Blackburn

anyway. 'That'll be tough shit for me, I guess,' he said.

Tatum wrote on the form. 'Okay. Let's talk about what'll happen during the operation, and then Duncan can schedule you for surgery.'

Blackburn was surprised. 'That's it?'

'For you it is. Couples take longer.' Tatum began to rummage through the mess on his desk. 'Besides, I figure that any guy who would be sterilized without understanding the consequences is a guy who shouldn't be spreading his dumbass genes around anyway.'

It was the most honest statement Blackburn had ever heard. He liked Tatum.

Tatum found a card with a diagram of male genitalia and held it up. 'You'll be given two shots of local anesthetic in the scrotum, one on either side of the base of the penis.' He pointed with his pen. 'After they take effect, the doctor will make a vertical incision midway between the vas deferens tubes. He'll pull one vas over to the incision, put a permanent clamp on it, and cut away a section. Then he'll repeat the procedure for the other side and close the incision with a few self-dissolving stitches. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes. Any questions?'

Blackburn stood. 'How much will it cost?'

Tatum glanced at the form. 'You'll need to bring a money order or cashier's check for ninety bucks.' He picked up a telephone receiver and punched a button. 'Ellen? When Mr. Cameron comes out, could you arrange the pre-vasectomy sample and schedule him for surgery? Thanks.'

'What's a pre-vasectomy sample?' Blackburn asked.

'Semen specimen,' Tatum said, hanging up the phone. 'You'll need to take it to a medical lab within a half hour of ejaculation. We do the post-op sperm counts here, because then it doesn't matter whether we find the sperm alive or dead, only that we don't find any. For this one, though, we need a live count. You never know-maybe you won't have any.'

'What are the odds of that?'

Tatum chuckled. 'About the same as the odds of the Royals winning the Series next year. If you don't hear from us before your surgery date, assume that your count's in the normal range.'

Blackburn thanked him and went out to Ms. Duncan, who gave him the address of the lab and told him to deliver his sample on Thursday morning. She also told him that his surgery would take place in one week, at 5:20 P.M.

'Soon,' he said. 'That's good.'

'Every Tuesday,' Ms. Duncan said. 'There are two underway upstairs right now.'

'Could I observe?'

Ms. Duncan said that she didn't think so. Then she gave him two instruction sheets and a baggie containing a single-bladed, blue plastic safety razor. The first instruction sheet told him what it was for.

Before going to the Dart, Blackburn stopped among the protesters and spoke to the woman in gray. 'You have the wrong night. There's no baby-butchering today.'

'I suppose you call it 'choice,' ' she said.

Blackburn smiled. 'No. Tonight it's 'crotch-cutting.' Or maybe 'scrotum-slicing.' '

'I can have you arrested for obscenity,' the woman said.

Blackburn laughed and crossed the street. As he unlocked his car, he heard footsteps on the asphalt. Turning, he saw that the woman in gray had followed him. She had left her sign and candle on the sidewalk.

'Are you going to throw more blood?' Blackburn asked as she drew close.

The planes of her face seemed frozen. 'You already have so much on you that it'll never wash off.'

'Yet blood washes away sin.'

'What would you know about that?'

He knew plenty, but instead of telling her so, he said, 'I'm not an abortionist.'

'It doesn't matter. If you work there, if you're in there, you're one of them. Condoning it is the same as doing it. It's evil.'

'So why come over here? Shouldn't you be afraid of evil?'

She tilted her head. 'I need to understand you if I'm going to fight you. How can you believe in what you do, and do what you do?'

For a moment, the sureness of her tone made Blackburn fear that she knew who he was, and knew the things he really had done. Then he remembered that she didn't even know him as Arthur Cameron, let alone as James Blackburn.

'You're wrong about me,' he said. 'In fact, I'm making sure that I'll never be the cause of what you're fighting.' He took the baggie containing the plastic razor from his jacket. 'This is to shave the hair off my scrotum. I'm having a vasectomy next week.'

The planes of the woman's face crumpled, and she spun and stumbled into the street. A car was coming fast and would have hit her, but Blackburn pulled her back.

He was startled at what he had done. He didn't save people from themselves. He left people alone… unless they angered him, in which case he either punished them if the offense was slight, or killed them if it was great.

In the past seven years, the only exception to this rule had been that he had not killed Dolores.

The woman in gray clawed at his hands until he released her, and she rushed into the street again.

'Could I have that back?' Blackburn called.

She stopped. Her right hand was clutching the baggied razor. She dropped it and ran to her fellow protesters.

Blackburn retrieved the razor, got into the Dart, and drove to his apartment. All that night, the woman in gray filled his thoughts. He was afraid that he might be in love with her.

On Wednesday, Blackburn worked twelve hours at Bucky's. He needed the money.

On Thursday morning, he ejaculated into an empty breath-mint box and took it to the medical lab. He was embarrassed, not because he was delivering his own fresh semen, but because he had conjured up the ghost of the woman in gray to produce it. She had thrown blood on him, and then they had rolled together, each staining the other.

After a ten-hour shift behind the grill, he drove to Responsible Reproduction. The woman and her friends were there, but none of them seemed to recognize his car. He parked a short distance down the block, and for the next hour he watched them shout at everyone who went in and out of the building. The voice of the woman in gray rose above the rest.

On Friday night, after cashing his paycheck, he approached the clinic from the opposite direction and parked across the street from where he had the night before. He watched longer this time. At nine-thirty the protesters blew out their candles and stacked their signs in a station wagon. Blackburn slouched low as they went to their cars.

The woman in gray crossed the street alone to a maroon Nova. When it left the curb, Blackburn followed.

He lost the Nova in traffic on the city's east side, but spotted it as he drove past a side street. It was parked under a streetlight, and the woman was standing on the porch of a small house. Blackburn pulled over and adjusted his rear-view mirror so that he could see her.