Ellis Weiner - Atlas Slugged AGAIN - The Secret Sequel to the Towering Masterpiece

The conversation ebbed as she entered. “Who was that?” Sanfrancisco asked. “One of the military-industrial complex boys?”

She smiled. “My office. A question about tunnel maintenance.” Dragnie resumed her seat, then turned to look over her shoulder a Nathan A. Banden, who returned her glance with one of his own. She tore a piece of scrap paper off a steno pad and scribbled a brief note on it, then folded it in half and handed it to the young man. He glanced at it, and it was only through the exertion of an iron discipline and self-control unknown to his less impressive peers that he was able to resist leaping up and shouting, although whether for joy or in dismay even he did not know.

“I’m pregnant,” it said.

“Is it… is it true?”

They were in Dragnie’s office in the apartment. Rawbone, De Soto, and Daghammarskjold had left. John Glatt was in his own office, drafting a response to the declaration of war. Nathan A. Banden stood before her desk as Dragnie sat back limply in her chair, physically but not morally or philosophically exhausted. “Yes,” she said.

Banden’s eyes grew wide, his manner animated. “Really?” He kept his voice pitched at an urgent whisper, somehow sensing that Dragnie had not yet informed Glatt and that, for the moment, she preferred he not know. “Does John know?”

“No.”

“Wow.” He nodded, not looking at her. It gave the appearance of a young man nodding to himself, as if he were two persons at once, both the nodder and the noddee, a paradox for which, had he been asked, he would have been unable to offer an explanation. “I’m going to be a father! The father of your child!”

“No.”

He laughed as he chuckled. “I know. It’s sheer madness. I can’t believe it either. But this is perfect! Look, I didn’t want to go to college anyway. The idea of spending four years at some ideologically-corrupt institution, where the pampered children of the middle class are lectured to by cosseted intellectuals one moment —so-called scholars, who spend half their time mocking and disdaining the elements of society who actually create the wealth that goes into their tenured paychecks, and the other half soliciting alumni donations from those selfsame industrialists and entrepreneurs in order to keep the university solvent so that they may continue to deride men of business—and then massing in the quads to protest the policies of the very institution that affords them the luxury of living the so-called life of the mind, while abler and stronger men are actually out in the real world, creating and producing things from which all men benefit, is disgusting! This way, I’ll stay at home with the baby, you’ll go to work, John’ll go to work, and we’ll be one big happy family!”

“Will we?”

“Why… why sure we will. Oh, I know—you don’t look forward to nine months of incapacitation and then being laid up a couple weeks after delivering. You’ll have to curtail your work schedule and possibly delegate some responsibility to your underlings. But you have good people working for you. They can pick up the slack.”

“Really?”

“Sure! And the first eight months or so you’ll be able to work anyway. I mean, I think. What do women do, who get pregnant when they have jobs?”

“They quit their jobs.”

“But you don’t have to do that. Oh, to be sure, that’s what ordinary women do. But you’re no ordinary woman, Dragnie.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re extraordinary! That’s why I’m so excited. Just think of it: Dragnie Tagbord is going to be the mother of my child!”

“No. I’m not.”

The youth looked baffled, as though he had been slapped during a moment when he had not been expecting such a thing. “What do you mean? I thought you were pregnant.”

“I am pregnant.”

“Then what do you mean, you’re not going be the mother of my child?” He pondered this matter in confusion and puzzlement for a moment. Then, suddenly, it was as though a light went on in the room that was his mind. His eyes went wide. “You mean… I’m not the father?” He forced a bitter laugh. “Of course. I’ve been such a fool. I just naturally assumed… But then, you do have a live-in boyfriend, as I of all people should be eminently aware.”

“No, the baby is yours.”

He face once again lit up with dawning joy. “But, then, what’s the problem? I want you to have my baby! And by the way, I’m not just any common Joe who’s fantasizing about the great Dragnie Tagbord giving birth to his spawn. I’ve had plenty of women after me to sire their offspring. Women my own age and, if you must know, older, including some of my mother’s friends. Are you shocked? I didn’t think so. To be an adult in the world of men is to become familiar with such matters. In any case, it is of no consequence. The important thing is, you are pregnant, and we’re going to be parents. Now: do you want a girl or a boy? I have my own reasons for either, but I think—and this may surprise you—I think I want… a girl!”

He fell silent and stood there beaming, as though having just presented Dragnie with a precious gift the value of which he knew she appreciated and for which he assumed she would be grateful. Several seconds passed in which both of them, wordlessly, said nothing, as if his extended monologue and its excited tone had burned up the air in the room and they must wait until it was replenished. Dragnie looked away and fretted. She did not permit herself to cry although she felt the urge to do so. She did not permit herself to shake her head and say, “Oh, Nathan, you fool,” although somewhere, at the far edge of her mind, she knew that his name was Nathan, and that he was a fool. Finally she drew herself up in her chair and permitted herself to address him directly.

“I do not wish to give birth—to your child or to any child. I do not wish to be a mother,” she said.

He looked stunned and perplexed. “But… darling! You don’t know what you’re saying! Every woman does. Motherhood represents the apotheosis of womanhood.”

“According to whom?”

“Why, according to a wide range of authorities. Not just the spiritual experts who promote the ideas and values of what middle-brow organs of news and opinion call ‘the world’s great religions’ (ideas and values of which I suspect you are as skeptical and dismissive as I), but according to eminent female writers of both fiction and non-fiction and to the received wisdom of society at large!”

“That is their opinion. It is not mine.”

He spread his hands, at a loss. “But… then… what do you intend to do?”

“I intend to terminate the pregnancy.”

His mouth fell open in shock. “But… you can’t.”

“I can.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

“It is not your decision to make.”

“But I’m the father.”

“That is less significant than the fact that I am the mother.”

“But… what if I forbid it?”

“You have no authority to forbid it.”

“But by what right can you do such a thing?”

“By what right can you prevent it?”

“But that’s our little son or daughter in there! It’s a person, damn it!”

“No. It is not. It is not a person. It is less than a lizard. It has no volitional consciousness. It has no awareness. It lacks the one thing that elevates man above the rest of the living world, the one sacred characteristic that differentiates man from every other entity in existence: a mind. Without a mind, it cannot possess a code to guide its actions, and without such a code, it is not human. Ask a fetus what is its code of existence and you will get a nullity for an answer. Question it as regards to it values, and you will obtain an evasive silence. Inquire of it how it is able to survive in the absence of these things, and you will hear nothing—but you will discern that it manages to remain alive, not by the conscious pursuit of its values, but by the passive, unthinking, and unreflective absorption of nutrients from another human being .