She found a microscope and telescope their father built for himself as a child. Beautiful heavy metal objects, elegant in their strange simplicity. She tries to imagine what he wanted to see, or was it rather the construction that had guided him? He had kept these objects with him his whole life, packaged and stored carefully for decades, moved across continents and back. Was it this way of wanting to know the world that made them who they are, each of them looking for ways of seeing or understanding the unknown.

The scale is impossible to visualize or grasp the meaning of – for months now the numbers and comparisons slip and slide in and out of focus.

She thinks about the stars, the dizzying sensation of lying back as a child looking up at the night sky, unable to remember the constellations and positioning, flooded by a wave of pleasurably melancholy, involuntary tears. She thinks of their father’s love of thunderstorms, silently watching the operatic cracking skies, black clouds against the moon, lightning in all its electrifying glory.

This body they are creating, glimmers with trillions of sparkling lights, when she tries to imagine it. Data points pulsating, made up of thousands of donated cells, gifted from the deceased to us here in the future. One body made up of ghosts from across our planet, a palimpsest, hybrid, mythical being, from flesh to data. This is what she imagines. A glow so bright it is like looking in to the sun.

They are working on an atlas her sister explains. They are mapping the entire human body at cellular level, identifying and locating every atom we are made of and how these interact and affect one another. It will take years, decades, thousands of them working on the task together across the world. This atlas will unlock mysteries that help us understand ourselves, our bodies and thus far incurable diseases. It will create a navigation system of this vast galaxy we are made up of, which we have been trying to know and see in more and more detail since the beginning of time. The cells are taken from tissue whilst the flesh is still alive, but the person has died. An in-between moment in which our bodies have not yet registered that our minds have ceased to function, our cells alive, our body clinically dead. This tissue is removed, cells frozen whilst dead-alive, transported from operating theatre to lab, dissected, isolated, until just one lone cell is named and positioned within the atlas. A fixed point remaining while the donor’s body now disappears. I think of those cells gifted by mothers, the bodies donated that did not know life outside of amniotic waters. I think of these points of light glimmering throughout the atlas, like stars in the night sky long dead – temporal insanity.

For years they slept in one bed, tossing and turning in unison like one nightly creature, holding one another as though fused in an unspoken choreography. They share the same genetic material, yet process the world so differently.

Her sister’s daughter, her saviour in those years of doubting, had told her something she thinks about every day. This first baby, who transformed all three of them from daughters and sisters into mothers, had told her when she was only a few years old that when we are born, even before entering the world, all of our eggs are already inside us. She whispered this seemingly ubiquitously known fact with wonder and glee. Inside, inside, inside – past, present and future held in one vessel, cells, who may meet again in another cellular configuration. It still seems entirely miraculous. To have known you already. To contain and be contained. The future invisibly already there … all of us together, sisters, mothers, daughters, generations of women and children together at once. You were always already within me, were with me before I came in to the world.
Esther Teichmann