Chapter 10

A lot has happened since I began work on this novel. One of our neighbors (who was noisy in the first place, always playing her music so loud we could hear it through the walls - and always after midnight, when we wanted to go to bed) got into an argument with her boyfriend at three in the morning. We couldn't hear what was being said, only that it was being said extremely loud. And it continued through the night and well into the morning. When I left to go somewhere (I forget where), my upstairs neighbor said they were outside arguing at eleven that morning. When I found out what it was about, I understood why. In a strange account of real life unknowingly imitating fiction, she had caught her son, who looks to be maybe six or seven, in a similar sexual act as Michel cause Jessie in with man who lives in one of the other apartments in our complex. And her boyfriend knew about it. Donna tells me the cops were at the man's apartment later that night.

I'm sure if you asked the guy, he would claim he wasn't homosexual. And, except for liking little boys, he's probably not. He has probably had several girlfriends. But what possesses him to be into little boys? I'm not going to claim to know. Most homosexuals I know would find him disgusting. So it seems his sexual perversion goes far deeper than homosexuality, which I don't consider a perversion, but a natural desire found in all people, as can be seen from the ancient Greek and Roman cultures, where bisexuality was the norm. In fact, the term homosexual wasn't even coined until the late 19th Century.

But all of this brings us back to the problem of Pat and her daughter Jessie. At the same time Michel was trying to see Sarah and had asked Jackie to start sleeping with him, Pat was fifteen, seeing her boyfriend Mark, and sleeping with every man possible. This is when Pat became pregnant with Jessie, and though she was dating Mark at the time, it is unlikely he was the father.

I learned from the Discovery Channel (or maybe it was the Learning Channel) that when women are unfaithful, there are various mechanisms that work to make a woman more or less likely to become impregnated by any given man. For example, this is what happened when Pat got pregnant:

Pat was unusual in her ability to have an orgasm at a very young age. Three days before she got pregnant, she had sex with a guy she met at a football game. He had a condom, so the only consequence was an orgasm. But having an orgasm make a woman's uterus more acidic, a condition which destroys sperm cells.

The next night, Pat went out with Mark, and as happened with every date they ever went on, they had sex, and she had an orgasm. This, as well as the sex from the night before, caused the acidity of her uterus to increase even more, killing a large number of his sperm. But Mark believed she was unfaithful, so, due to an unconscious mechanism we don't understand, he ejaculated twice the number of sperm into her than usual, though most were either slower sperm that act as a net to slow foreign sperm or killer sperm that killed any other sperm it ran into. Thus, his sperm and her own acidity protected her for the next five days from any other sperm.

But late that night, one of her friends, Jim, came over to her house, snuck in through her window, and had sex with her. Her uterus wasn't nearly as acidic by then, and she orgasmed at the same time he did, pulling his sperm deeper into her before it made her uterus acidic. He, too, produced a large number of killer sperm, which went to work against the sperm from Mark, killing many of them.

The next night, she had sex with yet another of her friends, Robert, again orgasming at the same time he did, pulling more of his sperm into her, where his, Mark's, and Jim's killer sperms tried to destroy as many of each others’ fertile sperm as they could find that had made it past the barrier Mark's sperm had created.

I don’t need to go into any greater detail about the other times she had sex with Mark, or who else she slept with that week, because it was sometime during that day that one of the fertile sperm from one of the three boys (at sixteen, they were all still boys) made it to the egg traveling down her fallopian tube, broke through the protein barrier surrounding it, and fertilized the egg, which continued traveling down the fallopian tube as it began dividing over the next few days before reaching the uterus and embedding itself there to finish developing into Jessie.

Two months later, she told Mark she was pregnant and that it was his. He told her he'd help take care of the child, but he didn't want to get married. They had already broken up and were dating other people. Mark's new girlfriend didn't take it too well, though, and broke up with him a week later. Pat's new boyfriend took advantage of the situation, knowing she couldn't get pregnant, and only broke up with her after he thought she had become too unattractive with her bulging belly.