Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  I had dragged a food-crusted magazine from an empty neighboring table and was flipping through it when I heard the gargling cry, and nearly leapt to my feet. I looked up sharply and saw Nicole had entered the cafeteria, and carried a bundled baby in her arms. Nicole, another customer service rep, had left some time ago on maternity leave – that I knew for sure. But for a beat or two I was almost in a panic. I thought the baby in her arms was one of mine. Of course it couldn’t be – how could one of them find its way here? Or, who would sneak into my apartment, steal one of them, and then bring it here so as to taunt me or confront me or accuse me? It was impossible, of course, but like I say – for a moment I thought that was exactly what had happened. Because Nicole’s baby sounded just like any one of my babies. From where I sat, bolt upright with a cold iron rod for a spine, it even looked like one of my babies. But Nicole never turned my way to glare or gloat; instead, she angled the swaddled infant for Angie to coo at.

  I rose from my seat, and did something especially bold for me. I approached Angie’s table, too, and leaned over her shoulder to gaze at the baby. “Well, well, is this him?” I asked innocently.

  “Her,” Nicole corrected. “Her name’s Jessica.”

  “Jessica,” I said. I wasn’t so bold as to touch the sleeping creature’s minuscule, dimpled hand. But then I knew very well how a baby’s hand felt. The skin as dream-soft as the skin of a very old woman’s hand. Mostly I just wanted to see the baby’s face. With her reddish hair, Jessica could have been one of my babies. Nicole might be lying about her being a girl. I felt an almost desperate impulse to wrestle the baby from Nicole’s arms and dash out the door with her. But I would have to take her word for it that the baby was indeed hers.

  I’d have to count my own babies when I got home that night. Though of course, that would do me little good if some new ones had appeared.

  * * *

  Maybe someone does sneak in my apartment, though. Brings the children and leaves them with me. If so, I don’t know why they chose me. I’d never been a father before January. But someone must have thought I’d be a good one, and I’ve definitely tried to be.

  But more often these days I assume that I’ve collected the children myself, gathered them here in the night, perhaps, when my conscious mind is sleeping. “My Bed is a Boat,” says Robert Louis Stevenson in A Child’s Garden of Verses. When I sleep I think I’m transported to another place within myself, and another me wakes up to take care of some of my needs that my day self might be a little too timid to contemplate. If I’m ever caught by the authorities, which is my greatest fear, I hope they come at night. My dreaming self would probably deal with the situation a lot better than my waking self would.

  The first baby came last January. Like the infant New Year.

  I had fallen asleep in my rocking chair, with my favorite blanket wrapped around me. It needed a wash but its unwashedness made it more of a comforting nest for me. The TV was still on, and I thought the gargling cry that woke me up had come from the set. But as I stirred, I saw that there were only two disrobed adults on the screen, and though they were making various inarticulate noises, none sounded like the cry I had just heard. And when I heard it again, coming from off to my right somewhere, I got to my feet and let my blanket slide off me.

  To my right was my bedroom, which was in darkness, and as I stalked nearer to the doorway the cry came for a third time. My skin rippled. I was very cold without the safe cocoon of my blanket. From atop a bookshelf outside my bedroom I took a metal figure of a knight holding a sword in front of him like the Oscar. I turned it upside-down in my fist for a club.

  My left hand plunged into the dark pool of my bedroom and scratched for the wall switch. It came on in a stark burst at the same time a fourth cry came from my bed and I lunged into the room, maybe crying out myself, holding the club high to smash down on the intruder who was writhing under my quilt.

  I jerked the quilt back and nearly sent the metal knight crashing into the wispy-haired skull of a naked baby boy. I had no experience with children before then, as I say, but now I’d know to place his age at about three months.

  With the warm quilt off him, his body exposed to the chilly air of my badly-heated apartment, the baby boy promptly started peeing. I’ve since seen it happen when changing diapers. It’s the change in temperature that sets them off. It can get you in the face. And wouldn’t you know all my babies are boys.

  The baby looked up at me, but for the moment I ignored it, looking here and there with jolts of my head, expecting to see an adult intruder as well. Whatever adult had left this baby here.

  I went into the other rooms. I found no one. I tested my door: locked, chained and bolted. My apartment was on the second floor of an old Victorian house, but I checked to see that the windows were still latched, nevertheless.

  Someone must have left it here before I came home from work, and the baby simply hadn’t made a sound until now, had been sleeping. A key would have admitted them then, but there was no way anyone could get past the chain and bolt that were currently in place.

  When at last I returned to the baby, I put down the knight statuette and stood looking down at my uninvited guest. It’s hard to tell with babies for a long time what color hair or eyes they’ll end up with. Its eyes, wandering with blissful emptiness up to me, were that sort of no-color almost-blue grayish color. I considered his lightish hair to be red. My hair is red I guess but I prefer to think of it as strawberry blond.

  It was a while before I picked up the baby. In the meantime I had made a cup of coffee, and lit a cigarette, and smoked it while I looked down at the baby. But then I got to feeling guilty. Smoke isn’t good for tiny lungs, it can promote respiratory illness in infants (I’ve since quit), and the bedroom is the coldest room in my apartment. I fetched my favorite blanket from the living room, stubbed out my butt, then went to the baby and bundled it awkwardly into my arms.

  It didn’t latch its jaws onto my neck, or sprout talons that it plunged into my cheeks. It gurgled and squirmed a little, but it seemed to like that I had picked it up at last.

  I had to call the police.

  Well, I had better drink my coffee first while I thought about that. What would the police think about my story? That I had woken up in my locked apartment to find a strange baby in my bedroom? A naked child, in my bed?

  You hear of children left on doorsteps. Better that than left in garbage cans. But why my apartment, why choose me so specifically? Someone wanted me, me, to care for this child.

  Maybe it was me who wanted me to care for this child. But I didn’t consider that theory until the fourth or fifth baby. That it might be me who was bringing them here. When my day self, the part that went to work, was off in Stevenson’s “Land of Nod.”

  I made another coffee, and as I poured in the milk the baby made a little half-sound. I glanced over at it, went “ohhh” inside, and then went about finding a way to get some milk inside the creature. I didn’t have an eye dropper, a turkey baster, anything like that. I checked the time. The Shopping Cart was open twenty-four hours. They’d have bottles there. Disposable diapers, too.

  I couldn’t very well take the baby with me to the store. I could be seen, recognized. (Or its actual parents might see it, recognize it, and accuse me of kidnapping.) Would he be all right here alone for half an hour? Well, he had been all right alone up to an hour ago. I carried him back to the bedroom, stripped my soaked sheet, flipped the mattress over and set the bundled baby in the center of the bed.

  “I’ll be right back, little guy,” I whispered to him.

  As I went downstairs to the front door, I prayed that the child would not start balling in my absence. What would the two elderly brothers who lived downstairs make of that? Well, they were hard of hearing in any case.

  At the Shopping Cart I bought diapers, bottles, nipples, canned formula, and – on a sudden impulse – a plastic rattle with cows on it jumping over a moon.

  And when I returned
to my apartment and let myself in, I found that there were two babies on my bed. A third was in the laundry basket in the bathroom, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  * * *

  Joan is too skinny, I decided, sort of hard-edged, like it might hurt to hold her tightly. Her face has concave cheeks, and I could visualize that her inner thighs are concave, and her hips hollow where the pelvic bones jut out in pointy knobs. I imagined that her unhealthy naked flesh, if you were to kiss it, would smell faintly of the diarrhea and vomiting that keep her so thin. She has slouching shoulders and her hair is a very dull brown. I like brunettes, mind you, but some people’s hair just has no sheen or life. I didn’t know what color Suzanne’s hair might really be, but I thought she looked good as a redhead. I guess I’m prejudiced that way; every one of my children is a strawberry blond.

  I ignored Joan. In the office, I found myself eyeing Suzanne. Suzy, her friends call her. One day I watched her come into the cafeteria from outside and stop at a friend’s table to chat for a moment, and her hair was mussed from the wind and the nipples on the heavy swells of her breasts were unabashedly erect, straining against her clearly outlined bra and her too-snug white blouse as it to tear through both. She was flushed in the face and a bit out of breath from the wind, as well. It was easy for me to imagine that this was how she would look if she were to be physically excited. I wondered if she dyed her secret garden that pretty red color, too.

  That same day I gathered up my strength for eight hours so as to say, “Goodnight, Suzy” to her as I passed her cubicle on my way home. She looked up and said, “Oh, hi, goodnight.” I thought that was cute. “Oh, hi, goodnight.”

  At work I would anxiously watch the little clock in the upper right corner of my computer screen. Count off the hours before I could go home. But I no longer fretted nearly as much as I did in the beginning, when I thought the babies might dehydrate during my long work day, starve or freeze, smother themselves while sleeping or fall out of bed or lie in their own poop for hours or any number of things. But my babies are all extremely well behaved, and really don’t even cry that often or that loudly. I feed them in the morning (no longer rushing home at lunch break to do so; I got in trouble for being late back to work too many times) then immediately when I get home. There might be a little dampness in some diapers, but they seem to be in synch to my rhythms and save the real mess for the evening (which keeps me busy). And I now have various cribs and playpens throughout the apartment, so I don’t have to leave them on the bed anymore, where they might roll off. I’ve put lots of stuffed animals and bright plastic things in their cribs and playpens. Bath night is Saturday, because it’s a real project.

  At this point I had fifteen babies.

  I still said hi to Joan if she said it first, but I didn’t look at her if she went down my aisle. Suzy, though. So very busty. Her ample bosom looked like it could feed a whole litter of kids. I imagined that the plush, lush flesh of her breasts was as soft as my babies’ hands. I imagined her aureoles were large, as befitted her overly generous orbs, a flower petal pink against the cream of her skin. And did they smell of milk, like the heads of my babies? I could smell the tops of my babies’ heads for hours. Suzy could recline regally on my bed, fully disrobed, languid as an artist’s model, and I could lie half upon her, one leg hooked over one of her meaty thighs, while I suckled avidly, ardently from her right breast...and one of the babies would lie upon her chest, its own working mouth fixed leech-like to her left breast, its hands far too small to encompass the girth of that life-giving organ.

  I would have to ask her out.

  * * *

  I firmly believe that you should read even to newborns, so that they get accustomed to the soothing flow of the written word, and the warmth of the human voice. I would have read to my children in the womb, had their wombs been nearby. How many different wombs they had formed within I had no way of knowing.

  With two babies in my lap and others close by, playing on the rug or in their playpens, I read from Stevenson’s book. It was a nice, very old copy – no date of printing, unfortunately, but it had art nouveau-style illustrations. The poem I read was “The Unseen Playmate”:

  “When children are playing alone on the green,

  In comes the playmate that never was seen...”

  Zach gurgled contentedly. Josh was trying to grab his own wiggly pink toes. Adam had already fallen asleep. I dressed them in certain outfits so I could tell them apart. In this light, I could see the spot on the top of Adam’s head where the plates of the skull hadn’t fused yet. It was slightly depressed, and pulsated with the flow of his blood.

  “When children are happy and lonely and good,

  The Friend of the Children comes out of the wood.”

  I had Suzy’s phone number memorized. One time I had even picked up the phone and begun punching the number. But I had lowered the handset back in its cradle. I must not act so unexpectedly, like I had with Joan. I needed to strike up more of a conversation with her at work first. Why should that be such a daunting idea? It could be mundane talk...this awful cold, all the snow...or shop talk. Work bitching. That always created a sense of camaraderie, didn’t it?

  “You need a mommy, don’t you, Zach?” I baby-talked, wiping bubbles of saliva from his lips. “A nice red-haired mommy? Yes, you do, don’t you? Nice red-headed mommy. Not some mean old skinny mommy like that mean old skinny Joan. No, not her. She didn’t want to be your mommy. She’s bad, huh? Huh, Zach? Bad, bad Joan.”

  * * *

  Suzy lives in a big old tenement house, too, but on the ground floor. It needs a coat of paint almost as much as mine does. There is a gym set in the backyard; I could see a bit of it from where I was parked across the street. At first my heart sank, because I thought that Suzy might already have children, but then I saw some Asian kids come out the front door with their mother and drive off in a minivan.

  If Suzy had already been a mother, I would have changed my mind about her. I certainly couldn’t take her away from her own children. She did have a boyfriend who lived with her, I discovered after watching her house for part of one Saturday and part of one Sunday, but that in itself didn’t change my newest plans.

  I don’t think I could secure chloroform. I’ve considered knocking her unconscious with something like my little statue of a knight (wrapped in a hand towel, maybe, to dull the edges), but I know it isn’t like knocking someone out in the movies. She might not go immediately unconscious...I might have to hit her again, keep on hitting her. Or I might just hit her once but so hard that it caused brain damage. Then what kind of mother would she be? It might even kill her. I didn’t want to do that. Not to Suzy. Suzy didn’t look mean like that scrawny little snobby Joan. Desmond Morris wouldn’t approve of Joan as a mother for my brood. I got hot throbs in my cheeks when I remembered how Joan’s smile had been all twitchy when I asked her out. Who’d want to kiss those twitchy, thin little lips?

  Suzy. Suzy was the one...

  * * *

  Bath time! I got more wet than the babies did. One after another into their plastic baby bath, factory style. It was while I gave each its turn that I counted seventeen. They were going to eat me out of house and home at this rate. I dreaded the terrible twos, though they hadn’t as yet seemed to be growing any older. Anyway, I needed a helper, and soon...

  I read to them all, one poem in one room, another in another room, leaving no one out. I stood over one playpen in which five of them were settling down to sleep, and read Stevenson’s poem “Young Night Thought.”

  “All night long and every night,

  When my mamma puts out the light,

  I see the people marching by,

  As plain as day, before my eye.”

  My own mamma never read to me, not once as far as I could remember. It’s a good thing I still developed a love of books on my own. Mamma was tall and bony thin and smoked cigarettes. Bad, bad mamma.

  * * *

  My day self is learning how to
be stronger and more assertive from my night self, as if he’s a big brother or an instructive, encouraging father. My day self has got his rifle permit now, and hence a rifle. It’s easier than getting a pistol permit, and this will work fine since I plan on keeping the rifle inside my car, where Suzy won’t see it until she’s close to the car. When she does see it she’ll know to get in, and I can keep the rifle in my lap with the barrel against her side while I drive with my right hand. I’ve gone through it in my mind, but I think I might have to saw off the stock of the rifle so it will fit better and be more maneuverable. I won’t saw off any of the barrel; I’d be afraid if I didn’t do a neat enough job the barrel might explode when a bullet went through it. But I don’t plan on shooting Suzy anyway, unless she makes too much noise. That wouldn’t work for either one of us, and I don’t even want to think about it.

  I wonder if she would indeed be willing to breast feed them. Can a woman who isn’t pregnant produce milk if an infant suckles on her long enough? How do nursemaids do it? I need to read about that; I have all kinds of baby books now, Dr. Spock and company. You can’t beat mother’s milk with any kind of formula, and I read in a children’s magazine I subscribe to now that some people think certain types of formula can contribute to the risk of autism. One in five hundred kids is autistic these days; the rate of autism vastly increased when kids started getting a new kind of vaccination back in the seventies. It’s still under debate, but good thing that none of my kids are vaccinated.

  I’m going to wait until the boyfriend goes to his job on Saturday morning, like he always does. He’s a big stupid grease monkey who works in a garage – I followed him there one Saturday. He looks like he drinks too much beer and watches too much football. Some father he’d make.