Free Baby Be-Bop by Francesca Lia Block

you really? I don’t believe you.’
    “'You’re right. I’d get right in. She is beautiful.’
    “'She’s Kali, the blessing, dancing goddess. She’s also death. In the East those things can go together.’
    “I knew what she meant. She danced for me for a while and then we lay on her mattress and made love all night.
    “After that I didn’t feel any less lonely, only that Just Silver had joined me in the wild blue windscape of my loneliness.
    “'I’m pregnant,’ she said one night as I felt her draw me inside of her like a mouth on a pipe full of a burning dream-plant.
    “'What? Just this second?’
    “'Yes.’
    “'How do you know?’
    “'I am very in touch with my body.’
    “'I can tell.’
    “'What are we going to do?’ She said we, knowing somehow that I wasn’t going to leave even though I reminded her of Siddhartha.
    “'I never had a dad,’ I said.
    “'I’m sorry. What happened?’
    “'Well I had him for a while but he died when I was five. He knew he was going to die so even when he was alive he kind of ignored me.’
    “Just Silver kissed the angles of my face. Her hair smelled like Nag Champra and marijuana. Her eyelashes were so long they looked like they hurt her. Her legs were as long as mine when we lay hip to hip and measured. Steep thighs.
    “'So you don’t want a baby,’ Just Silver said. ‘I mean, because of your dad.’
    “'No. I want a baby because of my dad. I want a baby so I can be a dad for him.’
    “'Or her,’ Just Silver said.
    “'I think we will have a boy.’
    “'Why?’
    “'I’m very in touch with our bodies.’
    “'I can tell.’
    “So we decided to have you, buddy. We almost named you Siddhartha but Fifi convinced us it was not going to be fun for a little boy to grow up with a name like Siddhartha, and Sid didn’t have the right feeling. Fifi liked the name Dirk because of the sound of Derwood and Dirby and so we agreed, although your mother didn’t see much difference between Dirk and Sid.
    “Fifi loved your mom as if she were her very owndaughter. She was so happy to see me with a friend. I had really never had any friends. Now Just Silver and I went everywhere together. I would recite my poetry and she would do her interpretive dancing on the stage. The wineglasses danced with her. I had expected things to stop moving around when I fell in love but I was just as telekinetic as ever. Maybe more so. Instead of grounding me, my love sent me spinning even deeper into the center of loneliness that was the stars and the night and the wind. I didn’t feel that my love was anything to do with the planet I had been born on. I wanted to fly away with Just Silver.
    “Then you were born. You presented me with this problem. How was I supposed to keep living this abstract way, trying to be like music from a horn, like sweat, like the dark skin of night peeling back at dawn? Although I’d wanted a baby so I could love it the way my father hadn’t been able to love me, when I saw you with your eyelashes and toes and everything, I realized what a big responsibility you really were. I had to care in a way I had never had to care before. I read you poetry and played my guitar. I made your toys fly around the room like planets in space. But I was drawn more and more to the waves and the wind. You made my heart hurt too much. It ached so much I thought it would stop pumping like my father’s had.
    “Your mother and I would leave you with your grandmother and go driving for hours. We liked to take Sunset all the way to the sea. We kissed in the furious SantaAnas that felt like jewel dust whirling around us as the sun went down.
    “The night we gave up on life, I can’t say it was a conscious decision. But we didn’t struggle against it either. That was the year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were killed. In a way I think it was all too much for us—this world.”
    Dirk thought of his parents on the precipice, wanting to sink into the cavern of night and