"Bailey-Cockroach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bailey Dale)

DALE BAILEY

COCKROACH

AFTER THE EXAMINATION, they gathered in the office of the physician, an
obstetrician named Exavious that a friend of Sara's had recommended. Dr.
Exavious specialized in what Sara termed "high-risk pregnancies," which Gerald
Hartshorn took to mean that his wife, at thirty-seven, was too old to be having
babies. Secretly, Gerald thought of his wife's...condition...not as a natural
biological process, but as a disease: as fearsome and intractable, and perhaps
-- though he didn't wish to think of it -- as fatal.

During the last weeks, a seed of fear Gerald had buried almost ten years ago --
buried and forgotten, he had believed -- had at last begun to germinate, to
spread hungry tendrils in the rich loam of his heart, to feed.

And now, such thoughts so preoccupied him that Gerald only half-listened as Dr.
Exavious reassured Sara. "We have made great strides in bringing to term women
of your age," he was saying, "especially women in such superb condition as I
have found you to be..."

These words, spoken in the obscurely accented English which communicated an aura
of medical expertise to men of Gerald's class (white, affluent, conservative,
and, above all, coddled by a network of expensive specialists) -- these words
should have comforted him.

They did not. Specialist or not, the fact remained that Gerald didn't like
Exavious, slim and Arabic, with febrile eyes and a mustache like a narrow
charcoal slash in his hazel flesh. In fact, Gerald didn't like much of anything
about this...situation. Most of all, he didn't like being left alone with the
doctor when Sara excused herself at the end of the meeting. He laced his fingers
in his lap and gazed off into a corner, uncertain how to proceed.

"These times can be difficult for a woman," Exavious said. "There are many
pressures, you understand, not least on the kidneys."

Gerald allowed himself a polite smile: recognition of the intended humor,
nothing more. He studied the office-- immaculate carpet, desk of dark expensive
wood, diplomas mounted neatly on one wall -- but saw no clock. Beyond tinted
windows, the parking lot shimmered with midsummer heat. Julian would be nuts at
the office. But he didn't see how he could steal a glance at his watch without
being rude.

Exavious leaned forward and said, "So you are to be a father. You must be very
happy, Mr. Hartshorn."

Gerald folded and unfolded his arms. "Oh... I guess. Sure."

"If you have further questions, questions I haven't answered, I'd be happy
to..." He let the rest of the sentence hang, unspoken, in the air. "I know this
can be a trying experience for some men."

"I'm just a bit nervous, that's all."

"Ah. And why is that?"

"Well, her history, you know."

Exavious smiled. He waved a hand dismissively. "Such incidents are not uncommon,
Mr. Hartshorn, as I'm sure you know. Your wife is quite healthy.
Physiologically, she is twenty-five. You have nothing to fear."

Exavious sighed; he toyed with a lucite pyramid in which a vaguely alien-looking
model of a fetus had been embedded. The name of a drug company had been
imprinted in black around its base. "There is one thing, however."

Gerald swallowed. A slight pressure constricted his lungs. "What's that?"

"Your wife has her own fears and anxieties because of the history you mentioned.
She indicated these during the examination -- that's why she came to me in the
first place. Emotional states can have unforeseen physiological effects. They
can heighten the difficulty of a pregnancy. Most doctors don't like to admit it,
but the fact is we understand very little about the mind-body relationship.
However, one thing is clear: your wife's emotional condition is every bit as
important as her physical state." Exavious paused. Some vagary of the
air-conditioning swirled to Gerald's nostrils a hint of his after-shave lotion.

"I guess I don't really understand," Gerald said.

"I'm just trying to emphasize that your wife will need your support, Mr.
Hartshorn. That's all."

"Are you suggesting that I wouldn't be supportive?"

"Of course not. I merely noticed that --"

"I don't know what you noticed, but it sounds to me --"

"Mr. Hartshorn, please."

"-- like you think I'm going to make things difficult for her. You bet I'm
nervous. Anyone in my circumstances would be. But that doesn't mean I won't be
supportive." In the midst of this speech, Gerald found himself on his feet, a
hot blush rising under his collar. "I don't know what you're suggest-ing--" he
continued, and then, when Exavious winced and lifted his hands palms outward, he
consciously lowered his voice. "I don't know what you're suggesting --"

"Mr. Hartshorn, please. My intent was not to offend. I understand that you are
fearful for your wife. I am simply trying to tell you that she must not be
allowed to perceive that you too are afraid."

Gerald drew in a long breath. He sat, feeling sheepish. "I'm sorry, it's...I've
been under a lot of pressure at work lately. I don't know what came over me."

Exavious inclined his head. "Mr. Hartshorn, I know you are busy. But might I ask
you a small favor -- for your sake and for your wife's?"

"Sure, please."

"Just this: take some time, Mr. Hartshorn, take some time and think. Are you
fearful for your wife's welfare, or are you fearful for your own?"

Just then, before Gerald could reply, the door from the corridor opened and Sara
came in, her long body as yet unblemished by the child within. She brushed back
a wisp of blonde hair as Gerald turned to face her. "Gerald, are you okay? I
thought I heard your --"

"Please, Mrs. Hartshorn, there was nothing," the doctor said warmly. "Is that
not correct, Mr. Hartshorn! Nothing, nothing at all."

And somehow Gerald recovered himself enough to accede to this simple deception
as the doctor ushered them into the corridor. Outside, while Sara spoke with the
receptionist, he turned at a feathery touch on his shoulder. Dr. Exavious
enveloped his hand and gazed into his eyes for a long and obscurely terrible
moment; and then Gerald wrenched himself away, feeling naked and exposed, as if
those febrile eyes had illuminated the hollows of his soul, as if he too had
been subjected to an examination and had been found wanting.

"I don't know," Gerald said as he guided the Lexus out of the clinic lot. "I
don't like him much. I liked Schwartz better."

He glanced over at Sara, her long hand curved beneath her chin, but she wouldn't
meet his eyes.

Rush hour traffic thickened around them. He should call Julian; there wasn't
much point in trying to make it back to the office now. He had started to reach
for the phone when Sara said, "He's a specialist."

"You heard him: you're in great shape. You don't need a specialist."

"I'd feel more comfortable with him."

Gerald shrugged. "I just didn't think he was very personable, that's all."

"Since when do we choose our doctors because they're personable, Gerald? She
drummed her fingers against the dash. "Besides, Schwartz wasn't especially
charming." She paused; then, with a chill hint of emotion, she added, "Not to
mention competent."

Like stepping suddenly into icy water, this -- was it grief, after all these
years? Or was it anger?

He extended a hand to her, saying, "Now come on, Sara --"

"Drop it, Gerald."

"Fine."

An oppressive silence filled the car. No noise from without penetrated the
interior, and the concentrated purr of the engine was so muted that it seemed
rather a negation of sound. A disquieting notion possessed him: perhaps there
never had been sound in the world.

A fractured series of images pierced him: rain-slicked barren trees, black
trunks whipped to frenzy by a voiceless wind; lane upon lane of stalled, silent
cars, pouring fumes into the leaden sky; and Sara--Sara, her lips moving like
the lips of a silent movie heroine, shaping words that could not reach him
through the changeless air.

Gerald shook his head.

"Are you ready to go home or do you need to stop by the library?" he asked.

"Home. We need to talk about the library."

"Oh?"

"I'm thinking of quitting," she said.

"Quitting?"

"I need some time, Gerald. We have to be careful. I don't want to lose this
baby."

"Well, sure," he said. "But quitting."

Sara swallowed. "Besides, I think the baby should be raised at home, don't you?"

Gerald slowed for a two-way stop, glanced into the intersection, and plunged
recklessly into traffic, slotting the Lexus into a narrow space before a looming
brown UPS truck. Sara uttered a brief, piercing shriek.

"I hadn't really thought about it," Gerald said.

And in fact he hadn't -- hadn't thought about that, or dirty diapers, or
pediatricians, or car seats, or teething, or a thousand other things, all of
which now pressed in upon him in an insensate rush. For the first time he
thought of the baby not as a spectral possibility, but as an imminent presence,
palpable, new, central to their lives. He was too old for this.

But all he said was: "Quitting seems a little drastic. After all, it's only
part-time."

Sara didn't answer.

"Why don't we think about it?"

"Too late," Sara said quietly.

"You quit?"

Gerald glanced over at her, saw a wry smile touch her lips, saw in her eyes that
she didn't really think it funny.

"You quit?"

"Oh, Gerald," she said. "I'm sorry, I really am."

But he didn't know why she was apologizing, and he had a feeling that she didn't
know why either. He reached out and touched her hand, and then they were at a
stoplight. Gerald reached for the phone. "I've got to call Julian," he said.

THE INSTRUMENT of Gerald Hartshorn's ascension at the advertising firm of
MacGregor, MacGregor, & Turn had been a six-foot-tall cockroach named Fenton,
whom Gerald had caused to be variously flayed, decapitated, delimbed, and
otherwise dispatched in a series of TV spots for a local exterminator who
thereafter had surpassed even his nationally advertised competitors in a tight
market. Now, a decade later, Gerald could recall with absolute clarity the
moment of this singular inspiration: an early morning trip to the kitchen to get
Sara a glass of grapefruit juice.

That had been shortly after Sara's first pregnancy, the abrupt, unforgettable
miscarriage that for months afterward had haunted her dreams. Waking in moans or
screams or a cold accusatory silence that for Gerald had been unutterably more
terrible, she would weep inconsolably as he tried to comfort her, and afterward
through the broken weary house they had leased in those impoverished days, she
would send him for a bowl of ice cream or a cup of warm milk or, in this case, a
glass of grapefruit juice. Without complaint, he had gone, flipping on lights
and rubbing at his bleary eyes and lugging the heavy burden of his heart like a
stone in the center of his breast.

He remembered very little of those days besides the black funnel of conflicting
emotion which had swept him up: a storm of anger more deleterious than any he
had ever known; a fierce blast of grief for a child he had not and could not
ever know; and, sweeping all before it, a tempest of relief still more fierce,
relief that he had not lost Sara. There had been a close moment, but she at
least remained for him.

And, of course, he remembered the genesis of Fenton the cockroach.

Remembered how, that night, as his finger brushed the switch that flooded the
cramped kitchen with a pitiless glare, he had chanced to glimpse a dark anomaly
flee pell-mell to safety across the stained counter. Remembered the inspiration
that rained down on him like a gift as he watched the loathsome creature wedge
its narrow body into a crevice and disappear.

The Porter account, he had thought. Imagine:

Fade in with thunder on a screaming housewife, her hands clasped to her face,
her expression stricken. Pan recklessly about the darkened kitchen, fulgurant
with lightning beyond a rain-streaked window. Jumpcut through a series of angles
on a form menacing and enormous, insectoid features more hidden than revealed by
the storm's fury. Music as the tension builds. At last the armored figure of the
exterminator to the rescue. Fade to red letters on a black background:

Porter Exterminators. Depend On Us.

But the piece had to be done straight. It could not be played for laughs. It had
to be terrifying.

And though the ads had gradually softened during the decade since though the
cockroach had acquired a name and had been reduced to a cartoon spokesman who
died comically at the end of every spot (Please, please don't call Porter!) --
that first commercial had turned out very much as Gerald had imagined it:
terrifying. And effective.

And that was the way Gerald thought of Fenton the giant cockroach even now. Not
in his present animated incarnation, but in his original form, blackly
horrifying, looming enraged from some shadowy comer, and always, always
obscurely linked in his mind to the dark episode of his lost child and the wife
he also had nearly lost.

But despite these connections, the Porter account had remained Gerald's single
greatest success. Other accounts had been granted him; and though Fenton was now
years in the past, promotions followed. So he drove a Lexus, lived in one of the
better neighborhoods, and his wife worked part-time as an aide in the children's
library not because she had to, but because she wanted to.

All things considered, he should have been content. So why, when he picked up
the phone to call Julian MacGregor, should the conversation which followed so
dishearten him?

"I can't make it back in today," he said. "Can the Dainty Wipe thing wait until
Monday?"

And Julian, his boss for twelve years, replied with just a touch of...what?
Exasperation?

Julian said: "Don't worry about that, I'm going to put Lake Conley on it
instead."

Lake Conley, who was a friend.

Why should that bother him?

Gerald came to think of the pregnancy as a long, arduous ordeal: a military
campaign, perhaps, conducted in bleak territory, beneath a bitter sky. He
thought of Napoleon, bogged down in the snow outside of Moscow, and he
despaired.

Not that the pregnancy was without beneficial effects. In the weeks after that
first visit to Dr. Exavious -- at two months w Gerald saw Sara's few wrinkles
begin to soften, her breasts to grow fuller. But mostly the changes were less
pleasant. Nausea continued to plague her, in defiance of Exavious's predictions.
They argued over names and made love with distressing infrequency.

Just when Gerald grudgingly acquiesced in repainting a bedroom (a neutral blue,
Sara had decided, neither masculine nor feminine), he was granted a momentary
reprieve when Sara decided to visit her mother, two hours away.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she told him in the flat heat promised by the August
dawn.

Gerald stepped close to her with sudden violent longing; he inhaled her warm
powdered odor. "Love you."

"Me too." She flung an arm around him in a perfunctory embrace, and then the
small mound of her abdomen interposed itself between them.

And then she was gone.

Work that day dragged through a series of ponderous crises that defied
resolution, and it was with relief that Gerald looked up to see Lake Conley
standing in the door.

"So Sara's out of town," Lake said.

"That's right."

"Let's have a drink. We should talk."

They found a quiet bar on Magnolia. There, in the cool dim, with the windows on
the street like bright hot panes of molten light, Gerald studied Lake Conley,
eleven years his junior and handsome seemingly by force of will. Lake combed his
long hair with calculated informality, and his suit, half as expensive as
Gerald's, fit him with unnatural elegance.

"Then Julian said, 'Frankly, Sue, I don't see the humor in this.' I swear, she
nearly died." Lake laughed. "You should have seen it, Gerald."

Gerald chuckled politely and watched as Lake took a pull at his Dos Equis. He
watched him place the beer on the bar and dig with slender fingers in a basket
of peanuts. Weekly sessions in the gym had shown Gerald that the other man's
slight frame was deceptive. Lake was savagely competitive in racquetball, and
while it did not bother Gerald that he usually lost, it did bother him that when
he won, he felt that Lake had permitted him to do so. It bothered him still more
that he preferred these soulless victories to an endless series of humiliations.

Often he felt bearish and graceless beside the younger man. Today he just felt
tired.

"Just as well I wasn't there," he said. "I'm sure Julian would have lit into me,
too."

"Julian giving you a rough time?"

Gerald shrugged.

Lake gazed thoughtfully at him for a moment, then turned to the flickering
television that played soundlessly over the bar. "Well," he said with forced
cheer. "Sara doing okay? She big as a house yet?"

"Not yet." Gerald finished his drink and signaled for another. "Thank God for
gin," he said.

"There's a good sign."

Gerald sipped at the new drink. "Been a while. We're not drinking much at home
lately."

"What's the problem, Gerald?"

"She could have told me she stopped taking the pill."

"Sure."

"Or that she was quitting her job."

"Absolutely."

Gerald didn't say anything. A waitress backed through a swinging door by the
bar, and tinny rock music blasted out of the kitchen. The sour odor of grease
came to him, and then the door swung shut, and into the silence, Lake Conley
said:

"You're not too happy about this."

"It's not just that she hasn't been telling me things. She's always been a
little self-contained. And she's sorry, I know that."

"Then what is it?"

Gerald sighed. He dipped a finger in his drink and began to trace desultory
patterns on the bar. "Our first baby," he said at last. "The miscarriage. It was
a close call for Sara. It was scary then and it's even scarier now. She's all I
have." Bitter laughter escaped him. "Her and Julian MacGregor."

"Don't forget Fenton."

"Ah yes, the cockroach." Gerald finished his drink, and this time the bartender
had another waiting.

"Is that it?"

"No." He paused. "Let me ask you this: you ever feel...I don't know...weird
about anything when Kaye was pregnant?"

Lake laughed. "Let me guess. You're afraid the baby's not yours." And then, when
Gerald shook his head, he continued, "How about this? You're afraid the baby is
going to be retarded or horrifically deformed, some kind of freak."

"I take it you did."

Lake scooped a handful of peanuts onto the bar and began to arrange them in a
neat circle. Gerald looked on in bleary fascination.

Another drink had been placed before him. He tilted the glass to his lips.

"It's entirely normal," Lake was saying. "Listen, I was so freaked out that I
talked to Kaye's obstetrician about it. You know what she said? It's a normal
by-product of your anxiety, that's all. That's the first baby. Second baby? It's
a breeze."

"That so?"

"Sure. Trust me, this is the best thing that's ever happened to you. This is
going to be the best experience of your life."

Gerald slouched in his stool, vastly

-- and illogically, some fragment of his mind insisted

-- relieved.

"Another drink?" Lake asked.

Gerald nodded. The conversation strayed listlessly for a while, and then he
looked up to see that daylight had faded beyond the large windows facing the
street. A steady buzz of conversation filled the room. He had a sense of
pressure created by many people, hovering just beyond the limits of his
peripheral vision. He felt ill, and thrust half an ice-melted drink away from
him.

Lake's face drifted in front of him, his voice came from far away: "Listen,
Gerald, I'm driving you home, okay?"

Opening his eyes in Lake's car, he saw the shimmering constellation of the city
beyond a breath-frosted window, cool against his cheek. Lake was saying
something. What?

"You okay? You're not going to be sick, are you?"

Gerald lifted a hand weakly. Fine, fine.

They were parked in the street outside Gerald's darkened house. Black dread
seized him. The house, empty, Sara away. A thin, ugly voice spoke in his mind --
the voice of the cockroach, he thought with sudden lucidity. And it said:

This is how it will look when she's gone. This is how it will look when she's
dead.

She won't die. She won't die.

Lake was saying, "Gerald, you have to listen to me."

Clarity gripped him. "Okay. What is it?"

A passing car chased shadow across Lake's handsome features. "I asked you out
tonight for a reason, Gerald."

"What's that?"

Lake wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel, took in a slow breath.
"Julian talked to me today. He's giving me the Heather Drug campaign. I wanted
to tell you. I told him you were depending on it, but..." Lake shrugged.

Gerald thought: You son of a bitch. I ought to puke in your car.

But he said: "Not your fault." He opened the door and stood up. Night air,
leavened with the day's heat, embraced him. "Later."

And then somehow up the drive to the porch, where he spent long moments fitting
the key into the door. Success at last, the door swinging open. Interior
darkness leaked into the night.

He stumbled to the stairs, paused there to knot his tie around the newel post,
which for some reason struck him as enormously funny. And then the long haul up
the flight, abandoning one shoe halfway up and another on the landing, where the
risers twisted to meet the gallery which opened over shining banisters into the
foyer below.

Cathedral ceilings, he thought. The legacy of Fenton the cockroach. And with a
twist like steel in his guts, the memory of that nasty internal voice came back
to him. Not his voice. The voice of the cockroach:

This is how it will be when she's dead.

And then the bedroom. The sheets, and Sara's smell upon them. The long fall into
oblivion.

HE WOKE abruptly, clawing away a web of nightmare. He had been trapped in
suffocating dark, while something--

-- the cockroach --

-- gnawed hungrily at his guts.

He sat up, breathing hard.

Sara stood at the foot of the bed, his shoes dangling in her upraised hand. She
said, "You son of a bitch."

Gerald squinted at the clock-radio. Dull red numbers transformed themselves as
he watched. 11:03. Sunlight lashed through the blinds. The room swam with the
stink of sleep and alcohol.

"Sara..." He dug at his eyes.

"You son of a bitch," she said.

She flung the shoes hard into his stomach as, gasping, he stumbled from the bed.
"Sara --"

But she had turned away. He glimpsed her in profile at the door, her stomach
slightly domed beneath her drop-waist dress, and then she was gone.

Gerald, swallowing-- how dry his throat was! -- followed. He caught her at the
steps, and took her elbow.

"Sara, it was only a few drinks. Lake and I --"

She turned on him, a fierce light in her eyes. Her fury propelled him back a
step. She reminded him of a feral dog, driving an intruder from her pups.

"It's not that, Gerald," she said.

And then--

-- goddamn it, I won't be treated like that!

-- he stepped toward her, clasping her elbows. Wrenching her arm loose, she drew
back her hand. The slap took them both by surprise; he could see the shock of it
in her eyes, softening the anger.

His anger, too, dissipated, subsumed in a rising tide of grief and memory.

An uneasy stillness descended. She exhaled and turned away, stared over the
railing into the void below, where the sun fell in bright patches against the
parquet. Gerald lifted a hand to his cheek, and Sara turned now to face him, her
eyes lifted to him, her hand following his to his face. He felt her touch him
through the burning.

"I'm sorry," they said simultaneously.

Bright sheepish laughter at this synchronicity convulsed them, and Gerald,
embracing her, saw with horror how close she stood to the stairs. Unbidden, an
image possessed him: Sara, teetering on the edge of balance. In a series of
strobic flashes, he saw it as it might have been. Saw her fall away from him,
her arms outstretched for his grasping fingers. Saw her crash backwards to the
landing, tumble down the long flight to the foyer. Saw the blood--

--so little blood. My God, who would have thought? So little blood!

"I'm sorry," he said again.

She dug her fingers into his back. "It's not that."

"Then what?"

She pulled away and fixed him with her stare. "Your shoes, Gerald. You left them
on the stairs." Her hand stole over the tiny mound of her stomach. "I could have
fallen."

"I'm sorry," he said, and drew her to him.

Her voice tight with controlled emotion, she spoke again, barely perceptible,
punctuating her words with small blows against his shoulder. "Not again," she
whispered.

Clasping her even tighter, Gerald drew in a faint breath of her floral-scented
shampoo and gazed over her head at the stairs which fell infinitely away behind
her.

"Not again," he said.

Gerald watched apprehensively as Dr. Exavious dragged the ultrasound transducer
over Sara's belly, round as a small pumpkin and glistening with clear, odorless
gel. The small screen flickered with a shifting pattern of gray and black,
grainy and irresolute as the swirling path of a thunderstorm on a television
meteorologist's radar.

Sara looked on with a clear light in her face. It was an expression Gerald saw
with increasing frequency these days. A sort of tranquil beauty had come into
her features, a still internal repose not unlike that he sometimes glimpsed when
she moved over him in private rhythm, outward token of a concentration even then
wholly private and remote.

But never, never so lost to him as now.

"There now," Exavious said softly. He pointed at the screen. "There is the
heart, do you see it?"

Gerald leaned forward, staring. The room, cool, faintly redolent of antiseptic,
was silent but for Sara's small coos of delight, and the muted whir of the VCR
racked below the ultrasound scanner. Gerald drew a slow breath as the grayish
knot Exavious had indicated drew in upon itself and expanded in a pulse of
ceaseless, mindless syncopation.

"Good strong heart," Exavious said.

Slowly then, he began to move the transducer again. A feeling of unreality
possessed Gerald as he watched the structure of his child unfold across the
screen in changeable swaths of light. Here the kidneys "Good, very good,"
Exavious commented w and there the spine, knotted, serpentine. The budding arms
and legs -- Exavious pausing here to trace lambent measurements on the screen
with a wand, nodding to himself. And something else, which Exavious didn't
comment on, but which Gerald thought to be the hint of a vestigial tail curling
between the crooked lines of the legs. He had heard of children born with tails,
anomalous throwbacks from the long evolutionary rise out of the jungle.

Sara said, "Can you get an image of the whole baby?"

Exavious adjusted the transducer once more. The screen flickered, settled, grew
still at the touch of a button. "Not the whole baby. The beam is too narrow, but
this is close."

Gerald studied the image, the thing hunched upon itself in a swirl of viscous
fluid, spine twisted, misshapen head fractured by atavistic features: blind pits
he took for eyes, black slits for nostrils, the thin slash of the mouth, like a
snake's mouth, as lipless and implacable. He saw at the end of an out-flung limb
the curled talon of a hand. Gerald could not quell the feeling of revulsion
which welled up inside him. It looked not like a child, he thought, but like
some primitive reptile, a throwback to the numb, idiot fecundity of the
primordial slime.

He and Sara spoke at the same time:

"It's beautiful."

"My God, it doesn't even look human."

He said this without thought, and only in the shocked silence that followed did
he see how it must have sounded.

"I mean -- he said, but it was pointless. Sara would not meet his eyes.

Dr. Exavious said, "In fact, you are both correct. It is beautiful indeed, but
it hardly looks human. Not yet. It will, though." He patted Sara's hand. "Mr.
Hartshorn's reaction is not atypical."

"But not typical either, I'm guessing."

Exavious shrugged. "Perhaps." He touched a button and the image on the screen
disappeared. He cleaned and racked the transducer, halted the VCR.

"I was just thinking it looks...like something very ancient," Gerald said.
"Evolution, you know."

"Haeckel's law. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."

"I'm sorry?"

"A very old idea, Mr. Hartshorn. The development of the individual recapitulates
the development of the species."

"Is that true?" Sara asked.

"Not literally. In some metaphorical sense, I suppose." Bending, the doctor
ejected the tape from the VCR and handed it to Gerald. "But let me assure you,
your baby is fine. It is going to be a beautiful child."

At this, Gerald caught Sara's eye: I'm sorry, this look was meant to say, but
she would not yield. Later though, in the car, she forgave him, saying: "Did you
hear what he said, Gerald? A beautiful child." She laughed and squeezed his hand
and said it again: "Our beautiful, beautiful baby."

Gerald forced a smile. "That's right," he told her.

But in his heart another voice was speaking, a thin ugly voice he knew. Ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, it said, and Gerald gripped the steering wheel until
the flesh at his knuckles went bloodless; he smiled at Sara, and tried to wall
that voice away, and perhaps he thought he succeeded. But in the secret chambers
of his heart it resonated still. And he could not help but listen.

Three weeks later, Indian summer began to die away into fall, and Sara reported
that the baby had begun moving within her. Time and again over the next few
weeks, Gerald cupped his hand over the growing mound of her belly, alert to even
the tiniest shift, but he could feel nothing, nothing at all.

"There," Sara said. Breathlessly: "Can you feel it?"

Gerald shook his head, feeling, for no reason he could quite articulate, vaguely
relieved.

Sara continued to put on weight, complaining gamely as her abdomen expanded and
her breasts grew sensitive. Gerald sometimes came upon her unawares in the
bedroom, standing in her robe and gazing ruefully at the mirror, or sitting on
the bed, staring thoughtfully into a closet crowded with unworn clothes and
shoes that cramped her swollen feet. A thin dark line extended to her navel (the
rectus muscle, Exavious told them, never fear); she claimed she could do nothing
with her hair. At night, waking beside her in the darkness, Gerald found his
hands stealing over her in numb bewilderment. What had happened to Sara, long
known, much loved? The clean, angular lines he had known for years vanished, her
long bones hidden in this figure gently rounded and soft. Who was this strange
woman sleeping in his bed?

And yet, despite all, her beauty seemed to Gerald only more pronounced. She
moved easy in this new body, at home and graceful. That clear light he had
glimpsed sporadically in her face gradually grew brighter, omnipresent,
radiating out of her with a chill calm. For the first time in his life, Gerald
believed that old description he had so often read: Sara's eyes indeed did
sparkle. They danced, they shone with a brilliance that reflected his stare--
hermetic, enigmatic, defying interpretation. Her gaze pierced through him, into
a world or future he could not see or share. Her hands seemed unconsciously to
be drawn to her swollen belly; they crept over it constantly, they caressed it.

Her gums swelled. She complained of heartburn, but she would not use the antacid
tablets Exavious prescribed, would not touch aspirin or ibuprofen. In October,
she could no longer sleep eight hours undisturbed. Once, twice, three times a
night, Gerald woke to feel the mattress relinquish her weight with a long sigh.
He listened as she moved through the heavy dark to the bathroom, no lights, ever
considerate. He listened to the secret flow of urine, the flushing toilet's
throaty rush. He woke up, sore-eyed, yawning, and Dr. Exavious's words -- there
are many pressures, you understand, not least on the kidneys -- began to seem
less like a joke, more like a curse.

In November, they began attending the childbirth classes the doctor had
recommended. Twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Gerald crept out
of the office early, uncomfortably aware of Julian MacGregor's baleful gaze; at
such moments, he could not help but think of Lake Conley and the Heather Drug
campaign. As he retrieved the Lexus from the garage under the building and drove
to the rambling old Baptist church where the classes met, his thoughts turned to
his exhaustion-stitched eyes and his increasingly tardy appearances at the
office every morning. Uneasy snakes of anxiety coiled through his guts.

One afternoon, he sneaked away half an hour early and stopped by the bar on
Magnolia for two quick drinks. Calmer then, he drove to the church and parked,
letting himself in through the side door of the classroom a few minutes early.
Pregnant women thronged the room, luminous and beautiful and infinitely remote;
those few men like himself already present stood removed, on the fringes,
banished from this mysterious communion.

For a long terrible moment, he stood in the doorway and searched for Sara,
nowhere visible. Just the room crowded with these women, their bellies stirring
with a biological imperative neither he nor any man could know or comprehend,
that same strange light shining in their inscrutable eyes. They are in league
against us, whispered a voice unbidden in his mind. They are in league against
us.

Was that the cockroach's voice? Or was it his own?

Then the crowd shifted, Sara slipped into sight. She came toward him, smiling,
and he stepped forward to meet her, this question unresolved.

But the incident -- and the question it inspired -- lingered in his mind. When
he woke from restless dreams, it attended him, nagging, resonant: that intimate
communion of women he had seen, linked by fleshly sympathies he could not hope
to understand. Their eyes shining with a passion that surpassed any passion he
had known. The way they had -- that Sara had -- of cradling their swollen
bellies, as if to caress the -g

-- Christ, was it monstrous what came to mind?

-- growths within.

He sat up sweating, sheets pooled in his lap. Far down in the depths of the
house the furnace kicked on; overheated air, smelling musty and dry, wafted by
his face. Winter folded the house in chill intimacy, but in here...hot, hot. His
heart pounded. He wiped a hand over his forehead, dragged in a long breath.

Some watchful quality to the silence, the uneven note of her respiration, told
him that Sara, too, was awake. In the darkness. Thinking.

She said, "You okay?"

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know."

And this was sufficient for her. She asked nothing more of him than this simple
admission of weakness, she never had. She touched him now, her long hand cool
against his back. She drew him to the softness at her breast, where he rested
his head now, breath ragged, a panic he could not contain rising like wind in
the desert places inside him. Heavy dry sobs wracked him.

"Shhh, now," she said, not asking, just rocking him gently. Her hands moved
through his hair.

"Shhh," she whispered.

And slowly, by degrees imperceptible, the agony that had possessed him, she
soothed away. Nothing, he thought. Of course, it had been nothing --anxieties,
Lake Conley had said.

"You okay?" she asked again.

"I'm fine."

She pulled him closer. His hand came to her thigh, and without conscious
intention, he found himself opening her gown, kissing her, her breasts, fuller
now than he had ever known them. Her back arched. Her fingers were in his hair.

She whispered, "Gerald, that feels nice."

He continued to kiss her, his interest rising. The room was dark, but he could
see her very clearly in his mind: the Sara he had known, lithe and supple; this
new Sara, this strange woman who shared his bed, her beauty rising out of some
deep reservoir of calm and peace. He traced the slope of her breasts and belly.
Here. And here. He guided her, rolling her to her side, her back to him, rump
out-thrust as Exavious had recommended during a particularly awkward and
unforgettable consultation --

"No, Gerald," she said. She said, "No."

Gerald paused, breathing heavily. Below, in the depths of the darkened house,
the furnace shut off, and into the immense silence that followed, he said, "Sara
--"

"No," she said. "No, no."

Gerald rolled over on his back. He tried to throttle back the frustration rising
once more within him, not gone after all, not dissipated, merely...pushed away.

Sara turned to him, she came against him. He could feel the bulk of her belly
interposed between them.

"I'm afraid, Gerald. I'm afraid it'll hurt the baby."

Her fingers were on his thigh.

"It won't hurt the baby. Exavious said it won't hurt the baby. The books said it
won't hurt the baby. Everyone says it won't hurt the baby."

Her voice in the darkness: "But what if it does? I'm afraid, Gerald."

Gerald took a deep breath. He forced himself to speak calmly. "Sara, it won't
hurt the baby. Please."

She kissed him, her breath hot in his ear. Her fingers worked at him. She
whispered, "See? We can do something else." Pleading now. "We can be dose, I
want that."

But Gerald, the anger and frustration boiling out of him in a way he didn't
like, a way he couldn't control -- it scared him -- threw back the covers.
Stood, and reached for his robe, thinking: Hot. It's too hot. I've got to get
out of here. But he could not contain himself. He paused, fingers shaking as he
belted the robe, to fling back these words: "I'm not so sure I want to be close,
Sara. I'm not at all sure what I want anymore."

And then, in three quick strides, he was out the door and into the hall, hearing
the words she cried after him -- "Gerald, please" -- but not pausing to listen.

The flagstone floor in the den, chill against his bare feet, cooled him.
Standing behind the bar in the airy many-windowed room, he mixed himself a gin
and tonic with more gin than tonic and savored the almost physical sense of
heat, real and emotional, draining along his tension-knotted spine, through the
tight muscles of his legs and feet, into the placid stones beneath.

He took a calming swallow of gin and touched the remote on the bar. The
television blared to life in a far corner and he cycled through the channels as
he finished his drink. Disjointed, half-glimpsed images flooded the darkened
room: thuggish young men entranced by the sinister beat of the city, tanks
jolting over desert landscape, the gang at Cheers laughing it up at Cliff's
expense. Poor Cliff. You weren't supposed to identify with him, but Gerald
couldn't help it. Poor Cliff was just muddling through like anyone --

-- Like you, whispered that nasty voice, the voice he could not help but think
of as the cockroach.

Gerald shuddered.

On principle, he hated the remote -- the worst thing ever to happen to
advertising -- but now he fingered it again, moved past Letterman's arrogant
smirk. He fished more ice from the freezer, splashed clean-smelling gin in his
glass, chased it with tonic. Then, half-empty bottle of liquor and a jug of
tonic clutched in one hand, drink and television remote in the other, Gerald
crossed the room and lowered himself into the recliner.

His anger had evaporated B quick to come, quick to go, it always had been -- but
an uneasy tension lingered in its wake. He should go upstairs, apologize -- he
owed it to Sara -- but he could not bring himself to move. A terrific inertia
shackled him. He had no desire except to drink gin and thumb through the
channels, pausing now and again when something caught his eye, half-clad dancers
on MTV, a news story about the unknown cannibal killer in LA, once the tail-end
of a commercial featuring none other than Fenton the giant cockroach himself.

Christ.

Three or four drinks thereafter he must have dozed, for he came to himself
suddenly and unpleasantly when a nightmare jolted him awake. He sat up abruptly,
his empty glass crashing to the floor. He had a blurred impression of it as it
shattered, sending sharp scintillas of brilliance skating across the flagstones
as he doubled over, sharp ghosts of pain shooting through him, as something,
Christ --.

-- the cockroach --

-- gnawed ravenously at his swollen guts.

He gasped, head reeling with gin. The house brooded over him. Then he felt
nothing, the dream pain gone, and when, with reluctant horror, he lifted his
clutching hands from his belly, he saw only pale skin between the loosely belted
flaps of robe, not the gory mess he had irrationally expected, not the blood--

-- so little blood, who would have thought? So little blood and such a little --

No. He wouldn't think of that now, he wouldn't think of that at all.

He touched the lever on the recliner, lifting his feet, and reached for the
bottle of gin beside the chair. He gazed at the shattered glass and then studied
the finger or two of liquor remaining in the bottle; after a moment, he spun
loose the cap and tilted the bottle to his lips. Gasoline-harsh gin flooded his
mouth. Drunk now, dead drunk, he could feel it and he didn't care, Gerald stared
at the television.

A nature program flickered by, the camera closing on a brown grasshopper making
its way through lush undergrowth. He sipped at the gin, searched densely for the
remote. Must have slipped into the cushions. He felt around for it, but it
became too much of an effort. Hell with it.

The grasshopper continued to progress in disjointed leaps, the camera tracking
expertly, and this alone exerted over him a bizarre fascination. How the hell
did they film these things anyway? He had a quick amusing image: a near-sighted
entomologist and his cameraman tramping through some benighted wilderness,
slapping away insects and suffering the indignities of crotch-rot. Ha-ha. He
touched the lever again, dropping the footrest, and placed his bare feet on the
cool flagstones, mindful in a meticulously drunken way of the broken glass.

Through a background of exotic bird-calls, and the swish of antediluvian
vegetation, a cultured masculine voice began to speak: "Less common than in the
insect world, biological mimicry, developed by predators and prey through
millennia of natural selection is still..."

Gerald leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. A faraway voice
whispered in his mind. Natural selection. Sophomore biology had been long ago,
but he recognized the term as an element of evolutionary theory. What had
Exavious said?

That nasty voice whispering away...

He had a brief flash of the ultrasound video, which Sara had watched again only
that evening: the fetus, reptilian, primitive, an eerie wakeful quality to its
amniotic slumber.

On the screen, the grasshopper took another leap. Music came up on the
soundtrack, slow, minatory, almost subliminal. "...less commonly used by
predators," the voiceover said, "biological mimicry can be dramatically
effective when it is..." The grasshopper took another leap and plummeted toward
a clump of yellow and white flowers. Too fast for Gerald really to see, the
flowers exploded into motion. He sat abruptly upright, his heart racing, as
prehensile claws flashed out, grasped the stunned insect, and dragged it down.
"Take the orchid mantis of the Malaysian rainforest," the voiceover continued.
"Evolution has disguised few predators so completely. Watch again as..." And now
the image began to replay, this time in slow motion, so that Gerald could see in
agonizing detail the grasshopper's slow descent, the flower-colored mantis
unfolding with deadly and inevitable grace from the heart of the blossom,
grasping claws extended. Again. And again. Each time the camera moved in
tighter, tighter, until the mantis seemed to fill the screen with an urgency
dreadful and inexorable and wholly merciless.

Gerald grasped the bottle of gin and sat back as the narrator continued,
speaking now of aphid-farming ants and the lacewing larva. But he had ceased to
listen. He tilted the bottle to his lips, thinking again of that reptilian
fetus, awash in the womb of the woman he loved and did not want to lose. And now
that faraway voice in his mind sounded closer, more distinct. It was the voice
of the cockroach, but the words it spoke were those of Dr. Exavious.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Gerald took a last pull of the bottle of gin. Now what exactly did that mean?

The ball whizzed past in a blur as Gerald stepped up to meet it, his racquet
sweeping around too late. He spun and lunged past Lake Conley to catch the
ricochet off the back wall, but the ball slipped past, bouncing twice, and
slowed to a momentum draining roll.

"Goddamn it!" Gerald flung his racquet hard after the ball and collapsed against
the back wall. He drew up his legs and draped his forearms over his knees.

"Game," Lake said.

"Go to hell." Gerald closed his eyes, tilted his head against the wall and tried
to catch his breath. He could smell his own sweat, tinged with the sour odor of
gin. He didn't open his eyes when Lake slid down beside him.

"Kind of an excessive reaction even for you," Lake said.

"Stress."

"Work?"

"That, too." Gerald gazed at Lake through slitted eyes. "Ahh."

They sat quietly, listening to a distant radio blare from the weight-room. From
adjoining courts, the squeak of rubber-soled shoes and the intermittent smack of
balls came to them, barely audible. Gerald watched, exhaustion settling over him
like a gray blanket, while Lake traced invisible patterns on the floor with the
edge of his racquet.

"Least I don't have to worry about the Heather Drug campaign," Gerald said.
Almost immediately, he wished he could pull the words back. Unsay them.

For a long time, Lake didn't answer. When he did, he said only, "You have a
right to be pissed off about that."

"Not really. Long time since I put a decent campaign together. Julian knows what
he's doing."

Lake shrugged.

Again, Gerald tilted his head against the wall, closing his eyes. There it was,
there it always was anymore, that image swimming in his internal darkness: the
baby, blind and primitive and preternaturally aware. He saw it in his dreams;
sometimes when he woke he had vague memories of a red fury clawing free of his
guts. And sometimes it wasn't this dream he remembered, but another: looking on,
helpless, horrified, while something terrible exploded out of Sara's smoothly
rounded belly.

That one was worse.

That one spoke with the voice of the cockroach. That one said: You're going to
lose her.

Lake was saying, "Not to put too fine a point on it, Gerald, but you look like
hell. You come to work smelling like booze half the time, I don't know what you
expect."

Expect? What did he expect exactly? And what would Lake say if he told him?

Instead, he said, "I'm not sleeping much. Sara doesn't sleep well. She gets up
two, three times a night."

"So you're just sucking down a few drinks so you can sleep at night, that
right?"

Gerald didn't answer.

"What's up with you anyway, Gerald?"

Gerald stared into the darkness behind his closed eyes, the world around him
wheeling and vertiginous. He flattened his palms against the cool wooden floor,
seeking a tangible link to the world he had known before, the world he had known
and lost, he did not know where or how. Seeking to anchor himself to an earth
that seemed to be sliding away beneath him. Seeking solace.

"Gerald?"

In his mind, he saw the mantis orchid; on the screen of his eyelids, he watched
it unfold with deadly grace and drag down the hapless grasshopper.

He said: "I watch the sonogram tape, you know? I watch it at night when Sara's
sleeping. It doesn't look like a baby, Lake. It doesn't look like anything human
at all. And I think I'm going to lose her. I think I'm going to lose her, it's
killing her, it's some kind of... something...I don't know...it's going to take
her away."

"Gerald--"

"No. Listen. When I first met Sara, I remember the thing I liked about her --
one of the things I liked about her anyway, I liked so much about her,
everything-- but the thing I remember most was this day when I first met her
family. I went home with her from school for a week-end and her whole family w
her little sister, her mom, her dad-- they were all waiting. They had prepared
this elaborate meal and we ate in the dining room, and you knew that they were a
family. It was just this quality they had, and it didn't mean they even liked
each other all the time, but they were there for each other. You could feel it,
you could breathe it in, like oxygen. That's what I wanted. That's what we have
together, that's what I'm afraid of losing. I'm afraid of losing her."

He was afraid to open his eyes. He could feel tears there. He was afraid to look
at Lake, to share his weakness, which he had never shared with anyone but Sara.

Lake said, "But don't you see, the baby will just draw you closer. Make you even
more of a family than you ever were. You're afraid, Gerald, but it's just normal
anxiety."

"I don't think so."

"The sonogram?" Lake said. "Your crazy thoughts about the sonogram? Everybody
thinks that. But everything changes when the baby comes, Gerald. Everything."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Gerald said.

AFTER THE GYM, Gerald drove for hours without conscious purpose, trusting
mindless reflexes to take him where they would. Around him sprawled the city,
senseless, stunned like a patient on a table, etherized by winter.

By the time he pulled the Lexus to the broken curb in a residential neighborhood
that had been poor two decades past, a few flakes of snow had begun to swirl
through the expanding cones of his headlights. Dusk fell out of the December
sky. Gerald cracked his window, inhaled cold smoke-stained air, and gazed
diagonally across the abandoned street.

Still there. My God, still there after these ten years. A thought recurred to
him, an image he had not thought of in all the long months ages, they felt like
-- since that first visit to Dr. Exavious: like stepping into icy water, this
stepping into the past.

No one lived there anymore. He could see that from the dilapidated state of the
house, yard gone to seed, windows broken, paint that had been robin's egg blue a
decade ago weathered now to the dingy shade of mop water. Out front, the wind
creaked a realtor's sign long since scabbed over with rust. The skeletal
swing-set remained in the barren yard, and it occurred to him now that his child
-- his and Sara's child -- might have played there if only...

If only.

Always and forever if only.

The sidewalk, broken and weedy, still wound lazily from the street. The concrete
stoop still extruded from the front door like a grotesquely foreshortened
tongue. Three stairs still mounted to the door, the railing -- Dear God --
shattered and dragged away years since.

So short. Three short stairs. So little blood. Who could have known?

He thought of the gym, Lake Conley, the story he had wanted to tell but had not.
He had not told anyone. And why should he? No great trauma, there; no abuse or
hatred, no fodder for the morning talk shows; just the subtle cruelties, the
little twists of steel that made up life.

But always there somehow. Never forgotten. Memories not of this house, though
this house had its share God knows, but of a house very much like this one, in a
neighborhood pretty much the same, in another city, in another state, a hundred
years in the past or so it seemed. Another lifetime.

But unforgettable all the same.

Gerald had never known his father, had never seen him except in a single
photograph: a merchant mariner, broad-shouldered and handsome, his wind-burned
face creased by a broad incongruous smile. Gerald had been born in a different
age, before such children became common, in a different world where little boys
without fathers were never allowed to forget their absences and loss. His
mother, he supposed, had been a good woman in her way-- had tried, he knew, and
now, looking back with the discerning eye of an adult, he could see how it must
have been for her: the thousand slights she had endured, the cruelties visited
upon a small-town girl and the bastard son she had gotten in what her innocence
mistook for love. Yes. He understood her flight to the city and its anonymity;
he understood the countless lovers; now, at last, he understood the drinking
when it began in earnest, when her looks had begun to go. Now he saw what she
had been seeking. Solace. Only solace.

But forgive?

Now, sitting in his car across the street from the house where his first child
had been miscarried, where he had almost lost forever the one woman who had
thought him worthy of her love, Gerald remembered.

The little twists of steel, spoken without thought or heat, that made up life.

How old had he been then? Twelve? Thirteen?

Old enough to know, anyway. Old enough to creep into the living room and crouch
over his mother as she lay there sobbing, drunken, bruised, a cold wind blowing
through the open house where the man, whoever he had been, had left the door to
swing open on its hinges after he had beaten her. Old enough to scream into his
mother's whiskey-shattered face: I hate you/I hate you/I hate you!

Old enough to remember her reply: If it wasn't for you, you little bastard, he
never would have left. If it wasn't for you, he never would have left me.

Old enough to remember, sure.

But old enough to forgive? Not then, Gerald knew. Not now. And maybe never.

THEY DID NOT GO to bed together. Sara came to him in the den, where he sat in
the recliner, drinking gin and numbly watching television. He saw her in the
doorway that framed the formal living room they never used, and beyond that, in
diminishing perspective, the broad open foyer: but Sara foremost, foregrounded
and unavoidable.

She said, "I'm going to bed. Are you coming?"

"I thought I'd stay up for a bit."

She crossed the flagstone floor to him in stocking feet, soundlessly, like a
grotesquely misshapen apparition w her belly preceding her. He wondered if the
long lines of the body he used to know were in there somewhere. She was still
beautiful, still graceful, to be sure. But she possessed now a grace and beauty
unlike any he had known, ponderous and alien, wholly different from that she had
possessed the first time he had seen her all those years ago -- ghost-like then
as well, an apparition from a world stable and dependable, a world of family,
glimpsed in heart-wrenching profile through the clamorous throng of the
University Center cafeteria.

She knelt by him. "Please come to bed."

He swished his drink. Ice bobbed and clinked. "I need to unwind."

"Gerald..."

"No really, I'm not sleepy, okay?" He smiled, and he could feel the falseness of
the smile, but it satisfied her.

She leaned toward him, her lips brushed his cheek with a pressure barely present
-- the merest papery rush of moth wings in a darkened room. And then she was
gone.

Gerald drank: stared into the television's poison glow and drank gin and tonic,
nectar and ambrosia. Tastes like a Christmas tree, Sara had told him the first
night they were together, really together. He had loved her, he thought. He
touched the remote, cycled past a fragmentary highlight of an NFL football game;
past the dependable hysteria over the LA cannibal killer, identity unknown; past
the long face of Mr. Ed. Drank gin and cycled through and through the channels,
fragmentary windows on a broken world. Oh, he had loved her.

Later, how much later he didn't know and didn't care, Gerald found his way to
the bedroom. Without undressing, he lay supine on the bed and stared sightlessly
at the ceiling, Sara beside him, sleeping the hard sleep of exhaustion for now,
though Gerald knew it would not last. Before the night was out, the relentless
demands of the child within her would prod her into wakefulness. Lying there,
his eyes gradually adjusting to the dark until the features of the room appeared
to stand out, blacker still against the blackness, something, some whim, some
impulse he could not contain, compelled him to steal his hand beneath the
covers: stealthy now, through the folds of the sheet; past the hem of her gown,
tucked up below her breasts; at last flattening his palm along the arc of her
distended belly. Sara took in a heavy breath, kicked at the covers restlessly,
subsided.

Silence all through the house, even the furnace silent in its basement lair:
just Sara's steady respiration, and Gerald with her in the weighty dark, daring
hardly to breathe, aware now of a cold sobriety in the pressure of the air.

The child moved.

For the first time, he felt it. He felt it move. An icy needle of emotion
pierced him. It moved, moved again, the faintest shift in its embryonic slumber,
bare adjustment of some internal gravity.

Just a month, he thought. Only a month.

The child moved, really moved now, palpable against his outstretched palm.
Gerald threw back the covers, sitting upright, the room wheeling about him so
swiftly that he had to swallow hard against an obstruction rising in his throat.
Sara kicked in her sleep, and then was still.

Gerald looked down at her, supine, one long hand curled at her chin, eyes
closed, mouth parted, great mound of belly half-visible below the hem of her
up-turned gown. Now again, slowly, he laid a hand against her warm stomach, and
yes, just as he had feared, it happened again: the baby moved, a long slow
pressure against his palm.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, hissed the thin nasty voice of the cockroach.
But what exactly did that mean.2

He moved his palm along her taut belly, pausing as Sara sighed in her sleep, and
here too, like the slow pressure of some creature of the unknown deep, boiling
through the placid waters, came that patient and insistent pressure. And then
something more, not mere pressure, not gentle: a sudden, powerful blow. Sara
moaned and arched her back, but the blow came again, as though the creature
within her had hurled itself against the wall of the imprisoning womb. Why
didn't she wake up? Gerald drew his hand away. Blow wasn't really the right
word, was it?

What was?

His heart hammered at his ribcage; transfixed, Gerald moved his hand back toward
Sara's belly. No longer daring to touch her, he skated his hand over the long
curve on an inch-thin cushion of air. My God, he thought. My God. For he could
see it now, he could see it: an outward bulge of the taut flesh with each
repeated blow, as though a fist had punched her from within. He moved his hand,
paused, and it happened again, sudden and sure, an outward protrusion that
swelled and sank and swelled again. In kind of panic--

-- what the hell was going on here

-- Gerald moved his hand, paused, moved it again, tracing the curve of Sara's
belly in a series of jerks and starts. And it followed him. Even though he was
no longer touching her, it followed him, that sudden outward protrusion, the
thing within somehow aware of his presence and trying to get at him. The blows
quickened even as he watched, until they began to appear and disappear with
savage, violent speed.

And still she did not wake up.

Not a blow, he thought. A strike.

Like the swift, certain strike of a cobra. An image unfolded with deadly urgency
in Gerald's mind: the image of the orchid-colored mantis exploding outward from
its flowery hole to drag down the helpless grasshopper and devour it.

Gerald jerked his hand away as if stung.

Sara's abdomen was still and pale as a tract of mountain snow. Nothing moved
there. He reached the covers across her and lay back. A terrific weight settled
over him; his chest constricted with panic; he could barely draw breath.

The terrible logic of the thing revealed itself to him at last. Ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, Exavious had told him. And what if it was truer What if
each child reflected in its own development the evolutionary history of the
entire species?

Imagine:

Somewhere, far far back in the evolutionary past -- who could say how far? --
but somewhere, it began. A mutation that should have died, but didn't, a
creature born of man and woman that survived to feed...and reproduce. Imagine a
recessive gene so rare that it appeared in only one of every ten thousand
individuals -- one of every hundred thousand even. For that would be sufficient,
wouldn't it? Gerald couldn't calculate the odds, but he knew that it would be
sufficient, that occasionally, three or four times in a generation, two carriers
of such a gene would come together and produce... What? A child that was not
what it appeared to be. A child that was not human. A monster clothed in human
flesh.

Beside him, Sara moaned in her sleep. Gerald did not move.

He shut his eyes and saw against the dark screens of his eyelids, the
flower-colored mantis, hidden in its perfumed lair; saw its deadly graceful
assault, its pincers as they closed around the helpless grasshopper and dragged
it down. The words of the narrator came back to him as well: natural selection
favors the most efficient predator. And the most efficient predator is the
monster that walks unseen among its chosen prey.

Terror gripped him as at last he understood how it must have been through all
the long span of human history: Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac, the cannibal killer
loose even now in the diseased bowels of Los Angeles.

We are hunted, he thought. We are hunted.

He stumbled clumsily from the bed and made his way into the adjoining bathroom,
where for a long time he knelt over the toilet and was violently, violently
sick.

Sanity returned to him in perceptual shards: watery light through the slatted
blinds, the mattress rolling under him like a ship in rough waters, a jagged sob
of fear and pain that pierced him through. Sara.

Gerald sat upright, swallowing bile. He took in the room with a wild glance.

Sara: in the doorway to the bathroom, long legs twisted beneath her, hands
clutched in agony at her bloated abdomen. And blood ---

-- my God how could you have ---

-- so much blood, a crimson gout against the pale carpet, a pool spreading over
the tiled floor of the bathroom.

Gerald reached for the phone, dialed 911. And then he went to her, took her in
his arms, comforted her.

SWARMING MASSES of interns and nurses in white smocks swept her away from him at
the hospital. Later, during the long gray hours in the waiting room hours spent
staring at the mindless flicker of television or gazing through dirty windows
that commanded a view of the parking lot, cup after cup of sour vending machine
coffee clutched in hands that would not warm -- Gerald could not recall how they
had spirited her away. In his last clear memory he saw himself step out of the
ambulance into an icy blood-washed dawn, walking fast beside the gurney, Sara's
cold hand clutched in his as the automatic doors slipped open on the chill
impersonal reaches of the emergency room.

Somehow he had been shunted aside, diverted without the solace of a last
endearment, without even a backward glance. Instead he found himself wrestling
with a severe gray-headed woman about insurance policies and admission
requirements, a kind of low-wattage bureaucratic hell he hated every minute of,
but missed immediately when it ended and left him to his thoughts.

Occasionally he gazed at the pay phones along the far wall, knowing he should
call Sara's mother but somehow unable to gather sufficient strength to do so.
Later, he glimpsed Exavious in an adjacent corridor, but the doctor barely broke
stride. He merely cast at Gerald a speculative glance

-- he knows, he knows ---

-- and passed on, uttering over his shoulder these words in his obscurely
accented English: "We are doing everything in our power, Mr. Hartshorn. I will
let you know as soon as I have news."

Alone again. Alone with bitter coffee, recriminations, the voice of the
cockroach.

An hour passed. At eleven o'clock, Exavious returned. "It is not good, I'm
afraid," he said. "We need to perform a caesarean section, risky under the
circumstances, but we have little choice if the baby is to survive."

"And Sara?"

"We cannot know, Mr. Hartshorn." Exavious licked his lips, met Gerald's gaze.
"Guarded optimism, shall we say. The fall..." He lifted his hand "Your wife is
feverish, irrational. We need you to sign some forms."

And afterward, after the forms were signed, he fixed Gerald for a long moment
with that same speculative stare and then he turned away. "I'll be in touch."

Gerald glared at the clock as if he could by force of will speed time's passage.
At last he stood, crossed once more to the vending machines, and for the first
time in seven years purchased a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. After a word
with the receptionist, he stepped into the bitterly cold December morning to
smoke.

A few flakes of snow had begun to drift aimlessly about in the wind. Gerald
stood under the E.R. awning, beneath the bruised and sullen sky, the familiar
stink of cigarette smoke somehow comforting in his nostrils. He gazed out over
the crowded parking lot, his eyes watering. Like stepping into icy water, he
thought, this stepping into the past: for what he saw was not the endless rows
of cars, but the house he had visited for the first time in a decade only a day
ago. And the voice he heard in his head was neither the voice of the hospital
p.a. system nor the voice of the wind. It was the voice of the cockroach, saying
words he did not want to hear.

You, the cockroach told him. You are responsible.

Gerald flipped his cigarette, still burning, into the gutter and wrapped his
arms close about his shoulders. But the cold he felt was colder than mere
weather.

Responsible.

He supposed he had been. Even now, he could not forget the isolation they had
endured during the first years of their marriage. The fear. It hadn't been easy
for either of them -- not for Gerald, sharing for the first time the bitter
legacy of a life he had still to come to terms with; not for Sara, smiling
patrician Sara, banished from a family who would not accept the impoverished
marriage she had made. To this day Gerald had not forgiven his in-laws for the
wedding: the thin-lipped grimace that passed for his mother-in-law's smile; the
encounter with his father-in-law in the spotless rest room of the Marriott, when
the stout old dentist turned from a urinal to wag a finger in Gerald's face.
"Don't ever ask me for a dime, Gerald," he had said. "Sara's made her choice and
she'll have to abide by it."

No wonder we were proud, he thought. Sara had taken an evening job as a cashier
at a supermarket. Gerald continued at the ad agency, a poorly paid associate,
returning nightly to the abandoned rental house where he sat blankly in front of
the television and awaited the sound of Sara's key in the lock. God knows they
hadn't needed a baby.

But there it was. There it was.

And so the pressure began to tell, the endless pressure to stretch each check
just a little further. Gerald could not remember when or why money he supposed
-- but gradually the arguments had begun. And he had started drinking. And one
night...

One night. Well.

Gerald slipped another cigarette free of the pack and brought it to his lips.
Cupping his hands against the wind, he set the cigarette alight, and drew
deeply.

One night, she was late from work and, worried, Gerald met her at the door. He
stepped out onto the concrete stoop to greet her, his hand curled about the
graying wooden rail. When Sara looked up at him, her features taut with worry in
the jaundiced corona of the porch light, he had just for a moment glimpsed a
vision of himself as she must have seen him: bearish, slovenly, stinking of
drink. And poor. Just another poor fucking bastard, only she had married this
one.

He opened his arms to her, needing her to deny the truth he had seen reflected
in her eyes. But she fended him off, a tight-lipped little moue of distaste
crossing her features -- he knew that expression, he had seen it on her mother's
face.

Her voice was weary when she spoke. Her words stung him like a lash. "Drinking
again, Gerald?" And then, as she started to push her way past him: "Christ,
sometimes I think Mom was right about you."

And he had struck her.

For the first and only time in all the years they had been married, he had
struck her -- without thought or even heat, the impulse arising out of some deep
poisoned well-spring of his being, regretted even as he lifted his hand.

Sara stumbled. Gerald moved forward to steady her, his heart racing. She fell
away from him forever, and in that timeless interval Gerald had a grotesquely
heightened sense of his surroundings: the walk, broken and weedy; the dim shadow
of a moth battering himself tirelessly against the porch light; in the sky a
thousand thousand stars. Abruptly, the world shifted into motion again; in
confusion, Gerald watched an almost comically broad expression of relief spread
over Sara's face. The railing. The railing had caught her.

"Jesus, Sara, I'm sort --" he began to say, but a wild gale of hilarity had
risen up inside her.

She hadn't begun to realize the consequences of this simple action, Gerald saw.
She did not yet see that with a single blow he had altered forever the tenor of
their relationship. But the laughter was catching, and he stepped down now,
laughing himself, laughing hysterically in a way that was not funny, to soothe
away her fears before she saw the damage he had done. Maybe she would never see
it.

But just at that moment, the railing snapped with a sound like a gunshot. Sara
fell hard, three steps to the ground, breath exploding from her lungs.

But again, she was okay. Just shaken up.

Only later, in the night, would Gerald realize what he had done. Only when the
contractions took her would he begin to fear. Only when he tore back the
blankets of the bed and saw the blood

-- so little blood

--would he understand.

Gerald snapped away his cigarette in disgust. They had lost the child. Sara,
too, had almost died. And yet she had forgiven him. She had forgiven him.

He shivered and looked back through the cold-fogged windows at the waiting room,
but he couldn't tolerate the idea of another moment in there. He turned back to
the parking lot, exhaled into his cupped hands. He thought of Dr. Exavious,
those febrile eyes, the way he had of seeming to gaze into the secret regions of
your heart. Probing you. Judging you. Finding you wanting.

There was something else.

Last night.

With this thought, Gerald experienced bleak depths of self-knowledge he had
never plumbed before. He saw again the smooth expanse of his wife's belly as he
had seen it last night, hideously aswarm with the vicious assaults of the
creature within. Now he recognized this vision as a fevered hallucination,
nothing more. But last night, last night he had believed. And after his feverish
dream, after he had been sick, he had done something else, hadn't he? Something
so monstrous and so simple that until this moment he had successfully avoided
thinking of it.

He had stood up from the toilet, and there, in the doorway between the bedroom
and the bathroom, he had kicked off his shoes, deliberately arranging them heel
up on the floor. Knowing she would wake to go to the john two, maybe three times
in the night. Knowing she would not turn on the light. Knowing she might fall.

Hoping.

You are responsible.

Oh yes, he thought, you are responsible, my friend. You are guilty.

Just at that moment, Gerald felt a hand on his shoulder. Startled, he turned too
fast, feeling the horror rise into his face and announce his guilt to anyone who
cared to see. Exavious stood behind him. "Mr. Hartshorn," he said.

Gerald followed the doctor through the waiting room and down a crowded corridor
that smelled of ammonia. Exavious did not speak; his lips pressed into a narrow
line beneath his mustache. He led Gerald through a set of swinging doors into a
cavernous chamber lined with pallets of supplies and soiled linen heaped in
laundry baskets. Dusty light-bulbs in metal cages cast a fitful glow over the
concrete floor.

"What's going on?" Gerald asked. "How's Sara?"

Exavious did not reply. He stopped by a broad door of corrugated metal that
opened on a loading dock, and thumbed the button of the freight elevator.

"One moment, please, Mr. Hartshorn," he said.

They waited silently as the doors slid aside. Exavious gestured Gerald in, and
pressed the button for six. With a metallic clunk of gears, they lurched into
motion. Gerald stared impassively at the numbers over the door, trying to
conceal the panic that had begun to hammer against his ribs. The noisy progress
of the elevator seemed almost to speak to him; if he listened closely, he could
hear the voice of the cockroach, half-hidden in the rattle of machinery:

She's dead, Gerald. She's dead and you're responsible.

Exavious knew. Gerald could see that clearly now. He wasn't even surprised when
Exavious reached out and stopped the lift between the fifth and sixth
floors--just sickened, physically sickened by a sour twist of nausea that
doubled him over as the elevator ground to a halt with a screech of overtaxed
metal. Gerald sagged against the wall as a wave of vertigo passed through him.
Sara. Lost. Irrevocably lost. He swallowed hard against the metallic taste in
his mouth and closed his eyes.

They hung suspended in the shaft, in the center of an enormous void that seemed
to pour in at Gerald's eyes and ears, at every aperture of his body. He drew it
in with his breath, he was drowning in it.

Exavious said: "This conversation never occurred, Mr. Hartshorn. I will deny it
if you say it did."

Gerald said nothing. He opened his eyes, but he could see only the dull sheen of
the elevator car's walls, scarred here and there by careless employees. Only the
walls, like the walls of a prison. He saw now that he would not ever really
leave this prison he had made for himself. Everything that had ever been
important to him he had destroyed-- his dignity, his self-respect, his honor and
his love. And Sara. Sara most of all.

Exavious said: "I have spoken with Dr. Schwartz. I should have done so sooner."
He licked his lips. "When I examined your wife I found no evidence to suggest
that she could not carry a child to term. Even late-term miscarriages are not
uncommon in first pregnancies. I saw no reason to delve into her history."

He said all this without looking at Gerald. He did not raise his voice or
otherwise modify his tone. He stared forward with utter concentration, his eyes
like hard pebbles.

"I should have seen the signs. They were present even in your first office
visit. I was looking at your wife, Mr. Hartshorn. I should have been looking at
you."

Gerald's voice cracked when he spoke. "Schwartz--what did Schwartz say?"

"Dr. Schwartz was hesitant to say anything at all. He is quite generous: he
wished to give you the benefit of the doubt. When pressed, however, he admitted
that there had been evidence -- a bruise on your wife's face, certain statements
she made under anesthesia -- that the miscarriage had resulted from an
altercation, a physical blow. But you both seemed very sorrowful, so he did not
pursue the matter."

Exavious turned to look at Gerald, turned on him the terrific illumination of
his gaze, his darkly refulgent eyes exposing everything that Gerald had sought
so long to hide. "A woman in your wife's superb physical condition does not
often have two late-term miscarriages, Mr. Hartshorn. Yet Mrs. Hartshorn claims
that her fall was accidental, that she tripped over a pair of shoes. Needless to
say, I do not believe her, though I am powerless to act on my belief. But I had
to speak, Mr. Hartshorn -- not for you, but for myself."

He punched a button. The elevator jerked into motion once more.

"You are a very lucky man, Mr. Hartshorn. Your wife is awake and doing well. She
is recovering from the epidural." He turned once more and fixed Gerald in his
gaze. "The baby survived. A boy. You are the father of a healthy baby boy."

The elevator stopped and the doors opened onto a busy floor. "It is more than
you deserve."

SARA, THEN.

Sara at last, flat on her back in a private room on the sixth floor. At the
sight of her through the wire-reinforced window in the door, Gerald felt a
bottomless relief well up within him.

He brushed past Dr. Exavious without speaking. The door opened so silently on
its oiled hinges that she did not hear him enter. For a long moment, he stood
there in the doorway, just looking at her-- allowing the simple vision of her
beauty and her joy to flow through him, to fill up the void that had opened in
his heart.

He moved forward, his step a whisper against the tile. Sara turned to look at
him. She smiled, lifted a silencing finger to her lips, and then nodded, her
eyes returning to her breast and the child that nursed there, wizened and red
and patiently sucking.

Just a baby. A child like any other. But different, Gerald knew, different and
special in no way he could ever explain, for this child was his own. A feeling
like none he had ever experienced -- an outpouring of warmth and affection so
strong that it was almost frightening -- swept over him as he came to the
bedside.

Everything Lake Conley had told him was true.

What happened next happened so quickly that Gerald for a moment believed it to
be an hallucination. The baby, not yet twelve hours old, pulled away from Sara's
breast, pulled away and turned, turned to look at him. For a single terrifying
moment Gerald glimpsed not the wrinkled child he had beheld when first he
entered the room, but...something else.

Something quicksilver and deadly, rippling with the sleek, purposeful
musculature of a predator. A fleeting impression of oily hide possessed him --
of a bullet-shaped skull from which glared narrow-pupiled eyes ashine with chill
intelligence. Eyes like a snake's eyes, as implacable and smugly knowing.

Mocking me, Gerald thought. Showing itself not because it has to, but because it
wants to. Because it can.

And then his old friend the cockroach: Your child. Yours.

Gerald extended his hands to Sara. "Can I?" he asked.

And then he drew it to his breast, blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh, this
creature that was undeniably and irrevocably his own child.





DALE BAILEY

COCKROACH

AFTER THE EXAMINATION, they gathered in the office of the physician, an
obstetrician named Exavious that a friend of Sara's had recommended. Dr.
Exavious specialized in what Sara termed "high-risk pregnancies," which Gerald
Hartshorn took to mean that his wife, at thirty-seven, was too old to be having
babies. Secretly, Gerald thought of his wife's...condition...not as a natural
biological process, but as a disease: as fearsome and intractable, and perhaps
-- though he didn't wish to think of it -- as fatal.

During the last weeks, a seed of fear Gerald had buried almost ten years ago --
buried and forgotten, he had believed -- had at last begun to germinate, to
spread hungry tendrils in the rich loam of his heart, to feed.

And now, such thoughts so preoccupied him that Gerald only half-listened as Dr.
Exavious reassured Sara. "We have made great strides in bringing to term women
of your age," he was saying, "especially women in such superb condition as I
have found you to be..."

These words, spoken in the obscurely accented English which communicated an aura
of medical expertise to men of Gerald's class (white, affluent, conservative,
and, above all, coddled by a network of expensive specialists) -- these words
should have comforted him.

They did not. Specialist or not, the fact remained that Gerald didn't like
Exavious, slim and Arabic, with febrile eyes and a mustache like a narrow
charcoal slash in his hazel flesh. In fact, Gerald didn't like much of anything
about this...situation. Most of all, he didn't like being left alone with the
doctor when Sara excused herself at the end of the meeting. He laced his fingers
in his lap and gazed off into a corner, uncertain how to proceed.

"These times can be difficult for a woman," Exavious said. "There are many
pressures, you understand, not least on the kidneys."

Gerald allowed himself a polite smile: recognition of the intended humor,
nothing more. He studied the office-- immaculate carpet, desk of dark expensive
wood, diplomas mounted neatly on one wall -- but saw no clock. Beyond tinted
windows, the parking lot shimmered with midsummer heat. Julian would be nuts at
the office. But he didn't see how he could steal a glance at his watch without
being rude.

Exavious leaned forward and said, "So you are to be a father. You must be very
happy, Mr. Hartshorn."

Gerald folded and unfolded his arms. "Oh... I guess. Sure."

"If you have further questions, questions I haven't answered, I'd be happy
to..." He let the rest of the sentence hang, unspoken, in the air. "I know this
can be a trying experience for some men."

"I'm just a bit nervous, that's all."

"Ah. And why is that?"

"Well, her history, you know."

Exavious smiled. He waved a hand dismissively. "Such incidents are not uncommon,
Mr. Hartshorn, as I'm sure you know. Your wife is quite healthy.
Physiologically, she is twenty-five. You have nothing to fear."

Exavious sighed; he toyed with a lucite pyramid in which a vaguely alien-looking
model of a fetus had been embedded. The name of a drug company had been
imprinted in black around its base. "There is one thing, however."

Gerald swallowed. A slight pressure constricted his lungs. "What's that?"

"Your wife has her own fears and anxieties because of the history you mentioned.
She indicated these during the examination -- that's why she came to me in the
first place. Emotional states can have unforeseen physiological effects. They
can heighten the difficulty of a pregnancy. Most doctors don't like to admit it,
but the fact is we understand very little about the mind-body relationship.
However, one thing is clear: your wife's emotional condition is every bit as
important as her physical state." Exavious paused. Some vagary of the
air-conditioning swirled to Gerald's nostrils a hint of his after-shave lotion.

"I guess I don't really understand," Gerald said.

"I'm just trying to emphasize that your wife will need your support, Mr.
Hartshorn. That's all."

"Are you suggesting that I wouldn't be supportive?"

"Of course not. I merely noticed that --"

"I don't know what you noticed, but it sounds to me --"

"Mr. Hartshorn, please."

"-- like you think I'm going to make things difficult for her. You bet I'm
nervous. Anyone in my circumstances would be. But that doesn't mean I won't be
supportive." In the midst of this speech, Gerald found himself on his feet, a
hot blush rising under his collar. "I don't know what you're suggest-ing--" he
continued, and then, when Exavious winced and lifted his hands palms outward, he
consciously lowered his voice. "I don't know what you're suggesting --"

"Mr. Hartshorn, please. My intent was not to offend. I understand that you are
fearful for your wife. I am simply trying to tell you that she must not be
allowed to perceive that you too are afraid."

Gerald drew in a long breath. He sat, feeling sheepish. "I'm sorry, it's...I've
been under a lot of pressure at work lately. I don't know what came over me."

Exavious inclined his head. "Mr. Hartshorn, I know you are busy. But might I ask
you a small favor -- for your sake and for your wife's?"

"Sure, please."

"Just this: take some time, Mr. Hartshorn, take some time and think. Are you
fearful for your wife's welfare, or are you fearful for your own?"

Just then, before Gerald could reply, the door from the corridor opened and Sara
came in, her long body as yet unblemished by the child within. She brushed back
a wisp of blonde hair as Gerald turned to face her. "Gerald, are you okay? I
thought I heard your --"

"Please, Mrs. Hartshorn, there was nothing," the doctor said warmly. "Is that
not correct, Mr. Hartshorn! Nothing, nothing at all."

And somehow Gerald recovered himself enough to accede to this simple deception
as the doctor ushered them into the corridor. Outside, while Sara spoke with the
receptionist, he turned at a feathery touch on his shoulder. Dr. Exavious
enveloped his hand and gazed into his eyes for a long and obscurely terrible
moment; and then Gerald wrenched himself away, feeling naked and exposed, as if
those febrile eyes had illuminated the hollows of his soul, as if he too had
been subjected to an examination and had been found wanting.

"I don't know," Gerald said as he guided the Lexus out of the clinic lot. "I
don't like him much. I liked Schwartz better."

He glanced over at Sara, her long hand curved beneath her chin, but she wouldn't
meet his eyes.

Rush hour traffic thickened around them. He should call Julian; there wasn't
much point in trying to make it back to the office now. He had started to reach
for the phone when Sara said, "He's a specialist."

"You heard him: you're in great shape. You don't need a specialist."

"I'd feel more comfortable with him."

Gerald shrugged. "I just didn't think he was very personable, that's all."

"Since when do we choose our doctors because they're personable, Gerald? She
drummed her fingers against the dash. "Besides, Schwartz wasn't especially
charming." She paused; then, with a chill hint of emotion, she added, "Not to
mention competent."

Like stepping suddenly into icy water, this -- was it grief, after all these
years? Or was it anger?

He extended a hand to her, saying, "Now come on, Sara --"

"Drop it, Gerald."

"Fine."

An oppressive silence filled the car. No noise from without penetrated the
interior, and the concentrated purr of the engine was so muted that it seemed
rather a negation of sound. A disquieting notion possessed him: perhaps there
never had been sound in the world.

A fractured series of images pierced him: rain-slicked barren trees, black
trunks whipped to frenzy by a voiceless wind; lane upon lane of stalled, silent
cars, pouring fumes into the leaden sky; and Sara--Sara, her lips moving like
the lips of a silent movie heroine, shaping words that could not reach him
through the changeless air.

Gerald shook his head.

"Are you ready to go home or do you need to stop by the library?" he asked.

"Home. We need to talk about the library."

"Oh?"

"I'm thinking of quitting," she said.

"Quitting?"

"I need some time, Gerald. We have to be careful. I don't want to lose this
baby."

"Well, sure," he said. "But quitting."

Sara swallowed. "Besides, I think the baby should be raised at home, don't you?"

Gerald slowed for a two-way stop, glanced into the intersection, and plunged
recklessly into traffic, slotting the Lexus into a narrow space before a looming
brown UPS truck. Sara uttered a brief, piercing shriek.

"I hadn't really thought about it," Gerald said.

And in fact he hadn't -- hadn't thought about that, or dirty diapers, or
pediatricians, or car seats, or teething, or a thousand other things, all of
which now pressed in upon him in an insensate rush. For the first time he
thought of the baby not as a spectral possibility, but as an imminent presence,
palpable, new, central to their lives. He was too old for this.

But all he said was: "Quitting seems a little drastic. After all, it's only
part-time."

Sara didn't answer.

"Why don't we think about it?"

"Too late," Sara said quietly.

"You quit?"

Gerald glanced over at her, saw a wry smile touch her lips, saw in her eyes that
she didn't really think it funny.

"You quit?"

"Oh, Gerald," she said. "I'm sorry, I really am."

But he didn't know why she was apologizing, and he had a feeling that she didn't
know why either. He reached out and touched her hand, and then they were at a
stoplight. Gerald reached for the phone. "I've got to call Julian," he said.

THE INSTRUMENT of Gerald Hartshorn's ascension at the advertising firm of
MacGregor, MacGregor, & Turn had been a six-foot-tall cockroach named Fenton,
whom Gerald had caused to be variously flayed, decapitated, delimbed, and
otherwise dispatched in a series of TV spots for a local exterminator who
thereafter had surpassed even his nationally advertised competitors in a tight
market. Now, a decade later, Gerald could recall with absolute clarity the
moment of this singular inspiration: an early morning trip to the kitchen to get
Sara a glass of grapefruit juice.

That had been shortly after Sara's first pregnancy, the abrupt, unforgettable
miscarriage that for months afterward had haunted her dreams. Waking in moans or
screams or a cold accusatory silence that for Gerald had been unutterably more
terrible, she would weep inconsolably as he tried to comfort her, and afterward
through the broken weary house they had leased in those impoverished days, she
would send him for a bowl of ice cream or a cup of warm milk or, in this case, a
glass of grapefruit juice. Without complaint, he had gone, flipping on lights
and rubbing at his bleary eyes and lugging the heavy burden of his heart like a
stone in the center of his breast.

He remembered very little of those days besides the black funnel of conflicting
emotion which had swept him up: a storm of anger more deleterious than any he
had ever known; a fierce blast of grief for a child he had not and could not
ever know; and, sweeping all before it, a tempest of relief still more fierce,
relief that he had not lost Sara. There had been a close moment, but she at
least remained for him.

And, of course, he remembered the genesis of Fenton the cockroach.

Remembered how, that night, as his finger brushed the switch that flooded the
cramped kitchen with a pitiless glare, he had chanced to glimpse a dark anomaly
flee pell-mell to safety across the stained counter. Remembered the inspiration
that rained down on him like a gift as he watched the loathsome creature wedge
its narrow body into a crevice and disappear.

The Porter account, he had thought. Imagine:

Fade in with thunder on a screaming housewife, her hands clasped to her face,
her expression stricken. Pan recklessly about the darkened kitchen, fulgurant
with lightning beyond a rain-streaked window. Jumpcut through a series of angles
on a form menacing and enormous, insectoid features more hidden than revealed by
the storm's fury. Music as the tension builds. At last the armored figure of the
exterminator to the rescue. Fade to red letters on a black background:

Porter Exterminators. Depend On Us.

But the piece had to be done straight. It could not be played for laughs. It had
to be terrifying.

And though the ads had gradually softened during the decade since though the
cockroach had acquired a name and had been reduced to a cartoon spokesman who
died comically at the end of every spot (Please, please don't call Porter!) --
that first commercial had turned out very much as Gerald had imagined it:
terrifying. And effective.

And that was the way Gerald thought of Fenton the giant cockroach even now. Not
in his present animated incarnation, but in his original form, blackly
horrifying, looming enraged from some shadowy comer, and always, always
obscurely linked in his mind to the dark episode of his lost child and the wife
he also had nearly lost.

But despite these connections, the Porter account had remained Gerald's single
greatest success. Other accounts had been granted him; and though Fenton was now
years in the past, promotions followed. So he drove a Lexus, lived in one of the
better neighborhoods, and his wife worked part-time as an aide in the children's
library not because she had to, but because she wanted to.

All things considered, he should have been content. So why, when he picked up
the phone to call Julian MacGregor, should the conversation which followed so
dishearten him?

"I can't make it back in today," he said. "Can the Dainty Wipe thing wait until
Monday?"

And Julian, his boss for twelve years, replied with just a touch of...what?
Exasperation?

Julian said: "Don't worry about that, I'm going to put Lake Conley on it
instead."

Lake Conley, who was a friend.

Why should that bother him?

Gerald came to think of the pregnancy as a long, arduous ordeal: a military
campaign, perhaps, conducted in bleak territory, beneath a bitter sky. He
thought of Napoleon, bogged down in the snow outside of Moscow, and he
despaired.

Not that the pregnancy was without beneficial effects. In the weeks after that
first visit to Dr. Exavious -- at two months w Gerald saw Sara's few wrinkles
begin to soften, her breasts to grow fuller. But mostly the changes were less
pleasant. Nausea continued to plague her, in defiance of Exavious's predictions.
They argued over names and made love with distressing infrequency.

Just when Gerald grudgingly acquiesced in repainting a bedroom (a neutral blue,
Sara had decided, neither masculine nor feminine), he was granted a momentary
reprieve when Sara decided to visit her mother, two hours away.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she told him in the flat heat promised by the August
dawn.

Gerald stepped close to her with sudden violent longing; he inhaled her warm
powdered odor. "Love you."

"Me too." She flung an arm around him in a perfunctory embrace, and then the
small mound of her abdomen interposed itself between them.

And then she was gone.

Work that day dragged through a series of ponderous crises that defied
resolution, and it was with relief that Gerald looked up to see Lake Conley
standing in the door.

"So Sara's out of town," Lake said.

"That's right."

"Let's have a drink. We should talk."

They found a quiet bar on Magnolia. There, in the cool dim, with the windows on
the street like bright hot panes of molten light, Gerald studied Lake Conley,
eleven years his junior and handsome seemingly by force of will. Lake combed his
long hair with calculated informality, and his suit, half as expensive as
Gerald's, fit him with unnatural elegance.

"Then Julian said, 'Frankly, Sue, I don't see the humor in this.' I swear, she
nearly died." Lake laughed. "You should have seen it, Gerald."

Gerald chuckled politely and watched as Lake took a pull at his Dos Equis. He
watched him place the beer on the bar and dig with slender fingers in a basket
of peanuts. Weekly sessions in the gym had shown Gerald that the other man's
slight frame was deceptive. Lake was savagely competitive in racquetball, and
while it did not bother Gerald that he usually lost, it did bother him that when
he won, he felt that Lake had permitted him to do so. It bothered him still more
that he preferred these soulless victories to an endless series of humiliations.

Often he felt bearish and graceless beside the younger man. Today he just felt
tired.

"Just as well I wasn't there," he said. "I'm sure Julian would have lit into me,
too."

"Julian giving you a rough time?"

Gerald shrugged.

Lake gazed thoughtfully at him for a moment, then turned to the flickering
television that played soundlessly over the bar. "Well," he said with forced
cheer. "Sara doing okay? She big as a house yet?"

"Not yet." Gerald finished his drink and signaled for another. "Thank God for
gin," he said.

"There's a good sign."

Gerald sipped at the new drink. "Been a while. We're not drinking much at home
lately."

"What's the problem, Gerald?"

"She could have told me she stopped taking the pill."

"Sure."

"Or that she was quitting her job."

"Absolutely."

Gerald didn't say anything. A waitress backed through a swinging door by the
bar, and tinny rock music blasted out of the kitchen. The sour odor of grease
came to him, and then the door swung shut, and into the silence, Lake Conley
said:

"You're not too happy about this."

"It's not just that she hasn't been telling me things. She's always been a
little self-contained. And she's sorry, I know that."

"Then what is it?"

Gerald sighed. He dipped a finger in his drink and began to trace desultory
patterns on the bar. "Our first baby," he said at last. "The miscarriage. It was
a close call for Sara. It was scary then and it's even scarier now. She's all I
have." Bitter laughter escaped him. "Her and Julian MacGregor."

"Don't forget Fenton."

"Ah yes, the cockroach." Gerald finished his drink, and this time the bartender
had another waiting.

"Is that it?"

"No." He paused. "Let me ask you this: you ever feel...I don't know...weird
about anything when Kaye was pregnant?"

Lake laughed. "Let me guess. You're afraid the baby's not yours." And then, when
Gerald shook his head, he continued, "How about this? You're afraid the baby is
going to be retarded or horrifically deformed, some kind of freak."

"I take it you did."

Lake scooped a handful of peanuts onto the bar and began to arrange them in a
neat circle. Gerald looked on in bleary fascination.

Another drink had been placed before him. He tilted the glass to his lips.

"It's entirely normal," Lake was saying. "Listen, I was so freaked out that I
talked to Kaye's obstetrician about it. You know what she said? It's a normal
by-product of your anxiety, that's all. That's the first baby. Second baby? It's
a breeze."

"That so?"

"Sure. Trust me, this is the best thing that's ever happened to you. This is
going to be the best experience of your life."

Gerald slouched in his stool, vastly

-- and illogically, some fragment of his mind insisted

-- relieved.

"Another drink?" Lake asked.

Gerald nodded. The conversation strayed listlessly for a while, and then he
looked up to see that daylight had faded beyond the large windows facing the
street. A steady buzz of conversation filled the room. He had a sense of
pressure created by many people, hovering just beyond the limits of his
peripheral vision. He felt ill, and thrust half an ice-melted drink away from
him.

Lake's face drifted in front of him, his voice came from far away: "Listen,
Gerald, I'm driving you home, okay?"

Opening his eyes in Lake's car, he saw the shimmering constellation of the city
beyond a breath-frosted window, cool against his cheek. Lake was saying
something. What?

"You okay? You're not going to be sick, are you?"

Gerald lifted a hand weakly. Fine, fine.

They were parked in the street outside Gerald's darkened house. Black dread
seized him. The house, empty, Sara away. A thin, ugly voice spoke in his mind --
the voice of the cockroach, he thought with sudden lucidity. And it said:

This is how it will look when she's gone. This is how it will look when she's
dead.

She won't die. She won't die.

Lake was saying, "Gerald, you have to listen to me."

Clarity gripped him. "Okay. What is it?"

A passing car chased shadow across Lake's handsome features. "I asked you out
tonight for a reason, Gerald."

"What's that?"

Lake wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel, took in a slow breath.
"Julian talked to me today. He's giving me the Heather Drug campaign. I wanted
to tell you. I told him you were depending on it, but..." Lake shrugged.

Gerald thought: You son of a bitch. I ought to puke in your car.

But he said: "Not your fault." He opened the door and stood up. Night air,
leavened with the day's heat, embraced him. "Later."

And then somehow up the drive to the porch, where he spent long moments fitting
the key into the door. Success at last, the door swinging open. Interior
darkness leaked into the night.

He stumbled to the stairs, paused there to knot his tie around the newel post,
which for some reason struck him as enormously funny. And then the long haul up
the flight, abandoning one shoe halfway up and another on the landing, where the
risers twisted to meet the gallery which opened over shining banisters into the
foyer below.

Cathedral ceilings, he thought. The legacy of Fenton the cockroach. And with a
twist like steel in his guts, the memory of that nasty internal voice came back
to him. Not his voice. The voice of the cockroach:

This is how it will be when she's dead.

And then the bedroom. The sheets, and Sara's smell upon them. The long fall into
oblivion.

HE WOKE abruptly, clawing away a web of nightmare. He had been trapped in
suffocating dark, while something--

-- the cockroach --

-- gnawed hungrily at his guts.

He sat up, breathing hard.

Sara stood at the foot of the bed, his shoes dangling in her upraised hand. She
said, "You son of a bitch."

Gerald squinted at the clock-radio. Dull red numbers transformed themselves as
he watched. 11:03. Sunlight lashed through the blinds. The room swam with the
stink of sleep and alcohol.

"Sara..." He dug at his eyes.

"You son of a bitch," she said.

She flung the shoes hard into his stomach as, gasping, he stumbled from the bed.
"Sara --"

But she had turned away. He glimpsed her in profile at the door, her stomach
slightly domed beneath her drop-waist dress, and then she was gone.

Gerald, swallowing-- how dry his throat was! -- followed. He caught her at the
steps, and took her elbow.

"Sara, it was only a few drinks. Lake and I --"

She turned on him, a fierce light in her eyes. Her fury propelled him back a
step. She reminded him of a feral dog, driving an intruder from her pups.

"It's not that, Gerald," she said.

And then--

-- goddamn it, I won't be treated like that!

-- he stepped toward her, clasping her elbows. Wrenching her arm loose, she drew
back her hand. The slap took them both by surprise; he could see the shock of it
in her eyes, softening the anger.

His anger, too, dissipated, subsumed in a rising tide of grief and memory.

An uneasy stillness descended. She exhaled and turned away, stared over the
railing into the void below, where the sun fell in bright patches against the
parquet. Gerald lifted a hand to his cheek, and Sara turned now to face him, her
eyes lifted to him, her hand following his to his face. He felt her touch him
through the burning.

"I'm sorry," they said simultaneously.

Bright sheepish laughter at this synchronicity convulsed them, and Gerald,
embracing her, saw with horror how close she stood to the stairs. Unbidden, an
image possessed him: Sara, teetering on the edge of balance. In a series of
strobic flashes, he saw it as it might have been. Saw her fall away from him,
her arms outstretched for his grasping fingers. Saw her crash backwards to the
landing, tumble down the long flight to the foyer. Saw the blood--

--so little blood. My God, who would have thought? So little blood!

"I'm sorry," he said again.

She dug her fingers into his back. "It's not that."

"Then what?"

She pulled away and fixed him with her stare. "Your shoes, Gerald. You left them
on the stairs." Her hand stole over the tiny mound of her stomach. "I could have
fallen."

"I'm sorry," he said, and drew her to him.

Her voice tight with controlled emotion, she spoke again, barely perceptible,
punctuating her words with small blows against his shoulder. "Not again," she
whispered.

Clasping her even tighter, Gerald drew in a faint breath of her floral-scented
shampoo and gazed over her head at the stairs which fell infinitely away behind
her.

"Not again," he said.

Gerald watched apprehensively as Dr. Exavious dragged the ultrasound transducer
over Sara's belly, round as a small pumpkin and glistening with clear, odorless
gel. The small screen flickered with a shifting pattern of gray and black,
grainy and irresolute as the swirling path of a thunderstorm on a television
meteorologist's radar.

Sara looked on with a clear light in her face. It was an expression Gerald saw
with increasing frequency these days. A sort of tranquil beauty had come into
her features, a still internal repose not unlike that he sometimes glimpsed when
she moved over him in private rhythm, outward token of a concentration even then
wholly private and remote.

But never, never so lost to him as now.

"There now," Exavious said softly. He pointed at the screen. "There is the
heart, do you see it?"

Gerald leaned forward, staring. The room, cool, faintly redolent of antiseptic,
was silent but for Sara's small coos of delight, and the muted whir of the VCR
racked below the ultrasound scanner. Gerald drew a slow breath as the grayish
knot Exavious had indicated drew in upon itself and expanded in a pulse of
ceaseless, mindless syncopation.

"Good strong heart," Exavious said.

Slowly then, he began to move the transducer again. A feeling of unreality
possessed Gerald as he watched the structure of his child unfold across the
screen in changeable swaths of light. Here the kidneys "Good, very good,"
Exavious commented w and there the spine, knotted, serpentine. The budding arms
and legs -- Exavious pausing here to trace lambent measurements on the screen
with a wand, nodding to himself. And something else, which Exavious didn't
comment on, but which Gerald thought to be the hint of a vestigial tail curling
between the crooked lines of the legs. He had heard of children born with tails,
anomalous throwbacks from the long evolutionary rise out of the jungle.

Sara said, "Can you get an image of the whole baby?"

Exavious adjusted the transducer once more. The screen flickered, settled, grew
still at the touch of a button. "Not the whole baby. The beam is too narrow, but
this is close."

Gerald studied the image, the thing hunched upon itself in a swirl of viscous
fluid, spine twisted, misshapen head fractured by atavistic features: blind pits
he took for eyes, black slits for nostrils, the thin slash of the mouth, like a
snake's mouth, as lipless and implacable. He saw at the end of an out-flung limb
the curled talon of a hand. Gerald could not quell the feeling of revulsion
which welled up inside him. It looked not like a child, he thought, but like
some primitive reptile, a throwback to the numb, idiot fecundity of the
primordial slime.

He and Sara spoke at the same time:

"It's beautiful."

"My God, it doesn't even look human."

He said this without thought, and only in the shocked silence that followed did
he see how it must have sounded.

"I mean -- he said, but it was pointless. Sara would not meet his eyes.

Dr. Exavious said, "In fact, you are both correct. It is beautiful indeed, but
it hardly looks human. Not yet. It will, though." He patted Sara's hand. "Mr.
Hartshorn's reaction is not atypical."

"But not typical either, I'm guessing."

Exavious shrugged. "Perhaps." He touched a button and the image on the screen
disappeared. He cleaned and racked the transducer, halted the VCR.

"I was just thinking it looks...like something very ancient," Gerald said.
"Evolution, you know."

"Haeckel's law. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."

"I'm sorry?"

"A very old idea, Mr. Hartshorn. The development of the individual recapitulates
the development of the species."

"Is that true?" Sara asked.

"Not literally. In some metaphorical sense, I suppose." Bending, the doctor
ejected the tape from the VCR and handed it to Gerald. "But let me assure you,
your baby is fine. It is going to be a beautiful child."

At this, Gerald caught Sara's eye: I'm sorry, this look was meant to say, but
she would not yield. Later though, in the car, she forgave him, saying: "Did you
hear what he said, Gerald? A beautiful child." She laughed and squeezed his hand
and said it again: "Our beautiful, beautiful baby."

Gerald forced a smile. "That's right," he told her.

But in his heart another voice was speaking, a thin ugly voice he knew. Ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, it said, and Gerald gripped the steering wheel until
the flesh at his knuckles went bloodless; he smiled at Sara, and tried to wall
that voice away, and perhaps he thought he succeeded. But in the secret chambers
of his heart it resonated still. And he could not help but listen.

Three weeks later, Indian summer began to die away into fall, and Sara reported
that the baby had begun moving within her. Time and again over the next few
weeks, Gerald cupped his hand over the growing mound of her belly, alert to even
the tiniest shift, but he could feel nothing, nothing at all.

"There," Sara said. Breathlessly: "Can you feel it?"

Gerald shook his head, feeling, for no reason he could quite articulate, vaguely
relieved.

Sara continued to put on weight, complaining gamely as her abdomen expanded and
her breasts grew sensitive. Gerald sometimes came upon her unawares in the
bedroom, standing in her robe and gazing ruefully at the mirror, or sitting on
the bed, staring thoughtfully into a closet crowded with unworn clothes and
shoes that cramped her swollen feet. A thin dark line extended to her navel (the
rectus muscle, Exavious told them, never fear); she claimed she could do nothing
with her hair. At night, waking beside her in the darkness, Gerald found his
hands stealing over her in numb bewilderment. What had happened to Sara, long
known, much loved? The clean, angular lines he had known for years vanished, her
long bones hidden in this figure gently rounded and soft. Who was this strange
woman sleeping in his bed?

And yet, despite all, her beauty seemed to Gerald only more pronounced. She
moved easy in this new body, at home and graceful. That clear light he had
glimpsed sporadically in her face gradually grew brighter, omnipresent,
radiating out of her with a chill calm. For the first time in his life, Gerald
believed that old description he had so often read: Sara's eyes indeed did
sparkle. They danced, they shone with a brilliance that reflected his stare--
hermetic, enigmatic, defying interpretation. Her gaze pierced through him, into
a world or future he could not see or share. Her hands seemed unconsciously to
be drawn to her swollen belly; they crept over it constantly, they caressed it.

Her gums swelled. She complained of heartburn, but she would not use the antacid
tablets Exavious prescribed, would not touch aspirin or ibuprofen. In October,
she could no longer sleep eight hours undisturbed. Once, twice, three times a
night, Gerald woke to feel the mattress relinquish her weight with a long sigh.
He listened as she moved through the heavy dark to the bathroom, no lights, ever
considerate. He listened to the secret flow of urine, the flushing toilet's
throaty rush. He woke up, sore-eyed, yawning, and Dr. Exavious's words -- there
are many pressures, you understand, not least on the kidneys -- began to seem
less like a joke, more like a curse.

In November, they began attending the childbirth classes the doctor had
recommended. Twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Gerald crept out
of the office early, uncomfortably aware of Julian MacGregor's baleful gaze; at
such moments, he could not help but think of Lake Conley and the Heather Drug
campaign. As he retrieved the Lexus from the garage under the building and drove
to the rambling old Baptist church where the classes met, his thoughts turned to
his exhaustion-stitched eyes and his increasingly tardy appearances at the
office every morning. Uneasy snakes of anxiety coiled through his guts.

One afternoon, he sneaked away half an hour early and stopped by the bar on
Magnolia for two quick drinks. Calmer then, he drove to the church and parked,
letting himself in through the side door of the classroom a few minutes early.
Pregnant women thronged the room, luminous and beautiful and infinitely remote;
those few men like himself already present stood removed, on the fringes,
banished from this mysterious communion.

For a long terrible moment, he stood in the doorway and searched for Sara,
nowhere visible. Just the room crowded with these women, their bellies stirring
with a biological imperative neither he nor any man could know or comprehend,
that same strange light shining in their inscrutable eyes. They are in league
against us, whispered a voice unbidden in his mind. They are in league against
us.

Was that the cockroach's voice? Or was it his own?

Then the crowd shifted, Sara slipped into sight. She came toward him, smiling,
and he stepped forward to meet her, this question unresolved.

But the incident -- and the question it inspired -- lingered in his mind. When
he woke from restless dreams, it attended him, nagging, resonant: that intimate
communion of women he had seen, linked by fleshly sympathies he could not hope
to understand. Their eyes shining with a passion that surpassed any passion he
had known. The way they had -- that Sara had -- of cradling their swollen
bellies, as if to caress the -g

-- Christ, was it monstrous what came to mind?

-- growths within.

He sat up sweating, sheets pooled in his lap. Far down in the depths of the
house the furnace kicked on; overheated air, smelling musty and dry, wafted by
his face. Winter folded the house in chill intimacy, but in here...hot, hot. His
heart pounded. He wiped a hand over his forehead, dragged in a long breath.

Some watchful quality to the silence, the uneven note of her respiration, told
him that Sara, too, was awake. In the darkness. Thinking.

She said, "You okay?"

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know."

And this was sufficient for her. She asked nothing more of him than this simple
admission of weakness, she never had. She touched him now, her long hand cool
against his back. She drew him to the softness at her breast, where he rested
his head now, breath ragged, a panic he could not contain rising like wind in
the desert places inside him. Heavy dry sobs wracked him.

"Shhh, now," she said, not asking, just rocking him gently. Her hands moved
through his hair.

"Shhh," she whispered.

And slowly, by degrees imperceptible, the agony that had possessed him, she
soothed away. Nothing, he thought. Of course, it had been nothing --anxieties,
Lake Conley had said.

"You okay?" she asked again.

"I'm fine."

She pulled him closer. His hand came to her thigh, and without conscious
intention, he found himself opening her gown, kissing her, her breasts, fuller
now than he had ever known them. Her back arched. Her fingers were in his hair.

She whispered, "Gerald, that feels nice."

He continued to kiss her, his interest rising. The room was dark, but he could
see her very clearly in his mind: the Sara he had known, lithe and supple; this
new Sara, this strange woman who shared his bed, her beauty rising out of some
deep reservoir of calm and peace. He traced the slope of her breasts and belly.
Here. And here. He guided her, rolling her to her side, her back to him, rump
out-thrust as Exavious had recommended during a particularly awkward and
unforgettable consultation --

"No, Gerald," she said. She said, "No."

Gerald paused, breathing heavily. Below, in the depths of the darkened house,
the furnace shut off, and into the immense silence that followed, he said, "Sara
--"

"No," she said. "No, no."

Gerald rolled over on his back. He tried to throttle back the frustration rising
once more within him, not gone after all, not dissipated, merely...pushed away.

Sara turned to him, she came against him. He could feel the bulk of her belly
interposed between them.

"I'm afraid, Gerald. I'm afraid it'll hurt the baby."

Her fingers were on his thigh.

"It won't hurt the baby. Exavious said it won't hurt the baby. The books said it
won't hurt the baby. Everyone says it won't hurt the baby."

Her voice in the darkness: "But what if it does? I'm afraid, Gerald."

Gerald took a deep breath. He forced himself to speak calmly. "Sara, it won't
hurt the baby. Please."

She kissed him, her breath hot in his ear. Her fingers worked at him. She
whispered, "See? We can do something else." Pleading now. "We can be dose, I
want that."

But Gerald, the anger and frustration boiling out of him in a way he didn't
like, a way he couldn't control -- it scared him -- threw back the covers.
Stood, and reached for his robe, thinking: Hot. It's too hot. I've got to get
out of here. But he could not contain himself. He paused, fingers shaking as he
belted the robe, to fling back these words: "I'm not so sure I want to be close,
Sara. I'm not at all sure what I want anymore."

And then, in three quick strides, he was out the door and into the hall, hearing
the words she cried after him -- "Gerald, please" -- but not pausing to listen.

The flagstone floor in the den, chill against his bare feet, cooled him.
Standing behind the bar in the airy many-windowed room, he mixed himself a gin
and tonic with more gin than tonic and savored the almost physical sense of
heat, real and emotional, draining along his tension-knotted spine, through the
tight muscles of his legs and feet, into the placid stones beneath.

He took a calming swallow of gin and touched the remote on the bar. The
television blared to life in a far corner and he cycled through the channels as
he finished his drink. Disjointed, half-glimpsed images flooded the darkened
room: thuggish young men entranced by the sinister beat of the city, tanks
jolting over desert landscape, the gang at Cheers laughing it up at Cliff's
expense. Poor Cliff. You weren't supposed to identify with him, but Gerald
couldn't help it. Poor Cliff was just muddling through like anyone --

-- Like you, whispered that nasty voice, the voice he could not help but think
of as the cockroach.

Gerald shuddered.

On principle, he hated the remote -- the worst thing ever to happen to
advertising -- but now he fingered it again, moved past Letterman's arrogant
smirk. He fished more ice from the freezer, splashed clean-smelling gin in his
glass, chased it with tonic. Then, half-empty bottle of liquor and a jug of
tonic clutched in one hand, drink and television remote in the other, Gerald
crossed the room and lowered himself into the recliner.

His anger had evaporated B quick to come, quick to go, it always had been -- but
an uneasy tension lingered in its wake. He should go upstairs, apologize -- he
owed it to Sara -- but he could not bring himself to move. A terrific inertia
shackled him. He had no desire except to drink gin and thumb through the
channels, pausing now and again when something caught his eye, half-clad dancers
on MTV, a news story about the unknown cannibal killer in LA, once the tail-end
of a commercial featuring none other than Fenton the giant cockroach himself.

Christ.

Three or four drinks thereafter he must have dozed, for he came to himself
suddenly and unpleasantly when a nightmare jolted him awake. He sat up abruptly,
his empty glass crashing to the floor. He had a blurred impression of it as it
shattered, sending sharp scintillas of brilliance skating across the flagstones
as he doubled over, sharp ghosts of pain shooting through him, as something,
Christ --.

-- the cockroach --

-- gnawed ravenously at his swollen guts.

He gasped, head reeling with gin. The house brooded over him. Then he felt
nothing, the dream pain gone, and when, with reluctant horror, he lifted his
clutching hands from his belly, he saw only pale skin between the loosely belted
flaps of robe, not the gory mess he had irrationally expected, not the blood--

-- so little blood, who would have thought? So little blood and such a little --

No. He wouldn't think of that now, he wouldn't think of that at all.

He touched the lever on the recliner, lifting his feet, and reached for the
bottle of gin beside the chair. He gazed at the shattered glass and then studied
the finger or two of liquor remaining in the bottle; after a moment, he spun
loose the cap and tilted the bottle to his lips. Gasoline-harsh gin flooded his
mouth. Drunk now, dead drunk, he could feel it and he didn't care, Gerald stared
at the television.

A nature program flickered by, the camera closing on a brown grasshopper making
its way through lush undergrowth. He sipped at the gin, searched densely for the
remote. Must have slipped into the cushions. He felt around for it, but it
became too much of an effort. Hell with it.

The grasshopper continued to progress in disjointed leaps, the camera tracking
expertly, and this alone exerted over him a bizarre fascination. How the hell
did they film these things anyway? He had a quick amusing image: a near-sighted
entomologist and his cameraman tramping through some benighted wilderness,
slapping away insects and suffering the indignities of crotch-rot. Ha-ha. He
touched the lever again, dropping the footrest, and placed his bare feet on the
cool flagstones, mindful in a meticulously drunken way of the broken glass.

Through a background of exotic bird-calls, and the swish of antediluvian
vegetation, a cultured masculine voice began to speak: "Less common than in the
insect world, biological mimicry, developed by predators and prey through
millennia of natural selection is still..."

Gerald leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. A faraway voice
whispered in his mind. Natural selection. Sophomore biology had been long ago,
but he recognized the term as an element of evolutionary theory. What had
Exavious said?

That nasty voice whispering away...

He had a brief flash of the ultrasound video, which Sara had watched again only
that evening: the fetus, reptilian, primitive, an eerie wakeful quality to its
amniotic slumber.

On the screen, the grasshopper took another leap. Music came up on the
soundtrack, slow, minatory, almost subliminal. "...less commonly used by
predators," the voiceover said, "biological mimicry can be dramatically
effective when it is..." The grasshopper took another leap and plummeted toward
a clump of yellow and white flowers. Too fast for Gerald really to see, the
flowers exploded into motion. He sat abruptly upright, his heart racing, as
prehensile claws flashed out, grasped the stunned insect, and dragged it down.
"Take the orchid mantis of the Malaysian rainforest," the voiceover continued.
"Evolution has disguised few predators so completely. Watch again as..." And now
the image began to replay, this time in slow motion, so that Gerald could see in
agonizing detail the grasshopper's slow descent, the flower-colored mantis
unfolding with deadly and inevitable grace from the heart of the blossom,
grasping claws extended. Again. And again. Each time the camera moved in
tighter, tighter, until the mantis seemed to fill the screen with an urgency
dreadful and inexorable and wholly merciless.

Gerald grasped the bottle of gin and sat back as the narrator continued,
speaking now of aphid-farming ants and the lacewing larva. But he had ceased to
listen. He tilted the bottle to his lips, thinking again of that reptilian
fetus, awash in the womb of the woman he loved and did not want to lose. And now
that faraway voice in his mind sounded closer, more distinct. It was the voice
of the cockroach, but the words it spoke were those of Dr. Exavious.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Gerald took a last pull of the bottle of gin. Now what exactly did that mean?

The ball whizzed past in a blur as Gerald stepped up to meet it, his racquet
sweeping around too late. He spun and lunged past Lake Conley to catch the
ricochet off the back wall, but the ball slipped past, bouncing twice, and
slowed to a momentum draining roll.

"Goddamn it!" Gerald flung his racquet hard after the ball and collapsed against
the back wall. He drew up his legs and draped his forearms over his knees.

"Game," Lake said.

"Go to hell." Gerald closed his eyes, tilted his head against the wall and tried
to catch his breath. He could smell his own sweat, tinged with the sour odor of
gin. He didn't open his eyes when Lake slid down beside him.

"Kind of an excessive reaction even for you," Lake said.

"Stress."

"Work?"

"That, too." Gerald gazed at Lake through slitted eyes. "Ahh."

They sat quietly, listening to a distant radio blare from the weight-room. From
adjoining courts, the squeak of rubber-soled shoes and the intermittent smack of
balls came to them, barely audible. Gerald watched, exhaustion settling over him
like a gray blanket, while Lake traced invisible patterns on the floor with the
edge of his racquet.

"Least I don't have to worry about the Heather Drug campaign," Gerald said.
Almost immediately, he wished he could pull the words back. Unsay them.

For a long time, Lake didn't answer. When he did, he said only, "You have a
right to be pissed off about that."

"Not really. Long time since I put a decent campaign together. Julian knows what
he's doing."

Lake shrugged.

Again, Gerald tilted his head against the wall, closing his eyes. There it was,
there it always was anymore, that image swimming in his internal darkness: the
baby, blind and primitive and preternaturally aware. He saw it in his dreams;
sometimes when he woke he had vague memories of a red fury clawing free of his
guts. And sometimes it wasn't this dream he remembered, but another: looking on,
helpless, horrified, while something terrible exploded out of Sara's smoothly
rounded belly.

That one was worse.

That one spoke with the voice of the cockroach. That one said: You're going to
lose her.

Lake was saying, "Not to put too fine a point on it, Gerald, but you look like
hell. You come to work smelling like booze half the time, I don't know what you
expect."

Expect? What did he expect exactly? And what would Lake say if he told him?

Instead, he said, "I'm not sleeping much. Sara doesn't sleep well. She gets up
two, three times a night."

"So you're just sucking down a few drinks so you can sleep at night, that
right?"

Gerald didn't answer.

"What's up with you anyway, Gerald?"

Gerald stared into the darkness behind his closed eyes, the world around him
wheeling and vertiginous. He flattened his palms against the cool wooden floor,
seeking a tangible link to the world he had known before, the world he had known
and lost, he did not know where or how. Seeking to anchor himself to an earth
that seemed to be sliding away beneath him. Seeking solace.

"Gerald?"

In his mind, he saw the mantis orchid; on the screen of his eyelids, he watched
it unfold with deadly grace and drag down the hapless grasshopper.

He said: "I watch the sonogram tape, you know? I watch it at night when Sara's
sleeping. It doesn't look like a baby, Lake. It doesn't look like anything human
at all. And I think I'm going to lose her. I think I'm going to lose her, it's
killing her, it's some kind of... something...I don't know...it's going to take
her away."

"Gerald--"

"No. Listen. When I first met Sara, I remember the thing I liked about her --
one of the things I liked about her anyway, I liked so much about her,
everything-- but the thing I remember most was this day when I first met her
family. I went home with her from school for a week-end and her whole family w
her little sister, her mom, her dad-- they were all waiting. They had prepared
this elaborate meal and we ate in the dining room, and you knew that they were a
family. It was just this quality they had, and it didn't mean they even liked
each other all the time, but they were there for each other. You could feel it,
you could breathe it in, like oxygen. That's what I wanted. That's what we have
together, that's what I'm afraid of losing. I'm afraid of losing her."

He was afraid to open his eyes. He could feel tears there. He was afraid to look
at Lake, to share his weakness, which he had never shared with anyone but Sara.

Lake said, "But don't you see, the baby will just draw you closer. Make you even
more of a family than you ever were. You're afraid, Gerald, but it's just normal
anxiety."

"I don't think so."

"The sonogram?" Lake said. "Your crazy thoughts about the sonogram? Everybody
thinks that. But everything changes when the baby comes, Gerald. Everything."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Gerald said.

AFTER THE GYM, Gerald drove for hours without conscious purpose, trusting
mindless reflexes to take him where they would. Around him sprawled the city,
senseless, stunned like a patient on a table, etherized by winter.

By the time he pulled the Lexus to the broken curb in a residential neighborhood
that had been poor two decades past, a few flakes of snow had begun to swirl
through the expanding cones of his headlights. Dusk fell out of the December
sky. Gerald cracked his window, inhaled cold smoke-stained air, and gazed
diagonally across the abandoned street.

Still there. My God, still there after these ten years. A thought recurred to
him, an image he had not thought of in all the long months ages, they felt like
-- since that first visit to Dr. Exavious: like stepping into icy water, this
stepping into the past.

No one lived there anymore. He could see that from the dilapidated state of the
house, yard gone to seed, windows broken, paint that had been robin's egg blue a
decade ago weathered now to the dingy shade of mop water. Out front, the wind
creaked a realtor's sign long since scabbed over with rust. The skeletal
swing-set remained in the barren yard, and it occurred to him now that his child
-- his and Sara's child -- might have played there if only...

If only.

Always and forever if only.

The sidewalk, broken and weedy, still wound lazily from the street. The concrete
stoop still extruded from the front door like a grotesquely foreshortened
tongue. Three stairs still mounted to the door, the railing -- Dear God --
shattered and dragged away years since.

So short. Three short stairs. So little blood. Who could have known?

He thought of the gym, Lake Conley, the story he had wanted to tell but had not.
He had not told anyone. And why should he? No great trauma, there; no abuse or
hatred, no fodder for the morning talk shows; just the subtle cruelties, the
little twists of steel that made up life.

But always there somehow. Never forgotten. Memories not of this house, though
this house had its share God knows, but of a house very much like this one, in a
neighborhood pretty much the same, in another city, in another state, a hundred
years in the past or so it seemed. Another lifetime.

But unforgettable all the same.

Gerald had never known his father, had never seen him except in a single
photograph: a merchant mariner, broad-shouldered and handsome, his wind-burned
face creased by a broad incongruous smile. Gerald had been born in a different
age, before such children became common, in a different world where little boys
without fathers were never allowed to forget their absences and loss. His
mother, he supposed, had been a good woman in her way-- had tried, he knew, and
now, looking back with the discerning eye of an adult, he could see how it must
have been for her: the thousand slights she had endured, the cruelties visited
upon a small-town girl and the bastard son she had gotten in what her innocence
mistook for love. Yes. He understood her flight to the city and its anonymity;
he understood the countless lovers; now, at last, he understood the drinking
when it began in earnest, when her looks had begun to go. Now he saw what she
had been seeking. Solace. Only solace.

But forgive?

Now, sitting in his car across the street from the house where his first child
had been miscarried, where he had almost lost forever the one woman who had
thought him worthy of her love, Gerald remembered.

The little twists of steel, spoken without thought or heat, that made up life.

How old had he been then? Twelve? Thirteen?

Old enough to know, anyway. Old enough to creep into the living room and crouch
over his mother as she lay there sobbing, drunken, bruised, a cold wind blowing
through the open house where the man, whoever he had been, had left the door to
swing open on its hinges after he had beaten her. Old enough to scream into his
mother's whiskey-shattered face: I hate you/I hate you/I hate you!

Old enough to remember her reply: If it wasn't for you, you little bastard, he
never would have left. If it wasn't for you, he never would have left me.

Old enough to remember, sure.

But old enough to forgive? Not then, Gerald knew. Not now. And maybe never.

THEY DID NOT GO to bed together. Sara came to him in the den, where he sat in
the recliner, drinking gin and numbly watching television. He saw her in the
doorway that framed the formal living room they never used, and beyond that, in
diminishing perspective, the broad open foyer: but Sara foremost, foregrounded
and unavoidable.

She said, "I'm going to bed. Are you coming?"

"I thought I'd stay up for a bit."

She crossed the flagstone floor to him in stocking feet, soundlessly, like a
grotesquely misshapen apparition w her belly preceding her. He wondered if the
long lines of the body he used to know were in there somewhere. She was still
beautiful, still graceful, to be sure. But she possessed now a grace and beauty
unlike any he had known, ponderous and alien, wholly different from that she had
possessed the first time he had seen her all those years ago -- ghost-like then
as well, an apparition from a world stable and dependable, a world of family,
glimpsed in heart-wrenching profile through the clamorous throng of the
University Center cafeteria.

She knelt by him. "Please come to bed."

He swished his drink. Ice bobbed and clinked. "I need to unwind."

"Gerald..."

"No really, I'm not sleepy, okay?" He smiled, and he could feel the falseness of
the smile, but it satisfied her.

She leaned toward him, her lips brushed his cheek with a pressure barely present
-- the merest papery rush of moth wings in a darkened room. And then she was
gone.

Gerald drank: stared into the television's poison glow and drank gin and tonic,
nectar and ambrosia. Tastes like a Christmas tree, Sara had told him the first
night they were together, really together. He had loved her, he thought. He
touched the remote, cycled past a fragmentary highlight of an NFL football game;
past the dependable hysteria over the LA cannibal killer, identity unknown; past
the long face of Mr. Ed. Drank gin and cycled through and through the channels,
fragmentary windows on a broken world. Oh, he had loved her.

Later, how much later he didn't know and didn't care, Gerald found his way to
the bedroom. Without undressing, he lay supine on the bed and stared sightlessly
at the ceiling, Sara beside him, sleeping the hard sleep of exhaustion for now,
though Gerald knew it would not last. Before the night was out, the relentless
demands of the child within her would prod her into wakefulness. Lying there,
his eyes gradually adjusting to the dark until the features of the room appeared
to stand out, blacker still against the blackness, something, some whim, some
impulse he could not contain, compelled him to steal his hand beneath the
covers: stealthy now, through the folds of the sheet; past the hem of her gown,
tucked up below her breasts; at last flattening his palm along the arc of her
distended belly. Sara took in a heavy breath, kicked at the covers restlessly,
subsided.

Silence all through the house, even the furnace silent in its basement lair:
just Sara's steady respiration, and Gerald with her in the weighty dark, daring
hardly to breathe, aware now of a cold sobriety in the pressure of the air.

The child moved.

For the first time, he felt it. He felt it move. An icy needle of emotion
pierced him. It moved, moved again, the faintest shift in its embryonic slumber,
bare adjustment of some internal gravity.

Just a month, he thought. Only a month.

The child moved, really moved now, palpable against his outstretched palm.
Gerald threw back the covers, sitting upright, the room wheeling about him so
swiftly that he had to swallow hard against an obstruction rising in his throat.
Sara kicked in her sleep, and then was still.

Gerald looked down at her, supine, one long hand curled at her chin, eyes
closed, mouth parted, great mound of belly half-visible below the hem of her
up-turned gown. Now again, slowly, he laid a hand against her warm stomach, and
yes, just as he had feared, it happened again: the baby moved, a long slow
pressure against his palm.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, hissed the thin nasty voice of the cockroach.
But what exactly did that mean.2

He moved his palm along her taut belly, pausing as Sara sighed in her sleep, and
here too, like the slow pressure of some creature of the unknown deep, boiling
through the placid waters, came that patient and insistent pressure. And then
something more, not mere pressure, not gentle: a sudden, powerful blow. Sara
moaned and arched her back, but the blow came again, as though the creature
within her had hurled itself against the wall of the imprisoning womb. Why
didn't she wake up? Gerald drew his hand away. Blow wasn't really the right
word, was it?

What was?

His heart hammered at his ribcage; transfixed, Gerald moved his hand back toward
Sara's belly. No longer daring to touch her, he skated his hand over the long
curve on an inch-thin cushion of air. My God, he thought. My God. For he could
see it now, he could see it: an outward bulge of the taut flesh with each
repeated blow, as though a fist had punched her from within. He moved his hand,
paused, and it happened again, sudden and sure, an outward protrusion that
swelled and sank and swelled again. In kind of panic--

-- what the hell was going on here

-- Gerald moved his hand, paused, moved it again, tracing the curve of Sara's
belly in a series of jerks and starts. And it followed him. Even though he was
no longer touching her, it followed him, that sudden outward protrusion, the
thing within somehow aware of his presence and trying to get at him. The blows
quickened even as he watched, until they began to appear and disappear with
savage, violent speed.

And still she did not wake up.

Not a blow, he thought. A strike.

Like the swift, certain strike of a cobra. An image unfolded with deadly urgency
in Gerald's mind: the image of the orchid-colored mantis exploding outward from
its flowery hole to drag down the helpless grasshopper and devour it.

Gerald jerked his hand away as if stung.

Sara's abdomen was still and pale as a tract of mountain snow. Nothing moved
there. He reached the covers across her and lay back. A terrific weight settled
over him; his chest constricted with panic; he could barely draw breath.

The terrible logic of the thing revealed itself to him at last. Ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, Exavious had told him. And what if it was truer What if
each child reflected in its own development the evolutionary history of the
entire species?

Imagine:

Somewhere, far far back in the evolutionary past -- who could say how far? --
but somewhere, it began. A mutation that should have died, but didn't, a
creature born of man and woman that survived to feed...and reproduce. Imagine a
recessive gene so rare that it appeared in only one of every ten thousand
individuals -- one of every hundred thousand even. For that would be sufficient,
wouldn't it? Gerald couldn't calculate the odds, but he knew that it would be
sufficient, that occasionally, three or four times in a generation, two carriers
of such a gene would come together and produce... What? A child that was not
what it appeared to be. A child that was not human. A monster clothed in human
flesh.

Beside him, Sara moaned in her sleep. Gerald did not move.

He shut his eyes and saw against the dark screens of his eyelids, the
flower-colored mantis, hidden in its perfumed lair; saw its deadly graceful
assault, its pincers as they closed around the helpless grasshopper and dragged
it down. The words of the narrator came back to him as well: natural selection
favors the most efficient predator. And the most efficient predator is the
monster that walks unseen among its chosen prey.

Terror gripped him as at last he understood how it must have been through all
the long span of human history: Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac, the cannibal killer
loose even now in the diseased bowels of Los Angeles.

We are hunted, he thought. We are hunted.

He stumbled clumsily from the bed and made his way into the adjoining bathroom,
where for a long time he knelt over the toilet and was violently, violently
sick.

Sanity returned to him in perceptual shards: watery light through the slatted
blinds, the mattress rolling under him like a ship in rough waters, a jagged sob
of fear and pain that pierced him through. Sara.

Gerald sat upright, swallowing bile. He took in the room with a wild glance.

Sara: in the doorway to the bathroom, long legs twisted beneath her, hands
clutched in agony at her bloated abdomen. And blood ---

-- my God how could you have ---

-- so much blood, a crimson gout against the pale carpet, a pool spreading over
the tiled floor of the bathroom.

Gerald reached for the phone, dialed 911. And then he went to her, took her in
his arms, comforted her.

SWARMING MASSES of interns and nurses in white smocks swept her away from him at
the hospital. Later, during the long gray hours in the waiting room hours spent
staring at the mindless flicker of television or gazing through dirty windows
that commanded a view of the parking lot, cup after cup of sour vending machine
coffee clutched in hands that would not warm -- Gerald could not recall how they
had spirited her away. In his last clear memory he saw himself step out of the
ambulance into an icy blood-washed dawn, walking fast beside the gurney, Sara's
cold hand clutched in his as the automatic doors slipped open on the chill
impersonal reaches of the emergency room.

Somehow he had been shunted aside, diverted without the solace of a last
endearment, without even a backward glance. Instead he found himself wrestling
with a severe gray-headed woman about insurance policies and admission
requirements, a kind of low-wattage bureaucratic hell he hated every minute of,
but missed immediately when it ended and left him to his thoughts.

Occasionally he gazed at the pay phones along the far wall, knowing he should
call Sara's mother but somehow unable to gather sufficient strength to do so.
Later, he glimpsed Exavious in an adjacent corridor, but the doctor barely broke
stride. He merely cast at Gerald a speculative glance

-- he knows, he knows ---

-- and passed on, uttering over his shoulder these words in his obscurely
accented English: "We are doing everything in our power, Mr. Hartshorn. I will
let you know as soon as I have news."

Alone again. Alone with bitter coffee, recriminations, the voice of the
cockroach.

An hour passed. At eleven o'clock, Exavious returned. "It is not good, I'm
afraid," he said. "We need to perform a caesarean section, risky under the
circumstances, but we have little choice if the baby is to survive."

"And Sara?"

"We cannot know, Mr. Hartshorn." Exavious licked his lips, met Gerald's gaze.
"Guarded optimism, shall we say. The fall..." He lifted his hand "Your wife is
feverish, irrational. We need you to sign some forms."

And afterward, after the forms were signed, he fixed Gerald for a long moment
with that same speculative stare and then he turned away. "I'll be in touch."

Gerald glared at the clock as if he could by force of will speed time's passage.
At last he stood, crossed once more to the vending machines, and for the first
time in seven years purchased a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. After a word
with the receptionist, he stepped into the bitterly cold December morning to
smoke.

A few flakes of snow had begun to drift aimlessly about in the wind. Gerald
stood under the E.R. awning, beneath the bruised and sullen sky, the familiar
stink of cigarette smoke somehow comforting in his nostrils. He gazed out over
the crowded parking lot, his eyes watering. Like stepping into icy water, he
thought, this stepping into the past: for what he saw was not the endless rows
of cars, but the house he had visited for the first time in a decade only a day
ago. And the voice he heard in his head was neither the voice of the hospital
p.a. system nor the voice of the wind. It was the voice of the cockroach, saying
words he did not want to hear.

You, the cockroach told him. You are responsible.

Gerald flipped his cigarette, still burning, into the gutter and wrapped his
arms close about his shoulders. But the cold he felt was colder than mere
weather.

Responsible.

He supposed he had been. Even now, he could not forget the isolation they had
endured during the first years of their marriage. The fear. It hadn't been easy
for either of them -- not for Gerald, sharing for the first time the bitter
legacy of a life he had still to come to terms with; not for Sara, smiling
patrician Sara, banished from a family who would not accept the impoverished
marriage she had made. To this day Gerald had not forgiven his in-laws for the
wedding: the thin-lipped grimace that passed for his mother-in-law's smile; the
encounter with his father-in-law in the spotless rest room of the Marriott, when
the stout old dentist turned from a urinal to wag a finger in Gerald's face.
"Don't ever ask me for a dime, Gerald," he had said. "Sara's made her choice and
she'll have to abide by it."

No wonder we were proud, he thought. Sara had taken an evening job as a cashier
at a supermarket. Gerald continued at the ad agency, a poorly paid associate,
returning nightly to the abandoned rental house where he sat blankly in front of
the television and awaited the sound of Sara's key in the lock. God knows they
hadn't needed a baby.

But there it was. There it was.

And so the pressure began to tell, the endless pressure to stretch each check
just a little further. Gerald could not remember when or why money he supposed
-- but gradually the arguments had begun. And he had started drinking. And one
night...

One night. Well.

Gerald slipped another cigarette free of the pack and brought it to his lips.
Cupping his hands against the wind, he set the cigarette alight, and drew
deeply.

One night, she was late from work and, worried, Gerald met her at the door. He
stepped out onto the concrete stoop to greet her, his hand curled about the
graying wooden rail. When Sara looked up at him, her features taut with worry in
the jaundiced corona of the porch light, he had just for a moment glimpsed a
vision of himself as she must have seen him: bearish, slovenly, stinking of
drink. And poor. Just another poor fucking bastard, only she had married this
one.

He opened his arms to her, needing her to deny the truth he had seen reflected
in her eyes. But she fended him off, a tight-lipped little moue of distaste
crossing her features -- he knew that expression, he had seen it on her mother's
face.

Her voice was weary when she spoke. Her words stung him like a lash. "Drinking
again, Gerald?" And then, as she started to push her way past him: "Christ,
sometimes I think Mom was right about you."

And he had struck her.

For the first and only time in all the years they had been married, he had
struck her -- without thought or even heat, the impulse arising out of some deep
poisoned well-spring of his being, regretted even as he lifted his hand.

Sara stumbled. Gerald moved forward to steady her, his heart racing. She fell
away from him forever, and in that timeless interval Gerald had a grotesquely
heightened sense of his surroundings: the walk, broken and weedy; the dim shadow
of a moth battering himself tirelessly against the porch light; in the sky a
thousand thousand stars. Abruptly, the world shifted into motion again; in
confusion, Gerald watched an almost comically broad expression of relief spread
over Sara's face. The railing. The railing had caught her.

"Jesus, Sara, I'm sort --" he began to say, but a wild gale of hilarity had
risen up inside her.

She hadn't begun to realize the consequences of this simple action, Gerald saw.
She did not yet see that with a single blow he had altered forever the tenor of
their relationship. But the laughter was catching, and he stepped down now,
laughing himself, laughing hysterically in a way that was not funny, to soothe
away her fears before she saw the damage he had done. Maybe she would never see
it.

But just at that moment, the railing snapped with a sound like a gunshot. Sara
fell hard, three steps to the ground, breath exploding from her lungs.

But again, she was okay. Just shaken up.

Only later, in the night, would Gerald realize what he had done. Only when the
contractions took her would he begin to fear. Only when he tore back the
blankets of the bed and saw the blood

-- so little blood

--would he understand.

Gerald snapped away his cigarette in disgust. They had lost the child. Sara,
too, had almost died. And yet she had forgiven him. She had forgiven him.

He shivered and looked back through the cold-fogged windows at the waiting room,
but he couldn't tolerate the idea of another moment in there. He turned back to
the parking lot, exhaled into his cupped hands. He thought of Dr. Exavious,
those febrile eyes, the way he had of seeming to gaze into the secret regions of
your heart. Probing you. Judging you. Finding you wanting.

There was something else.

Last night.

With this thought, Gerald experienced bleak depths of self-knowledge he had
never plumbed before. He saw again the smooth expanse of his wife's belly as he
had seen it last night, hideously aswarm with the vicious assaults of the
creature within. Now he recognized this vision as a fevered hallucination,
nothing more. But last night, last night he had believed. And after his feverish
dream, after he had been sick, he had done something else, hadn't he? Something
so monstrous and so simple that until this moment he had successfully avoided
thinking of it.

He had stood up from the toilet, and there, in the doorway between the bedroom
and the bathroom, he had kicked off his shoes, deliberately arranging them heel
up on the floor. Knowing she would wake to go to the john two, maybe three times
in the night. Knowing she would not turn on the light. Knowing she might fall.

Hoping.

You are responsible.

Oh yes, he thought, you are responsible, my friend. You are guilty.

Just at that moment, Gerald felt a hand on his shoulder. Startled, he turned too
fast, feeling the horror rise into his face and announce his guilt to anyone who
cared to see. Exavious stood behind him. "Mr. Hartshorn," he said.

Gerald followed the doctor through the waiting room and down a crowded corridor
that smelled of ammonia. Exavious did not speak; his lips pressed into a narrow
line beneath his mustache. He led Gerald through a set of swinging doors into a
cavernous chamber lined with pallets of supplies and soiled linen heaped in
laundry baskets. Dusty light-bulbs in metal cages cast a fitful glow over the
concrete floor.

"What's going on?" Gerald asked. "How's Sara?"

Exavious did not reply. He stopped by a broad door of corrugated metal that
opened on a loading dock, and thumbed the button of the freight elevator.

"One moment, please, Mr. Hartshorn," he said.

They waited silently as the doors slid aside. Exavious gestured Gerald in, and
pressed the button for six. With a metallic clunk of gears, they lurched into
motion. Gerald stared impassively at the numbers over the door, trying to
conceal the panic that had begun to hammer against his ribs. The noisy progress
of the elevator seemed almost to speak to him; if he listened closely, he could
hear the voice of the cockroach, half-hidden in the rattle of machinery:

She's dead, Gerald. She's dead and you're responsible.

Exavious knew. Gerald could see that clearly now. He wasn't even surprised when
Exavious reached out and stopped the lift between the fifth and sixth
floors--just sickened, physically sickened by a sour twist of nausea that
doubled him over as the elevator ground to a halt with a screech of overtaxed
metal. Gerald sagged against the wall as a wave of vertigo passed through him.
Sara. Lost. Irrevocably lost. He swallowed hard against the metallic taste in
his mouth and closed his eyes.

They hung suspended in the shaft, in the center of an enormous void that seemed
to pour in at Gerald's eyes and ears, at every aperture of his body. He drew it
in with his breath, he was drowning in it.

Exavious said: "This conversation never occurred, Mr. Hartshorn. I will deny it
if you say it did."

Gerald said nothing. He opened his eyes, but he could see only the dull sheen of
the elevator car's walls, scarred here and there by careless employees. Only the
walls, like the walls of a prison. He saw now that he would not ever really
leave this prison he had made for himself. Everything that had ever been
important to him he had destroyed-- his dignity, his self-respect, his honor and
his love. And Sara. Sara most of all.

Exavious said: "I have spoken with Dr. Schwartz. I should have done so sooner."
He licked his lips. "When I examined your wife I found no evidence to suggest
that she could not carry a child to term. Even late-term miscarriages are not
uncommon in first pregnancies. I saw no reason to delve into her history."

He said all this without looking at Gerald. He did not raise his voice or
otherwise modify his tone. He stared forward with utter concentration, his eyes
like hard pebbles.

"I should have seen the signs. They were present even in your first office
visit. I was looking at your wife, Mr. Hartshorn. I should have been looking at
you."

Gerald's voice cracked when he spoke. "Schwartz--what did Schwartz say?"

"Dr. Schwartz was hesitant to say anything at all. He is quite generous: he
wished to give you the benefit of the doubt. When pressed, however, he admitted
that there had been evidence -- a bruise on your wife's face, certain statements
she made under anesthesia -- that the miscarriage had resulted from an
altercation, a physical blow. But you both seemed very sorrowful, so he did not
pursue the matter."

Exavious turned to look at Gerald, turned on him the terrific illumination of
his gaze, his darkly refulgent eyes exposing everything that Gerald had sought
so long to hide. "A woman in your wife's superb physical condition does not
often have two late-term miscarriages, Mr. Hartshorn. Yet Mrs. Hartshorn claims
that her fall was accidental, that she tripped over a pair of shoes. Needless to
say, I do not believe her, though I am powerless to act on my belief. But I had
to speak, Mr. Hartshorn -- not for you, but for myself."

He punched a button. The elevator jerked into motion once more.

"You are a very lucky man, Mr. Hartshorn. Your wife is awake and doing well. She
is recovering from the epidural." He turned once more and fixed Gerald in his
gaze. "The baby survived. A boy. You are the father of a healthy baby boy."

The elevator stopped and the doors opened onto a busy floor. "It is more than
you deserve."

SARA, THEN.

Sara at last, flat on her back in a private room on the sixth floor. At the
sight of her through the wire-reinforced window in the door, Gerald felt a
bottomless relief well up within him.

He brushed past Dr. Exavious without speaking. The door opened so silently on
its oiled hinges that she did not hear him enter. For a long moment, he stood
there in the doorway, just looking at her-- allowing the simple vision of her
beauty and her joy to flow through him, to fill up the void that had opened in
his heart.

He moved forward, his step a whisper against the tile. Sara turned to look at
him. She smiled, lifted a silencing finger to her lips, and then nodded, her
eyes returning to her breast and the child that nursed there, wizened and red
and patiently sucking.

Just a baby. A child like any other. But different, Gerald knew, different and
special in no way he could ever explain, for this child was his own. A feeling
like none he had ever experienced -- an outpouring of warmth and affection so
strong that it was almost frightening -- swept over him as he came to the
bedside.

Everything Lake Conley had told him was true.

What happened next happened so quickly that Gerald for a moment believed it to
be an hallucination. The baby, not yet twelve hours old, pulled away from Sara's
breast, pulled away and turned, turned to look at him. For a single terrifying
moment Gerald glimpsed not the wrinkled child he had beheld when first he
entered the room, but...something else.

Something quicksilver and deadly, rippling with the sleek, purposeful
musculature of a predator. A fleeting impression of oily hide possessed him --
of a bullet-shaped skull from which glared narrow-pupiled eyes ashine with chill
intelligence. Eyes like a snake's eyes, as implacable and smugly knowing.

Mocking me, Gerald thought. Showing itself not because it has to, but because it
wants to. Because it can.

And then his old friend the cockroach: Your child. Yours.

Gerald extended his hands to Sara. "Can I?" he asked.

And then he drew it to his breast, blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh, this
creature that was undeniably and irrevocably his own child.