Chapter 4

The next morning, Fertility is whispering on the telephone to someone. I wake up, and she’s dressed and out of bed asking, “Do you have an eight a.m. flight to Sydney?”
She’s saying, “One-way, please. A window seat if you have it. Do you take Visa?”

By the time she notices me watching her, she’s hung up and putting on her shoes. She starts to put her daily planner into her tote bag but puts it back down on the dresser.
I ask, where is she going?
“Sydney.”
But why?
“No reason.”
I say, Tell me.
By now she’s started lugging the tote bag toward the bedroom door. “Because I got my surprise,” she says. “I got the damn surprise I wanted, and damn it, I don’t want it. I don’t want this!”
What?
“I’m pregnant.”
But how does she know?
“I know everything!” she screams at me. “Well, I knew everything. I didn’t know this. I didn’t know I was going to have to bring a child into this miserable, boring, terrible world. A child who would inherit my gift for seeing the future and living a life of crushing ennui. A child who would never be surprised. I didn’t see this coming.”
So now what?
“So I’m going to Sydney, Australia.”
But why?
“My mother killed herself. My brother killed himself. You figure it out.”
But why Australia?
She’s out the bedroom door now and dragging her tote toward the top of the stairs. I’d follow her, but I’m naked.
“Think of this,” she yells back at me, “as a very radical abortion procedure.”
A man steps out of the master-bedroom doorway dressed in a blue suit I’ve pressed a thousand times. In a voice I’ve heard on a thousand speakerphone calls, he asks me, “Are you Dr. Ambrose?”
By the time I’ve jumped into my clothes, Fertility is down the stairs and out the front door. Through the bedroom window, I watch her cross the lawn to a taxi.
Back out in the hallway, a woman wearing a silk blouse I’ve hand-washed a thousand times steps up to the man in the blue suit. The two of them frozen in the doorway of the master bedroom, the woman I used to work for shouts, “That’s him! Remember? He used to work for us! That’s the Antichrist!”
I tuck Fertility’s daily planner under my arm and make a run for it. Still running, out the front door, down the street toward the bus stop, it takes me another minute to find today’s date in the book, and there’s the answer.
At 1:25 this afternoon, Flight 2039, nonstop from here to Sydney, will be hijacked by a maniac and crash somewhere in the Australian outback.
Ladies and gentlemen, as the last person aboard Flight 2039, out here above the huge Australian outback, it’s my duty to inform you that our last engine has just flamed out.
Please fasten your seat belts as we begin our terminal descent into oblivion.