Baby+ With A Car Like Wolverine’s Claws
TAGS | fiction, international
Elizabeth Wong
Elizabeth Wong is a Malaysian author and geologist. She grew up in Kuala Lumpur and currently lives in London. She has degrees in Geology and English from Yale University and Imperial College London. Liz is interested in stories of Malaysia and also of this large world we live in—deserts, seas, rocks. Her debut novel, “We Could Not See The Stars,” is published by John Murray Press / Hachette, and was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and Lucy Cavendish Prize. Follow her journey in writing her second novel at elizabethwong.substack.com
Baby+ was still wrapped in a towel, her tyres still bloody, her little face purple from being born.
Why doesn’t she have legs? the father said, staring at the whole team of blue scrubs, their faces blurring into each other like an anonymous committee. What are you telling me?
She has legs; they are in the car, the obstetrician said.
She was born in a car, added one of the nurses.
Another nurse corrected her. She was born with a car.
You mean she inherited a car at birth?
No, she was born with this car here. It’s hers; the car is attached to her just like your arm is attached to you, and the car will grow as she grows. Like Wolverine’s claws. But a car. The obstetrician paused. I know this is hard for you to understand so I will get my team to print out an information pack.
At first, the father and mother did not know how to respond, and could only stare at the Baby+ as she was handed to them to hold. Skin to skin, one of the nurses whispered, before correcting herself, Or . . . skin to metal? The Baby+ started to cry. The mother rocked the Baby+ gently, then desperately as her cries intensified, a small creature bound in her cage. The frame of the Baby+’s car shuddered, arching with its passenger.
She is hungry here let me help you, a nurse said, her gentle tones assuring the parents that everything was normal, indeed. She scooped up the Baby+ and placed her over the mother’s breast, car and all. The Baby+ poked her head out of the car’s window and sucked. After a few minutes, she fell asleep, and the car frame relaxed, for she was very tired to be born.
She’s feeding really well, the nurse said. No concerns at all. You are very lucky to have this Baby+.
We are very lucky, the parents repeated, dazed.
The father took the sleeping Baby+ into his arms, feeling the roughness of the wheels pressing against his chest. Here he was, a father to a baby born with a car. A Baby+, in fact. Responsible for her and her car for the rest of her life. No antenatal class could prepare him for this. He noted the small perfectness of the Baby+ — her tiny seats, her steering wheel the size of his palm — that encompassed her fragile body of skin and bones and breathing. He made this. Well, her mother really. But he made a contribution. He pressed each of her fingers, one by one, sweeping from the little finger to the thumb, and wondered how humans had evolved to make this cluster of cells, barely conscious, barely moving. With this car she would never get hurt, he thought, his heart raced, fearful and thankful at the same time. She would never fall and hurt herself. The car would always be there to protect her. He stroked her and her car, together as one cluster of cells, one consciousness, and he accepted everything.
The mother was now delighted too, for different reasons. She was thinking of all the ways she could boast to her friends. How amazing her Baby+ will be indeed. Oh that Melissa Lim with no morning sickness and a petite bump would be so jealous when she finds out about her baby born with a car. And that Mrs. Azlan at work, always jabbering how advanced her boy was, blah blah three hundred piece puzzle completed at age four blah blah, well was her boy born with a car? Was her boy a Baby+? No? Suck that Mrs. Azlan — though the mother would never say those words out loud, only that that gods have blessed her with this incredibly amazing and fortunate baby.
For the most part, the Baby+ grew like any baby but with an extra appendage, symbolised by her plus sign. And the car grew as her body grew, just as the obstetrician had said.
Do you think if the characters in the X-Men movie had called the mutants ‘Person+s' for their special abilities, they wouldn't have hunted down them down? the baby's father mused. You know, instead of using the word ‘mutants’.
Then we wouldn't have had the movie in the first place, the baby's mother replied. No conflict no story.
The parents were very proud of their Baby+. She did her first drive across the floor of the living room at thirteen months, her little wheels wobbling uncertainly. My baby's no longer a baby, her mother said. She's so big now. Look at her, steering her wheel like a teenager, with her strong and confident palmar grasp. Reversing like a boss.
Their families and friends had many questions. How do you change her nappy? Does she poop in her car? Does she sleep in her car?
Like any other baby, though the car gets in the way sometimes, the parents said.
Eventually, their Baby+ grew up and was able to drive everywhere, though her parents chaperoned her in their own car — an external appendage, a separate contraception wholly unfitted to their bodies, unlike the Baby’s.
It was entirely logical that the first Baby+ was born in Kuala Lumpur, a car-centric city where there was simply no way of getting around without a car, where pedestrians had to risk their lives crossing multi-lane highways. Pedestrians were like pesky cockroaches: tolerated at best, squashed when necessary. They couldn’t take public transport either: light rail transit stations were built in the middle of fast-flowing expressways, with no bridges to connect the stations to anything. Forest reserves were cleared to make way for car parks. Hills were stripped bare and cut down to make way for four-story flyovers. And when the people complained about the traffic in Kuala Lumpur, why always jam in KL stuck in traffic for two hours you know cibai, the local politicians would solve the problem by building another flyover.
Indeed, a person’s body in Kuala Lumpur was useless without a car. Like a virus, the host environment of Kuala Lumpur was conducive to make this next leap in evolution.
Around the Baby+’s fifteen birthday, a second Baby+ was born with a car wrapped around his tiny body like a protective cage.
This second Baby+ was born to a family who lived two streets down — only a five minutes’ drive — from the first Baby+. The first Baby+’s family was displeased that their Baby+ was no longer the only one in the world, and at the same time, simultaneously happy to share the joy of having a unique child.
And then the two families, believing themselves to be unique in the world, received the unwanted news that a third Baby+ was born.
The third Baby+ was born on the other side of the world, in the suburbs of one of the Hawaiian islands. No longer a local phenomenon, some said, not an Asian virus after all.
The parents of the third Baby+, upon being asked for comment, said, we were surprised, we thought we were too old. And here is our miracle, our own Baby+.
The newspapers and social media debated whether this was a mutation in the Asian genome, a ticking time-bomb in evolution (the Hawaiian baby was born to a white mother and Asian father). Perhaps the gene was not a leap forward in evolution, but a leap backwards, they muttered.
Soon, the Asian-gene-mutation story was debunked when babies started to be born to white parents, in Paris, Milan, Istanbul, more babies too many to count, the news of Baby+s arriving exponentially — and some might even say going viral. Not just an Asian thing, and then the world exploded in Baby+s.
Baby+ after Baby+ were delivered in hospitals, in homes, in birthing pools, in Ubers on the way to the hospital; some Baby+s were premature, some near-term, some full-term, some underweight and some huge, some Buddhists, some Orthodox Christians, some Catholics, some Muslims, some Hindus, but they were all Baby+s, whether emerging from the birth canal or an incision in the stomach — a steering wheel, a seat, a metal cage that wrapped their entire body. They were the new generation of humans. Officially: Generation Plus. Unofficially: X-Gen. They were rolled out like software updates: it took some time getting used to and there were complaints, but soon people started to accept that this was the new normal.
Parents began asking for Baby+ checks during ultrasound scans. (The metal skeleton of the car can be detected from 15 weeks onwards).
Search engines, started to autocomplete words like "—drive" to queries such as "When will my baby learn to—". Paediatricians updated their baby milestone charts to include first roll-around.
Insurers began to offer comprehensive health coverage, which combined private medical health with car insurance.
The Baby+s grew, and so did their cars. Baby+ became Child+ who became Teen+ and eventually Person+, and each of the X-Gen grew into full personalities, with cars to match: minivans, sport cars, hatchbacks, convertibles, sedans, 4x4s, and even a pick-up truck which — when you squinted at it — could pass for a car. Their houses grew increasingly cramped as the cars were so large, so the families would extend their houses to fit the X-Gen, and widened streets so they could move.
The governments of the world built more road because how could there be enough road? Parks were tarmacked over, buildings were destroyed, roads were built over roads, with flyovers that would take them and their cars everywhere. Still there was always traffic, because they were traffic.
It was around this time when the first Person+ killed a Person- (as people without in-built cars were now called). A Person- happened to be crossing an intersection of a 14-lane highway. Though that Person+ was technically in the wrong as the traffic lights were red, everyone agreed that it was a tragedy, a car accident, wrong time wrong place, it was his fault but it’s not really his fault, mistakes were made, some excellent use of the passive voice in the media coverage. As punishment, the Person+ was banned from driving for six months, which was then reduced to five days on appeal as the Person+ said they couldn’t go anywhere due to the car being attached to his person. Everyone agreed that that the punishment would cause exceptional hardship and had to be mitigated.
In his appeal, the Person+ said that it wasn’t really his fault, you know. I couldn't see Person-, he was so very small and without his car.
In the aftermath of the incident, a Person+ influential thinker wrote a critical essay which everyone agreed with: We have to prevent these accidents from happening. The roads are not safe. WE NEED RULES. Otherwise more will die. We shouldn't allow people to jaywalk on the roads without a car. Driving a car is the safest way to protect our fragile, vulnerable bodies from damage. This is the best way to keep ALL of us, whether we are Person+ or Person-, safe.
More jaywalking laws were passed in the parliament. Person-s were forbidden to walk on pavements or roads, as it was too dangerous. There was discontent but there were the numbers of Person-s were falling, replaced by the X-Gen.
In most families, the elderly relatives, born without a car, were becoming an anachronistic embarrassment, a remnant of a backward past. They were kept in their rooms for their own safety, as even their own homes had become too dangerous to navigate car-less.
Free Person-s sought holdouts where they found others like them, little communes where they walked around with their bare feet — a shrinking paradise, in which they died and there was no replacement. One by one, the Person-s left this world that has moved away from them, evolved to a strange, different place. This world did not work for them any longer.
Soon the very last Person- was a 98 year old lady who lived by the seaside her whole life. She was born the same day as the third Baby+, and was often resentful that her genetics had trapped her in this world that she could not escape. Why was that other baby born with a car, why not her?
When the media found out the existence of the last Person-, they rushed to her house to get a sighting of the rare creature, last of her kind. Raz, a photographer from the local tabloid, spotted her one evening. The Person- had been looking at the sky stained with dark clouds, her arms outstretched, her legs and body fragile, naked without a steering wheel or metal frame. If any Person+ touched her, even the smallest of impact, she would be killed, Raz was sure of it. He felt his wheels tipping over into a new era of history, and here he was to witness it. She turned her head to look him, and he saw her sad eyes, her legs wobbling on the verge of collapsing. Suddenly her legs moved, a jerky discontinuous roll. Raz realised that she was moving towards him, her fragility and all of it — her skin that would bruise on impact, her feet that would be mangled by his wheels, her breakable bones — he did not know what to do with his self, so he reversed slowly, but she shouted and threw herself on the front of his car; he was just a photographer, what was he going to do, so he rolled over her, the last Person- in a car-full world.