IT IS THE end of the world for both of you. In the spare room you don’t talk about with each other anymore, your boyfriend sits with a pile of flashcards, flipping them over, one after another. He doesn’t say anything by way of identifying what is on the card. It’s a motion, a pattern. Flip, recognize, flip again. Each card features a cheerful caricature of a former President of the United States set on a yellow background. Earlier he took the living presidents out, set them on the window ledge to bleach in the sun. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, the George Bushes, Senior and Junior. Barack Obama.
You try to be with him for several hours every day. At first, you sing the Presidents Song in your head. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, while he silently flips cards. The song is a device you remember from your elementary school class. Somehow, they thought it was important, knowing the names of all the presidents. That was a long time ago; now, you never get any further than Jackson, humming the rest of the song without remembering the words. You watch your boyfriend carefully, waiting for his lips to move, but they don’t. He doesn’t even look at the cards, although he pauses on each one for long enough to see, if he were looking.
Otherwise you maintain your normal routine. You go to work early in the morning so you can come home a little earlier in the afternoon. Your job has been very accommodating. The Monday after, your boss tells you to take all the time you need, and you tell him that it will feel good just to have something else to focus on. This, too, felt rehearsed. You don’t know if it feels better to be at work or not. You don’t want to leave your boyfriend alone, but you know he is alone whether you are there or not. At work you feel alone, but also like a robot, or something automatic. You go through the motions. You laugh at jokes. Nobody notices that you have taken down all of the pictures that sat on your desk.
The night you came home from the hospital the house seemed impossibly warm. You checked the thermostat, and, sure enough, it was over eighty degrees. The air conditioner was broken. You fussed with the thermostat and then went out to the back yard to look at the AC unit. Your boyfriend was almost crying, shook his head and said, leave it, just leave it and his voice trembled. You stood outside on the dry grass in your bare feet and examined the AC unit with your flashlight. It wasn’t running, you couldn’t hear any noise, the fan wasn’t spinning. Nothing. You didn’t know what it was supposed to look like, but not like this. Something’s wrong with it, you said out loud.
You thought your boyfriend was on the porch, but he had already gone inside. You went room to room, opened all the windows, but really you were looking for him. You found him in the spare room, and you almost didn’t open the door, but then you did. Your boyfriend was sitting on the tiny bed, his weight wrinkling the comforter, which was covered in cheerful trains. There had been an argument about the cheerful trains; your boyfriend thought they were too gendered, but you held out for them. He was holding, in one hand, the kind of brightly-colored, soft, noisy toy that a baby could play with and chew on and throw at the cat. Around the lump forming in your throat, right at the bottom of your skull, you remembered joking that it looked like some kind of sex toy. In his other hand, he had the Presidents of the United States flashcards. The package is branded SmartBaby™ and has a cartoon baby wearing a mortarboard and holding a diploma.
He would have been such a smart baby, you think, and the weight of the night sits on you. When your sister agreed to carry the baby for you and your boyfriend, nobody thought much of it at all. It seemed like the easiest thing in the world. She was one of those women who loved being pregnant. She had three already and her husband didn’t want a fourth, and then you asked her if she would mind. Sure, she said. One more for the road.
Your sister made it, but just barely. The baby didn’t. That night, neither you nor your boyfriend slept. You did the things that made the most sense to you, made a pot of tea, cleaned the kitchen, called your mother to let her know your sister was doing fine. You heard your boyfriend crying, although you knew realistically you couldn’t hear him from across the house, over the sound of running water. You forced yourself still, told yourself you needed to finish the dishes. It was a little before sunrise and your neighbors were starting to wake up.
When you finished the dishes, you went back to the spare room to find your boyfriend wrapped in the train blanket, turning over the flashcards. His eyes were dry, and he was staring absently at the mural you’d had custom-painted on the bedroom wall. Later, you will want to paint over the mural, but your boyfriend won’t. You asked him if he wanted to come to bed, but he just looked at you and kept turning over cards. Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Madison. James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, smiled a happy cartoon smile up from the flash card. Neither of you could stop looking at him. When you heard the sound of your neighbor’s car starting, the beginning of his morning commute, you started crying, and then you were both crying. It was supposed to be his room, and then it wasn’t.