From: Brooklyn
Category: Amis
Date: 8/2/99
Time: 6:08:43 PM
Remote Name: 207.238.28.10
[The Marmadukian bit followed an excellent paragraph on Guy's breakfast of choice: MegaBran. "MegaBran was on a chemical knife-edge between cereal and human shit."]
They were alone tonight. But they were not alone. Marmaduke was present, in electronic form: the twin screens of the closed-circuit TV system shook and fizzed to his rage. There were twin screens in most rooms, on every floor. Sometimes the house felt like an aquarium of Marmadukes. Guy thought of all the video equipment in Nicola's apartment (what use did she have for it?) and then thought of his own, of how he and his wife had gamely wrestled with the webbing and the pistol-grips in the months after Marmaduke was born, gathering footage of Marmadukes screaming his head off in the playpen, Marmaduke screaming his head off in the park, Marmaduke screaming his head off in the swimming pool. They soon stopped bothering. After all, there was so little difference between the home movie and the closed-circuit monitor, which gave them Marmaduke screaming his head off twenty-three hours a day as it was. And when the twin screens weren't giving it to them (two different angles of Marmaduke screaming his head off), Marmaduke was giving it to them: live.
Now, against the background of the child's obscure agonies, a tremendously long silence gathered. This silence was shaped like a tunnel. It seemed to Guy that there was no way out of it, none at all - except full confession. Or this:
'We could have another child,' he said, staring seriously at his wife.
'...Are you out of your mind?'
Guy's eyebrows lifted and he resettled himself like a moody pupil. It was true that they had been most gravely advised - on many different occasions, in many different clinics and consulting rooms, in Geneva, in Los Angeles, in Tokyo - to renounce the possibility of a second child, or to delay it indefinitely, or at any rate until Marmaduke was at least fourteen (by which time Hope, besides, would be fifty-one). The billionaire specialists and Nobel Laureate child-psychiatrists had always warned of the disturbing effect on Marmaduke if a little newcomer should succeed him. None had been hearless enough to suggest that the second child might be just like the first.
[Ps Fav Tim's (actor): Conway]