Free The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci Page B

the air, something uncertain, and for a moment an insight seemed to be forcing itself on him, about Félix or something larger, Chernobyl, his son, hovering tantalizing before him but refusing to take shape. Then as quickly as it had come the feeling passed, and he tossed his cigarette out into the rain and started off home.

– 5 –
    T wilight had set in by the time Alex got home. He hated coming back to his empty apartment at this time of the day, hated how the light drained away from things, how listless he felt. He missed Moses, the stray he and Liz had taken in back in Toronto. He resented how they’d just assumed that Liz would keep him after the split, though he knew that if he’d actually been saddled with the cat he would have resented that more.
    His apartment was a shambles still, littered with boxes he had yet to unpack, with all the junk store furniture he’d filled it with. Half of it was ancient undergrad stuff he’d had to haul up to Montreal from his parents’ basement, a cracked drop-leaf table he’d got for five bucks, the hideous floral sofa bed his parents had had at the old farm, the mattress he’d paid fifty dollars for, used, back in second year and on which he’d slept with at least a dozen different women. None of these things had the comfortable air of familiarity they ought to have had—they seemed beside the point, a charade, remnants of a life he wasn’t part of anymore. Meanwhile, there was the letter in the drawer of his desk, though every time he turned his mind to it he seemed about to fly apart in a thousand directions.
    The rain had stopped. He poured himself a Coke from the fridge and went out to the balcony for another cigarette. Beyond him the lit towers of the downtown sat clustered like some beast huddling up against the night, framed by the dark mound of Mount Royal and by the river and the distant hills of the Townships. He had a sudden feeling of being stranded on the island the city was, as if it were a feeble encampment against the wild, though he knew it gave way to miles and miles offeatureless suburb where the closest thing to the wild was the local mall.
    He thought he might read the letter again. He had already been over it so many times, though always fleetingly, as if it might detonate, that he had it practically memorized.
I write after many years
, it began, in Ingrid’s Swedishly tentative Oxford-summer-school English,
to tell you of our son Per, who will be five in this coming September
. He never got any further than that before his heart was already in his throat. There were details about the boy, but no picture; there was the invitation, of course, to come, because, as Ingrid had written, as if Alex were a famous sports figure the boy had followed, “he very much would like to meet you.” But then at the end: “You must have your life now so perhaps it is better not to write back, if you do not think you can be a father to him. We will manage, of course. It wasn’t you who made the choice so you needn’t feel guilty, though I remember you liked to.”
    It made him squirm now to think how galvanized he’d felt when he’d first read the letter nearly four months earlier. He’d been ready to board a plane the next day, to abandon everything. But then slowly, with each day he’d delayed, his resolve had weakened. He could hardly have discussed the matter with Liz when their relationship was in its death throes at the time; and then when it was over, and he was left covered in shit the way he’d been, he couldn’t imagine trailing the noxious odors of himself into the clean, Swedish world of this innocent five-year-old. The reasonableness of Ingrid’s letter had begun to feel insidious by then. What did she mean, exactly, by
be a father to him
? Every day he had turned the phrase over in his head and every day it had seemed more ominous and obscure, a kind of test. Or maybe it was just Ingrid giving him an out, holding up to him the truth of his