Zahn Mendoza was not able to commandeer Jerry Garcia’s room for himself, nor, when she arrived, was he able to commandeer the room for Dixie. Wanting, in the world of Serenity Knolls, was met with resistance, and any resistance to that resistance was met with pills. At Serenity Knolls one was to take what one was given and be happy with that. This was its philosophy. It was spelled out quite clearly for the patients on bumper stickers thumb-tacked to doors:

Let go and let God.

Given Zahn’s extroversion and can-do attitude, it was difficult for him to accept the Serenity Knolls credo, but Zahn’s survival instinct, combined with a sudden lack of amphetamines, combined with the knowledge, gleaned from a group therapy session that he had attended a couple days ago, that he was potentially a father, had mellowed Zahn considerably.

When one signs the paperwork that condemns one to an eight-week stay at Serenity Knolls, one tends not to be in a condition to argue the terms of the agreement or to read the fine print, and Zahn feels, as do many of the residents of Serenity Knolls both past and present, a little had. He didn’t quite realize that by signing his name on a line while in the midst of a drug-induced desperation, while checking an X next to the line “you give your full consent to the course of therapy recommended by the counselors of Serenity Knolls” that he had signed away all rights to contact his friends, family, and business associates, that every move he made for the next eight weeks would be planned by someone else, that he had no say-so in his course of treatment, and that any complaining he did would be met with the quick administration of sedatives.

In short, Zahn felt stupid for being here. Serenity Knolls’ program was modeled after the Narcotics Anonymous program, and there was all kinds of twelve-step nonsense and religious paraphernalia scotch-taped to the walls of the center’s common areas. Zahn felt that he was caught in a catch-22, if you criticized a twelve-step program at all, then you were still stuck in Step One, denial, and you were eleven steps from recovery, as low on the recovery totem pole as you could be.

Fortunately for Zahn, his feeling stupid wasn’t accompanied by any anger towards this system. He felt duped, but he had put himself into a position to be duped, and in any case, it was better than any number of worst-case scenarios: arrest, overdose, the loss of someone he loved.

So Zahn is here, at Serenity Knolls, and he will do what Zahn does best: act, even if the act is to temporarily become a yes-man. Yes, I will put trust in Him and He will deliver me.

Zahn is here, at Serenity Knolls, but Zahn is suddenly faced with an entirely new and unique situation. Dixie, a woman whom he had an unspeakable crush on for years, and with whom he had consummated that crush about four months ago, Dixie Humes, his best friend’s girlfriend, confessed, just two days ago, in one of the Serenity Knolls group therapy sessions, that the reason she became so addicted to cocaine over the last two months was because she was pregnant. Dixie had confessed, in a room full of strangers, that when she had found out she was pregnant, despite being on the pill, she felt a misgiving that she had never felt before, because she realized, at that moment, that she had not traveled as far from what she considered her white trash roots as she had imagined.

In the group therapy session, Dixie confessed that when she found out that she was pregnant, she could think of no good reason to go through with the pregnancy, except that she was ashamed not to. Sure, she could go to Planned Parenthood, not a teenager, but a twenty-nine-year-old going to Planned Parenthood, not a girl frightened of condoms and contraception, but a fifteen-year veteran of the pill. She imagined herself going there and a receptionist asking her if she could pay the full fee or if she needed financial assistance, and her saying she could pay the full fee, and then a nurse practitioner or a doctor looking at her askance, as if to say she should, by now, know better. And she imagined herself having it done and then keeping the whole thing a secret from the potential fathers, two high-powered, young executives (Zahn noted this, the plural), because how could she tell them that she’d skipped a day of the pill and that that was all it took; and that, after all the cocaine she had ingested, she’d become pregnant with a potential crack baby, and had therefore had to abort it.

The whole thing made her sick to her stomach, an emotional sickness that seemed far worse than any nausea she might later have to cope with. She was ashamed. Yes, she was ashamed. And this was the reason that she never went to the clinic to get what needed to be taken care of, taken care of. Instead, she had opted to attempt a more natural form of abortion. She poisoned the thing with all-nighters and Ecstasy, thinking it would assess the acidity of the situation and spontaneously exit her womb. But it didn’t. The thing held on despite it all. She was at least three and a half months in, past the point when the majority of miscarriages happen. The thing was attached to her uterine wall now, had an umbilical cord, the beginnings of limbs, a head. The thing wanted to live, and she was, with the help of all the people in this room, if not the help of the two potential fathers, going to help it to do so. She was going to be pregnant here, at Serenity Knolls. She was going to leave the detox ward, once, to have an ultrasound followed by an amnio, and if she somehow hadn’t deformed it, and if the chromosomes all lined up, two by two, like passengers on Noah’s Ark, and if an X matched an X, or an X matched a Y, she was going to come back to Serenity Knolls and fulfill her eight-week commitment, she was going to go to classes and group therapy and watch her stomach swell and her pink hair turn back to its natural shade of dishwater blonde.

This is what Dixie had said, though in a much more drawn out, incoherent, and hormonally-charged fashion, in the group therapy session two days ago while Zahn sat about four seats over, part of the circle of participants, not facing her. Zahn knew, when she spoke, that she was not speaking to the general audience, although they cooed with a staccato of tell-it-like-it-ises, but to him. Dixie spoke to Zahn but never once looked his way. He couldn’t blame her for this. Their relationship had been predicated on a certain soullessness—come to think of it, the entire Internet scam was predicated on a certain soullessness—and now there she was, betraying the common law, betraying the coda: always smile and never, ever, tell it like it is.

Zahn Mendoza, two days ago at the group therapy session, had sat four seats over from the future mother of either his, or his best friend’s, child, and when she had come clean with her confession, a room full of people listening to her in rapture, Zahn knew that he, the man who both had it all and had it all wrong, had an opportunity to show his true colors, to unfurl his own personal stars and stripes. When she finished her heartfelt ramble, and the assembly of addicts applauded, there was a moment when the counselor in charge had asked if anyone had more to say, and had looked directly at Zahn when she said it.

It was obvious to him that the counselor was trying to lead him, and it was equally obvious to him that Dixie knew the counselor was trying to lead him. He knew that Dixie’s confession was not simply a confession but a plea, and he knew that at this moment she needed him to say something, that they were like a bride and groom in front of an altar saying their vows, and that the bride was a bit nervous because the groom was noticeably pausing before he said, “I do.” But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t share. He was quite simply, and for perhaps the first time in his life, stunned into silence.

It was very un-Zahn-like to be stunned into silence. He had, for all of his adult life, been able to meet every verbal challenge. He had been able to create, for skeptical investors, detailed business models on command, business models that morphed based on each investor’s concerns and shifted based on the current business climate.

Zahn met challenges like a traveling salesman selling bogus weatherproofing. He gave his family, friends, and business associates the illusion of living in a safe and warm house while gale winds tore at the thin, white washboard. But now things had gone too far. He’d reached the terminal velocity of spin. There was nothing he could do to turn this negative positive.

The moment passed. The counselor thanked them all and informed them that they would now have alone time, which meant that they would each be quarantined to their sterile, hospital-like rooms with televisions and remote controls bolted into tables, to watch golf or NASCAR racing or Jenny Jones.

The group session ended. All assembled got up to leave. On their way out, Zahn and Dixie were side-by-side, both looking down at the square pattern and Kool-Aid stains on the gray, industrial carpet. Zahn wasn’t angry at her. He had heard her story, and it made perfect sense. But it was a sad story. It was a story of defeat and not of success. Things weren’t supposed to go like this for Zahn. Life was supposed to be a series of successes stacked one on top of the other, like honey-wheat pancakes topped with pure, maple syrup. But this time, there was no way to make things good. From here on in, he would be marked with a scarlet letter.

Dixie’s confession was shattering for Zahn. Life was no longer like stacked honey-wheat pancakes, life was like a child’s stacked blocks, the wooden ones with letters of the alphabet carved into two sides and pictures of toys stenciled onto the others, pictures of wagons and teddy bears, life was like a child’s blocks stacked high and tilting, with the child stumbling forward, the Fisher-Price 747 clutched in chubby hands zeroing in.

For the first time in his life, Zahn felt terror. He stood side by side with the maybe-mother of his child. He hardly knew her. He had spent four years of his life sharing the same office space with her, forty hours a week for four years, not to mention long lunches or dinners talking shop with her and Xerxes, or the two weeks the three of them had spent in Oaxaca and Puerto Angel, and still he felt like he hardly knew her. They had never talked about anything of value. They discussed the merits and flaws of the cooling system of Zahn’s Porsche S Series convertible, and the cheap plastic valves that frequently leaked brake fluid in Dixie’s Vespa, but they never discussed who they were, what they wanted. To do so would disrupt their coolness. To do so would mark them as ordinary.

Now this woman whom he did not know might be carrying his child. She had pink hair, frequently wore vintage fifties jumpsuits with green dots on them, like the ones on a Twister board, had a thick smear of cotton-candy-colored lipstick that never came off her mouth, but who was she? Was she really all Pez, all the time?

Zahn suspected that she was not. He suspected that, like himself, she was wearing a mask. He suspected that beneath the veneer of a woman who did her damnedest to look and act unusual, was a woman who wanted more than anything else to be simple, to have children, and perhaps a husband, and plenty of time away from work to nurture both. It was a contradiction, Zahn knew, but it was an age of contradiction, and Zahn was, himself, a paradoxical man, a man who claimed to despise money, yet spent his entire life pursuing it.

Maybe Zahn did know Dixie. Maybe he had known her all along. Maybe, she was, in a way, an extension of himself. Zahn had moved his hand towards Dixie’s, rubbed the outside of his pinkie against hers. Just before they slipped out the door of the common room into the cool, staleness of the Serenity Knolls hallway, a hallway lined with private doors leading to private rooms, Dixie walking through first and then Zahn second, their pinkies curled against each other, locked. To both of them, the locking meant everything. It was Zahn saying, “I do.”

Two days after Dixie’s revelation, Zahn is watching television in a lonely hospital-like room. Later he will attend a group meeting in which he will be forced to acknowledge a belief in a higher power named Jesus. As Zahn spends his day in solitary confinement, his child, or his best friend’s child, grows in a womb just four doors down, grows in the womb of a mother who is as isolated as himself, a mother who is quite possibly lying in bed watching Radiohead’s “Karma Police” video on VH1 just like he is. As this happens, Zahn thinks to himself that it doesn’t matter which one of them is the father, that he, Zahn Mendoza, wants to take on the responsibility, that if, when the good counselors of Serenity Knolls release him back into society, all parties agree, he will be the one to take on this weight. Regardless. There will be no testing. There will be no matching of DNA. If the child bears no signs of him, if it has light eyes that are not wide on its face, he will still take on the responsibility. After all, he is the one that needs to make amends.

This is the new and unique situation that Zahn faces. And it has changed him. And he doesn’t mind so much eight weeks of confinement at Serenity Knolls. Zahn wants this child.