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I

t begins with me pulling away all the furniture Father shoved against the door the preceding night. He does it every night so he won’t be able to get out and spill important secrets after he has had too much to drink.

Father is a boozehound. And a genius. And a tortured soul. That description would serve for just about any of the nuts who have ever given something to the world and have received stones in return. The world is good at shortchanging. It’s ungrateful. Or maybe it's simply confused, like Father.

We live in a tower. It isn’t ivory and it has no ivy growing on it. It’s made of rough concrete blocks, is a hundred feet high and about seventy feet wide. Home.

Father hates the world.

Or himself. He loves me.

After putting the furniture back in place, I opened the door and looked out. What was to see? Nothing. A hallway and the ele­vator Father used once in a blue moon, when he took the jeep and went over the hills into town to stock up on food or to replenish his booze supply. It was a hick town. I suppose father and I were hicks.

The morning of my typical day didn’t last long. I dusted the living room. I ate corn flakes. I turned the gas on under the lab beakers— same thing every time I got up. A humdrum existence, Father said. Maybe so. It was all right with me.

Lunch? I thought about it, looked at the clock. No, it wasn't time for lunch, which meant there was something I had forgotten to do. Schedules, schedules, what the hell did 1 leave out?

Oh, yeah, 1 forgot to watch the races. Checked the clock. Wrong. It wasn’t time for the races. Hmmm. Oh, sure, I didn’t wash my face and brush my teeth.

Did that. All finished. The phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Hello. Hello?”

"Hello.”

"Is that you. Doctor Dakis?” “No, it ain’t.”

“Doctor? This is the University calling. Will you speak louder, please? I can’t—”

“Every damned day of the week, you call. Same time, same place. Every damned day we go through the same spiel. I’m here, you’re there, but there’s simply no com­municating between us. I know you. Miss Fat Rearend. Father told me your name. Miss Fat Rearend, will you please kiss my—”

"Hello. Doctor Dakis?”

She finally gave up and hung up. "Get the hell off the phone!” Father roared from his bedroom. “I’m off.”

He didn’t come out, turned over so hard the bed whacked the floor. In another minute I heard him snoring.

It started raining. I hung out the window in the north side of the tower and watched the silver needles fall from the sky. God, I loved rain. I spat down the tower, watched it mingle with the clean washing from heaven, saw it disap­pear, wished the world would renew its acquaintance with Father so his misery would go away like my spit. I’m eight years old.

The phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Doctor Dakis?”

“Hi, Miss Fat Rearend. No, we ain’t got no eggs for you today. And we ain’t got no sperm, neither.” “Doctor Dakis?”

I screamed in her ear and she hung up.

“Get the hell off the phone!" Father roared from his bedroom. He turned over and went back to sleep.

H

e got up at noon and we had lunch together.

“Make me eat it,” he said to me. His head dangled over his plate as if it had a broken connection.

I spooned some egg into his mouth. He grabbed his cup of coffee and gulped. I stuffed toast through his teeth. Again he gulped coffee. I held a strip of bacon and he nibbled that.

I made him eat two eggs, three strips of bacon and two slices of toast. After he finished he wiped his mouth, belched, looked sick, got up and stumbled into the bath­room.

“Get the hell out,” he growled— slammed the door in my face A bell rang somewhere. I ran to the open window, looked down. A blue truck was parked in the front

yard and the driver was pounding on the door.

“What you want?” I said.

He backed away from the door, looked up, saw me and waved an envelope.

“Can’t you rfead?” 1 said. “Put it in the basket and I’ll pull it up.” He kept waving the envelope. I hung on the windowsill and watch­ed him grow agitated. Finally he saw the basket, threw the envelope into it, gave me a severe glare and took his truck away.

The cable was from Germany. This time the zoo offered fifty thou­sand for the aphrodisiac.

“Who have you been talking to?” I said to Father as he came out of the bathroom. “I thought you didn't want anybody to know about the aphrodisiac.”

He kicked a clothes hamper out of his way and hunted on a bureau top for a comb. He combed his hair, his most beautiful feature. It was long and white and wavy. His skin was almost as white as his hair, which was why he made me coax him to eat. His health was poor. I think if it wasn’t for me he would have been dead long ago.

He combed his hair and smacked his lips, rubbed them with a trembly hand, looked at me with big sorrowful eyes. What he wanted was a stiff belt. What he expected me to bring him was a beer. What I got for him, out of the bureau, was a box of chocolate-covered cherries. With a shrug he took two and ate them, took two more and shoved them in his shirt pocket. He ate them before he got out the door. I had the box ready when he turned back. He had half a dozen.

Fine. When he ate candy he didn’t have beer and when he had no beer he didn’t follow it up with whisky. Today he would do some work. Marvelous, that candy. Me, too.

In the beginning, Father had no money and figured he would end on a farm, but he was too bright and went to school nights and even­tually he got hooked on genetics. Or he hooked it. Everything he did was right. He took his Ph.D. and taught at the University. After a while he stopped teaching and did only research.

Sex wasn’t something people did, according to Father. Sex was a phe­nomenon, like life. Gender wasn’t sex. Sex was mating but not the mating of male and female people. It was the mating of living or­ganisms inside people. Father didn’t have a better word for the two things that joined to make a baby. Or he didn’t want to go to the bother of explaining it to me in technical terms. “Bugs” was good enough. A girl bug and a boy bug mated and the whys and wherefores were mysteries to nearly everybody except my dad. A girl bug was an ovum, or an egg, while a boy bug was a sperm, or a beak. Beaks pierced eggs and the rest was downhill coasting.

Bugs were too selective to suit most geneticists. Why did they seem to want to mate only with their own species? Anyhow, once a beak pierced an egg, the egg either died or accommodated the invader. This was hazardous joining on the microscopic level. Father never seemed to rise beyond this level as far as his personal life was con­cerned. At least, I didn’t think he was mating with anyone . . . How did I get on this subject?

Father became famous when he invented the racecourse. We had one in the den, Plenty of people had them now.

I

t was a daily chore of mine to clean the racecourse after lunch. I dismantled it, ran a clean wire through it and put it back together again. It was a transparent tube with an incubator in its center and two little bubbles on the ends. The whole thing was about twenty-four inches long.

As he watched me, Father said, “You take an egg—you think she has no personality? That little girl is complete within herself, eats, eliminates, breathes, moves—and damned if she doesn’t have a pur­pose. That’s to mate—butter and bread to her. She loves it. Another thing, she kills her lover when she’s done with him.”

I knew all that. He had told me many times. I knew the sperm, or beak, was suicidal and basically a rapist. He was sex-happy, had nothing else on his mind. He would mate or die—in fact, he would kill himself in the attempt rather than leave off. Father said the beak screamed just before he died. Father was working on a miniature amplifier to pick up their sounds. Anyhow, the beak was stupid, or else he didn’t expect to get eaten, just wanted what he wanted and to hell with the consequences.

As for the egg, she had poor sen­sory equipment and recognized only sperm from her own species. Father wanted to study this phe­nomenon and find out why she would have nothing to do with cer­tain sperm. He thought maybe it was their smell, or something simple like that. Often she turned down one of her own kind and took a total stranger—of course. Father had given the stranger a squirt of his invention so she would notice him. Or smell him. Or whatever it was eggs did. It was best to talk about them as if they were men and women, because, actually, the bugs were the only true sexes in the world. They were male or female and no maybes about it.

People were dumb. They thought they could jump in bed and that was all there was to it, but the bugs in their bodies were out to get to­gether and nothing short of disaster or bad breath or body odor or what­ever could stop them. The bugs didn’t care about population con­trol—there was plenty of clean space in their worlds. People didn’t realize there were life forms in their bodies that could destroy the planet.

“I’m a male chauvinist pig,” said Father. “I admit it. That’s what half the peojple in this world call me. What it means is that I'm like the bugs inside me. I want what I want when I want it. I have no consideration. It’s the same with women. They’re female chauvinist pigs. If they can’t get what they want they have a fit. They’re larger extensions of the bugs inside them. If we all came up from the slime, we couldn’t have been very big in those wet days. Still, who won the climb up the evolutionary ladder? Whose environment is polluted, who’s killing each other off, who hates each other?” Father tapped his fingers on the table top. “I keep asking myself the same damned question—which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

He stopped talking. He stared up at the ceiling perplexed, bruised of soul.

I went on cleaning the race­course. It was shaped like a female reproductive system. A sperm was ejected from a depository into one of the bubbles at the ends of the tube and an egg was ejected into the other bubble. Fluid carried them to the incubator where they were supposed to join. Sometimes they didn’t. It depended upon how my dad was feeling. If he felt crabby or pensive, the sperm got a squirt of dad’s invention—the aph­rodisiac—and the joining was frenzied. If he felt sad or apprehen­sive the sperm got no treatment and the egg remained aloof and im­penetrable.

Squirting an egg produced no re­action.

Father said the squirting muffled the sperm’s undesirable qualities. What they were, he didn’t know. He suspected the egg exuded a killer fluid that destroyed stranger sperm. He had better look, smell, taste or sound right or she would murder him before he did his duty.

The rendezvous in the incubator in Father's lab always involved an egg and a sperm from different species. Once, long before, I asked him why and he said, “Who wants to mate a duo of human bugs? I know fellows who do that all the time. Nate Farrell likes it. He’s at the University. Teaches a couple of classes and spends his spare time complaining about the liberalized abortion laws. He claims the fetus is alive at conception. In the base­ment of his house he whiles away the time by creating human fetuses in a racecourse. He dumps them in the toilet when he’s done.”

I watched a tiger and a lion run the race to the incubator. Of course they were really only bugs, but I knew where they had originated. Father could work wonders with dyes and gels. A little dab of colored gel on a sperm made him look pretty big, especially since the walls of the tube were made of mag­nifying glass. A yellow dot was a tiger sperm, a pink ball was a lion egg, et cetera. I had memorized them all.

The mating of tiger and lion bugs wasn’t at all difficult, so I knew Father was feeling sad that day. Such a mating could have taken place in a zoo between two real animals. Racecourse mating be­tween tiger and lion bugs occurred ninety nine times out of a hundred. In a zoo, these animals rarely mated and getting a baby from them was more rare.

1 stood beside the table and watched the race. The course sat on a white table and was about at my eye level. The little yellow dot and the larger pink ball fell into the incubator, spied one another, had a tussle. The yellow dot stabbed hard, the pink ball squeezed him and gave him a thrill and then she opened and he fell in with a scream, after which she ate him. And I could have sworn I heard the scream.

The phone rang a moment later and Father stomped out of the lab. He never answered the phone, but he wouldn’t get rid of it and I knew why. When it rang the outside world spoke—and Father needed to hear that sound.

I answered it. "Hello.”

It was the same old thing. They couldn...