Around the time the synapsid opening evolved, I realized I had to pee. I asked Roberto if he had to go to the bathroom and he said no and darted off again. I would have to hold it; there was no way I was going to leave him unsupervised while I went, and I couldn’t imagine dragging him into the men’s room so I could piss. All over the world people were tending their children ingeniously in the midst of surpassing extremities, seeing them through tsunamis and civil wars, shielding them from American drones, but I was at a total loss as to how one could both be responsible for a child at a museum and empty one’s bladder. I followed Roberto through the Hall of Mammals and their extinct relatives, taking another picture of the boy before the brontops, who most likely subsisted on a diet of soft leaves. I caught myself shifting my weight a little from foot to foot as the cell phone made its simulated click, something I did as a child when I had to go to the bathroom, and I had an involuntary memory of wetting myself at the Topeka Zoo at four, having refused to go when I had the chance, the humiliating warmth spreading down my leg, darkening my corduroys.
By the time we stood together before the great mammoth skeleton at the end of the vertebrate cladogram — the mummified remains of a baby woolly mammoth displayed in a case beside the pedestal — I had regressed so severely that it felt like a form of devolution. Roberto calmly if clumsily sketched the great curving tusks while I tried not to wet myself and longed for a guardian. Half the men walking around the fossils seemed to have a baby strapped to their chests and I tried to reassure myself by remembering that Alex, the sanest person I knew, believed I was genetically and practically competent to be a father, to perpetuate the species. But why, exactly, had she selected me? Because we were best friends, of course — because our relationship was more durable than any marriage we could imagine, because she thought I was smart and good. I had never really doubted myself enough to doubt her reasons, but now it occurred to me with the force of revelation: She wants you to donate the sperm precisely because she doesn’t think you’d ever get it together enough to be an active father; she’s much more afraid of raising a child with an onerous father than without a father at all; she comes from a line of self-sufficient women whose partners disappear. You appeal because you’ll be sweet and avuncular and financially supportive and someone she can talk to for emotional advice, but she assumes you’re too scattered and scared to intervene dramatically in the child’s early development and daily life. She doesn’t want to do it entirely alone, but she doesn’t want to do it with a full partner; you come from great stock — Alex loved my parents — and will never go totally AWOL, but you’re also sufficiently infantile and self-involved to cede all the substantial parenting to her. She chose you for your deficiencies, not in spite of them, a new kind of mating strategy for millennial women whose priority is keeping the more disastrous fathers away, not establishing a nuclear family.
“I have to go to the bathroom, Roberto. Why don’t you come with me?”
“I don’t have to go.”
“Come with me and wait for me.” I was shifting my weight back and forth again.
“I’ll wait for you here.”
“You are coming with me. Now.”
“But—”
“Do you want something from the gift shop or not?”
As we approached the restrooms I repeated to Roberto that if he was in the exact spot I left him in when I came back out he could have a gift of his choice. I tried to joke away my worry and enlist his compliance by making it a game: see if you can stand as still as a fossil. I parked him beside the drinking fountain and went into the restroom while he positioned himself in a dinosaur pose, and when I emerged tremendously relieved two and a half minutes later I found that he was gone. Terror seized me and I had to keep myself from running back toward the galleries. As soon as I turned the corner, he leapt out at me, shrieking like a velociraptor. Before it dissipated, the fear turned to fury, and I knelt down and gripped his shoulders and all my accumulated anxiety and self-loathing issued forth in a hiss: I am going to tell your mom you’ve misbehaved; you’re not getting anything from the gift shop.
Roberto, eyes lowered, said he was just joking and hadn’t gone far and hadn’t done anything wrong. As my fury dissolved into remorse, he turned and walked away from me. For a second I feared he’d accelerate and try to lose me — he didn’t respond when I called his name — but instead he walked slowly and dejectedly to the stairs and descended to the third floor and I followed a few feet behind as he moped through the dioramas of Pacific Peoples and Plains Indians. The surrounding nineteenth-century taxidermy and painted backgrounds felt at once dated and futuristic: dated because low-tech and methodologically presumptuous and insensitive; futuristic because postapocalyptic: it was as if an alien race had tried to reconstruct the past of the wasteland upon which they’d stumbled. It reminded me of Planet of the Apes or other movies from the sixties and seventies that I’d seen as a child in the eighties — movies whose distance from the present was most acutely felt in the quaintness of the futures they projected; nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past.
On the second floor, in the strangely empty Hall of African Peoples, I stopped him and apologized, explained that I’d been worried and overreacted, pledged to give his mom a glowing report, and asked him to pick out whatever he wanted from the gift shop, where we proceeded together hand in hand; Roberto forgave me, but his excitement now was muted. I bought him a sixty-dollar T-rex puzzle because I would make strong six figures and the city would soon be underwater. I made sure the cashier removed the price tag, and I also purchased a couple of packets of astronaut ice cream, which Roberto had never tried.
We ate the freeze-dried Neapolitan stuff — a food from the future of the past, taken to space only once on Apollo 7, 1968—on a bench in front of the museum. It was an unseasonably warm day and the bizarreness and novelty of the food cracked Roberto up, restored his spirits; I broke off my chocolate and traded it for a fragment of his strawberry, which he found gross. He showed me his various drawings, which I praised, we discussed some additions to our diorama, and I told him how he’d one day be a famous paleontologist. His energy was back and it was as if I’d never caused a scene. We had a nice lunch at Shake Shack near the museum — a fast-food restaurant where the meat is carefully sourced, all the garbage compostable — and I returned him smiling and full of dinosaur factoids to Anita by four.
* * *
The baby octopuses are delivered alive from Portugal each morning and then massaged gently but relentlessly with unrefined salt until their biological functions cease; according to the menu, they are massaged “five hundred times.” The beak is removed and the small eyes are pushed out from behind. The corpses are slowly poached and then served with a sauce composed of sake and yuzu juice. It is the restaurant’s signature dish and so plate after plate of the world’s most intelligent invertebrate infants were being conducted from kitchen to table by the handsome, agile waitstaff. There were three on the plate finally placed before us, and my agent and I, after a moment of admiration and guilty hesitation, simultaneously dipped and ingested the impossibly tender things entire.
I had arrived for what would be an outrageously expensive celebratory meal still incredulous about the amount of money a publisher was willing to pay me to dilate my story, but, after we ordered and before the octopus and flights of bluefin arrived, I had quickly signed two copies of a contract. I asked my agent to explain to me once more why anybody would pay such a sum for a book of mine, especially an unwritten one, given that my previous novel, despite an alarming level of critical acclaim, had only sold around ten thousand copies. Since my first book was published by a small press, my agent said, the larger houses were optimistic that their superior distribution and promotion could help a second book do much better than the first. Moreover, she explained, publishers pay for prestige. Even if I wrote a book that didn’t sell, these presses wanted a potential darling of the critics or someone who might win prizes; it was symbolic capital that helped maintain the reputation of the house even if most of their money was being made by teen vampire sagas or one of the handful of mainstream “literary novelists” who actually sold a ton of books. This would have made sense to me in the eighties or nineties, when the novel was more or less still a viable commodity form, but why would publishers, all of whom seemed to be perpetually reorganizing, downsizing, scrambling to survive in the postcodex world, be willing to convert real capital into the merely symbolic? “Keep in mind that your book proposal…” my agent said, and then paused thoughtfully, indicating that she was preparing to put something delicately, “your book proposal might generate more excitement among the houses than the book itself.”