By Bryan Betancur
Now Entering Ayer
Ivy had the unnerving sensation that the sound of her voice didn’t coincide with the movement of her lips. Her words were stones dropped into a well, the echoes of their screams reaching the surface long after hitting bottom. She dropped her gaze to her lap. Her hands rested on her thighs, right thumb and index finger rubbing the base of her left ring finger, seeking the comforting familiarity of the wedding band she no longer wore, an instinct not yet unlearned. She cleared her throat and repeated the question.
“How long do I have?”
“About seven months,” Dr. Aristizábal replied.
“Iris,” Ivy closed her eyes and whispered her baby’s name. Five years of fertility treatment threw her life into a tortuous cycle: the same tense, silent drives to the clinic, the same nurses forcing smiles while they drained blood from her bruised arms, the same doctors’ reticent optimism about the next round of IVF. She didn’t become pregnant until she refused further invasive procedures and broke free from the tormenting loop of reproductive medicine. Not one to believe in supernatural phenomena (certainly not to the same degree as her mother), she couldn’t help but consider Iris’s birth a mystical restart to a life that bore the scars of repeated loss—the father she never met; the death of her mother; the embryos that didn’t thrive in her womb; the husband who filed for divorce three weeks before she discovered she was pregnant. Now, less than a year removed from her daughter’s birth, a terminal illness would put Ivy’s life on pause once more. Seven months to despair over leaving her baby. Seven months to fear that Iris wouldn’t remember having a mom that adored her with the grieving desperation of a woman who suffered five years of infertility.
Ivy opened her eyes and glanced at the silver name plate on the wide mahogany desk in front of her. Dr. Ivy Aristizábal. The two women shared a first name, a detail Ivy shrugged off when her primary care physician handed her a list of Aleph specialists. She scheduled a consult with Dr. Aristizábal simply because hers was the first name on the list, though the minute she dialed the doctor’s number, Ivy sensed that her mother would have found transcendent meaning in the women’s name. While she waited on hold to speak to a receptionist, against the backdrop of a classical violin piece she couldn’t identify, Ivy thought about the story of her name. Her mom, a woman who had sworn off having children her entire adult life, had felt an indomitable biological yearning for motherhood as soon as the plane that carried her from Medellín touched down in Boston. Though wary of starting a family while finding her footing in a new country, she committed fully to the unexpected calling and, as always, turned to the natural world for guidance and protection. She bought an ivy for the cramped East Boston apartment she shared with her husband, reverent of the plant’s mythical associations with fertility. My English was very poor, she said with a mischievous smile and a glint in her large brown eyes every time she told Ivy the story. I still read new words following the rules of Spanish pronunciation. When I found a yedra at a nearby nursery and saw the word, ivy, I heard ee-vee in my head. She became obsessed with the word and referred to it as a phonetic palindrome: the same sound forward and backward, but a different spelling. The universe had sent me a seña that told of rebirth and the many unknowable faces of eternity. I knew that day I would have a daughter and name her Ivy.
“Two hundred days, if you want a more precise figure.”
Ivy thought the doctor spoke with the bored detachment of an actor reciting a script she was sick of rehearsing. She clenched her teeth. She wanted to tell Dr. Aristizábal that she didn’t want a more exact figure, much less a physician speaking about her death with the nonchalance of a meteorologist noting the precise time of sunset. Ivy could appreciate that doctors kept emotional distance when delivering terminal diagnoses to preserve their own mental health, but she couldn’t accept Dr. Aristizábal’s glib presumption. The medical community had taken great strides in understanding Aleph Syndrome, but the disease continued to hold macabre implications: malignant genetic mutations; catastrophic physical deterioration; death. Still, the woman on the other side of the desk couldn’t possibly know Ivy would die in two hundred days.
She looked up from the name plate, prepared to chastise her namesake for poor bedside manner. But the sight of Monet’s Path through the Irises between two framed diplomas on the eggshell wall behind the doctor made her forget her displeasure. The same print hung above the changing table in Iris’s nursery. Ivy first saw the painting seven months into her pregnancy. After an explosive argument during which her ex declared he was moving back to Colombia and wanted nothing to do with their baby (just as Ivy’s father had done before she was born), Ivy stormed out of their apartment and sought emotional refuge in her favorite art museum. She ambled aimlessly from one gallery to the next until the pain in her lower back, and the suffocating fear of single motherhood, forced her to sit on a low wooden bench in front of Monet’s Irises. The painting hung between tall entryways that led to the adjacent gallery. Ivy lost track of the number of times she forced herself off the bench and meandered around the museum, only to find her way back to Irises. Every new examination inspired deep thoughts about the symbolism of the dirt path in the painting that cuts through a thick patch of pink and purple irises. The path has no clear beginning or end, no visible landmarks to serve as points of departure or destination. Monet’s interest, and by extension the viewer’s focus, centers on the lush flowers. The artist eschews the sense of motion and passage of time a path might otherwise convey and suspends the viewer in a meditative, timeless state. The solitary path does not suggest coming and going, here and there, forward and back. Irises presents a life on pause, not mired in the trauma of loss but deep in admiration of the beauty that surrounds us. The painting evoked the reverence for nature that Ivy learned from her mother and which she hoped to instill in her own daughter. She bought a copy of the painting in the gift shop and left the museum knowing she would name her baby Iris.
“I don’t mean to alarm you, but it’s vital you have the information necessary to make informed decisions about your health.” The doctor pulled gently on her left earlobe as she spoke.
Ivy furrowed her brow. She tended to tug on her own ear during stressful conversations, an unconscious reaction her estranged husband derided as infantile. She had never observed the behavior in another person, and seeing it now made her wonder how her ex could mock such an obvious cry for sympathy. The dread of an Aleph diagnosis so consumed Ivy’s thoughts she had ignored the painting on the wall when she entered the office. Perhaps she had also overlooked other nonverbal cues and judged the physician too hastily.
She scrutinized Dr. Aristizábal. The specialist looked to be in her late forties, some ten years older than Ivy. She was heavyset, with a cherubic face that made Ivy think of Iris’s plump cheeks. There was something odd about the physician’s countenance Ivy couldn’t articulate. She had thin eyebrows either stenciled or tattooed onto her forehead, and her hair didn’t quite fit the contour of her head, which likely meant she was wearing a wig. But most salient to Ivy was a mole beside the doctor’s mouth. It reminded Ivy of her mom, whose friends nicknamed her señorita Monroe because she had a beauty mark in the same place.
“What do you know about Aleph Syndrome?” Dr. Aristizábal averted Ivy’s penetrating gaze and began moving her hand away from her ear.
“Well, there’s no cure, so I’m likely going to—” Ivy stopped speaking when she realized she was reaching for her ear. For a fleeting instant, she and the doctor looked like mirror images. Ivy’s mother would have called that chance occurrence a seña, a sign from the universe. Ivy could hear her mother’s voice as clearly as if she were on the other side of the desk instead of Dr. Aristizábal. Don’t ignore las señas, mija. They tell stories. Stories outside the time of men.
“You’re likely going to die. Right. Yes. No cure. True. Well, um, partly. Partly true.” Dr. Aristizábal’s speech had become slow, staccato. “There’s no cure. But, um, it’s not that simple. Not in your case. No. We can save you. Perhaps. Rather, you can save yourself. Not this self, um, in that chair. But still a self. Your self, elsewhere.”
Ivy feared the doctor was having a stroke. What could be a greater irony than a physician suffering a life-threatening medical emergency while communicating a terminal diagnosis? The doctor cleared her throat and rolled her shoulders back to regain her composure, then rattled off information about Aleph Syndrome in a somber, professorial tone.
“As you may know, the disease causes a series of malignant genetic mutations. We don’t know why certain people’s genes are susceptible to these alterations, so we can’t predict who will contract Aleph. An initial mutation irreparably alters a patient’s DNA and opens the door to many more. But by the time the patient exhibits symptoms, medical intervention is palliative at best. The genome continues mutating until the patient experiences generalized organ failure.”
Ivy felt the sting of tears forming in the corners of her eyes at the encyclopedic explanation of how she would die. Her distress was exacerbated by the continued thoughts of her mom, whose voice she still couldn’t disentangle from the doctor’s. Ivy, the same sound forward and back, but a different spelling.
“We can’t stop the course of the disease, but I can offer you an alternative treatment.” Dr. Aristizábal rifled through the medical chart in front of her and turned it toward Ivy. “Here we have the most recent mapping of your genome, and the map generated when you were born.”
“Those maps are useless,” Ivy interjected, her voice louder and harsher than she intended. “They only make it possible to identify mutations after the fact.” She knew from recently becoming a mom that newborn genome mapping was ineffective in treating Aleph. The sequence of mutations caused by the disease was unique in every case, so genome maps of Aleph patients couldn’t serve as a blueprint for editing genes preemptively.
“Not if you travelled back in time.”
Ivy’s face grew warm. What the hell was this allegedly well-respected Aleph expert talking about? The doctor reached for her ear again and insisted that Ivy hear what she had to say. Her earlobe was turning as red as Ivy imagined her cheeks became at the inane notion of time travel. Ivy felt an urge to pull the doctor’s hand away from her head. The reaction was borne of a mother’s protective instinct, though given her identical response to anxiety, the impulse also carried a strange air of self-preservation. Dr. Aristizábal’s nervous behavior elicited in Ivy the same inexplicable sensation that there was something uncanny, bordering on creepy, about the familiarity she felt when she looked at the doctor. Perhaps it was the dual presence of Irises on the wall and her mother’s voice in her head. Don’t ignore las señas, mija.
“By comparing these maps, we can generate a list of your mutated genes, those we couldn’t know were vulnerable to Aleph before diagnosis. We can’t date your first mutation, but Aleph rarely manifests in patients younger than twenty-five. If you went back in time to your early twenties, you could tell your younger self how to edit her genome. You could save her.”
Dr. Aristizábal continued speaking, though much of what she said—scientific breakthrough; temporal portal in her office; covert, revolutionary studies; bogus ethics accusations; suspended medical license for sharing information—reached Ivy like the ambient chatter on a crowded subway, scattered, insignificant. The physician’s tone was insistent, urgent, but Ivy couldn’t bring herself to pay attention. Instead, she found herself immersed in a childhood memory she hadn’t recalled since her mother’s death nearly two decades earlier.
Ivy grew up in a Colombian enclave of East Boston. Every summer of her early childhood, she and her mom spent a day at Walden Pond. Ivy loved hearing stories about her mom’s life in Medellín while marveling at the pines and maples that cast long reflections in the pond’s blue-green waters. When Ivy was nine, a rainstorm on the drive to Walden threatened to ruin their annual outing. No te preocupes, Ivy’s mom gently moved her daughter’s hand away from her ear. Let’s go back in time, sí? To a day it didn’t rain. How about yesterday? Rather than turn off Route 2 toward Walden, Ivy’s mother continued north. After traveling for thirty minutes into a part of the state Ivy had never seen, her mother pointed to a white sign shaped like an open book. The words “Entering Ayer” surrounded a town seal and year of incorporation. Ladies and gentlemen, now entering ayerrr, Ivy’s mom rolled the final R emphatically to highlight the bilingual pun. Welcome to yesterday, mija! Ivy was still laughing at her mother’s corny play on the town Ayer and the Spanish word for “yesterday” when the sky began to clear. Ves, mija? Forget about today. Let’s stay here, in ayer. Ivy sat, dumbfounded, too naïve to consider that her mother had taken a long detour hoping the rainfall was a fleeting summer storm. The two stopped at Sandy Pond, a space that lacked Walden’s scenic charm but which remained etched in Ivy’s memory as the day she and her mom traveled back in time.
“Now entering ayerrr.” Dr. Aristizábal smiled. “Do you remember what she said at Sandy Pond? That she couldn’t go back to Colombia, because it would be like wandering a modern metropolis with a medieval map. Her mind would go back in time to a world that didn’t exist anymore and abandon her body in a place foreign to it. I can’t return to that ayer, mija. There’s only this Ayer now. Even at her most melancholic she loved her silly puns.”
Ivy gripped the armrests to steady herself. Her stomach felt like the inside of a lava lamp. “You can’t possibly know any of that!”
“She was scared to confront the part of her life she left behind when she emigrated.” The sudden mournfulness in the doctor’s voice made Ivy want to run out of the office, far from the torrent of memories and emotions surging within her. “But your story is different. You don’t have to fear going back in time.”
“Stop talking about my mother!”
The doctor ignored Ivy’s outburst and began typing at a computer next to Ivy’s chart. Ivy turned her head at a loud pop to her right. The doors of a tall steel cabinet creaked open. Ivy expected to see shelves stocked with medical supplies. Instead, the doors revealed large red numbers flashing on a screen that filled the front of the cabinet. She scarcely had time to register that the numbers formed a date when the image switched to a video of a busy café. She knew the location well. It had been her favorite place to study when she was in college. Movement in the bottom corner of the screen made Ivy nearly leap out of her chair. Her body tensed as if she had been thrown into an ice bath. A young woman had taken a seat at the table closest to the door. It was Ivy, in her early twenties.
“A woman approached me at this café when I was in college,” Dr. Aristizábal said. “This is a log of the woman’s ChronoCrossing.”
“What do you mean the woman approached you? That’s me in the video. How did you … is this stolen surveillance footage? This can’t be legal.”
Ivy stifled an urge to scream. A woman did in fact walk up to the young Ivy in the café. She looked exactly like Ivy as she was now, in her late thirties. The woman was Ivy.
“The woman said she was dying of Aleph and had travelled from the future to tell me how I could avoid contracting the disease. She claimed going back in time created an iteration of her past self—me—whom she could convince to undergo genome editing. Naturally, I thought she was crazy. But then she talked about mom, about Ayer. She said things I had never shared with anyone. That woman was you. An iteration of you. Of us.”
The doctor let out a long breath, shoulders slumped forward, hands hovering over the keyboard. Her eyes met Ivy’s for a fleeting instant, then she turned her attention to the computer screen and resumed typing. A new date flashed in large red letters, followed by another video. The same older woman from the café now lay in a hospital bed, wires extending from her head like Medusa’s serpentine hair toward an ominous array of medical devices. Her eyes were narrow slits devoid of luster; her pale and cracked lips quivered; her cheeks had nearly whittled down to the bone. But perhaps more surprising than the woman’s cadaverous appearance was the sight of the younger Ivy standing at her bedside. She had put on quite a bit of weight and held a cap in her hand clearly meant to conceal the large bald patches on her head.
Dr. Aristizábal was the first to break the silence brought on by the funereal hospital scene. “We were together two hundred days. Enough time for me to edit my vulnerable genes. Enough time for Aleph to consume her. Two hundred days to watch my future self die.”
“Enough!” Ivy pounded her fists on her knees. “I don’t know where you found this footage, or if it’s some fucked up deepfake you created with AI, but it doesn’t matter. Even if your ludicrous story about time travel were true, I would have gone back to my daughter. You can’t fathom what infertility does to a woman’s psyche. I wouldn’t spend five years mourning the baby I thought I’d never have only to leave her during my last days of life.”
“Going back in time is not the same as going forward; we have the means to do one but not the other.” Dr. Aristizábal spoke in a tone that made Ivy think of a schoolteacher tired of hearing her students ask the same questions over and over. “My future self knew she wouldn’t see her daughter again but still traveled in time to save me. If I lived longer than she did, I could fulfill her dream of raising a child.”
The doctor entered another command into the computer with quick jabs of her fingers. The screen retracted, revealing a disorienting void that seemed to extend beyond where the office wall should have been. Ivy refused to believe the metal container was anything other than an empty supply cabinet. Doing so would mean accepting that time travel was possible and that the videos were real. And if Dr. Aristizábal were telling the truth, it raised the possibility that the doctor had also traveled back in time to speak to Ivy. But that would be pointless, because if the woman seated across her desk had edited her genome, she wouldn’t have Aleph. She wouldn’t be suffering, like Ivy was, over the thought of her baby growing up without a mom.
“Genome editing spared me from Aleph,” the doctor spread her arms out while speaking, as if inviting Ivy to scrutinize her body. “But, as you’ve clearly seen, altering my genome also gave me hypothyroidism and alopecia, among other conditions. You and I aren’t physically identical, and this made our lives diverge in significant ways. For instance, I married a different man and took his last name.”
Ivy looked from the name plate on the desk to the diplomas on either side of the Irises print. Her eyes widened. Ivy Gutiérrez was written in bold calligraphic script on both degrees. She and the doctor had the same maiden name. Another detail she had overlooked. Another seña.
“Our lives also differ in other ways,” Dr. Aristizábal continued in a cracked whisper.
Ivy didn’t need further details to know what Dr. Aristizábal was trying to communicate. More than intuit what the doctor’s words meant, she felt their devastating melancholy course through her body in a way she hadn’t experienced since Iris’s birth. She yearned to tell the doctor to stop speaking, that she didn’t need to suffer the torment of saying she was infertile.
“You struggled to get pregnant, but doctors never told you it was impossible to conceive.” Dr. Aristizábal wiped tears from her cheeks. “I was devastated. I lacked direction for a long time, until I decided to become an Aleph specialist. I convinced myself the universe saved me from the disease so I could contribute to its cure. No matter what my body constantly told me, my destiny wasn’t to be a mother. If my future self wasn’t given the chance to raise a child, neither would I.”
The doctor wasn’t lying about her infertility. Ivy recognized the overlapping sadness, anger, and guilt, the vain attempts to rationalize a senseless, punitive fate. She glanced at the Irises print. Señas tell stories outside the time of men, mija.
“But I couldn’t overcome the pain of not having a child.” Dr. Aristizábal leaned forward and reached her hands across the table in search of Ivy’s. “That’s why you need to go back. Please. Only you can make things right.”
Ivy pushed the doctor’s hands away. “You want to raise my daughter!” She couldn’t explain why she finally accepted that time travel was real, but the logic of the situation was irrelevant now that something much greater was at stake. The doctor had travelled in time to take Iris from her. Ivy was merely an obstacle to the woman’s frustrated dreams of motherhood.
“I’m not only thinking about myself. I need to do right by her, too, the younger iteration of ourselves. She deserves a chance to have children before editing her genome. But if I go and tell her what I’ve told you, I’ll be trapped in the past, doomed to spend the rest of my life seeing what could have been, what I’ll never have.”
Ivy didn’t respond. Her thoughts wandered back to Ayer. Had Ivy’s mom warned her in an unconscious, mystical way that time travel would one day be possible and could change some indelible quality in a person? Superficially she and the doctor were Ivy, but something in the physician’s makeup transmuted when she altered her genome and went back in time. She and Ivy were no longer the same person on a vital, elemental level. The same pronunciation, but a different spelling forward and back.
“You’re wrong.” Dr. Aristizábal’s voice grew louder. “Mom was an immigrant desperate to find hope and meaning after her husband abandoned her in a foreign country. There’s no hidden symbolism in our name. If a phonetic palindrome is any kind of metaphor, it’s that you can rewrite a woman’s past and edit her genome without altering her essence. A different spelling forward and back, but the same pronunciation.”
Ivy felt overwrought with déjà vu. She wondered if the sensation was caused by her renewed desire to berate the doctor. Then she swept her arms across the desk, pushing the name plate and medical chart to the floor.
“You’re not reading my mind! You know what I’m going to say because we’ve already met, who knows how many times. And I must always refuse to leave my baby with you, so you wait until I die and try again. You’re trying to force my will!”
“You’re free to reject my proposal, always.” The doctor clutched her ear. “Yes, I’ve done this before, and every trip creates a new iteration of you that dies of Aleph in two hundred days. But other iterations’ experiences can’t influence you. I can’t coerce you.”
“Bullshit! You can learn from each interaction. You can watch the Chrono-whatever on that machine and find new ways to make me vulnerable and receptive.” Ivy pointed at the Irises. “How many times did your plan fail before you hung that print? What kind of sadist makes me look at the painting in my baby’s nursery when she tells me I’m going to die?”
“Nursery?” The grieved look on the doctor’s face made Ivy shudder. “I bought that print at the Met a month ago because it made me think of mom. Someone from Maintenance only put it up today.”
Ivy stared at the painting. The doctor followed her gaze and swiveled her chair to get a full view of the print. They sat in silence, lost in the path and the flowers, in thoughts about time, motherhood, señas.
“I’ll do it for her,” Ivy said, unsure if she was referring to her mother, her daughter, or her younger self. “But promise me you’ll drive Iris to Ayer some day.”
Bryan Betancur is a Spanish professor in the Bronx who writes on issues related to Latine identity and representation. His fiction appears in Acentos Review, Five South, Litro, Jet Fuel Review, Hispanic Culture Review, and elsewhere.