and a window. The chair here was brown leather, the daylight casting the room in a more calming blue, including a television that was already on with paid subscriptions to YouPorn and PornHub. An email came later that day, with results roughly the same as the last.
I tell one friend of this particular tour of rooms I’ve doing. He recounts driving an hour to his mother’s house, which was meant to be empty and closer than his own house for the requisite half-hour window given for producing a fresh sample. She was, of course, home, so after brief niceties he had to tell her that he was in her house to have a wank. She turned on the radio and told him to go upstairs. The laughter is an unexpected valve, and I wonder how many other stories like this are out there, an unspoken lineage of sad comedy.
The tempo shifted once we began IVF treatment. The doctor looks like a grizzly distant cousin of Ryan Reynolds. Mostly we see his eyes above a mask, crinkled, not unkind, that give the impression he is constantly joking. He rushes out the final syllables as he speaks, always elongating the last vowel in ways that felt too humorous for the conversations we were having, always adding my partner’s name at the end quickly, mispronounced.
Each time, two days before an extraction I was instructed to come. It became one of the few points during the extended year we would have sex. We would then travel to the clinic, and after follicles were extracted I was given a plastic pot, slightly larger this time, and shown to the toilets. Blue wallpaper, some generic flower print framed on the wall with the loud hum of an extractor fan, standing self-consciously over the toilet to make sure to get every last drop. The post-operation rooms were outfitted with handheld buzzers; come out and use this, they said, once I was done. I would sit the pot at the foot of the bed, to avoid handing it directly, angular and lukewarm, to the nurse. They would then subject it to what sounded like a miniature obstacle course for sperm, squirting them at one end of a series of small corridors. Those that made it to the other end were then checked to have the right shape and all, and loaded up.
That room, initially, felt like the hospital rooms that it emulated, stiff with formality and supressed hope. The second trip, we asked if we might be able to submit my contribution to the process in advance, in order to avoid the costs of both of us travelling back. It’s better, the doctor said jovially, if it’s fresh. By the third trip, both the formality and its unspoken sense of efficiency that came with it had worn. Remember, the receptionist cheerily called out down the hallway as we left one session, your husband needs to ejaculate this evening! We weren’t married.
One ectopic, three miscarriages and one failed implantation later, Ryan Reynolds raises his eyebrows. If it hasn’t worked so far, it probably willnotwork. Something about the energy, as if each embryo gave up before they’ve even started. It hasn’t been said out loud, but the next sample is the last.
minor literature[s] 