The Gemini Experiment

by Brian Pinkerton

  The vehicle’s rear lights lit up and its noisy engine rattled to life.

  Tom hopped into the truck’s cargo bed, quickly sinking between several fat black bags, immersing himself into the rubbish and out of view.

  The police sirens continued to sing. They were everywhere, a hysterical chorus.

  The truck backed out of its parking spot, and the driver punched up the radio. Brassy Latin music overwhelmed the sirens. Tom continued to stay low. Grass clippings clung to him and he squeezed his nose to stop from sneezing.

  After ten minutes, Tom guessed the truck had gone several miles. He decided to check his surroundings. As the truck stopped at a light, he poked his head up and tried to get his bearings.

  Sheridan Road. Not far from the beach and a large public park. What he needed was a good hiding place – better and more long term than the back of this truck – but exactly what that would or could be was stubbornly elusive.

  What was nearby?

  Then Tom realized: the harbor. His good friend and neighbor-across-the-way, Jay, had a medium-sized sailboat with a cabin, and he had gone on many sailing trips with Jay over the years. Tom knew two things: where the boat was docked and where Jay, currently, was docked.

  Jay was on the East Coast visiting colleges with his high school senior daughter. They weren’t due back until the weekend.

  At least it’ll give me someplace to gather my wits and plan my next move.

  Tom quickly sprung out of the truck, covered in dirt and grass, resembling some kind of creature, startling a teenage boy on a bicycle. The boy promptly hit the curb and toppled with his bike.

  The traffic light turned green. The lawn maintenance truck sped away, oblivious to the role it had played in Tom’s flight. Tom crossed the road and quickly disappeared into the park, feeling safer under the heavy tree cover.

  He casually strolled on a walking path, keeping his head down. He reached the harbor that provided boaters entry into Lake Michigan. It was a cool day without much activity – or many witnesses – to worry about. Tom picked his moments carefully, staying in the shadows when he saw people, and moving rapidly when the coast was clear.

  He found Jay’s boat, hopped on board and, with one swift kick, broke into the covered cabin. He found some cushions and lifejackets, threw them on the cold floor, and lay down to stay out of view, below the windows.

  He felt like he was covered in one big bruise. His body trembled and took a long time to settle. He was also hungry. He surveyed the scene. Any chance that Jay had left behind a bag of chips or box of crackers somewhere…?

  Tom noticed a red cooler. That was a good sign.

  He crawled over, hoping for the best, and flipped it open.

  The cooler contained several small Styrofoam containers of nightcrawlers. And that was it.

  Tom groaned and shut the lid.

  He wasn’t hungry enough to eat worms.

  Yet.

  Chapter Ten

  In Central Florida, Louis left the highway to find someplace to hunker down for a few days or weeks or months. He had placed sufficient distance between himself and his escape. It was time to ditch the stolen car someplace where it would never be found. He needed to create a new identity – not Louis Karp, not Tom Nolan. This new phase of his life was like being reborn. Maybe he would even ditch the itch to steal…and get a real job?

  Louis intentionally got lost on long, rambling side roads. If he saw signs that indicated he was getting closer to big tourist traps – Disney World, Sea World and so on – he quickly pointed the car in another direction. He reached an open area of flatland – pastures, prairies and numerous little lakes, rivers and ponds. The towns looked forgotten, which suited him fine: gap-toothed fences, overgrown brush, vacant buildings with absent or fragmentary signage. Everything wore sickly pastel colors – teal, light purple, lime green. The local economies appeared to be driven by desperate gift shops with screaming posters in the windows trying to lure in passing families on their way to see Mickey Mouse or the beaches on the coast. These shops offered nothing you would want to gift to anybody you actually liked, just crap. But Dad could stretch his legs, Mom could browse around for something for Aunt Dorothy and the kids could tinkle in the bathrooms.

  As the terrain took a turn to swamps and the attractions leaned toward alligator farms, Louis encountered an auto junkyard with many of the vehicles literally sinking into the marsh.

  He drove past, then thought about it and circled back.

  In the front, closer to the road, three old cars sat together with triple-digit pricetags visible in their windshields. Drivable junk.

  This was a good time to make an exchange.

  Louis slowed to a stop. He made sure his seatbelt was good and tight. He aimed the front of his car for a big pileup of broken, junked vehicles. He hit the gas and roared forward.

  Louis smashed his car into a mass of mangled metal. The windshield shattered, the front end crumpled up, and broken parts of abandoned cars – doors, tires – fell around him.

  The airbag exploded. He quickly slashed it with a knife. He grabbed his small travel bag of meager possessions. He unlatched the seatbelt and pushed open the croaking, badly dented door just wide enough to wriggle out. He felt remarkably unscathed, invincible. The collision was fun – like a demolition derby.

  The car was now undrivable and undesirable, merged with a mess of other car parts, destined to rot away like a vehicular corpse in this auto graveyard. It would lose its identity to rust and time, growing entangled in weeds and muck and the brutality of Central Florida’s high temperatures and humidity.

  “What the hell, mister!” An old man with a deep tan and a million wrinkles, wearing stained overalls, stepped toward him from a shack that served as some kind of sad home or office.

  “This is a junkyard, right?” said Louis, approaching the man, brushing dirt off his clothes. “Well, that car is a piece of junk.”

  “That car was in good shape!”

  “No, no,” Louis said quickly. “It had problems. A ton of problems. Garbage.”

  “Are you hurt? That was a crazy stunt.”

  “I feel great.” Louis stood before the man and studied him. “And I’m going to make you feel great, too.”

  The old man looked at him suspiciously. He raised his white eyebrows. “How so?”

  “I want to buy the Toyota Corolla out front. It’s drivable, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll pay you cash. Times two. Do you get what I’m saying? I’ll pay twice what you’re asking.”

  The old man’s suspicions didn’t ease up. “What’s the catch?”

  “I want no record of this transaction. I have a crazy ex-wife, a real bitch who’s after all my assets. You’re not going to tell anybody. Not your family, not a single soul.”

  “I have no family.”

  Louis nodded. “Then it’s just between us. If you break my trust, I’ll come back to slit your throat and feed you to the gators.” Louis said it in a matter-of-fact tone, no need to snarl with menace, just offering a simple fact.

  “Mister, if that car disappears from this lot, no one is going to know or care.”

  “That’s good.”

  Louis paid the man cash. Of course, he could have preserved a few layers on his bankroll by just killing the forgotten oldster and dumping his body in the shed to draw insects. But attracting cops to the scene where he had just dropped off a stolen car – probably not a good idea.

  The transaction was cordial. They shook hands. They exchanged a nod of understanding.

  Louis drove off in the 1998 Toyota Corolla. It was loud, the air-conditioning didn’t work, and so on, but it had a working engine and that was good enough.

  He traveled south, staying on long roads that cut through small towns. Somewhat randomly, he chose a motel. It sat across
the street from a shop that only sold oranges. The motel consisted of two floors of rooms with purple doors forming an L-shape around a simple swimming pool. A few grizzled occupants sat outside their rooms in chairs, smoking cigarettes and watching traffic. Large towels hung like colored flags to dry on railings. The parking lot was one-third full and the cars were generally beat down and tired looking.

  Nobody here would bother him or want to be bothered.

  Louis checked in. He paid cash, received a key card and pulled a map from a rack of junky tourist brochures. He found his room on the second floor and bolted himself inside. He tossed his travel bag in a corner and plopped on the bed.

  The interior resembled just about every other motel room he had ever seen with no effort to establish a personality. He felt like he should catch up on sleep, but he remained alert and awake. He could hear traffic from the main road out front and the occasional yelp of a mom scolding her kids at the pool.

  After nearly twenty-four hours of driving, his body still did not ache one bit. He marveled over his unwavering stamina but it also threatened him with the unknown.

  What am I?

  Louis finally moved off the bed. He entered the bathroom.

  He stared at himself in the mirror.

  The dopey blond guy stared back.

  “Go to hell,” he told the reflection in a voice that was not his own but one he had grown accustomed to.

  The bandage on his forehead was coming loose.

  Louis peeled it off. The wound underneath was nearly fully closed. Unblemished skin had quickly regenerated and sealed up most of the glimpse of his metallic skull.

  This new body was a source of endless amazement.

  He noticed he was growing stubble – how was that possible? The robotics people had thought of everything to simulate a real, living human being.

  Standing before the mirror, Louis stripped to get a good look at his full anatomy.

  He had a solid, healthy body. Good muscle tone. Not much fat. Everything symmetrical with good color.

  And he had a penis.

  He thought about the junk food he had been eating for the past day. While he wasn’t hungry, he had been eating out of habit. The food tasted good, so a sense of taste was part of the deal.

  But the food going in.… How did it get out?

  Do robots shit?

  The thought of all those Cheetos and Big Macs and beef jerkies simply accumulating inside creeped him out.

  Louis sat on the toilet and attempted to move his bowels.

  After a few minutes, he felt something like a lump traveling inside his digestive tract.

  He pushed and before long he heard a splash in the toilet.

  Louis immediately jumped up to take a look.

  There was a small blue ball in the toilet bowl. A perfectly shaped orb, smelling like…flowers?

  There was no foul odor. This was the most tidy, sanitized crap he had ever seen.

  Freaked out, Louis flushed it away.

  He looked over at the shower. He knew he was filthy. Plunging his car into a junkyard at full speed wasn’t the most sanitary of activities. Could he wash himself off and remove the grime? Or would the shower short-circuit him?

  The thought genuinely concerned him. He turned on a hot spray and watched it generate steam. He proceeded cautiously. First a hand. Then an arm. Then a foot. Then both feet. Then some water on his chest. His back.

  Before long, he was taking a full-fledged shower with no ill effects.

  He stayed in the shower for twenty minutes, enjoying the sensation, feeling cleansed, physically and mentally.

  When he was done, he realized he didn’t have any clean clothes to change into. Shopping for a wardrobe would be a priority. Simple T-shirts and shorts were fine. Nothing fancy to draw attention.

  He also needed a new name and identity. That would take some time and effort, but he knew what to do to make it happen.

  Louis stepped out of the bathroom, naked except for his underwear. He sat on the bed and turned on the TV.

  As he flipped through the channels, he found a news report about a shooting at a diner. It took him a moment to realize: Oh yeah, that was me.

  The woman he shot had been wounded in the shoulder. The fact that she lived didn’t move him one way or the other. She offered a loose description of the robber. The police sketch of him that filled the screen for two seconds was so general it could be anyone.

  “Good luck,” said Louis, and he resumed flipping through the channels.

  He kept a pen and small pad of paper at his side, the only freebie in the room, and listened for names that could become his new identity.

  Louis found an old episode of the crime drama The Sopranos and liked the name ‘Tony’. He wrote it down.

  As he dialed up and down, nothing else grabbed his attention, and he finally stopped for a while to watch The Simpsons.

  He could use a good laugh.

  Halfway through the episode, he figured: Why not?

  On the pad, alongside ‘Tony’, he wrote ‘Simpson’.

  Tony Simpson.

  His new identity. It had a nice ring to it.

  A few hours later, the television began to grate on his nerves and he shut it off. He tried again to fall asleep.

  For five minutes, he lay awake, eyes closed.

  Then something interesting happened. As if sensing his desire for sleep – perhaps through five minutes of inactivity and closed eyes – Louis felt a gentle fatigue settle in. It was like the effects of a couple of downers or sleeping pills.

  His entire being slid into a relaxed state and his mind began to slow down and drift.

  They really did think of everything, thought Louis.

  In ten minutes, exactly, he was asleep.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, Louis woke up with a start at the sound of a loud crunch.

  He sat up in time to see his door break open. Several men streamed in, armed with guns, wearing civilian clothes, moving in quick coordination. Before Louis could move off the bed to scramble for his own gun, they had their hands on him.

  Louis did his best to fight them off. He was strong, but there were too many of them and they quickly cuffed his arms behind his back and shoved his face in a pillow. When he continued to struggle, rising off the mattress, one of them punched him hard.

  He absorbed the punch but it effectively ended his resistance. He was fully surrounded. He could barely see their faces in the narrow light that leaked in from the doorway. How did they find him? He suspected the old man at the auto junkyard. The wrinkled bastard must have notified the authorities that something smelled fishy, and now the FBI had tracked him down. He regretted not turning the geezer into gator food.

  Louis looked into the guns pointed at him and yelled, “I’m not responsible for my actions! Those scientists turned me into a freak! They control me!”

  It was a silly defense on the surface, but how could he be responsible for his actions if he wasn’t even himself anymore?

  The men around the bed started to talk with one another. One of them shone a flashlight in his face and kept it there. Blinded, Louis listened to their chatter, trying to catch what they were saying. He couldn’t.

  It was some kind of foreign language.

  “Who are you?” said Louis, trying to get a better look at their faces.

  One of the men spoke into a cell phone, updating someone on the other end. A couple of the others exchanged more words he could not understand. Whoever this was, it wasn’t the cops or the FBI.

  Whatever they spoke, it wasn’t English or Spanish. It was harsh and thick, every syllable accented. He thought hard about where its vague familiarity came from…from movies or TV, perhaps, but not people he had known. The more they talked, the more Louis relaxed his body and didn’t
move, absorbed in their speech patterns, trying to guess their origins, becoming more confused than threatened. Then in a flash Louis had a thought, and the more they spoke in their serious tones to one another, the more his thought felt both right and crazy. Could these midnight intruders actually be.…

  Russian?

  Chapter Eleven

  Several hours after nightfall turned the cabin dark, Tom took a chance and restarted his cell phone. He had remained undisturbed in the boat, curled up low, listening to the lapping of waves and light bumping against the pier. Earlier, he heard occasional voices as people moved about on the creaking docks, but now he hadn’t heard anyone for a very long time. His mind was stuck in a loop recounting the bizarre sequence of events that brought him here, going back to that first dinner with Steven. He worried for Emily and Sofi.

  Tom knew that calling his wife was unwise. He took his chances with Giamatti instead.

  Giamatti answered immediately. “Let’s keep this short and sweet,” he said to Tom. “Tell me where you are, and I’ll send Cooper for you.”

  Tom described his whereabouts the best he could.

  “Stay low,” instructed Giamatti. “When you hear a man whistling ‘Sweet Caroline’, that’s your signal to come out.”

  Tom cringed. “Can it be a different song?”

  “You need to shut down your phone. We’ll see you soon.” Giamatti disconnected.

  Tom turned off his phone and waited. Sure enough, under half an hour, a man whistling Neil Diamond strolled the dock along the pier.

  Tom emerged.

  Cooper saw him and motioned wordlessly for Tom to follow.

  They walked swiftly to where Cooper had parked his car. Tom reached for the door handle on the front passenger side.

  “No,” Cooper said. He opened the trunk.

  “Really?”

  Cooper nodded. “There are police everywhere.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Giamatti’s house. You’ll be safe there.”

  Tom climbed in the trunk and Cooper shut the lid.

  During the ride, Tom felt every bump and pothole. His entire body already felt like one big bruise. This wasn’t helping.