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and what I had to consider every time I passed that fountain, was that this was a building filled with people who would abuse fish if given the chance.
    The day was dreary. I wore the weather like a torn shirt.
    Grand Street was buzzing. The regular trio of weirdos in front of the bodega. The girls with their gold chains and tight-ass jeans. Teenagers pushing strollers. A Hasidic woman in black with three yarmulked boys running ahead of her, their faces framed by ringlets. Like a Diane Arbus photo, two little girls, hand in hand, skipped down the sidewalk in perfect unison.
    A white yuppie woman with a baby slung over her shoulder. The children looked like trophies. The women were mocking me, Haha, we got a man to have a baby with us!
    I was pissed at Peter for not having a kid with me.
    â€œMy mom is so cool. She smokes pot with me, and she’s always encouraging me to do whatever I want,” my future kid would say.
    I would be one of those sick mothers who was fat and forever complaining. “I spent my childhood taking care of my mother. She was always sending me to the store to buy two-liter bottles of Diet Coke with her disability checks,” my future kid would say.
    Women with kids talk about how they are so busy and tired, but in their eyes they are saying, “Envy me.” I did. I wanted to be so tired and busy.
    If I believed in God, I would think he was waiting for me to get my shit together.
    It didn’t seem that long ago that I would freak out every time my period was late, running into the all-night pharmacy to pick up a pregnancy test and ending up in a girlfriend’s bathroom, where we would chain-smoke and then gasp with relief when the plus didn’t appear in the oval. And now every second week of the month, I was met with the familiar disappointment when confronted with the smear of blood on toilet paper. A marker of yet another thing not happening. All those years imagining the horror of a screaming red-faced alien forcing its way out of me somehow morphed into the ultimate climactic conclusion of my biological longing. To lie there with a baby sucking on my nipple in a symbiotic bubble of warmth and love. To never be alone again. To have a reason to take care of myself. To love something more than myself. To have a clear and understandable answer to the question, “So what do you do?”
    I wanted to erase myself. Where there was a picture of me, there would be a picture of a snotty, pudgy infant, new to the world, with its tiny hand out, grasping at nothing. On my Facebook page, above my name, there would be his or her little face. Take the best of me, take this genetic line further, and then a little further, till the sky turns black and we freeze and we melt. We are all babies. We will always be babies. All the babies will die. And one day they will be dead forever. But it was nothing to get stuck on. It was nothing to get snagged on. Enjoy the rolling skies of your time-lapsed world: This was where you crawled out of the ocean, and this was where you walked. That was where you were running,and then you were lying, and now you’re looking up at the ceiling, and above the ceiling is the same sky that rolls ahead and will keep rolling on after you are gone. Say, “Look at that.” Think, I can do that . Don’t be scared. It will all be over long after no one remembers you.
    When I was in India to scatter my father’s ashes, I saw children just crawling around in the garbage. Better that way—set the standard low. So you could think, At least you’re not crawling around in the garbage , if you ended up fucking up the kid’s life somehow. But of course, you would never say that.
    â€œWhat size is your shoe?” a hunched-over woman asked me. I thought of that film The Conversation . How everyone was once someone’s child. Someone once loved this woman more than anything else in the world. Or maybe someone didn’t, and that’s