The Capacity

The day you and your dad find out you’re both pregnant is the day the last of the leaves fall from the trees. The whole world, all of a sudden, loses its cover, the jades and emeralds of the generous seasons, the golds and vermillions of the lean ones. You emerge from the bathroom holding the pregnancy test stick with its pink plus sign at the exact time that he walks in through the front door waving a lab report with his blood cell and protein counts. Wow, what are the chances, he says, rubbing his belly, which you can see is protruding more than yesterday. You hug him, but you can’t stay, there is choir practice you have to get to at school, and you have a solo so you really can’t miss it. On the way, you’re practically skipping, not noticing the change in the world, how the newly bare branches almost immediately begin to reach for each other, locking like fingers overhead. Even higher up, the sun is nodding from side to side, a dandelion on a thin stalk of cloud.

The first few weeks are thrilling. When you’re done with all your homework, you sit with your dad on the couch in the waiting room, taking turns with his old stethoscope. First, he listens to your belly, moving the chestpiece around methodically, like he doesn’t want to miss a single note of what he calls a composition in progress. One day he swears he hears timpani. The next, an oboe. When you put the earpieces in though, all you hear is the sound the edge of the ocean makes when it’s pulling away from shore. Interesting, he says. I wonder if this is because I threw your placenta into the waves when you were born. Then he pours more of the bone broth that’s been simmered all night and spiced with ginger. It’s extremely delicious. The stethoscope is not needed for his belly. Both of you can hear the bubbling and growling in him while you sip from your bowls. Whatever it is, it’s growing fast.

Sometimes you take walks together, enjoying the muted weather now that the trees have knitted a kind of basket around the world. The wind doesn’t whip anything around anymore. The rain doesn’t drench. Light falls in chips on your faces and on the ground. The birds have quickly learned to adjust the design of their nests, making domes that hang upside down then pecking a door through so they can get in and out. You walk to the wharf, the supermarket, the library, the downtown strip with people in long, fluttering coats rushing in and out of boutique shops that display knives, pottery, shoes, lingerie, softballs, jewelry, chocolates, and small, groomed animals behind spotless windows. When you have to cross the street, he puts his hand on the back of your neck, he’s done this instead of holding your hand since you were little and still when you are taller than him and almost the age you can vote.

When the sick begins, at least you are in it together. His is always the color of sunshine. He rocks back and forth in his dotted gown until it’s all out of him. Yours doesn’t come out at all. It’s just a kind of potential lodged in the tunnel between your stomach and vocal cords. He thumps your back with his palm, but it doesn’t let go. You get used to it, but there is a consequence. You have to tell the choir director you can’t do the solo anymore. He pouts and tries to negotiate with you, pacing the forest of music stands in his bright blue suit. You explain that you’re not even that good of a singer, and now you can’t even button your jeans.

On a Thursday, while working on a probability assignment, you hear a gasp and look up to see your dad flicker. You can detect the faint blue outlines of his lungs and heart expanding and contracting, the white knobs of his spine strung by glimmering lights like cars on a highway, then the stack of pillows behind him propping him up. The pale hills where his eyebrows used to be jump in surprise. You drop your pencil and run to his side, reaching for his hand. You meet a resistance there, but it’s not skin, more like air moving at hyper-speed.

Inside the ball of his belly appears a city the way you might see it from a plane in descent, except it’s not done, it’s reaching further and further out with new roads and pockets of settlement. There are wires, frames, concrete blocks, and piles of dirt everywhere being moved around by groaning machines. You ask him if it hurts, and he just smiles, his cheeks like those translucent lightbulbs with the filaments sparking inside. You are just about to press the button to call for help when he snaps back into solidity. He grabs you by the shoulders, eyes wet with excitement. I’m with your mother right now, he says, we’re having fried bananas with ice cream at her favorite restaurant. Right now, you say, confused. Yes! Right now. He sticks out his tongue, and there’s a little mound of cream there, melting over the pink bumps.

The next time it happens, you are in the middle of writing an essay on Lady Macbeth who you think Shakespeare has rather misogynistically punished with madness. Your dad flickers for a longer period this time, enough for you to see skyscrapers grow to cast pointy shadows on his organs. When his opacity returns, he reports being in three other places. Three! A cave chandeliered by sleeping bats. A wedding on a bright open field. The Back to the Future Ride at Universal Studios. Is my mother there too, you ask. He laughs. No. But there are others. He won’t say who. Instead, he pinches your cheek like he used to when you were small and had said or done something precocious. From under his blanket, he brings out a pair of 3D glasses. He presses them into your hands. Please keep them safe, he says, for next time.

Soon, he is more often transparent than not, traveling to tens, then hundreds of places at once. Traveling is not really the right word, since he doesn’t have to drive or fly anywhere, he is just instantly there. From his reports, it seems there are no limitations on where or when there can be. For instance, he brings you back a vial of moon dust, a still gleaming ivory comb from one of China’s dynastic periods. Stuff like that. You don’t ask him to bring back the only thing you really want. When he falls asleep, you go out into the world and bury his gifts. The digging makes you feel accomplished these days when looking up only reminds you that you can’t see the sky anymore, only bark warping tighter around each other.

You start to lie awake at night, not just because your back and hips feel crushed by the weight of your belly, but because unlike him, you don’t seem to have any new powers and you start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you. Every day is the tedious same, punctuated by more and more frequent bathroom breaks as the ocean/orchestra inside you kicks and pushes on your bladder. You go to your classes, take notes, eat alone in the cafeteria, and do your homework interrupted by your dad’s exploits, to which you listen less and less, though he doesn’t seem to notice. Your bed smells like engine oil. You have strange cramps in your toes. Red welts appear on your chest, thighs, the pelvis side of your belly. You look for your face in the mirror and see a crow, a goat, sometimes, a tiger.

Since it’s become impossible to tell apart the seasons, you are not really sure when it is that you receive the visitor. Your dad is in one of his states when a rapid and confident knocking makes your head jerk up from your biology textbook. Looking back at him before you open the door, you are almost dizzy with astonishment. From head to toe, he’s alit with industry, no longer a city, but an empire. From the great dome of his belly, tendrils of steel, glass, brick, asphalt expand in all directions until there is no pocket inside him that remains untouched.

You were not expecting to find the choir director standing in the hallway in a black leather jacket, cradling a red motorcycle helmet. You don’t prop the door open because it feels obscene to let another adult see through your dad’s body, instead you step out with one hand pushing the door back behind you, so it doesn’t close and lock automatically from the inside. I have something for you, the choir director says, smiling broadly. His teeth are very even and white. He reaches into his helmet and pulls out a sheet of paper. Since you have not been able to come to choir practice, I have written a new, independent solo for you. I think you will like it. He offers you the sheet with a flourish. You are flattered and embarrassed at the same time. Does he really expect you to make a show of waddling around on stage with your enormous belly for the graduating class and their parents? You shake your head, but he insists, so to be polite, you take it with your free hand and scan the song. It’s called A Wayward Girl. No, thank you. You hand the sheet back.

Instantly a scowl replaces his smile. He crumples up his creation and tosses it away. Ungrateful bitch, he spits, as he takes a step toward you. Your eyes dart up and down the hall for signs of help, but all the doors are closed, there’s no one else around. He’s raising the helmet like an inflated fist over your head. You glimpse for the first time with excruciating clarity the dark churning room inside you, its ferocious wall of fiber and blood. You realize when it finally unlocks, anything might come out. You will regret it forever but it’s not like you had time to think about it – your arms shoot up over your face, and your dad’s door clicks shut behind you.

The hallway vibrates with the tuning of a thousand instruments, then vanishes. The next thing you know, your whole head is swallowed by a damp and rubbery material, which instinctively you try to push away only to find you have no hands. Or feet.

Panic starts to rattle inside you loud as a fork stuck in the waste disposal; behind it, a howling that sounds faintly human. Then something like an enormous plier, but softer and stronger, pincers you where your waist should be, wrenching you out with the force of a hurricane. You fly, cartwheeling, until you bounce against a smooth, hard surface. When you finally come to a rest, there’s a shiny red ball the size of a house rocking side to side next to you, and directly above, a rectangle of florescence that might be the length of a city block. You feel no pain. A quick scan of your body reveals that you’re intact but changed. You’re flat and hard, your upper half tapered with one serrated side, your bottom half round as a coin. The ground beneath you quivers. Some distance that looks like a mile away, you recognize the choir director, and he is bigger than anything you have ever seen. He’s doubled over, grunting, both hands cupped over one ear. This is when you realize how small you are. This is how you discover the capacity.

It takes a lot of practice to control the transformation. You can become any key you like, but keys are what they are because of their singularities. You can have an idea of what a key looks like, but that doesn’t mean it will fit into any real lock in the world. To memorize then visualize the dimensions of, as well as the distances and slopes between, each ridge, is extremely difficult. You really only have two options. The first is to study the original key that belongs to a given lock, but having it renders what you can do rather redundant. The other is to turn yourself into a generic key, enter a particular lock, then try to remold yourself to its contours. The problem with this method is more often than not, you can’t get in far enough to get a precise read.

There’s also the problem of gravity and scale. You only have levitation and control over your direction for a few seconds after the transformation, while you are still carrying (or being carried by, you were not paying enough attention in physics to be able to tell the difference) the residue of momentum from your human form. Since you don’t have anyone to pick you up and stick you where you need to go, you have to start all over if you miss the lock the first time.

Coming back to your human form is not exactly a piece of cake, either. It takes extreme concentration to register the subtle alterations pregnancy makes day after day. Each time, visualizing your body is an epic process of trial and error that leaves you depleted until you’d rather forget what you look like at all.

Your new power is so inconvenient that you would have just never bothered to learn how to use it had there been another way to get back into the room where your dad is probably a planet by now. Alas, the original key has never been sighted and his door proves resistant to both your amateur lockpicking and any external force you can scrounge up to batter it with. You do manage to unlock a few places, like a secondhand bookstore near your school that specializes in science fiction and a pastry shop that amounts to a miracle when you’re rabid with craving for a blueberry muffin. Otherwise, you prefer your made-up keys with no particular destination. When you’re tiny and metal, you can jam yourself into whatever is threatening you with the kind of hubris you lack when you are just a person.

In fact, shortly after his visit you learn that the choir director has to find a new job because of total hearing loss in his left ear. You feel a little bad because the graduation performance ends up a disaster. You see him once at the wharf, standing on the deck of one of the fishing boats in worn coveralls and knee-high rubber boots, barking, what, what, to someone beyond your line of sight. The bandage still wrapped around his head is dirty. He starts screaming when he sees you. Picks up a butcher knife bloody with salmon and hits the dock running. Luckily, there’s a crowd nearby you can melt into, but after that, you start wearing the red helmet he left behind everywhere. It blocks the noises of a world dying from enclosure and leaflessness. You can finally hear the composition rising from your belly. It has all the keys in the world tumbling in its whorls. You barely remember the sky’s luster, but you swear that’s what it sounds like.

_______

Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in fall 2021, Salvage: Poems (2017) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016). A 2021-2022 Amy Clampitt Resident, she has received the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize and the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award. She teaches creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and is originally from Bali, Indonesia.