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  “Let us dispense with the monetary side,” Reggie says. “I trust you have brought payment with you.”

  Alex hands him the envelope and they wait while Reggie counts it, all of it, right in front of them.

  “That’s more cash than we were legally allowed to bring into the country,” Alex reminds him.

  “Silly law, don’t you think? I thought we had agreed upon euros,” Reggie says. Noticing Leslie’s alarm, he quickly adds, “Not to worry. Dollars will do.”

  “I notice we’re the only patients here,” Alex says to Reggie.

  “Did you come here to meet people and make new friends?” he asks, putting the money back into the envelope. Seeing the look on Alex’s face, he changes tack and says Dr. Kis makes only two appointments per week, spending the rest of his time on research, and telling him how fertility specialists the world over come to Slovenia to sit at the feet of Dr. Kis, and how he has the highest success rate of anyone in the field. Reggie speaks rapidly, in the kind of rote singsong that puts them in mind of a tour guide who has long since lost interest in the scenery.

  “And now, one minute of science,” Reggie says. “You’ll be glad to know that the doctor’s injections are all one hundred percent organic.”

  “I don’t really see how you can use the words glad and injection in the same sentence,” Leslie says. And though her little jest fills Alex’s heart with love, he does wish she would be quiet and let matters proceed.

  “Obviously I would lose my job if I were to tell you what materials the doctor uses, but he does want you to know that he has had great success—great, great success—using tissue from some of the most vigorous and fertile beings on earth.”

  “Beings?” Alex asks.

  “Yes,” says Reggie. “Living things.”

  “What kind of being are we talking about?”

  “It’s the results that matter,” Reggie says. “Lions, tigers, bears—do you really care?”

  “Yes, of course we do,” Leslie says. “Alex?” Whatever exhaustion she was feeling has been dispelled, and her blood surges through her, and her eyes open wider with alarm.

  “I should tell you,” Reggie says, clearing his throat, “that often he uses just a small amount—a trace amount, really, undetectable, I should think—of…” The last word is uttered so softly that neither Alex nor Leslie can make it out.

  “Of what?” Alex asks.

  “Goby,” Reggie says, with studied nonchalance.

  “What’s a goby?” Alex asks.

  “A fish,” Leslie says. She sees the look of wonder on Alex’s face. “When you work in publishing, you learn all sorts of weird stuff.”

  “A fish?” Alex exclaims. “A fucking fish?”

  “Oh, and by the way,” Reggie interjects quickly, “here’s a plus to our service that we’ve recently added. We connect you with a first-rate obstetrics practice right in Los Angeles.”

  “We live in New York,” Alex says.

  “Oh, yes. Sorry. No problem. We work with a terrific bunch of obstetricians there as well. We strongly advise you to stay within network. These doctors are very sensitive to the whole process. And, by the way, there’s no charge for this service.”

  “The doctors see us free of charge?” Alex asks, rather skeptically.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know about that,” Reggie says. “But the referral is on us, that’s what I meant to say.”

  In the middle of all this, the door opens and in walks Dr. Kis himself. He is about forty, tall and chaotic-looking, with bristling iron-gray hair, wrinkled clothes. He looks like one of those concert pianists in the movies, the kind who are struck with amnesia or who hear voices, who triumph briefly in the concert hall and then descend into a final madness.

  He seems surprised to find Reggie speaking to patients. Reggie greets him in Slovene, and the doctor impatiently asks him a question, pointing to the dog bowls and the bone on the floor, and Reggie quickly picks them up.

  “The doctor doesn’t speak English, I’m afraid,” Reggie says to Alex and Leslie.

  “Really?” says Alex. “I was under the impression that most people in Slovenia spoke English.”

  “What can I tell you?” Reggie says. “Even geniuses have their limitations.”

  “Denar,” the doctor says, extending his hand and slapping two fingers onto his palm repeatedly until Reggie hands him the envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.

  “This is going well,” Leslie says.

  The doctor says something else—everything the doctor says seems angry and impatient—and Reggie answers rather plaintively. Kis cuts him off with a furious wave, and Reggie tells Alex and Leslie, “The doctor will see you now,” but it’s almost drowned out by a violent clap of thunder. The electricity suddenly is cut and they all stand there breathing in the damp darkness for several moments before power is restored.

  There are some doctors who inspire confidence, and others who don’t. And then there are doctors like Kis, who inspire dread. We expect doctors to be clean, and he is not clean. Though his hands are scrubbed and he smells of antibacterial soap, his uncleanliness comes from something far below the skin. His eyes are distant; his expression one of exasperation and superiority; his touch is impersonal and slightly harsh.

  After a very routine exam—stethoscope, blood pressure cuff—the doctor asks Alex and Leslie, in Slovene, when they last had sex, which Reggie translates with a kind of creepy relish.

  “We had sexual relations nine days ago,” Alex says with as much dignity as he can muster.

  “And how was it?” Reggie asks, but quickly adds, “Kidding, I’m just kidding. We actually prefer a longer abstinence period, but nine nights will have to do.”

  Kis goes on to explain what the procedure involves. His voice contains no enthusiasm, or warmth, or even simple humanity. With Reggie translating, he speaks rapidly, like the voice at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial on TV listing in eight seconds the hundred possible catastrophic side effects of the new medicine. Kis looks off into the middle distance as he rattles along, and Reggie picks at his fingernails as he does his best to keep up with the doctor’s rapid-fire delivery.

  “We are going to increase the motility of your sperm and the receptivity of your eggs. We are turning a quiet glade in the forest into a teeming spot in the jungle. Life, life, everywhere life, wanting, taking, growing. We are going to turn you on. Up high. Like teenager and creature of the wild. Nothing will hold you back. Life! Life!”

  Alex looks at Leslie, and the two of them start to laugh. The doctor is clearly insane, and the futility of their mission, plus the expense, and the jet lag, and the accumulation of three years of painful disappointments, leaves them with nothing but giddiness.

  But the next thing Alex knows he is shirtless with the others looking on, and, without a word of warning or a moment’s hesitation, Dr. Kis pierces the back of his right arm with a very large old-fashioned needle, and the silliness is gone, barely remembered. It is amazingly painful; the sensation goes to the marrow of Alex’s bones, and while he is absorbing the pain, Kis takes out another syringe, equally large, and injects Alex in the neck, frighteningly near the jugular. Alex’s heart races; he hears his own cry like the yowl of a fox in a trap. It crosses his mind that he is being murdered.

  When the pain subsides, he says, “This is not very much fun,” trying to be brave.

  “Just be happy it isn’t two years ago, when we used to give the injection directly into the willy,” Reggie says.

  Before Alex can react to that, Dr. Kis claps his hand over Alex’s left ear, pushing his head down to administer the final and most excruciating injection—behind the ear. As he pulls the needle out, Kis steps back, looking as if he has just vanquished Alex in a fencing match.

  “Now you are good to go,” the doctor says in English. His words, heavily accented, buzz like flies.

  Next it is Leslie’s turn, and the ordeal that awaits her is now no mystery, since she has just witnessed Alex’s a
gony. As he buttons his shirt, she shakes her head and says, “I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m putting myself through that. I just can’t.”

  “Then it’s not going to work,” Alex says. He feels a rush of heat moving through his body, disconcerting, almost violent, but he doesn’t react, not wanting to give Leslie anything more about which to be apprehensive.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie, I really am. But.” Leslie gestures helplessly.

  Dr. Kis, again in English—there are phrases he knows for situations that often reoccur—“No refunds possible.”

  “Screw you with your refunds,” Alex says, whirling on Kis, pointing his finger in the doctor’s face. Turning to Leslie, he says, after taking a deep breath to calm himself, “It hurts for maybe two seconds.”

  “Alex, you were screaming.”

  “But am I screaming now? That’s what counts.”

  “Really? Is that what counts? Nobody screams forever.”

  “Les…”

  “I can’t go through that kind of pain.” Leslie makes a move toward the door, and Reggie steps directly in front of her, blocking her path.

  “Go into the next room if you want this to work,” Reggie says to Alex.

  “Go! Go!” Kis says, waving his left hand while his right, hanging by his side, holds a fresh syringe.

  “Get out of my way!” Leslie shouts at Reggie.

  “Leslie, please,” Alex says. “We’ve come so far. You’re making a scene.”

  “Just go,” Reggie says. “Quickly. Having you here is further upsetting her.”

  “Shut the fuck up, you idiot bastard,” Leslie says. She attempts to push him aside, but despite his scrawniness and the utter lack of seriousness in his demeanor, he is unbudgable.

  “All right, Leslie,” Alex says, moving toward her, “can we just get this done?”

  “I want to leave,” she says, turning toward him, her eyes full of injury. “You’re supposed to help me, you’re supposed to be on my side, not theirs.”

  He places his hands on her shoulders and carefully draws her close to him. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispers into her hair.

  She shakes her head no, at first sadly, and then with increasing emphasis, and finally with a vigor that is close to hysteria.

  “Next room,” Kis says.

  Reggie leads Leslie back to the examination table and indicates with a movement of his chin by which door Alex ought to exit. He does as he is asked and finds himself in another examination room, this one, by the looks of it, not often used.

  The examination table is bare, and the several tears in the upholstery ooze yellowish stuffing. The shelves are empty and the one poster on the wall seems to have been taken from an acupuncturist’s office; it shows a human torso pierced on all sides by needles, and the sight of it makes Alex think of Saint Sebastian pierced by—what?—fifty arrows, but unkilled.

  He hears Leslie’s weak protests, and he goes to the door, driven by instinct. Yet before his hand can touch the doorknob he hears a strange ticking noise and when he turns toward it he sees Zeus walking slowly across the linoleum floor, a shower curtain of saliva hanging from his half-open mouth.

  “No,” Alex says in his most commanding voice. He hears scuffling sounds in the next room. “Zeus,” he says, remembering. “Sit down.”

  Instead, the dog shoves his snout into Alex’s groin. Alex presses himself against the wall, desperate to find even an inch of space away from the dog and his hot meaty breath.

  “No,” Leslie cries from the next room, wailing without hope.

  And at the same moment, the dog rises on his back legs and wraps his front paws around Alex’s right leg, about thigh high, and begins to thrust. Zeus humps away, thrusting, thrusting, stench rolling from his mouth and nostrils in scalding waves, his lurid red, glistening penis brushing against Alex’s trousers, thoroughly wetting them.

  When they finally get back to their hotel, the rain has stopped, though in its place are powerful wet winds that blow punishingly through the old city. Even if Leslie and Alex wanted to speak, the noise of the wind would drown them out, and it is just as well because they are unable to even look at each other just now.

  Alex carries a white paper bag in which are two vials of bright pink liquid. Kis had given his final instructions in Slovene, and Reggie smirkingly translated. “Drink these when you get home and let nature takes its course.”

  The hotel has a cozy little business center where guests have the use of a brand-new computer, and while she is still able to Leslie ducks in to check her e-mail, primarily to see if there is anything from her assistant. There is nothing, and, after a moment’s dismay, Leslie realizes it is too early back home for anything to have happened. There is one e-mail from Cynthia. Your house is soooo lovely. While she is at the computer and still thinking about it, Leslie tries to find out exactly what kind of fish the goby is.

  Moments later she is back in their suite. Exhausted from the ordeal of the overnight flight followed by the far greater ordeal of their visit with Kis, they fall into their faux-king-size bed—really two standard mattresses with a large sheet pulled tautly over them—and are asleep almost immediately.

  They awaken in each other’s arms in a room that would have been dark as coal had not one of them forgotten to turn off the bathroom light.

  “Where are we?” Leslie whispers.

  “Don’t ask,” Alex says.

  “Okay,” she says. “Don’t tell.” She looks at her Cartier tank watch (third-anniversary dinner, Le Bernardin); they have been asleep less than two hours.

  He leans over to kiss her but she recoils. He looks at her questioningly and she says, “Your breath.”

  “I wasn’t going to say it,” Alex answers, “but… yours too.”

  Despite everything, they are feeling urgently romantic. They have been given instructions by Kis to resume their sex life as soon as possible. Well, alone in a hotel bed in a strange city: it doesn’t get more possible than that.

  They roll out of bed and scamper into the bathroom to brush their teeth, rinse, gargle. Alex feels insanely young. Leslie’s loins are scalding. They remember the vials Kis has given them, and Alex runs into the bedroom and retrieves the white paper sack, brings them in. They clink their vials together as if toasting each other with champagne and drink it down.

  The taste is so strange that it cannot even be called repulsive—it reminds them of nothing they have ever tasted and so it is attached to no taboo taste. It’s not salty; it’s not bitter, or rotten. There are no words to describe it—except to say they both hope never to have anything similar pass their lips again. They drop the empty glass vials into the tin wastepaper basket beneath the sink, and the sounds they make ring out like gunshots.

  “My breath still tastes weird,” Alex says. He exhales forcefully and Leslie sniffs the air.

  “Ick, ick, ick,” she says. “Yet? I don’t mind it. I am in a state of not-mindingness.” She breathes into her own palm, sniffs. And then she squats and urinates onto the bathroom floor.

  In the morning, the desk clerk rings their room at eight o’clock. They survey the wreckage of the place and the wreckage of their bodies—torn sheets, overturned chairs and tables, bent curtain rods, scratches, bruises, bite marks.

  Alex says, “Whatever happens next, or really whatever happens for the rest of my life, last night…”

  “I know,” says Leslie. “Me too. Me three. Me… ten billion…”

  “My cock is numb.”

  “You’re lucky. Every place you went in is throbbing.”

  “Every place?”

  “Every place.”

  They shower, dress, pack, make an attempt to put the room in order, but it’s hopeless. They leave the housekeepers a very handsome tip and call down to the front desk, asking for a taxi to the airport. Ljubljana is deserted and looks desolate and somehow temporary in the cardboard-colored rain. The Art Deco core of the city gives way to socialist-realist outskirts, which in turn give way to
open fields alternating with thick clumps of woodland where the pine and spruce are so dark green they look nearly black. The airport is bereft of automobile traffic. It seems astonishing and almost unreal that the airport in a capital city—even the capital of a country most people have never heard of—could be so quiet.

  Takeoff from Ljubljana to Munich is delayed because of strong winds, and as their plane sits on the runway, Leslie watches as one of the little open-sided buses loops around the field, delivering passengers to an Aeroflot jet. Suddenly, a woman in her twenties, in a tight skirt and towering high heels, leaps off the bus and, after stumbling and falling to her knees, gets up and begins to run. Soon after, a man leaps off the bus and runs after her.

  What is going on? Leslie cranes her neck to see—she has a vision of the woman lifted up off the runway by the force of one of the jet engines, sucked into the whirling turbine and devoured—but now the flight to Munich is set to begin and their plane turns sharply onto the runway.

  The stewardess in her not-quite-turquoise blazer is nursing a cold. Across the aisle from them sit two elderly nuns; the thin sister comforts the large one, who is openly in tears, staring straight ahead and making no attempt to shield her face.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Leslie whispers.

  “I don’t know. Nuns have problems too. But you know what puzzles me even more? Since when do nuns fly first class?”

  “By the way,” Leslie says. “The goby eats its young.”

  They’ve been cleared for takeoff. The engines roar and the scenery races past. This is always the difficult moment on a plane for Leslie, and Alex takes her hand, pats it reassuringly. As they rise it looks like the thick forest is plummeting.

  “I think I’m pregnant,” Leslie whispers.

  Pregnancy is as natural as anything on earth, but it also has a certain science fiction aspect to it: a seed is placed inside an almost invisible egg and then a near replica of the man or the woman begins to grow inside the woman’s body. Breasts swell, hips enlarge, cheeks become rosy, moods swing. Pregnancy is not for the faint of heart.