Iris

by Norman Crane

years or was the most cheerful person in the world. He simultaneously regretted discovering the theory and considered it the best means of keeping human life sustainable. His death was suspicious, tragic, commendable, prophetic. Some said good riddance. Others said their goodbyes. Yet, as a species, we never quite shook the gnawing belief that he indeed knew something that we didn't, and that that knowledge was what killed him. His mind may have been as hermetically sealed as the wombs of the women around us, but in his death we sensed our own foretold. I was relieved I didn't have a daughter to explain that to.

  By April 15, no opossums had given birth. By itself that's not a troubling fact. However, the average gestation period of an opossum is 12 to 13 days. Hamsters, mice and wombats follow with gestation periods of around 20 days, then wombats, chipmunks and squirrels. No recorded births of any of these species occurred in April. Physically, their females looked pregnant but that was as detailed as it got: "The specimens display the ordinary symptoms of pregnancy, but they are displaying them in excess of their expected due dates, although they do remain healthy and function comparatively well to their male counterparts." My wife and I developed a fascination with a particular family of opossums in Ohio that we watched daily via webcam. We gave them names, we pretended to be their voices. Our opossums had adventures, family squabbles and bouts of stress at work. The daughter, Irene, was rebellious. The son, Ziggy, was a nerd. The dad, whom we dubbed Monsieur Charles, sold insurance and the mom, Yvette, worked as stay-at-home technical support for Amazon. We realized right away that we were already preparing for the storytelling phase of parenthood, but we didn't stop. As uncertain as the future was, the preparation for it was ours and we enjoyed doing it together. Nothing would take that away from us. When I touched my wife's body in the shower and pressed the palm of my hand against her tummy, it felt no different than it had felt a month before. There was no hardness, no lumps. It seemed unreal that somewhere beneath her skin, for reasons unknown, her body had produced a substance that was impervious to diamond saw blades and precision lasers—a substance that, at least if you believed the rumours, the Russians were already trying to synthesize to use as tank plating.

  For the rest of April it rained. Streaks of water ran crookedly down windowpanes, following the laws of physics but just barely. If you stared long enough at the wet glass you forgot there was anything behind it. Eventually, all you saw was your own distorted reflection. I liked when my wife put her arms around me from behind and pressed her chest against my back. I didn't feel alone.

  Pillow started to show her pregnancy in May. The World Health Organization also amended its initial communique, stating that based on the evidence regarding the prolonged gestations of other mammals, it was no longer able to predict an influx of human births in late December. If mice and gerbils weren't birthing as predicted, humans might not either. However, the amendment stated, preparations were still proceeding along a nine month timeline, and they were ahead of schedule. When the BBC showed field hospitals in South Sudan, I wondered what the schedule entailed because the images were of skeletal tent-like buildings that despite their newness already had the aura of contamination. My wife said it was naive to expect the same medical standards in developing countries as in developed ones. Perhaps she was right. The BBC repeated the platitude that there wasn't enough money for everyone, listed the foreign aid and private funds that had come in, and interviewed a tired young doctor who patiently answered questions while wiping sweat from his eyebrows. The United States Supreme Court issued an injunction against the New York Time's theory of everything evaluation website based on a barrage of challenges from corporations that claimed the website violated their intellectual property. Another website sprang up overnight in Sweden, anonymous and hosted from compact discs. Salvador Abaroa announced a free Tribe of Akna gathering at Wrigley Field. Bakshi called. He and Jacinda had argued, and she'd taken Greta and their car and driven to the gathering in Chicago. We watched it on television. Salvador Abaroa banged his gong and advanced his theories. The world was made of squiggles, not lines, and all this time we'd only been approximating reality in the way an mp3 file approximates sound waves, or the way in which we approximate temperature, by cutting it into neat and stable increments that we mistake as absolutes. Zurich opened its arms for Kurt Schwaller's funeral, which was interrupted by a streaker baring the logo and slogan of a diaper company. Police tackled the streaker and—for a moment—the mourners cheered. Later, an investigation of Kurt Schwaller's Dropbox account performed in the name of international security revealed that he had deleted large amounts of files in the days leading up to his suicide. The Mossad, Bakshi told me, had been secretly monitoring Kurt Schwaller for at least the past two years because of his Palestinian sympathies and were now piecing together his computer activities by recreating his monitor displays from the detailed heat signatures they'd collected. The technology was available, Bakshi assured me. It was possible. I was more worried when Ziggy the Ohioan opossum injured his left leg. "Oh my God, what happened?" Yvette asked when she saw his bandaged limb. "You told me to be more physically active, so I tried out for the soccer team, mom," he answered. "Did you make the team?" My wife's breath smelled like black coffee. "No, but I sure broke my leg." After pausing for some canned laughter, Yvette waddled obligingly toward Ziggy. "Well, you should at least have some of my homemade pasta," she said. I made eating noises. "Do you know why they call it pasta, mom?" My wife turned from the monitor to look at me. "I don't," she said in her normal voice. "Because you already ate it," I said. We laughed, concocted ever sillier plot lines and watched the webcam late into an unusually warm May night.

  In June, I returned to work and Pillow joined the list of pregnant mammals now past their due dates. She ate and drank regularly, and other than waddling when she walked she was her old self. My wife started to show signs of pregnancy in June, too. It made me happy even as it reinforced the authenticity of the coming known unknown, as a former American Secretary of Defense might have called it. My wife developed the habit of posing questions in pairs: do you love me, and what do you think will happen to us? Am I the woman that as a boy you dreamed of spending your life with, and if it's a girl do you hope she'll be like me? Sometimes she trembled so faintly in her sleep that I wasn't sure whether she was dreaming or in the process of waking. I pressed my body to hers and said that I wished I could share the pregnancy with her. She said that it didn't feel like it was hers to share. She said she felt heavy. I massaged her shoulders. We kept the windows open during the day and the screen mesh out because the insects that usually invade southwestern Ontario in late May and early June hadn't appeared. Birds and reptiles stopped laying eggs. We luxuriated in every bite of pancake that we topped with too much butter and drowned in maple syrup. We talked openly with our mouths full about the future because the world around us had let itself descend into a self-censoring limbo. The opossum webcam went dark. Bakshi dropped by the apartment one night, unannounced and in the middle of a thunderstorm. There was pain on his face. "What if what Kurt Schwaller meant was that fate was not inevitable until we made it so," he said, sobbing. "What if our reality was a series of forking paths and by discovering the theory of everything we locked ourselves forever into one of them?" Jacinda had left him. "You'll get her back," I said. My wife made him a cup of tea that he drank boiling hot. He put down the cup—then picked it up and threw it against the wall. "I'm sorry," he said. "I just wanted to see if I could do something that I didn't really want to do." I bent down to pick up the broken pieces of porcelain. "You'll get her back, Bakshi," my wife said. Rain dripped onto our table from the ends of his black hair. "I don't think so. I think we're locked in and Kurt Schwaller took the only way out there is." We didn't let him go home. We discretely took all the knives from the kitchen and hid them in our bedroom, and did the same with the medicine in our bathroom, and Bakshi slept on our sofa, snoring loudly. He was still sad in the morning but felt better. We ate scrambled eggs, knowing that unles
s chickens started laying them again we were having a nonrenewable resource for breakfast.

  Time was nonrenewable. My wife and I tried to take advantage of each second. But for every ten things we planned, we only did one. Our ambitions exceeded our abilities. On some days we were inexcusably lazy, lying in bed together until noon, and on others we worked nonstop at jobs like painting the walls, which later seemed insignificant. We considered leaving the city when the smog got too thick and renting a cottage in the country but we didn't want to be without the safety of the nearness of hospitals and department stores. When we were scared, we made love. We ate a lot. We read short stories to each other. Outside our apartment, the world began to resemble its normal rhythms, with the exception that everywhere you went all the women were visibly pregnant. Some tried to hide it with loosely flowing clothes. Others bared their bellies with pride. I flirted with a supermarket cashier with an Ouroboros tattoo encircling her pierced belly