Colin Harrison - Afterburn

The next morning Teknetrix's share price was up almost two points in the first fifteen minutes of trading-as the financial soothsayers shook their magic rattles and decided that tech stocks were hot-and this was good news, good enough to ward off the spirits of evil Chinese bankers for a day or two, good enough to carry him to the Park Avenue fertility clinic whose services Martha had engaged. He slipped a hand into his pants pocket and jiggled himself a bit, as if to weigh what kind of effort he might be able to make.

In the waiting room, its walls covered with photos of children, half a dozen anxious-looking women flipped through magazines without talking to one another. So young, Charlie thought, just like Julia. Two or three glanced up at him with smiles of benign curiosity, as if he were one of their fathers, which in one sense he was and another he was not.

The nurse summoned him into the doctor's office, where he stood reading the framed professional certifications for subspecialties he didn't know existed. The doctor, a curly-haired man not even forty, came in, shook hands, waved at the chair.

"You understand this arrangement?" Charlie asked.

"Martha explained it pretty well." The doctor shrugged, merely a humble technologist, a gentle farmer of embryos, so proficient he could probably get women pregnant with his thumb. "Seems straightforward," he added.

This kid has probably created as many lives as I've destroyed, Charlie thought, and yet here we are. "You don't have any problem with it-I mean, it's a bit unusual."

The doctor shrugged again. "We get all kinds of situations. Lesbian couples, widows, you name it."

"Sort of nontraditional," said Charlie. "Inappropriate, even."

"I help people have babies," the doctor replied, not interested in judging his patients. "I like babies. I believe in babies."

"You're busy?"

"Booked for the next three years."

"How did my lawyer get us in, then?"

"Martha is my older sister."

Old Martha, working every angle. "I guess that's why I'm here," Charlie said.

"No."

"No?"

"Martha doesn't give anyone any slack, not even her little brother." He shook his head. "The reason is that we have the highest success rate of any fertility practice in the city. Granted, it's only by nine one-hundredths of a percent, but it is the highest. You'd be amazed at how important this is. First thing a lot of prospective patients want to know."

"My daughter tried with a practice on Lexington and Sixty-first."

"Oh, they're very good," he noted. "Excellent reputation."

"She went through the whole thing nine times."

The doctor shook his head. "After nine times, it's not going to work."

"I guess not."

"We'll try only six times. After that, we tell patients no go." The doctor pulled a stoppered, wide-mouth test tube from a drawer. "Now, there's only one question I need to ask you."

"Sure."

"Do you remember how to masturbate?"

He stood in a dark, safe room, not a bedroom, but a velvety dark lounge in a very good hotel, perhaps the Conrad in Hong Kong, or the Huntington in San Francisco. Maybe the Pierre. No one else was close by. The smell of cigarettes. Music. Saxophone. A woman sat on a sofa holding a silky, nearly translucent veil, bluish in the light. She pinched a corner of the veil with each hand, and it lay over her nose and fell straight down from there, not draped against her body but swelling slightly where her breasts pushed against it. He wore his best suit and approached with a fluid ease impossible in real life; he moved like a thirty-year-old. He and the woman had never seen each other before, and yet they were well known to each other. Her eyes were warm, her mouth coyly affectionate behind the veil. As he neared, he could smell her perfume, which was heavy, as he liked it. She lowered the veil a little, so that its edge dropped below the tip of her nose, and she let it fall farther, looking from the veil to his eyes and back to the veil. And now she let the veil drape against her for a moment, he could see that she was voluptuous. The saxophone held a high note, smoke spiraled. She looked into his eyes and tilted her head forward, her eyes still holding his. He nodded, as if asked a question, and she moved closer to him, nearly touching him. Now she lowered the veil to her breasts and then against her belly. Her shoulders and arms were fleshy, her breasts heavy with their size, nipples large and eyed outward, and he ran his palms lightly up over them, which made her breathe in. He had to have her, he had to-

— be sure he aimed into the test tube. Which he did, opening his eyes as his semen spat into the receptacle, a white shot that slid down the glass wall, and he squeezed out a last bead, even as his erection was falling away, shrinking back to a state of plausible deniability. He pulled the stopper of the tube out of his breast pocket, inspected its underside for any foreign element, then pressed it into the glass mouth.

A moment later, outside the bathroom, Charlie found the nurse, a happily fat woman with hair the improbable color of tiger lilies.

"All set?" she said brightly, as if to a young child.

"Yes."

"I'll take it." She looked into the tube, swirled it around. She was not impressed.

"Gave it my best shot," Charlie apologized. There was no dignity in this, of course. So what if I run a half-billion-dollar company, he thought, all they care about is how much jism I have. "Anything else I need to do here?"

"Nope," the nurse answered. She stuck a coded label on the specimen. "Your part's done."

Civilization, like a fishing boat, needed maintenance. You had to keep protecting against the natural advance of decay, and he had decided to maintain himself, too, returning to the truck now with the tools and signifiers of civilization-clean laundry, a desk calendar, the Daily News, a new toothbrush, and a two-pound powder mix of creatine monohydrate, glutamine peptides, and whey protein isolate that he sprinkled on his food. He was going to get beefed and buffed, he was going to get a routine together, not just take showers at the gym with the homos staring at him, not just eat in cheap restaurants, including the Jim-Jack three times already looking for Christina-with no luck yet. Yes, he was going to open a bank account, he was going to set himself up right, maybe find a decent place to sleep. Church, Rick said to himself as he returned to the parking garage, at this rate I might even go to church.

He stepped out of the midday sun into the cool incline of the garage's shadow and noticed that breathless Horace was not in his booth and that the big elevator was in use, which meant Horace was parking a vehicle in the basement, where the truck sat. Rick now always used the fire stairs, because the rumbling elevator, which ran on hydraulics, not counterweights, took too long. He headed toward the stairs with his packages, pulling out his keys, but he noticed that Horace had left a car, a white Crown Victoria, parked in no-man's-land just around the corner from the booth. Horace, though a wheezing deadbeat, was dependably obsessive about where his cars rested at all times, and a Crown Victoria sitting there askew not only violated Horace's system but meant that Horace was not parking a car in the garage, and yes, Ricky-with-the-dickey, a white Crown Victoria was, often as not, an unmarked police car.

He wanted to know what they were doing down there. Maybe fucking with the truck. Could he beat the elevator to the basement? He skipped down the stairs, peeked around the corner, and saw the floor of the elevator sinking past the ceiling, three pairs of legs appearing, and he huffed stiffly along the basement's dark back wall, sliding to a stop beneath a new Lexus twenty cars away from the truck. Unless they searched the entire garage, they wouldn't find him.