Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

INTRODUCTION

In all honesty, the day did not begin well. It began as so many had lately — with Erica crying in bed in the silent fashion she had, without noises or sniffling, and what really got to Hank was how she could get up, turn off the alarm, start the coffee, and get dressed, all without ever acknowledging that she was crying, without so much as wiping away a single tear. She stayed stony-faced while tears ran in multiple streams down her cheeks, the snot swimming down from her nostrils; she wouldn't lift a hand to wipe the snot off her face, and Hank knew she did this to broadcast her suffering and his role in it, that even her mucus was a personal indictment of him and of their life together. Even Max, who was only five and not generally perceptive of adult behavior — in fact his own behavior was causing a lot of problems and costing Hank and Erica some serious money in child therapy bills — looked at his father and asked what was wrong with Mommy. Hank only shrugged — which he knew Erica hated, but still couldn't stop doing — and told Max to get dressed.

Then, as Hank drove him to kindergarten, Max threw a fit because he wouldn't pull over and buy him some ice cream, even though it was eight o'clock in the morning and Hank had explained the proper moments and places for the eating of ice cream time and time again. Obtuseness was the major facet of Max's personality — that and anger. No one knew where it came from, the anger, not Hank, not Erica, not the teachers or the therapists. They gave him crayons and he drew mushroom clouds and corpses with blood pooling around them in waxy, Razzmatazz Red streaks. They gave him toys at group playtime and he threw the toys at the other children, whose parents later (and understandably) requested that he be removed. Max, in general, hit people. He was a disturbed child. After a while the teachers and therapists who'd once nodded sympathetically in conversation with Hank and Erica began to look at them searchingly and then stare down at their own hands, as if there were questions in their minds they weren't quite sure how to phrase. Hank knew what those questions were. In fact it came down to only one question:

What kind of people are you, that you produced this child?

He looked to work for relief from the problems of home. This was essentially the reason work was invented, as far as Hank was concerned. That and to pay the child therapy bills, since Erica had quit work to spend more time with Max, not that it was helping, which was another subject that had been gone over time and time again. In the office, crammed with fish tanks and filing cabinets and scientific journals and old posters for talks his graduate students had given at regional conferences, Hank felt at ease. He was working on a manuscript that summarized his recent research into sexual courtship and predator behavior in Poecilia reticulata. He had crunched the data into graphs and tables and believed that he could clearly demonstrate the truth of his hypothesis that the male guppy showed a constant interest in appropriate females regardless of the presence of potential predators. The male guppy was oriented to risk-reckless behavior, and Hank could prove it. It was a sheer joy to work quietly at the office all by himself; the place promoted a sense of relief so strong that it almost felt physical — like blushing, or being drunk — and that's why it was so extremely annoying when Purdy strolled in to his office yet again, without even knocking, his cowboy boots scuffling, his jaw working away at a stick of jerky, to say, “Hey, how's it going, dude?”

Purdy was from California. He was in his forties and used the word dude without irony. For this alone he couldn't be forgiven, in Hank's considered opinion.

He clenched the stick of jerky between his large white teeth— which Hank suspected were caps, incidentally — and offered Hank another one, wrapped in wax paper. “Got this baby myself,” he said, for the umpteenth time. The deer were always baby to him. “It was a large buck, a handsome animal. I had it made into partly sausage and partly jerky. Jerky's great to take to work. They make it for me in a mom-and-pop place on the East Side. You want some?”

Hank said no thanks without looking up from his monitor, which he was pretty sure constituted the international sign for leave me alone. Didn't everybody know this? For someone who studied patterns of human interaction, Purdy could be pretty oblivious.

Instead of leaving, he strolled around Hank's small office, chewing audibly on his wizened piece of meat. “Hey there, buddies,” he said to Poecilia reticulata. “You guys want some jerky?”

Hank put his hands on the sides of the chair. “You know not to feed them, right?” he said. There was, he couldn't help noticing, an undignified squeak in his voice.

“Relax, man.” Purdy tapped the stick of jerky against the glass pane of a tank. “Give me some credit.”

Hank clenched his teeth.

Purdy was the star of the department, with an endowed chair. He appeared on news shows and was the subject of feature articles in newspapers. He'd made a name for himself, in scientific circles and in larger ones, by stipulating that there was a biological basis for a lot of skanky male behavior. Men Suck: Scientific Fact was a typical headline for a piece about him. Dumping your girlfriend because she got fat, cheating on your girlfriend, lying to girls you met in bars, putting Rohypnol into their drinks — it was all just biology, Purdy said, steps on the quest to get ahead in this Darwinian world. Cultural critics said his work was a justification of the basest parts of human culture. Confronted by these remarks, Purdy smiled cagily at interviewers and said, “I just go where the science takes me.” The controversy served him well; he brought in millions of research dollars to the school and had lunch with the dean once a month.

Ordinarily, Hank dealt with Purdy like everyone else in the department — by smiling to his face and making fun of him behind his back. But today Hank was a little more on edge than usual. Okay, a lot more. The week had been a swirling mess of anxiety and tears at home, of Erica refusing to talk and then talking in the middle of the night when Hank, needless to say, was not at his best in terms of providing the listening, the holding, the reassuring that Erica wanted. In fact he hadn't had a good night's sleep since Sunday night, when she told him, in a quiet, desperate-sounding blurt, that she was pregnant. He stared at her. Under the fluorescent light of the kitchen she looked haggard. Erica had once had a perfect complexion — an English rose, her parents had called her — but it was marred now by dark circles beneath her eyes and flakes on her dry skin. Max was aging her; life was aging her.

She was waiting to see what he would say. There was no right thing to say, he knew.

“Are you sure?” he said. She rolled her eyes. They had sex rarely enough these days that he thought he remembered the night it must have happened. They'd been fighting about Max— Erica wanted to put him in a special school, with other disturbed children, and Hank thought that this would be the end of him ever turning into a normal kid — and they'd gone to bed angry and drunk and resolved the fight with sex, drunk, blotchy-faced, no-eye-contact sex. At thirty-eight, Erica didn't bother with the diaphragm. Standing there in the kitchen, Hank thought sex like that shouldn't bring a child into the world. Then he told himself, You are a scientist, and you know that has nothing to do with it. As Purdy would say, sex was sex, whatever the circumstances. “Means to an end,” he liked to say while presenting data on courtship rituals, smiling with his huge Californian teeth. Erica stood with her back to the kitchen counter, her hands clutching the marble rim of the top, and gazed emptily at the tile floor. Finally she said, “I don't want to keep it.”