When Jake and Carol get home, they have to push their way slowly through the crowd. Four broadcasting vans are queued in front of the house. The chief of police and Phil’s coach sit in a police car in Phil’s driveway. Phil didn’t ask them to do this, but he’s glad they did. They’re the only barriers between him and the reporters.
For the next few days, a police car takes Phil to classes in the morning. His coach takes him home after practice. Phil often finds himself standing in the living room, looking at the people outside.
The crowd changes after the first day or so. The local news feeds finally give way to national feeds as the debate heats up. Phil’s nuclear DNA comes from Gordie Howe, but his mitochondrial DNA and cytoplasm come from the anonymous woman who donated the egg. The hormonal environment and the birth experience come from Carol Berger. How can he possibly be called natural? Whose child is he? Can Phil inherit from Gordie Howe? Can Gordie Howe demand visitation rights? Does the anonymous egg donor have any claim on him? Gordie Howe and Phil Berger have resolved the situation between them, but that does not affect the coverage; the fact of Phil’s existence and Gordie Howe’s fame is enough to propel the story.
The national feeds take their own obligatory pictures of the Berger house and move on, leaving the field to the tabloids, net drones, and con artists.
The coaches of Boston College and Boston University happen to visit Phil on the same day. While they are arguing on the front lawn the relative merits of the two schools, a representative of the National Hockey League takes Phil aside and tries to get him to sign with the Boston Bruins. “Why wait?” he asks.
Roxanne calls him. She tells him she’s home but unsure how she feels about things. They should not see each other for a while. He stares at the phone wanting to punch something.
By Friday’s first play-off game against the Marlborough Panthers, Phil is feeling claustrophobic, angry, and bitter. The Panthers take an early two-goal lead by the end of the first period. The Hillers, expecting to be beaten, are disorganized and chaotic on the ice. Phil no longer cares.
The Panthers win the face-off, but Phil intercepts the pass and comes into the Panthers’ zone at full speed. At that moment, his rage and bitterness come together in him and it feels as if he is leaning into his body, grasping its strength like a man picking up a hammer. He sees the defenseman try to check him and checks him first, knocking him over. The goalie dives to intercept the puck, but Phil pivots backward and pops the puck over him to score.
He can hear the crowd roar as from a great distance. The ice has grown to fill his vision. His teammates pick up the pace with him, and by the end of the second period, the score is tied.
The third period is a war of attrition as the Panthers try to score. It is bruising, full-contact hockey, played almost entirely on center ice as both sides refuse to give up their zone. Then, with three minutes left to play, Phil goes in on the left, spins around the defenseman, and passes to his center, who scores.
The Panthers are fighting for a tie now. They pull the goalie to get six men on the ice. But it’s Phil’s world. The ice is as broad as the sea. It’s his breath and his muscle. The harder he pushes himself, the easier it gets. He is given a half-second opportunity from the corner of the blue line, and fires a shot into the open net. The defenseman cross checks him from behind after the whistle blows.
Phil’s reaction is as unexpected as it is unconscious. He turns and decks the defenseman. In a heartbeat, he is the center of a brawl. He’s thrown out of the game. The Hillers lose the goal and beat the Panthers four to three.
He is showering in the locker room, the water pouring over his head. He’s never played that well, ever. Maybe he needed to be hungry for it. He wasn’t the youngest of six like Howe. A trick of the noise and current bring him a snatch of conversation.
“So that’s what it’s like to play with Gordie Howe!”
Hammett writes up the game, calling it a Gordie Howe hat trick: one goal, one assist, one fight.
With Phil thrown out for the next game, the Hillers lose in the next round of playoffs and are out for the season. He returns to his classes and the story seems to die down. He sees Roxanne across crowds of mutual friends, but she is distant. So is he.
ACT II
Over the summer, Phil works in his father’s plant, accepts a hockey scholarship at BU, turns eighteen. While the discussion continues, it has passed him by. He has disappeared from the national and state media, overshadowed by the politicians. Instead, the dialogue has moved into the State House and Congress. New cloning regulations are proposed in several states. MassPIRG contacts him about helping their lobbying effort. Phil doesn’t return their calls. Phil has become yesterday’s news, and he is grateful. He and Roxanne even take in a couple of movies, though they are both very careful with one another.
He reports to the BU Terriers two weeks before classes for hockey practice. No one mentions Gordie Howe. He feels their gaze watching and measuring him. He resolves to ignore it. Things appear to be working out. He’s starting out in the third line, which suits him just fine. He’d had his fill of visibility in the spring.
Practice goes well. The feeling he’d had in his last game, that sense of leaning into his body, has not left him. By the time the first game comes along, against the Air Force Falcons, he has been pulled from the third line and put in the second.
It’s a good game and the Terriers win with a single goal – Phil’s. He happens to be in the right place when it bounces from the glove of the Falcons’ goalie. While he played well, he has no illusions that the goal was anything but good luck.
The next morning, leading the Globe sports feed, Frank Hammett’s story lies below a picture of Phil popping in the puck: “Gordie Howe wins against Air Force.”
Phil reads the story over an early dorm breakfast. Phil wonders which is real – as far as he was concerned, the goal was a fluke. According to Hammett, it was the result of his excellence of play stemming from Gordie Howe’s genes. In effect, Gordie Howe played for BU by proxy.
The warm camaraderie he’d felt during the practice weeks turns cold. Conversations dry up when he comes in the room. No one shuts him out of planning or discussion of games. But it is purely professional. Most of them, he realizes suddenly, are here on scholarship and not expecting to go into professional hockey. It’s a way to get through school. If Phil wins games for them, that’s good for them. But they don’t have to like him.
Perversely, this seems to work for him. In high school, he’d enjoyed a certain amount of popularity. Phil was never lazy, but he was not averse to substituting a big grin and a glib tongue for work. His talents had carried him in spite of himself.
Here, though, he speaks to few and finds himself trusting no one. He concentrates on his studies and on hockey. He returns his teammates’ professionalism with professionalism. They are close colleagues, not friends. His talents are an anvil and this coldness the hammer by which he forges his skill.
On the ice, the personalities and conflicts are left behind. The game exists to the exclusion of all else. On the ice, Phil is free.
It is no accident that he is brought up into the starting line by midseason.
Hammett has developed a pattern in his stories: if the Terriers do well, it is because they have Gordie Howe playing for them. If they do badly, it is because of an inadequacy in Gordie Howe’s clone. The language keeps the debate fresh. More than once, late at night, Phil, too exhausted to sleep, tunes into the sports feed, only to find the cloning debate in full swing, with him in the starring role. In November, in a fit of sudden, killing rage, he rips the display from the wall and throws it through the window. Phil’s room is on the sixth floor. It is pure accident that no one is hurt. He cleans up the mess that night before any reporters get wind of it. He does not replace the unit. He thinks about taking a yoga class or something to relax. The idea of a Hammett headline saying “Gordie Howe Takes Yoga” stops him.
Phil keeps reminding hims
elf what had happened in his last high-school game; how a sudden burst of temper had cost him the rest of the play-offs. College hockey plays by the same rules: fighting gets you ejected from that game and the next. He keeps his temper under control. Still, he occasionally checks too hard or hooks too vigorously. His penalties mount.
By February, Hammett has accused him of bringing “NHL-style hockey to Boston University.” Phil speaks little, works very hard, and only seems to come alive on the ice. His parents try to talk to him, but he answers in monosyllables.
Then comes the first night of the Beanpot.
Since 1952, the four hockey teams of Boston – Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern University, and Harvard – have played against one another for bragging rights and a bowl of beans: the Boston Beanpot. Boston College is paired up with Boston University in the first game – a rivalry within a rivalry. The game is fought like trench warfare. No inch is lost or gained; no goal is scored. Then, BC scores the first goal. Phil scores the second for BU on a breakaway. Both teams are playing better than they have in months. The game is full of hard and sweaty grace. Phil is at home with his teammates, with the game, with the ice.
In the middle of the second period, Phil is carrying the puck into the Boston College zone. He sidesteps the defenseman and goes around him. The defenseman turns and tries to hook him, but loses his balance on the pivot. Instead, the stick whirls high in the air and slaps the side of Phil’s helmet, directly over the ear, knocking him down. There is no injury, but the pain pins him to the ice for a moment. He stands and skates slowly toward the face-off circle. The defenseman protests the penalty. Phil looks around the arena, sees Frank Hammett watching him from the other side of the glass, shaking his head. Phil can almost hear what he’s thinking: “Not much like Gordie Howe. Gordie wouldn’t take that. Not him.” Phil can almost read tomorrow’s article: “Gordie Howe’s Clone Not Up to the Original.” It pounds in his chest along with his heart. He can see what will happen next.
The defenseman gives up arguing with the ref and starts to skate over to the penalty box. When he comes near, Phil pulls up with his stick and the defenseman goes down on his back. Without thinking, Phil lands on him with both knees. Then, Phil pulls off the defenseman’s mask and starts pounding him. This is no stylized violence like the NHL. Phil is out to kill him. This is not Gordie Howe, he is thinking. This is me.
His teammates pull him off. The defenseman curls on his side. The refs throw him out of the game. His coach screams at him in the locker room. Gordie Howe would never have done that! Phil is out for two weeks, and maybe for good. Everything seems to happen from a distance.
He puts on his clothes and goes outside into a deep clot of reporters. They’re just as far away as everything else. He just keeps walking, through the West End and downtown Boston. Past the Commons. Eventually, no reporters follow him and he is alone in the South End.
He finds a hole-in-the-wall bar on Columbus Avenue and orders a beer without thinking. As if it’s the most natural thing in the world, they serve him, even though he’s underage. Something about his abstracted manner and his size suggest he’s older than he is.
It’s the NHL for me, then, he thinks. Why not? Or the minors – there’s more fighting in the minors. At that moment, he thinks he could enjoy the minors.
It happens as gently as snow on ice. A man jostles him on the way to the john. An insult is exchanged. Phil swings. The two men end up on the floor. Phil rolls over on top, and for a moment as he pounds on the stranger, as he wanted to pound on the defenseman, as he would have gladly pounded Frank Hammett or even Gordie Howe, he loves this stranger as he has no other.
The bartender knocks him out with a sap, and he awakes, dizzy and puking, in the back of a police van. The nameless man he had been fighting is not there. It is only Phil and another, unconscious drunk. He leans back against the wall, wondering what happens next.
Phil finds out at the arraignment that the man’s name is Kenneth Roget. He has been released from the hospital with a mild concussion and missing teeth. Phil gets six months’ probation and two hundred hours of community service. Roget threatens to sue, but the DA points out that Roget has a history of bar fights and is already on probation for assault on his ex-wife. The DA gets Roget to settle for medical costs.
Hammett’s article reads: “Gordie Howe’s Clone Jailed for Assault.”
BU kicks him from the team and out of the university. He moves back home, contented for the moment to do his community service. His parents try to talk to him, but he is sullen and uncooperative. They suggest he call his friends from high school. He leaves the phone untouched.
For his community service, he works as a janitor at the Framingham hospital. The simple and silent work suits him. He is invisible as he mops a floor or pushes a cart out to the trash compactor. Medical staff and visitors stream past him, oblivious. The patients, especially the chronic ones, strike up incidental conversations with him. One man, a paraplegic from a car accident, reminds him of the other Howe clone, Danny Helstrom.
That night, on impulse, he finds a single Helstrom in Nashua, though there are two others in nearby towns. Phil isn’t sure how he should proceed. Call him? Could Danny Helstrom even speak? There but for chance and circumstance goes Phil Berger.
A woman answers the phone. Her voice is tired. Phil is surprised. He expected a recording. Jake and Carol have been screening calls for nearly a year.
“Uh, hi.” Phil can’t think of anything to say. “I’m Phil Berger.”
“Yeah?”
There is silence. “Is there a Danny Helstrom there?”
“Oh,” comes from the other end. “That Phil Berger. Robinson said you might call. I figured it would have been last spring.”
“Yes.” There is silence on the phone. “Are you Danny Helstrom’s mother?”
“You bet. Grace Baker.”
“Baker?”
“Danny’s father couldn’t take it. He split when Danny was two. Funny, huh?” She laughs bitterly. “You want to meet your clone brother? I think it’s a bad idea, but Danny would like to see you.”
Danny Helstrom looks like Phil. At least, if Phil had been stretched thin and shrunken, then broken and reset, he would look like Danny. Danny has never been able to sit erect. He half lies across the wheelchair fabric on his right side. His fingers are long and graceful, and move gently and independently of him like the tendrils of a sea anemone. His voice is high and nasal. He weighs barely ninety pounds. Looking at Danny makes Phil feel obscurely ashamed of standing on two legs, of feeling his muscle and strength, of being able to speak. When Danny looks at Phil, it is out of Phil’s own eyes.
Danny smiles, quivering; half his face locks up and releases. He speaks. Danny only has partial control of the muscles of his tongue and lips; his words are a smear of long vowels, grunts, and hisses. Grace interprets for him: “He’s really glad you came up here. He thinks of you as his brother.”
At first, Phil doesn’t know what to say. He’s not sure why he’s here. “Good, I guess,” he says hesitantly. “Did Dr. Robinson test you, too?” It seems inconceivable that this broken creature could be a clone of Gordie Howe.
“Yeah,” says Grace. “Gordie Howe. Just like you.”
Danny says something to Grace. She frowns. “Are you sure? I should be here.”
Danny gives her his half smile and replies. She shrugs, leaves the room, and returns with a black box fitted with a speaker. She attaches a microphone to Danny’s shirt, gives Phil a long glance, and leaves the room.
Danny makes a sound like a cross between a moan and a stutter. The box says in a monotone: “She’s trying to protect me.”
More at ease with Grace out of the room, Phil sits down on the bed. “How come?”
“She thinks you’ll hurt me because I scare you.” Danny half grins again. “Are you scared?”
Phil watches Danny. Something feels like it’s cracking inside him. “Yeah. You scare me.”
Danny flops his head back and forth in a nod. “I could have been you. You could have been me.”
Phil sighs. “Yeah.”
“I know. Could be worse.” He grins again. “Could have not made it at all.”
Phil clasps his hands together. This is my twin brother. “Is that what you really think?”
Danny looks back at him. “Because of my body?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. I do. I’d rather live.”
“Okay, then.”
“But you owe me.”
Phil spreads his hands. “How do you figure?”
Danny tries to point with his finger but it trembles in the air as if underwater. Instead, he nods in Phil’s direction. “You got the legs.”
Phil looks at himself. “Yeah.”
“Tell me about hockey. Tell me what it’s like to play like Gordie Howe.”
Phil lets his breath out slowly. Danny’s right. It’s the luck of the draw that Phil got the body and Danny didn’t. He owes for that luck. He has obligations to Danny, as close to a twin brother as he will ever know, because of that luck.
He thinks for a long time. It’s important to say it right, to express it. “If I could fly,” he says at last. “It would feel like skating.”
The Bruins call him. He does not return the call. The Ice Cats in Worcester, the Chicago Freeze, the Florida Everglades. He does not return the calls. He has the phone screen out sports agents. He does not understand why he’s doing this. It is only a minor assault charge. Professional players have done worse, taken worse penalties, and still played. He may not be Gordie Howe, but he could still play with the Amarillo Rattlers, for God’s sake. He’s at least that good.
Frank Hammett’s article reads: “Clone of Gordie Howe a Janitor in Framingham.”
Something in him breaks.
He finishes his community service by June. Jake gives him two thousand dollars. Phil takes his car and leaves town. He tells no one where he is going, since he doesn’t know himself.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 Page 20
