He could send Lucy, he guessed. She had a vested interest, after all. And maybe he’d get lucky—two birds with one cheetah . . .
Dev shook his head. No. He’d not shot her when he had the chance, and he hadn’t because of the baby. None of this was the baby’s fault. Maybe with Dev as its default stepfather, the kid could be raised to be a more humane human, unlike the jerks he remembered. The baby deserved a chance at least. And that chance started with not being miscarried or stillborn or strangled by its own umbilical cord: all possibilities Lucy had mentioned while they made bread together—possibilities he needed to prepare for now that Marcus was dead.
And so he gassed up the Miata and grabbed some firepower for when zoom-zoom wasn’t enough. He thought about telling Lucy where he was going, but the where would demand a why, and he didn’t want to worry her. Dev was doing enough of that for all 2.875 of them.
Lucy felt a wave of fear pass over her, watching the last man on earth getting into a midlife-crisis car. “You can’t leave me!” she shouted, running as best she could with a bowling ball strapped in front of her.
Dev stopped to let her catch up and catch her breath before saying, “Have to,” before adding, “It’s imperative.”
“Abandoning me?” Lucy said before touching her stomach and changing course. “How is abandoning us imperative?”
“I’m coming back,” he said. “I’ve just got an errand to do.”
“An errand?” Lucy said. “Yeah, right.” It was obvious he didn’t go out beyond the wall, because he hadn’t—except to help her drag Marcus’s body out. And as a fellow, onetime sufferer, she could feel the anxiety coming off him that time. So what was it about the act of giving birth that was scarier than everything else he was already scared of?
But before she could ask, he was already gone, leaving her to walk back to the house alone, her legs as bowed as a cartoon gunfighter, heading for a rendezvous with high noon.
The sight of all that information, bound and shelved, made his Aspie heart leap—to the extent it could. Here was the internet in printed form. It was bulky and clunky and harder to search, but not bad for the generations that came before the generation that didn’t need buildings to house what it knew. It was a shame he hadn’t brought something bigger—a Hummer, say, or a mobile home. He’d gladly have filled either with books like he’d once filled similar gas guzzlers with his neighbors’ dead bodies.
But he was driving a two-seater with a strictly decorative trunk, and he had no intention of making another trip. Along the way, he’d noticed that the world had entered its dog-eat-dog phase—literally; he thought he might even recognize a few of the remains from back when they’d been under his care. The bodies from before had rotted or been chewed down to bone, disassembled, scattered, used to build things by the animals that built things—beavers, mainly. The other rodents of note were the rats, which had become noticeably larger, looking more like possums now. Seeing the world come to this made him congratulate himself all over again for building his wall—and fueled his desire to get back to the other side of it.
He started with the medical reference section, focusing on obstetrics and gynecology, carrying stacks to the Miata and piling them on the passenger seat. Next, he headed to the parenting section and pulled down anything with the word difficult in the title. He fit as many of these onto the driver’s seat as he could while still being able to drive—low enough so his head missed hitting the roof at every pothole, but not so high he couldn’t compensate by adjusting his mirrors. He balanced a couple of the larger tomes on the gas and brake, to make up for the extra distance between his foot and either pedal. And then he headed back to Devonshire, his reading list set from now until the fat lady sang—so to speak.
To say that Lucy was surprised to see him return was an understatement. As she’d run after him before, she ran to meet him now, a semiquick, bowlegged waddle that would’ve been funny if Dev hadn’t had a car full of how unfunnily things could go in Lucy’s condition. Before he could even get out of the car, she was there: a great, looming pregnant lady bending over the open door, taking aim at Dev with outstretched arms. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, punctuating each thank-you with a temporary tightening of the hug she was inflicting upon him while Dev grew stiff as a board—and not in a good way.
“You’re welcome,” he said through gritted teeth. “Please don’t touch me.”
“Sorry,” she said, relinquishing his shoulders. “I forgot.” She stepped away from the car, carving out a Dev-sized slice of personal space, her hands reaching around and bracing her lower back. “What’s that all you got there?”
“Books,” Dev said.
“What kind of books?”
“Thick ones, thin ones, paperback, hardback . . .”
“I mean, what are they about?”
Dev looked at her belly, as big and round as the whole world. “That,” he said, pointing.
48
The baby was born at night, next to the fireplace for warmth and to boil water because somebody always boiled water for delivering babies on TV, though why, he had no idea. It wasn’t for sterilizing the assortment of baby-delivering equipment he had assembled: a variety of scissors, clamps, twine, and gauze, all of which he sterilized in a bucket of rubbing alcohol. He’d developed a kind of tic as they timed contractions, plucking various instruments out to test them, though for what, Lucy had no idea. The truth was he loved the cooling sensation of the alcohol evaporating off his skin. It contrasted nicely with the buffeting warmth from the fireplace.
For light, while the flames added color and a certain ambiance, the real star of the evening was the full moon. Throwing open the curtain to let the light in, Dev pulled the air mattress from the ice cream truck to the center of the lit floor. This auxiliary source of lighting was so convenient the mother-to-be suggested it might be an omen.
“It’s like God is saying he approves,” she said. “Like we’ve got his blessing to reboot mankind.” Yeah, she’d begun talking like that—like her mom—the closer she came to becoming a mother herself. Seemed it was hard to be a nihilist once your stake in the future grew by a generation.
As far as Dev was concerned, the moon was no big deal. Had it not been around, he’d have used flashlights or the garden lights or run the generator. It was convenient, was all—not a sign from God. As far as Lucy’s lesser claim that it was romantic, he’d just have to take her neurotypical word for it.
Not that he did so without challenging it, starting with, “You mean the moon?”
Lucy nodded during the latest sweaty calm between contractions.
“It’s just a rock with sunlight bouncing off it . . .”
“So why are you always looking at it with your telescope?”
“Because it’s a rock with sunlight bouncing off of it,” Dev said calmly, “in outer space.”
Lucy was about to say that that made a lot of sense, but winced instead. Whether it was from a contraction or the thought of spending the rest of her life having conversations like this, she didn’t say. Whichever it was, that was that for the romantic talk that evening.
The rest of the talk wasn’t even talk so much as animal noises: screams and cries; groans and growls; hard, rapid panting; and a mixed medley of theres and okays from the one who wasn’t giving birth, just encouragement, to the extent he was able. That, and a hand to hold, which was to say squeeze until the knuckles cracked and the fingers became so slick with sweat Dev had to clamp his other hand over the top to keep them from slipping free, which he wouldn’t do until . . . there:
A bloody, slimy baby-doll head coming out all smushed and close lidded, its shoulders hunched around its ears, its skin a pale blue that reminded Dev of the corpses he’d seen, before they got much worse. But he’d read all about that; he wasn’t scared about that—not yet.
The rest came sliding out in a fraction of the time it took to deliver that big-brained head, so fast that Dev barely had time to get h
is hands freed and under it before the body was already in them, the umbilical tumbling out after it like the intestines of some of the game he’d dressed. He used dental floss instead of suture, tying it fore and aft before cutting in between, dividing being from being by sliding steel against steel:
Snip!
He cleared the mouth with a rubber suction bulb, wiped around it with a warm, wet cloth. He didn’t hold it by its ankles to smack out its first breath, but pinched the baby’s robin-egg rear end as its slick, slack face hole became a yawn that grew into a scream as the pale blue thing turned pink, then red—a squalling, bawling ball of red rage tensing its hands, feet, whole body into fists shaking at being push-pulled out of its warm amniotic bath into this other place. It cried for days—or minutes—before facing reality, or at least accepting the fact that it had to breathe for a living now, as opposed to just kicking back and letting life happen in a womb of its own.
Calmer, its red, raw skin settled into a mottled, marbly pink as its black lizard eyes blinked open and looked right at him—Dev was sure—even though there wasn’t enough white to really tell. Lucy, her own eyes raccooned with broken blood vessels from the strain, looked at Dev, too, searching his face for any news about what was going on down there, on the other side of her hiked and curtained knees.
“You were right,” he said.
“It’s a girl?”
Dev nodded, sweat slipping from under his hairline. We’re all wet, he thought—not a judgment, just an observation. And indeed, they were: from sweat, from tears, from amniotic fluid—a slick-haired trio, becoming in their wetness, and at that instant, a family.
“Let me see her,” Lucy said, wrung out but with enough strength left to reach, to hold, to cradle.
And that was when Dev felt something he’d never felt before, at least not toward a fellow human being. He didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want this squirming mass of muscle, skin, and bone to leave the shelter of his hands. Somehow, it had attached itself to him in a way he couldn’t describe but one that threaded through his heart and into his brain, linking the two like they’d never been linked before, even at the thick end of a topique.
He looked at the baby. He looked at Lucy, opening and closing her hands: the gimme gesture. He looked at the baby again. “Oh,” he said, the first syllable of “okay,” but he was stuck on it, like an amoeba reluctant to split. “Oh,” he said again, still clinging to this Velcro feeling inside, the one making a ripping sound only he could hear as he handed over the baby and finished the one-word sentence he’d begun twice:
“. . . kay.”
“Say that again,” Lucy said, looking at her baby but talking to Dev. “What you just said.”
“Okay?”
“Yes,” Lucy said, “but slower, like you did before.”
“Oh,” Dev said, counted a second, two, three. “Kay,” he concluded.
“Kay,” Lucy announced. “That’s going to be her name.”
“Kay?” he echoed, but as a question. It wasn’t his first choice for a girl, which was Electra, short for Electrolux. But what did it matter, really? It wasn’t like they were going to get each other confused. And so after a moment’s pause, “Okay,” he agreed, not that it mattered whether he did or not.
Lucy, meanwhile, had continued her train of thought re naming. “Maybe Kay can be her middle name,” she said. “Her first name should start with an O. That way her initials can be OK.” She paused. “O. K. Abernathy. Sounds like a writer.”
Dev didn’t point out that there weren’t a whole lot of people left to write for. He was getting a little bit better about not giving all his thoughts air.
Lucy, meanwhile, looked at her baby’s face like she was trying to read something off of its forehead. “How about Olivia?”
Dev shrugged. It didn’t seem special enough, but then again, he couldn’t come up with a name that was.
“Of course, we’d still call her OK,” Lucy continued, returning to her original theme, “for short, that is.”
“Well, she is that,” Dev observed. “Short, that is.”
“She’s the other thing too,” Lucy said, rubbing her nose against the baby’s nose. “Okay, that is.”
Dev thought about saying, “So far,” but didn’t—another unaired thought. It was a slow process—that learning—but he was doing it all the same.
Having the necessary equipment for child feeding, child everything else largely fell to Lucy while Dev killed or gathered or grew things and just stood by watching as a third of the world cleaned up after the natural byproducts of having fed her little Okeydokey. It didn’t seem exactly fair, this division of labor, postlabor, and Dev—who’d gotten off easy—said so.
“Can’t I help?” he asked. And Lucy acted like she was thinking about it before shaking her head no.
He wondered if she was worried the baby might catch his Asperger’s and tried reassuring her. “I don’t think I’m contagious,” he said.
Lucy smiled a weak smile. “It’s not that,” she said, playing catch and release with her pinky and her daughter’s gimme-gimme hands. “It’s how you hold her.”
“How do I hold her?”
“Like a bomb that’s about to go off.”
Dev looked at her, his resting blank face as blank as ever, leaving Lucy to fill in the blank as she tried to take it back. “It’s endearing, really,” she said, “but I don’t think all that anxiety is good for the baby.”
“So I’ll stop being anxious.”
Lucy looked back at him, a former, fellow sufferer. “That sounds wonderful,” she deadpanned. “You let me know how that works,” she added over her shoulder, patting Olivia Kay’s back as she walked away.
They’d always been there in his stepfather’s closet. No need to go to the library to assemble a collection of books about the one subject he’d avoided all his life: himself. Or his condition, at least. Easier to formulate theories about evolutionary next steps and neurological superiority than read what people who’d made autism not just their topique du annum but pour la vie (for life). He’d known they were there—books by researchers and Aspies themselves—but Dev didn’t want to know.
Now he did. Now he needed to. And so he went to his parents’ bedroom and opened his stepfather’s closet, pulled down the boxes of books with their one-word, black Magic Marker-ed labels: “Dev.”
He unfolded their flaps. He took out the books, the xeroxed articles, his stepfather’s notebooks of observations. Stacked and totaled in feet and inches, they were taller than he was. And though it was no way to measure information, he hoped the stack’s height was a good sign. Dev didn’t think he could trust something shorter than he was to explain him to himself. Even though, in the end, that was exactly what happened.
Diving into the books, he read about something called mirror neurons, the nerves that light up in an MRI the same way when someone performs an action as when they merely watch someone else perform the same action. They’d been mentioned—briefly—in his suicide research. Evidently, these neurons were believed fundamental not only to how children learn through mimicry, but could also explain the human capacity for empathy. Conversely, defective or poorly developed mirror neurons were suspected in everything from the reflexive parroting of words known as echolalia, to the stickiness of certain tics in Tourette’s, to the empathetic impairments of autism spectrum disorder.
He thought about his mother and all the time they’d put in, Dev looking at the faces she showed him, trying to translate the cards into the emotions they portrayed. They’d been looking at only half of the problem—the recognition of certain emotional states as an intellectual exercise. She’d been teaching him pattern recognition, but not empathy. Dev and his resting blank face stayed blank, blinking rarely, while his brain sorted through its Rolodex of x- and y-coordinates for plotting the shape of lips. Smile, frown, grimace—guess correctly and get a reward.
But he had never felt the emotions he was statically decoding. He had nev
er tried to make the faces they were making. If he had—if they’d introduced a mirror into the game so Dev could practice the lip shapes he saw—how much closer would he have gotten to feeling what they felt? At the very least, he’d have learned what the facial muscles felt like when they made certain expressions. If he held them long enough, would the physical sensations turn into something deeper? Did the doing become the being—the expression become the emotion the expression expressed?
Dev tried explaining what he’d read to Lucy, asked her the questions he’d been asking himself. She nodded as he spoke and spoke when he stopped. “Act as if you believe until you do,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s something they told us in Catholic school, before I got yanked out due to ‘economic conditions’ beyond my parents’ control,” she said. “If we found ourselves doubting some article of faith, we should act as if we believed it anyway, and the act, with grace, would become a reality.” She paused. “They’ve got a bumper-sticker version for AA: ‘Fake it till you make it.’”
“Can you just do that?” Dev asked. “Fake emotions?”
Lucy nodded. “Sure,” she said. “It’s called acting.” She paused, thought about saying something about fake orgasms. Didn’t. Smoothed the wisps of Olivia Kay’s hair as the child crinkled her nose and squinched her lids, her toothless mouth forming a reflexive smile.
Dev watched OK and her lively face. He’d always been better with children’s faces, though his prior encounters had been inherently fleeting, lasting as long as whatever line he was in did. And then, after that, it was back to looking at his shoes to avoid the chaos of older faces.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 35