A New Millennium's Omega

by Marilyn Black

  Michael was in our living room, checking out the bevy of video games we had. I never played any of them, but Stuart was still healing from giving birth. By that point, he was mostly back up in shape and instead spent most of his time holding Josh. I was amazed to see Josh's little matted head every time I did because it filled me with that overwhelming awe of 'Wow, I helped to create this.' It's indescribable. That feeling of bringing another life into this world was in the top five moments of my life.

  We had his room ready to go, all painted in a pale and soft blue color, as well as a crib with a baby monitor. The only issue was actually putting Josh in that crib, all because Stuart wouldn't let him go.

  "I can't let him go," he said to me while letting Josh drink from a bottle. "Look at him." He scratched Josh's nose, the tiniest nose ever. Watching Josh move was like watching a kitten move about. As a result, it didn't take us long to predict which animal he was going to be able to shift into.

  Life around the mansion became a lot slower and more laid back, to the point I was often found without my suit.

  The idea was that we would keep Josh here, where we could at least keep watch over him. That way, we would be safe in the knowledge that he wouldn't roll or crawl out and get himself seriously hurt. Of course, that was still a long ways off— the little rugrat had just been born, and wasn't going to be moving around at all for several more months at the soonest.

  And to an extent, I did think it was a little extreme. It seemed like we were starting out his life by making him pampered and overly spoiled.

  But we couldn't deny that Scott, Jasper, Neil, and Tommy made a good point. After all, they did this before us. They were helping us out. And for people as hopeless as us, we'd need all the help we could get with raising a child.

  The crib was small with curved sides at the top, and the hope was to dissuade Josh from trying to climb out.

  Gosh, they really made me concerned alongside Stuart.

  But I couldn't help it.

  I was an Alpha and a Unicorn. Two creatures whose whole mode of being was to protect the ones we loved. That's not to say Stuart doesn't have that instinct or that he has a much stronger version— if I had to guess, we both equally cared for Josh. I couldn't leave anything up to chance because that's not how we work. We're people of honor and defense.

  Besides the crib and the wall color, there were only a few other trinkets scattered about. Zeke told me that painting some cartoon characters on the walls would help with Josh's growth by helping him see and recognize faces, while also giving him a lot of amusement.

  When I asked him which cartoon characters, he gave a lot of the usual suspects that I also knew: Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and whatnot. But there was also this other character he mentioned, telling me that his old child was in love with it: this weird-looking yellow anthropomorphic sponge who I took to be called 'Bob' who was apparently part of a white-hot show on a particular channel I didn't watch. I didn't recognize it, but I figured he'd work as well.

  So except for the characters on the walls, we had everything set up. It was exciting to see a new life come into focus, and we were both happy with each other that we could make this possible.

  It was closing in on the end of the school year when we received some phone calls from Scott and Zeke alike, telling us that their children wanted to stay at our mansion for the summer.

  "Oh really?" I said to Scott in particular. "I just got a call from Zeke, and he said that Miranda wants to stay. What's the occasion?"

  He sounded flustered. "What? Ha! I didn't know that. Michael just wanted to stay over at a mansion for once instead of our dinky little house."

  "Uh oh!"

  We both laughed.

  "I wonder if he'll still be so eager when he has to share a house with Miranda."

  "We'll see!

  In the end, all three agreed under the special terms that we didn't tell the children about what was about to unfold. I knew Michael and Miranda were still in THAT phase of their lives, where cooties existed, and the other sex was icky. Perhaps thanks to all those cartoons and movies, they had a very binary view of gender too— boys liked action figures, video games, and creepy crawlies while girls liked dolls, dress-up, and the color pink. And what's more, neither was as closely married to that binary as they thought they were. Considering both had two dads, it only could be pop culture that made them feel this way.

  My only fear with them being here was in the passing, fleeting chance they might still be around if Jack ever came back. It was a frightening possibility, partially because I knew I'd never be able to survive the roasting I'd get from their parents if anything happened to them and mostly because such a thing forced me to think about Josh winding up in a similar situation. And by god, that was an awful thought.

  They eventually did arrive on June 5th, and they came at the exact same time. Their eyes when they saw each other step out of the other's car was priceless, like something out of a cartoon where the coyote sees he's walked off the cliff and hasn't realized it yet.

  But no backies!

  Stuart, in particular, was very excited about the prospect of having kids over because he wanted to follow their pop culture even more.

  "It'll help me figure out what the kids today are interested in!" was his explanation no more than an hour before they arrived. "And plus, I'll have an idea on what to expect when Ja-Ja is older."

  I grinned and said, "If you think that'll help, then I won't stop you, of course. But I think Ja-Ja will be a very different sort of person who can't be so easily predicted, especially if we're the ones bringing him up."

  They pleaded with their parents to take them back, offering to drive the cars themselves, while Stuart and I wrapped our arms around each other and tried our best not to laugh. It kept coming out as broken-sounded coughs and gasps because the whole scene was the most adorable thing I'd seen since I saw Josh that morning.

  It was Jasper that got them both walking towards us, and Stuart opened his arms like a flower blooming.

  I saw Michael turn slightly to Miranda, and right as they were next to us, I heard her say, "This place isn't big enough for the two of us."

  To which Michael added, "That's true."

  I nearly spit all over myself, and Stuart gawked at me with his mouth agape. For at least half a minute, I was bent over, trying to catch my breath.

  Everyone was looking at me, and the other parents were laughing too.

  "What's got into you?"

  I couldn't tell Stuart. It was the way Michael said 'That's true' that did it for me. Sometimes, the funniest things you've ever heard are also the most mundane that have merely been said the perfect way at the perfect time.

  Those were good times, and both of us knew they were good times— we wanted to cherish them and last as long as we could.

  When the kids had found their rooms and were out of earshot, I pulled Stuart in close and whispered into his ear that I’d never let him go.

  And he’d whisper back, “Sometimes you have to let me go, just so that I know you’ll catch me when I fall.”

  I read a newspaper, sitting on my corduroy chair and with my pipe in my mouth. Michael sat in the living room, setting up little green and gray army men next to a stone pillar. He had something called an ‘mp3’ player next to him, with a pair of blue headphones over his ears.

  “What’re you listening to?” I asked, suddenly myself fascinated by the kids’ way.

  He pulled them off and said, “Rock.”

  “That’s an old genre, so you’re going to have to help an old man. I grew up with Motley Crue and Bryan Adams.”

  “Who?”

  I clutched my heart, which needed a good kickstarting. “Oh, that hurts.”

  “You ever heard of Blink-182?”

  I backed up and said, “Not at all. But with a name like that, I’m interested.”

  His eyes lit up as if he was amazed that someone older than 18 cared about his kind of music. However, Miranda w
alked into the room with her own mp3 player— this time blasting out from a speaker that had been built into it. I recognized this one only because I had heard the song on the radio before: Britney Spears’ big sequel hit, ‘Oops… I Did It Again’. To an extent, I was tired of hearing it, but it was cute to see Michael squirm at the opening chords.

  There was a lot of music being played around that time, and they’d compete with each other. Because of how big the place was, I could always escape to a quieter room— except I didn’t, because I’d often meet with Stuart in Josh’s room.

  We’d look down at the little bean and laugh.

  Josh would cry a lot, and then when he had his fill, he would cry some more. We tried everything to get him to stop— I cleaned his diaper, and then Stuart cleaned his diaper just to make sure he didn't have some sort of ass-wiping preference. I jingled my keys in front of him, and then Stuart would show off his stack of video game discs and cartridges and say,

  "You'll get to play these in a few years!"

  Nothing.

  I tried going a bit more analog, waving a purple teddy bear in front of Josh's face. This made it worse.

  Soon enough, we both gave up and accepted that Josh was crying just because his own voice enchanted him. And that was fine by me because he'd have to stop crying at some point— right?

  Stuart picked him up and patted his back, making him burp, which offered a half-second reprieve from the crying.

  I hoped that nothing was wrong with him because I was bringing my grown-up brain to understand a baby. That's always going to work.

  It didn't that time.

  While bobbing him on his knee, and with Josh powerfully crying away every tiny bit of fun he had doing so, Stuart turned to me and said, "No, we were right the first time: he likes hearing his voice. See this?" He pointed to Josh's cheeks, and I was shocked to see a complete lack of tears. Those soft cheeks weren't even slightly damp.

  "You little chubby bastard!"

  Eventually, Josh did calm down, allowing me to head back to my newspaper. By that time, Michael and Miranda were back in their respective rooms, trying to pretend the other didn't exist. The whole ordeal there made me feel genuine panic in a single moment as I imagined the possibility of having a second child.

  Stuart and I hadn't said anything on the topic as we wanted to see how well we raised this one before we made any plans for a second. As Josh was working out swimmingly (swimmingly, I tell you) and as the mansion started to counterintuitively feel larger and emptier with him around, I began to feel a strange sensation that three's company, but four is a family.

  If I did, then I could only assume that Stuart did as well.

  Stuart

  When I managed to put the little tyke down for his one-hour-a-day sleep in between his bouts of making sure we knew what his voice sounded like, I threw myself down into the front room couch and turned on our big plasma screen TV to HBO to catch up with a show called Sex and the City. I'd been watching since '99 and wanted to see the episodes that I missed before I started, as I was just so enraptured. I won't say it's the best show EVER, but it was what I needed to unwind and relax: a slice of New York life following four active and high-octane women. Well, maybe not FOUR, but most of them were nice.

  But instead of getting into my feelings on that, I'd check up with the kids and ask them about their days and what they were doing.

  Michael told me, "You know about Pokémon, right?"

  "Yeah, I've been playing around with it a bit. I got the Blue version."

  He scoffed and said, "The Red version is so much better, trust me."

  "Well, shoot, ain't that my luck?" And I laughed.

  Miranda didn't want to tell me what she did at first: the initial answer was always, "Watch TV and listen to music and stuff."

  "Wow. When I was your age, I was still playing with toys."

  And then came the inevitable, "I've been told I'm really mature for my age."

  I don't know why, but that saying always grated on me. It implies that kids can't be interested in certain things without being considered 'adult.' And while there are some things I agree you shouldn't have a kid knowing, having preferences for one thing or another shouldn't be with them.

  And I told her, "I mean, when I was your age, I also watched a lot of TV. There was this show called Mork and Mindy that I loo~ooved."

  "I haven't heard of that one."

  "Yeah, it might be from before your time, I guess. So what do you watch?"

  She shrugged, keeping to her sketchpad. "Stuff."

  "What, do you watch TV static?"

  She laughed. "No!"

  "I bet you watch Sesame Street."

  And she looked half offended at this one. "No, have you heard about Xena?"

  "There you go, girl. And that show's pretty hardcore! Nice."

  See? It doesn't take much to break the ice.

  At least until you break that ice and discover a freakin' volcano under it.

  From what I learned, Michael was really into pop-punk but kept saying he liked certain songs from pop bands. If I sang the lyrics to some N' Sync, New Kids on the Block, Destiny's Child, and Cher, he knew exactly what I was talking about. Even if the song wasn't their pop hit! It didn't take long for me to figure out that he was actually into pop but hid behind pop PUNK to be cool with his bros at school. And hey, I didn't want to knock pop-punk. It was a little too juvenile for my tastes— there was an album called 'Enema of the State,' and I knew another called 'Dookie' and that was about as far as I wanted to go— but if that was his thing, then I wouldn't take it away from him either.

  Come to find out, Miranda was into a big trend at the time called "nu-metal" and only listened to Spice Girls, Destiny's Child, Faith Hill, and N’SYNC because she didn't want to be seen as the weird kid at school like another ostracized girl. Because her mp3 player was filled with bands with such colorfully dark names like Coal Chamber, Soulfly, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, and even a really new band— I mean they had just released an EP a few months prior— called I think "Lincoln Park" or something of that sort.

  What's more, she was the one into violent video games. Michael was fine with Pokémon and even Tetris, and he liked other games in those styles. Puzzles and role-playing games. Miranda was in love with super-bloody murder simulators they called Doom-clones. When she moved in, she even asked if she could buy two new games that had just come out in the past month called Perfect Dark and Daikatana. I had an N64 for the first, but I didn't know the first thing about PC gaming. That was the domain of Frederick, and I never knew him to do more than Solitaire.

  I liked the computer, but I didn't stay on it for long because he had to use it for work.

  Still, it made me sad. Michael and Miranda were both forced to persist in two entirely different gender roles than who they themselves really were. Not that they weren't a boy and a girl respectively, but that they weren't allowed to be a 'girly' boy and a tomboyish girl— actually, Miranda wouldn't be a tomboy regardless because she was still into the whole pretty in pink, Unicorns are cute, glitter and sparkles thing many other girls were into. She just happened to have stereotypically masculine preferences too.

  It made me worry a lot about Josh's future. I just wanted the best for him and for him to grow up proud to be himself. We're always told to be ourselves, after all, so it was sad to me to think that he might grow up surrounded by other boys and girls pressured to be something they weren't and get it in his head that he could only be one thing.

  Speaking of Josh, he was making his voice heard again. Just to make sure, I checked him. Nope, he had a clean diaper. And when I pressed his tummy a few times, he immediately stopped laughing and started giggling and cooing. Confirmed: he LOVED the sound of his voice.

  And speaking of computers, I got a very peculiar question from Frederick that afternoon.

  He was in his office, listening to The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony (I didn't expect him to be still listening to that song even though i
t'd been out for three years, but it was very eargasmic). I had popped in intending to smother him in kisses. It was a habit of mine that I'd do ever so often: when he was least expecting it, I'd kiss all around his head about a thousand times in a few seconds. He'd get frustrated, and it was cute.

  But this time, he barely reacted, and I asked him, "What's wrong?"

  He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. "I don't know. Something about all this doesn't seem stable."

  My heart flipped, and I swallowed. "Us?"

  "No, no, I mean my business. I don't know if my internet business is going to work out. The stock market is just so inflated."

  I was quiet about this because I didn't know how to take this. I had no knowledge of the stock market whatsoever, and he knew I wouldn't know the first thing about it.

  Yet he still said, "I need your honest opinion on this: should I jump ship now?"

  "Why?" I laughed and spread my arms. "Why me? I don't know what you do that well."

  "I trust you and your intuition."

  "After Y2K failed?" I joked.

  "Besides that."

  OXO

  He decided to stay at his business for another month but didn’t feel comfortable about it. I teased him: “And you gave me so much shit about being worried about Y2K, and here you are worried about an entire industry collapsing!”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  Michael and Miranda giggled at us.

  “I mean, I knew all along that nothing would come of it, so there was no reason to be worried. With the business, I don’t think they’re going to be able to keep bringing in money at all. It’s just not sustainable...”

  “Why?”

  “This has to be a bubble, with all these internet companies starting. And all bubbles pop.”

  Michael was leaning on the table with his elbows. “Can you make a bubble last forever?”