The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  “Come inside,” the doctor said, and Blakey followed.

  Blakey felt ill-prepared to replace brash violence with clear-headed arguments on why his wife should not take a large step up and enter the doctor’s life permanently. He didn’t even think that was an argument he wanted to defend.

  “You want a drink?”

  Blakey nodded. And soon found himself at a bar listening to Dr. Foley’s story, of the kids’ late mother, of the kids themselves, especially the dyslexic one, the pirate, and how they all loved Blakey’s wife and how tough those first couple years as a widower had been for the doctor. He’d taken a whole year off from his practice. He’d had to rebuild his client base from scratch. Did Blakey know how hard that was? The doctor’s wife had loved the sea. The doctor told Blakey how he had borrowed a friend’s sailboat (knows how to sail, has boat-owning friends) on New Year’s Eve (their anniversary, of course) and gone to the Outer Banks to scatter her ashes. Incidentally, the bar was inside Dr. Foley’s house, just off the kitchen with its twin dishwashers, fridges, stoves and sinks. Nearly the whole house (for he’d been given the tour) was lit from recessed fixtures that left pools of light on the Berber carpet and the wood and stone flooring that seemed too perfect to be true wood or stone, but were rather improved wood and stone and doubtless more expensive than the real thing. Blakey thought of his basement pool room, his collection of jazz and 70s rock on the bookshelves, and the modest house surrounded by yards, not gardens. The doctor’s golden retriever began humping Blakey’s leg again.

  “We don’t know why he does that,” the doctor said, aiming several squirts of water at the dog’s muzzle. “It’s embarrassing.”

  Blakey looked down at the dog, and where the spray of water had hit his own pants. He stood to leave.

  “Did you wet yourself?” asked the pirate child, pointing to Blakey’s crotch in a way that made Blakey feel eight again. “I used to wet myself,” the pirate said. “But I outgrew it.”

  From inside the doctor’s bathroom, Blakey could hear urgent knocking at the front door. He rubbed his pants as dry as possible with one of the many hand towels. He heard a dozen thank-you’s from outside, the door shutting, the doorbell again, the soft plop of candy falling onto candy. It was hard not to see the reflection of himself in the enormous mirror, stooped over, like some masturbating hunchback. He turned around. The doctor’s late wife stared at Blakey from picture frames. The children were young in the photos, even cuter. There was one photo of her and the doctor, the doctor’s arms wrapping around her from behind, his jaw resting on her head. And there was one of just her alone, staring out a window, not particularly happy or sad, but pensive, as though she could see the car accident that would claim her, or her replacement that would appear, later, in the form of Blakey’s wife. Or maybe she was simply upset that the toilet paper roll was put on the wrong way, whatever direction of wrong she once subscribed to. And then he heard her. His own wife. The doctor said his name. Blakey waited in the bathroom as he heard Lizzie gather up the doctor’s kids and take them out the door for their sugar rounds. It took all of thirty seconds.

  Blakey left the house unseen. His heart forgot beats on the drive home, leaving seemingly vast spaces of dead silence in his chest. He dug out a tight knot from his pant’s pocket and pulled out a cube of pool chalk. He peeled back the paper and wrote LIAR across the dashboard of his wife’s car, then scrawled spirals over the word until it was illegible, until he could figure out why “liar.” Would “Thanks for wasted years” be more appropriate? Or, “Why did we even bother?” And why did his heart not feel broken, only ill-spent. What a bad, bad limb he’d climbed. He blubbered and swore. He’d prefer his wife’s new love to be one of the gardeners (or even all three), or someone at the office. Anyone but this doctor with the fine home, the children, the tragic loss of his first wife. Couldn’t she just have a fling, not a replacement? Because now he was losing his sense of self and—maybe if he reexamined himself. Maybe all was not lost. Maybe he had more to offer. Maybe he hadn’t wasted the past seven—no, nine!—years. Maybe she would fall in love with him again. And vice versa.

  FACT: Blakey didn’t have a chance. He was a loser.

  FACT: Blakey rented an apartment, survived divorce proceedings, and retained custody of the cat and parrot.

  FACT: Blakey couldn’t listen to anything but the Stones for weeks on end. You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

  His wife—nearly ex-wife—had more surprises, this time delivered over the phone. “I’m pregnant.”

  “That was quick,” Blakey said, feeling instantly hurt at how urgently she seemed to be making up for lost time, and her apparent satisfaction at broadcasting the information. But then,

  “There’s a possibility the baby could be ours,” she said. “Yours. Ours. You know what I mean. Or not.”

  No, he didn’t know. What did this news mean, exactly? Was it possible she’d been sleeping with the doctor so close to their last marital coupling (he’d heard her watching porn on her TV and he had come in, available in her eyes, he supposed) that she really had doubts as to the father? And, if so, did this mean there was a remote chance her egg had been assaulted by two dueling sperm not of the same father? No, that was too disgusting an idea, his guys and the doctor’s thrashing their way wherever it was they thrashed.

  “Blakey?”

  And why—here was the question that didn’t matter anymore—why hadn’t she and the doctor used protection, a condom at least? Or one of those morning after pills—he could write prescriptions after all. Uh-oh. What if the doctor had some kind of transmittable disease? Blakey knew that doctors were notorious smokers, drinkers and drug users (his own was all three). He made a mental note to check himself for signs when he got off the phone. And the baby, of course, what if it was something that could be passed down to the baby? But he didn’t ask these questions because his wife was going on about paternity testing.

  The next morning, Blakey sat alone in a clinic reading about the DNA test in one pamphlet called Paternity 1-2-3 and about Amniocentesis in another simply called Amniocentesis, a tri-fold that had given him a bloody papercut. For some inexplicable reason, the clinic did not stock bandages they could simply give out. He sucked his finger and looked at the colored drawing in the Amniocentesis pamphlet. A long needle reached all the way into the amniotic fluid, the tip just millimeters, at least on paper, from the curve of the baby’s soft, vulnerable skull. Everything in the drawing—the baby, the womb, the screened back organs of the mother’s body—were bright and brightly colored, though Blakey suspected that, really, it was dark inside there. Or maybe faintly red, like a darkroom. Still, darkness. And in that darkness, a needle headed blindly toward a baby that might be his. That was the moment it really hit him. Fatherhood. Or at least the opportunity of being a father. It was the one thing in his life that was new and untouched and full, immeasurably full, of possibility. Dare he—yes, okay—he dared think the word pregnant with opportunity. Blakey left the clipboard and unsigned consent forms on top of old issues of Redbook and Field & Stream, drove back to his apartment and googled “amniocentesis dangers.” Despite the doctor’s assurances later that evening, via cell phone from the mountains and his week-long vacation with the kids and Lizzie, Blakey told them both he wanted to wait until the baby was born. If this was to be his son (the ultrasound had arrived in the mail that day), he didn’t want to risk any harm.

  FACT: Blakey felt reborn.

  FACT: He started carrying a dumbbell around the house to build up his child-holding muscles.

  FACT: He began seeing a chiropractor because of his back.

  He woke. Taped to the ceiling above the couch where he slept was his home-made sign from the night before. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER! First, though, breakfast. He groaned to the coffee maker, fed the cat, then cut up some fruit for the parrot, refilled the seed cup, and changed the newspaper. His back was killing him. Worthless chiropractor. He needed to buy a bed. An hour later, after shavi
ng his divorce beard, trimming his nose and ear hairs, and dealing with the other minor general grooming areas (neck hair, eyebrows, the funky mole on his chest that was basically a quarter-inch patch of regenerative monkey skin), he was ready to move from physical revival to examining his economic state of affairs. Once his half of the equity came in from selling their house he could live on that for a couple years before he’d be back at zero. In the meantime, there were expenses. The first and last to secure the apartment had tapped him out. He was living on credit. He’d lost his freelance clients from not working (now he knew what the doctor meant about client base), and the only work left were the book projects, with deadlines fast becoming obscenely overdue. The manuscripts for Write Right Press were Quirky Careers And Peculiar Professions and A Dark and Stormy Night: 1,001 Types of Weather for Writers. He’d already included all the jobs and forms of precipitation he could conjure up without serious research, and now, well there wasn’t a chance he was going to spend hours in libraries while his (maybe) son’s cells were dividing and subdividing into limbs and organs and needed a father who’d be waiting for him, whole, with all his shit together. True, it felt good to be working and to fill the time, but he just couldn’t concentrate. Five months of waiting. He didn’t know if he could distract himself for that long. Blakey looked outside. There was no weather. In fact, it might as well have been a vacuum outside, sucking him right out into emptiness. And though he was on a familial basis with that feeling, emptiness, the prospect of having a son made him desire a warm summer breeze bending fountain grass, dappled shade on park lawns, and other weather-related imagery that adorned the free calendar he had tacked up in the kitchen.

  There was an early Christmas tree in an apartment window across the street. He wondered if lumberjacks still worked the forests. He sat down and wrote a section on lumberjacks for the Quirky Careers book, renaming them Forest Engineers to make it seem he’d conducted some bona fide research. After writing up the section on Forest Engineers, Blakey listened to a record he’d picked up at a yard sale earlier that week, Become a Court Stenographer (1969). He boosted the salary, increased the technological requirements (he’d seen stenographers on TV talking into something like gas masks lately, what were those called? Audiotranscribers sounded good, he decided), and continued his half-improvised account of what a fictionalized stenographer, Lizzie the stenographer, might be like. He omitted her possible ambitions and dead-of-night fears (privacy, folks—we don’t need to know how she shakes the clammy hand of midnight), but he imagined details to bulk up her character. He bulleted out facts about stenographers. Lizzie earns more than her husband, the Forest Engineer, mostly by selling trial transcripts to the media, thanks to being placed on a particularly high-profile and endless (judges-have-passed-on-to-the-other-side endless) Hollywood/murder-for-hire trial. She is falling in love with the D.A. and he wants her to dump the lumberjack, the lumbering, blundering, blubberer and take dictation just for him.

  Blakey worked all day into evening, then went out for Chinese. It was a slow night, or perhaps every night was slow here—he was still scoping out the neighborhood restaurants. The kitchen staff sat at a round table near the kitchen doors, gossiping as they snapped through a two-foot-high pile of green beans. Or maybe they weren’t gossiping—he doesn’t speak the language after all. They could be continuing a nightly dialectic involving—no, no they were definitely gossiping. He sipped from his bottle of Tsingtao and eavesdropped, understanding only syllables of what? Mandarin? Cantonese? He wondered which dialect cornered the Chinese restaurant market, then, thinking of the overdue book project, began an entry for Translator in his head. When Blakey returned to the apartment there was a “I’m concerned” message on his machine from his editor at Write Right Press (deleted), and one from Lizzie. They’d received his message about waiting until the baby was born for the paternity test, but they’d gone ahead with the amniocentesis that morning, at a local hospital where Dr. Foley (she called him “doctor”) knew the doctor personally. She paused and Blakey could see the needle enter her, pierce her womb and then into the amniotic fluid and then—they were all skiing, she said, but she was still feeling morning sickness and staying in the lodge, watching TV and drinking mugs of decaf. He could go to his clinic and deliver a saliva sample for his DNA. OK. Good-bye.

  He was furious, betrayed, and so, so thankful he wouldn’t have to wait all those months to learn whether he had a son. Just a saliva sample and he’d know. A sample which he’d provide on his own terms. They’d have to wait for him, now, for his news. He drank a fruit juice glass of Cognac, then smoked a joint. The heater had been on too long, too high, and the apartment felt a thousand degrees hot. Blakey opened a window, but the cold air seemed reluctant in coming and dissatisfying, like standing in front of an open freezer in summer. He poured himself a glass of ice water and stood in front of the refrigerator where, pinned by his realtor’s magnet, Crystal Jolly—Selling With A Smile (really), hung a Christmas card from Dr. Foley. Who were these people, he wondered—like the neighbors across the street with the tree—who dragged Christmas into November? He knew his having received the card must have been an office staff mistake. Mailing list cock-up. Oh dear. Bloody hell. He talked in mock-British until the parrot squawked at him. In the photo, Blakey’s wife posed with Dr. Foley and the doctor’s four kids, including one Blakey hadn’t met, even cuter than the others and hidden until Blakey had peeled away the mail forwarding sticker. The kids resembled his ex-wife, more so the longer he stared. In fact, the soon-to-be Mrs. Foley blended so seamlessly into this family that Blakey wondered if he had imagined his own marriage to her. If, standing here in the kitchen looking at the card, he’d just experienced an epic illusion in the span of ten seconds in which he had believed (“yet how real it felt!”) that he had met this woman, Lizzie, in a concert ticket line, and that they’d dated for a year and then gotten married, bought a house, woken up next to each other thousands and thousands of times, at least until she moved into the separate bedroom. Really, Blakey might not be Blakey. He’s Porter Johnson, Asian language translator, come back from a business trip in Shanghai, and he’s just had something go off in his brain, some delusion that’s played out this Life of Blakey story in his head. Some delayed flight-cabin pressure pop. In reality, Porter’s got two kids at the academy, a skyline view from the penthouse window, a wife in the bedroom waiting for him (the sex is always sublime, the lingerie outrageous, when he returns from extended business trips), and there, digesting in his belly, a big fat bite of American Dream.

  FACT: Blakey is not Porter Johnson.

  FACT: Blakey is both drunk and high.

  FACT: Blakey is about to do something he will regret.

  Having steadily lost its adhesion through the course of the day, the Get Your Shit Together! sign dropped silently from the ceiling, curved past the couch and landed on the many unpacked moving boxes. Blakey remembered when tape used to be good, when it actually held things together for longer than a few hours. What had happened? He felt lonely, thought of his son, and admitted to himself that chances were slim it would be his. After all, wasn’t copious copulation the mainstay of any affair? His sperm had a hundred to one shot. With all the doctor’s medical training, his sperm probably knew the route, what to look for, and how to get inside once there. Blakey felt angry again, here in this four-hundred square foot apartment, no house of his own, unemployed (the pay for the book projects wasn’t worth claiming for the IRS), soon nothing but the bitters and aperitifs left from what had been a well-stocked matrimonial liquor cabinet. He looked at the Foley Christmas card in his hand. There was no personal message, just the photo, and underneath, “Happy Holidays from the Foleys,” surrounded by sharp spears of holly. Blakey grabbed a beer from the fridge and threw the Foley family Christmas card in the trash after the bottle cap. He then searched the moving boxes for The Collected Works of William Shakespeare and flapped the book’s pages until the Polaroids come out. He and Lizzie in Vegas, hotel be
d, poker chips almost concealing her nipples, the other photos, well no need to go there now when, focus, focus, focus, okay but just this once Blakey thought, also aware how low this was, as he sat down, leaned a photo against the beer bottle and unzipped his pants thinking how he wished they had made a video. But nothing. Not a thing, not a stirring, not a damn thing. Not even of the one where Lizzie is —. Nope. Not even with a little help. Blakey Jr. didn’t have a thing for Lizzie anymore either. In the kitchen, he blistered the Polaroids over the range.

  He could ruin her for the doctor. Blakey called the doctor’s number, but got his exchange, a sleepy female voice. Undeterred, he called the doctor’s home number, got the machine, and proceeded to tell the doctor about how he and the late Mrs. Blakey had consummated their marriage in the limo ride between church and reception. He told Kevn Foley, M.D.—that’s right, K-e-v-n, some fancy spelling—a thing or two, intimate details, then exaggerations, complete fabrications, mean lies. While in the midst of recounting a fictitious three-way with a stranger, the machine cut him off. He suddenly felt cold, the apartment freezing and thick with the smell of melted plastic. He winced. What had he been saying about the woman who could, possibly, be bearing his child? What had he spoken to the man who might help raise that child? Was he, Blakey, to be an ugly cowbird, putting his child in a fatter, more comfortable nest, all the while crying about not getting a personal relationship with his son? Advantageous and devastated? And there, on the fridge, the ultrasound. The sight of the baby filled him with remorse so strong he vomited into the kitchen sink. Why was it so hard to get your shit together? As he ran the garbage disposal, he knew one thing—he needed to erase the doctor’s answering machine.