She nods at the book in my lap. “I’m glad you’re liking him,” she says. “He’s my favorite author.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Great. What do you want. How did you get in here.”
“You left the door unlocked.” I can tell she’s hurt by my brusque callousness, and I feel a faint, unwelcome pang somewhere inside of me.
“Shit,” I say. “Goddammit.” I haven’t been sleeping well again—in fact, I think it’s been about three days since I last slept—and my wits aren’t entirely about me. The insomnia hasn’t gotten to the point of being unbearable ever since the bout that ended in my having to bash myself to sleep, but there are periods of time when all I can think about is the impending birth of my child, and sleep becomes an impossibility for a few days.
“Are you really that dead-set against talking to me?” Helen asks, still looking upset.
“Yeah,” I say. “You should go.”
“No,” she answers, suddenly becoming indignant. “This is ridiculous. You’re the father of my—”
“Stop it. Don’t say shit like that. It makes me want to throw up. Jesus, Helen. You eat babies. You eat them. You don’t have them.”
“Like I said, it’s different this time. It’s mine, and it’s special.”
“You need to kill it.”
“No.”
“It’s really a simple procedure, you know. They just let the air in.”
She glares at me, but cracks a small half-smile. “Are you actually quoting Hemingway right now?”
“It’s true,” I say, kind of impressed she caught the reference. “It’s very simple.”
“I’m a maternity doctor, in case you forgot. I know how it works. Besides, it’s too late anyway. I’m too far along into the pregnancy.” She sighs, and then smiles again. “I know what it is. You don’t like fat girls. You don’t want to watch me get fat and turn into a big white elephant.”
“That really isn’t funny.”
“You started it.”
“Why are you here,” I ask again.
She lowers her gaze to her bloated stomach and rubs it lovingly. “We have something,” she says. “Don’t you get that? It’s not just this baby—we had something before that. We’re the same. You’re the only person I can relate to. And . . . I miss you.”
Excuse me while I go puke and then commit hara kari with a tree branch, or something. I can’t handle sentimentality. I really, really can’t.
And then, as if she can see right into my fucked-up head, she says, “Okay, I’m sorry, I know you don’t like that kind of thing. But . . . it’s true. And even though sometimes it seems like all you’re doing is tolerating me . . . I know you at least sort of enjoy my company. I mean, you did go on a date with me.” She smiles at this.
I frown. “Yeah. I’m really not sure why I did that.”
“You fucked me.”
“Not really sure why I did that, either.”
She sighs again, rubs her stomach again. “Either way, you did. There’s something there, I know there is. You feel something for me.”
“I don’t really know how to feel anything.”
“You don’t know how to, but you do. For me, you do.”
I can’t think of anything to say.
“Stop locking the door, okay? Please? I won’t . . . I won’t come around and bother you as much, but there’s no reason for you to shun me like this.”
“Abort the baby and you can come see me as much as you want.”
She shakes her head and stands up. “I have to go,” she says. “Please stop locking the door.”
I don’t say anything.
She purses her lips, sighs a third time, and leaves.
I lock the door behind her.
***
A couple of days later, Nick comes up to my apartment around noon to get the rent. I hand it to him in a rolled-up wad of bills that he flattens out and counts right there in front of me, even though I’ve lived here for five years and never once have I shorted him. I suspect it’s a junkie thing.
“Thanks, kid,” he tells me, and I’m about to shut the door when he stops me and says, “Hey, wait, I almost forgot—that guy was down at the bar last night. He wanted me to thank you for him.”
“What guy,” I ask. “Thank me for what.”
“You know,” he says. “That one guy. The one who came in when you were down there that one night. It was . . . I don’t know, a while ago. Whenever it was, he came in and told us that he thought his wife was cheating on him.”
Shit. That guy. The one I’d accidentally advised on how to repair his marriage. He’d remembered me, just as I’d feared. My presence had become tangible to yet another human being, so much so that four or five months—or however long it had been—hadn’t been long enough for the memory of that conversation to fade away. He’d been pretty wasted, too, so the fact that he remembered anything at all from that night is startling, in and of itself. “What did he say,” I ask weakly, not really wanting to know.
“He said he got his wife flowers, just like you told him to, and that it worked. They . . . fucked, I guess. And apparently now they’ve got a kid on the way. He said you saved his marriage and helped him start a family, all with just a little friendly advice.”
“That sounds a little . . . extreme,” I say. “I’m sure he was . . . exaggerating.”
Nick waves his hand dismissively. He almost drops the wad of cash, so he hastily jams it in his back pocket, looking flustered. “No, man, he was pretty adamant. He wasn’t even drunk, either. Said he’s gonna make a habit of getting her flowers every time he comes into town from one of his trips, in the hopes it’ll get him laid.” Nick snickers at this for some reason.
“Okay,” I say. “I really have to go.”
He shrugs, pats his back pocket to make sure the money is still there, and then goes down the stairs. I shut my door and bolt all six locks.
What is happening to me.
I’m saving lives, saving marriages, and helping start families, for fuck’s sake.
At that last part I think of Helen, Helen and our baby, Helen and our fucked-up little family. Is that what we’ll call it? A family? Will she ask me to move in? Will I say yes?
No.
I would say no.
At least, that’s what I like to think.
I also would have liked to think that I’d let that girl in the park die, though.
I light a cigarette and peek out my curtains, peering through the blinds, looking at the harsh light of the day, the empty sidewalks, and the pothole-pocked road. Jubilee Street is ugly during the day; its aesthetic appeal, if you could call it that, is dependent on a darkness pierced only by headlights and neon and the glow of lit cigarettes.
Everything is prettier in the dark.
I close the curtains and turn off the lights, sitting against the wall and smoking. I wonder if I could arrange for Helen to accidentally fall down some stairs, or something. Not in the interest of seriously hurting her, because I don’t want that—I really am a peaceful creature, and I still do sort of like her, even though she’s carrying life I helped create. No, I really don’t want to hurt her too badly—just enough so the thing inside of her dies.
I wonder how she’d react if I punched her in the stomach.
I wonder if I even possess the physical strength to do enough damage.
Jesus, when did my life become so fucked up.
***
I stop locking the security room door.
As promised, she doesn’t come around as much, but a couple of times a week she’ll show up and tell me her dreams, or ask me about my sex life with the dead, which hasn’t been very active lately; I can’t seem to concentrate, and I’ve been having difficulty . . . getting it up. There was a gorgeous college cheerleader in here the other night, who had broken her neck when she’d fallen from the top of one of those human pyramid things they do. It was a big thing in the news, and it had happened on live television, so I got to watch the v
ideo and jack off to it. But when she’d been here, waiting for me in the morgue, I’d stood before her goddess-like body and been completely unable to perform.
It was Helen’s fault, I think; she’d visited me earlier that night, and she hadn’t been wearing her long white coat, so her belly was more visible, and more bloated than ever. Sickeningly so. She’s almost six months pregnant, now. I don’t even think back alley abortion doctors will so much as consider sticking a coat hanger up there at this point.
Meanwhile, Helen is changing in more ways than her fattening stomach. She tells me she’s becoming more and more apathetic, that she’s having all these weird dreams and they’re making her think a lot, think about how people are in comparison to how she is. She tells me normal life is becoming less and less attractive to her.
She tells me she’s not going to raise our baby to be normal.
We’re in the morgue when she tells me this. She’s come with me to help me look for a suitable girl to fuck, convinced she’ll be able to help me get hard. I’m really just humoring her at this point, because she’s been harassing me to let her help for over a week now. The two of us walk around lifting up the sheets, not having any luck. Most of them are men, and the few women are either fat and ugly or fat, old, and ugly. I’ve fucked dead old women before, but they have to be in moderately decent shape, and I have to be pretty desperate.
I’m really not that desperate right now.
Not for a fuck, at least.
My mind is otherwise occupied.
For the most part, Helen at least respects my wishes and doesn’t talk about the baby. But tonight, she’s been trying to get my input on a name for it, because she now knows it’s a girl, and she’s very excited about this—too excited for me to get her to shut up about it.
“I’m not seeing anyone good enough,” I say, putting the sheet back over some dead kid and sitting against the wall to light a cigarette.
“I’m not, either,” Helen says, and comes over to sit by me. She has to be careful when she sits down.
With her next to me like this, I could probably elbow her hard enough in the stomach to be potentially harmful to the thing inside. I hand her a cigarette, instead, and light it for her.
“I really want a unique name for her, you know?” she says, lazily blowing smoke into the cold air. “I want her name to be unique because she is going to be unique. Unique as in, fucked up. Fucked up like me. Like us.”
“What are you talking about,” I ask. I loathe conversations about the little fucking brat, but this is particularly unnerving.
“I’m not sure yet, exactly,” she says dreamily. “But I don’t want her to be normal. At all. I know that for sure now. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve dreamt about it a lot. Last night, I had a dream that, for her thirteenth birthday, I took her to an abortion clinic and cut one of the fetuses in half, and we shared it.”
“That’s pretty fucked up, Helen.” And this is coming from me.
She beams and blows smoke in my face. “Exactly. Perfectly, wonderfully fucked up, and in such a poetic way. I was thirteen when I ate my first baby.”
“You also had a ferret that ate your brother when you were six.”
Her face darkens. “I’ve been thinking about that, too, and I’m not entirely sure that’s related. I think maybe I was just born with a taste for babies.”
“Are you hearing what you’re saying.”
“Maybe it won’t be babies, though,” she says, not hearing me. “Maybe she’ll have some other little quirk.” Her stoned eyes are alight with wistful wonderings as she thinks about the endless possibilities for her—our—fucked up child.
“Jesus, Helen,” I say, lighting another cigarette with the burning butt of my last one. “The things we do—they’re not quirks.”
She’s still not listening. “Maybe she’ll . . . maybe she’ll be a killer,” she muses. “Could you imagine if our daughter was a serial killer?”
“Helen,” I say, “what the fuck has happened to you.”
She looks deeply at me with an expression that’s far too affectionate and says, “You, darling. You happened to me.”
She actually reaches up and strokes my stubbly cheek. I angrily brush it away and say, “Don’t call me darling.”
***
The next night, when we’re outside smoking in the frigid winter air, Helen tells me she killed someone last night. She’s smiling when she says it.
I really don’t know how to respond to something like that. I think about it for a second, sucking on my cigarette, and then say quietly, “Um . . . were you . . . naked when you did it.”
She cocks her head and squints at me through the smoke. “Why would I be naked?” she asks.
“Because you’re naked when you eat babies.” I’m thinking back to how I met her, finding her sitting in the morgue with a half-devoured infant corpse in her hands, and how all I could say was, “Why are you naked.”
“I wasn’t naked,” she says. She’s standing there, smoking and looking at me, waiting for a reaction, which is irritating because she should know by now that I really don’t do reactions. She has her free hand pressed lightly, almost protectively, against her stomach. That’s another thing I’ve never understood about pregnant women. It’s like they’re trying to hold the baby in, for fear it might come tumbling out.
I wish it would.
I wish it would fall right out onto the pavement so I could squash the fucking thing.
“I killed someone,” Helen says again. Her expression is peculiar, and I can’t read it. I’m really not sure how a person would feel after killing someone. Especially not a person like her. Or me.
Could I kill someone?
Am I capable of it?
Could I kill Helen and sufficiently end the pregnancy debacle, cutting it off at the source? I could get away with it, I’m sure—I’m smart, and I’d figure something out.
But could I actually do it?
And—Helen, of all people—could I really kill her?
Do I really even want to?
“I killed someone,” Helen says for a third time, and she’s smiling again. Her eyes dart around to make sure we’re alone. She looks over her shoulder and then back at me and says, “A person. One of the normal people. I killed her.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. None of this feels real. I’m standing outside smoking with a baby-eating maternity doctor, who’s carrying my child, and she is now proudly proclaiming to me that she’s recently become a murderer.
“What don’t you understand?” She flicks the cigarette away and holds both hands to the bloated stomach beneath her coat.
“How,” I ask. “How did you do it. Why did you do it.”
“She was dying, right there in front of me,” she says, almost giddily. She takes a step closer to me and lowers her voice. “The baby was fine, which is unfortunate, but that’s not the point. The mother—she was bleeding out. Technically, I did everything I was supposed to do to try and save her. But—here’s the thing—I saw a way. I won’t bore you with all the medical terminology, and procedures that you wouldn’t understand anyway, but . . . I could have saved her. I saw something that none of the other doctors or nurses saw, and I could have stopped the bleeding. The woman could have lived.”
She’s grinning from ear to ear, and in this moment, her beauty has become, in some abstract sense, nightmarish.
“But I let her die,” she says.
“Why,” I ask. My hands are shaking for some reason. My legs feel weak. I drop the cigarette and lean against the building.
Helen’s smile turns downward. “What do you mean? I had the opportunity, so I took it. I thought you’d be proud of me, or something.”
“I don’t kill people, Helen. I fuck dead girls.”
Her frown turns further downward. “I told you, I’m seeing things differently. I’m seeing people differently. I keep thinking, fuck everyone, it’s just me and my baby.” She pauses. “Our baby,” sh
e says, “if you want it to be.”
“Don’t.”
She sighs and turns away and walks out from under the awning to look up at the star-spangled sky. A light snow has begun to fall. I think about following her, but only for a moment. I’m about to go back inside when she turns and says to me, “I am what I am. I’m coming to terms with that. I was looking down at this woman, this woman who was dying, and I thought, what would she think of me, if she knew what I was?”
“What does it matter.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, smiling again. “And she doesn’t matter, either. I keep thinking about the things you’ve said, about normalcy and normal people. I keep thinking about how you see things. And . . . it’s easier to think like that, to see things like you do. It’s so . . . liberating. I thought of all that, and I thought, why should this woman live? So, I let her die. In essence, I killed her. I thought you’d be impressed. I mean, if you had a chance to kill someone, someone normal, and get away with it, wouldn’t you?”
I look at her stomach and think again about killing her, musing on the idea for a second, but that wasn’t her question. “I don’t think so,” I say. “I’m too apathetic to kill people. They’re not worth the effort. And when you kill someone, you become the most important thing about that person’s life. I don’t want to be important to anyone.”
She gently rubs her stomach. “You’re important to me,” she says.
“Don’t,” I say again. “Please.” The soft tone of her voice grinds at me, like a snow shovel scraping a driveway. I glance at the security camera overhead and think, for a brief second, that if it weren’t there I might run over and shove her down and punch her in the stomach until blood started to seep from between her legs. Then I wince at the thought, urgently pushing it away. I’m really not a violent person.
Just a desperate one.
“The woman,” Helen says. “The woman I killed . . . she’s in the morgue. She’s all yours.”
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