“This is Janelle. She’s twenty-seven. She wants to be our surrogate.”
I did not take his phone. “I suppose she just approached you out of the blue and offered her services?”
“I wanted to get an idea of what our options would be. But she’s perfect, babe. Just out of law school. Smart, kind, beautiful. Genes for days! And she’ll accommodate us on everything.”
He tried to touch my back, but I moved before he could do so. I removed my ARs. They were fogged from entering the air-conditioning. Seth took my hand.
“Ash, just meet her. That’s all I’m asking. Meet her and tell me this isn’t destiny.”
“I’m sure you can guess my feelings about an insipid notion like destiny. The brain seeks patterns because that is what brains desperately do. This would be an irrevocable decision for us.” The joy drained from his face. I’d punctured his enthusiasm, and as he deflated, I admit, I found it very gratifying.
“Okay, Ashir, that was uncalled for.”
“I’m concerned about the irresponsibility of the decision. You act as though we bear no moral culpability for creating a consciousness at this particular social and environmental moment.”
He brayed an obnoxious and exaggerated laugh: “Wow! Babe! How original! ‘Oh, this world’s so cruel, how can we bring life into it?’ At least make an effort to not be cliché.”
I took his outburst in stride, but there was an instance of mental forewarning, almost a premonition of mauve darkness billowing down.
“You keep track of your emissions footprint on your glasses, Seth. You scold my sister when she eats a hamburger, and we all had to suffer through the two of you arguing interminably about low-methane beef at Thanksgiving. You do understand that every metric ton of carbon you’ve saved as a moral crusader will immediately propel itself into the atmosphere after our second year of buying diapers?”
“That’s so bogus, Ash. That’s not what this is about.” He walked behind our kitchen island and pretended to busy himself. Because our finances were so secure due to my investment strategies, he purchased an excess of upscale kitchen appliances. He now fiddled with the nutritional analyzer and a handful of chopped mushrooms. “You’re afraid.”
“I am. But not of what you think. You believe I’m afraid of late-night feedings and the responsibility of caregiving and perhaps the passing along of my insecurities and anxieties. My depression and suicidal ideation. These, Seth, are obviously banal concerns.”
“Oh, are they? Could’ve fooled me.”
Seth quit pretending at his concern over the mushrooms’ quality, grabbed the kitchen island, and clutched it as if to steady himself. His blue eyes trained on me, his high blood pressure likely spiking. I said:
“Yes. And spare me the speech about the singular joy of becoming a parent. Haniya and Peter expressed sentiments just as boring after they had Noor, so I beg you not to be as uninteresting as them.”
“Real nice.”
I replaced my glasses and noticed an alert in the lens with your name, Congresswoman. I apologize for not responding. Instead, I went to our bookshelves, which lined the wall and surrounded the television. I pulled down my colleague Dr. Anthony Pietrus’s book. I also took down those of James Hansen, Fred Pearce, and Elizabeth Kolbert. I pulled from the shelf every book of Seth’s that dealt with the climatic impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and piled them under my arm, these cheap tomes of popular science meant to frighten and unsettle a particular class of college-educated, medium-to-high-income urban professionals of an energy and extraction-intensive economy, one who likely reads Moniza Farooki in the New Yorker and has a certain genre of documentary suggested to them by the algorithms of their streaming services. I carried the pile over to the kitchen island and dumped them on the food analyzer and the mushrooms. A few of the books spilled off the sides of the kitchen island.
“You’re not ignorant, Seth. You read the material, or at least the material you can comprehend. So you understand there is a better than fifty-fifty chance that by the year 2100 civilization will be drastically altered in nearly every regard, and those deviations could include violence and turmoil on a scale never before experienced in the memory of humanity.” I was glancing from the floor to Seth and back to the floor, as I did when I grew heated. “You also understand—at least if you paid attention to all these books you so proudly display—that there is a very real chance that runaway climate change could eradicate most human life, and that this could happen quickly, possibly within the lifetime of this hypothetical child you want to pay this impoverished, indebted law student to carry for you. And why do you seek this? Because of some fuzzy notion indoctrinated in you by the aspirational marketing of cloying lifestyle brands targeting the consumer habits and media diet of the yuppie homosexual? You chide the right wing for their intransigence, you chastise the working poor for their ignorance, but how are you any different? You want to maintain your beloved political signifiers out of a sense of self-righteousness while you enjoy the privileges you feel entitled to, but you are as selfish, blithe, and arrogant as the Middle American consumers you so decry.”
We stood there for a moment, the mess of books scattered around us. Seth stared at me, and I stared at the edge of Tony’s volume, with its picture of Hurricane Sandy clobbering the Eastern Seaboard. Seth said:
“It’s amazing what an asshole you can be when you put your mind to it.”
He left the room, and I slept on the futon in my office that night.
In the morning, I found Seth in front of the TV with an untouched bowl of cereal. Instead of preparing my morning tea, I was drawn to the CNN report he was watching. I’d forgotten to text you back, but I now knew why you’d tried contacting me: 542 people dead at Chicago’s Wrigley Field in the worst mass shooting in American history.
The night before, the Chicago Cubs were competing in a baseball game against the Milwaukee Brewers when five men opened fire from nearby rooftops. Using high-powered military assault rifles and the same guided bullets popularized by the al-Bawadis, they shot into the stands for over an hour as panicked fans attempted to flee. With the exits covered, people simply ran into gunfire as they tried to escape. Nearly a thousand were wounded. What the so-called smart bullet has precluded is the utility of “running away.” In an era of guided ammunition, to run is to ensure one’s death. The five men had each purchased a ticket to various apartments and rooftop perches and then set themselves up behind heavily fortified shooter’s nests so that the Chicago police were unable to effectively return fire. Instead, the bomb squad strapped explosive devices to separate crowd control drones, piloted those drones into the occupied apartments and, as a weeping Chicago police chief put it, “blew those monsters straight to hell.” It is the first recorded use of drones to kill combatants on American soil.
Haniya had called me in a panic because she assumed these men had been Islamic extremists. They, of course, turned out to be white separatists from Indiana with ties to the wider militia movement, and I could not help but think of what Agent Chen had told me in Anacortes the month before. One of the shooters, Robert Lynn Carmichael, left behind his infamous appeal to:
“Wake the hell up, America! They’re taking it all, and if you don’t fight for your heritage and your skin, they will destroy you. This is a genocide, and you are already standing in the gas chamber!”
Remarkable how the people who cause the most chaos are also always the most boring and insecure. When I made this remark to Seth, the first words I’d spoken to him since our fight, he looked at me with contempt.