Project Cain (Project Cain)

by Geoffrey Girard

  So here we are, he said. I walked over to behind the chair and asked NOW WHAT?

  Castillo said something corny about us being lions hunting and all.

  I kinda thought he might even be warming up to me.

  • • •

  We were in that stupid horrible house a couple of days. The first day was the worst, as we just sat and watched another house. Castillo never talked. We ate peanut butter sandwiches and cold hot dogs quietly together. Every so often I took watch for a couple of hours so Castillo could get some sleep. I’d just stare out the window at a house where nothing ever really happened.

  Once, the big thrill of the day, I saw the kid’s mom drive out to do some food shopping. I didn’t really get a good look at her. The thing I most noticed was that she had those stupid little family decals on the back of her prerequisite SUV. The cartoon dad with his little golf club, cartoon mom with her little shopping bags, big brother holding a basketball, and then little cartoon Gary. The youngest son. Smaller figure than the first but another basketball.

  As she pulled away, I got this funny idea of another figure next to Gary’s sticker. Another figure just like Gary’s small one. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another.

  Fifty, a hundred, cartoon stickers of Gary Sizemore running up over the first family and filling the whole back of the windshield. All perfectly identical. Not a single difference between them.

  My dad and DSTI could have done that. Easily.

  The next day I actually saw the real boy, little Gary Sizemore, play basketball in the driveway for a bit. Not an imaginary sticker but another flesh-and-blood freak my father had made.

  • • •

  Note: DSTI could—and did—produce clones of various ages. Any age they wanted, really. If they wanted a normal baby (which is what this Gary Sizemore had been), they could make one of those. This was the easiest way to make a clone. Implant the egg into one of their, say, Ukrainian girls (not that a girl from any other country wouldn’t do just as well) and wait nine months in the—relatively speaking—traditional method. Now, if they instead wanted to, for whatever reason, make one older (which is what I was), they had two options: (1) start the embryo in a biological host (i.e., a Ukrainian woman) and then extract the embryo to incubate in a special vat of liquid for almost as long as they wanted, or (2) speed up gestation through artificial means while in the vat and make the clone come out at—by physical size and appearance and physiological development—four years. Or fourteen. Or (in some very rare and expensive and horrific cases) thirty.

  • • •

  Castillo told me that half of all adoptions in the United States occur through private arrangements. Seventy thousand babies a year trading hands that no one really knows anything about. Kids just like ME. How easily it might have been ME we were now watching. Adopted out to some unsuspecting family. Maybe even a family that was paid to abuse me. Jeffrey Sizemore of Hitchcock, Indiana. How easily Gary could have ended up as Gary Jacobson from Jersey. All us little clone babies. Nothing more than a dozen cosmic coin flips.

  • • •

  So when I wasn’t looking out the window at “what-might-have-been,” I mostly read the book Castillo’d picked up for me. (A gesture I appreciated.) It was actually a pretty good book because it had stuff about the Hundred Years’ War and witches and the plague. But it was also, like, a thousand pages, and made me sleepy. I slept on the floor in the upstairs room behind Castillo and his chair.

  Other times, I just wandered the empty house. Tried imagining what the family who’d lived here had been like. What furniture had been in each of the now-empty rooms? How old were the kids? If there’d been any. Did they have a dog? Were they a NORMAL family with a mom and dad and kids? Or one more like mine? An imaginary mom. A mad scientist. A test tube. Some cells from the world’s most loathed serial killer.

  I explored each room a dozen times, running my fingers across bare walls where once there’d hung pictures and knickknacks, their ghostlike outlines now imprisoned in muted stains. What had the pictures shown? My own house back in Jersey had been turned just as empty and ghostlike.

  Eventually I found the house wasn’t so empty after all.

  Eventually I found that THE WORST was still coming.

  • • •

  While most of these two days proved a blur of reading and sleeping that felt like a month, here are some moments that stand out. Some are good and some bad. Honestly it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference anymore.

  • • •

  On the second night, I talked with Castillo.

  I told him what I knew about Dolly the cloned sheep. That the scientists made her from a cell that’d been taken from another sheep’s mammary (a fancy word for tit), and that there was this singer once named Dolly Parton who was famous for having really big tits. So the scientists called the sheep Dolly. He got my point. The most significant experiment of the last hundred years, the scientific advancement that brought man closer to God than any other before or since . . . was a tit joke.

  I wondered from what Dahmer cell they’d made me. I did not wonder this out loud. And I tried really, really hard not to wonder very long.

  To change the subject, I voiced to Castillo that I thought we were totally wasting our time. That the guys were never going to come to the Sizemore house. Castillo just told me “never” was a long time and to be patient. He reminded me that he’d hunted that terrorist guy two years.

  So then I told Castillo about Mendel and his experiments with hawkweed. Castillo made some joke about Mendel having big tits. But I continued. My father might have been a crazy bastard, but he’d definitely spent good money and time teaching me all sorts of science stuff. I figured it was the least I could do to help Castillo understand what a waste this was.

  I told him that after his famous pea experiments, Mendel had also worked on another plant, called hawkweed. Why hawkweed? Well, a famous biologist in Germany read Mendel’s paper on peas and wrote to him, said he’s gotta give this hawkweed stuff a try. The guy was, like, the only real biologist who ever wrote to Mendel. Said he’d experimented with hawkweed before and even sent Mendel some seeds to help get him started. Nice.

  The hawkweed didn’t work, however. The plant had/has a very weird “reproductive pattern.” Random. Even makes clones of itself sometimes, instead of true offspring, just to keep things interesting. Mendel’s notes and ideas on heredity suddenly made 0.00 sense. He wrote a paper and admitted to the whole world he couldn’t repeat his pea experiments with the new plant. He admitted he could be wrong about everything.

  My dad said this German guy set Mendel up. The guy wanted Mendel to fail. Wanted him to understand you can’t predict shit.

  Castillo got my point again but told me to give him a break.

  Then he said: You done good, man. Getting us this far. Really.

  Hawkweed, I replied.

  My implication was that you can’t predict shit. I probably hadn’t gotten us any farther than we’d been a week before.

  Castillo just turned back to the window. Maybe, he agreed.

  • • •

  That was the same night I saw Konerak Sinthasomphone.

  • • •

  I did not yet know who Konerak Sinthasomphone was.

  Like Richard Guerrero’s, his was a name I’d have to learn later. (Soon, actually.) That night, he was only a face I recognized. Completely. One I’d seen a dozen times before in various forms. In the treetops and skyline of some new city. In the wallpaper pattern of some hotel lobby. A face that, this night, had slowly once again filled the whole world.

  Castillo was upstairs staring at the Sizemore house as usual. Still waiting. And I was a couple of rooms away, stretched out in a small upstairs loft that overlooked the dark family room below. Castillo said he wouldn’t need me again until morning. I hoped to sleep again. Couldn’t. The paperback was open and across my face. (I’d already read the whole thing twice.) I breat
hed in the scent of its pages. Tried to clear my mind of all its concerns and questions and doubts. Every fifteen minutes or so a car’d go by and its headlights would briefly sneak around the book and my closed eyes.

  Eventually, hours later, maybe, I gave up.

  He took shape then.

  I opened my eyes, and between the railing posts the boy’s face emerged in the darkness beneath me. The shadows playing off and up the family room walls and corners, the shallow ruts and lines in the carpet; streaks of black where furniture had once been. Muted light from a neighbor’s porch light bleeding through the back windowpanes, casting curious streaks and shapes across the whole room. All trickling slowly together in the blackness and combining into more-distinguishable things. A mouth. Eyes. Jawline. An ear. A smile.

  Soon a complete face. An Asian kid.

  Sometimes I can force myself to look away. Like in the motel shower. But not this time.

  It was as if I’d been caught in a magical trance, or I was a deer in headlights. Once the face started to take shape, I felt I had to let it finish. I was unable to look away, and he now filled the whole room below.

  • • •

  Later I would learn that Konerak’d been only fourteen when killed by Dahmer. That he and his family had come to Milwaukee from Laos to escape the Communists. That, after Konerak’s death, his family had removed all of his pictures from his house because they could not bear the pain of seeing his face.

  • • •

  Those same giant black eyes gazed up at me now as I struggled to break away.

  The lines of the mouth bending, opening as if to speak. To scream. I closed my own eyes, unwilling to look, to maybe eventually hear. When I opened them again, the face had already all but faded.

  An illusion. Imagination. No more . . . Yet another shape had already taken his place.

  A darkness moving into the room below from the unseen kitchen. A terrible blackness spreading steadily across the carpet, consuming whatever faint memory was left of the boy’s face.

  The Woman in the Black Dress. The Thing on the Bed.

  Standing perfectly still just within the opening of the kitchen, just out of sight. A glimpse only. (Thank God.) The boy’s face continued to dissolve away from her widening reach. Her shadow consuming the whole room as it had the park, working up the wall toward me. The neighbor’s porch light muted, vanishing also. Her despair filling the whole world.

  I looked up from the spreading blackness to where her face should be. Again, only a glimpse. Horrendous white. So artificially bright, it looked wrong. Sick. Perverted. And an enormous unblinking eye. I could only see the one. Gaping straight back at me.

  Then long black fingers trailing up her mask. Monstrously elongated. Deformed. Fingers a foot long. Tapered at the ends in sharp nails like needles. Peeling the mask back.

  I thought that I would scream bloody murder or that my chest would explode from my beating heart, but it was calm. I was lost. Peaceful. As if time were standing completely still. Waiting to see the monster within.

  The taloned fingers skinned back the white mask. The enormous unblinking doll eye lifting to the ceiling. Beneath the mask, the glimpse of the real face beneath.

  My father’s face.

  Spattered in blood.

  I rolled over, away from all the monsters below. Shivering. Queasy.

  Lost. Gone.

  • • •

  I pulled myself together later. Hours later, I’d say.

  And then went to Castillo. What I would say to him exactly, I had no clue.

  He didn’t want to hear about the things I’d seen any more than I did. They couldn’t help him in any way. And they would only make me more of a monster in his eyes.

  Yet . . .

  I still stood in the doorway to the bedroom, half in the hall. Afraid to commit to the conversation I really, really wanted to have. I ended up trying pointless small talk. He told me to go read my book. I figured I’d get more specific, try to get us to where I needed to be, and asked about Ox. Castillo started to blow me off again but I just kept pushing. I had to. I wasn’t going back out into that dark house again until I’d found out more.

  I asked where he and Ox had met, and he admitted in Afghanistan ten years before.

  Then I finally asked about the ghosts. About talking to ghosts.

  • • •

  “Talking to ghosts” was the last thing Castillo and Ox had talked about at the baseball game. I hadn’t forgotten that little exchange. Far from it. Both of them kinda joking about it but, at the same time, seeming to me they were, just beneath the surface and all, both dead serious about whatever this thing was. Something they did with ghosts, something this mysterious Kristin woman had taught them about. And since “ghost” meant a hundred different things to everyone, I was real curious here. You can’t deny I was a bit of a ghost expert myself.

  • • •

  At first Castillo acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. But I stepped fully into the room now, kept pushing. Castillo searched the ceiling for an answer. He finally admitted it was “something” that “someone” taught “some of us.” You couldn’t get more vague if you tried, but it was still the most Castillo had EVER told me about anything personal. All I had to do was sort out the pronouns. I assumed by “someone” he meant Kristin, and said so. He seemed surprised I knew her name, and I explained I’d picked it up when he’d spoken with Ox at the ballpark. He admitted she was the “someone.”

  It was a start. So, naturally, I kept going.

  I asked if she (Kristin) was the girl he spoke to on the phone sometimes. The person feeding him information about serial killers and whatnot as we traveled across the country together. (I’d kind of already put this together at this point but wanted confirmation all the same.)

  No, he lied then. (He didn’t want to involve her yet. And I didn’t/don’t blame him.)

  He would only admit to what Ox had already given up anyway. That Kristin was a psychiatrist who worked with soldiers who’d come back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a lot of bad memories and feelings. Guys now fighting depression, alcoholism, nightmares, rage, detachment from society, and thoughts of suicide. (These are all symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, a condition those who’ve been in war often develop.) It was her job to help soldiers get rid of, or at least manage, all those feelings.

  And then Castillo admitted to me he was one of those guys. One who’d come home angry, always looking for a fight that never came. Filled with regrets. People he’d let down somehow. He’d learned from Kristin that talking to some of these people was the best thing to do. Often, however, he couldn’t talk to them. One way or another, a lot of ’em just weren’t around anymore.

  So this Kristin woman taught this exercise where vets would try to face specific regrets, these “ghosts.” Instead of letting them haunt you, you just kinda meet ’em head-on. Talk it through.

  He held up his hands to indicate the explanation was over, that it was so simple and silly, it hadn’t even been worth talking about.

  But we both knew that was another lie.

  • • •

  30% of the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with PTSD.

  That’s more than 250,000 people.

  It is believed that susceptibility to PTSD is genetic.

  • • •

  I then asked Castillo who Shaya was. Shaya was a name he’d mumbled in his sleep more than once. It totally freaked him out. I don’t think he had any idea. He told me only that Shaya was a boy he knew in Afghanistan during the war. Not something I talk about, he said. And he seemed sad. An emotion I honestly didn’t think he was capable of.

  War’s stupid, I offered.

  He agreed it was but then told me a cool story about fighting the Taliban when he was younger. Like a hundred guys with tanks and stuff on both sides. Bullets flying, guys yelling charges and orders and prayers in a dozen languages over the gunfir
e. And the US troops had ridden horses. American Special Forces guys working with a powerful Afghani warlord against the Taliban. They’d had to cross this huge field, hundreds of guys, and the best way had been in waves of horses. Castillo’s whole face lit up when he told the story, and I asked Castillo if he liked being over there. If he liked war. I remember he said he “liked being good at something.”

  Killing people, I verified.

  He said: That’s not all we did. . . .

  But you did, I said.

  He agreed finally with a yup and added it was never something he wanted to do. Then I saw something in Castillo’s look that suggested it was time to drop the topic. So I did.

  Instead I asked if he thought the guys were still coming here (he did) and then again what he would do with me when this was all over (he still didn’t know). It was honest but not very comforting. I suggested I could run away. Wondered if he’d still let me. Before, he HAD given me money to run away. Now, not so much. Instead he brought up about my being only sixteen and all, but I reminded him that kids did it all the time.

  He agreed but seemed sad again. An emotion, perhaps, he carried more than I’d ever thought, now that I knew what to look for.

  Then he handed me a book. His book. The Odyssey. The one he was always reading right before the few hours of sleep he got each night. The thing looked like it was fifty years old, it was so used and abused. Dozens of dog-eared pages and a spine broken in twenty different places. He told me to read a chapter called “A Gathering of Shades.”

  Said it was about how to talk to ghosts.

  • • •

  That next day, I probably read that chapter a dozen times. The hero of the story, Ulysses, travels to the Underworld to get information and ends up talking to a bunch of dead people. To do this, he has to sacrifice a couple of sheep because it’s their blood that lures the shades/ghosts. As the ghosts gather around the fresh blood, he ends up talking to guys who died beside him at Troy, his own mother, a bunch of dead princes, and even a guy who killed himself because of Ulysses. He ends up learning a lot about where they’ve been and what’s been going on in the world while he’s been traveling. One of the ghosts, a famous oracle, even reveals Ulysses’s future. A future of eventual victory. And, of course, more blood.