"Y, him."

∼  Amaurón, Exordium, Act IX, Scene 29, line 1954

    Thomas Bailey Sturkaz, M.D., explained to Fran, "Ab initio, there was a zygote." He did this while standing between her legs, holding her baby's head and listening to her moans, which stopped only when she pushed. He felt the baby's shoulders turn. Fran grunted a final time and he took the baby in his arms. "From a single cell, this."

    Fran let her head collapse on the pillow, felt the nurse wipe her brow, and muttered, "From tiny Champagne bubbles, this."

    He had no idea what she was talking about, but continued with his standard lines of encouragement. "From a small acorn," his voice added a hint of question, "a mighty oak." He placed the silent baby face-down on her stomach. A nurse covered it with a blanket and rubbed its back to encourage breathing. He watched for a few moments. Then he turned the baby over, tilted its head to open the airway, and took over rubbing.

    "Doctor?" asked Fran.

    "All according to Hoyle, my dear." He caressed more firmly, wondering if she expected him to deliver an old-fashioned slap on the bottom. Was that how she wanted her child welcomed into this world? Surely not during this special moment of life emerging, the making of a dream out of a blessed sleep, the newborn abandoning whatever pre-existence it might have known, exchanging one worn-out body for a new suit that houses the long-awaited guest, and allowing the child to come forth with intimations of immortality, trailing clouds of glory—

    "Doctor?"

    The little creature gasped and cried. The dull eye opened. It breathed hard, convulsed, and its limbs agitated as if ignited with particles of heav'nly fire blown into its nostrils.

    The nurses gathered 'round, and they gazed in wide wonder, at the joy they had found, until the head nurse spoke up and said—she could tell right away—that he was . . .

    "A boy or a girl?" asked Fran.

    He wiped away the wet clay-like vernix caseosa. The child morphed into a creature of a more exalted kind. "Let's see," he said, glancing between the baby's legs. "A pair of X-chromosomes would produce a girl, but if there's a Y-chromosome . . . "

   

    Seven months earlier, Fran stood on her front porch and peered through her picture window and sheer curtains. She saw her friend Mary reading TV Guide while her son, Philip, knelt on the large braided oval rug crashing toy metal cars with Kevin and Linda. When she stepped through the doorway, Mary leaped up and nearly shouted, "Well?"

    "Definitely," she said, as Linda ran into her arms. "Due the last week of September."

    "I can always tell. Now, get your coat off. Let's see what you're going to have?"

    "Mary."

    "Come on, Fran. Was I wrong with Kevin or Linda? Was I? Where's your sewing box?"

    "Beside the rocker," she answered wearily.

    Mary threaded a needle while Fran told the children the news.

    "Okay, get over here," called Mary.

    "Oh, Mary," she said, walking to her side with Linda.

    "Palm out." Fran complied. "Linda, this is going to tell us if you're going to have a new brother, the needle will sway back and forth, or a little sister, if it goes around in a circle."

    Linda looked at her mother, who explained, "It's not for sure. The needle is wrong sometimes, and we wouldn't," she paused until Mary looked up, "and we wouldn't want anyone to be disappointed, would we?"

    "Fine," blurted Mary, who took Fran's hand, bobbed the needle three times, and then held her own hand steady. It swayed back and forth. "Another boy!" she cried.

    "Maybe," Fran said firmly, "and I thought a sway meant a girl."

    "You've re-arranged your bedroom since Linda's birth, haven't you? Your bed is pointing north."

    "Beds don't point at all, Mary."

    That evening, she and Eric telephoned their parents with the news. Fran did the same with their friends the following day, but they already knew. Mary, they confirmed. As Fran chatted away, each woman took the Clondale family's bearing, circling together important factors such as its size, the ages and health of its children, how well it lived on Eric's salary, and the mother's level of enthusiasm for the baby. With no physical effort, with no conscious thought whatsoever, a calculation transpired and guided each woman to the conclusion that in this post-Depression economy the Clondales would be just fine with another child.

    Over the next couple of months, Fran wondered from time to time whether she would miscarry, again. As she grew round-wombed, Mary pointed out that Fran was carrying the baby low.

    "A boy."

    "Maybe."

    "And you've added weight around the hips. Definitely a boy."

    "I have extra weight everywhere, Mary."

    In early summer, Fran's concern shifted. Would the baby survive if born prematurely? With two months to go, those thoughts had waned with the summer sun. A few weeks later, the fetus rotated in Fran's womb, the head turning downward, and the umbilical cord slipping from around its neck at the last moment.

 

    " . . . and there was a Y chromosome because he's a him," continued Dr. Sturkaz, who held up the baby. "Congratulations." He saw the child's face scrunched in an unheard cry. He watched his arms flail, his tiny hands stretch, and his reach exceed his grasp for the first time.

    He left the delivery room without sharing a few worrisome facts. With few exceptions, boys were more susceptible to hemophilia, Ducheene muscular dystrophy, and the most common cause of inherited mental retardation, Martin-Bell syndrome. Still, they seemed to be more alert than girls and innately more curious as well. Some said they were more emotionally attached to their mothers. Was that borne out in clinical study? He'd ask his friend Larry Fine, a specialist in pediatrics.

    Dr. Sturkaz sat at the small desk provided by the hospital and took a blank form from a dwindling stack. Another birth certificate, he thought, but immediately censored himself. This child was special, if only to his family. He would be to himself, in time, and possibly others. He scribbled his signature on the certificate and slipped it inside his coat pocket. Heading to the exit, he recognized that the Clondales' child had been fortune enough to be born into a stable home, one already nurturing a pair of healthy children. His brain could develop there. It had already begun to mature, its smooth outer surface wrinkling even during the pregnancy. What heroic journeys might he make over those cortical folds, scaling the mounds of gray matter, delving into its valleys, and tunneling deeper still into its secret, ill-lit caverns, where shadows played on the wall. Would he wonder at the light behind him, turn, and climb toward it? Would he see himself as the master of his fate, the captain of his soul?

    He stepped into the parking lot and realized that in all likelihood he'd never know. He marveled at the hundreds, if not thousands, of little faces he'd ultimately deliver and watch disappear into the crowd. So many kids these days! He drove past a metal newspaper dispenser on the sidewalk and imagined its headline:

NUNNERIES FULL
Women Breeding Sinners Everywhere

RIVERMOUTH, Wednesday, Sep. 29—It's not just the old woman living in a shoe who has so many children she doesn't know what to do . . .

    Birth, and copulation, and death—that's what people got up to in little places like Rivermouth and nearby Eliot, where he lived, and all across America. He'd had a childhood in St. Louis, with a dad who owned a successful brick-making firm and a mom who wrote a bit of poetry but mostly looked after her husband. They had encouraged his brain to grow.

    The Clondale boy, he didn't have an animal brain. His would learn to appreciate time and its limitations. It might ponder the ontological, hopefully with a sense of humor! (The unexamined life is not worth living—who said that, Thoreau or Emerson?—he could never remember.) And little Clondale would be expected to develop a sense of right and wrong, too. He'd have the freedom to choose between the two, not simply rely on instinct, which was what exactly? Tiny bubbles of understanding that rose to the surface of that timeless stream that flowed down the umbilical tunnel from generation to generation, which cascaded into our brains so that its alluvium could stick to the walls of our personality, which we would spend a lifetime papering, painting, and patching.

    To what extent, he wondered, was that little tyke's mind unencumbered, a tabula rosa? Was his cranium a filing cabinet of primal forms to be filled in at a later date? Freud and Jung. What would those pioneers into the subconscious make of today's clinical findings? He had once considered a career in psychiatry himself.

    "Grown men and women," his first wife had scoffed, "making formidable reputations on the hodge-podge of dreams in which people fly, talk to the dead, and live in houses that seem incredibly familiar but don't exist during waking hours. Campbell's monomyth, hah! It's all turn-of-the-century, non-empirical, Voodoo-science, a way of making a living by stating the obvious—people are basically the same everywhere."

    Tough woman, too tough, as it happened.

    The general practitioner steered his black Packard Patrician 400 off Holles Street and into his driveway. He turned off the motor and admired his two-storey, neoclassical Federal home on the Newichawannock. He loved its brick exterior, the dentil molding of its cornice, the white-paned Palladian windows flanked by black shutters, the semi-circular fanlight over the front door. He'd seen a photo of Jefferson's Monticello taken from the air and wondered if his own home would look even more impressive from that angle. He would bring a camera the next time his friend Leonard took him up in his private plane.

    Inside the dark house, a single sliver of light could be seen beneath the closed door of the study. He pushed it open quietly. His college-professor wife, Edith, sat at the desk engrossed in her work on the classical philosopher Amaurón. She was, apparently, totally unaware that the sun had set and that someone might arrive home hungry. She did realize his presence, held a finger for silence, and finished jotting down a note before asking, "Good day?"

    "The usual, illness and impending death topped off by the delivery of a child whose mother doesn't mind if he suffers the same in time. As they say in the maternity ward—"

    "There's a sucker born every minute," she finished.

    "Thank you. Any chance of supper?"

    "We can heat up last night's meatloaf and vegetables."

    "Is that the matrimonial 'we,' the male-singular pronoun?"

    "If you like."

    Later that night as they read in bed, he heard her intone softly, "I'm afraid."

    He kept his eyes on his book and asked, "Afraid as in you've reached a conclusion you don't want to tell me about, such as your work won't allow you to get away again this weekend? Or you're actually in fear of something, such as bodily harm committed by me upon your person should you reach that conclusion?"

    "I'm afraid," she said closing a worn hardcover and rolling to face him, "I've reached the possibly fearful conclusion that Amaurón—are you ready for this?—has lived and worked in a number of centuries."

    He closed his book and looked at her. "Really? You do know that you're telling this to a man of science who, although he has no actuarial training, is aware of mortality tables."

    "I know that."

    "Are you suggesting the transmigration of Amaurón's soul?"

    Her arms and book crawled onto his chest. "No. I don't think so because that would require his death and I suspect that he hasn't died."

    "Like the titular character in the novel She by Haggard?"

    "I have no idea what you're talking about."

    "Ditto." He closed his copy of Thoreau's Walden, placed it on the cherry night stand, and turned off his brass lamp. "I'm glad your research is going well. I couldn't find what I was looking for."

    "Amaurón's writings are unmistakable, to me anyway, and I've been finding them all across the ages."

    "Even before his birth?"

    "Don't be facetious. All researchers place his birth in the fifth century B.C., but none of them know when he died."

    "Or if he died."

    "Exactly! Identifying his earliest works, those written in Greek, is child's play, but doing so with his writings in Latin, say the ones from the early 1600s—specifically Fama Fraternitatis RC and Confessio Fraternitatis, that's very difficult. I can safely say, however, that Amaurón published during Christ's lifetime, again during the Crusades, and most prolifically during the Renaissance, although he appears in other epochs as well. I'm not sure if he wrote Ancrene Wisse," she lifted a book for him to inspect, "but I am certain he wrote this in 1912."

    He read its spine with skepticism, "Why the Buddha Loves Gouda."

    "The original manuscript is in Welsh, with an introduction by Taliesin Ben Beirdd."

    "You're joking."

    "Amaurón's perspicacity is best revealed in a chapter on analytic and synthetic cubism."

    "He really is the man who knew too much."

   "Don't laugh; it makes perfect sense. Cubist art is full of disjointed and angular forms that operate on a multitude of planes at the same time. A Welsh miner spends much of his time in tunnels walled with similar craggy dimensions. The artist within would find inspiration in that milieu."

    "However colorless it might be." She waited for an explanation. "A mine shaft is dark, gloomy, and devoid of color, apart from the dead canaries."

    "I suppose," she begrudged before regaining momentum. "At this point in time, I believe that Amaurón is living in Indianapolis."

    He yawned, "The Athens of America, why not?"

    "He's tall, with curly hair and glasses. Possibly of German extraction. He is busy writing quasi-science fiction, if my literary instincts are correct." She tapped her book on his nose with each word, "Not really sure. I may need to go to Alexandria for further investigation."

    "You're prepared to demonstrate—to base your magnum opus on—the notion that Amaurón was not only a brilliant thinker but a time-traveler?" He removed his reading glasses, folded them, and placed them atop his book.

    "Is a time-traveler. Sure, I'm wary of the pseudepigraphic, but I can demonstrate that Amaurón has published under pseudonyms and allonyms as well as anonymously throughout the history of Western Civilization." She nodded with assurance. "I can prove it, to my satisfaction."

    "Ah, there's the rub," he said, massaging the bridge of his nose. "What about your colleagues, that jolly group that will put aside its petty jealousies just long enough for a quick chuckle before getting down to the serious business of critiquing . . . their prospects for promotion in the afterglow of your self-immolation?"

    "What advice did Lord Polonius give Laertes? 'To thine own self . . . '"

    "Be truly burnt at the scholarly stake?"

    "I'm prepared to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

    "Roll the dice."

    "As Amaurón said, 'Life is a pair 'a dice tossed.'"

    "What did he have to say about bravery, or indeed lunacy?"

    "During which century?"

    "Which century, ha! There's no catching you with a trick question. You'll do well with your oral defense. It will be clear to your inquisitors that you've done your homework—every weekend all summer long—which brings us to this weekend."

    "It's peak foliage up north. I think we should hike Mount Chocorua, take the Liberty Trail while everyone else parades up the Piper or the Champney Falls."

    "The road less traveled."

    "Could make all the difference, and besides, it might do you some good." She took a pinch of his waistline. "Getting a bit chubby there, aren't ya Tom?"

    "Um."

NEXT SECTION: Chapter 5 - Mamas & Papas