Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

Then Chalmers and I escorted him to the front gate. There, with a display of loyalty totally undeserved, Rudy Starnes picked up Barrington in the Contact Cable News van in which the two had been camping for the past three ass-freezing days, presumably to drive him back up the lonely highway to Atlanta.

Upstairs, in a tiny bedroom next to the studio, I found Livia George with the new parents. In one corner was a white wicker bassinet, but RuthClaire was sitting in an upholstered chair nursing her baby, whom someone had bagged up in a yellow terrycloth sleeper. A newt, I thought. A salamander. I reported what had happened with Barrington and told Livvy that I needed to get back to the West Bank to oversee the restaurant’s closing—assuming, that is, that my hires had not long since walked off the job in bootless anger and frustration.

“They’ll be back,” RuthClaire said.

“I hope so,” I said. “It’s hard finding good help.”

“Oh, I don’t mean help. I’m talking about those jerks from Contact Cable.”

Adam stalked out of the room. Lights clicked on in the studio, and a wash of yellow lambency unrolled past the nursery.

“I don’t think he remembers the last time he let himself go like that,” RuthClaire said by way of explanation.

“The time he wrestled E. L. Teavers into the brick kiln?”

“That was self-defense, Paul, a matter of life and death. Tonight, the only thing that was truly at stake was the sanctity of our baby’s birth.”

“Adam be awright tomorrow,” Livia George said. “It’s jes’ too much ’citement for one evening.”

“He didn’t even bite the bastard,” I said. “Just knocked him down and growled.”

“He went wild.”

“Everybody goes wild now and then.” I grinned. “Why, Ruthie Cee, even you went a little wild this evening.”

She shifted her hold on the baby. “We discussed naming this little character for you. Keep that up, though, and you can forget it.” Gently, she began to jog the suckling infant in her arms. “Adam sets standards for himself, high ones. They’re high because the general expectation is that he’ll comport himself like an animal. Well, his sense of self-respect demands that he never—ever—fulfill that cynical expectation.”

“Then his standards are higher than nine tenths of the world’s human population.”

“Adam’s human.”

“You know what I mean. I was trying to compliment him.”

The baby— Paul Montaraz , I realized with sudden humbling insight—had fallen asleep nursing. He was small. Even asleep, his mouth tugged at RuthClaire’s nipple with desperate infantile greed. Livia George lifted him, coaxed a burp from him, and lay him on a quilted coverlet in the bassinet. RuthClaire told me that tomorrow morning the Montaraz family would return to Atlanta and my own life could go back to normal.

“Whoever said I wanted a normal life?”

“Look in on Adam, will you, Paul? Right now, another person’s attentions might be better medicine for his blues than mine.”

I looked in on Adam. He was sitting on the drafting table, his stack of read and unread library books teetering at his knees. Although he heard me enter, he refused to look up. We were alone together in the tall drafty expanse of the studio. Despite the room’s chilliness, my hands began to sweat.

“Adam,” I said. “Don’t feel bad about going after that Contact Cable turkey. If it had been me, I’d’ve bit him.”

The habiline looked me in the eye. His upper lip drew back to reveal his pink gums and primitive, powerful teeth. I looked away. When I looked again, Adam’s gaze had gone back to his book.

“Let me congratulate you on becoming a father, Adam. The kid’s a crackerjack.” No response. “What’s that you’re reading?”

The cloak of civility he was trying to grow into would not let him ignore a direct question. He lifted the small volume so I could read its title. Ah, The Problem of Pain again, on which Adam had foundered shortly after his arrival. I turned the book around and saw that now he’d run aground on the beginning of Chapter 9, “Animal Pain.” One sentence jumped out at me as it may have already jumped out at Adam: “ So far as we know beasts are incapable of either sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it .” My belief that this sentence may have wounded Adam was predicated on the feeling that although RuthClaire had accepted him as fully human, he had yet to accept himself as such.

“You ought to try Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet ,” I said. “It’s a helluva lot more fun than his theology.”

Adam tweezered the book from my two-fingered grip, pulled it to his chest, and then flung it past my head to the far end of the studio. Like a broken-backed bird, it flapped to a leaning standstill against the baseboard. Adam took advantage of my surprise to hop down from the table. Exiting the studio, he put me in mind of a lame elf or an oddly graceful chimpanzee: there was something either crippled-seeming or animalish about his walk. “Shame on you, Loyd,” I scolded myself.

Papa, Mama, and Little Baby Montaraz went back to Atlanta. The international media descended upon their home not far from Little Five Points, a two-story structure with a ramshackle gallery, lots of spooky gables, and a wide Faulknerian veranda. The house became almost as famous as the kid.

As for little Paul, he rapidly turned into the anthropological prince of American celebrity. Everyone wanted a piece of him and his parents. People, Newsweek, Life, 60 Minutes, 20-20, Discovery, Nova, Cosmopolitan, Omni, Reader’s Digest , and a host of other publications and programs sought to report, analyze, or simply ride the giddy whirlwind of the Montaraz Phenomenon. Indeed, it took better than a year for the extravagant circus surrounding the family to dismantle its tents and mothball its clown costumes, but, for long afterward, a carnival of revolving sideshows kept the promise (or threat) of an even dizzier Return Engagement before the public.

But I’m running ahead of myself. Let me back up.

In the absence of an attending physician, Tiny Paul required a birth certificate. Because his parents had left Paradise Farm early on Sunday morning, there was no way for them to obtain a file form on which to apply for a certificate from the Hothlepoya County Health Department. On Monday, then, I drove to Tocqueville to pick up the form. I filled it out standing at the registrar’s counter. Surprisingly, she treated the application as a routine matter. When I questioned her, she told me that the form would now go to the Office of Vital Records in the state-government complex in Atlanta.

“What about the birth certificate?”

“Send in a three-dollar filing fee and they’ll send it. It really doesn’t take long.”

“If I write the check, should I specify that the certificate itself should go to the parents’ Atlanta address?”

The young woman—trim, deftly mascaraed—looked at me with a flicker of interest. “Why would they send the certificate to you? Writing the check doesn’t make you the child’s father.”

“Then it isn’t necessary?”

“Of course not.”

Irritated, I sought to shock her. “What if I did happen to be the kid’s father?”

“Then it’s awfully big of you to pay the filing fee,” she said smoothly.

I grunted, pocketed my checkbook, and left.

On Wednesday, I received a long white envelope from Atlanta, not from the Office of Vital Records but from RuthClaire and Adam. The notes inside were both in Ruthie Cee’s peculiar El Grecoish script—tall, nearsighted characters in anguished postures—but the second was reputedly dictation from Adam. Even in my ex’s etiolated script, Adam’s was the more original and perplexing document: