I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn’t a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?
What I really wanted was to opt out of the causal relation between myself and this cake, the causal relation that I couldn’t seem to avoid, living in this house that I now appeared to live in. The proximity was changing me: I couldn’t avoid seeing or noticing things that happened in this place, and because I was the only other person around, things couldn’t help but involve themselves in me. I decided to think about the orbital motions of the moon around the earth, and of what might happen if the force of one on the other ever exceeded expectations, pulling the two uncomfortably close, causing them to crash together in a fiery and highly destructive event. But he was taking up so much space in me now, I could no longer think around him, peer around him to the shapes of things I had known before I entered this place. What had he meant by a surprise, and what had he meant by something to celebrate? How much time had elapsed in his experience, and was it really different from how much time had elapsed in mine? Or was I instead just a highly avoidant person with serious difficulties connecting to others? I didn’t want to be so difficult, but that difficulty felt like a part of me, a part that I didn’t want taken over by new features belonging to a me that did not yet exist.
I heated the oven to 350 degrees. In this house events seemed to move unusually quickly. Would the cake still require the usual twenty-five to thirty minutes of baking? Or should I try to calculate the temporal properties of this home and scale the time appropriately?
I slid the cake into the oven and walked back into the room. I missed you, he said.
I missed you too, I said.
That sentence came as a real shock. It felt as though it were spoken from some point farther down my throat than tooth or tongue or gag reflex. It felt as though it came from someplace deep within my body, from some speech organ that I had never heard of, that had never been discovered, and that probably didn’t actually exist at all.
He smiled warmly and took my hand. It felt strange at first, both colder and softer than I had expected. But when I reexamined that feeling, I found that I couldn’t remember ever having expected something else.
Now we were standing around holding hands and not much was going on. I began to think of words I had known, just for fun, just to fill up the blank space in my head. Couch, I thought. Cuisinart, I thought.
The words felt different right now than they had before. They meant a little less, held a little less, but seemed somehow fuller: I had never really noticed how much sound there was in a word. The way it filled your mouth up with emptiness, a sort of loosened emptiness that you could tongue, an emptiness you could suck on like a stone. Stomach, I thought. Variety, I thought. Expectation. Intimation. Infiltration. Infiltration: I tongued that one further. I knew it had a hostile aspect, like someone breaking into your house or posing as someone that you should trust. But it also had a lovely sound, a kind of tapered point and a gently ruffled edge, and as I repeated it over and over in my mouth it took on a really great flavor and I thought of water filtering in and out of a piece of fabric, back and forth, moving between, soaking it and washing out, soaking in and taking with it pale tremors of color, memory, resistance, all that stuff, until I felt like one of those pieces of cloth on the television commercials that got washed with the name-brand cleanser and is now not only white, but silky and mountain-scented.
Suddenly, I remembered the cake.
I think I have to get the cake out of the oven, I told him. Hurry back, he said.
I walked across the room to the kitchen and I hoped that the cake would be okay. Certainly it wouldn’t be pretty, but hopefully it would taste like something full of butter, sugar, and cocoa, which was what it was, and how bad could that be?
In the kitchen I took the cake out of the oven with two nice new oven mitts and I carried it back over to the dining-room table. As I set it down, I noticed something written on the top in pale blue icing.
Congratulations? I read.
Congratulations for what? I asked him.
It’s your surprise, he replied. I had a very strange feeling in my stomach.
He advanced toward me holding something in his arms. As he got closer, I saw that it had a face. Look who it is, he said, smiling down at me.
Who is it? I asked.
Can’t you tell? he replied.
I looked at it. It was a decent-size baby. It didn’t look like a newborn. It didn’t look like a toddler. I couldn’t tell if it looked like me. I suppose we looked similar insofar as we were both humans, with eyes and noses in the right places. But at this stage, it was too difficult to say whether we resembled each other.
Why don’t you hold it? he said. He levered it off into my arms.
I don’t know, I said.
Just then it began to wail, and he handed me a little spoon full of mush.
Somehow I knew that if I put this food into the mouth of the baby, I would never be allowed to leave this house. But if I didn’t put the food into the baby, who would? He wouldn’t do it, and the baby was unlikely to feed itself until it was at least a week or so older. My best hope was to wait around, try to figure out how things happened here, and learn how to make time pass faster and faster until it was grown up and ready to leave. Then maybe I could sneak out through the hole it made as it escaped.
Say something to it, he said.
As I looked at the baby, I felt nothing taking shape in mind or mouth. I had no idea what the sort of things were that somebody would say to a baby. I had no idea why anyone would say anything to a baby. I held it carefully, as one would a sack of apples. And then, with him watching me, nodding encouragingly, I began to say to it, for lack of anything else to say, all the words I had ever known, in order.
III
Fake Blood
It was some sort of banquet hall or ballroom, windowless and arrayed with candles, and containing thirty or forty people who turned toward me, staring. They stared at me as though they hoped they could fix me through staring, or at least stare me away. I felt a stickiness move across my skin, and because I could not shut their eyes, I shut my own.
When I opened them, I was still standing in a large room with many other people. Nothing in the situation had changed or would change, however much I wished for it, and that seemed unbearable in a way that I supposed I would be bearing anyhow. There were small, delicate cakes and little heaps of berries. There were balloons floating up against the ceiling and wilting on the ground, colored shapes lying still in the dim and festive light.
I had arrived in costume, but it was not a costume party. Just a normal party, they said.
I looked down at my body as if for the first time. It seemed impossible to get an accurate view of myself without a mirror or camera, something on the outside to look in. From the perspective of my eyes, my shoulders and torso were huge. My legs began in knees, short and stubby, then suddenly there were shoes and it was all done. I was dressed entirely in white: a short white vinyl dress and white stockings; short white gloves and white heels. I had on a hat with a red cross at the front, and I was covered in fake blood.
I had come dressed as a sexy nurse: the blood was mostly incidental, mostly a way to keep from getting mixed up with the other sexy nurses that inevitably turn up at costume parties. But this was a normal party, and as such the blood was now a real liability. It was perhaps the one factor that made it truly unimaginable for me to blend in with the elegant people that fluttered around nearby, laughing lightly and staring at me like I was covered in blood, which I was.