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“Oh, you know my parents. They don’t read what’s right in front of them.”

“But the refrigerator door is where your mom puts all her vital information.” This is true: everything from employees’ telephone numbers to shift schedules and delivery receipts are posted on the refrigerator. And now, I’m afraid to say, so are guidelines on self-lubrication, plus tips on which particular lubricant to use (as if any male over the age of eleven needs to be told this. Who’s coming in for male fertility testing anyway—second-graders?).

I hang up the phone and sit down in the living room of Kay’s empty house. Maybe Gab is right—maybe I should get tested. Should I get it over with right now? I am still in my pajamas, after all, and there’s no one here … Oh, for Christ’s sake! I have to be at the Review for a meeting in a few hours, and it wouldn’t be very “professional” of me, would it, to run late because I was doing that? That’s the sort of thing George would have understood. (“That’s why you’re late? Of course it’s not a problem. I was doing the same thing!”) But of course George is gone.

Part of me thinks that the problem is just my wife’s impatience; six months is not actually that long for a couple in their thirties to have to wait for conception to take hold. But part of me can’t help wondering, Is it us? Could we be somehow mismatched, like those couples you occasionally read about in which one spouse turns out to be allergic to the other? Could it be that on a spermatazoic level a battle of personalities is being waged, pitting my sensitive little overthinkers against Gab’s overachieving go-getters? I’ve begun to worry that my squad of little Bens, with their tendency toward reflection and process-mindedness (Who gets to ascend the fallopian tube first, I can see them wondering, and how does that “privilege the narrative” of the fallopian crossing?), are getting distracted from their job. Can a terminally ambivalent and self-questioning personality turn one’s own progeny into the equivalent of a Massachusetts politician’s presidential campaign?

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN an involuntary mimic. I pick up not only people’s accents but their hand gestures, their speech impediments and, eventually, since language determines our perception of the world, their whole outlook on life. In everyday situations this is problematic enough. However, given the random assortment of characters you meet at the checkout counter of a New York deli, working at the store sometimes makes me feel like Sybil, or at least as if I’m auditioning for a flash improv troupe. Now be a French diplomat! Now an Albanian hit man! Now a garbage-truck driver from Bayonne!

The key to involuntary mimicry is a feeling that your personality has become unmoored, that you’re an actor in search of a part, that you have no core—which isn’t an uncommon feeling in a deli late at night. Sometimes things slow down and hours pass without a single familiar face coming through the door. During these stretches you’re in the same place you always are—behind the checkout counter, looking at the door—but there’s a dreamlike quality to it all. Did a shriveled old woman in a camouflage tube top really just spend fifteen minutes talking in Spanish to our selection of cheese? And is there really such a concoction as “whipped-cream-flavored ice cream,” which someone just asked me for? At these moments anyone could walk through the door—the president; Donna Ledbetter, my sixth-grade girlfriend; a man clip-clopping on goat legs—and I would not be surprised. I myself could be anyone; I could try on a new accent or give myself a completely different persona. Chemical enhancement of reality doesn’t even begin to approximate the sense of Why am I here? Where did I come from? that I feel on some nights. And while I can fight the undertow pulling me into a vortex of trippiness, resistance usually just makes it worse. It’s like A Nightmare on Elm Street, where the characters are always saying Don’t fall asleep! Don’t fall asleep! Don’t … and