The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  Neither of them made any move toward actual physical contact.

  “So,” Liz said.

  He had a little speech he’d put together that consisted mainly of various levels of apology. He was sorry for the abortion; he was sorry he hadn’t supported her more when they’d moved here; he was sorry for how things had ended. There were certain words he planned to avoid, certain specifics, but if it came to it he was ready to be sorry for other things as well. The speech was structured like a kind of plot diagram: rising action, conflict, awful climax. The denouement, he hoped, would be them sitting here saddened but reconciled in this café on Duluth, as in the last scene of a Woody Allen film. This was when he would tell her about Ingrid. He would tell her about his son.

  It took a matter of seconds for the whole scheme to crumble.

  “Look, this is stupid,” Liz said. “We can’t go around pretending to hate each other for the rest of our lives.”

  He latched onto the word like a drowning man: pretending.

  “No,” he said, lowering his gaze as if he were the one who was mainly at fault in this.

  “We were both pretty messed up. I can hardly even bring myself to think about it. I don’t know—the two of us. Maybe we’re just too much alike. Maybe we know each other too well.”

  All of this was so far from what he’d expected that he felt he could only follow her lead until he’d figured out where exactly they were headed.

  “I always thought that,” he said carefully.

  “It’s not as if either of us is especially well adjusted. I suppose that was what I liked about you.”

  It stunned him that she could still talk about that, about liking him.

  “I guess I made a lot of mistakes.”

  “Yeah, well. We both did.”

  She was being so reasonable, so measured. It was almost as if they were talking about some other breakup, a normal one. Maybe it had been normal.

  “So. That was all I wanted to say.” The initiative had gone over to her entirely by now. “I just didn’t want to have to go around feeling all the time like there was this thing between us.”

  That was it, then. No specifics, no who-did-what, no Jesuitical haggling over the fine points of blame. She was actually letting him off the hook, more or less as he’d hoped. What he couldn’t figure was why he felt so strangely bereft, as if he’d been robbed somehow of his fair portion.

  “Look, Liz,” he started, not even sure what he was about to say, which almost certainly meant he was about to put his foot in it. He was saved by the waitress, who chose this moment to grace them with her presence.

  Alex, in his bad French, ordered a cappuccino, the first thing he could think of. The waitress gave him a withering smile.

  “Et pour madame?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  By then, whatever urge it was that had risen up in him, the need to make a concession, the need to know, had passed. He couldn’t bring himself to go back there now, into that swamp.

  “I should tell you I’m moving back to Toronto,” Liz said, looking away as if she had said something awkward.

  “Oh.” It was what he had always figured, that she would go. He might have felt relieved at this except for the shadow that had seemed to cross her, that had seemed to put their conversation in a different light. What he had understood was this: she was the one who didn’t want to know. “I guess it never worked out for you here.”

  “I don’t like it here, to tell you the truth. I feel like a foreigner or something.”

  It was true: even sitting in this café she looked out of place. Something, some quality in her, didn’t fit.

  He couldn’t bring himself to ask about Moses.

  “If you need any help,” he said.

  “It’s fine. I’ll manage.”

  He’d been left to drink his cappuccino alone, everything that he’d been planning to say, to get rid of, still sitting in him like a bad meal. That had been the crux of it: he had wanted to hand everything over to her, like a suitcase stuffed with a body he had cut up. Here, take this. It astounded him that he had even remotely considered dragging his son into the discussion, though in his mind he’d envisioned bringing pictures out and Liz growing maternal and good-humored, gently chiding him for not having mentioned the boy sooner. Bollocks. It was his baby, not hers; hers was in the suitcase. It would have seemed a mockery to her, that he’d been handed this grown child in perfect working order like a manufacturer’s replacement for the one that hadn’t panned out.

  He couldn’t forget that shadow. She had made up a story to spare them both, this version of what had happened they could live with.

  “The thing with Liz,” he said to Dr. Klein now, “was that nothing was ever clear. We were both these smart people, but it seemed like we never had the least idea why we did things. Why we were even together.”

  Even as he said this, Alex understood that this was exactly why they had been together, because things were unclear, because there was safety in that.

  “You’ve never really said whether you loved her.”

  He was taken off guard. Clearly the doctor was not on his game today, throwing the L-word out as if it were actually some sort of acceptable clinical term.

  “I guess it never came up,” he said, and couldn’t think what to add.

  He fell silent again. Everything, somehow, seemed to go back to the child. In his mind there were two children now, his child and his shadow-child, the one who lived in Sheol or whatever they called it, the unpleasant underworld place where people ate dirt and lived on forever. The first one, at least, was no longer a shadow; Alex had laid eyes on him by then. In the week after Christmas, he had boarded a plane and gone over. Afterward, in his memory of it, the visit had quickly become a wash of different shades of ambivalence and doubt, and yet it had changed things, fundamentally. The boy was no longer abstract, a mere possibility. He had fingers and toes, all the usual parts; two arms, two legs. The whole time Alex had been with Liz in that café, the image of the boy had hovered before him—not, as he tried to pretend, as a scourge to beat himself with, but more as a kind of standard to judge by. The first thought he’d had when he sat down with Liz, if he was honest about it, was, We could never have done that. That was what had thrown him off, really, what had left the ball in her court, the niggling sense that he didn’t feel remorseful at all, not about the abortion, maybe not about any of it. What he felt was relief—at his narrow escape, at his having come through it all with only his little guilt suit to wear, his prophylactic.

  Out of the blue he felt tears welling up in him and he turned his head to one side to keep them from Klein. He didn’t know what he was crying about—that he was a heartless ass, he supposed, that Liz had deserved better than him, though it was hard to make out if he was just feeling a twisted sort of self-pity or if some alter ego in him was truly coming to terms with his emotional bankruptcy. He kept coming back to that fucking abortion, kept seeing himself in that spooky waiting room while Liz went under the knife. She would have had the abortion in any event; it was what had made sense. But then it hadn’t been his own body that the thing had been ripped from. It had to be like tearing out your own circuits to do that, like cutting off one of your arms. It had nothing to do with ethics: sure, it was yours, cut it off if you wanted, but it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  He heard the doctor’s chair squeak.

  “You seem distracted.”

  He should just come out with it, the whole story of his son. Of Per. The name still felt like a foreign element, some molecule of a different species he was being taken over by, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

  “I guess it just came to me,” he said. “About Liz. That I don’t really feel that guilty about her. About the whole relationship.”

  Dr. Klein’s chair squeaked again, though whether in irritation or with the restrained chirp of professional glee Alex couldn’t have said.

  “Why don’t you tell me about that.”
<
br />   He had gone over to Sweden on a cheap Aeroflot charter, running up the bill on his new Visa card against the hope of more grant money in the fall. The trip, a twenty-two-hour slog, had included a flight path over Chernobyl, obscured at the time by what might have been a permanent nuclear fog, as well as an eight-hour layover sequestered in an overheated waiting room at the Moscow airport, where Intourist hostesses served stale liverwurst sandwiches and prevented any attempts at espionage or escape. By the time he had made his way across the sound to Landskrona from the Copenhagen airport he felt like a Gulag returnee.

  Ingrid was waiting for him at the terminal with Per. He was a spidery bundle of limbs, as stupefyingly alien-looking and blond as his siblings had been years before. Somehow the photos hadn’t quite made clear that he was this Teuton, this pagan wood sprite of the North.

  His coat sleeves were too short, his hair was too long and unkempt.

  “Hello, Father,” he said, in his small Swedish voice, holding a tiny hand out to Alex’s big brutish one with such innocent fortitude that Alex’s heart sank.

  He had made a mistake. He wasn’t up to this.

  “It’s very nice to meet you,” he said desperately, and shook the boy’s hand.

  Everything felt strange this time around, doubled over, itself but also a kind of replica of itself, like one of those tourist villages that re-created historical eras. Here was the stucco house at the edge of town, here the white furnishings, here the kitchen table that looked out to the garden. Lars and Eva were with their father, but there were pictures of them strewn around the house that looked to Alex like the updated computer renderings of children who had gone missing years before, Lars rigorously clean-cut and blue-eyed and tall, Eva already with the housewifely look of someone soon to be married and pregnant.

  “I hope you don’t mind to stay in the cabin again,” Ingrid said. “It’s Lars’s room now.”

  This time he felt none of the old sexual chemistry between them. Maybe it was just that, like God, he couldn’t imagine sleeping with the mother of his child, though what he didn’t like to admit was how old Ingrid looked, not older but old. Out in his cabin he felt relieved to be alone, though the place was layered now with the spoor of adolescent boy, every inch of wall filled with Lars’s posters and trophies, every corner jammed with sports gear and teen accoutrements. At least the old cot was gone, replaced by a proper bed. It would have been too much, to think of Lars in the bed where he and his mother had made love.

  Per was watching some show of his on the TV when Alex went in as if he were just a completely ordinary child, as if he met his birth father every day.

  “It’s been difficult,” Ingrid said, “but I should never trade it. Not for anything.”

  He was drawn into a long series of getting-to-know-you activities that seemed as ritualized and laden with meaning and precise as a Japanese tea ceremony. Per showed him his bed, in Lars’s old place next to Eva; he showed him his coloring books; he showed him his stamp collection, turning, at Ingrid’s urging, to the Canada pages, from where little profiles of the Queen looked off into space next to commemorative stamps from Expo 67. All of it had the blare of excess information, of things that were not quite apprehendable or in a clearly decipherable code.

  Under his bed Per kept a collection of bugs, just a heap of crumbling thoraxes and tangled limbs at the bottom of a Mason jar.

  “It is insects,” he said gravely. “Of course they are dead.”

  “I used to collect bugs,” Alex said. This was not strictly true. “I grew up on a farm.”

  “Yes.”

  Any minute now, Alex kept thinking, he’d blow his cover. He didn’t know how long he could keep this up—not days, surely, not months and years. Already his face ached from holding its fatherly look, his skin itched, he wanted to scream. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected—that he and Per would fall into each other’s arms, maybe, that they would unleash in a rush all the genetic blood-love that had been stymied in them. Not this, at any rate, not this polite sussing out as if they were shopping for clothes, as if they had some kind of choice. It wasn’t as if they could simply break up if things didn’t work out. Nothing they said, nothing they did, would ever change that Per was Alex’s son.

  “He says you have a funny smell,” Ingrid said. “Perhaps from the smoking.”

  He had been taking such pains to hide this from the boy, huddling behind the cabin to smoke and scrubbing his face afterward and running water through his hair the way he had done to hide his smoking from Liz.

  “It’s not so good to smoke,” Per said, in his textbook English.

  Alex hadn’t quite been prepared for this fluency of his. It was disconcerting, as if the boy had mastered particle physics or beaten Alex at chess.

  Already Alex had forever lost the authority a true non-smoker would have had with the boy. He ought not to have come was what it was, not yet, not until he was ready. He’d been counting on Ingrid, he supposed, had been expecting her to manage matters from the wings the way she had always done with Lars and Eva. But something was different with Per, in a way he wouldn’t have expected. Per put him and Ingrid at odds, somehow. Ingrid stood watching from the kitchen window while he made a snowman with the boy in the back garden and there seemed a part of her that would have preferred if she had never written him, if he had never come.

  At some point Ingrid stepped away from the window.

  “Where is my mother?” Per said at once, as if Alex were a child molester, a total stranger.

  “It’s fine. She’s probably in the living room.”

  “We must go inside now, I think.”

  Per needed to learn to trust him, Ingrid said, but what could that mean, when he would be gone in a matter of days? It seemed a question of physical presence as much as anything, of getting the measure of each other’s gravity, but Alex had been merely this phantom all of Per’s life, as insubstantial as the Easter Bunny. Here the boy was, his own flesh and blood—and Alex had caught a glimpse of him, something in his expression or the angle of his face, that had suddenly seemed so much the mirror of himself that he had had to look away for the intimacy of it—and he had not yet even properly held the boy.

  Their first day felt like an accumulation of little failures: maybe he was too deeply flawed, Alex thought, or the boy himself was. He was Alex’s son, after all. There seemed a stubborn resistance in him that wasn’t quite normal, that was like a test that couldn’t be passed. If he needed a drink fetched, it was in a particular cup, not the one that Alex had chosen; if he needed a pencil, it was the one that Alex had taken for himself. There seemed nothing so simple as mere attention-seeking in any of this, but more as if there was some absolute arrangement of things which must be adhered to at all costs but whose shape revealed itself only moment by moment.

  Each time Ingrid quietly stepped in to restore order Alex thought, Wrong, wrong, feeling erased, feeling she had already ruined the child with her indulgence of him. But then wasn’t this what he’d wanted, that she should corral him, that she should keep him from error? There had been no arguments, no open battle of wills, yet by suppertime Alex could feel a kind of static building up among them all as toxic as nuclear fallout.

  “You should tell me about your studies,” Ingrid said. “Perhaps I haven’t understood so well.”

  “It’s just a lot of technical stuff, mainly. Theories and so on.” He added, not really wanting to, “I could finish them anywhere, really.”

  Per sat swishing the food around on his plate, not pleased at sharing his mother’s attention.

  “Per, you must eat,” Ingrid said.

  He bent to his bowl like a wounded hunchback.

  “How long will Alex stay with us?” he said, throwing the Alex out like a challenge.

  A long second passed.

  “We’ll see.” Alex had been waiting for a reprimand. “Some days still.”

  Alex could see by then that the situation was hopeless. They were a cabal alrea
dy, a closed shop; they didn’t need him.

  He got up from the table, seething with things he couldn’t name.

  “I’m going out to the cabin.”

  He skulked out. Why did he want me here? he thought, but then what could it have meant in Per’s five-year-old brain, how could he have understood that having a father meant a hairy lout like Alex showing up out of nowhere? Alex felt like the gift that hadn’t worked out, the exotic pet brought home for Christmas that had proved less amusing than had been hoped.

  Ingrid was at his door. He wanted to blame her for letting matters come to this, for leaving him out.

  “You mustn’t run away like a child.” Her own anger took him by surprise. “At least Per can say he’s only five.”

  Alex felt close to tears.

  “He doesn’t even like me.”

  “It’s not that way with children,” Ingrid said, but more gently.

  “How is it, then?”

  “Mostly they’re afraid. Only that.”

  He was the one who was afraid, of being stranded here, of being turned away, of discovering he was some kind of child-hating sociopath, of waking up to find he had somehow stumbled into the rest of his life. No way out.

  “We’ll try an excursion tomorrow,” Ingrid said. “Perhaps it will be better.”

  They spent the next day at the Farm. Alex had never laid eyes on the place before, yet it had touched on his life so curiously that it had taken on for him an almost mythical air. It turned out, though, to be exactly what it was billed as, a working farm, with a cattle shed and a chicken run and a thatch-roofed barn that looked like it went back to the Vikings. They wandered around in there in the narrow alleys that ran alongside the stalls and storage bays catching glimpses of barn cats and of dust motes that hung in the slats of sunlight like fairy dust.

  Per was on his best behavior.

  “You must show Alex your special place,” Ingrid said.

  Alex didn’t like to think what blandishments or threats his mother had held over him. Maybe only the threat of her disapproval.