by Nell Zink
The personal is not political. It can become political when abstracted and generalized, stripped of identifying markers. The political subject is a depersonalized subject: This could be you. This could be you being lied to, spied on, shot at, searched without warrant, convicted without trial, executed without appeal. Could be, but isn’t. When it turns personal, it’s too late.
Accordingly, political people were more cautious with their data than they used to be. Even Jennifer on Twitter never got more pointed than “You’ll never guess who’s twenty-five and having a certain person’s son,” which proved to be true.
At the same time, Aaron was privy to details he didn’t know were relevant. His fellow Clinton campaign volunteer Ikumi Sakuragi also attended Clinton-apostate get-togethers sponsored by the post-Sanders organization Our Revolution. During post-meeting beers at a Capitol Hill bar, she had confided in him about an affair she’d had with a prominent Democratic strategist during the weeks prior to the election. This self-assured older workaholic had seduced her on the verbal strength of his lust alone, summoning her magisterially to fuck in empty offices upstairs from receptions and that sort of thing. Their sex could be spontaneous, she said, because he’d gotten a vasectomy. She called him “the sex poet.” Aaron wasn’t buying it. Ikumi showed him photos. He realized he had seen the man but never met him. His own position in the Democratic organization was official and menial; Bull’s was the opposite. Their paths ran parallel, never touching. Ikumi’s path touched Bull’s only because he had swerved.
The sordid affair struck Aaron as perfectly in keeping with the status-laden guy’s offensive name. One of her snapshots, taken surreptitiously from the perspective of a pillow, depicted his naked back. His head, lowered, was invisible. The image of a large expanse of expressionless meat stuck in Aaron’s mind. When he thought of Bull, he imagined a bull-necked creature that was mostly blank flesh, like a centaur.
XXVII.
Pam suffered from spring fever. She was working truncated hours, like she used to do when she was starting out. When the weather was nice, she left her suit jacket on the back of her chair, to notify coworkers that they were supposed to pretend she was in, and walked home from East Harlem through the park. It couldn’t possibly fool anybody, given how small the office was, but she thought it might fool Yuval, since he wouldn’t look for her in the ladies’ room.
When he sent her a text at two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, inviting her to Friday brunch in Tribeca, she got a sinking feeling. He texted her again in the morning to tell her to stop by his apartment first and check out his remodeling job.
She had been there a few times before. His place was in an elevator building from the fifties. He lived on the sixth floor out of eight, facing the street. Nothing fancy, but large, with high ceilings. After the remodeling, it emerged, nearly everything in the place was white, rounded, and smooth. Even the curtains were made of some kind of ultra-heavy fabric that blocked light completely, yet was radiantly white. He joked that the decorating style was called “bachelor iPad.”
“Dirt in here would really stand out,” she said. “I bet it took your maid all of three minutes to hunt down the hametz crumbs on Passover.”
“I saved her the trouble. I remodeled, and then I went gluten-free.”
“More dirt is better for your immune system.”
“That’s why I keep the children upstate with the dogs, for their health.”
The exchange encapsulated the difference between them. He was a purpose-driven perfectionist, and she liked things to be good enough if you squint. She was much too sincere ever to think anything was perfect.
In related news, his happy family adored him (he was sure of it) and condoned (ditto) his maintenance of a reputation as a downtown playboy par excellence, while she was a chronically half-assed system error kept in one piece by its loyalties and inability to escape its body. She was starting to know it—that she would never be a cohesive unit, no matter how hard she squinted.
She took off her boots and sat cross-legged on a sofa. He lit some tapers in a candelabra to set a visual accent less messy than flowers and gave her a glass of seltzer. She said, “Yuval, I can’t do this anymore.”
“Funny you should say that.”
She weighed the possibilities and said, “Okay. Whatever. Why?”
“I got a sub-rosa offer for the company from Alphabet. This was months ago, in February. Now I’m watching the price come up and wondering why they don’t lose interest. It must be some very special product you developed.”
“And still you hesitate, because you’re so invested in building the brand.”
“Are you?”
“Oh, totally! There’s no way this acquisition can go through unless you fire me. Make it a condition.”
“And how much is it going to cost them? Approximate ballpark.”
“Feel them out. I trust you.”
They went downstairs to the bistro. As aperitifs, they ordered dry martinis. Pam took one sip of hers and stopped. Ideas were crowding into her head. She didn’t want to reduce her capacity to absorb a power surge.
She asked for oyster stew—the fastest thing on the menu—and ate it quickly. She felt restless and hyperactive. She kept turning to look out at the street. She wanted to yell a celebratory song, something like “Raoraorao.”
Yuval took possession of her key card. He asked what personal effects he should have delivered to her home by courier, since it might be best for negotiations if she never touched the firm’s hardware again. She thought about it hard, but she couldn’t come up with anything she wanted out of her office.
“Shoes?” he prompted her. “Hairbrush? Makeup?”
“You mean my corporate bedroom slippers?” She stomped her nailed boot heels on the floor. “I’ll come get them after they pave downtown with travertine and turn it into an air-conditioned pedestrian mall. It won’t be much longer.” She dunked her hands in her martini glass (it was nearly the size of a finger bowl), rubbed them vigorously together, and ran them through her hair. She leaned back and put her arm up on the back of her seat. Alcoholic fumes wafted toward Yuval.
“Smells great,” he said. “But a waste of good gin.”
“Better gin than me.”
“You don’t want to be wasted?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Bad Pam! How am I supposed to celebrate?”
“Dude, you just fired me. You’ll have parties! But for me, it’s over. I’m flying. You think I’m sitting here, but I’m way over your head. If there’s one thing in this town that doesn’t need disinfecting right now, it’s my brain.”
She headed home by way of B&H electronics on Ninth Avenue, where she bought a fancy video camera, lenses, and a tripod. The dark web would yield pirated copies of Avid and Scenarist. A rental car would bring her to skies crisscrossed with power lines over shallow water. Video Hit was (for reasons of astrology, tourism, and entrepreneurial misjudgment) selling off a surplus of inflatable vinyl goats. She had this idea for some art.
DANIEL RETURNED HOME AT FIVE THIRTY FROM THAT WEEK’S TEMP GIG, HIS MOOD HEAVILY compromised by foulness. He was playing systems administrator to a consumer products giant that had reduced laptop attrition by installing low-end tower PCs on the floor under people’s desks. When they kicked the motherboards and cables loose by accident, Daniel got to plug them back in. He felt he was getting too old for jobs that required crawling. He hung up his jacket and said, “Today was a fucking ordeal.”
Pam looked up from her perusal of her new camera’s user manual and said, “You want to quit work and be my collaborator?”
“And shave my head?” (He was alluding to the women “collaborators” who were traditionally shaved as punishment for bearing the children of invading armies.)
“I got fired today,” she said.
“With prudent and necessary force?” (That is to say, with a severance package or without, though he couldn’t have told her which was meant by the phras
e he chose.)
“Yes.”
He sat down to take off his shoes and said, “Hallelujah. I was afraid he’d notice your thirty years of service and give you a gold watch.”
He collapsed flat on his back on his couch, resting the inside of his elbow on his eyes to keep out the light.
“Yuval’s selling out,” she said. “I’m the holdout CEO with the ironclad contract who’s dragging her feet. The company’s worth so much more without me. It’s not in the bag yet, but I have a very good feeling.”
“So what’s your art?”
She set the brochure down and crawled over to sit on the rug beside him. “Video,” she said. “Original soundtrack, with my vocals. Goats are involved. You know the goats I mean.”
“And you need a sound tech, or somebody to blow up the goats, or what?”
“I need a collaborator,” she said. “Nobody takes artists seriously if they work alone. We’re equal partners. Svoboda and Svoboda.”
“I want to be Svoboda. You can be ‘Svoboda.’”
“I have dibs. It was my idea.”
“I think I’ve contributed most, if not all, of the Svoboda to this collaboration.”
“So license it to me.”
“What are you offering in trade?”
“Ice cream. The best. Your favorite.”
“So you take credit for my art, and we go out for ice cream.”
“You are correct.”
“Throw in a glass of water, and we have a deal.”
They shook hands. He got to his feet, rather energized, and headed for the shower. She went to the kitchen to get him a glass of water.
IN LATE JUNE, FLORA RAN INTO AARON ON G STREET. SHE HAD BEEN VISITING THE National Portrait Gallery and buying bras at Macy’s. The block was lined with the polished stone facades of minor lobbying offices and pricey coworking spaces. He appeared out of an entryway, wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and trekking sandals, looking like a recent immigrant from the Pacific Northwest, but fifteen years out of date.
When their eyes met, he broke into a run, straight toward her. After a second he resumed walking slowly, but he didn’t swerve.
She stood still, waiting, feeling grotesquely pregnant, embarrassed to be seen wearing running shoes and carrying a plastic shopping bag.
“Hey, Flora,” he said. “Wow. Look at you. Congratulations! You’re so— Who’s the lucky guy?”
She replied that the answer was on a need-to-know basis. She couldn’t tell whether he was doing the math in his head. He didn’t look calculating, just surprised and happy. He was bouncing on his toes, as if seeing her were a good bit more excitement than he had expected to experience that day. Which was probably true, given their history, she figured.
They asked each other what they were doing and where they were living. He was living in a group house way up Sixteenth Street, almost to the Maryland line, and working for the AFL-CIO. He kept glancing at her abdomen.
“I guess I truly don’t need to know,” he said. “But, I mean, is it your same boyfriend? I had no idea! Let’s get coffee and catch up. I don’t have anything until one.”
There were coffee shops on all four corners of the next intersection. She picked the Starbucks, because of the low armchairs. He paid for her lemonade.
At first they talked about work. She told him how depressing the Stein campaign had been before it disbanded to lick its wounds. He told her about the supposedly liberal university professors who ran the facilities whose custodians he was trying to unionize. He couldn’t keep his eyes on her face or even her breasts.
Finally she said, “Okay, Aaron. It’s Bull Gooch. You know, the strategist? That’s my boyfriend. He’s been my boyfriend for years.”
All at once he looked upset and sad.
“I know it’s weird,” she continued. “But he’s someone where we always understood each other perfectly, from the minute we started talking. He’s like my brother from another mother. He never has to ask what I mean, and I always know what he’s getting at. I know friends don’t let friends vote Green—I mean, he even supported me in that!—but by the time the election was over, I had gotten the message. And he’s my best friend. It wasn’t planned, but it happened.”
“It’s not that,” Aaron said. “It’s that when he was fucking my friend Ikumi last fall when you and me were in Towanda, he told her he’d had a vasectomy. So now I’m wondering.”
Flora stared. The baby kicked her hard in the bladder. For a second she lost awareness of her surroundings, like a Victorian lady swooning. She felt she was suspended in space and that everything around her was turning yellow. Then Starbucks came back. She shifted her weight in the chair, listed to one side, and grasped her belly while the baby shifted positions. “That’s a kick in the head,” she said.
“I know,” Aaron said. “I’m sorry. I can’t fucking believe it myself. But I had to tell you, because my head is exploding.”
“My body is exploding,” Flora said. “I have to call him right now. I need to know.” She put her hand on her phone.
“What’s there to know?” he said. “Fucker lied to you. He’s not your fucking best friend! That’s your idealism talking. You want friendship, you have a right to it, but it’s got nothing to do with that fucker.”
“Chill out, Aaron. You don’t know him.”
“Well, maybe he lied to Ikumi? It’s you or her. And this is your best friend. I get it.” His words were sarcastic, but his tone was less contemptuous than pitying, as though he couldn’t stretch his brain enough to contain the pathos of a woman whose best friend would tell her a lie.
She turned to look out the window and dialed Bull. He answered straightaway, casually, despite being in a tutorial session with students. The pregnancy was far enough along to create a certain suspense. “Hey, sweet pea,” he said.
She said, “Question. Is this your baby?”
“Take five,” he said. He paused for the students to vacate his office and said, “No, it’s not. I’ve known since the amnio. They did a paternity test. Maybe I should have told you.”
“Bullshit,” Flora said. “You knew before that. You had a vasectomy.”
“No. Okay. The truth is I’m infertile. I have a low sperm count. No viable sperm. But stranger things have happened, you know? Your girlfriend fools around on you and gets pregnant, and sometimes you take it as a gift.”
“And Ikumi, whoever the fuck she is, needed to know this, and I didn’t?”
“Don’t be petty. You’ve been fucking around on me since I don’t know when. But I love you. I’m thrilled to be a father. I’m excited and happy about everything. Really.”
“But, Bull, I used condoms”—driven by jealousy, she didn’t care whether Aaron heard her lie—“and obviously you didn’t, because why else would you tell some random bitch you had a vasectomy?”
“Because she wanted my baby, you numbskull. She wanted to get serious.”
That was checkmate. She saw why he had lied. She couldn’t deny her importance to him. She breathed heavily for a moment and said, “Okay. I’ve got to think this over. I’ll see you later.” She put her phone back facedown on the table and took a sip of lemonade.
“By the way, it’s my baby,” Aaron said. “Just saying that because it’s true.”
“It’s Bull’s baby,” Flora replied.
“No. That’s not how it works.”
“It’s whoever’s baby I say it is. I could start the process right now and put it up for adoption tomorrow, if I wanted.”
“And I could sue you for the right to take it. I wouldn’t even have to go through an adoption court, because I’m the dad. I’m having a baby, with you. We’re having a child.”
“Your father’s rights bullshit is really unpleasant to me right now,” Flora said. “Nobody but me has anything to do with this baby. I’m the one carrying it around. It’s made of me.”
Picking the label off his lemonade bottle with both hands, he said, “Just don’t say you woul
d put our baby up for adoption. I was so in love with you. I mean it. I still am.”
“And now you want visitation, or shared custody, or what? Care to formulate your demands?”
“Why are you asking me aggressive crap like that? How do you think I’m feeling right now?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “What I need for you to do is leave me alone. Go away. My life was fine. I don’t need to see you. Do that for me! Let it go. Be done. Let us have our baby, and go make babies with somebody else.”
Without warning, he moved from the chair to his knees on the linoleum and made so as to rest his head on her stomach. There was no way she could get out of the low armchair, with its low armrests, fast enough to escape. What he was doing was invasive and intrusive and rude, but rather than yell for help, she let it happen, because after all they were in public, and she did know him, and she had loved him once, for a little while. As he was reminding her. He stopped shaking and began to glow. His embrace of her malformed body, his ear and hair gently touching her belly, reminded her of when they were partners. She squeezed her eyes shut. From all around, she felt an impossible happiness approaching. It filled her ears with silence, like being submersed in deep water. There was a rightness to his head in her lap.
She imagined presenting the baby to Bull. She saw wrongness. He would hold it in his immense hands, look down approvingly, and say, “This is my beloved son,” pleased to have sired an heir he hadn’t sired, while Aaron was already loving the baby so personally that it hurt them both. The baby’s challenges all lay ahead—being born headfirst, getting enough oxygen—and when she imagined something going wrong, and the little boy damaged, she saw which man would be heartbroken, in love with his flawed son, never angry at her. Which man was already implicated in the baby’s weaknesses. A crack appeared in the firmament.
Aaron said, “I’m trying to get my head around this, but I can’t. I thought maybe if we put our heads together, the baby would tell me what to do, like a Vulcan mind meld.”