Kyle wants to have a baby with Abby. They are not married and never dated. But, he loves kids and can’t go five minutes at a family gathering without swaddling an infant. Abby, on the other hand, wants a baby so badly, she feels nauseous just looking at one. She likens her biological clock to an hour glass and jokes that, at age 35, her AMH levels have converged with Kyle’s blood alcohol content.
They mourn college friends lost to marriage and parenting at weekly sushi dinners. Their bill approaches the price of a mid-range stroller. Oh, how they love fatty tuna, or toro, which Kyle mispronounces with rolled R’s. Sometimes, they postmortem their own dating tribulations. But, lately, there’s nothing to postmortem.
Then Kyle reads a blog post by a woman he vaguely knew in high school, named Lynn. She writes about deciding to have a baby with another single friend. They buy a cheap intracervical insemination kit online, which looks like a syringe, straw and dildo in the picture she posts. It works. She is six months pregnant at the time of writing. They plan to live as one happy family in a two-family home.
Kyle wants him and Abby to take a page out of Lynn’s blog. He feels confident that platonic boundaries would upset no one. Abby, who minored in fashion, despises his wardrobe of company sweaters, the way he practically wears his resume, and Kyle would never date someone so tall. Abby’s personality is more “no, but” than “yes, and” whereas Kyle is more “yes” than “and.” Still, he thinks they’d make good parents, if poor lovers, from their sheer desire to. On the mechanics, he would not object to penile insemination, though he would not suggest it either as nonsexual methods present less controversy.
He waits for the right time to ask her over the next few months, but wonders if it won’t be necessary when he meets Matilda, a war journalist. He admires the way she braids her glossy red hair in a towering updo but is too intimidated by her deep-set eyes and stern expression to attempt a good night kiss. Her two favorite subjects are the Rohingya and Uyghurs. Kyle asks questions generously, but listens with increased stinginess as the dinners wear on. She finally agrees to go home with him after their seventh date and even consents to holding hands on the way there. He imagines her fingers ruffling his thinning hair, her raspy voice whispering “good morning sweetie.” But, when they arrive, she recommends a three hour movie on Bosnia and calls an Uber when it’s over. The day after they end things on a short, polite phone call, he lifts up a sofa cushion when looking for the remote and finds her shining silk scarf beneath it. He curls the garment into a tight ball, holds it against his face and inhales her rosewater fragrance for the first time. He had known every brand she ever boycotted, but not her scent.
That night, he looks up Lynn on social media. He finds a picture of her at the hospital from a couple weeks ago. Frizzy strands of hair hang over half shut eyes. Her baby looks like an oversized reddish prune with humanoid appendages. The coparent rests a hand on her shoulder and smiles in a terrified sort of way. Kyle thinks he and Abby can look this happy. Soon, the day arrives when he will broach the subject.
He sits on his spiral staircase like a stoop and sips a tall can of citrusy IPA after stumbling home from a company-sponsored bar crawl. Abby calls him. She complains about waking up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in her gut and claims she could earn a college credit with the amount of audiobooks she’s listened to on the toilet. The doctor thinks it’s stress related.
“I have a prescription for antidepressants,” says Abby. “But, I don’t want to take them. And I hate this therapist. She tells me a perfectly toned body won’t make me happy and that a boyfriend won’t solve my problems or that I can’t find happiness by making more money. It’s like she doesn’t want anything to make me happy and I suppose she gets exactly what she wants.”
“Uhm, why don’t you just fill that perscription?” asks Kyle.
“Therapy culture. Mental health awareness. It’s all a ploy from big pharma,” says Abby.
“Then just go on more dates,” says Kyle. “Find someone who makes you happy. Prove her wrong.”
“I’d love that,” says Abby. “If there was a decent guy still single at our age.”
“What about me?” asks Kyle. He listens to a few breaths echo on the call before announcing “we could have a kid together.” He feels momentarily lighter until milliseconds turn into full seconds and a wrench of anticipation roils his chest.
“Good one,” says Abby, finally.
“Not romantically. I’m serious. It’s a real thing. It’s called platonic co-parenting. There are books about it.”
“Ok, this bit’s gone too far,” she says. “Sleep it off. We’ll get bagels in the morning if you’re not too hungover.”
“It’s not a bit,” says Kyle, squeezing a crease into his beer can. “I’m serious, Abby. Why make your entire life progress dependent on finding a husband? Some people even think it’s healthier when the person you parent with isn’t also expected to fulfill your romantic needs.”
“Who says that!? The tiny number of people in these rarified arrangements?”
“Ok fine. But-”
“Kyle. My parents are divorced, I wouldn’t want to put a kid through that.”
“Through what?” asks Kyle.
“Split custody, shepherding your clothes between homes like a vagabond,” she explains.
“We’d live in the same house. But we’d sleep in different rooms, of course. Or at least separate beds. We could even have apartments in the same building or some kind of split-level townhome situation.”
“Sounds idyllic, but no.”
“Will you think about it?”
“I’m sure I will.”
They get off the phone. Kyle picks up a bottle of wine at a bodega across the street and drinks it on his balcony in a T-shirt, numb to the article level wind chill. He wonders if any guy friends might want to have a kid with him, but imagines those conversations going even worse. He looks over the skyline. The pattern of lit windows makes the buildings look like broken LED signs. He chugs the remainder of his wine then throws the bottle over the railing, hearing, but not seeing, the shatter.
At work on Monday, he sees a meme on a non-manager slack channel called “#MemeTeam,” which he should have left when he got promoted a few months ago. It’s the girl from the Exorcist projectile vomiting with the caption: when your white boss compliments your skin tone. Replies peg him as a creeper. He regrets drinking so many hard seltzers with his direct reports that weekend and predicts they’ll never respect him again, assuming they ever did. But, he hardly needs a job with all the money he’s saved. So he quits.
The evenings of that next week are spent drinking vodka out of a goblet from his ten-year college reunion while watching reruns of family-friendly 90’s sitcoms and online montages of choked-up late night hosts opening monologues in the direct aftermath of major school shootings. He finds a subletter and after his last day of work, flies to Thailand where he rides a bicycle deep into the outskirts of Bangkok until his calves burn. There, he watches a girl with pigtails and a plaid dress carry a bucket of green vegetables to her family’s noodle stand. He takes a video of some boys playing soccer in the courtyard of their apartment complex, their goalposts defined by chalk outlines on the walls.
Over the week, he takes a tuk tuk tour and river cruise. He goes to night markets and floating markets. He visits the temples of Wat Pho, Wat Arun and Wat Saket. He eats grilled bananas and curry noodles at crowded markets and drinks sweet iced coffees on cafe patios, smoking cigarettes from cheap packs adorned with harrowing images of amputated feet and charred lungs.
Abby calls on his sixth morning there. The poor wifi makes her face look grainy but he can tell she looks paler than before. She limits her diet to broth and crackers. Her doctor thinks it might be something more serious now: Crons, an infection of the digestive tract or even cancer. She is upset with her mom for not visiting.
“That bitch donated a literal kidney to her boy toy and all I get is a gift card for a manicure.”
“Did you ask her to come?”
“I’m not going to beg.”
“You’re right,” he says. “She should just read your mind.”
“That’s not what I’m saying Kyle. Don’t get sarcastic with me.”
“It is what you’re saying,” Kyle retorts. “Which is ok. You should still ask. But, it’s ok to not want to have to.”
“Whatever,” she says. “Ugh. Kyle. What if I die of dehydration and nobody notices until the stink of decay alerts my neighbors? Did you know I stopped eating apples because if I choked, there’d be no one to do the heimlich maneuver on me?”
“Maybe that’s why you’re sick,” says Kyle. “Apple deficiency. But, I’ll call you. Each night. If you don’t pick up or text me back in an hour. I’ll just assume you’re dead.”
“That’s nice,” she says.
Kyle reaches for the bottle of beer on his night stand.
“Dude,” says Abby, watching him take a hearty gulp. “Isn’t it like 9 a.m. where you are?”
“But it’s still 9 p.m. based on my internal clock,” he says, smirking.
“Have you considered calling my cousin?”
“The Christian?”
“I think he’s a Buddhist now. But, at least he hasn’t drank in forever.”
“Don’t get on my case. I’ve been good all week. I just want to pregame the Grand Palace.”
“But isn’t that kinda rude and uhhh, wouldn’t you need to stop if you, like, want to have a kid someday?”
“Are you offering?”
“Over my dead unfound body. Kyle. I don’t even know if I want kids anymore. I’m my own baby and I’m a bad parent.”
They hang up. He chugs a few more beers from the mini fridge and downloads an app for finding coparenting partners. In the free text portion of his profile, he writes: caring, easygoing professional with high earning capacity (currently on a sabbatical for spiritual exploration). Seeking an intelligent and nurturing individual (ciswoman preferred but not required) with common sense values to foster resilient children with well rounded critical-thinking skills. Not into gentle parenting or adoption.
He wants to jazz up his profile before submitting it so he orders a couple mekhongs from the hotel bar for inspiration. Then, he chows down at some food stalls across the street and picks up a pint of vodka at a corner store, which he nurses on a bus toward the Grand Palace. He jumps off to vomit a torrent of seafood noodles into a storm drain then walks straight into another bar and orders a mojito. Some Australians gawk at him from a nearby table. He looks down at his jean shorts, splattered with half-digested squid tentacles. He stumbles into the bathroom and tries to scrape it off with some wet paper towels. Then he walks out to finish his drink and orders a few more from a sadistically chuckling bartender.
He wakes up in his hotel room the next morning with a vague memory of regal spires, engraved with gold figures. He also remembers getting yelled at for kicking a gong and a security guard escorting him out of a temple as he sobbed uncontrollably. He pukes in the toilet until he tastes a sour grassiness in the back of his throat. He rests his throbbing forehead against the cold white tiles of the bathroom floor. By the base of his bed, he finds some cotton white pants with spiraling Buddhist patterns. He remembers buying them at a stand. But, he can’t find his shorts, which have his phone and wallet in them. So, he uses his laptop to cancel his cards and message Abby, asking her to wire him some Baht. She figures out the ancient system of Western Union at a deli. Kyle takes his passport out of the closet safe and uses it to receive the transfer at a nearby bank. He reschedules his flight for the next day when he uses the money Abby wired him on incidentals, a pork bun and cab fare to the airport. On the plane, he recalls the streets of Bangkok, feeling the hot concrete through the sole of his sneakers, smelling rot mixed with lemongrass. He clasps his hands together and uses them as a pillow against the window. He can still smell the sour stomach acid on them and he can hear the patter of his knees shaking against the seat in front of him.
When he gets back to the States, he stays with Abby, his subletter being entitled to the apartment for a few more weeks. They watch a dating show with a weak premise and cast of straight thirty-somethings whose romantic history is as sparse as his and Abby’s. The hosts make occasional cameos.
The radiator hisses like an unendingly deflating balloon. Abby chomps on crackers, sprinkling crumbs onto the throw blanket that covers both their knees. Kyle has ordered Thai because he misses it already, though it obviously tastes nothing like the food he had in Thailand.
That afternoon, Kyle built a project with an Arduino board connected to Abby’s router via an ethernet cord. It’s a pessimistic life alert. If she doesn’t press a switch button every 2 hours, it will use text over IP to message 911: this is an automated notification informing you that the resident of the address enclosed requires immediate assistance. Prepare to knock down the door and call her emergency contact Kyle Caruso at …
He stacks a few empty beer cans and carries them to the kitchen where the recycling bin has overflowed with Abby’s pedialytes. So he puts them on a side table where they stand alongside her ceramics collection. He recognizes a slender vase whose striking black and white line work gives it the geometric quality of an optical illusion. He remembers Abby made it while pursuing a Masters in art therapy until, burnt out from her field work at the children’s hospital, she boomeranged back to the lucrative world of advertising.
He opens the fridge and takes out another beer but puts it back, anticipating Abby’s judgement. On the way back to the sofa, he kneels down to pull the power adapter from the Arduino board so it won’t go off in their sleep. He must program some schedule for it. Perhaps, it should resume functioning at 8 a.m. or even later on weekends and it should pair with her phone so it can detect if she’s left its range, like when she’s at work, and suspend operations.
He sits down beside Abby who stretches her arm across her chest and starts kneading her shoulder. Kyle offers to massage her. She agrees. He sits on the backing of her sofa, leans forward and begins. The muscles around her neck are firm and the skin does not sink under the pressure of his thumbs like he expects. So, he applies more strength. Abby whimpers. But, she tells him to keep going when he backs off.
On the TV, a woman cries her makeup off. A man screams into a tablecloth. The television is a window into another world. It is a time machine and teleportation device. But, there is no required distance to travel. Abby shuts it off. She yawns and carries his bowl to the sink without saying a word.
That night, Kyle sleeps below a throw blanket on the sofa. Abby awakens with stiffened fingers and numbed toes. She walks over to the radiator and touches the cold pipes. She takes a space heater out of her closet and plugs it into an outlet near her bed. She puts on a sweater and wraps herself tightly in the blankets. She’s nearly asleep when she hears the floorboards creek and looks up. Kyle stands in the doorway.
“Is the heat off?” he asks, walking toward her. He looks like a rabbi with the throw blanket over his head and shoulders.
“Yep,” she says. “But you can sleep here.”
He plops onto the bed beside her. She unwraps the blankets from her and he pulls them around him too. They duck their heads under the sheets and hold the ends in their hands, which they press against the memory foam, sealing it like a womb. The shadows of branches flutter over them like fingers as a passing car briefly blocks the first few rays of dawnlight.
Abby inhales the stale breath and must of their fragrant cocoon. It reminds her of the room she shared with her brother at their family’s summer cottage. She looks at the pulsing creature in front of her, his knees curled into his chest. His eyes are closed so she does not know that he is wide awake and, with his ear against the mattress, listening to the sound of their infant little heartbeats.