Tarot Sour by Robert Zimmerman Page B

and out with the random lines of light that lay randomly tossed about the room. Her voice trying to make itself heard. Those are the noises of love.
    I still love her that day at the hospital, as she lies helpless in labor. But I will always resent her for her part in all of this. I’d had my chance to mention abortion, adoption, but I am too afraid of what she might think of me for suggesting them. I resent her for not mentioning it. Now she is prying it from herself, for us . And I, I just have to leave. I don’t want to watch it happen. I don’t want to see it at all. So I come to this waiting room to “get some air,” I tell her, just for a moment. But knowing they will come for me as it gets closer, I make my way out of the ICU to the family clinic here in the next building over. It isn’t that I don’t want children, because I do. We had planned it, we had talked about it. I go through all the logistics, algorithms, calculations, on my own just to make sure. And yes, I do want children. I want to look down and see a precious lump of my watered-down DNA looking back up at me, holding my hand with its little paw, asking for guidance. For my guidance.
    I just didn’t want this one. This particular combination of genes. I have seen something in it, something that repulses me, maybe a latent memory of the ambiguous fragments stolen from the sun after learning about Cifezzo. And I’ve already sworn I will allow no room in my life for this child. It is my wife’s. She wants it, she can have it. We can share the next one, I decide. I watch the clock tick off another hour; its grin becomes a sidelong sneer. It is time to go back. I figure, if it hasn’t yet been born, it never will be, at that point. And if it has been, well there is not much I can do about it.
    In hindsight, the only thing I regret is that by missing my daughter’s birth, I have unwittingly missed my wife’s death. When I arrive, her body is laying stained, some unnatural pallor of ashen gray from the lights of the morgue they lead me to. She looks unlike she does in mauve or in white. Ghoulish, but lovely nonetheless. The doctor gives me my moment to mourn, a nurse spits on me with her eyes. “Where were you?” her pupils dilate out in Morse. “It’s a girl,” they say to me. The nurse holds the bundle of undeveloped bones and fatty tissues out over my wife’s pea-split carcass.
    And that is when it happens. “Not mine,” I say. “Give it away.” I hold onto my wife’s hand, give her a quick kiss on the cheek, and leave the hospital. And yet, somehow, at the same time, I don’t say it. My body splits, like an amoeba or a cell in mitosis. At the same time that I give my child away and turn my back on it, I watch in wonder as a duplicate of myself takes the child in its arms and, upon seeing my wife’s dead body, instantly forgives all the ill will he has for the thing. He cries into its bald little body while I simply leave . From that moment on, I live with the uncomfortable knowledge that I simultaneously exist someplace else, making separate decisions, living a separate life. It is excruciating, frustrating. But, at least I know that something in the world is provable, Asam Cifezzo is right. And so the world must be ending.
    * * *
    The phone wakes me from where I lay, back from the edge of the bed with my legs hanging off and still planted to the floor. I go to the hall where the phone hangs on the wall and answer it. It is Mr. Henrik. I tell him I will be there as soon as I can. I never made it to the shower. I smell myself. Far from ideal, but excusable. Particularly in the company of a shut-in. I go back to the kitchen, pausing in front of the basement door where I hold my breath and listen for the rats. They must be asleep. I sit at the table and strap my boots on, heavy-duty things that get me through the rough-hewn desert ground without threat of