My hands started shaking.
—with an exciting career working at a prestigious lab known for sending unmanned probes to Mars and beyond. I work long hours and when I get home I like to sit in my favorite armchair and watch my favorite movies over and over. I don’t think of myself as a “loner” because I enjoy the camaraderie of my coworkers at the lunch table and get as much of a kick out of swapping interesting facts I find in the scientific publications we read at our meals as the next guy does. But I confess I’m not a fan of unfamiliar “gourmet” foods and for that matter I don’t much like change or needless disruptions in my schedule. Although I had a college girlfriend in college, I don’t meet a lot of women in my line of work. I will be forty years old on my next birthday, which I understand to be the cutoff age for sperm donation. Having recently learned that bit of trivia from an acquaintance, I’ve begun to wonder whether I’ll meet a woman I would like to have a family with while my sperm is still at its most viable. Moreover, a single mother raised me so I grew up without a male—
At this point he’d turned the paper over and finished his answer on the back.
—role model and while I think that worked out fine for me, I am not convinced I would be an exemplary father in all the ways a father should be. I am hopeless at sports and other “manly pursuits.” I can be impatient and short-tempered. Living with a child would invite chaos into my life at a time when I’m not sure I’m equipped to deal with chaos. But my mother always wanted grandchildren and I like the idea of creating a child for her sake, even if I never get to see that child, ever. My mother isn’t alive anymore, so she would never get to see a child of mine ever, either. But to put a child or children out there, for my mother—that would be wonderful. She was the best. I miss her every single day.
Somebody—probably Mimi—had drawn a red arrow to that first line on the flip side. Clipped to a new sheet with CHILDHOOD PHOTOGRAPHS typed across the top—a page not included in the other packets—was a photograph of a little boy with smooth red hair and huge brown eyes magnified to lemur size by Buddy Holly glasses. He wore a round-necked striped T-shirt and shorts and sat on a lawn chair holding a birthday cake on his knees that was decorated with five candles and a rocket ship. “May * 1965” appeared in tiny type along one fluted white edge of the photograph.
I read his form again from the top. He was five foot eight, nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, allergic to shellfish and cats. The other donors had their own issues: one was colorblind, the second a smoker and prone to keloids, and bachelor number three had some moderate acne scarring and had once struggled with alcohol addiction. There were hypertensive grandparents, a father dead at forty in a car accident, a mother with early-onset diabetes, an aunt who committed suicide, siblings with scoliosis or arrhythmias or hearing impairments. At the end of the stats section I found a line that read, “Donors who provide consent will be open to having their contact information released to any resulting progeny when a child or children reach the age of eighteen. Donors who do not agree to release that information prefer to remain anonymous.”
That line of type was followed by two boxes. The first three donors had checked “Consent to Contact.” The rocket scientist had checked the second one, the one that said “Anonymous Donor.” Alongside that, in Mimi’s handwriting, one word. Him.
I LOOKED AT that snapshot of the little boy with the rocket cake for a long time before I put it away.
Frank’s sleeping bag was on a shelf nearby, and I rolled it out on the bunker floor, turned off the lights, and crawled in. At that moment the skylight perfectly framed the moon on its voyage across the night sky. When it traveled out of sight over some European countries or other foreign places with lots of history and culture and other things like that, it was way darker in the bunker than I had thought it would be. I got worried the hinges of the bunker’s hatch would fatigue and allow the trapdoor to do its worst. I would die an awful, solitary death down there and it would only occur to somebody to check the Dream Bunker for all that was left of Alice after they smelled a horrible odor coming from under the floorboards in Frank’s closet.
So I crawled out of the sleeping bag and wedged a couple of Frank’s outgrown wool trousers in where the hinge hinged so the hatch couldn’t close all the way no matter what. While I was looking for something that would survive the wedgie undamaged I found a couple of nice little cashmere argyle sweaters and took those back to the floor with me to use as a pillow.
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