The Time Traveler's Almanac

“Did she?” I ask, only half-listening. I’m thinking about my imminent date with Cecilia, who I’ve been seeing for a few months now. She is lush and brown. It takes both of my hands to hold one of her breasts, and when we spoon at night, her belly fits warm in my palm like a bowl of hot soup on a cold day.

“You know what Kamla did?” Babette asks, bringing me back from my jismdamp haze. I hear the inhale and “tsp” sound of someone smoking a cigarette. Babette has started smoking again during the move. “She poked around in the sand for a few minutes, then she told us we were stupid and bad and she wasn’t going to talk to us any more. Sulked the rest of the day, and wouldn’t eat her dinner that night. She’s still sulking now, months later.”

That’s another thing about kids; their single-mindedness. They latch onto an idea like a bulldog at a rabbit hole, and before you know it, you’re arranging your whole life around their likes and dislikes. They’re supposed to be your insurance for the future; you know, to carry your name on, and shit? My mother’s been after me to breed, but I’m making my own legacy, thank you very much. A body of art I can point to and document. I’m finally supporting myself sort of decently through a combination of exhibition fees, teaching and speaking gigs. I want to ask Cecilia to move in with me, but every time I come close to doing so, I hear Sula’s words in my head: No children? Well, what are you going to do with yourself, then? I don’t know whether Cecilia wants kids, and I’m afraid to ask.

“Greg?” says Babette’s voice through the telephone. “You still there?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Mind wandering.”

“I’m worried about Kamla.”

“Because she’s upset about the move? I’m sure she’ll come around. She’s making friends in school, isn’t she?”

“Not really. The other day, the class bully called her Baby Bobber. For the way her head moves.”

I suppress a snort of laughter. It’s not funny. Poor kid. “What did you do?”

“We had the school contact his parents. But it’s not just that she doesn’t have many friends. She’s making our lives hell with this obsession for Bradley’s Cove. And she’s not growing.”

“You mean she’s, like, emotionally immature?” Or intellectually? I think.

“No, physically. We figure she’s about eight, but she’s not much bigger than a five-year-old.”

“Have you taken her to the doctor?”

“Yeah. They’re running some tests.”

Cecilia can jerry-rig a computer network together in a matter of minutes. We geekspeak at each other all the time. When we’re out in public, people fall silent in linguistic bafflement around us.

“They say Kamla’s fine,” Babette tells me, “and we should just put more protein in her diet.”

Cecilia and I are going to go shopping for a new motherboard for her, then we we’re going to take blankets and pillows to the abandoned train out in the old rail yards and hump like bunnies till we both come screaming. Maybe she’ll wear those white stockings under her clothes. The sight of the gap of naked brown thigh between the tops of the stockings and her underwear always makes me hard.

Babette says, “There’s this protein drink for kids. Makes her pee bright yellow.”

The other thing about becoming a parent? It becomes perfectly normal to discuss your child’s excreta with anyone who’ll sit still for five minutes. When we were in art school together, Babette used to talk about gigabytes, Cronenberg and post-humanism.

I can hear someone else ringing through on the line. It’s probably Cecilia. I mutter a quick reassurance at Babette and get her off the phone.

*   *   *

Kamla never does get over her obsession with the beach, and with shells. By the time she is nine, she’s accumulated a library’s worth of reference books with names like Molluscs of the Eastern Seaboard, and Seashells: Nature’s Wonder. She continues to grow slowly. At ten years old, people mistake her for six. Sunil and Babette send her for test after test.

“She’s got a full set of adult teeth,” Babette tells me as we sit in a coffee shop on Churchill Square. “And all the bones in her skull are fused.”

“That sounds dangerous,” I say.

“No, it happens to all of us once we’ve stopped growing. Her head’s fully grown, even if the rest of her isn’t. I guess that’s something. You gonna eat those fries?”

Babette’s come home to visit relatives. She’s quit smoking, and she’s six months pregnant. If she’d waited two more months, the airline wouldn’t have let her travel until the baby was born. “Those symptoms of Kamla’s,” says Babette, “they’re all part of the DGS.”