FIRST PHOTOGRAPH
by Zoran Živković

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

(from Weird Tales #351, Sep/Oct 2008)

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Appearances can be deceiving.

You look at a picture and think you see everything. Young mother with babe in arms. Indeed, what else is there to see? You’ve seen thousands of such photographs. Even on postcards. It’s a cliché, you think.

And yet it isn’t. Take a closer look. The two-month-old child (me, although, of course, you can’t recognize me on my first photograph) seems intent on holding its head where it’s not supposed to be, under its mother’s bosom, closer to her stomach.

There’s something unnatural about that position. One would expect the baby to long to hear its mother’s heartbeat. That’s why mothers instinctively hold babies with their head cradled in their left arm.

I suppose I too (although, to tell the truth, I don’t remember) loved to hear my mother’s throbbing heart. How could it be otherwise? I was a normal baby.

Or perhaps not quite normal. I knew something that, even if I could, I wouldn’t have told anyone. Because it wasn’t normal. At least not according to the standards of the time. Today people would probably have a different take on it all. Be more indulgent. At least I hope so.

Here, let’s check it out. I’ll tell you the secret why I, this weak little baby, was trying with might and main to listen beneath my mother’s bosom. I wanted so terribly to hear the beating of another heart that was down there a bit lower.

No, my mother didn’t have two hearts. Not at all. Anatomically and in all other respects, everything about her was in perfect order. She certainly would have been horrified to learn about that other heart, particularly since it wasn’t hers and yet was located inside her.

Well, all right, whose other heart could that be, you wonder with a certain understandable surprise, in the normal mother of a two-month-old baby?

Here’s the answer. The other heart beating in my mother’s body belonged to my twin brother. I would like to call him by name, but he was never given one. Not only because he was never born. Had my parents known that he was conceived when I was, they would certainly have had a name waiting for him. As they did for me. But there was no ultrasound at the time.

Wait, wait, I can already hear your interruptions, what do mean to say ― he wasn’t born? How could he still not be born two months after your birth? All-embracing medicine has yet to record such an event. Without mentioning the fact that your mother, even after bringing you into the world would have been ― and looked, which is more important ― pregnant.

It truly would have been like that, and your amazement quite fitting, had things taken their natural course. But they didn’t. Exactly two months and eleven days after my twin brother and I were conceived, he decided not to be born. It’s true we were only fetuses at the time, but you are terribly mistaken if you think such far-reaching decisions can’t be made so early on.

All right, not all fetuses are equally mature. Take me, for example. Something like that would never have crossed my mind. I was much more ingenuous. Nothing more far-reaching than enjoying the warm, safe surroundings of my mother’s womb interested me. But even then my brother was characterized by a seriousness and responsibility of which few can be proud, among newborns and adults alike.

His decision astonished me, of course. How else could it be? I had counted on us being born together as befits identical twins. How could I enter the world by myself, deprived of the closest relative imaginable? It’s not certain I could even consider myself a twin in that case.

Completely distraught, I asked for an explanation. But I didn’t get one. All I was told, in the special nonverbal way that fetuses communicate, is that that’s the way it had to be. As though Fate itself were talking. It was not until much later that I realized it actually could not have been otherwise. The explanation went far beyond my capacity to understand at that age. It’s questionable that I could even today. I sincerely doubt that I will ever reach an understanding of the world to match that of my brother when he was just a fetus.

While I was unable to grasp his reasons for not being born, I wanted to know how he intended to pull it off. This was a technical, not metaphysical question, so I hoped that I would be able to understand it. Was he intending to keep growing and developing in Mother’s stomach until he came of age, and even afterward? I was horrified at the thought of what our mother would look like with a grown man in her stomach.

He took me soundly to task for such a vicious thought. Of course he wouldn’t keep on growing. How could he spoil his own mother’s appearance? He wouldn’t even stay in his current tiny proportions that would certainly cause her no inconvenience. He would go to the opposite extreme. Become smaller.

I must have given him a dumbfounded look with my large fetus eyes, because he hastened to dispel my doubts. Why was I so surprised? We live in an age of miniaturization, don’t we? Everything’s getting smaller and smaller. We’re coming closer to a quantum world in all respects. It turns out that even the cosmos itself isn’t quite as enormous as was once thought. So why should fetuses be any exception?

What else could I do but accept this rational explanation. But this did nothing to lessen my concern. When do you intend to start shrinking, I asked him. Sensing fear in my inaudible voice at the possibility of being all alone, he firmly promised that nothing would happen before I was born. He would maintain his current size until then.

And indeed, while I continued to grow, he didn’t change. Over time I became so large compared to him that I had to be very careful not to accidentally harm him. Moving about like every lively baby at the end of its term in the womb, I could have smothered him, pressed him or even smashed him.

My anxiety grew as the delivery date approached. It’s a tumultuous event, something could go wrong. What if he didn’t manage to stay inside? If he came out with me, he wouldn’t even be a premature baby. The obstetrician and midwife might not even notice him.

He just waved his bud of a hand dismissively at my anxious questions. I was not to worry, everything was taken care of. He was always to the point when important matters were involved.

He was able to console me in that regard, but not about our parting. It was clear to me that Fate was behind the whole thing, but this didn’t make it any easier for me. Is there anything harder than taking leave of your twin brother? It’s like parting with your own self. But we’re not parting, he assured me. I won’t die, I’ll just get smaller. And I won’t go anywhere. You’ll be able to hear my heart whenever you put your ear to Mother’s stomach.

Just as he promised, the delivery went smoothly. For both of us. And for Mother too. In spite of her exhaustion, she was cheerful, and everyone misunderstood my cries. They shouldn’t be criticized for this, though. Every

baby cries at birth. How could they suppose that my tears were from parting with a brother no one knew about?

Although quite weak, ever since Mother first drew me to her breast I made every effort to put my little head on her stomach. At first she found it unusual and brought my head back up, but she got used to it over time. Particularly since I fell asleep the fastest in that position. And what mother wants to have trouble putting her baby to sleep?

My brother’s heartbeats, although barely audible, had a calming effect on me. We were no longer touching like before, but we were separated by the very small partition of Mother’s skin and a thin layer of fat. You could even say that we were still connected. Just like when we were happily inhabiting the same body.

Well, no idyll is ever of long duration. This one ended when I was four and a half months old. Not all at once, but over three days. At first I thought there was something wrong with my hearing. I had to press my head harder and harder into Mother’s soft abdomen to make out the sound of the tiny heart inside.

And then with horror I realized the truth. My brother had set out on the final minimization. At the end of the third day I could no longer hear him regardless of my efforts. And I couldn’t try any harder because Mother’s stomach had started to hurt from all my pressing, so she held me away from it.

Inevitably I fell ill. Many adults, let alone a baby, would have been crushed by such a trauma. My illness caused the doctors great concern. No one could discover its cause. They examined me thoroughly and tried various therapies, but nothing helped improve my blood count and bring back my appetite. And pull me out of my apathy.

I got better at the beginning of my sixth month. They thought it happened all by itself. The doctors couldn’t find the reason for this spontaneous recovery either. But it caused them no concern. Who cares why things are going fine, while they are? They didn’t miss a chance, however, to give themselves credit for this favorable turn of events.

And the credit was all mine. I simply started to look at things rationally. At that age a lot of maturing happens in a month and a half, even when you’re sick. Or rather, particularly then.

All right, I can’t hear my brother’s heart anymore, but that doesn’t mean, as he himself said, that he died. He’s still alive in Mother’s womb, he just got smaller. To the quantum level. Maybe even below it. Indeed, miniaturization truly knows not boundaries. And there, as we all know, it’s completely immaterial to talk about sound, so there isn’t any beating.

This silence from the womb actually came at just the right time. I couldn’t keep my head on Mother’s stomach forever. What would that look like? Babies have to be weaned sooner or later. It’s a bit hard in the beginning, but then they get used to solid food. And start enjoying it.

I rarely think of my brother today. You know how it is: out of sight, out of mind. I only remember him when I look at this photograph, and I don’t do that very often. You can’t see him, but I know he’s there. And I hope he’s well wherever he is now. In any case, it was his own choice.

I don’t know whether I’ve convinced you, though. I’d say I haven’t. Congratulations on the quantum world, I can almost hear you thinking, but if a person doesn’t believe their own eyes, whom will they believe and why? Appearances can be deceiving, but not that much. The picture only shows an ordinary young mother with babe in arms. And since the baby truly doesn’t look like me now at this advanced age, how can you believe me when I say it’s me? Particularly since my penchant for wild ideas earned me a bad reputation long ago. I’m even trying to make a living out of it.

Zoran Živković is a writer, essayist, researcher, editor, publisher and translator from Belgrade, Serbia, where he still resides. He is the author of seventeen works of fiction including The Fourth Circle (1993), Time Gifts (1997), The Last Book (2007) and Escher’s Loops (2008). Živković has been nominated for several awards and received the Miloš Crnjanski Award, World Fantasy Award, the Isidora Sekulić Award, and the Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša Award for Life Achievement in Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.