Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  Jeremy had the sense that he was watching with future retrospection. There was a sense of something having already happened imprinted in the unfolding present, an aura of story, once upon a time. He was not American after all. He was from the part of the world where inevitability was still expected. You were your father’s son. Or at least your mother’s.

  The symbols for sounds were black on his screen, bold. When news carried the potential to change your life, it seemed as though it should be served with some physical weight, even if only the weight of a sheet of paper. But that wasn’t what was happening. It came through with the department store coupons and day center memos. He opened the email.

  “You’ve been matched,” it said.

  He was going to be a father.

  Borderless Children, the letter was signed.

  The agency communication stated that the child was not a girl, as their preferences had been listed, but he didn’t remember preferences. An image of spiraled metal appeared at the bottom, an attachment. He didn’t want attachment yet, though. He didn’t want to look at the attached photograph of the child. Jeremy didn’t look. If somehow the adoption didn’t go through, there would always be that little face, that face he’d have to remember as the one that should have been his family.

  They’d been matched.

  He removed his sandwich from a paper bag and laid it on napkins, but his hands were their own animals. Fatherhood rooted you between past and present, walls of time streaming in and out, the people who gave you life and the person to whom life came from you. He could be someone’s history. He could be someone’s fate. They could. They had asked and they had waited. He had waited so long.

  “Ham and cheese again?” Lily Framer asked, tapping his cubicle on her way out to buy lunch. “Live a little, Jeremy. Nothing worse than regret.”

  He was hoarse with the morning, with the psychoeducational script used at the day treatment center. Who here hears voices? It’s a disease of the brain. There’s no reason why people get it. There’s no reason to it. “Still thinking about the roast beef sandwich that got away?”

  “Atlanta, 2006,” Lily said. “It’s why I got into this line of business. You know what they say: therapists become therapists because they want therapy.”

  “And that’s working out for you?”

  “You’ve known me how long and you’re asking? I’ll see you in group, Jeremy.”

  He stared at the sandwich. Someone is offering the impossible life.

  His telephone shivered against the desk. It sounded like a quiet automatic. He stared at the words. Matched. He thumbed glass. “Have you looked at the picture?” he asked.

  “He’s ours,” Alexandra said.

  “I didn’t look. Couldn’t.”

  “But we’re doing it, aren’t we? Parenthood.”

  He switched the phone between hands, put it to his other ear. He could hear the street surrounding Alexandra, a weave of voices and car noises. The sounds were the same as any other day, but they landed with new weight. “It’s the only clear good thing I could ever come up with.”

  “You make a good toast,” she said.

  Lily Framer held up fingers expressing dwindling time. He would need to run a harm reduction group.

  He said a thing he needed to do. He took the stairs to the room for group. The walls were vibrating with a failing bulb. There was verification in this, the simple motion of ascendance. You decided on one foot and then the other and somehow it meant that you rose in the small hoists. It was not that the room shifted without your motion, and that was a miracle. He turned into a room rimmed with people in folding chairs, nodded, went to the back where Lily was shuffling papers.

  “If it isn’t Mr. Ham and Cheese,” she said.

  “You know me.”

  “You make it easy, Jeremy.”

  She was talking. He could see her mouth. She was telling him there were bagels in the break room from the Risperdal drug reps. But the break room seemed very far away when there was his boy. The letter said his name was Han. They would promise to love him. They already did. The feeling was so big it was strange to think that anyone looking at him would not know he was meant to be a father.

  Chapter 6

  Jeremy began to doubt his eyes into his own life. The apartment was brightly lit and impeccably clean, with a wide view and bookshelves, all in all, as much as he could surmise, from the outside a lovely home. Except that it had no bedroom for a child. Tilt it one way and there it is: property of the professional couple. Tilt it another and it is a failure to project home into the future, or negligence. That was the way of these things. They could be disqualified for what they hadn’t thought to think.

  The adoption people would be looking at all the sharp corners and doorframes of their life.

  Several months before, they’d sat in the office of people who controlled the ebb of children. She was very beautiful in a navy sweater with a knobby vine running up the center and gold strung around her neck and her ring from the day they promised until the end together. Maybe it was the application they shared, or maybe it was the command of heart thump— home, home, home—he could perceive her peppermint in his throat, something unflappably bright coming off her, and it was as though she was in his lungs, wintry and vital, sweet in vigor. What he had heard that day were the approving murmurs of the woman making decisions attended by a smile that suggested it wouldn’t be long. “Everyone who talked whispered when we met,” Alexandra said. “We met in a library.” Jeremy could see himself and Alexandra through this woman: thin and neat, accomplished or stable maybe, well though not fashionably dressed, a timeless two, time-honored, family. They fell into the notch. He could feel its periphery fit tight around them, and it seemed to him, as they exited the building, that when he looked up, his self somehow compounded with his Al, his child on the horizon. There had been something bigger than the workweek in the air. He could wrap around the world.

  He did not want to lose it all over a protruding nail, sharp corners.

  So he hired a small crew to build a new wall off the den to form a second, smaller bedroom for the child. The boss gave estimates on the new seams of the home, elbows rested on his own enormous gut, and Jeremy waved his hand, whatever number, whatever it takes. He could hear the beat of the hammers in his chest as he slept, like loud footsteps of a child coming home. If they were turned down for the adoption, Jeremy didn’t know what they’d do with the new room. He went to the hardware store and held paint chips up to the light, sky and seafoam, Atlantic, every element of earth, and he stood there waffling. They had difficult decisions to make.

  “There are second acts in paint,” Alexandra said.

  “But not in the home study,” he said.

  And she laughed. She told him he was crazy. She told him he was a therapist who needed therapy.

  The other difficult decision involved the riots.

  Because during the riots, Jeremy’s mother called. She wanted to tell Jeremy that his brother had been arrested. “He was in the street with them in Tottenham, and he was running off, but they got him with some trainers.”

  Alexandra, on speakerphone, said she was sorry. Jeremy, on speakerphone, said of course.

  “The police killed a colored man, Mark Duggan,” Mrs. Allsworth said. “They tried to fake the circumstance. They pointed out a bullet on a police radio as the dead man’s, and it was police-issue ammunition. Your brother was protesting.”

  “So you smash up a store and run away with arms full of trainers,” Jeremy had said. “Tell me what’s the message in thieving Nikes.”

  “He told me it was undercovers who started it. To distract from the real issue.”

  But Jeremy knew Shane was an opportunist. He knew what his brother would look like to the adoption people. And so he told his mother they could not have Shane round next month, never mind if the family had
all already bought tickets.

  “The ballistics test proved it, Jam. Just the once can’t you believe your brother meant well?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  Alexandra gave him a silent look across the cell phone between them, but he didn’t revise his position. He had made difficult decisions before, and he knew there was always a cost.

  Chapter 7

  One day when the paint had dried, he received a call from the home-study social worker, and she was in, and she was out, and it was a new wait, a wait again. The study had been fast as a bubble bursting. Then an evening went long and loose again. They were waiting again, sitting through time.

  He began to track time in clients. He would write them down and cross them out like days on a calendar, and because there were more of them than days in the week, it began to feel as though their family was closer.

  He met with his client Abraham.

  He met with his client Maria.

  He met with his client Tyrell.

  “Because a pupil is rightless,” Tyrell said. “That’s why. And I’m, no please. Do not. Do not say that word one more time.”

  “What word is that?”

  “College.”

  “Does that word offend you, Tyrell?” Jeremy asked.

  “Sure do.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because it’s a scam,” Tyrell said.

  “A scam.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Jordan.”

  “You think college is a scam.”

  “No, did I say that?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “Damn.”

  “You seem to feel frustrated, Tyrell.”

  The boy shrugged. He was a big boy, but young. It made his hands look smaller as they wrapped around each other, twisting in his lap.

  “Why do you feel frustrated, Tyrell?”

  “Because it’s a scam.”

  “What is?”

  “Saying it,” Tyrell said.

  “Saying ‘college.’”

  “That’s what I said,” he shouted.

  Jeremy tried to think of what a father would say. He would need to have more words for his son. He needed them now.

  Chapter 8

  She already knew what to say in finale: They are you. You was everybody who loved mutually. Alexandra had won the bid to make the life insurance ad, and now she needed to make people think of a happy ending after a happy ending.

  They are the couple who decides if it’s “One if by land, two if by sea” to stick to their sailboat. They are the opposites attracted. They are the ones who can finish each other’s paragraphs. They are you.

  “Paragraphs aren’t sexy,” her boss, Carver Ellington, said.

  “They are in love letters,” she said.

  “Give me sexy. Give me fun. More boats, less prose.”

  “Sexy boats,” she said.

  “Exactly. Float my boat. And for the record, that’s not a euphemism.” He shifted in a seat resembling a perfect red potato chip.

  “Got it,” she said.

  And in a circuitous way, she had gotten it. She had come to America for what it refused to give, thinking there were quick tunnels to the complete picture. In its place, she’d been given a new picture, not that family again but a new family, a son, and he was beautiful, and she was in love. She wished she could show Shel the picture of the boy who’d be her son, that the world still surprised.

  Shel could be anywhere, one place in all the places. It was impossible to know what he would do, or had. But she decided he was alive because, historically, when he disappeared, he had not been dead. She knew that everyone was historically not dead until they were, and still she was sure she would know it if he had died. Her hand would cease to clasp, or she would find herself sleepwalking all the way to Nevada. Her own existence was totem became the way to think. If she could live, he lived. She only needed to continue as though nothing had happened for nothing bad to happen. And nothing had. Besides, Ray Gutierrez said he could do better this time. Now they had an address. The world was furnished with reason to hope. A son, and perhaps soon, too, a brother.

  Chapter 9

  They lay on the floor of the room that might belong to a son and tried to imagine how he would see it. Is it large? So large it is frightening? They tested nightlights. The brown rabbit here. The little polar bear. He would have a favorite animal.

  “I think he’ll favor a clam,” Jeremy said.

  “Definitely a lion guy,” Alexandra said.

  “Or snails.”

  “What kind of kid’s favorite animal is a mollusk?”

  “Children like an octopus, don’t they?” he said.

  In the corner of the room, they attached three small glowing stars. She looked at them. One for each of the family. She rolled over onto her stomach and propped herself by elbows to look at her husband.

  “What if his favorite animal is shrimp, and we can never eat scampi again?” she said.

  “Then we’ll hire a babysitter once a month.”

  “And what if he wants a dog?”

  “Then we’ll attach longer ears to So-So and Jill.”

  “You are very wise,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows, turned on his side. “A fortune cookie amongst men,” he said.

  “And what is the secret to happiness?”

  “You.”

  “And how do we solve war?”

  “Sterilization.”

  “And what is the meaning of life?”

  “The opposite of sterilization.”

  “And now for the soft pitch: How do you make an angry person not?”

  “Sometimes you can’t,” Jeremy said.

  “Then how does he get better?”

  “Sometimes she doesn’t.”

  “It seems too meager to be Jeremy wisdom when you say it,” she said.

  So-So swished in from the living room, a pale orange body climbing over Jeremy’s torso as though it were any other terrain. He lifted the cat, detaching claws hooked into his shirt, and replaced So-So on the floor.

  “Do not mistake discrete for meager,” Jeremy said. “The distinction is what maintains my mental health when clients quit.”

  Alexandra lay back on her back. Her hair was splayed beneath her. “But what about the ones you work with for a while? Wouldn’t it be impossible to see them leave when you know what could happen?”

  “Why would it?” Jeremy asked.

  “Because people over time,” she said to the corner stars. “Because you’re used to them, and it isn’t easy to remove someone from your life.”

  “We live in New York City. Every day doing errands, buying milk, on the MTA, I see hundreds of people I’ll never see again. That is the grammar of the universe and nothing more. It’s normal not to see people again, more normal than continuing to meet for the rest of your life. They are only the laws of time and space that never again will we coincide with almost everyone.”

  “If you love them let them go? Is that what it is?”

  “Don’t,” Jeremy said, “love them in the first place. I think that is the point. Let’s talk about the animals again. I liked the animal conversation.”

  Alexandra closed her eyes. “A discussion for the birds.”

  Chapter 10

  He popped a noise from a bottle, filled flutes when Alexandra came home. She was very serious, he was.

  “Open it,” she said. “He’s coming home.”

  A new law of the universe: look at a photo, and the information is son. Strange that that is what it meant. Jeremy followed the patterns of light. What can be known? You must know the measurements of at least one object to attempt to scale the rest. Something behind Jeremy’s eyes quivered.

  And there he
was, this little guy, with black hair and dimples, standing in pajamas dwarfed by a white teddy bear the size of a large toddler. In the background, another little boy flopped on a mat. Han looked into the camera, confused. His gait appeared uncertain, or perhaps it was the gravity of his world that was shifting before the lens. Han’s hand was extended, reaching, maybe, or else thrown out as a counterbalance. Jeremy couldn’t contain himself; he emailed the photo to Robert and Cassandra.

  This is him—this is our boy.

  Alexandra was sponging mascara from her eyes.

  “Who is he?” Jeremy said. Then, “We are going to raise someone who has emotions we can’t see.”

  “Why wouldn’t we see them?”

  She held the device with the picture, the one from which he called her, the one that connected him to the world. He stood behind her, and they looked at their son, a stranger in a picture taken many miles away.

  “He will never have seen a white man probably,” he said. Jeremy rested a hand on her shoulder, a cheek on her back. “He will think I’m a monster.”

  “What are you afraid of?” she said.

  “It’s exactly what I want.”

  And he couldn’t explain that for so many years his one belief was that a home could not hold. He had believed in having a tighter life so less would be undone.

  Chapter 11

  Across from Lyle, M was speaking, his hands in constant motion. An erect index. Then fingers splayed in roots, pushing something, maybe doubt, down. Their relationship had advanced enough that Lyle could ask about the background, the textures and turns, he’d elaborate in the book, that led to M’s brief career with the agency.

  Online, M had discovered there were message boards full of names who had loyalties to Linux, channeled hearts full of anarchy into fast type. There was an elasticity to the boards; language sprang back. Someone could respond to you, wherever you were, if you spoke through fingers in downward patter. They called themselves RabbidUnicorn, CommanderUnix, or LordNowuSemen. They were brash, and they were civil. They wanted to keep the internet free, but their mores were practical—don’t file a bug report, you enable crises. They were principled haters, generous in advice and criticism, pointing, always pointing to new directions, thinkers, and most of all, they were, even when degreed, anal autodidacts with fuck-you attitudes and enthusiasms for building, dismantling. RabbidUnicorn had even been part of DoS attacks that crashed credit card websites, jabs at the market.