Deconstructing Dylan

by Lesley Choyce

  The book by my bed was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a book that was about The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Robyn had said it would help me get my head around some of the difficult stuff she was interested in. I’d been trying to read it but was having a hard time with some of the ideas. The author, Sogyal Rinpoche, was talking about how the living needed to “help” the dead in their transition from this world to the next. He referred to the first forty-nine days of the “bardo,” the transition time, as the most critical. But he went on to say, “It is never too late to help someone who has died, no matter how long ago it was.” Even someone who has been dead for a hundred years can benefit, he suggested.

  I didn’t really understand this but something about the idea resonated within me. Helping the dead. Here I was, alive, sitting in my room, still physically shaking from the shock of learning about my dead brother, someone I had never met, never even known about, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. How did he die? What kind of life did he have? I felt so sad and even lonely. I wished he had lived. I wished I had gotten to know Kyle Gibson, my long-lost brother. I wished he had been there to stand up for me when I was bullied or to pick me up when I fell. I truly missed this brother, felt angry that I had not had a chance to meet him. It wasn’t fair at all.

  My anger soon came back to bear on my parents. They had no right to keep such a secret. It seemed impossible that they had succeeded all these years.

  The image of the photo swam up into my consciousness. It had been real. It was him in that other photo. It wasn’t me at all. My brother and I must have looked very much alike.

  I heard my parents come in downstairs. They were talking loud and laughing. I hadn’t heard them like that in a long time. How could they have done this to me? I kept thinking. My gut instinct was telling me to go down there and confront them. Tell them I knew and rage at them for not telling me about my brother.

  Instead, I tried to read more of Sogyal Rinpoche’s book. He spoke of delok, those near-death experiences that people in all parts of the world have shared. In Tibet these experiences were recorded and considered to be real information about what happens after we die. Sometimes, a person experiencing delok would go to a place like hell, then come back and warn his friends about how to avoid going there. Sometimes a delok person would meet others already dead and come back to the living with messages from them — messages that were taken very seriously.

  In ancient times, certain well-practised religious leaders could intentionally travel to the world of the dead and return. Those around him or her would test the validity of the delok experience in a rather odd way: “The orifices of the body were stopped with butter, and a paste made from barley flour put over the face. If the butter did not run, and the mask did not crack, the delok was recognized as authentic.”

  It almost sounded like some bizarre skin treatment that was offered at the cosmetic boutique in the mall. I closed the book and began to feel tired but it wasn’t a good tired. I felt abandoned, lost. I lay down and closed my eyes, tried to drift free of myself, but instead I thrashed back and forth in bed, restless and now sweaty. I kept thinking about what I’d read: Tibetans willing themselves into a temporary death state. And that business about helping someone who is dead, even if they had been dead for a hundred years.

  How exactly do you help someone who has been dead a long time? How do you help someone you never met?

  In my dream, I remember feeling hot. My body felt like it was on fire. My surroundings were blurred — hallways, tunnels maybe, a red tinge to everything. I was moving quickly through this place. I thought I was running but then realized I was on my back looking up at the ceiling. Faces appeared within my view and then they disappeared. Frightening faces &hellips; faces that showed fear. And then I was lying alone in a bed, still looking up at the ceiling. The ceiling now was white. I felt hot still. And then the pain began to grow.

  Time was passing but it was not time in the usual sense. It went slow, then fast. The pain — and it was in every cell of my body — slowed time down against my will. Then something changed within me and the pain subsided. Time raced forward again only to decelerate to a near halt when the torment returned.

  I was aware that I was asleep in my bed. I was aware that I had been reading about near-death experiences. One part of me was acutely aware that what was happening was a dream, that I was upset and even traumatized in my “real” world and this was a manifestation of it. But that did not alter in any way the concrete reality of what I was experiencing.

  I kept trying to wake myself up, trying to open my eyes, but I was being pulled down, as if into the bed itself, or dragged through whatever building structure was beneath me, into the earth. I was being swallowed. And then this thought blossomed in my mind: This is not you, Dylan. This is not happening to you. It is happening to someone else. No. It happened to someone else. It is real and not real at the same time.

  And then I heard a voice: Help me.

  Who was saying this?

  Help me. The voice was more faint. The energy was diminishing. Someone was dying.

  Kyle was dying. I was experiencing his death.

  Help me.

  It is never too late to help someone who has died.

  Help me, please.

  But I didn’t know how.

  I was shaking my head side to side, trying to release myself — the real me — from the pain I was feeling. I was trying to open my eyes and it took all the energy in the world to do this. I could see only faintly through a slight crack and I saw the faces of my mother and father. It was me this time speaking to them: Help me.

  And then it went pitch black and I sat bolt upright in my bed and screamed.

  My mother arrived first in my room and my father close behind.

  “Dylan, honey. Are you all right?” my mom asked.

  I was sweating and breathing very hard. Panting. The sense of panic was still with me as my mother put her arms around me and looked at my dad with grave concern. My father touched the top of my head, trying to soothe me as he stroked my hair. That’s when I realized the pain was going away. The heaviness that had been pulling me down was gone. I felt lighter.

  “How did he die?” I demanded between gasps for air. “Exactly how did my brother die?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  My father looked at my mother. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said rather unconvincingly. I was still trying to stop the spinning in my head, trying to wrestle some kind of sense into all this.

  “Just tell me the truth. Tell me about the other boy in the photograph by your bed.”

  You could have cut the silence with a knife. And then my mother spoke. “It was all very hard on us. We should have told you much earlier. I &hellips; we &hellips; made a decision under a lot of stress. I felt like I was losing everything. I felt so terrible. I wanted to die.”

  I was sitting up in bed now. My father was rubbing his hand through his hair. “Dylan, when Kyle died, your mother became terribly depressed. Suicidal, even. I was afraid I was going to lose her, too. Kyle had a very rapidly advancing form of cancer, a painful form of cancer. His treatment had been going well, and then he suddenly got worse. We went from feeling that everything was going to be okay to realizing that we were losing him.”

  “He was only nine,” my mother said. “He had his whole life to live. It wasn’t fair.”

  I felt a chill go through me. I swallowed hard. “I think I somehow relived what he was feeling there in the hospital. That was what I was dreaming about. I was him.”

  “It was just a dream. You couldn’t possibly have those memories.”

  “I realize that. It just seemed so real. I would like to have known him. I would like to have had an older brother.”

  I studied my father’s face and he seemed puzzled by something, not just worried but puzzled. “Dylan, how much do you know about your brother?”

  I told them about the net search and the obituary I had read.

>   “Then you don’t know the full story, do you?” my mother asked.

  “How do I know what the full story is?”

  My father took a deep breath. “Jesus.”

  Something was beginning to gnaw at the back of my brain. The full story. What was it? “You had quit your research, right Mom? You had Kyle. You raised him. He was your son. When he died you wanted another child. That makes sense to me. I think I understand.”

  “But there’s more, Dylan,” my father said. “And you do need to know.”

  “Maybe not yet,” my mother said.

  I threw her an icy look.

  “Yes, I do need to know. It’s been long enough. If there is something you aren’t telling me, please tell me now.”

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” my mother told my father.

  He tentatively started. “You have some understanding of the research we were doing at the time in Scotland, don’t you?”

  “Oh my God,” I said out loud. I felt an icicle sliding down my spine.

  “We didn’t just want another child, Dylan. We wanted Kyle back. We wanted to give him a second chance.”

  My mom reached out to touch me but I pulled back. “We took a gamble. We made a leap and we did it recklessly. We had been working with Ian Wilmut. We were doing parallel research, sharing some of what we each did but keeping some things, well, secret. It was all quite controversial. I knew that we could offer the medical profession a powerful new tool to cure diseases, even prevent diseases, if we could just stay on our path. But it wasn’t easy. Funding came and went.”

  “What we did, we did out of grief, love, and desperation,” my father said. “Wilmut’s research had been with animal cells. Ours had been with human cells. We used healthy DNA samples from Kyle. We used them in creating another pregnancy in your mother.”

  “When you were born and we knew you were healthy and normal in every way, we were thrilled.”

  “Oh my God. I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “Dr. MacKenzie, the one we took you to see in Scotland, is the only other person who knows. And now you.”

  My father rubbed his hands together. “Others picked up your mother’s research where she left off. She had already dropped out of the scene and she decided to stay there. I shifted into working for the drug companies. We moved here. Started a new life. We wanted to raise you as a normal kid. We didn’t want you to have to grow up under the scrutiny of the media, being the target of crazies. There were fanatics everywhere. People who hated us for what we were doing. We wanted what was best for you.”

  “And you’ve turned out wonderfully. And now you have a big challenge ahead of you. You have to figure out what you are going to do with this knowledge.”

  “The knowledge that I’m a clone or that I had a brother who died?”

  “Both, I guess,” my dad said. “Although some experts might argue about what the true definition of the C word is, but you pretty much have it right.”

  The confusion in my brain was massive. “What am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to have to get on with living the life you’ve already started,” my mom told me.

  “But I don’t know if I can.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t feel like I really know either of you. I don’t know if I can trust you. And I’m not even sure I know who I am anymore.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I asked to be left alone and my parents respected my wishes. As I began to regain my bearings ever so slightly, a mass of questions began to swarm in my head. If I was the product of my brother’s DNA, wasn’t there a good chance that I too would die from whatever form of cancer had struck him down? But that didn’t scare me as much as the overwhelming confusion I was currently feeling about just who I was.

  Which part of me, of my physical self and my identity, was me and which part had come from Kyle? I was confused. Beyond confused. Confused and angry. Overriding everything was a sudden fear that I would never be able to simply be myself again. If I told the truth to anyone, then I might end up being labelled and ridiculed. I vowed that I would keep my mouth shut. I would bury the secret and I would just go on as I had been.

  In the morning, my parents were waiting for me at the breakfast table. “We need to work on a strategy of what we do now,” my father said. He saw the look in my eye. I was still very angry with them both.

  “I already have a strategy,” I said. “I’m not telling anyone. I’m going to pretend you never told me, pretend I don’t know.”

  “I think that’s the best option,” my mother said. I could tell from the sound of her voice that she had been crying.

  “You want to take the day off from school?” my dad asked.

  “No. I want everything to be just as it was. I want to go to school.”

  “I’ll drive you,” he said.

  “I’d rather walk.”

  The hike to school confirmed my resolve. I looked around at people driving by, at kids getting on buses, at old men and women walking slowly for their morning pleasure. I felt alone and cut off from them all. I felt different. When my mind drifted to thoughts about Robyn, I realized that she was perhaps my greatest problem. She knew enough to ask more questions but she didn’t know the whole truth. And she’d be asking questions.

  I saw her in the hallway and went in the opposite direction. I succeeded in avoiding her until fourth period. She grabbed my arm as we left English class. We both had free blocks then and I knew I couldn’t just walk away from her.

  “What did they say? Why were they hiding the truth about your brother?”

  I took a deep breath and avoided looking her in the eye. “After Kyle’s death, my mother went into a deep depression. When I was born, she was still deeply messed up and she convinced herself that the only way she could raise me without feeling the pain of the loss of her first child was to block it out of her life. My dad went along with it.”

  Robyn looked at me and furrowed her brow. “But your parents are smart people, Dylan. They have PhDs, for God’s sake. They know you can’t just erase the past. They can’t pretend their first son didn’t exist.”

  “Maybe that’s why my mom is feeling so messed up now. Maybe it’s why she drinks and takes those pills.”

  “Hmm. I’m not so much worried about her right now. I’m worried about you, Dylan.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m okay.”

  But Robyn looked truly worried. “This is probably incredibly weird for you.”

  “It is.” I wanted to tell her I felt like one of those insects I’d read about. I’d just outgrown the hard casing of my body. I’d cracked out of one skin and was tossing it off but I didn’t have a hard new skin yet. I felt exposed and vulnerable and the only person who could really help me was right here with me. And I could never, would never, tell her the truth.

  By the afternoon, I’d slipped into a kind of dull grey fog. My new shell was forming, tougher and harder than the last, more impermeable and I hoped permanent. After school, Robyn said she wanted to hang with me, wondered if I wanted to go to the mall and watch the shallow people shop. We could sit by the holo-fountain and make fun of them. It was a skill she had honed to perfection. But I said no. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to escape from this world in whatever way I could.

  At home, my mother was in a videoconference with a white-haired intellectual somewhere else on the planet. I was glad she had continued to share her knowledge of stem cell research. That field of medicine had grown by leaps and bounds and, had she stayed with her work, she would probably have been at the top of it. Instead, she’d faded into the background, first to raise Kyle, then me — and to protect me from the outside world. She knew what kind of freak I really was.

  Sleep eluded me, so I found myself sitting at my comp running a search for everything and anything about clones. I read about Dolly, tried to imagine how my story, the really big story, would have played out in the media had it come to light. It became
obvious that my parents might have even been prosecuted and put in jail. I read articles on cloning and ethics — bioethics, some called it. I watched vidclips of people with fundamentalist religious views — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — and realized how strongly they felt that cloning was somehow sacrilegious because it was tampering with something so sacred.

  There were political ramifications, social ones, and finally I found an article with the title, “Does a Clone Have a Soul?” I sat back in my chair and pondered yet again whether I believed anyone had a soul. Robyn and I had been working at this. She was convinced we all did. Everyone died and moved on through those stages of death she’d read about in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Your soul or spirit lived on and then you came back. Over and over.

  But would that be true for me? I was different. Kyle had died and his soul, I am sure, went on to somewhere. Christian heaven or into the bardo stages and on to the next world. Maybe he had already returned in the form of another human being. But what if my very existence, my birth, somehow interfered with that process? At birth, I was the clone of my brother. Maybe I was the same baby he had been. As I grew I had become a different person, but genetically I was identical from the start. Did those religious people have good reason to have such strong opinions?

  Or was Kyle’s soul within me now, living and breathing as part of me? I had no way to begin answering this or any of the other impossible questions posed. Did I even have a right to exist? Not according to some of the hard-line thinkers. I was a freak of nature. A monster. And how was I going to live with that?

  Certainly, there was a loud and active pro-cloning community of scientists and others out there. Husbands and wives who could not have children and wanted to could create a new life this way and build a family. And I came across stories of other parents who had lost young children and wanted the right to “bring their children back.”

  Some others argued that an entire race of clones could be created as “cheap labour” or even slaves. After all, they would not be fully human; they would not have been conceived in the normal way. They would not need rights or privileges because they were not human. They did not have souls.