by Jarett Kobek
—Where are you living? I asked.
This question may have given away more than I wanted. It presumed that I knew she wasn’t living on East 7th Street. I’d haunted the old block on several occasions, hoping to catch a glimpse of Adeline. I never did. Finally, I encountered this old Ukrainian lady who lived on the ground floor of our building and asked if she’d seen Adeline. The Ukrainian said that Adeline had moved out.
—The same old place, said Adeline. I’m serving a life sentence on East 7th.
—No kidding, I said.
Adeline couldn’t even look at me. She kept staring at other people’s children.
I saw the conversation ending in five minutes, with us maybe running into one another on the street every couple of years. As if we’d never been real friends. I swallowed my pride, my everything.
—Adeline, I said. I’m sorry.
—Don’t be sorry, she said. I’m the one who should apologize.
—It’s all my fault, I said. I fucked everything up.
—I’ve wasted the last two years blaming myself, she said.
I hugged her again. I didn’t care if she couldn’t breathe. I loved her so goddamned much.
—Put me down! she cried. For God’s sake, man, get some control over your impulses.
—Adeline, I asked, can it go back to how it was?
—You can’t move into my apartment, she said.
—That’s not what I meant, I said. I want to be friends again. I want to go back to how we were.
—Me too, she said.
—But, Adeline, I said, you can’t repeat the past.
—What do you mean you can’t repeat the past? she asked. Of course you can.
Everything would be fine again, everything would resume where it left off. But that was a crazy fantasy. Things left off horribly. It was a nice thought, a reassuring moment. A point of adolescent reversion.
A child in a stroller started crying for its mother. I was about to say something to Adeline about irresponsible parents who inflicted their miserable kids on the world, but she wasn’t there.
She picked up the crying child. She carried the crying child to me.
—Baby, she said, meet my son. Meet Emil Mahmoud.
AUGUST 1994
Reunion, Part Two
I’ll beg your indulgences as I simply flood you with information, that new currency of our twenty-first century. Very many things transpired betwixt my San Francisco departure and the decade’s halfway mark. I’ve gossip to dish, you lovely creatures, and I suppose that you must be dying to hear about Emil Mahmoud and his big daddy Nash Mac and my procreative urges and how yours truly found herself embalmed by motherhood.
As you might imaginate, it started in simple innocent pleasure, with Nash Mac screwing out my brains. Please believe me when I say that I ain’t one of those foolish simps who adopts an inactive role in her own contraception. I insisted, each time, that Nash Mac wrap his Johnny within a rubber, whilst also personally deploying many a liberal squirt of spermicidal gel.
When my period ran late, I thought nothing of it. You’ll remember the dreary months following my contretemps with Baby. Only natural, wasn’t it, to assume that faulty plumbing had forced another work stoppage. As it turns out, I’m one of those rare women blessed with a lack of morning sickness.
I maintained my starred-eyed ignorance until month three. ’Round then, I came to the misbegotten notion that, Great God All Mighty, I might be carrying a child!
By that point, I’d reestablished residence on East 7th Street, evicting Luanna’s friend and retrieving my useless possessions. I had presumed that a return to NYC would be as pleasant as a four-automobile highway massacre, so imagine the surprise when excitement burst beneath my skin as I stomped down from the L train at Third Avenue. When I saw the dome of St. George’s, why, a jolt of pure joy rose in my breast!
Luanna’d begun grumbling about how I must learn to use a computer, as daft an idea as any I’d heard. “Things are changing,” she said. “It’s a cutthroat business and the newest knives are digital.” I’m positively certain that you’ll understand why I gave up illustration and chose to focus on Trill.
I didn’t give a jot or tittle about the business end of comics, trusting that Jeremy could handle matters. Winterbloss suggested letting a third party take care of distribution. He arranged a last-minute deal with Image Comics, a company founded by some of the biggest brutes in the whole dirty funnybook bizness, men like Todd McFarlane and Robert Liefeld.
Those boys had established Image as a response to the ghetto workhouses of Marvel and DC, focusing their new company on creator-owned projects and constructing a framework by which the individual might release her work upon the world. The company took the upfront, asking for zero stake in the intellectual property, an arrangement unprecedented in human history.
Jeremy’s connection was Jim Valentino. They’d dealt with each other, briefly, whilst working on an issue of The Official Marvel Index to the Avengers.
Winterbloss reasoned that with our promotional debut in Cerebus and Image’s place of pride in Diamond’s Previews catalogue, we would establish a fairly meaningful beachhead. If business with Image proved unpalatable, then we could dump the company and self-publish on the strength of the material and the launch.
Everything was swellegant. Yet you’ll remember, darlings, that when life is at its most swellegant those who are doomed to live it will most often cock the thing up.
My breasts swelled. My stomach protruded. My emotions veered into the erratic.
All of this seemed cotton-pickin’ peculiar and far beyond the elementary discomfort of a long overdue period. Don’t you know that the idea arrived fully formed like Pallas Athena? Adeline, said my brain, what if you’re pregnant?
O, God no! says I to myself. How could it be? The only man who’d given me the time was Nash Mac, and it seemed impossible that anything about the fellow, let alone his DNA-infused spermatozoa, possessed the gumption to survive a heady mix of latex and Nonoxynol-9.
I purchased two pregnancy tests at a grocery store on Avenue A that was built into the crumbling remains of an old RKO movie house. I had no other items of acquisition. The woman behind the cash register proffered an all-too-knowing glance. A lesser person would have wilted under her disapproval, descending into all six forms of Judeo-Christian shame.
Yet you know me, darlings. I’d read somewhere about a custom during the Middle Ages called The Beggar’s Tribute. Kings and other nobles took no vengeance upon any beggar who dared insult them, believing a beggar’s voice to be his only coinage and his insults the only tribute that he might pay. A beggar’s insults marked one as a person of distinction.
This grocer woman was no different. Let her stare down my slutting ways, let her examine the “A” branded into my cheek. That’s what beggars do before their betters.
I made water upon the first test. Not examining its result, I made water upon the second. I waited a good ten minutes before consulting both.
. The double +. +.+. ++. Ne plus ultra. My fertile womb, my jolly unborn child. +++++++++++++++++++++.
A baby was so much work. A baby was so much money. A baby would change everything. Life would never be sane again. All those dreadful little clichés. I was acting positively plebeian!
The enormous debate. Whether or not to keep the thing. Yet there ain’t much suspense in that regard, is there, oh reader? You know that the babe was born. Little Emil may be many things, but we shan’t count him as the sole known example of spontaneous human generation.
I’d floated through life vowing that if I ever had suffered the misfortune of being knocked up, I’d dilate-and-scrape quicker than two shakes of an epileptic’s fist.
I’d known some very dubious young sophomores and juniors who conflated abortion with birth control. How many friends from Crossroads had I dri
ven to Planned Parenthood? I never judged, never saw it as anything other than an operation. Many of the girls were shell-shocked by their visit to the clinic. Their rationality of choice could not outweigh the emotional imbalance.
They resided in a country that heaped ashes of guilt upon their heads, victims of a misbegotten religious society which framed the argument through a bogus feint towards the inherent sanctity of all life. What egregious nonsense! The sheer hypocrisy is revealed by anyone who spends twenty minutes walking through any major American city, any person who speaks with the country’s destitute and its broken, with its homeless. People smeared in their own filth, reeking of acidic urine, destroyed by mental illness. Life was sacred, old boy, but only so long as it remained within a woman’s womb. Once the damned creatures crawled from the primordial uterine ooze, then it was a battle for every cent and every breadcrumb. There are no handouts in America! Everyone must operate their own bootstraps! Three cheers for a decrease in the surplus population!
This says nothing of the poor abused mothers. Girls doomed by social pressure into the wrong decision. Their fragile lives ruined by the phantasmal promise of sanctified motherhood. Those who are miseducated from their early months, told of the beatific glow of motherhood, only to be thrust deep into the bowels of poverty.
Abortion is a social good, but you’ll never hear tell of that particular notion. Our country is addicted to its own lies. Even the so-called pro-choice wing of the national dialogue will not publicly admit the truth. At last some mouth must give it an utterance, so I suppose it shall be yours truly. Abortion is a grand thing.
For me, myself, I considered the operation in the stewing mess of my own life. I’d spent years running towards the weird, shunning the normal. And it hadn’t gotten me very far, had it? I drew a comic book about anthropomorphic cats, and I spent a good many days listening to Astral Weeks, but there wasn’t much to show, was there? What if the only path forward was through an embrace of family?
The situation itself suggested that I might not want to tempt fate’s vagaries. If this particular sperm, of all the billions, had survived its many travails, then surely it must be a special thing, a creature desperate to be born. It struck me that the universe was giving me a sign.
You’ll be charitable enough to remember that the pregnancy went three months without discovery. My body had flooded itself with hormones designed to cloud judgment and commandeer my thinking. The fetus protected through biochemical manipulation of its mother.
I telephoned Nash Mac.
I’d dumped him in San Francisco. That news hit with a rough shock. He sunk so low as to suggest following me to New York. I’d given this half-baked notion a complete veto. “Dear boy,” I’d said, “don’t you know that you’re a San Francisco person? A California kid? You can’t come live in New York. It simply won’t do, old sport. It won’t do!”
Nash Mac pointed out that Fairfax, Virginia, was significantly closer to New York than Pasadena, and that thus, perhaps, he had more of a genuine connection with the East Coast. Acrimony ensued. He accused me, as most men eventually do, of never really knowing him. It hit me as it always does, but what can a person say when they’re escaping a scene and going back to their once upon a time? I cut the apron strings and said good-bye.
Now imbued with the news that he was a father-to-be, Nash Mac moved to New York. Nothing could keep him from his child, and, one supposes, myself. He asked no permission, but in fairness, the pregnancy had me befuddled enough that when he arrived at JFK, I waited by his gate and brought him into my arms and my bed.
He’d taken an extended leave from LucasArts, summoning his inner Daniel and reading MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. He’d arranged employ at Enteractive Inc., a third-rate outfit on West 40th Street. Despite the many times that he attempted description, I could not understand the nature of his job. I presumed that he was hired as a result of his infinitesimally tangential association with George Lucas.
Had it lasted, I’ve no doubt that he would’ve proposed marriage.
I managed a month and a half before his tender ministrations drove me to distraction. I cut the cord, again. In the seemingly endless fight, he held his move to New York over me, suggesting I hadn’t expressed gratitude for his performance of an action that I hadn’t requested.
“You imagine me some fey creature of whimsy,” said I. “My only mistake was in thinking that you’d want to know about the omnipotence of your spermatozoa. Don’t delude yourself. You came to this city because you wanted to live in New York. None of this was for me or for the baby.”
I promised Nash Mac that I shouldn’t ask a thing of him. He was appalled. He wanted to be in his child’s life. I assured him that he would, leaving the details vague. We didn’t know a thing about this child. Why make plans?
Yet I knew that I couldn’t keep Nash Mac out forever. Every action has its consequences.
His experience at Enteractive offered enough trauma that he was soon ringing LucasArts, informing them of his imminent return. We’d passed into the year 1994. The company’d released Sam & Max Hit the Road and were ramping up for Full Throttle. “None of these games are great,” said Nash Mac. “No one is as good as Ron Gilbert.”
He departed through the same terminal gate by which he’d arrived. The true horror of sex spilled out, right there on the industrial carpeting of Terminal 3. The inescapable Nash Mac.
He wasn’t nothing but some guy who’d given me the time in San Francisco. I’d done no wrong, kept myself protected, but it hadn’t mattered. Caught stealing from the cookie jar, we’d been sentenced to a lifetime of each other. Oh Jesus, make up my dying bed!
Goodbye, New York, said he. Goodbye, Adeline, said he. Goodbye, Nash Mac, said I, hoping that I might yet discover a path to navigate the awkwardness of our special relationship.
*
With Nash Mac stationed back in Californy, I didn’t have another soul to help with my pregnancy. Luanna only went so far. There were many considerations. Should I move? Should I convert Baby’s room into a baby’s room? What of the delivery itself and the prenatal care and the vitamins and the food and all the other miseries with which Nash Mac had been helping?
Darlings, I was at my lowest. I telephoned Dahlia.
My sister, that abominable fool, that delirious idiot. She and Charles had separated and reunited on three separate occasions, never quite divorcing and somehow bringing two children into this mortal world. A daughter and a son. Dahlia was an old hand at motherhood. For the first time in her life, she knew more than yours truly.
Yet she remained Dahlia, unable to transcend herself. “Pregnancy,” she said, “is like the worst flu you’ll ever get. It’s a nine-month sickness. It’s, like, an agony. When I was carrying Deanna, it was, like, the worst time of my life. My stomach swelled up, I got so fucking fat, I retained water in my ankles, I got hemorrhoids, I was sick all the time, I got varicose veins, I peed every thirty seconds, I ate like a whale, I craved like the grossest foods, and when I did, like, give birth, the labor was thirteen hours and it felt like shitting a baby seal. You’re in for it.”
Dahlia arrived for the last month of my pregnancy, helping with the preparations. Her most vital role was serving as a buffer between me and Mother.
My coinage couldn’t cut it. Though I still refused to speak with the old crone, I’ll say one thing for Mother. She did pony up the cash that eased her third grandchild from my womb.
Emil was born at Roosevelt Hospital. The labor was as bad as Dahlia had warned. Even with all the pain and all the drugs, I kept hearing her stupid advice. There I was, darlings, experiencing the miracle of birth, and the only thing flying through my drugged brain was how dreadfully close the process felt to shitting out a seal.
When it was over, I had the child in my arms. Emil’s bruised and purpled face. All was forgiven.
Dahlia remained for two extra months. She’d falle
n in love with the East Village’s upmarket diversity. Through the magic of telephony, I know for dead certain that both of her children and Charles were happy for an interregnum. Life without my sister’s inane dialogues and meditations. I was their favorite.
Her focus fell on yours truly and my son. Yet even here I can’t rightly complain, as Dahlia taught me the very basics of motherhood, and helped keep Trill on schedule. We never missed an issue or a ship date.
Consider it, won’t you, darlings? My two great contributions to human civilization. Emil and Trill. In a horrible way, their success was down to Dahlia.
The very soul that had haunted my adolescent years with her manic braying and incessant preening. Dahlia! Dahlia! My wretched old sister. Now I owed her everything. She’d saved me! She was my hero. She was all that I had!
No one ever claimed that adulthood would be easy.
*
I saw Baby beside the fountain in Washington Square Park. Blond hair, farmfed good looks only modestly weathered by city life.
I’ve no shame confessing my moment of doubt. I considered gathering Emil and avoiding complications. The old bitterprick of anger about Mother, emerging from sheer hypocrisy.
Baby’d only done what anyone would, which is receive a cash infusion from the family coffers. I myself was guilty of the very same. To whom did I run when it became clear that I’d birth Nash Mac’s demon seed?
That’s the problem of people like Mother, people with serious money. We are bent to their wills.
I said, “Hello, Baby, how do?”
Without expectation of things playing out as they did, but that was only yours truly making herself the fool. I loved Baby. I’d always loved Baby. I’d missed him, even if I loathed admitting it to my lonesome.
So there we were, the old messy duo standing in Washington Square, a child in my arms. I invited Baby to 7th Street. Perhaps it was too soon. Oh, Adeline, said I to myself, throw caution to the wind. This is Baby. Baby whose only crime was getting an education. No ill fortune can befall you. Not from Baby.