Brian - Alessandra Antonacci

After driving four hours to Paterson, New Jersey, the doctor originally refused the ultrasound. I’d listened to him interact with his 11 o’clock patient through the wall. She was six months along and was worried to death that she wasn’t big enough. I saw her leave with the silver photo reel from the ultrasound waving behind her, then she called her husband to say that their girl looked like she was already smiling.
 
I lied and told him I was bleeding- bleeding and worried. Very worried, even.
 
“Okay, say we do the ultrasound, because the only real negative to the idea is a waste of time,” he said as if beginning a riddle he knew I wouldn’t be able to figure out on my own.
 
“There’s three ways this can go.” He continued on making more syllables than sense, listing pieces of me I didn’t know existed, like this whole time my insides had been swapped with exotic fruits. I wished I’d recorded a voice memo.
 
The doctor checked my left ovary first.
 
“I work the way I read,” he explained, “Left to right.”
 
It was funny, it was all funny. From where I was laying I could see the remains of his college career as a standup comedian, the laughter-fueled-ego still lingering like the latex stench in the room. But the first time the doctor saw Brian on the ultrasound, he kept his eyes away from mine. He looked stunned out of his profession, like a Broadway actress in a dead silent theater, all of the show’s next lines stuck stacked in her throat.
 
He only pushed the camera further in, said: “That’s abnormal.”
 
When he swiveled the screen toward me, laying cold, gowned, and very aware of my guts, he asked, “Can you see that?”
 
“Yeah, I do.” I didn’t; I couldn’t distinguish Brian from the shadow of my uterus, my bladder. They had me empty it beforehand so it wouldn’t obstruct the screen. I learned over the years to always come equipped to any doctor’s office with a large bottle of water, ready for a pregnancy test. Routing checkup? Pregnancy test. Stomach pain? Pregnancy test. Sore throat? Pregnancy test. Why they automatically assume all women come in knocked up, I don’t know. But when I complained of just a little pain on my right side and explained that I’d had an IUD put in a few months ago, they said I’d go straight to the ultrasound instead.
 
Though I didn’t see what they did on the screen, I did notice that they spelled my name wrong. The file was titled “Mario S.” instead of Maria. That’s when I decided he’d be a boy. An “abnormal” boy, Brian.
 
After that, the doctor measured him. He was 5 centimeters by some unit I can’t remember. The numbers made sense, though. I can feel him when I lean my weight on the right side of my body, all 5 by whatever centimeters pressed up against the side of my skin I can’t touch, and it makes sense.
 
“That’s almost twice the size of one ovary, for scale,” he added. “When did you say you first felt pain?”
 
He continued to push the camera further into my body as if leaning into an interesting conversation.
 
“Last week, I think.”
 
I feel Brian when I walk. When I run, cook dinner, pick my last sock out of the dryer. It’s easier now that I know his name, like knowing your neighbor’s cooking breakfast at the decibel level of a construction site at 1 a.m. because they work the graveyard shift with no lunch break. The racket is less invasive. There’s nothing to investigate with a candle, you can fall back asleep.
 
“Have you been sent for blood work?” he followed up.
 
“No, not yet.”
 
The room got colder. I fainted every time and I had to be scooped up off the floor by a nurse who should be paid more. It made me feel like a child being carried to bed after falling asleep on the long car ride home.
 
I shifted through the anticipatory feeling of a needle in my skin and accidentally placed too much weight on Brian’s side of my body. But he, like a rabid raccoon with a dying wish to protect its nest, pushes back until I am, again, over-aware that my body is a residence. It scares me that this isn’t foreign for most of the population, to become aware of a new thing in their body and have to be okay with it.
 
“We’ll need to send you downstairs to the lab,” he said as he began to save the last of the photos to their appropriate files. “Just to check on the CA-125 levels, make sure they’re normal.”
 
“Sounds good.” I gave a weak thumbs up.
 
He removed the wand and began to take off his gloves. “You can sit up,” he said. The machine beeped and whirred at that moment, and the ultrasound photos appeared. An old habit. The doctor shot his arm out to grab them before I saw.

​“Can I keep them?” I rushed. He wasn’t phased. I think the thumbs-up after the news gave him a good indicator that I hadn’t been to the doctor alone much yet in my adult life. He nodded and left Brian’s first photos on the table, though he wouldn’t hand them to me.
 
“Stay in touch. The secretary will give you my email on your way out,” he said, half of his body facing me and half already out of the door.
 
I heard him slip into the next examination room without skipping a step, then the subsequent greeting of a very pregnant woman. She sounded blonde through the door. She giggled between sentences. I couldn’t hear her husband, but I’m sure he was there. The quiet type.
 
 I got dressed and threw the clammy paper gown in the garbage. I picked up the pictures of Brian and slid them into my bag.
 
In the parking lot outside, I roll the windows down and sit in my car, contemplate who to call first. They always choose the boyfriend first in the movies. They sigh, dial the number with shaking hands, and say something vague and dramatic like, “It happened.” Something you say and the person on the other line just knows your hands are shaking; You may have even gone dizzy. And it’s always the boyfriend, never the husband. Always young love, small and reckless and free on Friday nights.
 
“It’s 5 centimeters and something. It’s hugging my right ovary, covering it pretty much, you can’t really see it anymore,” I said.
 
“I’m sorry, love,” he responded.
 
“It’s benign though, probably. He said he thinks so since I’m, like, only twenty-one.”
 
“Well that’s good news, right?”
 
“Yeah, I think.” I distract myself with a truck as it pulls out of the lot in front of me.
 
“I named it Brian. I figured I’d give it a name. I also took the ultrasound photos home. I’m gonna put them on my wall facing the bed.”
 
“You named your tumor Brian? Why Brian?” he asked with a nervous chuckle.
 
“I thought it has to be a man,” and I only register why as I say so. My face catches itself in the mirror and I am older. No scene has given me the language to move my mouth on this script’s desire.
 
I can’t imagine the invasive entity in my body as anything else.
 
“It’s inconvenient,” I say. “It might even have teeth.”