The Baby

by Albe Harlow

It has been some months since Grace and I had dinner out. Our infant has been at our throats. Yesterday a shower of objects flew our way from the spare room. The day before that, we were unceremoniously thrown out trying to put it to sleep. Grace interpreted this as my just deserts. She thinks I did a crummy job cleaning the crib. “You should have done better,” Grace said to me in another hail of plastic.

We go to sleep quietly, sometimes quite late and with myriad bruises. “The frog chandelier did not appease,” Grace said this evening in the dark.

“He is a lie-abed,” I said. “He expects me to be an animal balloon artist or something.”

“Well,” she said, “you could have learned something about balloons. You could have learned how to make something with balloons. But you are too busy. You are thinking about your own life. You don’t make time.”

That night I dreamt of fighting the baby in a duel. Many beautiful women and famous artists were in attendance. Observing honorifics, my baby bowed or curtsied or something, and called me father sarcastically. That was that. We began snapping our leather switches at one another’s faces. I chased it up the grand staircase, but it leapt over the marble banister. Using one of the thousand potted poinsettias, it skillfully blocked my back-handed sally and jumped straight at me, calling me a big boring man midflight. I couldn’t take it anymore. I broke down. “What do you want, my child?” I screamed in front of everyone.

When my baby noticed I had lost my will to go on, it stopped flying at me and settled in the cradle of my folded arms. “I am your child,” it said with bulging glass eyes. “I am here to protect you. Do not think me a menace. You simply overfed me. Too much sugary pap from the bodega.”

“Impossible,” I said, crying.

“There, there,” it said, fisting its eyes with its newborn hands. “If I grant you and your consort two nights’ rest, a night on the town, half a mind-development-stage’s worth of liquid capital, some of the capital currently tied up in my sensorimotor development, would that be enough for you to put your life back together again?”

Considering this generous relief fund, I stroked the baby’s forehead. It blinked like it thought well of me, like I was its rightful benefactor. This geniality was, of course, false. The baby had always been a bald-faced liar. The clemency of which it spoke wouldn’t last longer than the shimmy of a crib mobile. Slowly, I began drawing the small hidden knife from my ankle sweatband. In a lip-smackingly quick turn of events, I had the knife against its ringlets of hair. My child felt the metal but was brave.

“I’ve always known this day would come,” it said stoicalistically.

“You’ve held nothing but contempt for me,” I said.

“If you vanquish me now, I will return to you, a ghost.”

“Impossible,” I said.

“Think about it,” said the baby.

Someone in the audience screeched an emphatic call for death. “Death to the tyrant!” the person screamed again. Soon the whole audience, all the beautiful women and all the famous artists, were chanting: “Death to the tyrant! Death to the tyrant!”

Several nights later, Grace and I left our infant with a babysitter so that we could go see a play. It was nice to be downtown and fantasize about the untrammeled sex drives of yore that had brought us together. When we got to the theatre, I saw that the program read “The Clouds, a Play by Aristophanes.” Oh hell, “The Clouds,” I thought, having seen a college production of the play several years before. I don’t want to see “The Clouds.”

“Gracey, can we ditch this litter box and go see another play off-Broadway?”

“Silly husband,” she said. “Of course we can do that but I have in my store three perfectly sensible reasons discouraging the adventure: one, our tickets are nonrefundable; two, by leaving this theatre and seeking another, we lay ourselves open to many risks, not the least of which is failing to find availability anywhere else at all; three, we are well-settled here, snug in our seats, and my mother loved ‘The Clouds’ by Aristophanes.”

“Your mother was a student of literature,” I countered.

“She was,” said Grace.

“You were always rule bound as a child. You never threw your toys across the room.”

“Shhhh…It’s starting,” she said.

The curtain rose by mechanical crank and the first argument commenced with great efficiency. The baby was a born equestrian but the father hated this hobby, which admittedly was no way to be. A feral interpretation of the Greek, I thought. Then I learned that the baby was embezzling money from the father to pay for all his cavalier fancies. He can’t just have any horse he wants, I thought.

“He can’t just have any old horse he wants,” I whispered to Grace.

“Shhhh,” she said.

Good thing Socrates lived nearby at the Thinkery. The father commanded his child to attend the Thinkery and learn from Socrates about how to litigate the family out of its horsy debts, which were growing by the day. The baby refused. All the same, there was certainly little indication that the baby’s horse-trading was on the wane. Meanwhile, the baby called its father a “rustic moron.” The baby would do anything to get what it wanted. It would not do as it was told. This was fiscally unsustainable. Someone had to learn the fine art of witticisming and lawyerly swagger. As such, sacrificing the peach-picking downtime of his retirement, the father decided he himself would go learn from Socrates. There was a lot of blabbering and learning. I almost fell asleep but Grace flicked me on the skull.

Being as my bladder was yielding, I pardoned myself and left our row, slinking through the doors to the restroom. Knowing all too well how the play carried on, I kept it going while urinating, looking up at the ceiling tiles, recalling the father’s pupilship at the Thinkery, how, when the father learns that the Zeus-god is dead and, instead, the shapeshifting clouds are the true gods, the father has a revelation.

“Wow!” he yips, almost dropping his cane.

This seemed to account for everything. Well, I thought, washing my hands, there was something about a celestial vortex but eventually, sure enough, the father left the Thinkery, a lettered man.

I returned to the theatre and, having nestled into my seat and taken Grace’s hand, discovered that, as anticipated, the baby had been horsing again. Horsing day and night, one was led to believe. This was an outrage renewed. The father needed the baby to shore up its own debts. It was not the father’s responsibility. Up against an overwhelming blitz of rhetorical genius, the baby relented and was finally compelled to the Thinkery. Things did not go as planned for daddio. Once the baby returned, freshly lettered and more devious than ever, there was a duel:

(a) Baby strikes first

(b) Father, despite age, retaliates with cane

(d) Father excoriates, “I am your father! You forget your place! If you cried, ‘Momma!,’ I fetched you purée!”

(e) Father also says, “I cleaned your kaka!”

(f) Baby calls father old boring fat and therefore a child

(g) Father blames clouds for baby’s miseducation

(h) Father sets fire to Thinkery

After the play, Grace and I went across the street for the post-theatre menu. The first bottle of Côte du Rhone was gone before the food arrived, so we ordered another.

“Do you think the baby knows we’re gone?” I said, after much digressive and trivial prattling about cultural affairs.

Grace laughed, horrified. “Yes, of course,” she said.

“I sure hope the putdown was easy.”

“Millie is a reliable sitter. I’m sure she knows how to deal with infants.”

“Ours is different,” I said over the olives.

“That’s rubbish. We’re just learning how to be parents. That’s the problem. You can’t blame our faults on a harmless little infant.”

“Gracey,” I said, questing for the plumbing in her eyes. “Our infant controls our lives.”

“That’s what infants do, my dear. We live for the infant.”

“Servitude. Day and night. Even at twilight. Tantrums. Blood-curdling yelps. We used to be crepuscular beings, Grace. We used to fuck and eat peach galettes. It’s not what I signed up for.”

“Well, maybe you should have thought twice that morning in the bathroom,” she said unbearably.

“Alright, alright,” I said. “Our one night out. Let’s enjoy ourselves.”

“I don’t want to argue.”

“Good. I don’t want to argue either.”

When our beef and frites arrived, we became lurid barbarians giving chase to all the juices of life. We nearly fell asleep on the subway back uptown. We were hot stuff.

Millie thanked us for the sorry-we’re-late-sized tip and inaudibly receded from the apartment hall. “Lovely girl, that Millie,” I whispered to Grace.

“Isn’t she?” said Grace excitedly.

Rosy-cheeked, we held one another closely while sneaking into the spare room. By the blue glow of the plastic globe, we watched our baby sleep, curled into a ball.

“What is that?” I puffed silently.

“What is what?”

“What is this animal?”

A stuffed animal I had never before seen lay under the baby’s arm, a little mottled horse.

“Millie must have gotten our little one a new toy.”

While we didn’t dare touch the infant in any manner, such as patting its head or strumming its fingers, we genuflected with a kind of seafaring wave and snuck away. I could sense that Grace was nervous. In the safe haven of our bedroom, I told her that I myself was worried the horse had not been properly inspected for contaminants.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” she said. “Millie is a reliable sitter.”

“Grace, this is the first time we’ve ever used Millie, and you obtained her name on one recommendation.”

“Stuffed animals come pre-cleaned,” she retorted.

“What if it’s used? A used stuffed animal.”

“Babies carry a million diseases. I don’t think a little stuffed horse is going to do any hurt.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” I said.

“Well, if you don’t like it then take it away. But please wait until tomorrow. I cannot afford another endless war.”

“Understood,” I said soberly.

After Grace shut off the light, I waited through the five minutes it took for her to begin that whimpering little snore of hers and I made my way to the spare room. The baby was still in its ball formation, dreaming inane quixotic dreams. Knowing that one night with horse would produce an inseparable comradery between beast and child, I reached over the parapet of the crib. Gently rearing the baby’s purple-sleeved arm, I went for the horse. The baby began to stir, blubbering drool. I dropped its arm. Shaking violently, it unfurled and began to scream. By the glow of the globe, I found my footing and ran out of the room, catching a small wooden block on the heel.

The next day, the final day, a Saturday, what was by some accounts to be a final day, Grace looked up at me from the paper-mâché horse the baby had commissioned.

“We are in bondage,” she said. “You should never have disturbed the baby’s sleep.”

“My Gracey, I have a plan. We can escape this. But we must work together.”

“But if the horse monument is not complete by tonight…”

“Gracey, look at me. We can beat this. We can be free.”

“How?”

“I invited your parents over for dinner.”

“You did what?”

“They will take the child. They will correct it. They will avert its fearful gaze. They have a garden. They live in the hills. They know what infants desire. We are connoisseurs of ruin, we who dwell in the city.”

“No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

She moved to the sink for a sip of water. The distant baby began to yell. It has in its possession a sonic map of the apartment: its ears were attuned to the seething. I ran to Gracey and sheltered her in my robe. She began saying “No, no, no, no” again.

“It won’t grow here. It needs space to roam.”

“Our child is barely one year old,” said Grace.

“I know; I know,” I said, holding tight.

“I never thought I’d give birth to an exile.”

“I never thought I would see you so unhappy.”

After the parents took away our infant, I walked into the spare room and flicked on the lights.

“See?” I said to Grace. “It’s not so bad in here.”

Grace’s parents had taken most of the popular toys, including the hanging frog mobile.

“We could turn this room into a lounge space. We could pick out a metal drink cart. A pewter ice bucket. Maybe a small pool table. A Stairmaster. An overarching floor lamp.”

“Husband, our child will be back in a week,” she said.

Over that week, Grace had taken up painting and revived her emergency-Russian. She had written sixteen letters to senators and representatives across the State of New York, canceled the old ripoff farm share and subscribed to a new nutrient-wise farm share, repainted the apartment Warm Ivory, rekindled several dubious but socially lucrative friendships, purchased flowers and some poisonous-smelling cheeses, reinstalled the chess-playing app for her phone and played me from across the room in hearty regalement. What pastimes! Everything was vibrant. Our groins were hot. When we walked to the nearby park, Grace said things like “Wow. If we lived just a little sum closer, I would be here every day,” even though we lived only one avenue over. I brought several pairs of pants to the tailor for button replacements, procured an Islay scotch for the poisonous-smelling cheeses, made French press coffee almost every morning, read and judiciously cut out portions of the Times that I found particularly interesting, laundered the window curtains, finally joined the complainants of a class-action lawsuit versus my former employer who had been running a real estate brokerage out of his frosty nonprofit. I attended a screenplay workshop, complimented a woman about her fashionable earrings in a non-sexual way, rehinged the bathroom door to its lintel, had a pillow fight with Grace, lit candles after the pillow fight. Our responsibilities were to one another.

When the baby came to me in the dead of night, as it was inevitably to do, I said, “You have come too early, haunter of my eve. You torch my serenity, and with no explanation, no pity, no regard.”

I was addressed by its flaming glass eyes. It said, “Father, the time will come when you’ll repent of your trick with the horse.”

My baby jumped. It jumped up from its crib and bit me on the neck. It would not let go. I swung and writhed and shook and serpentined myself, but it would not unclasp. The bite was final.

I am now in an unmarked bedroom, cooking grass-fed cow on a camper grill near the window. Grace will be arriving soon with other provisions. Today, at least I can say the baby is loved and lauded by many, the new face of NitroDiapers. Sometimes the baby wears blue, sometimes red, sometimes green. It has its own email address. In the ads, it is of calm bearing, its mouth a well-mopped toothless crescent. In one ad, it grips the handles of a wooden horse, rocking back and forth, back and forth. “The baby is going to be rich,” I whisper out the window to the sky crossed with fire escape. Grace does eventually return, bags in hand, one silk cack under her arm. She slammed the door and told me the decision has been made: “The baby is going to be an actor.”

Albe Harlow’s stories, essays, and poems are published in the Cambridge Literary Review, 3:AM Magazine, Princeton University’s Inventory, Contrary Magazine, RHINO, La Piccioletta Barca, and elsewhere. Additional work is forthcoming in 3:AM Magazine. His project relating to the auditory legacy of Jacques Derrida, publicized by Cornell University Library, is ongoing. He is a 2019 graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program and a reader at Harvard Review. Recently, he attended the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University for the 2021 Summer Session. New York City is his home.