Naja Aidt - Rock, Paper, Scissors

Patricia starts to get to her feet. “I just hope you come to a consensus on the best way forward,” the doctor says. “I understand you two have wanted a baby for some time.” He looks at Thomas and smiles, but his eyes are not smiling. “Good luck.” And Thomas wants to scream that he never wanted a baby at all — and certainly not one some monster of a man may be the father of, a kid conceived during a violent assault against the woman he lives with, a kid who carries that violence inside even before it’s born. But he doesn’t say anything, he just nods at the doctor and follows Patricia out. She’s already on her way down the hallway. “I hate hospitals,” she mumbles when he reaches her. “It smells like illness and death here.” And still he can’t talk. Everything’s spinning around in his head, the rape, the pink and goopy little creature that’ll be pulled out of Patricia, and all of it happened behind his back, and why? She walks faster every time he catches up with her, and that provokes him. “Stop,” he snarls, grabbing her arm. “Look at me!” But she pulls free and continues without looking at him. He marches in front of her and forces her to stop. “Could you fucking look at me? What’s going on?” A nurse in white clogs passes them, a stack of folders in her arms. She frowns disapprovingly at Thomas. “Why won’t you look at me? It’s one thing that you didn’t tell me you were pregnant, but another thing entirely that you just sit there and. . and. . and say out of the blue that you don’t care who the father is! That you don’t care . What do you mean by that? You say it means nothing to you! So you don’t care about me? Do you not care about me?!” That last part he nearly screams. “Stop shouting,” she says measuredly, shoving him aside. She keeps walking hastily forward. The elevator is filled with people. Going down, the butterflies in his belly nauseate him, and for a moment he almost throws up. He stumbles after Patricia through the foyer, and when they exit the hospital, it’s as if they slam into a wall of unbearable heat. Thomas gulps for breath. “You need to talk to me,” he says, almost tearfully. He grabs her hand. “We need to talk.” He guides her to a bench, she sighs wearily. Reluctantly she sits at the far end. She raises her eyebrows a little. “What do you want?” she asks, indifferent.

“What I want? After all this? Don’t you think we have a whole lot to discuss? For one thing, I’d like an explanation.” She smiles contemptuously. Just one moment in the sun and he feels so hot it’s as though his blood is boiling; his headache’s splitting his skull in two, as if his cranium has become too small, as if the tissue in his head is pressing on the helmet of his skull. Patricia shoots him a cold glance. “You’d almost think you hate me,” he says. “Do you hate me?” No answer. “Why do you hate me all of a sudden? Haven’t I helped you and supported you as best I could?”

“Just stop it.” She looks up and regards a ginkgo tree’s columnar shape. “What do I want?” she says, calmly. “Why do you keep asking me that? You just heard what I want.”

“But this has got to be a joint decision! For God’s sake, we live together! I love you!”

“Oh, do you now?” she says, still without looking at him.

“Maybe we can have a baby together, one we know is ours. Later. That’s mine. Okay? Why are you so stubborn? Please look at me, Patricia?” Her eyes linger briefly on his, then she turns back to the gingko tree.

“It’s very simple,” she says. “I want a baby. I’ve wanted a baby for a long time — unlike you. Now I’m pregnant, and obviously I don’t want to have an abortion. Is that so strange?”

He stares at her profile. Her beautiful, aquiline nose and her fine little ears, from which a single white pearl dangles in a slender filament of gold. He loves her ears.

“Yes,” he says. “I think it’s very strange. There’s a strong possibility that you got pregnant that night. No normal person would run the risk. I just can’t understand how you can even consider having the baby, especially when you can take a test and actually find out if he was the one who got you pregnant.”

She turns her head and looks him straight in the eyes. “What would I do with that knowledge? I’d still have to give birth, either way. To a dead child, mind you.”

A pause. Once again he feels a surge of powerless rage, a hatred of this fucking fetus that’s sloshing around in Patricia’s body, that has possessed her, that has fucking possessed her, he thinks, sweat rolling off him. He says, “Then you’ve got to put it up for adoption. If you’re going to be so fucking obstinate.”

For an instant her eyes spark to life. There’s a brief flash of terror, which is followed again by a cool, stiff expression. “I hope you don’t really mean that.” He shrugs irritably. “What else?” “You know what?” she says, slowly raising her right hand while turning toward him. She points at him. “You listen closely.” Her voice is low and savage. “I know better than anyone how to live with what happened to me. Don’t you lecture me. Don’t you make demands. Don’t you ask me to put anything up for adoption . I want to have a normal life again. And I will. A life more normal and joyful than my last few months with you.” She lowers her finger, but continues to stare at him. “I have my reasons for not involving you in this, Thomas.” She studies his face. His nose, mouth, chin. It feels very uncomfortable. As if she’s gauging him. As if he were a stranger. Then she looks into his eyes.

“I’ve rented an apartment near the river,” she says. “I’m moving out. I’m moving, Thomas. I’m leaving you, and that’s how it is.” He opens his mouth to talk, but nothing comes out. “That’s how it is,” she repeats. She stands, clutches her green suede bag, and hurries across the scorched lawn. He remains seated on the bench, in the sunlight, unable to move. “Patricia!” he shouts after a moment. He gets clumsily to his feet. “Patricia!” With all the strength he can muster in his lungs, he roars her name across the hospital campus. But she doesn’t turn around.

When she’s out of sight, he slumps onto the bench. Everything’s unreal, blurry. He buries his head between his knees. A normal and joyful life, she said. The opposite of a life with him. In the morning, when she goes to work, before he’s gotten up, the little click of the lock when the door closes. Not a word of goodbye , he thinks, furious. He has difficulty catching his breath. And yet he lights a cigarette, the nicotine clawing at his throat. Thoughts and images swirl around in his brain, his headache growing more and more intense: Patricia, naked in the shower, smiling as he hands her a towel; Patricia sitting opposite him in the kitchen one winter evening, a glass of wine in her hand; private conversations they’ve shared while lying in bed in the dark of night; the sensation of gliding into her; the wet softness of her mouth; her hand on his back. Is he the one who impregnated her, in the car on the way to Kristin’s, maybe, or on her desk in her office? Or is it the lover he suspected her of being with all those nights in May when she didn’t come home? And: Why does she have Luke’s number? Now he pictures Luke’s oil-squirted hands sliding across Patricia’s skin, there in Kristin’s kitchen. Did she have an affair with Luke? The rapist left his sperm in Patricia, but the police couldn’t find a match in their database. They have nothing at all, no traces, no description. Thomas shakes his head slightly. Patricia’s voice early one morning: “I think of it as a bad dream. I won’t let him mean anything. Not one thing .” Thomas flings his cigarette and arches forward, resting his head in his hands. The sun is burning his back and the nape of his neck. And Jesus, this past Monday when he came home from work, she was sitting on the basement stairwell just like he’s sitting now, her head in her hands, silent as a stone pillar. It startled him, he hadn’t seen her until after he’d been waiting at the elevator for at least two minutes. She hadn’t made a peep. “What are you doing , Patricia?”