I was there at the beginning—or at least the beginning of the small part of it that happened at the hospital where I work. What happened there was happening—is still happening—all around the country and the world, for all I know. There have even been reports of several instances in China but, naturally, they have been officially denied. The first physical hint of it that we got here in the United States was when that baby was born in a hospital in Oklahoma City. The baby—a boy—entered the world with everything just the way it was supposed to be except for one small detail: he didn’t have any fingerprints or footprints.
When did it really begin?
Who can say? If you listen to the pop-philosophers on the television talk show circuit, it started the day...the cosmic instant the scales shifted.
Shifted from what to what?
Well, just hang on a bit, and I’ll tell you. First, I want to tell you a bit about myself. Not that it really matters, but...well, if something does happen, I want all of this to be on record.
My name is Judy Morrow, and I’m a nurse at Southern Maine Osteo., in Portland, Maine. I got my nursing degree from B.U.MedicalSchool some years ago. I guess wanting to get away from big city pressures is what prompted me to move to Maine. The simple...or, at least, the simpler life was going to be the key to my future happiness. And it was...for a while.
The only opening I found was working the swing shift in the o.b. at Osteo. Since I always liked babies and thought I’d never have one of my own, I didn’t mind ushering the little sweethearts into the world. Of course, most parents-to-be have innumerable fears, both rational and irrational, but the vast majority of cases are absolutely normal, and so are the results of anywhere from two to twenty-four hours of intensive labor.
…Mostly...
I suppose it’s time to mention Doctor Thomas Jacobs. He was one of the residents—the resident, actually, who set most of the nurses’ hearts a’flutter whenever he was around. “A flutter!“ What a stupid word, but that’s the best I can come up with. The night I met him, after I’d been on duty only three nights, my heart literally skipped a couple of beats, and I was as tongue-tied as a junior high school girl with a mad crush.
Look, I was young at the time, but I was a “city girl.“ I’d been around. I knew the score. But—damn! My heart did skip a few beats. I wish I could stop resorting to these cliches, but—really—that’s how he made me feel. I said I was young!
Anyway, at first Dr. Jacobs—Tom—and I would just sit together now and then in the break room (the one with that cute little sign: “BEWARE OF STAFF INFECTIONS!“) and shot the breeze. He told me right up front that he was married, and I didn’t miss that gold band he wore. He told me how he hadn’t started med school until several years after college, with a stint as a medic during the Gulf War in between, so he was quite a bit older, almost twelve years older than I was.
But like I said, I was a “city girl,“ so I thought that more or less evened things up. So what started out as just a doctor and a nurse chatting over a cup of coffee now and then turned a bit more serious—a lot more serious after a while. Long hours working double shifts—the usual pressures of the job, especially in those rare instances when “complications“ do occur—all of that more or less brought us together. After a while—hell, I won’t mince words here—Tom and I started sleeping together. Never at work, mind you...although now and then an empty bed in an unoccupied room got mighty tempting. Just a couple of times at my apartment on Montrose Ave after work...and once out behind the hospital in the parking lot one summer night. Steve Blodgett, one of the janitors, almost caught us that time. I teased Tom a lot about that, telling him I was the “kid,“ and he should have known better. And we laughed a lot … I remember that.
Then...well, of course, we heard about that baby in Oklahoma City like everyone else did. Just the idea of a baby with no finger-or footprints was pretty freaky, to say the least. But when we heard more of the details, what was at first interesting or weird started to get downright creepy. Rumors travel fast in the medical field, and we started hearing things that didn’t get to the media right away, like about how the baby in Oklahoma City was...different.
I know this sounds like something out of a cheap paperback horror novel, but word got around that the baby boy supposedly “looked“ dead. His eyes, so the rumor mill informed us, looked like the eyes of a dead person. Oh, he was alive, all right. Make no mistake. He ate and slept and filled his pants—did all the things a normal baby does. But the way some folks described it, he looked like he had no soul...like he was empty...the husk of a human being, but not the contents.
Then reports started coming in from around the country. Soon, within a couple of weeks, we heard of nearly fifty cases of babies, both boys and girls, being born with no fingerprints, no footprints...no soul!
Six weeks after the first one was born in Oklahoma City, we had one right here in Portland. Believe me, all the grist from the rumor mill and the sensationalism in the media didn’t prepare me for that baby!
It was...cold!
Now, back stepping a bit here, I don’t intend to analyze what brought Tom and me together. Chemistry? Pressure at work? Fate? Sure. And the problems he was having with Becky, his wife, certainly didn’t help, either. So it might have been all of these...some of them...or something else. Who cares? I do know what broke us up, though. It was when Tom found out that, after three years of trying, Becky was pregnant. Once that happened, he dropped me like a bad habit, let me tell you.
Oh, yeah. It hurt. You might say I was crushed, but—hey! Be realistic, I kept telling myself. You don’t have an affair with a married man and honestly expect him to dump it all—lay his marriage, his life, and his career on the line for...for what, truthfully, had been just a couple of nights of fun.
There’s this thing I’ve noticed about life, you see. You have to pay for your fun.
Always!
Like I said earlier, parents-to-be have all sorts of worries. Most of them, I know from experience, are absolutely groundless. But with everything that had been happening lately, and news reports of more instances coming up daily...well, Tom got pretty upset. No, that’s putting it mildly. He was in a state of near constant dread that his baby would be born with no fingerprints.
The media didn’t help any. It rarely does. They’d picked up the stories from around the world and were running them for all they were worth. Radio and TV talk shows, and newspapers at the grocery checkout counters were the worst. Aren’t they always? They started in with explanations ranging from terrorist plots (after nine-eleven, people could believe anything) to pre-invasion tactics of the interstellar aliens to astrology and reincarnation.
It was the reincarnation angle that got to Tom, and after listening to him, I have to admit that it kind of got me worried, too. We had stopped having sex together by then, but we were still friends. Many a slow night in the staff room we’d talk...and talk...
And Tom told me he was convinced the reincarnation angle was the right one. That’s what I meant as the start about the “scales tipping.“ The basic thrust of the idea was that, with all the improvements in medicine and with life expectancy being extended well into the eighties and nineties, the Universe was running out of souls to be born. Babies, so the theory went, were still being born within the normal course of nature, but there simply weren’t enough souls left over to fill all these new bodies. “NOBODY IN THE BODY,“ as one banner headline put it. Fingerprints were like the souls’ identification card number, the cosmic bar code. There was no way to stop the babies from being born, so the cosmos or whatever just kept churning them out, but it had to leave out the contents!
Does any of this make sense?
Well, to me—as a nurse trained in the sciences—of course it didn’t. But if you read and believe those sleazy newspapers, it might make sense. No worse, anyway, than “Amazonian Frog Boys“ or the B-52 that was supposedly found in a crater on the moon. What truly amazed me was that Tom, an educated medical man—a doctor, for Christ’s sake!—would embrace such a cockamamie idea. And I’ll be damned if, after spending several nights talking with him, he almost had me convinced, too. He certainly had me worried.
But Tom wrapped himself around the idea like Ahab, embracing Moby Dick just before he goes under. He clung to that idea and took it so much to heart that … well, this is what finally happened.
Tom got in touch with a supposed expert on this theory and after much admittedly hazy philosophical discussion became convinced the “problem“ began at birth, not at conception. Never mind that an embryo’s fingerprints are formed much earlier in development. The “soul,“ so Tom was told—and believed—didn’t actually enter the baby until the instant of birth. I know that idea doesn’t sit well with the Right-to-Lifers, buy—hey, you believe what you want to believe.
Becky carried the baby well. Tom told me often enough to keep a few pangs of jealousy tingling that she was “textbook perfect.“
“Great! Good for her!“ I’d say, but beneath it all, I knew he was worried to his core that when Becky finally delivered, the baby—his baby—would have no fingerprints!
No footprints!
No soul!
I had no idea what he planned to do about it. If I had, I certainly would have tried to stop him. But he planned it with all the skill and finesse of a murderer, and that’s exactly what he was, except in his case he was a self-murderer.
Tom was in the o.b. the night Becky went into labor, and textbook perfect or not, she—like any woman—went through some things that night that she never expected. The labor was intense and basically unproductive. It lasted all night, then through the next morning and on into the afternoon.
Tom—the textbook perfect husband and father-to-be—stayed by her side the whole time, doing whatever he could to make it easier. Truth to tell, I think he might have known too much. Certainly, he was much too involved with the situation to be effective as a doctor. Sometime around six o’clock that evening, he suggested giving Becky a squirt of Petosin to see if they could make the labor more productive. By this time, Becky was an exhausted, sweating, shaking wreck. There’s nothing like childbirth to strip you to the core of your humanity.
Tom gave his wife the shot, and it seemed to help some. Nobody—at least at the time—saw what he did with the empty hypo. He must have pocketed it then. Anyway, once the drug kicked in and Becky’s labor was finally getting somewhere, once she entered transition, Tom backed away from the delivery bed. He asked the intern there to take over for him. He excused himself saying he was exhausted.
Finally, Becky was fully dilated, and the stand-in doctor told her she could start pushing. Her face, infused with blood, turned a bright, beet-purple. The only sounds in the delivery room were her heavy panting and the steady beep-beep-beep of the fetal monitor. As I remember it now, there suddenly were two new sounds—the sudden, mewling cry of a baby, and the soft thump of a body, dropping to the floor.
I had been in the delivery room for the entire labor and birth. I wanted to be there, and not just out of some vindictive desire to see the woman Tom wouldn’t dump for me reduced to a sweating, screaming mess. No, I wanted to be there if nothing else than to help Tom see it through. I still felt something for him. And—yes, I’ll admit it. I was curious to see if their baby was born with or without fingerprints!
When I heard the soft thump, I turned and saw Tom, sliding slowly to the floor. I thought at first that maybe he had fainted, but even with the quantity of blood involved with a delivery, I was shocked—stunned, actually—to see a thin ribbon of blood lacing down the inside of his arm and dripping off his cuff to the linoleum floor.
Even before I reached him, I knew he was dead...and I knew why he had done it. Using the empty hypodermic, he had injected a bubble of air into his artery. He knew exactly where to hit and when, and it didn’t take long for the embolism to kill him. I’m convinced he killed himself at the exact moment his daughter was born so there would be a soul available for her.
Sounds crazy, I know, but who’s to say it didn’t work? Elizabeth Marie Jacobs was born with a full complement of fingerprints and footprints.
Of course, the shock of a suicide—a doctor’s suicide—in the delivery room put the whole hospital into an uproar that lasted for weeks—months. It didn’t do much for Becky Jacob’s mental health, either, but she, at least, had baby Elizabeth—a part of Tom—for herself. In time, I knew that would help her heal the wounds.
The next day, Mark Dufresne, one of the hospital orderlies, and I were looking at Tom’s baby through the nursery window. I was on some pretty heavy medication myself to help me deal with the shock of what had happened. I had also resigned that morning even though I didn’t have another job and couldn’t hold onto my apartment for long without one. I remember Mark commenting that baby Elizabeth had her father’s eyes.
I remember saying to him, “More than you realize... “ I didn’t tell him...at least I don’t think I told him or anyone else, until now...that just three weeks before Becky delivered, Tom and I had made use of one of those empty beds during a particularly slow night. “For old time’s sake,“ he had joked with me afterwards, and I honestly didn’t mind. I missed him.
I mind now, though, because I wonder if, when our baby is born, there will be another soul available.
I wonder...