When fate closes a door it opens a window, goes the platitude, but in this case Keith is both door and window. He opens the window with his liver. There’s a story in the Canadian Buddhist nun’s book about a prince who stumbles upon a starving tigress and, in an act of supreme compassion, sacrifices himself to feed her. But in my opinion, the prince should have killed the tigress. She was bound to continue suffering after the prince was gone, until she was gone herself. I have observed myself and my Keiths with a similar sort of compassion, but I can’t decide which role is mine. Keith inhabits himself in a parking-lot-during-snow sense that I am incapable of imitating. So he must be the prince and I the tigress. He is not hungering like so many of us to belong in the world. Before Wanda was recruited to the Keith Fulfillment Center, she was employed by a bioremediation service that identified anonymous corpses. If no next of kin or friend or acquaintance claimed the remains, they would be cremated and then stored in a different type of warehouse.

To create a Keith, the lab technician vacates an ovum of its extant tenancy. I contemplate the ova, those microscopic rooms, as Wanda describes searching through the deceased’s receipts for products ordered from our warehouses—since the Keith Fulfillment Center is but one branch of a parent company that can also fulfill needs for everything else: area rugs, immersion blenders, socks, half of which will go missing—to confirm a name. Apparently, you come to recognize the deceased’s deodorant of choice. A Keith has no accessories other than his body, which is not buried. His donations are treated with the utmost diligence, but the dross of Keith is disposed of like standard medical waste. The warehouse hands joke about unpacking a Keith while they pack up our stuff. They might kid about hazing the newbie by hiding an ear in his lunch, but they are just as subject to scrutiny as we are. And yet they don’t have to hassle with a pulse.

The wing of artificial wombs is where nurses tend to spend their breaks. It’s called the Aquarium, with the Keiths like fish hovering above us. But the Keiths don’t seem much like fish to me, even in their early trimester when they are most liquid. They’re closer in aspect to a scented candle than a shark. On one wall there are quaint educational posters of a woman’s abdomen, the traditional biological womb. Lately Keith with a mole and I have been transfixed by nature documentaries, and the illustrated female reproductive system, its retinal ovaries sloping into the snout of the womb, resembles the head of a praying mantis. An interesting fact on a poster is that fingerprints are made when the fetus presses up against the mother’s uterus. Keith’s fingerprints are smooth. His plastic enclosure does not resist—it gives and gives. As I trail Wanda into the wombs, she glows with an embryonic warmth. I am left with the impression that she is a vessel of great sacrifice and purpose.