Your Responsibilities

I wake up in the dorm. It's 2:00 am. I get up to use the bathroom. Mark is also up, and with me. "Hey, let's get treats out of the freezer and watch tv," he says. I am reticent, I want to get back to bed. I go to the bathroom; we get separated for awhile. The bathroom is also a vast locker room. There are shelves upon shelves of every kind of candy and chocolate bar. Standing next to someone at a urinal, he remarks that the Butterfingers always disappear first. Back in the halls, many many students are now filing around. Perhaps it has become day. I see JP and LCS walking in the halls. I stay ahead of them, pretending not to see them. JP is angry at me for I have wronged her, and she doesn't want to talk to me anyway. JP eventually becomes MK. Oh, remember at prom last summer we had sex and now she has my baby. She didn't want my help or any kind of relationship, but she has my son now. 

I meet back up with Mark in an office in one of the halls. I remember the plan to watch tv. We go to the dorm MK shares with someone else. A large, windowed room with a kitchenette and an attached bedroom. At first the baby's asleep and I think she doesn't want me to see the baby. I sit on the couch awkwardly. At some point Sam is sitting next to me and talking about how he has quoted me in his thesis -- about exchanging tokens of value for money, and how at last I have seen the light. I think about my thesis, how I have already done the hard research and how it has some substance to it. I have done the hard work already, but I still have to write it. 

I have seen glimpses of my son before, but now he comes out of the bedroom. He is toddling around, and he can kind of speak. He is sad and angry -- he is no longer the baby, somebody else has had another baby and he's jealous. No, I assure him, you will always be the baby. He says something I can't quite understand, but seems quite angry and violent. I hug him, his tears get my shirt wet. I am worried, will he hurt me because he seems angry and violent? But he's just a baby. 

More people come in and sit on the couch. A woman I knew in high school and her husband. Doesn't he work at Seattle Rep, I think? Many people sit on the couch, flirting. I am careful not to touch the woman next to me too much. That's flirting, it's not for me anymore. Does MK need money to raise the baby? I have lots. She hasn't asked for any, but I could give her some. No son of mine should ever want for anything and all that. We are leaving. MK asks me to fix the frame of her door; I say maybe Mark could help me. We examine it -- it is lined with some wearing rustic wood. Mark opines that he can easily reface it. 

He and I head back to our dorm. We step through a broken fence into a playground on our way home. Oh my god, I think, I have a son -- I will have to tell L. And I cheated on her, too. How can I have done this? How can this have happened to me? I think about remarking something to Mark about it. But I don't say anything.