by Ryan Somma
My clone was a huge disappointment.
School let out hours ago, while still daylight out. I slouched in my living room recliner, sipping scotch, pacing myself as not to drink away my anger. My fury and disappointment were dangerously close to becoming self-loathing and despair, and I steeled my resolve when I finally heard his key tinkering with the front door lock.
He noticed me in the candle light once the door closed behind him, a moment too late. I savored the nervous expression my angry glare evoked from him. He stood on the foyer doormat as if it were a life raft, and one step onto the hardwood floors would lose him to the sharks.
I knew the feeling. "Got a call from your guidance counselor today," I said. He came to attention satisfactorily, "Said you've missed so many days of school you automatically failed the year."
He didn't answer, not wanting to make things worse.
"There's gonna be some changes next year," I continued. He folded his arms protectively, avoiding my eyes in that familiar way, “No more partying with your friends on weeknights, not until your homework is done, and you’re quitting your job at the gas station—“
"There won't be a next year," he blurted out suddenly and pursed his lips into a white line.
I was too angry for the incriminating gesture to register. I leveled my forefinger at him, "Don't even think you're dropping out--"
"I don't have to,” he interrupted me again. He knew better, “Mr. Gregory called me into his office this afternoon."
"What'd he say?"
"He said I'm eighteen,” there was a long pause and he finally met my eyes, squinting as if my anger’s intensity was too much, “I'm not the school's responsibility anymore."
“What?” I shouted, leaping out of my chair. The snifter of scotch shattered on the wood floor, pine, a soft wood, leaving a dent like a scar in the surface. Junior took a step back, coming up against the door, “What do you mean you’re not the school’s responsibility? Of course you’re their responsibility! They have to let you finish your education! What the hell are my taxes paying for?”
“Well, they’re not paying to detain me another year,” he put on a fake casual smile, knowing exactly what buttons to push.
“I’ll send you to private school,” I said. “You have to graduate.”
“You can’t afford it,” he countered “You can’t even keep the electricity on. You hide the pickup two streets over to fool the repo guy. It’s even got me looking over my shoulder… seeing as how you bought me on credit.”
“You can afford it,” I nodded at him, one eyebrow cocked knowingly. “You’ll get your degree at the community college, and you’ll pay for it with the money from the gas station.”
“Like hell I will,” he snapped and I wanted to slug him.
Instead I got red-faced and shouted, “As long as you live under my roof you will do as I say!”
He just stared at me, shaking his head calmly, resolved. With his hand hidden behind his back, I didn’t notice him twist the doorknob. In one swift motion he disappeared. I lunged forward too late, and came up against the closed oak door. By the time I got onto the porch, he’d vanished into the night.
"Will you need a surrogate to carry the embryo to maturity?" I remember how that question leapt off the form at me. I hadn't thought about it. Somehow I always associated cloning with bubbling vats of embryonic fluid, fetuses floating peacefully inside. Of course I would need a damn surrogate.
It took months to decide on one. My ideal choice was far beyond my budget. For the "limousine" of womb-rentals I would get a woman who's fulltime job was growing my baby, eating a prescribed diet, no seafood or smoking, and avoiding even weak electromagnetic fields, like televisions. She would also play a selection of music and audio readings for the baby, for when the brain was grown enough to hear it. Just imagine the genius developing in that womb, coming into the world already familiar with classical music, foreign languages, and books on tape.
The best I could afford was Latanya, who worked fulltime at a dry-cleaning joint renting out her womb for the extra cash. I signed a contract with her assuring me she would not smoke, drink alcohol, or take illegal drugs for the duration of the pregnancy. I wonder if the chemicals at the dry-cleaners affected Junior's brain chemistry in some way. He looked healthy at birth.
Naturally Junior wanted to know about the life-support system that carried him to term.
"Technically she is my mother."
"Don't think of her that way. You don't share any of her genes--"
"I share her mitochondria."
"Uh--" Did he? Could that be the problem? Could that explain our differences? "Well..."
"You don't know what mitochondria are, do you?" he grinned like an oaf at his father’s ignorance, the bastard.
“I—uh—paid extra to have my own mitochondria put in the egg.”
He gave me that look of disbelief that would make my own father slap me cross-eyed. I resisted my instincts. It was not a “constructive urge,” as the social worker put it. I tried to dissuade him. Wasn’t I enough identity? I even tried satisfying him with a picture of Latanya, but that only made things worse.
"Mom's African American?"
I nodded my head awkwardly, staring at the floor, "Yes, I'm afraid your mother is--"
"Cool!"
I looked up, "What?"
"I'm black."
"You're not black," I countered, "You don't have any of your mother's genes."
"Yeah, but I spent nine-plus months eating what she ate, listening to her music, her social interactions while my brain was wiring up for life. It’s not just genes, blackness is a way of life."
"I met with her once a week to talk to you in there too."
"It certainly explains a lot, like my taste for jerk chick--"
"You're my child and you're white!" I exclaimed.
His eyes went wide and he pointed at me accusingly, “You’re racist!”
“What?” I exclaimed.
“You’re a racist!” he laughed and slapped a palm to his forehead. “I don’t believe it! All this time I never realized it, but you are a bona-fide racist!”
“I am not a racist,” I defended instinctively. “I think everybody should have the right—“
“--to own black people!” he finished, eyes wide, mouth agape with the revelation. “You’re a racist. It’s been right there in front of my nose all my life and I just accepted it as normal behavior. What a hypocrite—“
Before I knew it, he was on the ground and my hand was prickling in that familiar, regrettable way. I stood over him, daring him. He stayed on the floor, afraid to provoke me further, and that angered me more.
“Stand up,” I ordered.
He rose to his feet without looking me in the eye. The handprint was already swelling out on his cheek, with some speckles of blood blooming. He would miss a week of school because of my split-second loss of control. I sent him to his room.
That weekend, after Junior’s bruise faded enough to be unrecognizable as a handprint, I tried making amends. When he was younger, he was easy to bribe with comic books or baseball cards, this time I knew there was only one way to console him. It was ironic—yes, I know what that word means-- that exercising my authority was the very thing that forced me to concede.
Junior accepted my offer to drive him to meet his “biological” mother quietly, barely breaking the week-long silent treatment. He called her himself and arranged to visit. I drove him into the run-down, government-subsidized housing where she lived and walked him to the door. It opened before Junior could knock, revealing the short, fat smiling woman who carried him for nine over-priced months. They hugged. As soon as Junior was inside the humid apartment reeking of house pets, her smile dropped into a scowl. She closed the door in my face without a word.
If Junior was slipping away during his teenage years, he was lost on that day. His youthful, heroic illusions of me were vanished. The child who tossed the ball with his dad in the back yard was no more, replace
d with a young adult who understood that I was just another human being, full of faults, like my own father.
I learned of my old man’s stroke months after it killed him, when a debt-collector noticed the smell. Dad’s Doberman barely survived that time digging scraps from the garbage and chewing on the old man’s corpse. I had it put to sleep.
In the weeklong process of settling his accounts, selling off his worldly possessions, and purging any remaining evidence of his miserable life from the earth—short of taking a sledgehammer to his headstone, I realized I was the last one, last of a family line who served in every single American war. I was it.
Three ex-wives in fifteen years did nothing to inspire the confidence that I might one day have children to pass this legacy onto. When I sold off the old man’s gun collection and the land his worthless shack of a house was sinking into, I was surprised to find myself $110,000 wealthier before taxes. I owed it to the old man to ensure the family name carried on at least one more generation.
Even with the $110k, I was still short. My wages at the shipyard wouldn’t secure a loan worth a damn, so I took out a second mortgage on my house on false pretenses with the intention of declaring bankruptcy at a later point. I could never afford the lawyer to do that, and my credit was forever wrecked, but I guess that just proves I’m not the government.
Raising him wasn’t easy as a single father. I got him away from Latanya, around three months old, and found a more appropriate sitter. Between her and my mortgage payments, forsaking all else, I was working twenty hours overtime a week staying afloat. Every couple of months I switched sitters, to prevent arousing suspicion and to keep Junior from growing too attached. Life became exhausting, but I guess the wonder of seeing myself grow up in the snippets of free time made it all worth it.
Once Junior was old enough to send to public school, I let my tax dollars keep an eye on him. He was home alone most of the afternoon, but I sprung for cable television and that kept him out of trouble. With the economic burden allieveeated… aleaviated… alleiv--decreased, I cut my hours to devote more time to Junior’s aware years. He wouldn’t remember that I wasn’t there for his first words and potty training. I could still shape him as a person.
Junior grew up, got expelled, and eventually the letter from Virginia Military Institute arrived. It was in a small envelope, same small envelope I got my senior year of high school. The one I hid from my father for two weeks until he found it in one of his room searches.
"One day, you'll have children too," I heard him say through the haze of pain, as I cowered against the wall, "and I hope they are as much a disappointment to you."
And it got worse.
"You're joining the Navy?" I asked.
"Already signed up," I noticed he was only packing the clothes he’d bought with his own money from the gas station. "I'm gonna be a nuke, work in a submarine."
"Why did you do that?"
"Why do you think? To get away from you. It's the fastest way to get out on my own."
“You’re not doing this,” I said sternly. “This was not what I wanted for you.”
“Really,” he said contemptuously. “What exactly was that?”
“I want you to be better than me,” I said.
“I am better than you,” he said, still packing, “I’m smarter than you, stronger than you, and I am already more successful than you. I have a job, a car, a girlfriend—“
“You have a girlfriend?”
“I have a career planned out. I am so far above you it’s not even funny,” he shook his head in disgust.
“I had a plan for you too,” I sacrificed–“
“You planned out my life all right. It was going to be exactly like yours.”
“I think I have that right,” I argued. “After all the sacrifices I made. I have a say in this.”
“You don’t own me,” he retorted.
“It cost me over half a million dollars to bring you into adulthood.”
“You don’t own me.”
I raised my hand to strike him, but he stepped forward, fists tight, swelling his chest, locking eyes with me, “I dare you old man. You know damn well I could lay you out easy.”
I lowered my hand.
He shook his head, the way my father used to do, and I felt that same rush of shame, “Why the hell did you create a copy of yourself if you hate yourself so much?”
I blinked, Hate myself?
I watched him stuff things down into the duffle bag, relentlessly packing. There was the washboard stomach now five years from protruding over his belt buckle and ten years from preventing him seeing his penis. There was the mop of thick brown hair he was going to miss so much, curse my mother’s father’s genes. What about his inevitable Type-I diabetes? Or the inexplicable kidney stones that will start plaguing him in his mid-30’s?
“I get it,” I said at last. “I made you. Giving you life was my choice, making you just like me. So I deserve the blame—completely—for the hand I’ve dealt you. I chose to give you all my faults and defects, and I’m sorry for—“
“This has nothing to do with me being a clone,” he interrupted. “This has to do with you being a bad father. People come up with the stupidest reasons for having children. Some figure they’re a failure at everything else in life, so they do it to have one accomplishment. Other’s do it for love, something that depends on them completely. Others for the power trip….” He trailed off, shaking his head.
He drew the duffle bag tight, and stared at it, slumped over on the floor at his feet, “I wish there was a competency test for having children. I mean, this is the future of our species we’re talking about here, and the only criteria for getting into the next generation is finding some way to reproduce.”
He slung the duffle bag over one shoulder and pushed past me. I could only stare at his room, trying to understand, looking for the insight that would prevent this. It was the first time I had seen his room without suspicion or criticism. There was a lot of me here.
I heard the front door open. “If you go down this route, you’ll end up just like me,” I shouted, and I couldn’t blame him for not believing me. How could he know that just this once I was speaking in his best interests, because they were mine too?
The door shut. I knew the rest of this story, and was glad I didn’t own a dog.
I spent the rest of the afternoon pouting in the living room, sipping scotch from a coffee mug until the sun set and I was alone in the dark. A week ago I saw an article in the paper about a surgeon successfully transplanting the head from one monkey to another. He thought the process could be repeated on a human, transplanting a head to a clone engineered without a brain. The promise of immortality always seemed right around the corner, like the cure for cancer.
I stared at the door. What a waste, I thought.
My old man didn't want me. I was an “Oops.” He didn’t feel he owed me anything. Junior was intentional. He had cable TV and Internet. He had an eclectic—yes, I know what that word means--upbringing from his many babysitters, and an independent adolescence that taught him self-reliance. He even had my wisdom, the most important advantage of all, my advice on everything in the world, to prevent him making my mistakes.
My bottle of scotch was almost empty and I was sinking deeper into my lazy-boy with these thoughts as a blanket. The day’s event’s had made me aware enough to know I was “rationalizing,” as the social worker put it, but what else could I do? My 18-year sentence was up, but the crime was just now being let loose on the world. Even with someone to warn me, I would still make my mistakes. Even with every advantage provided me, I would still fail. It was in the genes life dealt me, completely out of my control…and there was something very comforting about that.
lizzie’s clone
