My mom.
I turned around, shaking so hard I nearly fell over. I felt sick, like when you’ve made a mistake you can’t ever take back. Like when I dreamt I cut off my finger. Or when I told my classmates that I had divorced Evelyn.
I knew my mom was dead. And I’d been running away.
My mind numb, my legs began walking me toward the kitchen.
“Now give me the gun,” Lyle demanded.
“But I get to kill the boy,” said the woman.
“I said give me the gun,” repeated Lyle. “It’s God’s will.”
“No!”
I stepped into the kitchen. It was the woman. Her hair had gone from red to gray, but it was her – Gabrielle Burns. She looked like a skeleton in her white dress, the skin around her eyes had shrunk so she looked as crazy as she was. Lyle carefully placed his pipe on the counter, then darted for her gun. They struggled. It went off. And Gabrielle was jolted back against the kitchen cabinets. She gaped at the blood on her white dress. As she slumped to the floor, she withdrew a silver knife from her skirt pocket.
And then she caught sight of me standing in the kitchen entryway. Her already large eyes widened further. I wasn’t sure what all raced through her mind as her eyes locked onto mine. A realization that she had failed her God and would never be given a baby. Perhaps second thoughts about what she had just done as a glimmer of sanity returned.
The only thing that raced through her mind for sure was a bullet. Lyle held the gun at her even after she was dead.
My mom was sprawled on the floor next to Gabrielle. There was blood on the cupboards above her, the one from which she had grabbed my cereal box that morning. I pushed past a surprised Lyle and slid to her side.
“Mommy?” I heard a voice cry. “Mommy!”
I lifted her head in my hands, pulling her surprisingly heavy head into my lap, then brushing her hair out of her soft but still face, expecting to see her wake. Her eyes were wide open, dilated so widely that her beautiful blue-gray irises were scarcely visible. Eyes that for the first time ignored me. Or accused me.
I bent over and pressed myself to her tighter, as if the life in my body could return life to hers. But she made no reply.
“I…I’m sorry I was too late,” Lyle said from behind, laying his hand on my shoulder.
I shrugged him off. Couldn’t bear his touch. Could focus only on my mom, gently running my fingertips over her eyebrows, and the edges of her face. Her soft, rounded chin. I tried not to look at her eyes, but they kept drawing me back.
Lyle took his hand away and remained standing behind me, not making a sound. Yet I saw movement. My mother hadn’t moved. The movement had come from the reflection in her dead, staring eyes. The hair pricked up on my scalp as I saw Lyle pointing the gun at my head. He didn’t know exactly when I’d arrived or what I might have seen or heard before he began struggling with Gabrielle for the gun. And the way I shrugged him away may have convinced him that I knew he was responsible for my mother’s death. He would shoot me now, and explain to the authorities how Gabrielle had killed both mother and son before he could get the gun from her. Then he could start with a new Adam, an Adam-3, whom he could influence without Sarah’s interference. My great-grandfather was going to kill me as he had just murdered his granddaughter. Unless maybe I pretended not to know. Pretended to look to him for comfort.
“Oh, Grandpa,” I cried, not turning around, burying my face against my mother’s still warm cheek.
Would she have wanted me to try to preserve my life, or was I betraying her by not facing down her murderer? Would a human child, a non-clone, have done the same? I felt ashamed. I was no longer scared that she was dead, but that she would awake and see me doing this thing. That she would see her son wasn’t human after all. Half of me wanted him to kill me. Kill the freak who would run away as his mother was murdered, and then think of himself as he hugged her dead body.
There was a hesitation that seemed like forever. Would I know if he fired, or would I be dead first? Relief and revulsion flooded my body when his non-gun hand rested back down on my shoulder.
Lyle wasn’t going to kill me today.
Instead he picked the silver knife out of Gabrielle’s hand, slipped it into a plastic bag and placed that in his pocket, and then called 911 on his cell and used it to beam a hologram of the scene to the paramedics, police, and the physicians at Lyle’s Ingeneuity.
They arrived within five minutes, but I had no hope the paramedics or Ingeneuity doctors could resuscitate my mother, and no hope the police would arrest her murderer.
Table of Contents
17
I was in the news again as background on the investigation trickled out. Police found conclusive evidence that Gabrielle had fired the shot that killed my mom. The official story went as follows: Gabrielle Burns began stalking us after her release from the mental hospital. On Friday, as Sarah walked out the front door, Gabrielle was waiting. She forced Sarah back into the house at gunpoint, ordered her to call Lyle and ask him to pick me up from church, and held her in the kitchen until Lyle pulled up. Surely she was waiting for me to arrive so she could kill mother and child together. If she had killed Sarah right away, neighbors might have heard the shots and called the police.
When Gabrielle saw Lyle enter the kitchen, she must have shot Sarah, hoping to shoot Lyle and myself next. But Lyle was able to tear the gun away and kill her.
Though I had no proof, I was convinced of a different story. After the Thanksgiving argument, Lyle met with the recently released Gabrielle (released, as I learned much later, by a psychiatrist with an indirect connection to Lyle). Lyle probably told her that he wanted to repent for his sins, and that God had told him he needed to help her destroy the unholy child and its mother. With some help from Lyle, Gabrielle was able to get into the house and hold Sarah at gunpoint until Lyle brought the child to join them. When Lyle entered the kitchen, he ordered her to kill Sarah, and then demanded Gabrielle’s gun.
I now believe that he wanted my mom out of the way so he could raise me directly, a suitable husband for Lily. He set it up so he would look like the hero, saving me from the crazed Gabrielle, though unfortunately unable to save my mother. And if I hadn’t distrusted Lyle from as far back as I could remember, perhaps it would have worked.
My mother’s funeral was set for Monday. I wanted to go to church on Sunday and even participate in the Christmas pageant, knowing I could hide behind the sunglasses. I mostly wanted to go and be comforted by Jack and Reverend Lewis. But Lyle said there were too many things to do before Monday, and I was kept away.
On Sunday morning, as the sirens wailed down the main cross street near our house and a helicopter hovered in the distance, the noise barely registered. I couldn’t take my eyes off a photo of my mom and me at the entrance to Disneyland. Lyle, who had spent the night in my mom’s room, walked into the living room and turned on the news.
“I think something’s happened,” he said.
I ignored him except that my hands gripped the frame of my mom’s photo a bit tighter. But the words on the news began to drift into my consciousness. Suicide bomber…Cassandra Society… Unitarian.
I looked up to see the camera panning over the stone steps where Evelyn had kissed me two days ago. Now they were littered with debris. One of the mangled church doors was lying at the bottom of the stairs. There were dark stains I didn’t recognize as blood. Lying by itself near one of the stains was a severed arm with nails sticking out of it.
At some point I’d stood up, but my legs grew wobbly and I knelt in front of the screen. Over forty people already confirmed dead. A group now calling themselves the Gabrielites in honor of their martyred leader had claimed responsibility. All those who harbored clones were enemies of God, and His vengeance would be swift and terrible.
I spent hours believing that everyone I’d known at church was dead because of me. They kept promising to announce the dead as soon as loved ones were notified. Unbear
able hours crawled by. Finally a link for the list appeared on the screen. Lyle chose it before I could. Fifty-three dead listed in alphabetical order. I scanned down to the L’s. Albert Lewis. Melinda Lewis. I closed my eyes. Jack wasn’t on the list.
“Isn’t that your friend’s dad?” Lyle asked.
I nodded, eyes still closed. Reverend Lewis shuffling his papers. I can’t believe being born is ever a sin. No sir. A belief that had killed him and his wife.
“I didn’t know Evelyn went to your church.”
“She doesn’t,” I said. It was several seconds before I put Lyle’s words together. I forced my eyes back to the list. Green. Aaron Green. The war hero. I saw him shaking my hand. Saluting me. Evelyn proudly leaning up against him. They had gone to see the Christmas play after all. Maybe after they heard about my mom. I shook my head. It wasn’t true.
“That’s terrible,” Lyle said.
I didn’t take my eyes off the name. It was another Aaron Green. Or a mistake. They would take the name off soon. Apologize for the confusion.
“Terrible,” Lyle repeated as he turned off the news.
Table of Contents
18
Sixty years before my mother’s funeral, at the funeral of my c-father’s mother, the pastor said that God had wanted Sarah early for a special purpose in heaven. But my clone-father had found no comfort in that. All he saw was his mother’s lifeless mouth falling open, and no loving God would allow such an ugly thing to happen.
“I felt then,” he wrote, “that Death was the only true evil in the world. And since the Bible said that Death had been a curse by God on Adam and all his descendants, it seemed as if the heavens had aimed it specifically at me. I hated God for it. And I grew determined to do what the original Adam was unable or unwilling to do. I will undo God’s curse on humanity. No more Sarahs will die.”
*
On the morning of Monday, December 23, 2041, I attended my mother’s funeral. If God was angry on the stormy night of my birth, did the warm sunshine reflecting off our slowly moving limousine mean that God was smiling over my mother’s death? Or gloating?
Authorities tried to keep the hundreds of protestors at a distance, but I saw them as the funeral procession made its way into the cemetery. They were shouting and jeering at us, waving signs that said such things as “God Hates Clones,” “The Whore of Babylon Burns in Hell,” and “Antichrist’s Mother Returned to Sender.”
At our now-gutted church, I’d been told that Christ wanted us to love our neighbors like ourselves, even to love our enemies, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and to never judge our fellow man. They were beautiful sentiments, and Reverend Lewis managed to convince me that, Gabrielle Burnses of the world notwithstanding, heaven would welcome me, and that it would be a pleasant place to spend eternity. But on the morning of the funeral, I began to wonder if perhaps I truly was the Antichrist. Maybe that was why God didn’t grant my prayer to save my mom. Maybe God had my mom killed because I, the Antichrist, had begged him to save her. I looked at my small, thin arms and legs covered in a black suit. I stared at my palms. Were these the limbs and hands of the Antichrist?
I promised myself I would never pray for anything again. If all these protestors represented the views of God, and they would celebrate my sweet mother’s murder and taunt her son, then God must have been deeply disappointed with the messages Jesus had preached. And I would be against their God with my limbs and hands and every part of my body.
I didn’t hear a word of what the chaplain said. The next thing I noticed was Lyle grabbing a handful of dirt and throwing it on my mother’s coffin. I heard it hit with a sickening thud. Was she still glad that cloning had allowed her to have a son? Someone told me to throw some dirt, but I shook my head.
As Lyle’s gritty hand took mine and led me from my mom’s grave, a few of my mom’s friends and several employees of USCS offered their condolences. And then, to my surprise, there was Jack. His downcast face was cut and bruised. Our eyes met briefly, then he fixed his attention on the procession of cars leaving the cemetery.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Jack didn’t respond. He was orphaned because of me. I should have been grateful that he had come at all. But at the time, all I knew was that the only Christians who had ever accepted us were now rejecting us. God had punished those who had welcomed us, turned his back on my mother and me, and chosen the side of the protestors and bombers. Lyle pulled me from Jack without another word said.
I never thought I’d feel so alone as I did that morning. But I was wrong. Lyle took me out of all but my virtual school during the holiday break, and by doing so eliminated Lily’s competition. I never returned to Hill Creek Junior Academy, and so was unable to say goodbye to Evelyn.
I had a dream about Evelyn on Christmas Eve, waving at her on the street while she rode away in her father’s car. I wasn’t sure whether she saw me or not, but she didn’t wave back.
Table of Contents
19
My clone-father first met Lyle Gardener in 1988. Adam-1 was given a tour of Ingeneuity by his Uncle Charles not long after my clone-father developed his obsession with genetics – the key to life, and therefore Adam-1’s key to immortality. His only hope of not meeting the same fate as his parents.
Charles led me into the spacious room. Around the perimeter of Lyle’s office stood an array of antiques – mostly scientific or military, ancient guns and microscopes. Behind the desk loomed an eight-foot-tall grandfather clock, a family heirloom. Its loud tick-tock seemed to count down the seconds of our lives, as if the clock knew it would long outlive everyone present, and it wouldn’t let a second pass without reminding us.
The only thing in the room more threatening than the clock was the man sitting in front of it.
“Um…Mr. Gardener,” Charles began, “this is my nephew Adam. Adam, this is the founder and owner of Ingeneuity, Mr. Lyle Gardener.”
Lyle was in his mid-thirties. He was unusually thin and his hair was already silvering, and he had an arrogance about him that made me feel inferior. He scrutinized me for an uncomfortably long time, an elaborately carved pipe protruding from the left side of his mouth. Then he rose, taking his pipe out with his left hand and extending his right hand to me, forming a stiff, alarming smile.
“It’s an honor to meet you, Adam,” Lyle said.
“Thank you, sir,” was all I could muster. My hand was encased in Mr. Gardener’s surprisingly solid, enveloping grip. I felt right away the man was dangerous, but I also knew Mr. Gardener may be the one man who could give me what I needed. If I wanted to live forever, I’d have to fly as close to that alarming smile as possible.
***
I would come to know that same smile on a face fifty years older, and the memory of it still makes me feel like a child.
I went to live in Lyle’s house on December 25, 2041. It was sterile, not a speck of dust, and elegant in a clinical sort of way. The bedroom in which I now resided was a shrine to Adam-1 filled with his pictures and diplomas on the walls – constant reminders that I was him and that I should live my life as if it was a continuation of his. That might have comforted me, seeing my grandpa as a father figure who loved my mom and would protect me from Lyle. But with my mother’s murderer forcing my c-father on me, I began to wonder if Adam-1 had always been in league with Lyle, and if he had only used my mom for his own selfish needs. Needs that had led to her death.
For the first time, I began to resent my clone-father.
I never worked up the courage to ask Lyle to take the stuff down. Once I took a framed picture of Adam-1 and Grandma Lily off the dresser and put it in the drawer, replacing it with the Disneyland photo of my mom and me. The next day the other picture was back out and mine was nowhere to be found.
“Why did you put your picture in the drawer?” he asked at dinner that night.
“I just liked my other picture more,” I said. I kept my eyes on my food.
??
?It’s disrespectful, Adam. Remember who you are.”
“I don’t remember him at all,” I whispered.
“Don’t ever answer back to me again.”
I didn’t answer back or move any of Adam-1’s relics again. But it made me begin to loathe my c-father every time I walked into my bedroom, and every time I woke in the morning. If Lyle thought he could force me into becoming my c-father, the strategy was backfiring.
So I thought. What Lyle knew, and I didn’t, was the power of a ticking clock.
***
In the world beyond my bedroom, change was happening quickly by 2042. Cloning moved further into the mainstream. More than 100,000 clones were born during that year alone. The first private schools exclusively for clones opened their doors, though most people encouraged the integration of clones and non-clones in schools and society, and nearly all early divisions proved to be short-lived. The majority of the new wills were written with a “cloning clause” that indicated whether or not the person wanted to be cloned upon death, and if so, who should be the guardian and what the financial arrangements would be. Most churches strongly discouraged cloning – especially upon death – but nearly all of them allowed and encouraged clones to join their parishes.
More sensationally, a few “clone cults” sprang up on the fringe that believed humans should become their own gods as a form of ancestor-descendant worship. They believed that eventually only the people who cloned themselves would live forever, and that those who put their faith in an external God were doomed to die and pass into oblivion. This, not coincidentally, was exactly what Lyle wanted the people to believe. If people were convinced that cloning was the only possible afterlife and Lyle controlled the cloning establishment, he could theoretically hold the keys to heaven. Lyle was not directly responsible for these religious movements, but some of his associates encouraged it by writing books and quietly bankrolling the new churches.