Paul watched the television above the bar. An army of turtles waddled up a beach, cumbersome helmets dragged through the fine sand to deposit a clutch of smooth, white eggs in the dunes. He saw the wriggling reptilian babies emerge sticky from the broken shells and repeat the journey in reverse, thousands of tiny helmets trundling inexorably over the moonlit dunes towards the breakers. Those who escaped being flipped over on their backs and pecked to death by wading birds were finally swallowed up in the surf. There was no pleasure involved in this reptilian cycle of birth and death. The turtles survived purely because there were so many of them, and the oceans were so vast, that one or two were bound to slip through unnoticed.
He wondered why they bothered, and presumed it could only be because they had no choice. Their genes forced them ever onwards -life would not be denied. Previous generations had imposed their will upon their distant descendants, and the descendants wearily obeyed. If, by chance, a turtle was born in whom this instinct towards multiplication was misformed or absent, a turtle whose instincts directed them not towards reproduction but towards reflection on the purpose of reproduction, say, or towards seeing how long it could stay underwater on one breath, then this instinct would die with the turtle. The turtles were condemned to multiply purely by the breeding success of their own ancestors. There was no escape for them. Multiplication, once set in motion, was unstoppable.
At the present moment, the balance of his own inclinations tilted more towards sleep, the cessation of thought, hibernation, and vegetation. Had he been one of those tiny helmets, he would, at that moment, have flipped over belly-up in the sand and simply awaited the releasing beak. Parenthood had taken him by surprise. The books, the articles, the classes, had not prepared him for the intensity of it all. Snap decisions to be made, everybody looking to him for the answers, and no way of knowing if he had made the correct guess, no way of finding his way back to the main track if he took a wrong turning. Last night he had been half a couple. He had lived with others all his life. It was easy – you had rows, you had resentments, but if they became too frequent or too boring, or if the compensations ceased to be adequate, you just left, and tried again with someone else until you found someone you could put up with. He could not remember how it had all changed. Perhaps it had been the doors of youth and liberty creaking shut behind him, or the demands that were suddenly being made of him, the faces turning towards him when a decision was required. Or perhaps it was just the steaming concoction of his emotions, his hormones, and his thoughts slopping around his veins with the coffee and nicotine. Whatever it was, something had obliged him to seek out a tranquil place in order to restore some order to his metabolism.
Then there was the feeling that he had been duped -the one feeling that he hadn’t been warned of – when he saw mother and baby together and realized that the reason why everyone made such a big deal of fatherhood these days was simply because it was such an implausible state. Mothers and babies were the world. Fathers were optional extras, and accessories. If some strange virus colonized the Y chromosome and poisoned all the men, the world would carry on. It would not be a very exciting world perhaps, rather bland and predictable, but women would find some way to reproduce, and within a generation or two it would be difficult to believe that there had ever been men at all. They would appear in the encyclopaedias somewhere between dinosaurs and Romans. Future generations of little girls would try, in vain, to understand what it had been that men had done, how they had contributed. What use had they been? He had suddenly seen his role exposed as that of a footnote. The books had warned him of this feeling, of jealousy, of irrelevance and superfluity. They had said it was natural, that he would get over it. What they had not said was that it was natural because it was so manifestly, poignantly true, or that he would get over it only by stopping thinking about it. Fathers deceived themselves. Mothers and babies held it all together. The men came and went, interchangeably, causing trouble and bringing presents to make up for it.
He turned his attention to the television. The tiny helmets he had watched clawing their way down towards the surf had become parents themselves now. You could tell they were the same turtles, because the scientists had painted fluorescent hieroglyphics on their shells. They returned to the beach on which they had hatched, and the credits rolled.