The implantation was only a little uncomfortable. I actually enjoyed being flat on my back for a day. The cube there was deliberately set up so it couldn’t be used as a work station, which annoyed me at first. I watched a lot of movies and parts of movies. I checked the annotated version of The Tempest that Hearn and Billingham finished last week: a green dot appeared in one corner when they were sure that Shakespeare’s words were being used, and a red dot when they were sure it was not Shakespeare. It seemed to me that only about five minutes’ worth of the text was in question.

I know it’s absurd, this early, but I do feel kind of pregnant. A sort of presence, an intrusion, or something. Maybe it’s the mental image of that tiny organism clinging to my uterus for dear life. I almost wish I hadn’t seen Dr. Carlucci’s slide.

Think I did this out of selfish motives but can’t really get in touch with them. Something about personal survival, certainly. Maybe it’s a talismanic thing, the fetus as good luck charm: God wouldn’t dare destroy this tiny innocent spark of life.

Not like ten billion innocent sinners. Wipe them out just to see what will happen.

I have been dreaming about Earth almost every night. Dreams with vivid colors, tastes, smells. They’re not recollections so much as surreal montages, dream worlds that use my memories as raw materials. Last night the people were Africans like I saw in Nairobi, tall men with skin so dark it was almost indigo, but the setting was Manhattan. Four of them pushed me into a big London-style Checker cab and gave me a shiny black briefcase with a golden latch. Then they started shooting at people through the windows, which must be from that gangster movie I watched at the hospital, The Godfather. The driver was shooting, not driving, and we collided with a truck, which woke me up. I woke up remembering the smell of midday Manhattan, metallic pollution and sweet garbage rot, that always struck you when you stepped out onto the slidewalk from an air-conditioned building. The locals complained about it, but to me it was exotic, sensual. To allow waste food to rot was evidence of unbelievable plenty, to a person from a world where every particle of shit is scrubbed clean and pushed back into the food chain.

(Q: What’s for dinner tonight? A: Same old shit.)

I read that the gutters of London in the nineteenth century were so odoriferous that vendors sold oranges studded with cloves, for aristocrats to hold under their noses when they had to share the streets with hoi polloi on their way from the opera to their cars. Though I suppose they didn’t have cars until the twentieth century. Horses, contributing their own piles to the problem. It’s almost impossible to visualize.