Doxology. Nell Zink
He said to himself, “Fuck it,” as people often do when deciding to spend money they don’t have. Joe instantly agreed to record a seven-inch with two three-minute songs in a single afternoon. Daniel booked a studio with an engineer in Hoboken, about three months into the future, and paid a deposit of $200.
PAM’S PERIOD WAS LATE. SHE DIDN’T WANT TO TELL ANYONE JUST HOW LATE. SHE AND Daniel had had unsafe sex more than once. It didn’t feel like it counted, because it was such a small fraction of the total sex they’d had. Okay, she admitted to herself: five weeks late. If her period skipped another week, it would be an open-and-shut case. She would need an abortion.
She knew that if she told Daniel, he’d offer to pay, and there would go Lion’s Den records. She had plenty of money. The only way to get an abortion and keep the single was to tell Daniel nothing. He was already in over his head, buying studio time for a friend when he could have pressed a clean master provided for free by strangers. In any case it might already be too late for a black-market poison-pill-style abortion with smuggled RU-486. It would make her sick all weekend, cramping and bleeding until she swore off sex for life, but at least she wouldn’t have to make time for a clinic. She needed to hurry. She’d have to explain being sick to Daniel. Food poisoning, maybe? She would have to come up with what she ate and where. She didn’t feel like rushing into being sick. Besides, the pregnancy might resolve itself unobtrusively. If she skipped the poison pill and stuck to old-fashioned abortion clinics, she had months left until the third trimester.
All she needed was to keep the information away from Daniel until she got organized and found out where they do second-trimester abortions.
She was a programmer and a punk, versed in the mortification of the flesh, accustomed to treating her body as a sink and a tool. She was young and inexperienced, not in tune with her own biology and nature. She was not thinking straight. She was not thinking at all to speak of. In the corner of D.C. where she grew up, abortions came from Mom. You told your mom you’d been stupid, and she made the relevant appointments. You handed off the thinking to someone else, like a user, not a programmer. Pam didn’t make the appointments.
Right around week ten, she grabbed herself by the scruff of the neck, set herself on her feet, and confronted Daniel. She said, “Daniel, I do not feel good.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“From me? Hey, I don’t know what you get up to after I go to work! Maybe you turn tricks under the viaduct.”
“It has your eyes.”
“When did you find out?”
“I haven’t found out yet. I keep putting it off. I need to get on the stick and do something about it.”
“Do you not want a baby?” Seeing her shake her head, he asked, “Is it because of the Art Strike?”
“A baby is not creative work!”
“Are you sure you don’t want a baby ever in your life? Most people want one sooner or later. Like me. I always assumed I’d have kids someday.”
“What are you saying?”
“I know we never talked about it, but right now I’m thinking, ‘If not now, when?’ You’d be a total bottom-shelf mother.” (“Bottom-shelf” was positive, since in midwestern refrigerators the top shelf was where you put the cheap beer for guests to notice when they were making themselves at home.)
“And ‘If not me, then whom?’” Pam said.
“Random unwed parenting is standard practice back where I come from! We Christians welcome every new Christian soul.”
“It’s standard everywhere,” she said, “but not for me. And the reason we never talked about it is that we’ve been dating for maybe four months.”
“Obviously,” he said firmly, “abortion makes sense on paper. But I don’t live my life on paper. I would have been happy to know you were pregnant with my child the first time I saw you.”
“You’re just weird,” she said.
“If we have a kid now, we can be out of the woods at forty. I implore you!” He clasped his hands together pleadingly. “Besides, scheduling an abortion is work, but if you just let it ride, you don’t have to do anything. Which I guess is what you’ve been doing. How far along are you?”
“That’s so not true! There’s prenatal care. I have to get sonograms and do Lamaze and La Leche League and turn into my mom. You’re going to love that. Not to mention giving birth and the next eighteen years.”
“It’ll be easy. We’re young and healthy.”
“I should get a pregnancy test,” she said. “Maybe it’s just ovarian cancer.”
THE DISTANCE SHE HAD PUT BETWEEN HERSELF AND HER PARENTS KEPT HER FROM indulging the notion that her child would inherit her traits. It would be its own person, transporting nothing of her into the future. It would be raised differently from the way she had been raised, in a different world. Yet already it seemed to embody personal weaknesses she thought she had learned to repress.
Nausea and latent disquiet, for instance. While still the size of a pushpin, Flora reopened Pam’s eyes to the horror of existence. The Cold War had ended. The peace dividend was pouring in. All the thermonuclear warheads were still there. All, what, ten thousand of them? Twenty thousand? In any case, enough to cook every animal on Earth and leave the survivors licking their eyeballs off their maggoty faces.
Nuclear deterrence was a variant of predestination. Whatever happened to you was your fault, if you hadn’t deterred it. It was life as an endless stud poker game in which folding equaled death. Any day now, life could become The Day of the Triffids, if the Triffids had been defense policy wonks and not evil plants from space. The Triffids in turn reminded her of The Genocides, a novella by Tom Disch in which alien farmers sow the unfortunate Earth with giant sugarcane. Millennia might pass before that happened, but by having a baby, she would be involving herself directly in the tragedy. It was no consolation to recall the survivors’ stubborn capacity for joy or their relief at the conclusion of the harvest. As a willingly pregnant woman, she would at once be placing a long-shot bet that life on Earth would be idyllic forever and condemning a stranger to have its heart broken by her death.
She even worried about the coming Asian century, which she imagined as resembling Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts. Western imperialism was still going strong. It would take fifty years to decline—and there stood the baby, all grown up, undernourished, lopsided from twelve-hour days in the sweatshop, enslaved by happy-go-lucky taskmasters who decorated its dormitory in red and gold. The red tide of slave labor was all around her in Chinatown. She just had to open her eyes to let it engulf her.
She was not getting any work done. She called Video Hit from her office and made Margie wake Daniel so she could say, “There’s no way I’m having this baby. I’m sorry. It’s over.”
“All right. That’s a shame.” After a moment of dead air, he added, “Now I’m sad.”
It crossed her mind that killing Daniel’s baby might not be the most efficient method of removing heartbreak from the world. She said, “In fact, I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“I wish you were here,” he said. “I’m going crazy. I’ve been thinking about names. What do you think of ‘Irene’? It means ‘peace.’”
“Too nasal for New York. Plus I might not even be pregnant.”
WHEN THEY WERE DONE TALKING, SHE WENT DOWNSTAIRS TO A DRUGSTORE ON JOHN Street. She had put off buying a pregnancy test. After all that time without her period, she wouldn’t have believed a negative result, and a positive result wouldn’t have told her anything she didn’t know, so the parsimonious solution was to skip the test. It was positive.
She didn’t call Daniel. Instead she walked into Yuval’s office,