2290

It was an odd feeling walking down a busy sidewalk. The eyes of dozens, hundreds of strangers studying you, learning everything they could in the matter of a few seconds—it was scary almost, the way they scrutinized you. I hadn't ventured the city streets since I was six (being enrolled in school enabled me to freely utilize public transportation), and doing so twenty years later, I felt a sense of déjà vu, like although I now better understood things, the eerie awareness of constant surveillance hadn't changed.

And despite the discomfort I experienced, I too found myself eying up the strangers as they passed. There was so much to see; it was like a little game. I saw a small, meek, bookish man with thick, round glasses. He wasn't particularly well-dressed, but he seemed to be extremely intelligent. I got the impression that he was a teacher in one of the lower class schools. It turned out that he hadn't even graduated from high school himself. He was a sex offender.

I saw a woman, about six feet tall with heels, staring haughtily ahead with her cold, blue eyes. Her brunette hair was teased and hung in expert curls just past her shoulders. She wore a modest, but clearly quite expensive, business suit in greys and violets. I knew from her face that she had much to be proud of and little to be ashamed of. She was a lawyer, and she had adopted three children. She wasn't united, but her features seemed to suggest that she didn't mind. Perhaps she was infertile, but that wasn't something you could learn just by looking at someone.

Sometimes I wished you could tell everything by looking at someone. Though I couldn't deny it works both ways. I had a number of deep, dark secrets, and I was glad they weren't all written on my face.

I turned suddenly into a convenience store and strolled casually into the restroom. Once I had situated myself onto a toilet, I reached into my purse and retrieved the home pregnancy test I had purchased on my personal card nearly ten minutes ago, on the other side of town. As I took the test in the public lavatory, I thought of how much more comfortable I would have felt doing it at home. I just couldn't take the chance of discarding the evidence where it might again be recovered and traced back to myself. I had learned my lesson, I thought, feeling the slightly raised areas of my forehead where two codes resided, proof of my first child, who was stillborn.

I remembered the first time I realized I was pregnant. I knew somehow, in that very instant, that my child was a girl, and that I was going to call her April, after the month in which she was born. I knew that she had my curly auburn hair and her father's emerald eyes, authentic gems that twinkled when she smiled. There was hardly a thing I wasn't sure of, until I finally witnessed the lifeless shell of my child's body come out of me at only six months of age.

I had been wrong, about everything. The thing that I had given birth to that January (not April) was not a girl, nor was it a boy. It was a genderless mutant. It did not have curly auburn hair, but clammy, grey, hairless skin. The eyes behind its eyelids were not shining emeralds, but cloudy blue-grey marbles inside its face. I could not help the feeling that it was not a child at all, but some kind of grotesque tumor.

Now that I suspected I was about to repeat the whole, traumatic process, I was going to take more precautions, the first being not to tell my significant other, despite how it tortured my conscience. Of course, none of that torture would be necessary if I was not pregnant after all...

But I was, I confirmed as I finally looked at my result.

I wished I could have the same kinds of premonitions about the new baby as with April, but all that came to mind was the six-month-old fetus that was my dead child, so I eventually shook the thought from my mind and concerned myself instead with how I was going to hide my pregnancy as my belly began to swell.


"Eden!" I heard my partner yell from the kitchen.

"What is it, Klaus?" I asked, coming out from our bedroom to find him hunched over the refrigerator, peering into it as if it were a mystical portal to an alternate universe. If only...

He turned to look at me and said, "You didn't get milk."

With everything that was on my mind, I had gone into the store and completely forgotten to buy groceries. I sighed. Klaus put his arm around me, and I worried that he could feel the tiny fetus inside me, the one that he and I had created. "What's wrong?" he asked. "You seem stressed."

"Just... trying to find a job," I said quickly, "so you don't have to support me all by yourself." It wasn't all a lie; I had in fact been planning to do a bit of job hunting, but I hadn't started yet.

"Oh, Eden, don't worry about that," he said. "I'll do all the work; you just sit back and relax. Isn't that how families were, years and years ago?"

"More like centuries," I laughed.

Klaus smiled. "Centuries then. We're getting by just fine," he assured. "If you got a job, we'd have more money than we know what to do with."

I thought to myself, Yes, except right now there's only two of us, but I said, "I guess you're right." I kissed Klaus on the cheek and added, "I'll get the milk first thing tomorrow."


Later that night, Klaus and I lie in bed together; I was reading a work of nonfiction, and he was watching a particularly goofy comedy program on television. I glanced up from my scientific text and glared at the actors with contempt. Their real tattoos had been edited out of the picture and replaced with their characters'. And for what? Nothing but a few cheap laughs from people like Klaus—whom I loved though he was a few cards short of a deck. I wished that I could have the technology to alter my own history, erase stupid mistakes, things that were irrelevant to my life and to people I interact with, things I was embarrassed by. But I didn't have it, they did, so they could become Leander Huxley the paranoid astronaut and Chantel Barnes the brilliant lingerie model for a few hours every day to entertain viewers who probably didn't even have thoughts of forgetting the past.

I put down my book and turned off my light. "Can we go to sleep now, Klaus?"

"Shh," he said. "It's almost over."

Groaning, I took the remote from his hands and clicked off the TV.

"Hey!" he shouted, groping around for the remote. I didn't have it anymore; I had set it on my nightstand, by my book. "Leander and Chantel were professing their love to each other!"

"That's very sweet," I said without much emotion, "but I'm afraid Leander and Chantel will have to wait until tomorrow. I'm very tired."

"But I'm not ready for bed yet," Klaus whined. It was too dark to see, but I could visualize his puppy dog pout. "Could you please turn it back on? I can't see anything."

I can't see anything. Those words brought something out in me. I couldn't have explained it at the time, but it was something so powerful that it not only turned me on, it turned me up to four hundred fifty degrees.

I climbed on top of him, and his hands automatically came to my waist. I leaned over him, my hair cascading over his bare chest and neck, and said seductively, "Who am I?"

He hesitated for a while, and when he finally spoke, his voice portrayed multiple levels of confusion. "What?" he asked uncertainly.

"Never mind," I said, moving back to my side of the bed. The moment was over. The thing that Klaus had unknowingly evoked had gone back to sleep. And now so would I.