Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

“Why’s that?”

“I made some calls.”

I’d been to a lot of campuses by now, and Reese had probably heard about some poorly attended events in which I insisted that a repeal of solitude was not only sufficient but ample grounds for a movement with only one requirement to join: a desire to join.

For half an hour, I wallflowered while a couple made out next to me. After that, a girl with a pink Mohawk took their place.

“Nice spot,” she said. “One thing about me, I like to watch people. A place like this, you can really watch. All this space.” She outstretched her arms.

“These your friends?”

“No”—and she sank to the floor.

“Come on,” I said. “It can’t be that bad,” though I suspected it was. And I was right. She touched her belly. “Freshman with a bun in the oven. It is that bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

She returned to her feet. “Second wind, baby. Want to dance?”

I said no. I could not keep time. Even my heart beat erratically.

“Is it that you don’t want to dance with me? ” she said. Her eyes had tears.

“Oh, God, no. It’s not that at all.”

“You think I didn’t want to be pretty? This isn’t by choice,” she said, pointing to her face. “How do you think I got knocked up, anyway? A girl like me, you get passed around.”

It was nearly eleven. I dropped my beer. Three hours of sleep in two days. The dog lapped up the suds before they were lost to the carpet. I decided to make for the bathroom, where I planned to fold up in the tub.

“You know, I haven’t told anyone about the bun,” she said. “Weird that I just told you, right?”

I nodded and smiled because this was the Helix, right here. She asked if I wanted to have sex. I said no, but that I’d be happy to stimulate her clitoris if she thought it would do her any good. She said this was not the most enticing proposal, but sure, why not.

She took my arm. Only, when we got to the bathroom, I really did collapse in the tub. I was just so tired. She said there was a Korean doctor in town who was an OB but also a healer of some kind and maybe, from the look of things, what I needed was some healing. She had been to see him about the baby and in the waiting room she’d met another pregnant woman who told her about the healing. In fact, the other pregnant woman had recently come to town precisely to see this Korean doctor, who was, she swore, the best.

I almost passed out, though not from fatigue. What did the woman look like? She was lovely. How pregnant? Six months. A blanched star of skin on her earlobe? Could be, yeah.

I raced down the hall and turned on the lights. I was looking for Reese; I needed his car. A boy getting oral sex on the couch said, “Ignore it! Keep going!” Reese said, “Sure, man, but when you get back, we want to hear about the Helix.”

The OB’s name was Choi Soon Yul. I found his office in the phone book and sifted through a dumpster out back until I found an electric bill with what I took to be his home address. Two hours later, I was banging on Yul’s screen door, smelling very much like the garbage I’d just been through. Porch lights went on, a dog went nuts, and I was sure someone would call the police, which would at least have given me a place to sleep. It was nearing 3 a.m. Instead, Yul came to the porch in slippers. Yes, yes, please would I come in and stop making that racket.

He was oddly self-possessed. He made us tea. I drank two cups and asked about Esme. He made a pretense of doctor-patient confidentiality but gave it up when it became clear I was not to be deterred and could, in fact, spend the rest of the night wailing on his doorstep. Finally he said yes, he had a patient who fit the description, but so what? Her file was in his office. I said we had to get it. He asked if I was threatening him. I was not. Only, was she okay, the patient? Was the baby okay? At last he seemed taken aback. And I was confused. Should I have been asking something else?

We agreed to visit his office the next day. In the meantime, he gave me a blanket.

I slept late into the afternoon and awoke to a flashlight pointed at my face and someone squirting me with water from a spray bottle. The room was dark; the shades were pulled. I felt massively hungover. I shaded my eyes and headed to the bathroom. My urine was a russet color I had never seen in nature. I was still feeling parched and groggy, so I went back to sleep on the couch. Next I knew, there was a voice saying, “Lift up your shirt,” and a hand feeling for the softest part of my stomach and something sharp breaking the skin.

“B-twelve plus,” she said, and again came the flashlight.

I swatted at the barrel until she turned it off. My Esme, six months pregnant, with hair parted down the middle and trussed in short pigtails. The look was not at all in keeping with the woman I knew, nor was her floral maternity blouse or canvas satchel. But it did not matter. She could have been in a chicken suit — my feelings were unchanged. I wanted to solder my body to hers, but it would not do to have Yul watching. He had served his purpose; now go away.

“B what?” I said.

“Twelve. Twelve plus. Will help with the grogginess. Yul said you drank two cups. One would have been enough.”

I rubbed at my eyes and tried to think. But — what?

Esme sat next to me. “You’ll be feeling better in a second,” she said, and she touched my forehead with the back of her hand. I was starting to already. She took my pulse.

I’d had many feelings in the anticipation of this moment, though none was on hand to help me recruit Esme back into my life. I had intended to plead and, that failing, to use the adamance of my passion to win a chance. But my head was still gruel.

You will ask why I loved her, and the answer is, I do not know. Once we’re past the qualities we all rejoice in our lovers — she is kind, she is funny, she is smart — there comes the X factor. Norman says that when you cite X factor, you are unburdening yourself of the onus to think. Imagine we chalked up all of our feelings to the X factor. Why do I kill? I dunno, it’s just got that special something. Norman has a point, but it does not attend to the experience of meeting a person who makes you want to live forever.

Esme said, “In any other universe, a man coming for Yul at three a.m. is the RDEI. Only it’s not the RDEI; it’s Thurlow Dan come to find true love. Jesus.”

“What’s the RDEI?”

She slipped her fingers under her glasses and began to press and rub at her eyes. “You’re going to cost me my job,” she said. “Which is almost ironic, since you pretty much got me this assignment to begin with.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about, only that she was not saying what I most dreaded to hear. Go home, Thurlow. Leave me alone, Thurlow. I never want to see you again, Thurlow.

She leaned back into the couch and touched her stomach. “I’m going to be a tennis ball at a party tonight.” She lifted her blouse, and there was the outline of a tennis ball in white paint. “A costume party at the high school gym. I’ll probably be the only person without a date. Bare-balled and pregnant.” She laughed grimly.

I did not ask whatever happened to not wanting the baby. I asked, instead, if she’d been feeling okay. She shook her head. There had been some bleeding early on, all-day nausea that sneered at the misnomer morning sickness, and a test for CF that boded poorly. I watched her relate these difficulties and was just beginning to marvel at the stoicism with which she’d met each one when the unexpected happened. She wept.

The effect was to make of the B12, in contrast, a shot of tar. I vaulted to her side and took her hand. She wiped at the tears with the hem of her shirt and said, “Listen to me very carefully. Yul is a North Korean defector. You don’t know what I do for a living, but it’s enough to say he’s helping us. And so is this pregnancy. It keeps our cover. But, Thurlow”—and here she started to cry anew—“I’m scared. I’m going to have a baby. I’ve never held a newborn. I never even had a pet.”