Babylon and Other Stories Part 20

"You want to hit a few b.a.l.l.s?" I said.

"Hey, that sounds great!" Frank said. "I'm in the book. Give me a call."

"I meant right now," I said. "Unless you're too tired."

He watched his kid, who was talking to another teenager over by the c.o.ke machine, and nodded. He looked winded from all his bounding, but I could tell he didn't want to admit it. "Sure thing," he said. "Why the h.e.l.l not?"

I ran over and explained to Anil that I was going to play with my father's old partner for a few minutes. He hadn't kept up his game and looked relieved, wandering over to the sidelines.

I took my place at the baseline. Frank McAllister was bouncing the ball against his racket, getting ready to serve. As I crouched there, I began trembling with anger. I wanted to beat the s.h.i.t out of Frank McAllister, humiliate him in front of his kid, make him feel tired and pathetic. I knew I could do it, too; he looked out of breath and old. I wanted to beat him not because he wouldn't talk about Ivy but because he didn't remember my father. We had mythologized the McAllisters, had loved them, and he didn't even know who we were, just as Ivy had never known who I was, not really, never cared to find out before she'd gone off and died. To the McAllisters we were nothing. The world, I thought then, is divided into sides just like a tennis court is: into winners and losers, into forgetters and forgotten.

I realized that my father had always known which side he was on, and he didn't care. He was even, I thought, proud. All around me was the sound of his game, of rubber soles and asphalt and the hiccup of a ball crashing into the net; and, beyond that, the sound of the suburbs on a summer afternoon, the lawn mowers and radios and family conversations. Across the court, Frank McAllister asked me if I was ready.

"Sure thing," I said, and prepared myself to lose.

An a.n.a.lysis of Some Troublesome Recent Behavior.

by H. G. Higginbottom, Ph.D. Department of Biology, Western University.

ABSTRACT.

This paper will address the root causes and consequences of some troublesome recent behavior by Hank Higginbottom, Ph.D. Professor Higginbottom studies s.e.xual selection in Poecilia reticulata, aka the Trinidadian guppy. In his office, on the sixth floor of a concrete building in the southwest corner of the university campus, his main enjoyment comes from the blue burble of the tanks and the swishing, distinctively orange-spotted bodies of Poecilia reticulata within them. It's a precarious enjoyment, a calm easily disturbed. It's most easily-and frequently-disturbed by Joseph Purdy, who studies s.e.xual selection in the human male, whose office is located next door, whose research is more provocative and better funded than Hank's, and who therefore has a much nicer and larger lab, with windows, even though said research seems to take place mainly through the observation of pickup lines in bars and therefore does not even require much office s.p.a.ce, and whose seemingly favorite activity during the day is to stroll into Hank's office wearing his cowboy boots and offer Hank some deer jerky from an animal he has personally shot himself. On the day in question Hank responded to this offer with a right hook to Joseph Purdy's angular jaw, landing Purdy in the hospital.

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 ma.n.u.script that summarized his recent research into s.e.xual 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 const.i.tuted 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 gla.s.s 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 s.k.a.n.ky 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 rea.s.suring 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x, drunk, blotchy-faced, no-eye-contact s.e.x. At thirty-eight, Erica didn't bother with the diaphragm. Standing there in the kitchen, Hank thought s.e.x 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, s.e.x was s.e.x, whatever the circ.u.mstances. "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."

This hadn't even occurred to Hank as a possibility.

"Max is enough," she said. "He's more than enough. He's more than we can handle already."

Hank swallowed. His mouth was dry. He and Erica had met in college, in a stats cla.s.s, and now he was a biologist and she was a bank teller who'd quit her job to take care of Max. She'd given up whatever career she might have had to follow him where he got work, and then to take care of their son. He never talked to her about Poecilia reticulata. The fact that they both wanted a family was what had kept them together so far.

"But," he said. He could see her hands tighten around the marble countertop. He wanted to say that maybe if they had another child and it was normal, that might dilute the effect Max was having on them. Which would make it sound as if he didn't love Max and was therefore the wrong thing to say. He also thought, but did not say, that he was amazed Erica didn't want to keep a child when they had a household and the opportunity to raise it. They weren't teenagers; they weren't poor. What kind of woman are you? If she could let this go so easily, he thought, there was no telling what she'd let go of next.

"But what?" Erica said.

He realized that she'd been standing there, waiting, for minutes. He opened his arms in a gesture of openness and defeat. "We'll do whatever you want," he said. Which apparently gave the impression that he didn't care what happened and was therefore, as it turned out, also the wrong thing to say.

MATERIALS AND METHODS.

For three days Erica wouldn't talk about it. When he tried to bring it up she'd just shut down, literally; she'd leave the room or put a pillow over her head. In the middle of the night he'd wake up to hear her sniffling quietly in her pillow, or sometimes whispering, a string of soft muttered syllables, although it wasn't clear what she was saying or whom she was saying it to. Herself? Him? The fetus? He was a scientist. He tried to confront the situation scientifically. The evidence suggested that the idea of giving up the baby was making her sad. So he leaned closer to her in the bed, took her hand, and said, "You know, we could do this. We could have this child."

"f.u.c.k you, Hank," she said.

"What? Why?"

"You get to go to the office all day and stare at your f.u.c.king fish. You're not here getting phone calls from teachers and therapists. You're not here when your own son kicks you in the shin because you won't let him play video games for three hours straight and the kicking hurts, it really actually hurts, and you want to hit him and you almost do but then stop yourself because he's your son, but you wonder how much longer it'll be before you give in and smack him across the face."

At the end of this speech there was silence and then a long, snot-filled intake of breath. She got out of bed to blow her nose, several times in a row, in the bathroom. She hadn't generated snot like this since her first trimester of pregnancy.

"It's okay. It's okay," he said when she got back into bed.

"No," she said, "it f.u.c.king isn't."

Also, during the next few days Max did them the favor of being his usual self, which is to say a terror, as if he wanted to remind them the whole situation wasn't going to get any better and they should stop pretending it would, as if he didn't want the situation to be clouded by cheap sentiment arising from his acting like a normal kid. He insisted, to the point of hysteria, on wearing his football helmet to bed, and in the middle of the night he woke them up by banging his helmeted head against the wall. One afternoon, while Erica was in the shower, he went into Hank's study and pulled down all the books from the shelves, then managed to pull the shelf itself down on himself, covering himself in scabs and bruises (though not, thankfully, breaking anything) that made him look like the victim of some horrible household abuse and was only going to earn them more doubting looks from all the various child-care professionals in his life. The doctors concluded that they needed to up his medication.

Hank escaped to the fish. Starting in college, fish had been his calm and his succor, and once he'd married Erica and had Max- both of whom he loved, and never wanted anybody to think otherwise for a single second, and he was grateful he had them and would die if anything happened to them, okay?-the fish had mattered even more, because they were quiet. They swam around quietly, they ate quietly, they developed patterns of s.e.xual selection quietly. The occasional splash or ripple was all you ever heard, and you had to love them for that. When your home was full of falling bookshelves and indeterminate midnight whispering, the quiet of fish was a blessed thing.

What he'd been studying was the relationship between predator presence and s.e.xual behavior in Poecilia reticulata. Purdy, he knew, thought of this as dating in the fish world: the males were trolling the aquarium for dates, their orange spots standing out like unb.u.t.toned shirts and gold chains on chests. The females were hanging out at the bar, eyeballing the available options, waiting for the flashiest candidate to pick them up. To Purdy, fish were interesting only insofar as they provided corollaries to similar patterns of behavior in humans. Mere ammunition for his theories about s.e.xual compet.i.tion and male hierarchy, they provided the biological context that proved (so Purdy thought) that humans were exceptions to no rules.

Whereas Hank, not that he was some starry-eyed undergrad, thought the fish mattered in their own right. In fact, some wisea.s.s in the lab had plastered a b.u.mper sticker to the side of a tank that said FISH MATTER. These were the kinds of jokes that made Erica dread department parties, and Hank couldn't blame her- but still. When Purdy, on the day in question, came in and tapped on the gla.s.s with his jerky, it obviously annoyed him. So Hank asked him, very politely, very calmly, if he could please not do that anymore, and then mentioned that he was trying to finish a paper for the upcoming meeting of the ichthyological society and it was going slowly and that he'd really appreciate some peace and quiet.

"You bet, guppy man," Purdy said, cheerfully as always. And this, for some reason, was the last thing Hank wanted to hear. Guppy man. He basically just could not stand those two words coming out of Joe Purdy's mouth. And Purdy, incredibly, was smiling at him as he said this, even waving his jerky good-bye as he started for the door, and Hank knew guppy man was code for a lot of things that weren't related to guppies at all. That, in sum, is why he stood up, crossed the room, and smacked Purdy square in the jaw, causing him to stagger backwards, hand on his chin, jerky flying across the room-though even in his expression of shock Hank couldn't help noticing that there remained a kind of smirk, as if yet another hypothesis about male dominance and hierarchical behavior had just been substantiated by real-world observations. Then Purdy, from the floor, said, "Whoa, Jesus, Hank," and blood streamed out of his nose, thick and red as if in a drawing by Max.

The next few minutes pa.s.sed in a kind of a blur.

Hearing Purdy cry out and fall to the floor-actually, he fell against a filing cabinet, knocking off a stack of journals on top of it, and then fell to the floor with a clatter and violence that, admittedly, gave Hank no small amount of satisfaction-two of his grad students came in and took him away, apparently to the hospital, although it seemed unlikely to Hank that he personally could generate enough force to put someone in the hospital. He wasn't exactly brawny. But the grad students were shaking their heads and clucking almost maternally over their fallen leader and stage-whispering things like "What the h.e.l.l's the matter with that guy?" and "We'd better get to the emergency room right away," which Hank, sitting back in his chair, acted like he couldn't hear. They left him alone in the office, the fish still swishing quietly, and he could hear mutters and whispers outside in the hall, and no doubt everybody in the department already knew about this behavior, which, though it might confirm Purdy's research, could still potentially get him fired. Which would mean no more escaping to the fish. Which would be the last thing he needed just now. Which is how he came to be alone in his office as day turned to night, afraid to go home and face Erica and Max, unwilling to face even the hallway outside; instead he was sitting there typing this a.n.a.lysis of some recent troublesome behavior.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION.

It is possible to think logically about all this. Like a female guppy responding to the brilliant orange spots on the male, which mimic the orange fruits that guppies like to eat, the subject's behavior arose in response to a clearly defined set of stimuli. If he were to defend himself to the chair of the department, or at the very least provide evidence of these stimuli, Hank would have no trouble providing the data. He could, for example, present the following data points: TABLE 1. Annoying Behavior of Joseph Purdy TYPE OF ANNOYING BEHAVIOR NUMBER OF TIMES IN RECENT MEMORY Starting conversations about grant funding merely in order to brag about the amount he has gotten 8 Mentioning expensive renovations done to house, clearly paid for by salary attached to said grant funding 6 Offering deer jerky and using offer as opportunity to brag about hunting exploits 5 Asking questions about fish, then not paying any attention to the answers 4 Tapping items (e.g., jerky) against aquarium gla.s.s and bothering fish, which even a behaviorally challenged five-year-old knows not to do MORE TIMES THAN CAN BE COUNTED This was not the only data. Ideally, for a complete discussion of the behavior in question, other figures would be designed and included-a graph, maybe, showing the relationship between these factors and the factors at home. An xy graph, where x would plot Purdy's annoying interruptions and y would plot Erica and Max, and the two would intersect in a jagged, mountainous line cresting at the peak point, which would represent the events of today.

Yes, a graph like that would certainly illuminate the subject.

CONCLUSION.

Whether this troublesome behavior is a temporary aberration or a permanent feature of the animal's behavior cannot be determined at this time. Perhaps this paper will result in copious grant funding to pursue the crucial questions raised by the preliminary investigation. Or, perhaps not.

Cleaning up the journals that fell off the filing cabinet, Hank found lying next to a power outlet the stick of jerky that must have fallen from Purdy's mouth at the climactic moment. He clenched it in his hand, thinking again of Purdy's swagger, his large white teeth, his cheerfulness, and Hank's only wish was that he'd hit him harder. With these thoughts in mind, it is impossible for the author of this paper to express regret for any troublesome recent behavior by Hank Higginbottom, Ph.D.

But home is a different thing. At home Erica sits in the dark, crying or not crying, and Max is in his room-because he does not enjoy the company of other children or even, lately, his parents, and at this point you can't really blame him-either screaming or not screaming, but most likely screaming. And Hank is left to wonder what will happen when he gets there, whether Erica will have changed her mind or solidified it, and what he will say to her. He can't go home yet, because he can't stop thinking, among other things, about what the life inside her will look like when the doctor drains it: a potential human form stripped to some forever partial version of itself, a reduction, a piece of jerky. He pictures Erica's face and his inability to comfort her; he pictures Purdy nodding and chewing and saying, "Certain scientific facts may be hard for people to grasp." Men act according to biological imperatives. While your wife cries at home, you manufacture figures on a desktop computer in your office. What kind of man are you?

In the tanks the fish watch quietly, showing themselves off, selecting their partners. One mating of Poecilia reticulata can result in several batches of fry, s.p.a.ced over an interval of months. If the newborn fish are not provided with cover or protection from their parents, they might be eaten by them. Yet they come nonetheless-batches at a time the guppies emerge, orange-spotted and oblivious of risks, swimming reckless and confused into the world.

ALSO BY ALIX OHLIN.

The Missing Person.