It was a large baby, well-proportioned, but clay-blue and lifeless. As every man, woman, and child in the room watched in awe, the placenta squirted out and thudded onto the ground. With that, the baby’s chest spasmed and it inhaled. Then another breath. And within moments the blue boy was pink and squealing like a piglet.
At the moment life came to the boy, death came to his mother. She took her last breath and her body went still.
Ubertus roared in grief and grabbed the infant from the midwife.
“This is not my son!” he screamed. “It is the Devil’s!”
He moved fast, dragging the placenta along the dirt floor, using his shoulders to force his way through the crowd and out the door. Josephus was too stunned to react. He sputtered but no words came out of his mouth.
Ubertus stood in the road holding his son in his stonehard hands and he wailed like an animal. Then, as torch-bearing villagers looked on, he grabbed the umbilical cord and swung the baby high over his head as if he were wielding a sling.
He brought the small body crashing down hard onto the earth.
“One!” he shouted.
He swung it over his head and smashed it down again.
“Two!”
And over and over: “Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven!”
Then he dropped the bloody broken carcass onto the lane and numbly shuffled back into the cottage.
“It is done. I have killed it.”
He couldn’t fathom why no one was paying him any mind.
Instead, all eyes were on the midwife, who was hunched over the lifeless Santesa, frantically groping between her legs.
There was a shock of ginger hair showing.
Then a forehead.
And a nose.
Josephus watched in amazement, scarcely believing his eyes. Another child was springing from a lifeless womb.
“Mirabile dictu!” he muttered.
The midwife grimaced and pulled the chin free, then a shoulder and a long thin body. It was another boy, and without any prodding it instantly began breathing, strong, clear breaths.
“A miracle!” a man said, and this was repeated by everyone.
Ubertus stumbled forward and glassily took in the spectacle.
“This is my eighth son!” he cried. “Oh, Santesa, you made twins!” He warily touched its cheek as one might touch a boiling pot.
The infant squirmed in the hands of the midwife but did not cry.
Nine months earlier, when Ubertus had finished planting his seed, his spray had shot through Santesa’s womb. That month, she had produced not one but two eggs.
The second egg fertilized became the baby who now lay shattered on a cart path.
The first egg fertilized, the seventh son, became the ginger-haired boy who now held every soul in the room spellbound.
MARCH 19, 2009. LAS VEGAS
As an only child growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, Mark Shackleton was rarely frustrated. His doting middle-class parents satisfied every whim and he grew up with only a passing relationship with the word no. Nor was his inner life disturbed by feelings of frustration, since his quick, analytical mind sliced through problems with an efficiency that made learning nearly effortless.
Dennis Shackleton, an aerospace engineer at Raytheon, was proud that he’d passed on math genes to his son. At Mark’s fifth birthday party, a family affair in their tidy split-level, Dennis produced a clean sheet of tracing paper and announced, “Pythagorean Theorem!” The skinny boy grabbed a fat crayon and felt the eyes of his grandparents, aunts, and uncles follow him as he approached the dining room table, drew a big triangle and underneath it wrote: a2+ b2= c2. “Good!” his father exclaimed, pushing his heavy black glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Now what’s this?” he asked, jabbing a finger at the long leg of the triangle. The grandfathers chuckled as the boy screwed up his face for a moment then exploded with: “The hippopotamus!”
Mark’s earliest frustrations came as a teenager when he became aware that his body had not developed as robustly as his mind. He felt superior-no, he was superior-to the jocks and the goofballs who populated his high school, but the girls couldn’t see beyond skinny legs and a pigeon chest to the inner Mark, a soaring intellect, scintillating conversationalist, and budding writer who constructed elaborate science fiction stories about alien races conquering their adversaries with superior intelligence rather than brute strength. If only the cute girls with pillowy chests would talk to him instead of giggling when he gangled through the halls or eagerly pumped his hand into the air from the front row of class.
The first time a girl said no to him, he vowed it would be the last. In his sophomore year, when he finally mustered the courage to ask Nancy Kislik to a movie, she looked at him strangely and coldly said, “No,” so he shut down that part of himself for years. He threw himself into the parallel universe of Math Club and Computer Club, where he was coolest of the uncool, first among equals. Numbers never said no to him. Or lines of software code. Not until well after grad school at MIT, when he was a young employee at a database security company, flush with stock options and a convertible, and dated a plain Jane systems analyst, did he mercifully score for the first time.
Now, Mark paced nervously in his kitchen, kinetically transforming himself into his alter ego and nom de plume, Peter Benedict, man about town, gambler extraordinaire, Hollywood screenwriter. An entirely different sort of man than Mark Shackleton, government employee, computer geek. He took a few deep breaths and knocked back the last of his lukewarm coffee. Today’s the day, today’s the day, today’s the day. He psyched himself up, praying almost, until his reverie was halted by the hated reflection in the glass of the deck sliders. Mark, Peter, it didn’t make a difference. He was slight, balding, and bony-nosed. He tried to shake it but an unpleasant word crept in: pathetic.
He had begun work on his screenplay, Counters, shortly after his meeting at ATI. The thought of Bernie Schwartz and his African masks made him queasy but the man had virtually commissioned a script about card counters, hadn’t he? The ATI experience had been gut-wrenching. He loved his rejected script with the kind of affection lavished on a firstborn but had a new plan now: he’d sell the second script then use it as leverage to resurrect the old one. He swore he would never let it die on the vine.
So he threw himself into the project. Every evening when he got home from work and every weekend he pecked out the action sequences and the lines of dialogue, and in three months it was done-and he thought it was more than good, that it was maybe even great.
As he conceived it, the film would be first and foremost a vehicle for major stars who, he imagined, would approach him on the set-the Constellation?-and tell him how much they loved the lines he had put on their lips. The story had it alclass="underline" intrigue, drama, sex appeal, all set in the high-stakes world of casino gambling and cheating. ATI would sell it for millions and he would trade his life in an underground lab in the middle of the desert, with his life savings of about 130 grand, for the glittering world of a screenwriter, living in a grand house high in the Hollywood Hills, taking calls from directors, attending premiers, klieg lights sweeping the horizon. He wasn’t fifty yet. He still had a future.
But first Bernie Schwartz had to say yes. Even the simple act of calling the man was complicated. Mark left for work too early and returned too late to connect with Bernie’s office from home. Outside calls from work were impossible. When you worked deep underground in a bunker, there was no concept of popping outside to make a call on a cell phone, even if mobiles were permitted, which they weren’t. That meant he literally had to take sick days to remain in Las Vegas to phone L.A. Too many more absences and his superiors were bound to ask questions and force him to get evaluated by the medical department.