The Executor Read Free Page A

“ Ich, natürlich. ”
    “Oh, come now,” she said.
    But I could hear her smiling.
    “I shall be pleased to meet you, Mr. Geist. Are you available at three o’clock?”
    “Three o’clock—today?”
    “Yes, three o’clock today.”
    I almost said no. I didn’t want to seem too needy. “That should be fine.”
    “Very good. Allow me to give you the address.”
    I wrote it down. “Thank you.”
    “Danke schön, Herr Geist. ”
    Standing there, receiver in hand, it occurred to me that we had not set any terms. I didn’t know how long she wanted to talk or what she wanted to talk about. Nobody had mentioned money, so I didn’t know what, if anything, she intended to pay me. I didn’t even know her name. The whole arrangement was incredibly bizarre, and I wondered if it was a scam after all. She sounded harmless enough, but.
    The phone began to chirp. Distractedly, I depressed the hookswitch, fumbled out more change, and called information for the number of the local sperm bank.

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    I t may seem immature, not to mention impractical, for a thirty-year-old man to hold his breath and turn blue rather than go out and get a job like everyone else. I had far more at stake than pride, however. For years I had defined myself by my ideals. This had to be the case, because I had published nothing, received little recognition, beat back endless criticism of my choices. Everything I had achieved in more than a decade of study could be, and often was, dismissed as a waste of time. Certainly I hadn’t made any money. So when I laid my head down, when I rose up in the morning, all that I had to sustain me was the knowledge that I had been faithful to a principle: to live by my mind, and my mind alone. What looks like laziness, the tantrum of a postmillennial slacker refusing to make concessions to the real world, was in fact an act of self-preservation. At the risk of sounding maudlin, I will say that it was a struggle for my very soul.
    Why this should be so is best understood with a backward glance. The great chain of causality stretches far into the past, and only the cosmologist approaches the truth when he claims to begin at the beginning. For the rest of us—shrieking as we tumble in medias res—an arbitrary starting point will have to do.
     
     
    I WAS BORN in a small town between the coasts—flyover country, to those with less-than-perfect tact. The nearest city referred to itself as a suburb of a second, bigger city, making us the demographic equivalent of an asterisk to a footnote. We had two Dairy Queens, three diners, and an International House of Pancakes. Of sturdy German and Irish stock, sixty-five percent of us were registered Republicans. Firearms ownership was the rule, NRA membership common, atheism unheard-of. Our winters smothered; our summers drooped. On sharp October afternoons I would roam the woods behind our house, stomping leaves and startling the white-tails that came to nibble on my mother’s flowerbeds. As a boy I could identify dozens of birds by call or sight, wearing out a copy of Sibley by fifth grade. Once I left home, all that knowledge bled away, and the deep sense of loss I felt whenever I went back was one of the reasons I never did.
    My mother and father married young, enough so that her parents had to accompany them down to the courthouse for the license. Needless to say, it was a shotgun wedding. My father was nineteen, estranged from his own family, a high-school dropout with little more than a muscle car to his name. My mother hardly knew him, her parents less still, and while I suppose that it’s impossible to place a price on respectability, I will always wonder whether everyone would’ve been better off counting to ten and taking a few deep breaths before doing anything rash. Is marriage so intrinsically valuable that it’s worth sacrificing the happiness of all involved? This was 1970, after all. Single motherhood still carried a stigma, but the world was changing.
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