Megan Bergman - Birds of a Lesser Paradise - Stories

I parked the car outside on the slick ebony street and let myself in through the heavy mahogany doors. It was a cold sixty degrees out; the rain gave the air a chill. An old chandelier with missing and cobwebbed bulbs hung over me in the pastel yellow foyer, which was crowded with bikes and shoes.

I let myself in to our friend’s apartment and sat in a folding chair in the back row. There were twenty or so attendees, most of them thin and hip with snug jeans and black winter hats pulled down over their hair.

These people who professed to love nature, it seemed to me, would be quickly lost within it.

Malachi, riffling through papers at the front of the room, nodded solemnly at me, eyes widening as if surprised by my presence.

He rose, cleared his throat, and began the meeting as he always did, with a reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Apostrophe to Man”:

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself,

die out.

Breed faster, crowd, encroach.

Have you thought of protesting at the fertility clinics? one guy asked, raising his hand, scanning the room for approval. All the multiples—

It’s an idea, Malachi said, but probably not the best place for recruiting sympathizers.

I cringed, picturing the scene, the people so desperate to conceive a life, their insides poked, tested, and fragile. I knew, then, that the secret I was carrying made me an outsider at EWU, forever sympathetic to the enemy cause.

What we’re trying to cultivate is awareness, Malachi said, the realization that every human life drains the earth’s limited resources. Our reproduction is excessive and disgusting.

Yes, someone said. Amen.

The people gathered in the room sipped their tea and took notes. We wanted the same thing, I think, an earth less taxed by human presence. But giving up on life now, I felt, was like leaving the party early.

Would there be water shortages? Yes. More starving babies? Unfortunately. Would our quality of life soon be diminished by global warming? Probably. But who, I wondered, but the strongest among us could hold those ideas in their heads and find happiness? Get out of bed in the morning?

Remember, Malachi said, not having a child is the best thing you can do for the planet.

As the meeting ended, people mumbled about Freitas’s notion of ecophagy, nanotechnology gone wrong. They spoke of ecocide by asteroid, sterility by route of too frequently ingested GMOs.

Afterward, Malachi stood behind me and massaged my shoulders. His flannel shirt was missing buttons and he hadn’t shaved in days. He kissed the back of my head.

Come with me, he said, leading me to the empty dining room. The fireplace was cemented over. A beer-pong table was shoved into a corner, and the smell of old beer in the carpet began to turn my stomach.

You’re here, he said, smiling, though I knew his pleasure would be short-lived.

It’s not as easy as you think, I said. You herald the natural world, then dismiss the power of biology over our bodies and minds.

Lauren, he said, you’re a smart girl. You can control your biological urge.

I don’t want to, I said.

Take a step back, he said, smiling. You can live without this.

What are you going to do, Malachi? I said. Die forty years from now with a smug grin and the satisfaction of knowing you convinced twenty people not to breed?

Your carbon footprint will be hard to live with, he said. Trust me.

His once appealing certitude was ugly, a barrier to my happiness. Malachi cleared his throat and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

I pictured the mother whale, exhausted from labor, pushing her calf up to the skin of the water. The miracle of breath in the face of predation, life in the wake of whaling ships.

I know what I want to do, I said. I looked down and saw the hope within my body as I began to explain, my raw and stupid hope.

We are the bad mothers, the moose and I — me for drinking, the moose for abandoning her yearling to attend her newborn.

I’m reading about moose in a coffee-table book someone gave me last Christmas. I ogle the pictures of moose racks, felt peeling off the antlers like downy rags. Beware the behavior of yearling moose freshly abandoned by their mothers, the book warns.

The storm of the decade rages outside. Four inches of snow top the previous night’s frozen rain. It’s too much for skinny pines and sandy soil. The trees bend and snap and fall down across the roads, ice needles shattering like glass. I suppose the barometric pressure will put women in labor across the South, jump-start a run on milk, bottled water, chicken pot pies.

My television flickers. I have it on because I’m lonely and like noise. I’ve forgotten what I’m watching. A tampon commercial comes on. Girls in high heels. Girls on Vespas. Menstruation is fun, the commercial seems to say. I haven’t menstruated in seven years.

The power goes out. 4:43 is a long minute; I watch it on a battery-powered clock bought when I could still afford frivolity. 443 began my first phone number, a number I memorized with pride, a number that belonged to a brick ranch in a new neighborhood that abutted an old farm. A number I wish I could call now and hear my mother on the other end. I can still feel the fat of my lip tucking beneath my adolescent buck teeth when I mouth the number four.

I call my daughter, Leslie. She doesn’t answer. I guess I called knowing she wouldn’t.

Leslie believes the world will end in one year. She lives with a man with no education who wears work boots and stiff canvas pants. They live in his parents’ basement and watch informational videos about the apocalypse online. His mother bakes herself in a tanning bed in her garage, right next to her husband’s rusted-out Chevrolet. She’s the color of red clay.

I tell the girls at work that Leslie’s boyfriend, Zach, is like the stud pony they use to get the mares going at the reproduction barns — all prance, five hands short his filly.

Leslie’s like a yearling moose, all legs, ungulate eyes with too much hope in them. Beautiful, well bred, wasting away. Hard to find.

I’m leaving school, she told me this fall. There’s no point. What else have you given up on? I’d asked. Do you still brush your teeth?

The phone rings. I don’t answer. Suddenly I’m not in the mood to talk to Leslie anymore. I don’t know what to say. The machine picks up.

Suzanne? a voice says. This is the Lemur Center calling. You’re a volunteer with us?

I pick up. The answering machine screams like a banshee.

You live within walking distance of the center, correct? she says. I need you there now. Our power is out and it’s too cold for the lemurs. The aye-aye, too.

I’m in my pajamas, I say.

The anxiety in her voice worries me. She’s going to involve me in a desperate act. I can feel it.

This is a life-or-death situation, she says. With the ice and trees on the road it will be hours before we can get there.

I’m sorry, I say.

Call me when you get there, she says. I’ll walk you through what to do.

I pull jeans over my pajamas and a hat over my uncombed hair. Over that, an old Burberry trench given to me by my ex-husband when I was in what I call my Gene Tierney stage — good cheekbones, groomed eyebrows. I grab sheets and towels from my linen closet and wrap an afghan around my neck like a scarf. The truth is, I have nothing better to do.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I run the Feed an Aye-Aye a Raisin program at the Lemur Center. Every recovering alcoholic knows it’s best to live within walking distance of work; it’s easier to assume one morning I’ll be too tanked to drive. My sobriety is fragile. I’ve been sober going on forty-six days, but it’s not the first time, or the longest. Sobriety, like parenting, is something I’m good at screwing up.