Our difficulties began one night three months ago. I know the exact night. Lynn came home from class and said, “I just got my period. It’s so early this month.” She said something cute like “You don’t have to worry about rubbers for a while.” I do worry about rubbers. They are my downfall. We did it that night, no rubber. There was an instant—I remember it—when I was deciding whether or not to actually go for it. I followed a certain line of reasoning, and remembered what she said, twinkled over the risks, and then blew my nuts out. It was something to behold. I really enjoyed myself, oink oink, drowning in it. But then her period disappeared the next day. Or I should say it never came.

She was ovulating.

Let me lay this out again. She ovulated that night, thus the dot of blood. Then we did it. Bingo. You morons, you fucking biologists.

She was pregnant. It was April. I’d just turned twenty-four. I’d never been near an abortion clinic. And Colorado’s not the laid-back, liberal-Jew neck of the woods I come from. This here’s the American West. I work for a software designer, but I’ve seen guys in spurs all duded up like Deliverance on a Friday night.

I felt desperate and called my parents. My mom told me how in Florida a pro-life group stood outside a women’s clinic with a bullhorn, yelling, “If you come out now we’ll shoot you, but your unborn child will be spared!” Congress had just blocked the abortion pill for the eighty-second time. She told me that what we were doing was O.K. Her voice made me homesick.

The thing about New York City is everything’s so jam-packed. It’s the crowds, there are so many bums, dead people practically lying on the street. In the winter you die from the cold wind, in the summer you die from the heat. The breeze stinks, the people smell like piss, there’s the traffic. It’s impossible to park. Everybody’s in a rotten mood. No place to hide.