Tag You're It: 20 Questions

1. Male, 34, New Jersey, scientist. This is kind of cheating, isn't it?

2. I know, that was a little vague. My training is in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, but I'm now in the department of psychiatry at the med school at Penn, studying how depression affects brain activation in emotionally taxing situations. 

3. I'm not sure how much longer I'll stay on, actually. The funding climate is bad, the commute is worse, and the salary is just OK. I think I can find a better opportunity in tech nearby or in New York.

4. Married almost six years, two kids. Una is three, Rowan is ten months.

5. That's kind of specific. Well, as it happens, that was the night after Una was born. Or, rather, she was born a bit past midnight on September 27, so it was that evening. You get the idea. Anyway, I was probably either dead asleep or begging her to figure out how to nurse so I could get some sleep. It turns out that, when you don't sleep, you don't encode memories very well --

6. Christ, I don't know. Chef's knife, paring knife, bread knife, the long one that isn't a chef's knife that nobody ever uses, two steak knives; I guess that's six? Why?

-- wait, what the *fuck* --

7. Yes. I understand perfectly well. 

Thank you for waiting until I was alone.

8. I'm going to say something that's going to sound like I don't understand how serious you are, and I really don't want you to take it that way. But it sure seems like you know what happened, which means you know what I'm about to say. So why get my side?

9. No. I very much don't want you to do that.

10. I was very careful. And lucky -- there was another white and Asian couple on the ward, their baby girl was just a day older than ours. The husband had to work or something, so the wife would push the baby around in that wheelie bassinet whenever she felt up to it. And Shin-Yi's an extrovert. So I played extrovert and introduced them, and volunteered to stay with the girls while they compared notes on the births. 

That was all it took. They all look the same at that age. I even switched those little Lojack things the hospitals put on their ankles, just in case they were keyed to the baby's identity. Never did find out.

How did you find out?

11. Missing? Oh, Jesus -- you mean it's still alive?

12. Any sane person would have smothered it before it was a month old. I didn't want it to be me.

13. You weren't there. You didn't hear it speak.

14. It was a C-section, the birth. The labor was awful, and eventually the OB just gave up and decided to operate. You know how that is, maybe. They took Shin-Yi into the room, and after maybe twenty minutes or a half hour of prep they let me in. And the basic deal is the room is draped with plastic sheeting absolutely everywhere, like some undergrad art installation, so I didn't get to see what they were doing to my wife -- which was just fine, there's a reason I don't study anything south of the brainstem, but it's this very Captain Trips kind of moment, where you're in surgical scrubs being led on this narrow path through an OR and your vision is very clearly being directed away from something very important that's happening not very far away at all. And then you get to talk to the love of your life, only you can only see her from the neck up and you know exactly what's happening five feet away even though you wish you didn't, and she's out of it anyway because that's the only civilized way to do this, and then it's blast-off and you hear this ungodly awful sound that's like no noise that ever passed the throat of man or beast. And someone shows you this blood-covered thing that's flailing around and just flaying your brain with this anthem of hate, this shriek that somehow seems to be making a note of each person in the room and saying "You'll pay. And you. And you." And, as soon as you lay eyes on it, the thing's eyes snap open and it looks directly at you and it goes absolutely silent. And then it opens its mouth, as if it's planning to eat you, and the gums are studded with a three-deep row of needles. And words come out.

No, I know, most people don't get that last part. That was just for me.

15. Oh, I asked the nurse. They make you go to the nursery with it, you know, if you're the partner and your wife has just had a C-section. 

She said, "Some kids are born with them." Didn't seem to think it was anything unusual.

16. No one else heard them. Just me. It didn't stop talking until daylight.

I thought it was over then. Just a hallucination brought on by stress. But it started again at the stroke of sundown. That was when I knew I had to get rid of it.

17. It told me how I'd die, and how everyone else would die. But not when.

Do you know? Do I go last, or first?

18. Oh, thank God. Yes. Yes, that's just what I want.

19. The knife, please.

20. No, I'll do it. Only --

If you see them, tell them I'm sorry, will you? I don't know if I have the strength to write a note. Tell Una I loved her as though she were my own. More. And tell them how sorry I am that I wasn't brave enough to take them with me when I went.