In the morning I wake before her, an instant hyperwarp into consciousness. One moment I’m drifting in torpid blackness…the next I’m staring at Nooshin, a dusky angel of scrawn and mussed hair, her delicate features smooth with sleep. We’re cramped together in this small bed, facing each other. Beneath the covers her naked skin is touching mine in about 10 different places.

I spend my first moment of consciousness drinking her in — her lush mouth, those cheekbones like ski slopes, the tiny scars ghosting across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose. The next moment of consciousness is when it hits me again. It. The imperative barreling through our lives like a runaway train.

We’re going to have a baby.

I have no fucking idea what that means. Well, only in the mammalian sense. Growing up on a farm you learn all about reproducing the species, except the species in question belong to the domesticated families of Bos and Sus and Gallus — that’s cattle, pigs, and chickens to you. But after the baby is born? I know more about the Stars Wars cosmos than I do about raising a kid.

My imagination rewinds through the only references I have. Chicklit I’ve read. Commercials I’ve watched on the Lifetime cable channel. Print ads I’ve seen in magazines like Parenting and Working Mother when there’s nothing else on the rack at the doctor’s office. I envision our trajectory through parenthood as a series of consumer cliches. Arranging a nursery for the baby and stocking it with colorful Fisher-Price tripe. Shopping sprees at Baby Gap and Kids-R-Us. Driving places in a minivan. That’s my life in seven months.

Then a different kind of advertisement pops into my head. The DeBeers kind, with a big honking diamond that’s supposed to be worth three months of salary. Not that the DeBeers empire was built by marketing to impoverished grad students. Three months of my stipend will buy a nice chunk of cubic zirconia.

I sag into the mattress, feeling ill with stress, and my temples thump with a rush of blood. What the hell is happening to my life? Having a kid? Marriage? This is fucking insane. I’m only 27 and not even done with my Ph.D. yet. I shouldn’t even be thinking about this shit.

After a while I carefully untangle myself and roll away, needing to piss — and almost break my neck when I slip on a piece of paper lying on the dusty tile.

Oh yeah. Now I remember. The floor is covered with the 6th chapter of my doctoral dissertation. Last night Nooshin was reading it when I returned from drinking with Beto. I tore the pages away from her and tossed them in the air. My favorite gesture of late.

“Fucking fuck!” I mutter, slipping and almost losing my balance again as I pad toward the bathroom.

“Nick? What’s going on?”

She’s sitting bolt upright in bed, sheets clutched to her flat chest. Her dark eyes blink nervously, the right one jerking in its socket. Then her gaze falls to the floor.

I raise a foot carefully. Pages stick to it. “I kinda forgot I, uh…”

“Yeah,” Nooshin agrees, trying to suppress a giggle — and failing. I must look ridiculous, naked and balanced on one foot in a sea of paper.

Then she slides out of bed and starts helping me pick up the scattered dissertation chapter, kneeling, her long inky hair sweeping the floor, spine a gentle slope of bumps. Together we make an impromptu work of performance art, a nude archetypal Adam and Eve treading on the same scholarship we’re picking up.

“So what did you think of it, anyway?” I ask.

Nooshin’s hesitation tells me everything I need to know. She’s choosing her words carefully. Trying not to upset me. “I think the research is all there, but the writing needs…something.”

“Don’t bullshit me, okay?”

Her bony shoulders rise and fall in a sigh. “It’s not as good as the other chapters, especially not the first one.”

That’s my dissertation for you. A decline from mediocrity into a complete waste of trees. I reach for another page of Chapter 6 — “Market Contours of NAFTA at the Korea Textile Maquiladora”. Nooshin has marked it up with underlining and little scribbles.

“I feel guilty, like it’s all my fault. You wrote the first chapter in Tijuana, before we…you know. Got involved.” A smile ghosts across her face. “Then you wrote the next three chapters in Chirbampo, before you knew I was pregnant. And now this chapter…” She’s avoiding eye contact. “I’m just a distraction.”

I find myself laughing. “We’re having a kid, for chrissake. Of course I’m going to be distracted.” Then my mirth dies away, replaced by an impulsive realization. “You’re not a distraction, Nooshin. You’re, like, the opposite of a distraction. You came into my life and clarified everything.”

She stands slowly, head tilted at a curious angle. The effect reminds me of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, if Venus was underfed and ethnically Persian and clasping handfuls of paper. “What do you mean, I clarified everything?”

I don’t know what I mean, not at first. I have to think about it for a while. “I’m not sure I can explain it, really. It’s like you came along and showed me that I’ve been wasting my life or something. With Phoebe, even with grad school.”

“You’re not wasting your life. Don’t say that, Nick. Getting a doctorate is not wasting your life.”

“It is if you’re not passionate about it. If you…hate it.” I glance down at my hands, which are tightening into fists and crumpling the pages they’re holding. My dissertation. Just another hoop of flaming bullshit. “I’m not doing this for me.”

Nooshin reaches over and gently pries the crumpled pages away from me, adding them to her half of Chapter 6. “Then who on earth are you doing it for?”

My gaze is roaming around the hotel room like a trapped animal. It briefly alights on the giant Evian bottle I bought to rehydrate myself last night. The ribbed plastic lies in a corner, empty and tossed aside. Suddenly my bladder is reminding me that it still needs relief. A convenient excuse to duck her question. I’ve already toured enough uncomfortable places in my psyche for one morning.