I.
Every young couple I know is having babies, which makes me happy because I love babies. Their probing pincers, their gleaming carapaces—Oh! If I weren’t so confirmed in my bachelorhood I would by now have many babies of my own. But I must content myself with others’ contentment.
It’s gotten to the point where I can tell a couple is going to have babies before they utter a word to any soul. There are signs: the patterns of light about the couple’s eyes and mouths change, their strides widen. Also, they have a new body odor: sweet, plummy. Soon enough, they batten down the hatches of their home and get to work.
First, the female grows broody; she paces; she mounts armoires, seeking elevation. I am told this stage is pleasant, a pellucid calm settles over the home before those mysterious wheels inside the female start to turn. But soon enough they kick into gear and everything changes. The female scales a wall and mounts her position in the uppermost corner of the home. Over several days her ovipositor slowly extends, dripping gum. The male can only stand by and catch dropped strands of protein, which he presses in the pages of heavy books as keepsakes.
Finally, in a series of sloshy plops, the female deposits her egg cluster. She then descends the wall, exhausted, and retreats to the washroom for a hot bath.
Now it’s the male’s turn. He climbs the wall and irrigates the eggs. I am told that while they do this some males look at magazines; others just use their imaginations. Either way, intense focus is key.
Once the eggs are irrigated the gestation period begins. It comes, it goes: not much to talk about there. But before long time is up and—How can I describe it? The eggs in their cluster either tremble, or else light trembles upon them—or else they make their own trembling light. There’s a roar like a large motor, rising in frequency, and—There! Can you see it? The first baby has pierced its enclosure with its jagged eggtooth, it’s propelling itself into the world—Look! The head! The glittering, polyhedral head of a newborn.
Soon all the eggs have hatched and the home is teeming with beautiful babies. Typically there are sixty to seventy of them, but I know of one female who had one hundred. Imagine how adorable that must have been, one hundred babies scuttling around!
In short order, friends and relatives arrive and the baby shower begins. It is always a joyful gathering and I never turn down an invitation. The female and male, gracious hosts, lay out plate after plate of cured meats while guests play baby games and swap baby stories.
All the while the new babies clatter about, rubbing their forelegs together, mounting one another’s carapaces, moulting.
Even before the baby shower is over, however, the babies’ numbers are in decline. Now there are sixty babies—now fifty-three—now forty. As the total number of babies declines, the size and vigour of the remaining babies grows. I have interviewed leading baby experts and every one was at a loss to explain this phenomenon. One might suspect that some babies eat other babies, but babies have no mouths; they eat only time.
Whatever the cause of this winnowing, within a month of the first baby hatching, their total numbers have been reduced to three, four at the most. By this point they are quite large and active, they knock over armoires and trample the ficus, they bleat endlessly.
The male and female are frazzled. They’re losing sleep. Gone is the placid happiness that enveloped them during the newborn phase. Nothing could have prepared them for full-grown babies!
The only viable plan now is for the babies to move out and get jobs. This they usually do in short order: as workers, babies are in high demand. Some find jobs working for greengrocers, keeping produce fresh with their cooling baby mists. Others become stevedores, security guards, or masseuses. But most, from what I’ve heard, leave home to work in the human factories.
II.
When Spring comes every year our city is inevitably drenched in babies. The baby showers have become more intense, stickier in recent times. Many I speak to blame this on pollution from the human factories. Others say is a natural cycle of the Earth.
In Spring, all anyone can talk about is babies: When is the next shower due?—We were supposed to get one on the weekend but it rained instead.—Have you aired out your baby skin yet? Mine seems to have shrunk since last Spring, or else I’m getting fatter; I’ll need to buy a new one.—Can you believe what they’re charging for a basic gusseted baby skin these days?—That’s inflation for you—and so on.
My bookkeeper leaves town each Spring because she claims that the babies affect her health. No matter how she seals her windows and doors with special proteins, no matter what expensive brand of baby skin she wears, she ends up with inflamed sinuses and a constant headache.
By what passage, then, do the babies enter her body? She believes they climb her tears like a ladder and scamper through the ducts.
The convenience store down the road puts out a fresh doormat daily. The owner says it’s because customers are always tracking in babies on their shoes and that the doormats at least mitigate the problem.
Once they infiltrate the store the babies invariably find their way into the loaves of bread, the chocolate bars, the cigarettes. They’re insatiable, they’ll gobble up anything a person could desire. Only the magazines are spared.
It’s like this everywhere. Walk down any busy street in Spring and you’ll overhear people griping about the babies: how they gum up machinery, scum windows, confuse dogs, corrupt youths, rust bumpers, dull razors, unravel rugs, curdle compliments, clutter byways, snarl traffic, pucker eyes, spread rumours, coarsen features, stain the light, lower the horizon, spoil the water, aggravate the moon, and generally stink up the place.
This last is impossible to deny. Whatever our poets have to say about Spring’s sweet nard and unctuous balsam, I’ve never met a denizen of our city with anything nice to say about the babies’ smell. Sour and scalpy, it’s impossible to avoid. I have no figures to prove it but I am sure that sales of air freshener increase in Spring.
As for myself, I can’t help but pity the babies. They’re only doing what comes naturally to them. And there’s something picturesque, nostalgic, about the fibrous strands of babies billowing from fresh-budded trees early in the season, and the glittering encrustations that accrete on window ledges as Summer approaches.
Do I wish I was free of those inconveniences which, like everyone else, I suffer because of the babies? Of course I do. But then I also wish that I was free from the clamour of motor traffic, the raucous love songs of lotharios strolling the avenues, and the pale bat guano that spatters my window every Fall. Take these away, and what remains of the city? A packed-in populace with no complaints in common. And—as the poets say—to complain is to have a soul.
Out of civic pride and common cause, we ought to celebrate the babies, and at the same time, let our hearts be moved by their condition. They are here only for a little while, just as we are. And, like us, they are but a few particles of a greater baby, an all-encompassing baby, for which the poets have no name.
III.
I recently got back from my visit to the baby, and I can confidently report that it’s just as wonderful as everyone says it is. I bought a package deal—Who can afford to do otherwise these days?—selecting it based on the location of the hotel: right at the edge of the Western Fontanelle, just south of Mare Perturbus.
Every night I drifted off to the drumming of the Fontanelle; every morning I awoke to the tumescent pink mists of the long-dead sea.
I soon made a friend in my touring group: R., a widow and retired bookkeeper who, day and night, wore a many-pocketed fishing vest. On our first tour—of the Navel—she said, If I had known it was going to stink like this, I would have stayed at the hotel.
Everyone knows the Navel is notoriously feculent, smelling something like a mixture of old blood and rotten plums. But it’s impossible to appreciate the physical impact until you smell it yourself. I briefly blacked out.
Besides the Navel, we visited all the other sites you would expect: the Toes, the Cheeks, the Nipples, the Window, the Wings. The only major destination our group missed was the Horn, which was closed off for the season due to repairs.
I took many photos, so many that I doubt I will ever develop them all. This sort of excess is justified, I think, when you’re on vacation.
In the evenings there was dinner and dancing, followed by live performances. The tumblers who make their livelihoods performing on the baby are all virtuosos, having adapted their usual backflips and pirouettes to the baby’s strange gravity. I don’t know how they do it; I could barely make it up the stairs to my room each night without stepping on my own head.
R., an accomplished dancer, attempted to teach me the Sonogram Slide.
I was content to play the part of tourist among the hordes. We were all rushing to visit the baby before it drifted into retrograde. But for what? Certainly not Sublime Joy, which the poets so often invoke. If you visit the baby looking for Sublime Joy, you’re bound to be disappointed: the natural wonders, the monuments, the distant view of Earth rising over the horizon—these have been reproduced so many times in magazines and on postcards that they have become quotidian, even cliché.
No, we all come to the baby simply because that is what is done. I cannot imagine a life lived without making at least one visit to the baby. I doubt anyone else can.
Amid all the tourist hustle and bustle, a single natural feature of the baby stood out to me, and that was the teeth. Baby teeth showed up everywhere: constellating the walls of majestic canyons, encrusting pergolas, and flecking the otherwise spotless face of my thin hotel pillow.
R. complained about them constantly. She said, If I’d known there would be so many teeth here, I would have left my dentures at home.
I had to agree, the teeth were disturbing. Taken as a whole, they were a minor inconvenience. But when I rattled a cluster of baby teeth in my palm, when I considered each tiny molar, incisor and bicuspid, its yellowy sheen and the spot of red cupped in its hollow root, I couldn’t help but wonder where its mouth had gone.
As the end of our stay neared, R. stopped cracking jokes, she grew quiet and squirrely, she even skipped a few nights of dancing. When I asked her what was the matter she said she suffered from sciatica. But I had my suspicions. The pockets of her fishing vest bulged.
Finally, on our last night on the baby, I surprised R. in her room. There I found her bent over her luggage stuffing fistfuls of baby teeth into her carry-on bag. The smell rising from the heaps of teeth was like milk spoiling in a dark cupboard.
R. blushed deeply, she stammered excuses, but finally I got her to sit down and tell me the whole story.
When we were young, she explained, my husband was a wonderful singer. He always talked about visiting the baby, maybe even performing here, but the plan never came together.
He’s gone now, she continued, and I miss his voice. I thought that maybe if I brought back enough teeth—I know it’s silly—but maybe I would hear him sing again...
Taking home any part of the baby is a serious offense, punishable by jail time, I reminded her. She winced.
But, I added, I think this sort of excess is justified when you’re on vacation...
Now I am home. I am happy to have made my trip to the baby, but even more happy to be back where gravity behaves normally, where the only teeth I must concern myself with are those in my head. R. wrote me the other day to say she is planning to return to the baby as soon as she has the chance, but I don’t think I will join her. I am already planning my next vacation: at last, I am going to visit mother.
Bryce Warnes was born yesterday. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Malahat Review, and scaffold. He lives on Vancouver Island.