Abbott Awaits Read Free Page A

blots it with his shirt. They look at a neighbor’s cat in the yard. They ruin a yoyo. They spin a propeller. They eat animal crackers. They play with a long-necked toy dinosaur whose wonderful scientific name, Abbott will learn later, has secretly been changed to a name not nearly so good. Abbott looks at the clock and calls out in pain. His four-and-a-half cups of coffee have been, according to the calibration on the pot, eleven cups of coffee. They make Remote Control dance. They find a ladybug, some brown pine needles that must have fallen from the Christmas tree. They sort beads by color,by size. They roll the beads down inclined surfaces. “Dad sit right here,” Abbott’s daughter says, and Abbott sits right there. “Hold this,” she says, and he holds it. “Do this,” she says, and he does it. “Not like that,” she says. What did Abbott used to do with his summer mornings? He cannot even remember, cannot contemplate the freedom, the terrible enormity of Self. Abbott’s wife walks into the family room and kisses his warm head and his daughter’s warm head. Then she sits on the floor in a playing position. Abbott gulps the rest of his tepid coffee and goes to bed. He can hear his wife and his daughter talking at the dining-room table. “What do you think we should name the baby?” Abbott’s wife asks. There is a pause before the girl says, “Cheetah.” Abbott approaches sleep with an ineffable sense of relief that he did not know, before having a child, what it was like to have a child—did not
really
know what it was
really
like—because if he had known before having a child how profoundly strenuous and self-obliterating it is to have a child, he never would have had a child, and then, or now, he would not have this remarkable child. Abbott’s wife, were she here, might say that it doesn’t quite make sense. Abbott might rub her hip lightly with the back of his hand. “That’s the thing,” he might say.

7 Abbott’s Dread
    It can happen at any time, in any room of the house. Abbott is never safe, and neither, consequently, is his wife. This afternoon, as Abbott kneels in the kitchen, pouring kibble from a forty-pound bag into a plastic bin from which the dog is fed, a folded coupon falls to the tile floor, frightening the dog. The coupon is covered in a fine coating of kibble dust. Unconcerned, Abbott picks it up and hands it to his wife, who is in charge of coupons. “Here,” he says, unaware that it is a smuggled and coded message. She unfolds the coupon to determine its value and its restrictions. She snorts. “This expires in
2017
,” she says. Abbott looks up from his task, spilling some kibble across the floor. He feels an unpleasant tingle at the back of his neck. Will there be dog food in 2017? Or grocery stores? Or legal tender? “Ever notice,” Abbott says to his wife’s back, “that when you say a future year out loud, it sounds kind of ominous?” The dog eats the hearty nuggets one by one from the floor. Abbott says, “Not when you see them written, but when you say them out loud. 2023. 2048. The plan is to cut carbon emissions in half by 2051. Congratulations to the class of 2040.” His wife says, “Let me try. Wait. OK. The treaty expires in 2074.” Abbott nods. “
See
?” he says.

8 Wonderful Life
    The Internet, Abbott reads tonight on the Internet, is now believed by experts to be one percent pornography. Somewhere, no doubt, confetti settles onto tumid organs. When Abbott browses the Internet, he imagines all that porn lurking inside the monitor, directly behind the screen he is browsing. It’s
in
there, it’s in his computer. Just a flimsy scrim of tragic news headlines dropped between his torpid gaze and all that nudity and unorthodox penetration. He imagines that one small transposition of letters in a Web address will produce a