I know what the secret ingredient is in an Orange Julius: it’s an egg. Knowing this, you might expect my appetite for an Orange Julius would have waned, become a phantom craving on the back of my tongue, but you’d be wrong, because it all depends on whether you choose to focus on the delicious creamy orange flavor or the little chick embryo sliding down your gullet, and I for one have always chosen to focus on the delicious creamy orange flavor.

To begin again from the beginning, about a month back my girlfriend Mary and I went to the mall for an Orange Julius in an effort to fortify our resolve. Our appointment at the clinic was scheduled for later that week but already Mary was having second thoughts. I guess I was having second thoughts too, but not enough to overcome the fear of our future, my freedom; not enough to entirely control the adolescent inside me straining to get a glimpse of the cleavage on the Victoria’s Secret model in the window as we walked past. “We have fun,” I said. “We have a great rapport. I don’t want to lose that, do you?”

We bought our drinks and were just on our way out, unwavering, our resolution as frail as gossamer thread. Without the scarcest glance to the Foot Locker, the Macy’s (certainly not the Baby Gap), we walked through the atrium toward the exit only to find ourselves inexplicably walking into the Sears store, electronics. We doubled back, certain we’d made a wrong turn somewhere, but every time we found ourselves walking into another store without an exit; Nordstrom, Radio Shack, Bed Bath & Beyond without the beyond.

Surely, we thought, security would come and kick us out, show us the exit, but one minute we turned around and they were all gone and we were alone. It was all just as abrupt as snapping your fingers. We were alone in the mall, locked behind the gates of Barnes & Noble, east end, kitty-corner to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

For the past couple of weeks now we’ve been camping out in Fiction. We found ourselves this little nook in between Faulkner and Thoreau and it’s about as domestic a place as we’re liable to find around here, our own little Yoknapatawpha County or Walden Pond. Would it be crass of me to mention we’ve been relieving ourselves in the Self-Help section on the other side of the store? Very well, then. Call me crass. I found us some candles from Spirituality and we stay up most nights, reading to each other passages from our favorite books.

There are all kinds of books one would expect to read in a situation like this: Robinson Crusoe, for example, or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Lord of the Flies springs readily to mind, but I push it, frantically, desperately, away), but the books we read have nothing to do with adventure. They’re the books from our childhood, literary comfort food. I read to her from Franny & Zooey. I read, “[He is] the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo.” We skip from page to page like we’re reading poetry, like plot doesn’t matter: “Any time I’m feeling blue, or puzzled, what I do, I just invite a few people to come visit me in the bathroom, and—well, we iron things out together, that's all.”

I don’t know what time it is but I feel it’s late, the middle of the night, I think. Mary’s been sleeping and she’s just woken up. She says she has some stomach cramps but they’re not as bad as they’ve been. I give her a madeleine cake and she stretches and yawns. She mumbles something about a beach ball and I can tell she’s not really awake yet. I sit up and adjust my pillow, Proust’s Within A Budding Grove, and mildly curse it for the perennial crimp in my neck it’s given me the last week and a half.

“Hey,” I say. “How did you sleep?” She mutters something about spiders, about a web, and I ask if she’d like me to read her Charlotte’s Web.

“No,” she shakes her head. “It wasn’t that kind of spider,” she says, and then she doesn’t say anything else for a while. She’s been getting moodier and moodier lately which just concerns the hell out of me. The situation is such that we can’t just come right out and talk about it, at least not with our own words, but I worry about her. I worry she isn’t taking care of herself. I don’t mean physically, because there’s not a whole hell of a lot we can do on that front, but psychologically, she’s become forlorn. Just last night, for example, I saw her looking sidelong at The Bell Jar.

“Shouldn’t we be on the run from zombies?” she asks. It’s two days later and we’re wandering through Horror and Science Fiction. “Isn’t that what happens in these kinds of situations?”

“Only in the movies,” I say. “Zombies don’t really exist.”

“Well I for one would welcome the company. No offense,” she says, “but I think a fresh face to talk to would be nice.”

The thing you need to know about Mary is that she has the most beautiful hands you’ve ever seen; hands that look to be just as capable bowing a violin or plinking a piano as threading a needle, just as adept picking fruit as picking the gnats out of the fur of her brood, but where they really shine, what made me fall in love with her all over again, was the sight of them holding a book. I swear to God, they’re hands that were made to hold a book.

Though she’d never admit to it, her eyesight’s not very good, and when she holds a book it’s always away from her, with almost her full arm extended, gripping the book there by the spine with her ring and index fingers, with all the grace and poise of a Geisha holding her fan or a queen, beckoning to her humbled knight. Her fingers are long and slender and just as good tapping or pointing as breaking a pencil between them. With this hand she holds a book by Dorothy Parker and reads, “That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”

Reading these books, we both feel as if they’ve all been written with this exact situation in mind, and not just for an abstract passerby but for us, for where we are, removed from any kind of independent context. It’s as if of all the books we’ve ever read and in all the places we’ve ever read them, all the little things that just never quite made sense now do. Every word reverberates with the force of a sonic boom. Every character stands before us as clear as day.

That said, our little home feels as dead as disco. The little madeleine cakes they sell by the register are nearly gone now and I give both the cakes in the package to Mary. She groans that they’ve only whet her appetite. I read to her, “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” She retorts from Dickens, from Oliver Twist, “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

Days later, maybe weeks, and apropos of nothing she suddenly says, “You know, your mom really pisses me off sometimes.”

“What?” I say. It’s the most words she’s said without reading in days, maybe weeks.

“I was just thinking,” she shrugs. “She really pisses me off sometimes. The way she’s always isolating me from every conversation. It’s always about the camping trip you went on when you were ten or the time you and your brother lost the dog before she found it sleeping in the bathtub, and everything I ever mention is always some terrific cue to a story about you or your brother or the neighbors across the street when you were in junior high or the mailman, and it’s just frustrating is all.”

“She doesn’t do that,” I say. “And anyway, that’s just the way she is.”

“She does,” she says. “And sometimes you do too. You should try to stop. It’s rude.”

The night before I wake up in a cold sweat, suddenly remembering that I left the light on in the kitchen, or maybe the heater in the bedroom. One of those old electric wall heaters, expensive, and the hamper with all the laundry I’d planned on doing later that afternoon right in front of it. Had the apartment burned down? If not, I thought, the electricity bill is going to kill me, not that it really matters anymore. These are just the things we think about when we’re not reading.

We’ve started reading spiritual books to each other, which I guess is a bad sign. Last night Mary read from Book One of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and this morning I went looking for The Way of the Pilgrim. I’m beginning to feel now like we’re two very lost runaway children, staring into the living room windows of happy families, wondering what ever made us decide to run away in the first place.

The thing is, as we were walking out of this place that day, our Orange Julius in hand, we were both looking like crazy for some way out of doing what we were going to do, and desperation like that can’t help but turn into blame pretty quick. You could sense it in the air between us. Things were about to get nasty. But now all that’s gone. Strange as it may sound, there’s no room for nastiness in here. In this place the written word holds sway over all others. Pretty soon though we’re going to have to face the fact that we might not be getting out of here. Pretty soon we’re going to have to decide whether bringing a child into a place like this is worth bringing it out at all.