At Moon Marble, the glassblower says glass has memory. He says, this is important to know: if you introduce air, or the temperature changes too quickly, and the marble cracks, you’re going to try to fix it. You’re going to think it was a successful repair.
You lock eyes when he says this next part; you holding your preschooler while he climbs you, while he is trying to put on your skin, and the glassblower holding what he says was meant to be a jellyfish marble.
I’ve made a mistake, he says, and the glass is going to remember that it was once cracked in a very specific way, that a micro canyon etched itself through the center before I held it to the flame a second time. The crack will come back eventually—maybe the temperature shifts again or your brother holds it between his sweaty thumb and pointer finger and then, he lets it fly, really lets it fly, and after it knocks your glow-in-the-dark aggie out of the ring, it also hits a landscaping brick and splits in half.
“Is there nothing you can do?” You want to interrupt him, but there’s no need. He says, we have to go back to the beginning.
You tell him about the research, as if he asks for an excuse or wants an explanation. “We thought we were on the cusp of something.” This is what you tell him after the presentation, after everyone else has left, while your child lounges drowsily in your arms, and he resets his workstation for the 1 o’clock demonstration.
“Parents were looking for answers but what they really wanted most was a solution,” you say. “We started asking questions about memory. We started asking what it meant if every dream is a memory.”
“What do you think babies dream of?” you ask him, but he shakes his head, so you continue on.
You all knew the case studies. There were subjects who dreamed of drowning, who stopped breathing in their sleep. Once your partner asked that first question about infant dreaming, about the memories they were turning into stories in their sleep, you couldn’t stop asking the question.
It seemed like there was only one answer. It seemed like only one thing made sense: They’re dreaming about life inside their mother’s body, about life as a fetus, about life without air.
“It’s a difficult question with an impossible answer,” you tell him. The ethics of it, there was nowhere to go from there. So, you published a paper that was all hypothesis and hoped it would mean something to someone one day. You hoped it would be an answer to a new question, or that it would become a new question with a different answer.
“I promise I tried to move on,” you tell him.
You tell him how you tried so long to get pregnant; you don’t tell him about the thermometer and moleskine on the sink in your bathroom, about writing down your temperature every morning and before bed. Or about inserting two fingers into your vagina, describing your discharge as milky, slippery, thick, clear. Or about lifting your legs in the air for 20 minutes after sex. Or about eating the entire core of a pineapple on days 10 through 16 of your cycle. Or about your partner eating oysters, eating dark chocolate, pomegranate, and walnuts. Or about your partner going vegan while you ate more red meat. Or about testing everyday.
“We built a monitor in the second trimester.”
You promised your partner it would only be observation, that you wouldn’t intervene unless it was dire, but then you held your child in your arms for the first time and there was anew understanding: you could stop anything, you could protect him from anything, if you only watched closely enough.
There was something you hadn’t expected about interrupting every dream you measured a risk, and as you say this the weight of your child deepens in your arms, his breathing starts to slow. He startles and wakes crying.
I made a glass baby, you say, and I don’t think I can take it back.