The roach

My roommate told me she was having a child. I told her I was happy for her and I would do my best to be a good father, since the child's biological father was not "IN THE PICTURE" as they say. She told me she appreciated the gesture, but technically I would only be the child's roommate. As long as I kept the apartment clean and paid my share of the rent and utilities on time the baby and I would get along fine. I asked her if her child would be paying its share of the rent and utilities too, but my roommate said no, it didn't work like that.

My roommate went into labor one morning just as I was stepping out to work. I pretended not to hear. By the time I got home she was back and the baby was all moved in. I introduced myself. The baby regarded me from its bassinet. I told my roommate it was adorable, but she pretended to sleep. The baby looked like it needed to be fed, so I fed it.

I had the smaller room, so the baby was moved in there and I moved into the living room. The baby didn't take to my room, which was stuffy on account of one small window that didn't open, so the baby was moved to the kitchen, my roommate into my room and I moved into the shower, except when my roommate or her baby needed the shower, in which case I moved into the vestibule.

In the second week, the baby learned to crawl. It was about this time that the baby developed a vicious cough. It would climb out of its bassinet and make its way over to me in the shower and crawl on top of me and wake me up coughing directly into my face. When I woke up it would stop, and then I would close my eyes and it would go right back to coughing again. I would drop it off outside the bathroom and close the door, but it would crawl through the vents and land on top of me and start in coughing again.

I took the baby to the free clinic. There it was diagnosed with something and it died. I returned to my apartment where my roommate was. I told her I had taken the baby to the free clinic and it had died there and she was furious with me. Who was I to bring the baby to the free clinic? She accused me of overstepping my bounds as the baby's roommate. She accused me of exposing the baby to germs at the free clinic, which probably is what killed it or at least drove the final proverbial nail into its proverbial coffin. She accused me of being delusional and hysterical and said the reason for my overstepping my bounds as roommate was my pathetic longing for a child of my own. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!? I told her that I treated the baby like any other roommate and I would have carried her to the doctor had she crawled onto my chest and coughed on me instead of the baby. She called me a dangerous psychotic. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT???????!!!!!!!!!!? She told me to vacate myself from the bathroom, so I did, and moved into the free clinic.

They say there's something in kids that can cut through all pretense, make you "DROP THE VEIL" as it were and get right down to the essential truths of your character, when you're around them, their essential honesty. It wasn't like that with that baby. It was just dumb. I'd get up to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and happen to look down into the baby's bassinet and look at it for a while. It was always awake. I'd look down at it for a couple minutes or hours, waiting for it to do something for me, but it was just some dumb baby. It looked back up at me, as if waiting for me the same way I was waiting for it. "YOU STUPID BABY," I'd shout as loud as I could without waking up my roommate. "GET THE HELL OUT OF MY ROOM, YOU ASS" (because I was secretly jealous of it because I wished I could sleep in the nice kitchen). One night I pushed the bassinet outside and left it by the curb. My roommate woke up the next morning and found it there. She asked who had done it, and I said it must have been the roach who lives under the fridge. She killed the roach that afternoon. She smashed it with a hammer and nailed it to the ceiling in the bathroom, where it stayed until the end. I'd stay up all night, trying to get comfortable, staring at it, and I swear I got more staring at that roach than I ever did staring at that stupid baby.