The Baby Merchant

by Kit Reed

  What it is like just to be.

  Isn’t there something you’re forgetting, Tom?

  Right. He has one more job to do. If he could dodge this last assignment, which leaves him feeling disrupted and, OK, dirty, he could get on with it. But bullish Jake Zorn reached deep into his past and grabbed him by the entrails, and he is twisting hard. He won’t let go until he has what he wants. Run and the self appointed Conscience of Boston will destroy Tom Starbird’s mother on TV

  Interesting, how you need to take care of and protect a person you don’t particularly like.

  All Starbird wants is to sit quietly and consider, but first he has this to do. If he could, he’d skip the country and get lost with the monks on Mount Athos, straining upward, toward he’s not sure what. He could climb the high Andes and stand alone at Machu Picchu or escape to Kathmandu and not have to do this, but he can’t. All he can do is procrastinate.

  No wonder he’s so busy building his own little world. He’d like to spend the rest of his life like this. In flux.

  Unless he is in stasis.

  He can’t be sure. Bright and ambitious, organized and driven all his conscious life, Starbird tells himself he is preparing. But for what? When Zorn tracks him down, and he will track him down, he’ll tell his sort-of employer that it’s this last job that he’s preparing for, but he knows better.

  He is resting his heart. For now, he’s escaped the pressure of other people’s expectations. He is out from under their hopes.

  “Hello,” he says experimentally, precisely because nobody is around to answer. “So. Hey,” he says into the empty room.

  Laughing, he throws his cell phone in the toilet. He doesn’t wait to see whether it drowns.

  Tom Starbird is getting off on being alone.

  Why was I so busy, he wonders. Why was it so important to keep busy? What have I been doing, really? What was I doing all that time?

  Instead of popping up seconds before the alarm blurts he wakes up whenever and lets the day take him. His days are gloriously simple now. Routine obviates the need for decisions, and Starbird relaxes into the simple schedule like a convalescent at a desert spa. When he wakes up he showers and looks out the window for a long time, watching nothing until even that disappears. Then he folds up like a camp stool and sits crosslegged, facing the spot where the walls meet to make the empty corner he has selected for this. His open hands rest lightly on his thighs, palms up, inviting whatever comes. It will come in time, he knows, if only he can clear out twenty-eight years of trash— isolated facts and unwanted memories, desires and worries and old needs and the half-digested lyrics to a thousand songs he ingested as a kid who went through school plugged into a Discman so he wouldn’t have to talk. Item by item, Tom Starbird is reducing the number of particles in his head.

  Folding into lotus position, he hits a low, subverbal hum, a little bit more than breathing, less than speech. He doesn’t have a mantra because there’s no way to put words to what he is doing here. Franny, he thinks, in the old story, this girl Franny worked out her angst and misery with the Jesus prayer, but Starbird is not anxious and he is far from miserable. He is, right now, what passes for happy. For the first time in a long time, serene. This girl Franny’s prayer wasn’t really about the deity, it was a nervous breakdown spelled out in a language she didn’t understand, whereas he is trying to damp down to alpha waves. The kind of pure concentration that empties the mind so something bigger can come in. What exactly this will be, he does not know, he only knows that there is more out there than the parts of his life that he can see.

  Unbroken concentration? He isn’t even close. He needs to lose it all— words, thought and volition. He needs to empty himself.

  Tom Starbird is crunching toward something he can not yet identify. He can’t see it yet, whatever he’s looking for— he certainly can’t give it a name but today …

  He lapses and comes back with a start. Tom Starbird in lotus position, facing the meeting of two featureless walls. It happens so fast that his neck snaps. “What!” He can’t find words for the thing he is inviting but suddenly he can, in a stupendous feat of understanding, imagine it. He imagines its existence and in that moment it is out there for him. Whatever it is. Wow! Excited and shaking, he jumps up. What was that?

  Starbird hears himself calling, “Who? Who!”

  No telling. Nothing he can name. What a rush! Something’s out there, he’s sure of it. He knows it as surely as he knows that his ankles are sore and his legs raw from the industrial carpeting where he has been sitting— how long? So long that the light has changed and it is late morning. In the next second the red numbers on the digital clock flip and the thing or the intimation or the awareness—whatever that was! is gone.

  He’s running late. Time to go out. Every day Starbird buys three papers. New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, which he consumes over coffee and at the corner coffee shop. Morning walk uptown. Back by two with a paperback from the Barnes & Noble on Union Square, a novel the size of the Manhattan phone book; for the first time in his life he has time to read things like House of Leaves and Infinite Jest. The books he chooses are huge but no problem, with nothing left in his life but this order to fill for Zorn, he can sit up nights reading; with nobody around to interrupt he can read a book straight through to The End and get rid of it. Divest. He dumps the book in the return box at the branch library. This little act of generosity is key; his daily gift to literacy entitles him to buy a new book. It’s OK to own books now, as long as he never owns more than one at a time.

  Content in the tight emotional space he has created, Starbird expands in the silence, and if Jake Zorn’s long shadow keeps pace with him like a raptor trailing a funeral cortege, he chooses not to know.

  Every day or so he fires off an email to prove that he is on Zorn’s case, and the replies? No idea. He’s written a filter that dumps them straight in the trash. If the threats are escalating, he doesn’t want to know. The rest of his mail, he deletes. It gives him a kind of vindictive pleasure, like Gulliver severing the ropes that tie him down. Take that, whoever you are. Take that. And that.

  He gives the job a couple of hours a day. Last week he finished the XYZs in the database on his laptop, sorting extant potential subjects— unchipped possibilities he’s been following with rescue in mind. Probably because he really is procrastinating, he confected reasons to discard even the likely prospects for the Zorn family, even though his inventory is first rate. He nixed a half-dozen babies according to gender and availability, coloring, body type and demographics, with special attention to physical and intellectual potential as determined by each genetic package, soberly noting why each was disqualified in long, thoughtful mails to Zorn. No to this one, too phlegmatic for you, no to that one, IQ potential low, you would be ashamed of him. No to that one and that one and that one, Zorn, no. No. No. Maybe he’ll get the message and give up.

  Starbird knows better. When Zorn does catch up with him he’ll come down hard. When the Inspector General comes, look busy.

  Which Starbird does. It isn’t what you do but what you look like you’re doing that makes the difference, so he’s hacking into the servers of state agencies. Time isn’t of the essence but it’s an issue here. If he can find what he needs, he’ll double back on the doctor he’s kept on retainer and let him solve the problem of the chip. He has less of a conscience about skimming a subject out of the public sector because public is what it is, wards of the state often end up worse off than they would going home with Zorn. Sure Zorn will be the hard driving kind of dad who’ll ride his son hard, but there’s plenty of money for good schools, great dentists, that first car. Hey, he could be doing some orphan a favor. The problem, of course, is that these babies don’t fit the demographic Zorn expects. Correction: demands.

  So far he’s kept hands off the private agencies because when they enter a secure server, even the most gifted hackers leave tracks. Given time, Starbird can hack into anythin
g. He can breach any firewall and decrypt all your classified data, no matter how brilliantly it is coded or how obscure the key; he can penetrate your secure server and open your files no matter how deep they are stored and if he has to he will, but piracy is a dirty business and Tom Starbird stays clean.

  Two hours on Zorn. No more. Then he is free to sit down in this quiet, featureless room and read his brains out. Amazing how your mind wanders out and what it comes back with when you are reading. Meditation is hard and in a way, he thinks, reading brings the same kind of concentration. The moment when you forget who or what you are.

  He breaks at seven every night and goes out to eat. He won’t have food on the premises. He doesn’t take home leftovers. He is hooked on the stark white interior of his empty refrigerator shelves. No Styrofoam containers or plastic forks in this pristine room. Six-packs of Evian water and that’s it. No products, no vodka in the freezer, no wine, not even a piece of fruit. After dinner he buys a grapefruit and a magazine and sits down under a strong light in Washington Square. He peels his fruit and leaves the detritus in the refuse bin. He skims Harper’s or The New Yorker or a news magazine, depending. As soon as he’s turned the last page he goes back to the apartment. He recycles the magazine on his way in. No need to keep things around once you are done with them. They are, after all, only things.

  The simplicity is ravishing.

  Even better: the not speaking. Except for the necessaries when he prepaid— cash— and moved in here, Starbird hasn’t spoken to a single living person in two weeks. At the bookstore and the newsstand and the market, he puts his purchases on the counter and pays. Smiles. In restaurants, he never speaks. Grimacing like a foreigner, he picks up the menu and points. Perfect.

  Nobody knows where he is.

  Living this way, it is possible to lose track of time. Suspended between what he thought he was and whatever he is becoming, Tom Starbird moves dreamily from thing to thing. Possessions don’t matter to him now. They never really did. For him, no object has any more value than the others. What he did in life before and what people thought of him won’t matter either. All Tom Starbird is right now is, and this is the delight and the terror: in flux.

  In the featureless world he has created here, significant events do surface, although he suppresses them. If they make a difference in his perception of the simple life he is designing, Starbird is in denial.

  For instance, today.

  It’s his fault, unless he can blame Rick Moody. He picked up this novel about a young guy taking care of his debilitated mother; in the end he threw it into a corner. It wasn’t the taking care of the mother part. He just has zero patience with alcoholics. Starbird hates addicts of any kind, those pathetic, weak sons of bitches. Who cares about a guy who can’t get a grip?

  Big mistake, man, tossing away the book you bought to get you through the day. Stay here. Read on until evening, when it’s safe to go outside because the working world is homeward bound and nobody expects you to interface.

  Instead he goes out. It’s late spring. He drifts into Washington Square when the sun is still high and women are out with children in all sizes, from infants and toddlers in padded overalls to swift, feral older kids who play rough. Remember, Tom Starbird has made it up until this moment without human contact. He is wide open and receptive, vulnerable precisely because he is off guard.

  Then a child waddling along in a bunny suit trips and smashes on the sidewalk in front of him, splitting his lip.

  Don’t cry. Blood and snot are running down as the baby howls as if the world left him behind at liftoff. Oh please don’t cry, Starbird, who is not used to children, thinks, This is awful.

  “Davey.” A mother’s frantic fluting rises behind him. “Davey?” She is crosshatching the park behind him, calling, “Has anybody seen Davey? Oh, please!”

  What Starbird does then is as foolish as it is instinctive. He picks up the kid, rocking and hushing it. Where he’s usually like steel he is all there there, ransacking for some bright trinket to take the baby’s mind off its grief, calling, “Ma’am. Ma’am!”

  The mother sees them. “Davey, oh my God!”

  “It’s OK, it’s really OK,” Starbird says in that creaky Tin Woodman voice that no amount of oil will make functional. Napkin from Dunkin’ Donuts to stop the bleeding, bright plastic keyring for the baby to put in its mouth, coating it with blood and snot and, as it snuffles and starts to feel better, a film of drool.

  “Davey,” the mother cries. “What are you doing to him?”

  “It’s OK, lady. He’s OK,” Starbird says to her, holding Davy under the armpits like a puppy, handing him off. “He just fell.”

  She susses him out and concludes that he has done a Good Thing here instead of a Bad Thing, which is what young mothers in Manhattan usually expect of strangers. Her expression makes clear she believes she has nothing to fear— nice, clean-cut yuppie-looking guy like him. “Thanks so much,” she says. “I was so scared!”

  And this is Starbird’s mistake. He looks directly at her. “Welcome,” he says, but he is overturned by the feelings written on her face: love and anxiety and relief and the infinitely complicated spasm that grips a mother with a hurt child, even though the baby in the bunny suit—late Easter or what?— has forgotten all about it and smiled. Now she is smiling too. It blazes so bright that he has to turn away. “Bye.”

  “Take care,” she calls after him in a sweet voice.

  Contact is terrifying. Leave!

  Starbird has done well so far but nobody can keep the world at bay for long. Bad omens drop into his life like the light rain before a storm. One day he finds a Manhattan phone directory in its plastic sleeve propped against his door like a little rock. Leaflets and misaddressed mail that the super has slipped under the door slither like roaches and every time he goes out somebody tries to force a flier or a free sample on him. The world keeps handing him small objects that he didn’t ask for and doesn’t want; if they keep piling up at this rate there won’t be any room left for Tom Starbird in this tight space. At the end of the week he comes home to find mail heaped on his mat and sitting on top of that a carton— a large end table or small appliance correctly addressed to him. Odd, he hasn’t ordered anything. Some fool neighbor signed for the damn thing and he has to lug it inside. If UPS can find him, it’s only a matter of time before Zorn comes barging in.

  He gets up the next day and slips on the routine like armor, but it’s a bad fit.

  On his daily bookstore run a sales rep for some big novel thrusts a gaudy Advance Reader’s Copy on him as he’s leaving the store with his book for the day. “Here, it’s signed.” Disturbed, anxious and burdened, he cuts through Union Square and hands it off to a pretty girl. Their hands brush and she smiles and tries to hand it back to him. Again he flees; he’s lost the unwanted book, but he can’t shake that incandescent smile.

  It’s hours before he feels safe again. There is no fulltime job as demanding as willful isolation.

  Starbird manages, at least until ten, reading along as though none of this has happened, but he is not himself. Unsettled by so much human contact, he marks his place and drops the book. So what if he doesn’t finish tonight, so what if he has to keep it an extra day? He can’t sit still. After days of freedom, people have come back into his life. In another minute some fool will knock on his door or the goddamn phone will ring. He has to get out!

  Alone in the night, Starbird walks across town and back on Houston, but where he should be lulled by the night air and the happy knowledge that not one of the dozens of carefree Saturday people he passes will look into his face, he is edgy. A drink, he thinks. After all, alcohol’s a known depressant. It’s not that he wants to be depressed, he just needs to come down a little.

  Dumb, walking into a bar. Although he lives without subtext and tries to pretend that he is freshly minted, Tom Starbird is more firmly rooted in the world than he admits. Like everybody else out there, he has a past. Grammar school class
pictures, one a year. High school yearbooks, college transcript, medical and dental records, rap sheet (small one, one speeding ticket and a busted store window when he was sixteen) plus an indelible mark in several people’s memories; all right, he was stupid for going into this business without growing a beard or paying for a face job. And stupider for leaving it without trying to make some changes in his looks. Like everybody else out there, Starbird is trapped in his body. He is not only what he’s trying to be, a faceless New Yorker with plenty of money and few possessions; he’s a man who has lived in this world for almost thirty years, which means he is an ordinary person equipped with a history, just like everybody else.

  Therefore he knows exactly who that average looking under-thirty guy is, squinting at him across the horseshoe bar: I know you, He’s been made, as surely as a perp in a police lineup. Stupid, Starbird. Do you actually believe you can duck out the back before the guy rounds the bar and grabs your arm? Like a fugitive in a cheap movie he slaps a twenty on the counter and leaves, only to discover that the back door he thought opened on an alley ends in a tight hallway with two doors marked Stars and Garters. Very Village. Very much a trap.

  Fine, he thinks. Wait it out in the men’s. It’s shitty light to read by, but at least I brought the book. Before he can barricade himself in a stall the outside door opens.

  “Tom, Tom Starbird. I knew it was you!” This guy who knows him advances with a big, bland smile. Name is, what is it: Barton. Willie Barton, same floor, senior year. They were never friends but they used to run into each other going out and coming in.

  “Yeah, I guess it is.” Starbird sighs. “Hello, Willie.”

  “Yo, Tom! Excellent! What are you doing in New York?”

  “Oh, you know.” Smoothly, he maneuvers Willie into the hall.

  “Man, you so look like a New Yorker.”

  “So, Willie. Are you here for a convention?”