Doxology

by Nell Zink

  “Get up,” she said, tugging on his sleeve. He squatted upright again and slid back into his seat. “Listen. It’s a boy. His name is Michael. I picked it.”

  “It’s a great name. When’s he due?”

  “August second.”

  “Holy cow.”

  “None of this scares Bull. Are you sure you’re old enough? You don’t have to do this.”

  “I don’t see it as my decision,” he said. “I don’t get to decide what’s true and what’s not.”

  “Yes, you do. You choose your family. That’s why they have adoption and marriage. Adults have their family of choice.”

  “That’s not how it feels to me,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like I’m choosing this. It’s just an objective fact. It’s like, okay, I spawned, what next? It’s a decision the way being alive is a decision. You make the best of it, and sometimes you get lucky and it totally rules.” He took her left hand in both hands and leaned down to kiss it.

  “Let me put it this way,” she said. “I personally am able to choose my family. I’m the one who’s going to pick the dad, whether it’s you, or Bull, or nobody.”

  “That’s simply untrue,” he said, straightening up. “The only reason you don’t want my name on the birth certificate, so I have to pay child support, is because Bull’s fucking loaded. But I could still sue for custody. Men’s rights, man! Except I would never dream of doing something shitty to you like that, because I can’t imagine by what rights I should be deciding things about your baby. What kind of an asshole would I be? I agree with you. It’s your decision. So decide. Decide now.”

  He spoke like a man prepared to live or die by her verdict.

  She thought of Bull and felt the shadow of death passing over—the fear of fear itself, of what she would feel when they broke up, what he might say.

  She turned up her hands, looked from one to the other, and said, “I can’t decide.”

  “I thought you already had,” he said. His voice had turned gravelly and desperate. His face was blotchy. He was hugging himself.

  An instinctive self-defense mechanism told her: Let go. Open your empty hands and let go. The power he had granted her was too much. She had too much power. She could sense it directly, because she was so close to creating a new person, as if she were God. She didn’t want to be Aaron’s God.

  She struggled out of the low chair. He jumped up to help her, grasping her forearm. She said, “Okay, Aaron. It’s like this. I’m in shock. I’m walking away. You stay here. Don’t follow me. I need time. I’ll call you.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But can I get you a cab? Can I do anything to stop feeling so ashamed I might die?”

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Be patient. I’ll call you tonight.”

  Without giving him her hand, she picked up her plastic bag and walked away. From the escalator in the Metro, she texted Bull: “Why???” She maintained her composure, but the emojis were crying.

  BULL CALLED HER TWO HOURS LATER, WHEN HIS SEMINAR WAS OVER AND SHE WAS AT home lying on the sofa under the bedroom window, looking out at a gum tree. He said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you met Ikumi Sakuragi and she talked about me.”

  “Wrong. I met her friend Aaron Fleischer, and he told me your open secret.”

  “Small world. So if I’m not the father, who is?”

  “Aaron’s ready to accept responsibility,” she said.

  “He’s a fucking socialist who wants to take responsibility for the whole planet. Can he tie his own shoes? Did you check?”

  She had this sudden unwelcome vision that maybe she’d seen him stumbling along the riverbank with one shoe untied. Simultaneously she became aware that Ikumi must have talked to Bull about Aaron. What for?

  “It’s my baby,” Bull went on. “Or at least I’m adopting him. If biological-father-boy wants to make it an open adoption, let him try.”

  “You don’t need me, if it’s a baby you want,” she said. “Have your own baby. You can afford a surrogate.”

  “I guess for you Millennials that’s just one more kind of sex work, but FYI, I’d rather be raped by an animal than exploit a woman of color like she’s a piece of meat. I love you, Flora, you fecund slut. I’ve got stuff to finish up here, but I’ll be home in an hour.”

  They said goodbye and hung up.

  Doubts about Aaron flooded her mind. A breakwater—the wall with the handwriting on it saying AARON’S THE DAD—fell over, and on the other side lay alternative facts. She’d known Bull for years. She trusted his judgment, if not all of his words and actions. Who was Aaron, anyway? They’d vacationed together for a few days the year before. He was unknowably young, practically larval. Yet Bull had come inside her only because he had gotten in the habit of coming inside somebody else, Aaron’s friend Ikumi, who was allowed, because Bull didn’t love her, to know that he couldn’t father children.

  She wanted to minimize badness; she wanted to minimize wrongness. But goodness and rightness were not the same thing. Goodness would have dictated Michael’s adoption by happily married scholar-athletes who ran an organic farm. A child needs health, education, and welfare, as she knew from personal experience with the parental Fresh Air Fund that deported her to Cleveland Park. A child needs stability and a house in Georgetown.

  Yet rights trump everything. You can’t do the right thing and violate a right, except—maybe—if you’re punishing a crime. She didn’t feel guilty of any crime. As a mother, she had property rights to Michael, the only rights of their kind. Love can seem to lovers to confer ownership, but it only feels that way; no one has proprietary claims over another adult, even when that adult believes she has vacated every one of her rights, signed on all the dotted lines, become a slave.

  She wasn’t going to let a judge decide either. She didn’t think the state had a right to draft soldiers, so surely she wouldn’t let it designate fathers.

  Which meant the onus was on her, but she couldn’t decide. She couldn’t even tease out the basic form of the story. Was Bull stealing Aaron’s child, or was Aaron stealing Bull’s? The investment was Bull’s. The DNA was Aaron’s. Bull’s commitment and friendship, his pursuit of her—everything he did—blew his rival out of the water. Aaron had never cooked her so much as a hard-boiled egg. He had suggested an affair, written her off when it ended, and run into her by chance. But she wanted him. Maybe not to raise a child. It was almost as if his being the dad was an excuse for her to want something more. Something erotic, irresponsible, and probably stupid.

  Another well of wrongness was what a last-minute decision would do to Bull. She couldn’t give birth and say she was leaving. She would have to leave him first and move back to Cleveland Park, which there was no reason to do, beyond the accidental parentage of a child he longed for. He would be publicly humiliated. Everyone in town would know he’d suckered himself, volunteering to raise another man’s child with a woman too young to be faithful.

  Her urge to protect him bothered her. He was a grown-up. Turning risks into sure things was his profession. She didn’t feel nearly as maternal toward her immature vagabond fling Aaron. It was paradoxical, wanting to shield the guy who was her rock. Almost as if she didn’t want to live on a rock.

  She lay on the couch, telling herself that none of it mattered, because she had someone to love and his name was Michael.

  It wasn’t any comfort. The baby didn’t work as a symbol of her personal freedom.

  Bull came home, kissed her as though nothing were wrong, and made dinner. She didn’t reach out to Aaron after that, and he left her alone. Whenever she thought of him, she hated him, because he didn’t call.

  XXVIII.

  On the last Wednesday in July, Washington was bathed in an acrid mist. The roses and marble facades stood sweating in air that stank of uncertainty. It was a smell that ought to be rising from burning trash, not falling from the sky as fawn-colored haze.

  Flora’s media were reporting
—based on an item in New Scientist—that human error was to blame. A stable high-pressure zone of falling air over the mid-Atlantic states was bringing dust from the Great Plains, ash from western wildfires, Chinese foundry emissions, and little bits of Lake Chad. The particulates could have rained out over the ocean or the mountains, but they were trapped in the air by a shortage of hydroxyl radicals.

  The shortage was traceable to airplanes. That was the theory. Sun hitting ozone created hydroxyls, whose electric charge allowed water vapor to condense around particles of dirt and fall as rain. Condensation trails were using them up. All the seeded cirrus at cruising altitude had encased North America in a bone-dry dome of crystalline latticework, and the net effect was uncertain. Possibly the clouds cast cooling shade, and the smog bred new hydroxyls. Possibly it might never rain again in North America. It depended on which website you read.

  She stepped out their front door in Georgetown to look down the street. She held her breath. The sky was glowing and the street faded on both ends to a hot yellow blur. The air wasn’t gritty with sand or thick with powder. It was something else, which seemed to be descending in slow waves. The birds and bugs were silent, as under low pressure before a storm. But the pressure was high. It should have been a bright, clear day.

  Survivalists online were making claims of radioactivity. Some of her Green Party friends were quoting white supremacist preppers. Reposted posts quoted unnamed sources and headlines from years before. Who got there first, and where did they get the idea of fallout? Was it just the way the air looked, soft and glittery as a supersaturated metal?

  She reentered the stuffy house. The internet swung between alarm and complacency, waiting for the collective momentum to slosh to one side. It knew no more than she did. She refreshed it over and over.

  Bull said the reports were bunkum. His sources at NOAA and the EPA—forbidden to talk to the press—said that the origin of the haze lay closer. The woods of the Southeast were overexploited. The fast-growing phase of pines was early youth, so that’s when forestry managers would cut them down, right when their carbon sequestration rate started to slow. The soil where they stood was degraded as a cornfield, stripped of humus and moisture. It took only one stray charcoal briquette to turn young pines into a smoldering mess not worth putting out. With temperatures too low for efficient combustion, the fires were churning all sorts of things into the air. But winter would bring rain, and spring would bring new growth. The pendulum was always swinging, mowing down the world like a scythe.

  When she thought of the young pines burning, she thought of herself.

  IN NEW YORK THE AIR WAS TRANSPARENT. THE CITY WAS A HEAT ISLAND WITH ITS own powerful updraft. Ocean air dense with moisture streamed through its tower intakes and poured toward the sky. Its sunless canyons were damp and oppressive. Inside cooled spaces, the walls sweated. Roaches gathered at puddles in rotting wood and wallpaper like sparrows at a birdbath. It was hideous. It was nothing that hadn’t been going on for centuries.

  Pam arrived at Washington Union Station on the Acela around one, to visit Flora one last time before she became encumbered with Baby Michael. The air was heavy with golden dust even on the platform where she disembarked. She kept trying to make eye contact with strangers, wanting to talk about it. But most had big sunglasses on, and those who didn’t kept their eyes low. Some had dust masks. There were fewer cars on the street than usual. People were keeping them garaged, afraid the air would damage the finish.

  She was finally able to talk about the air with her parents. “Some air you got there!” she said.

  “It’s the seventies all over again,” Edgar said.

  “Maybe it’s the revenge of poor soil management, like Flora says. The new dust bowl.”

  Ginger said, “I bet the sunsets are glorious. We should drive out to the Blue Ridge.” She added that she was kidding, because she wouldn’t go more than three miles away from Flora. Driving in the miasma felt dangerous even in town. She didn’t want to know what things were like out on the Beltway.

  Pam’s phone rang. It was Flora.

  “Hey, Mom,” she said. “I’m just calling to say I’m going to be a couple hours late.”

  “You not feeling well?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Are you at home?”

  “I’m in a taxi, headed up to the cathedral.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Have you seen the news? They’re saying Trump violated the nuclear test ban and the yellow stuff in the air is radioactive sulfur. Like, he tested a suitcase nuke in a coal mine in Tennessee.”

  “You’re outside in radioactive fallout?”

  “Mom, they’re nuts. Since when do physicists go into journalism? Everything is bullshit. That’s the problem. I was just calling to say I’d be over later, because I need time to think.”

  Ginger by this point had navigated to the website of the Washington Post on her laptop. She called out, “Nothing about anything radioactive in the Post!”

  Flora said to look at the Guardian, a center-left London daily that was popular and influential around the world because it could be read online without a subscription. Ginger found the headline. When she clicked it to read the story, there was a 404 error: PAGE NOT FOUND. When she returned to the main page, the headline was gone.

  “The page is acting strange,” Pam told Flora. “There’s no story. But tell the driver to bring you over here instead.”

  “I need to be by myself.”

  “Then we’ll come over to the cathedral and give you a ride back here.”

  “That sounds fine. I’ll see you in a couple hours.” She signed off.

  Scrolling through the New York Times, Pam said, “The girl has lost her mind from the stress.”

  Edgar had returned to reading a biography of Eisenhower in his den. Ginger approached him to say that they were going to the cathedral to check on Flora. She asked him to keep an eye on the news, because there were rumors the air might be radioactive. He promised to call right away if he heard anything.

  The women gulped down their coffees and got in Edgar’s new hybrid Camry to drive west. It wasn’t far from the house to Flora’s old school. If Connecticut Avenue had been filling up with drivers fleeing the city, if the Cleveland Park business district had been boarding up, if an angry mob had been forming to march on the capitol, they wouldn’t have known it, because they took a back way. Steering up Porter Street in the eerily silent car, the air conditioner cycling internally, Ginger said, “This is not what I wanted. Flora in a spiritual crisis. She should be welcoming this baby with us and Bull, not hiding out alone in a church.”

  “I can relate,” Pam said. “This isn’t the world she was planning to bring it into.”

  “What was she expecting, Tahiti? She was born on the Lower East Side!”

  Ginger’s unaccustomed sarcasm surprised Pam. “She has a right to Tahiti,” she said. “I always knew I could escape civilization, if worse came to worst. Move to Key West and spearfish pompano or whatever and sleep on the beach. Where can she go? There’s garbage and tourists on every beach in the world, and the beaches are going to be gone soon.”

  “Is it such a bad thing, knowing we’re all in it together?” Ginger said. “It was always true.”

  “I was happier not knowing.”

  “Pam, these facts were uppermost in Flora’s mind at an age when you were still worshipping that punk rock boy. She’s a smart girl. For her, it’s always been one world. And maybe, whatever this stuff in the air is, it’s time we were confronted with it, instead of just reading about it. Now we’ll take action.”

  “Not possible,” Pam said. “It’s just going to shorten our lives.”

  “Why are you such a pessimist?”

  “Working with machines will heighten your tragic sense of life. They don’t heal themselves. There’s friction, and they break, and that’s it. But at least they were made by intelligent design, unlike this random fucking planet. The Earth is doomed.�
��

  “You sound like your father. This planet isn’t good enough for him either. He’s getting interested in Mars.”

  They parked in a faculty spot, since it was midsummer, and walked up the brick path to the narthex’s dusty glass doors. The woman selling ten-dollar tickets to offset the cost of earthquake damage knew Ginger, so she waved them in. The cathedral was cool and fresh inside. The windows tinted the light as blue as daylight on a normal day.

  Pam headed for the stairs to the crypt, because it had been her favorite place when she was young, but Ginger stopped her and said, “No, not down there. She goes to where they had Thursday chapel.”

  They found her toward the rear of the school’s dedicated space, facing its banner and patron saint, slouched on a straight-backed chair dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe, with her sock feet on a needlepoint raven. She turned to them when she heard their voices.

  “Baby, you look sick,” Ginger said. “We need to get you to a doctor.”

  “Can I talk to you?” she said. “Please?”

  “Come on,” Pam said. “It’s doctor time.”

  She didn’t budge. She said, “Sit down and listen to me. I have to tell you something impossible.”

  Pam and Ginger sat down on Jefferson Davis and William Jennings Bryan, respectively. Ginger said, “We love you, sweet pea. Tell us anything you want, no matter how bad you think it sounds.”

  “I don’t want to raise this baby with Bull.”

  They were silent for a moment, and Ginger responded, “He seems to me like he’ll make a good father. It doesn’t have to be forever.”

  “Isn’t it more like once a father, always a father? Isn’t it forever?”

  “Flora, you might be thinking you want to move back in with me and Ed. But we’ve raised two generations. I don’t know that we want to raise a third.”

  “It’s not that, Grandma. He’s not the dad.”

  “He’s not the dad,” Pam echoed.

  “There’s an actual dad,” Flora said. “I ran into him last month. His name is Aaron Fleischer. We had this fling when I was in Pennsylvania, right before the election. He was volunteering for Clinton. We’re the same age. He has a job downtown now, at this new custodians’ union.”