Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  Needless to say, I sat down on that stranger’s lap and whispered in his ear, “Seal the deal,” as he looked at me bewildered through his glasses and accepted the condom seemingly only to ensure I go away. It was perhaps the most uncharacteristic thing I have ever done.

  —

  A year and a half later—amid those indescribable last few months of college that are equally fraught with doubt, accomplishment and restlessness—I was at a friend’s party and waiting in line for the bathroom. Standing there, probably thinking about nothing, I was approached suddenly in the hallway by a kid I’d never seen before. Before I knew it, he’d backed me against a wall with his finger between my eyes. I’m not normally one to be frightened of shorter people but aggressive pointing makes me uncomfortable.

  “You,” he growled, “you owe me a pack of cigarettes.” He was a chubby kid, with delicately styled facial hair and a scarf piled just so around his shoulders. He looked like someone who always kept a notepad on his person to scribble down bits of poetry when they struck him. He was also swaying where he stood.

  I blinked, his index finger pressed just above the bridge of my nose, and said, “Who are you?”

  “You don’t remember me?” He looked shocked, the kind you get when the shock is so thorough it becomes an insult.

  “I have no idea who you are,” I said. I just needed to use the bathroom.

  “You don’t? You really don’t?” He got even closer.

  “Nope.”

  He said through gritted teeth, “You ruined my life.”

  Here I felt a faint recognition. Didn’t he work in the coffee shop downtown . . . ? “Are you the guy from—”

  He snorted. “You gave me a condom and said, ‘Seal the deal.’”

  “Oh yeah!”

  “I used it that night with the girl you saw me with. I made the worst mistake of my life.”

  I probably had the decency to grimace here, because I did understand he was alluding to having sex and some kind of attendant consequences.

  “You ruined my life.”

  “Whoa—” I said and paused.

  “Phillip,” he offered.

  “Phillip. You had sex and I ruined your life?” And my brain immediately set to thinking, I made sixty dollars off that! What did I buy with the money? I bet it was good. Beef jerky? Cashews? Yogurt? The good kind of yogurt?

  “The condom broke.”

  My jaw dropped.

  For the first time, he broke eye contact. He said, “We didn’t keep it.”

  The thought that came into my head was one of horror: I bought SpaghettiOs.

  He looked at me again and his expression was not all anguish but instead a kind of drunken contempt. “I dropped out of school. I work in a coffee shop now.”

  For obvious reasons, I was unsure what to say.

  “We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing,” he said. “I was . . . I’d never used a condom before”—the finger hovered up again but he didn’t stick it between my eyes—“so you owe me a pack of cigarettes.”

  This was a lot to take in. “Why do I owe you a pack of cigarettes?”

  “Because you owe me something and I’m a little drunk. And I don’t have any cigarettes. And you do. So I want you to give me one of yours right now, and then I want you to buy me a pack of Pall Malls later. Unfilteredsss,” he slurred.

  I was beginning to suspect this was some elaborate performance. “I owe you a pack of cigarettes because a girl you were with got an abortion?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve set the value of your unborn child’s life at . . . twenty-one cigarettes? And the brand of the twenty-first one doesn’t matter?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Of course it makes sense. You ruined my life and I want cigarettes and you have them. And you’re going to buy me some because I had to drop out of college and work at a fucking coffee shop.”

  “I’m not the reason you work in a coffee shop. Also, you can’t arbitrarily pick something for me to owe you.”

  He looked outraged. “So you’re not going to buy me cigarettes?”

  “No. Me buying you cigarettes would be an admission of guilt.” Even still, I was impressed by his willingness to make such a disturbing claim to a stranger at a party who was trying to use a bathroom.

  He started again, “I don’t know how you can be such a callous bitch after what I’ve told you,” but then his strange, accusatory aggression swept away and he looked overcome. It was about here I realized he was extremely drunk. “Before that,” he said and came out with it, “I was a virgin. That was the worst mistake of my life. You ruined my life.”

  It was about here that the initial swell of empathy in my heart just went away, because abortion, like divorce, is a shitty thing that’s usually for the best. The only thing sadder than some eighteen-year-olds misusing a condom and tearing it somehow and one of them having to go get an abortion was the idea of this drunk idiot being a father. That unborn baby practically owed me a favor (in a roundabout way).

  “I’m sorry, Phillip, but I’m not going to buy you cigarettes.”

  “I’m sorry you’re such a bitch.”

  I looked at him flatly because I couldn’t quite discern if any of this was true (or even happening) but just then the door to the bathroom opened. Before ducking inside, I said, “Excuse me, my water broke.” Which in retrospect was pretty raw.

  —

  I’m still conflicted about the confrontation, though I can identify the big flaw in Phillip’s logic: even though I had given him the condom, I was only one link in a chain of culpability. If Phillip could lay the blame on me, then I could easily lay the blame on Sandeep, who handed me the condom in the first place. But Sandeep got a pass, too, because he could blame whatever anonymous decorating committee member who had dumped the condoms on the table. The anonymous decorating committee member would be well within his or her rights to blame the manufacturer for the defective product. Moreover, myself, Sandeep, the Manhattan WASP with the Aston Martin, the anonymous decorating committee member, and the manufacturer would all be invited to comfortably blame Axl Rose as the architect of this whole abortion kerfuffle. Why stop there when we’ve yet to include cheap beer, my hairstylist and how inarguably great Appetite for Destruction is? Similarly, if someone hands you a gun, and you shoot yourself, are they responsible? That depends. There’s probably actual case law about this. Let’s just say if the person who hands you the gun is legally responsible, they shouldn’t be. However, one factor that, without question, did contribute to the abortion was drunken sex between teenagers.

  All those other factors could have been different, but the outcome of the situation was still ultimately determined by decisions made by two people to have sex. Sex has consequences. If they aren’t adequately explained to people, systematically and starting at a very young age, they go around making stupid decisions without ever comprehending the negative results. Which brings me to the most important thing we could possibly talk about once we all agree that nobody wants an abortion: you can’t get enough sex ed.

  I’m going to make a pretty unfair, unfounded assumption here (this is my book) and say that Phillip probably wasn’t endowed with a terrific sex education. I’m basing that on his inability to really accept responsibility for the consequences of his actions and also I think he was from Mississippi. Of course eighteen-year-olds can’t accept responsibility for the consequences of sex if they aren’t properly terrified of them.

  There’s an allegorical argument for sex ed (and all ed, for that matter) in the Bible. The argument appears in Genesis, when God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. God commands, “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.” Basically he just says, “Don’t eat the pears, they’re poisonous,” and then he leave
s them be, expecting them not to want to eat pears ever, even though they’re used to having all of their wishes fulfilled all the time. That is abstinence-only education: “Don’t do it. It’ll kill you. Don’t ask questions.” Eventually, Eve meets the serpent and the serpent says, “I ate it and I’m not dead. And it gave me the gift of speech.” The serpent (seemingly) is a living, breathing, talking demonstration of God being wrong with regard to the fruit’s fatalness. In this way, the serpent represents every other message kids receive about sex: “It’s not dangerous at all. It’s just awesome.”

  Alternatively, if God had said, “Well, it’s not lethal per se, insofar as it won’t kill you immediately. It’s more like it’s going to give you this fleeting thrill but then there’s going to be all kinds of darkness that descends on you and you’re going to be ashamed of your bodies and you’re not going to be able to communicate telepathically with animals anymore. You’ll be cast out of the garden and then you’ll have to toil over a hard land in shadows until your hands bleed—also, you’ll bleed and that’s its own separate horror—and then, after a long tedious life of labor and resentment and self-loathing and murderous, megalomaniacal children, your bones will become frail and your skin will sag off your body and you’ll be unrecognizable to yourself. Then you’ll die. So, when I say the fruit will ‘kill’ you, I’m not describing an immediate physical death, it’s more of a protracted spiritual death in concert with a long, agonized slide toward physical death. Does that make sense? Do you have any questions?”

  If God had presented things this way—that is, as a comprehensive breakdown of the consequences that would befall them if they ate from the Tree—Eve might have been able to critically evaluate the serpent’s claims. In this way, original sin is a beautiful, probably unintentional argument for why we should give kids good sex education: they might still go after the pears, but at least it’s an informed decision. If we tell them about herpes and warts and crabs and syphilis and burning pee and pregnancy and AIDS, they’ll be that much less reckless when it comes to sex. Or, we could just cryptically tell them not to have it.

  I left the party with the impression that Phillip was a drunk, ornery teenager who couldn’t take responsibility for his actions. If I thought about it at all in the next few days, it was with a baffled awe that anyone would behave that way. I figured he was telling the truth, at least, because it made more sense than him trying to accumulate free cigarettes with the old you-caused-my-abortion con. I didn’t really think about what he’d gone through or why he was angry. I didn’t think about what a terrifying thing unwanted pregnancy is to a young person. I had always been responsible.

  —

  Right after graduation, my then-boyfriend and I stayed at his parents’ house in upstate New York. We were living out of his childhood bedroom while we looked for a place in Brooklyn, taking the bus down and staying with friends as we marched through the demoralizing nightmare that is trying to find a New York apartment on the Internet with no clue what New York is like.

  I had always kept birth control next to my toothbrush, so I could take it at the same time every day. Just like I had since I was fifteen, years before I became sexually active, as prescribed to me by a dermatologist. Unfortunately, my then-boyfriend’s parents were remarkably good at lying to themselves about the grown-up habits of their grown-up son. For example, he’d smoked for years but did so on late-night walks, far enough away to ensure they couldn’t see the cherry of a lit cigarette in his hands. When he got his yearly STD tests, he checked the mail compulsively for days, to ensure his parents did not suss out the dark truth that he was being a responsible adult. There was no way I could just keep my birth control in plain sight in the bathroom, though I felt that was perfectly fair.

  Unfortunately, with my birth control hidden deep in my luggage, I was having trouble remembering to take it at the same time every day. Toward the end of the month, I forgot a day and then another day and then I was late. The first two nights were a private panic, in which I hoped things were just off and didn’t want to involve my then-boyfriend in the anxiety under which I was squirming.

  On the third day, the terror was looming too high to ignore. I admitted to my then-boyfriend that I was late and fearful I was pregnant. In my desperation, I asked him if we could keep it, if he’d even be open to that. He said no. We went to the store and bought a pregnancy test.

  Soon, I was sitting alone in the bathroom, on the floor next to the magazine rack, trying to build up some courage and take the test. His father—who might charitably be described as a vain, socially inept academic—stocked the bathroom with one kind of reading material: scientific journals in which he’d been published. His father was impressed only by scholarly accomplishments (especially his own) so they were scattered all over the house to remind my then-boyfriend of his inadequacies. Staring at that magazine bin full of testaments to his father’s achievement, my first thoughts were of the judgment I’d face if we could not keep my hypothetical abortion secret. I would be a stain on the family if I killed their unborn grandson, who could have been a proper scholar and gotten published in the same journals. I would be depriving them of progeny they’d admire more.

  Inevitably, my thoughts turned to my then-boyfriend’s mother, the woman whose favorite game was Telling Stories About All the Girls My Son Has Known Who Are Better Than You, progenitor of the Laura from High School fable. I would never be the Ivy League–educated architect or lawyer or art history major that I needed to be in order to impress her; I would just be this. She wouldn’t be bragging about me to anyone anyway, but now she’d just be quiet and not even mention me. She’d never brandish Ashley Who Got an Abortion at any of his future girlfriends.

  This is a roundabout way of saying that what pervaded my fear so much more than I ever could have anticipated was shame. The casual, flippant rationalizing with which I’d deflected and dismissed Phillip abandoned me; I didn’t remember the jokes on the Internet or the ridiculousness of the evening with the condom or Phillip at all. I was too stricken with terror to think of anything but what a brutal mess I’d suddenly been shoved into. When I unsheathed the pregnancy test, I meticulously folded the wrapper up like an origami scarlet letter and buried it in my pocket, afraid that someone would root through the trash can looking for evidence of my transgressions.

  A strange clarity came over me when I was confronted with the thing itself. There was the pregnancy test, naked in my hands, as ominously preposterous as a crystal ball . . . and it was then I experienced my first full, lucid, rational thought in several minutes: I should really stockpile these.

  Turns out, when you’re ashamed and terrified that you might need an abortion, the last thing you want to do is go to Walgreens. For one, they don’t offer them there.

  I was deathly still for a long time—or what felt like a long time, sitting on a bathroom floor and suspicious there was an unwanted entity inside of me. Then the terrible thinking began: I was three years into a relationship, had just graduated college and was going to move to New York City to try to get a book published. I had all these ideas about my hopes and dreams and how to realize them: contacts I had and favors I could beg out of people, how I was going to wait tables four nights a week and work on my novel for the other three, nonstop, all day. How I’d been working for that my whole life, how I’d go to New York City and live somewhere cool and gritty and get a book deal. I didn’t think it was going to be two hundred pages of facile revelations about men I’ve allowed inside of me, but it takes forty-three muscles to frown and probably less to make a cheap joke about vaginal odor.

  I had all of these things I was working for and was going to achieve and I’d just finished college and that was going to help me somehow, too. I realize that if this isn’t a concise expression of my privilege then nothing is, but I thought about this when convinced I was pregnant because my first instinct amid the confusion and fear was to keep it. Perhaps some of tha
t was the dread and disgust with which I associated abortion, but there was something else. I considered all that I’d accomplished and all that I would and I thought my relationship with the man who would become the father was stable enough and that we had enough money or we’d find the money and we were both going to get good jobs and be hugely successful and have health insurance and an extra bedroom and, until then, both our parents would help us. And that we would try. And if I thought hard enough, I could convince him this was true.

  Then I thought, Why would I give up everything so I can provide a shitty life to something else?

  It was crazy. Why would I trash all my aspirations to spend the rest of my life trying to provide for a child I didn’t plan for and didn’t want? Not only that, the would-be father would be a terrible father and the would-be grandparents would barely contain their derision. My own parents would be so disappointed in me because they didn’t work hard to put me through college just so I could graduate and a month later get knocked up and spend the rest of my life suffocating under student loans as I toiled to provide for what was, at that moment, not an adorable baby but probably nothing more than imperceptible biological function performing itself inside of me. A blip of primordial red ooze. Not even a SpaghettiO.