24 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
PERSONAL HISTORY
IMAGINING ZIGGY
A passage to parenthood.
BY AKHILSHARMA
ILLUSTRATION BY DADU SHIN
N
ot long after we began dating, my
now wife, Christine, and I started
making up stories about the child we
might have.
We named the child—or, in the sto-
ries we told about him, he named him-
self—Suzuki Noguchi. Among the things
we liked about him was that he was
cheerfully indifferent to us. He did not
wish to be either Irish (like Christine)
or Indian (like me). Suzuki was eight,
and he chose this name because he was
into Japanese high fashion. When we
told him that he couldn’t just go around
claiming to be Japanese, Suzuki said that
he was a child of God and who were we
to say that God was not Japanese.
In addition to being a dandy, Su-
zuki was a criminal. He dealt in yel-
lowcake uranium and trafficked in en-
dangered animals. Sometimes we asked
him how his day at school had gone
and he would warn, “Do you really want
to be an accessory after the fact?” We
imagined him banging on our bedroom
door when we were having sex and
shouting, “Stop! You can’t get any child
better than me.”
My wife was forty-eight and I was
forty-seven, and we started inventing
these stories as a form of play. It also
soothed some hurt part of us.
Christine grew up very poor in Dub-
lin. As a child, she experienced periodic
bouts of homelessness. When her fam-
ily was able to get public housing, it was
in a neighborhood where heroin was en-
demic. The family eventually settled in
an area where children were regularly at-
tacked by a local pit bull and people would
come running with flaming torches, be-
cause fire was one of the few things that
would make the dog unclench its jaws.
I grew up with a severely brain-damaged
brother, whom my parents took care of
at home. My brother could not walk or
talk or roll over in his sleep. Some nights,
we didn’t have health aides and my par-
ents stayed up to turn him from side to
side so he wouldn’t get bedsores. My wife
and I are careful people. We feel lucky
to have the lives we have, and we don’t
want to mess them up. Our imaginary
child was not careful at all.
Normally, it is the parents who imag-
ine a future for the child and, through
the imagining, hold open a space for
the child to step into. In our case, it was
the reverse.
I used to teach at Rutgers. I got an
offer to teach at Duke for meaningfully
more money. Duke wasn’t promising
tenure, though. I didn’t want to surren-
der that security. Christine asked, “What
would Suzuki do?”
“He would make me feel bad about
how little I earn.”
“‘Daddy, your salary is a rounding
error,’” my wife said.
“‘Is that a paycheck or a dinner bill?’”
“‘A tip on a dinner bill.’”
“‘Are you going to be scared until
you die?’”
The most wonderful thing about
leaving New York City and moving to
green North Carolina was the fact that
we didn’t have to worry about money.
Once I left New York, I realized that
financial anxiety had been like a piece
of furniture I maneuvered around a
hundred times a day. In Chapel Hill,
we rented a three-bedroom, three-bath
mid-century-modern home, on two
acres with an artificial stream and a koi
pond, for twenty-two hundred dollars
a month.
My wife and I began talking about
I.V.F. At this point, she was fifty and I
was forty-nine. It was usually at night
that we discussed it, lying in bed with
the white-noise machine roaring. Chris-
tine had wanted to have children when
My wife and I began making up stories about the child we might have. she was younger but had surrendered
