The retching stopped and she almost immediately began to feel better. She flushed the mess away and then padded back upstairs to the bedroom. A glance at the bed showed he was still asleep, still snoring lightly, still in the same position. That was good. She did not want to answer any questions just yet.
She went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, paying particular attention to her breasts. They had been sore the last week or so, a dull throbbing ache that got worse whenever they were touched. In the mirror, they looked a little bigger than they usually did. They were definitely swelling.
“This cannot be happening,” she muttered. “It can’t.”
But she was running out of denial. She had sore boobs and had awakened with vomiting four out of the past six mornings now. And even during the day she sometimes had nausea assault her out of nowhere. And her period ... now that was the really interesting piece of information. It should have started two weeks ago. She was as regular as clockwork, as she should be. No period had come.
But it just can’t be! her mind insisted on telling her. There is no way ... is there?
She brushed her teeth listlessly and then took a shower and got dressed. When she finished with all of this she looked and saw he was still sleeping.
She grabbed her car keys and took a drive to the twenty-four hour drug store not far from the house. There, she purchased a small package that showed a happy, excited couple on the front. She drove it home and took her purchase into the bathroom.
She opened it up and pulled out a small piece of white plastic about three inches long and about half an inch wide. On the far end was a little circular hole with white paper inside of it. In the middle was a rectangular opening, called a window, where the results would appear. The packaging recommended that the first urination of the day would yield the most accurate results.
“Here goes nothing,” she said, sitting on the toilet and spreading her legs wide. She let herself go and then positioned the little circular hole into the stream (getting urine on her hands in the process). She then placed the device on the counter, face up, and went about the process of wiping and pulling her pants back up and flushing. She then washed her hands thoroughly in the sink.
She looked down at the device, which promised results in two minutes. If the test was positive, a plus sign would show in the rectangular window. If the test was negative, a minus sign would show. Bracing herself, she looked down. The minus sign was showing quite plainly.
“Negative,” she muttered, feeling mixed emotions at the revelation. But ... it hadn’t been two minutes yet, had it?
She continued to stare and, right before her eyes, she saw the vertical cross bar in the window slowly darken up across the horizontal cross bar. After another minute or so the + was showing in all its glory.
“Well ... damn,” she whispered, wondering what was going to happen next.
Chapter 13: Occam’s Razor is Dull
Oakland, California
May 21, 1993
Jam-On Productions Studios sat on Martin Luther King Junior Way, just a little north of 18th Street, in one of the worst neighborhoods in Oakland—a city that was quite notorious for bad neighborhoods. The single-story building was very much like a fortress. It had no windows and the doors were reinforced steel similar to that on a bank vault. The entire property was surrounded by a twelve foot high chain link fence topped with razor wire. Security cameras peered out from every corner of the building.
Inside the building, however, all was clean, sterile, and professional. There were two complete studios that a host of independent rap and hip-hop artists from all over the west coast paid premium dollar to record, mix, and master their music in for distribution.
Gordon Paladay, i.e. Bigg G, had rented three hundred hours of studio time from Jam-On for the price of six hundred dollars an hour. On this day in late May, he was one hundred and ninety-six hours into that allotment and running more or less on schedule.
Jake Kingsley sat on a stool in the isolation room of Studio B, a pair of cans on his ears, his Yamaha acoustic guitar in his hands. He and the Nerdlys had flown up two days before so Jake could record his part of the song Step In, Gordon’s experimental piece he planned as his second release on the new album. Gordon had put the three of them up in a hotel in Jack London Square and had paid all of their travel expenses. Other than that, however, neither Jake nor the Nerdlys were asking for any kind of compensation for their efforts.
“All right, Jake,” said the voice of High-Top, the young engineer who was running the sound board for this session (Jake did not know his real name, and suspected that Gordon didn’t either). “We’re going to do take twelve of Step In, starting with the bridge melody. The band will pick up from the start of the second chorus section and you just fall in with them.”
Jake did not answer verbally, as no one would have heard him. Instead, he raised his left hand up and gave a big thumbs-up.
“All right,” High-Top said. “Let’s do it. Fire when ready, brothers.”
Outside, in the main studio, the drummer and the bass player began to play. The DJ began to twist his turntables back and forth, eliciting the secondary melody. Gordon himself, who was closed into the second isolation room, began to sing out the lyrics of the second chorus. Jake took a moment to orient himself to his place in the tune and then began to play, his left fingers pushing on the fret board, his right hand strumming the strings.
“Can’t you step into his mind, try to see what he been through?” sang Gordon, his voice a rich baritone that sounded vastly different than it did when he was simply rapping.
“Can’t you leave your hate behind, what if that was happening to you?
“Won’t you step into his mind, find a way to see him through?”
“Step into his mind ... yes, step into his mind.”
The bridge of the song started and Jake changed both the tempo and the melody to fit it. He began to strum out the chords while Gordon sang out a rapid-fire series of lyrics that was edging back into the land of straight rap. He sang of brothers in jail and sisters on the welfare, about kids joining gangs and ending up in the morgue, about those who try to save themselves and are called Uncle Tom, about rich motherfuckers who forgot where they come from, about how we should just step into each other’s minds, and try to see things from their different points of view.
Jake enjoyed the song a lot, both the melody and harsh realism of the lyrics. Working with Gordon on the tune had been a lot of fun and had increased his musical respect for the rapper considerably. He played his guitar with all the emotion and feeling that the song deserved, making it all the way through the bridge section and then onto a brief acoustic guitar solo backed by only the DJ. It was just as he began the transition back to the primary melody that High-Top’s voice interrupted.
“All right, homeys,” he said. “Let’s pull it in right here.”
The musicians all stopped, bringing a jangling halt to the music playing in Jake’s headphones.
“What’s the word?” asked Gordon from his booth. “It sounded pretty tight to me.”