30th Birthday Story It was my thirtieth birthday and, for all intents and purposes, things were going well. I was relatively content with my life, loved my friends, and felt ready to shed the various skins I'd worn throughout my twenties. To celebrate, I treated myself to a big lunch at home, letting myself eat all the foods I like so much, but which, given a certain autoimmune condition I suffer from, provoke serious digestive problems if I eat them too often: candies and donuts and other bready, sugary delights; a big, fat cheeseburger. "Everything in excess can kill you," my mom's boyfriend told me when I was in high school. "... Even cheeseburgers." It was my dog Xochi's birthday, too. Who knows when she was actually born (I found her on the street), but I had decided for festivity's sake to share the date with her. So I bought her a steak and cooked it up with a lot of salt. I cut it up into little bits and, with my housemates, fed them to her, repeating phrases of encouragement like, "feliz cumpleaños, Xochi," and, "muy bien, Xochi... Muy bien." Afterwards, she licked my pant leg happily, and expected more steak. Xochi's first year in the house had been, to put it optimistically, full of learning experiences for the both of us. Under her unceasing cloud of mayhem I had suffered the casualties of a laptop (only a year and a half old), my cowboy boots (one of the toes of which she chewed clean through, one of which simply disappeared), my favorite jacket (which she had opened a particular drawer to locate and destroy), as well as a first edition of Anne Kawala's Screwball , a book I had translated into English, inscribed with a 2-page letter to me from Anne herself, which she wrote while visiting my apartment in Mexico City. I would have to write a whole book, just to convey to you the wreckage. But these losses aside, I had to admit, Xochi had been a positive addition to my life, a grounding and constant force of mutual love and attention in my home. And there we were, celebrating our birthdays together on the couch. I felt the happiness of a thirty-year-old, and she felt the happiness of a one-year-old. I could hear it in her snores. Around three in the afternoon, I got a knock at the door. This seemed strange to me, because I wasn't expecting anyone. Moreover, I had told my friends that I wanted to spend the afternoon alone, as a gift to myself, and had gone so far as to tape up a NO VISITORS sign on my front door. Even so, the knock came again, a bit more insistent this time. Xochi woke up and waddled to the door, clumsily whiffing at the air. Putting down my notebook, I walked over too, feeling interrupted, and opened up. What I saw was peculiar, though I can't say I was entirely surprised. Before me stood three of myselves, although none was exactly me. There was myself at twenty, all mopey and poetic, and alongside him, introverted and overexcited, myself at ten. Then, in a little wheeled incubator which the child was diligently pushing along, equipped with tubes and the rhythmic beeping of his tiny heartbeat, there was myself at precisely zero, a little blue-eyed fetus on life support, looking ready to be delivered into the world. I didn't know what to say, but before I had time to decide on a strategy, I found myself, out of habit, inviting them in. Their entrance was awkward. As were my efforts at hosting. We all had trouble making sense of how to move together through my narrow kitchen while introducing ourselves and exchanging niceties. The ten-year-old tripped on the raised lip of the living room's threshold, causing the baby in that scientific contraption to plop over onto his face and scream into the fabric, all tangled up in wires and tubes. The beeping was getting faster, and no one knew what to do (the three clarified that they, themselves, were hardly acquainted), until we decided to just kind of ... jiggle the cart, until the fetus had flipped back over onto his back and his heartbeat had resumed its normal speed. Finally, after another minute or so of cordialities and nervous laughter, I asked them why they had come. In the meantime, I had actually become quite curious. Call me ageist, but I had assumed that the one of myselves who was going to do the talking was the twenty-year-old. But the one who opened his mouth first to speak was the ten-year-old. He used the word "random" a lot, and many other words he claimed to have made up, such as "noodlebunker," which apparently referred to a sort of winged dragon he had invented, and other terms I felt I'd known at some point, but had since forgotten. His sentences often exploited alliteration, which he emphasized by raising his voice at each repeated consonant. "K-it... We've C-ome C-alling be-C-ause, C-uriously, you C-ouldn't possibly C-onceive the C-onse-Q-uences of your a-C-tions." "E-X-C-use me?" I asked, mocking his S-tupid way of S-peaking. "Don't mo-CK young CH-ristopher," added the twenty-year-old with a win-K. "Ye-S, your S-i-X-ty-year-old S-elf S-ent u-S to S-ay S-omething S-eriou-S. He S-aid you S-imply mu-S-t know ..." "Okay, umm," I said. "I'm ready when you are." "TH-ere are TH-ree TH-ings he TH-ought--" "Oh, sweet infant!" cried the twenty-year-old, whose way of speaking was as sad, maudlin, and falsely poetic as the ten-year-old's was cloying and insufferable. "While you orate so, our honeyed hours do while away! Until the end of our lofty, B-razen existences that B-oy would B-reathe such B-reathless, like-consonanced phrases, never arriving at the slaking of any curiosity whatsoever. So, prithee... onto my own back allow me to raise such responsibility! But first, assure my fruitlike heart that you, your fruitlike self, shall ripen with the responsibility of knowing what I am to tell you." "Yeah, yeah," I said. "That seems fine." "Seems? I know not seems! A firmer agreement. A handshake--firm, I say, as John Clare would have had it." I sighed and extended my arm, already tired of this clown show, and shook hands with my twenty-year-old self. He motioned toward the ten-year-old, whose hand I also shook. (A strong handshake for such a saccharine little kid.) Then he motioned toward the fetus, as well. "What? I have to shake the fetus's hand, too?" I asked. The twenty-year-old me nodded gravely, and Xochi stirred from sleep. "But he's completely sealed away in there!" This time he shrugged, and motioned again. Xochi cocked her head as I walked over to the medical case. I started kind of ... stroking (how else to say it?) stroking his container uncomfortably, and looked down at the face I had thirty years ago to the day, soft and red in its lack of experience. Xochi starting growling. And I looked at the twenty-year-old to see if he accepted my gesture. He nodded in approval, and I sat back down. "Are we ready?" I asked. "Yes! Now! The première chose of which we've been informed--" At first it was just a confused yipping, but Xochi's sounds quickly twisted into an uncontrollable howl. She had never much known how to deal with company at home, especially that of strangers, and, as her excitement built, her need for physical expression exceeded that body of hers with its little coordination. She flopped over on her back and began heaving loud breaths, the air catching in her throat. The ten-year-old started to laugh at her. Then Xochi began to buck, sprinting in insane circles around my living room, colliding with glasses and bottles, tubes of paint and books, throwing my papers to the floor. And before we could stop her, she had knocked the fetus's container to the ground and begun chewing on its wires. In her mouth the wire snapped and, in the moments I spent before fading entirely out of consciousness, I heard the beeping of the fetus's heartbeat become a constant drone, and I saw the twenty-year-old version of myself poof into a cloud of dust and blow away, and I watched the ten-year-old wither too, repeating the sounds of the letter K, and I watched the fetus grow up and up and up--as I felt my own self crumpling, as if the breath were being vacuumed from my lungs--aging until he had come to replace myself at thirty, a naked, hairy adult body stuffed into that medical apparatus meant for bodies just ready to be delivered, my nose and cheeks and lips hardly recognizable as they squished up against the glass, like a little kid making funny faces. Excerpted from Cartoons by Kit Schluter All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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