The Octopod Inside/Birthing a story in twin halves
- by Victoria Brooks -
The radiographer never reacted with surprise at how they looked on the ultrasound screen, but I often gasped at the wild scrabble of bright white tentacles. Something was shining through their skin, like they had been eating moonlight. Glowing appendages waving through a dark inky sea. They were voiceless at this stage. Just the muffled thumping of hearts, swooshing; the deep ocean. The sonographer turned off the sound.
I’ll use they/them pronouns to refer to this alien thing—the octopod inside—since for all I knew (and still know) they could turn out to have as many genders as they do tentacles. One thing I am sure of is the effect the octopod has had on my skin. Prior to the creature taking root, my skin was bad. Greasy and blemished. Once the octopod had established itself, my outer coating became perfect, apart from some stretch marks around my belly and dark bruises from self-injecting the blood thinners I was prescribed. Angular limbs punched and kicked. It was as if the octopod was about to burst out, tearing me apart in the process. I started to look like one myself. When I was lying flat on the floor, my bulbous distended belly would stretch up and out, looking just like a cephalopod’s mantel. My head, chest, arms and legs flattened to look like tentacles in profile. Or I looked like a snail. I moved like one. I oozed fluids like one—colostrum, cervical goo. Glugs of slick cold gel across my belly eased the uncomfortable glide of the ultrasound probe. Hot vomit leaping up my oesophagus in the mornings. The slime coating the two twisted umbilical cords from the big brown jelly placenta feeding the octopod inside with its smooth, closed, mollusc eyes. Some nights I would be thrashing about in bed. On one side, the kicks would come like a flurry of rocks against my ribs, my bladder, and towards the end, my heart. And then I would turn and I’d get the same on the other side. I’d shout at the fucking thing. And it would get worse.
Their tentacles were trapping me inside my own body. According to Terence McKenna in Understanding and the Imagination in the Light of Nature, octopods use a ‘vast repertoire’ of colours and patterns to communicate through their skin. That’s why they were like fireworks on the ultrasound. They were trying to display meaning for me. They were saying, ‘See me.’ At every scan (and I had 20 of them), the sonographer was unable to hear this hidden conversation and wrote down only measurements and blood flow patterns, but I got the message. McKenna continues, ‘By eliminating the ambiguity of the audio signal, and substituting the concreteness of the visual image, the membrane of separation, that allows the fiction of our individuality, can be temporarily overcome.’ Perhaps the sonographer had only ever been used to the communication styles of quadrupeds and was missing the important information coming from this creature inside me. Each time she was laser-focused on finding the membrane indicating the octopod had two sacs, two worlds. ‘So long as they’re separate, they’re safe,’ she said. This floating membrane confirmed the octopod as diamniotic and meant that they were a less dangerous species than monoamniotic—the totally unseparated kind of octopod. Separate, but only faintly, or microscopically, like molecules in matter. It’s a breath of a boundary, almost a fiction. Not a line. Just a faint distinction between me and you that could easily evaporate into nothing. Although they were diamniotic, they still shared one big brown jelly organ. They had to balance nutrients between their parts. Like we humans trying to keep one another alive.
Do you know what you’re having? Asked the sonographer before they put their probe away. I don’t know where to start. Of course. I’m having an octopod. How ridiculous of them to ask.
At the outing, they pulled them from a wound. They almost cut me in half to do it. A slash through seven layers of tissue. How bizarre that I was awake. How odd that I lived. They had to do it early (at 35 weeks’ gestation because Electronic Octopod Monitoring had determined that half of the octopod’s body might be getting weaker). As they pulled them out I could see the two surgeons were armpit deep in my abdomen, wrestling with it and oh my God the pushing against my ribs and lungs was so violent I thought they were going to kill us all. And then they cried and they put them on my chest to look at. Slimy, purplish. I stared at them. They stared back at me.
Will you be breastfeeding them when they come out of the neo-natal unit, mum? The nurse said. Who the fuck is mum? The octopod was being seen to in a specialist unit to check their breathing. I decided I didn’t want to breastfeed because octopods famously have a beak—imagine that on a nipple. No but really, my breasts are mine. What am I saying? No, they are not. I could give you a list of people who have laid claim to them, but instead I’ll tell you about a vision I had, long before the octopod started growing in me:
I had been ensnared by the fourth of eight. Not tentacles, but men. He said I had to let him fuck me or he would throw me onto the street. I believed him because he’d done it before. He shoved it in, then all around me became salt water. My ears filled with sea, I gasped and pulled liquid into my lungs instead of air; except I could breathe. It was icy and cool and I liked it. I looked at my arms and they were the texture of corrugated card. I was speckled with glowing spots—or I thought they were until I inspected them closely. They were letters. There were recognisable words, like a tickertape across my skin. They’re waiting for you, when you get out. It could have seemed threatening but I felt reassured. I looked ahead and saw something floating towards me. It was a crate. Crammed inside were hundreds of squids, octopuses—squashed together such that they formed an undulating slime ball with thousands of flailing tentacles. They were caught. Then I heard an orgasmic moan—the man was coming, and I was being lifted up. I gasped as the air became dry and coarse again, and below me I saw hundreds of the crate monsters—monster pearls, or maybe flailing embryos in a petri dish, waiting for release.
After the outing my whole body grew strong from hulking around the expanding octopod, enduring sleepless nights, learning to love it. I became comfortably macho. One time, once I was able to stand up and dress myself, I put on a very tight sports bra which flattened my chest. I put on a shirt. I looked right, for the first time. My chest was mine. I ordered some binders. When my new nylon skins arrived, I tried them on, I felt born. Not reborn. Born. I have become them, since the outing. Now I’m out. Not only have they opened up new chambers in my heart, but they have also given me two more whole beating hearts. What gender are they? The answer is a question: what’s the gender of a heart?
My IVF doctor rolled and re-angled the trans-vaginal ultrasound wand. The feeling was as if some man from my past was trying to magic pleasure out of me–always hurting, never working. I almost started faking an O to make it stop. ‘There’s one heartbeat. There’s the other,’ said the doctor. ‘You can see them flickering. You can’t hear them yet—we’re only at six weeks—you can only hear the mother’s, but soon you’ll be able to hear all three.’
‘That’s just like an octopus—they have three hearts, don’t they?’ My partner said.
‘They’re identical,’ said the doctor—ignoring my partner’s insights—'because they came from one embryo, which divided after it was transferred to the womb. There’s a 2-3% chance of that happening.’ It was somehow not surprising since it was a monster of an embryo—I remember the embryologist saying at the time it was put back in my womb that they initially thought it didn’t thaw properly and were about to give up, but then it roared into life. They’re monochorionic diachronic twins. This means there’s a membrane between them (they have their own gestational sacs) but they share a placenta. ‘With my obstetricians hat on,’ said the doctor, ‘I should warn you that multiple pregnancies are risky, but congratulations!’ The older siblings of the twins were born in that moment: fear/fear.
The last embryo. It looked like a microscopic sea creature. I loved it. The pressure on those clumps of cells. The pressure on me. I would lay awake, before I could feel their limbs landing kicks and punches, and I would think about how impossible it seemed that one person could become three. That I shouldn’t get my hopes up. Then I would wonder about whether they already had their own language. Before language, before even before language. Syllables whispered in timeless, formless soul vibrations bouncing off of the folds of my insides, between the gurgles of my bowels, heartbeats and my distant voice. Yes, I—the world—will force them backwards, not forwards. From intuition to language. The world would force them apart. Would force them to hurt. I can’t stop it and I can’t bear it.
The doctors said I could have a vaginal delivery because they were both head down. But then you could end up having an emergency section, anyway, so maybe just have that. Whichever it is, it’s still birth. Birth or birth. By the way, more people die from c sections. They said they would scan me every other week to check for TTTS (Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome—it’s something that happens, only with identical twins, where one takes more nutrients, more blood, than the other). Each scan was laborious. Labour. They took painstaking measurements of each baby, every time, to make sure one wasn’t killing the other. I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes at 25 weeks. It was scary because if it’s uncontrolled there’s a risk of stillbirth. Life/death, life/death, always twins. The placenta made it impossible for my body to process sugar. My diet turned into one whole meal toast in the morning with one egg and a piece of cheese, then lunch was salad and protein of some sort, and then dinner was the same and no pudding, plenty of snacks (healthy) and no sugar/fat. I pricked myself on the fingertip after every meal—closely watching the numbers and exhaling with relief when my sugars were within range. I was admitted to hospital four days before my scheduled c-section. The cubical was claustrophobic. I didn’t sleep. They needed to monitor the babies every three hours and take blood sugars every four. Electronic Foetal Monitoring meant sticking these octopus sucker things on my belly—two per baby. And I had to squeeze a trigger every time I felt a kick. The process took at least half an hour each time, sometimes more. They were worried about one of the babies. ‘I want to go home.’ I said.
‘You can’t. Well, you can, but we don’t recommend it. By the way, what are they?’ Replied the nurse.
I remember thinking I know what happens once people think they know what you are. So I say, ‘They’re babies.’
‘Don’t be silly, Victoria.’
Victoria, a lady name. A Queen’s name.
‘I mean the sexes!’
Penis and penis or vulva and vulva. Those are the choices. Identical.
At the birth, there were ten people. I asked for the minimum but I was sure there were a couple of students just observing. Maybe looking at my naked half numb body thinking her pussy looks better shaved (they shaved it for the incision). Someone inserted a catheter because I wouldn’t be able to get up and pee afterwards—I didn’t feel it, thank fuck. I felt nauseous and freezing. Oh so cold and shaky—my teeth were chattering. Everyone was rushing and I didn’t realise they’d started cutting. The music was Teenage Kicks. How fucking funny. The first baby was about to come out and the surgeon (who said if he was worried I might die from the bleeding, he’d cut out my womb) called for complete silence. To distract me, my partner was talking about the dog and how she loves to eat frozen shits. The shivering became worse—it’s the anaesthetic the anaesthetist told me. She injected me with something—my blood pressure was dropping. They were digging with their arms in my middle—I had no idea it would be this physical, rough, reliant on strength as well as skill. I felt shoving at the base of my lungs which made me call out and gasp, my ribs were pushed up in an alarming manner. ‘This isn’t right!’ I cried, but it was exactly right. They hung up their bloody swabs which looked like huge sodden maxi-pads on a rack to estimate how much blood I’d lost—it’s not too bad, apparently, although it looked like a Joan of Arc macho period. Then a cry came. Or more like, a motor from a toy car. A bleating lamb. They lifted up this alien thing, held it up to the sky, stretching this freakish plastic-looking shiny obscenely sci-fi lifegiving umbilical cord out of me. I saw it. And then before I knew it, the nurse was saying, here is the first baby, and this blue purplish sausage was on my chest wrapped in a blanket. I was shaking so much the theatre nurse kept her hand there to stop the sausage from rolling. I just stared at it like what the fuck is that. I wondered where the other one was. They were tiny birds. 1.8kg and 2kg. I was numb, not just in body but in mind. All I wanted was jam on toast. When I moved to the postnatal ward, and the feeling had returned to the lower half of my body, the pain was as though they had cut me in half and then shoved me back together, holding me in place with just a few stitches.
‘That’s exactly what we did.’ Said one of the midwives as she dabbed the crusting blood from my vulva. They wouldn’t take out my catheter until I could walk to the toilet, so I had a bag of piss next to me. I imagined my womb ripping with every movement, every time I turned to them in their Perspex cradles.
They each had tags on their tiny ankles. One read twin one. The other, twin two. Mine said Victoria. Each name was followed by one solitary letter to indicate gender—what use was that? Why not instead tell us something useful, like how to look after each other? Besides that, how did they even know a complex thing like gender just by simply looking at our bodies?
Victoria Brooks (they/she) is parent to identical twins/an octopod, and is a writer interested in trauma, time-travel, ethics, and trans-dimensional sexuality. They have published two nonfiction books and various essays and short stories. Her first novel is Silicone God (MOIST Books).
