He was still relatively new. And because of it, they fawned over him. Particularly my wife, who could never get enough of him. She cooed to him, whispered sweet nothings. All in front of me. And then kept badgering me. When? When? When?

I would always respond, why? Look at him, for example. He lacked any humility. Flush with unqualified love, he never seemed to return it. He would just bask in it. His lips would part slowly, before curving at the edges and retracting. His teeth were small and blunt, but he relied on them as part of his semi-sweet smile, the one that made hearts melt.

The day he revealed himself for who he was, and the day our struggle against one another commenced, began with a “miracle.”

“What the hell is he doing there,” I asked, as Sammy teetered toward the stereo cabinet.

“Benny, watch your mouth. He can understand you,” my wife Ella said with a wave of her thick left wrist. The width and muscularity of her wrists always perplexed me. She was a small, thin woman, but had the wrists and grip of a bricklayer. Sometimes she would punch me in jest on my shoulder, and I felt like I had taken a left hook from George Foreman. She was not nearly the chef, however, that Foreman was, managing to burn everything, even those items that should be a breeze to cook with our copy of the aforementioned Foreman’s multi-purpose grill.

In any event, I wasn’t so sure she was right. All I ever heard from him were noises. And to him, whatever we said was probably just noise as well. An empty symphony of sound. No, looks mattered more to him than sounds. He was vain, constantly tugging on his thick black curls or batting his long black eyelashes like a geisha.

“Let’s keep an eye on him over there, though,” my sister Saba said. He was hers, and ever since he had come into her life she had become obsessed with everything about him, from his bowel movements to the type of leather in shoes (“Patent leather is for narcissists and people dressed in cheap tuxedos,” she would say). “He loves watching movies, and he’s always turning on the VCR and trying to put in his favorite movies.”

“Sure,” I said. From what I saw he barely had enough mental capacity to eat without prompting. Complex actions involving motor skills seemed beyond this lunk’s grasp.

“The VCR is broken anyways,” Ella said, “So I doubt he’ll get what he’s looking for.”

We turned, and I began to discuss Edward Said’s legacy when I heard:

“Oh my God, Sammy.” It was Saba.

So, she was clearly paying attention to him, and not me. Both Ella and she ran over to the TV/stereo cabinet.

“I can’t believe it, can you?”

“No. Unreal.”

“What?” I said walking over.

There it was. The TV was on, and there was William Holden, face down in the fetid pool at the end of Sunset Boulevard. The movie that had been in the VCR when the VCR broke. I had tried to eject it at that point because I had found the ending to be unsubtle.

“What did he do?” I asked approaching the scene cautiously.

“He fixed it,” Ella said pinching our nephew’s absurdly round cheeks.

“What the fu-- sorry, what the heck do you mean he fixed it? I spent hours over the last month actually tinkering with it.”

“Are you sure?” Saba asked.

“What do you mean am I sure? The tape was stuck. I tried everything to get it out or back in and nothing. Are you saying that this fifteen month old kid is some sort of brilliant repairperson?”

“I don’t know about all that,” Ella said taking Sammy out of Saba’s arms, “all I know is that I saw him touching the VCR and now it works.”

With her typical wanton hyperbole, Saba declared, “it’s a miracle!”

Sammy gurgled and smiled at his mother. And then turned to me and glared.

About a week later, I was dozing on the loveseat in our family room, the one under the west-facing window looking out onto our claustrophobic backyard. Like our recently deceased cat, I had come to love stretching out beneath the warm glow of the afternoon sun. But, unlike our dead cat, I didn’t leave fur all over the place.

I was lost in the deceptive wasteland between consciousness and a deep refreshing sleep. Conscious, but virtually paralyzed, it was only my sense of smell that had any sort of sharpness or clarity. And I smelled shit.

“What the hell,” I started. There was Sammy hopping up and down on my chest. He gave off a squishing sound every time he landed. “Get off. Saba! Get over here!”

He then stopped and grabbed my arm. My arm started to burn. The skin began to cook, the smell something akin to burning pork. He released his grip, and then raised both his hands and lowered them towards my eyes. I grabbed his forearms and struggled as them lowered. “No, no, no. Saba!”

“Aren’t they sweet together,” Ella said over me. I opened my eyes.

“Yes,” Saba responded. “Perfect.”

I looked down at my chest. Sammy was asleep, his head nuzzling my chest. “Get him off me. Now!”

I couldn’t tell Ella. But she should have put two and two together. Like when Sammy snuck up on me in the bath one day and tried to drop the plugged-in blow dryer into the tub. Both Saba and she thought it was some sort of amusing effort by Sammy to help his uncle with his hair as he got cleaned up. His lack of dexterity was the only thing that saved me. Thank God he was not more effective when it came to destroying me.

It is not lightly that I accuse my nephew of trying to kill or destroy me. The incidents were many and increasingly troubling. A few days before the blow dryer incident, Saba and Ella thought it would be a good bonding and character-building (their respective goals) exercise for me to feed Sammy.

So there we were. A jar of apple sauce, Sammy and me. The minute Saba and Ella left the room, he hissed at me. Not like a snake hisses, i.e., from the throat. This was a deep, guttural hiss that came from deep within him. From a dark place. I expected it to smell like sulfur, but the scent of the apple sauce proved more pungent and victorious.

“Look, I don’t know who or what you are, but it needs to stop.”

Then, he said something. It wasn’t entirely clear to me. It sounded to me that he said, “Baby hates.”

“What did you say?” I asked. “Baby hates? Baby hates what?”

He just bopped around in his high chair, and started grabbing at the applesauce.

“Baby hates apple sauce?” I asked.

But drool started to come down the corner of his mouth. No, it wasn’t the applesauce he hated. I figured some applesauce may stop him from spewing the apparent vitriol coming from his mouth. I dipped the spoon into the jar, and started to guide it towards his mouth.

What happened next was the subject of great debate. I remember Sammy grabbing my wrist as it approached and jabbing my wrist and the spoon at my forehead. Ella and Saba found this story utterly unrealistic. Instead, I guess they preferred to believe that I had randomly chosen to ram my forehead into the end of a metal spoon.

In any event, they both came rushing in when they heard me yelp in pain.

“What happened?” Saba asked. “Your forehead.”

“Mauck,” Sammy said.”

“Oh yes, baby. Yes! Yes! Did you guys hear that?” Saba said lifting her son out of the high chair. “Benny does have a mark on his forehead.”

“What do you mean?” I looked at my reflection on the back of the metal spoon. There was a noticeable bruise on my forehead. “He did it.”

“Sweetheart,” Ella cupping my mouth. “Positive reinforcement. Remember positive reinforcement.”

I growled in contempt.

“Easy there,” Ella said patting my back.

The next day, I waited for a half hour before the news, reading a week-old Newsweek and hating the environs. I hate doctors’ offices.

“You are sterile,” Dr. Aftooni said to me.

“Not even a hello, doc?” I said sitting down.

“No sitting. No time. You know what you need to know. You saw the 25 other patients out there I need to see. Wear looser underwear, keep fucking like a rabbit and maybe one of the inordinately small number of listless misshapen sperm you have will somehow persevere and pierce one of you wife’s beautiful eggs. But, I’ve seen them under a microscope and I am not optimistic. Your sperm lack guts.”

And there it was. The reason why when will be never: my sperm were gutless, mis-shaped lazy extensions of myself. I had failed Ella, but life could be worse. I could have another Sammy, whose sociopathic warning signs are deliberately ignored by his parent. His recent attempt to knock me out with a frying pan was poo-pooed as a cute attempt at cooking. The brick that he swung at my knees? “Look, it’s little Sammy the builder. How cute!” It started to get absurd. Ammonia in my beer (true story), and it’s, awwwwww, little Sammy the homemaker! (Saba was convinced that Sammy thought it was honey – betrayed by my own blood) I had no allies. I was alone, and no one would believe me. And I was too ashamed to ever explain it properly.

After 12 months of nothing, Ella and I both went in to figure out why. I had been convinced that it was a problem with her eggs. After the first and last breakfast she ever cooked for us, I had ample evidence that she faced numerous challenges when it came to eggs.

That evening, when I came home and broke the news to her, she began consoling me and hugging me. I was confused. It didn’t bother me that I was loaded with blanks, so to speak. We could always adopt after all.

“That would be beautiful,” she said, “but I wanted us to share ourselves in at least one child, Benny.”

I guess. “Of course, Ella. I’m sorry.” Then, I began to cry. Not loud, wet sobs. A couple of tears, backed up by a lot more pain.

I had to get my composure because Saba walked in with Sammy.

Sammy ran up to Ella and clutched her stomach. “Mommy.”

Rub it in, you little …, I thought.

“No, that’s mommy,” Ella said pointing to Saba.

“Not my mommy. A mommy,” Sammy said.

“Your kid is speaking in koans,” I told my sister.

“I love you,” he said to Ella. She hugged him.

“What about Uncle Benny?” Saba asked.

“When…maybe…then,” he said shrugging his shoulders and pressing his head in Ella’s stomach.

Saba moved to Washington a month later, after having gotten a gig at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She had always been obsessed by statistical anomalies, epistemology and what qualifies as work. She felt blessed, and shrugged off our efforts to convince her to stay or to console her on her chosen career.

A couple of weeks after Saba moved, Ella started to throw up a lot in the mornings. I thought she was secretly cooking breakfast for herself, because the last person to vomit so violently was me after eating the eggs mentioned earlier. When the doctor told us she was pregnant, we told him to jump in a lake and give her something for whatever viral or bacterial infection was causing her to throw up so often. But, it turns out her gynecologist was right. Eight and a half months later, we had twin girls.

When I was speaking to Saba from the hospital lobby, she put Sammy on the phone. I had decided to leave all the hand-holding and comforting to my mother because it would probably sound a lot more convincing coming from her. I spent the time trying to see if there were any potentially interesting names for my daughters in the New Yorker I had brought with me.

“You are sucky,” he said.

I had misheard him. I must have. I had been a selfish asshole, and there had been larger issues fueling my irrational thoughts about Sammy. He was like any child, pure and special. He needed love. “Did you say I am lucky, big guy?”

“No, sucky. And wicked.”

Kids.