Einstein's Monsters by Martin Amis

what he’s planning or where he’s really coming from. Still great, great heat. I don’t think the sun can keep this up much longer.
    Dan’s Notebook
    In common with Harriet, or Hattie , the “baby,” I have had no sleep for four nights.
    But who needs it? True, I sometimes achieve unpleasant half-states that are further from wakefulness than from its opposite. Often, now, when I jerk upright in my bed, the baby is hiding nearby. I hope she will soon tire of this vicious frolic or tedious torture. My insight , though certainly a remarkable tool, is no help to me here. Of course whenever I rouse myself, with infinite pain and difficulty, and get up and go to her room, the baby is back in her crib. She lies there and pretends to be asleep. I watch over her for hours but she never weakens in her imposture. Schizophrenics can do this because, you see, they don’t need sleep. And when at last I return to bed she comes creeping in immediately. The baby is trying to make me do something that I will never do.
    Thwarted in her plans and ambitions, Francesca is wounded and remote, and feigns indifference. She concentrates on the baby in that finessing, wouldn’t-you-know strategy always employed by females and fate. Ned is understandably angry about this too. He wanted Fran to take me as her lover; he is so old that he cannot expect to satisfy her for very much longer. So Uncle Ned ignores me, furiously busying himself elsewhere. All day I am very nice to the baby, repeatedly imploring her not to come to me at night. But she takes no notice and just pretends to be an unexceptional little creature called Harriet. When she does reveal her feelings, when she stares at me with a scowl of almost farcical hatred, they just think she’s crying, like a baby.
    They all seem to love each other here and maybe that’s the point I’m missing. Ned loves Fran, who loves Harriet, who loves Fran, who loves Ned, who loves Harriet, who loves Ned. You know, through all this somber torment and disgusting confusion I sometimes imagine that if I weren’t so sick I’d just be feeling lovelorn, love-beleaguered. I’d just be lovesick. Dad is gone, and my mother, so to speak, has always been conspicuous by her absence. I’d just be lovesick. For when it comes to the love match around here, I have lost, I am wiped out, love-six, love-six, love-six.
    Even with my time disperception I know that I spend hours contemplating the firebreaks of the water. Insight. Will I cross them? Together the bugs and fauna in the wood make a noise like a great dry-hinged door slowly closing forever, closing ahead of me, closing behind me. Loathed am I too by the fierce and beautiful dragonflies that keep guard over Flame Lake.
    Ned’s Diary
    August 5. Dan is kind of gruff or matter-of-fact with the baby—but extraordinarily gentle. When Harriet, pleased to see Dan, opens her arms to him from her highchair, his face is studious as he bends to pick her up, and he shows the extra care of the clumsy person, feeling in her armpits to get the balance just right before hoisting her skyward, anxious not to strain those little joints. Out on the scorched lake-front, when the baby is kneeling there and stuffing God knows what into her mouth, or crawling at top speed toward the water, Dan is always in frowning attendance and never lets her out of his sight. I notice that he talks to her a lot, and that’s good, because I don’t. Harriet adores him. It’s beautiful to see. Fran and I can think of no more natural therapy, no simpler recommendation of life and living, than to be with a baby as it makes its first acquaintance with the world.… I don’t know about this “exponential” business. Maybe there’s just more of every kind of crap these days. I’ve been badly disturbed by that case of the four-year-old girl and her stepfather, step-uncle, and step-grandfather. Every night they—No. Clearly, we cannot think about that. But we can think about this: the great eyes