Looking at his younger self, perhaps Cordo saw the younger’s cluelessness and felt it just as keenly now as, or perhaps more so than, then.
Cordo let the pages fly as though he were shuffling a deck of cards, the photo album turning into a cinematograph telling either a bildungsroman or a namorsgnudlib, the transformation of Amelia either from a bald-headed babe to a black-haired infant with captivating green eyes and a malicious smile when she found use for such an expression.
Flipping through Amelia’s first book for the umpteenth time, perhaps fascinated by the gradual lengthening of wrinkles in his own face or perhaps the graying of his hair, which thankfully showed no signs then nor now of receding, he stopped when Amelia turned into a toddler, perhaps three or four, Hortense’s age. And in addition to her age, toddler Amelia shared a great deal of Hortense’s appearance. And perhaps this was what caused Cordo to so long linger in this age range.
He turned to pages of older Amelia, child, adolescent in the second book, candid photos taken in secret by either Tom or Cordo during her pregnancy, as she nor Camille nor Hortense ever willingly submitted to be photographed.
Cordo yet again paused over these pictures, giving them more attention, and soon he perceived what would be evident to any random pedestrian: the striking resemblance between teenage Amelia and 13-year-old Camille.
To be sure he opened Camille’s second book, found a picture of her pregnant with Hortense, put it beside the picture of Amelia pregnant with Camille.
The resemblance was unbelievable.
Cordo scooped back his hair, breathing turning shallow while his pores opened and exuded moisture.
Turning the pages both Amelia and Camille aged or youthened at the same rate and the resemblance was constant. Looking away changed nothing, the fact was there again when he looked back. Cordo stood and walked around his floor, breathing.
Then he got down Lourdes’ photo albums from the crawlspace. He sat the four books, which he’d finally filled over the years with the old loose pictures of Lourdes from the bags in the crawlspace, on the bed and turned through them.
There were no pictures of her in her childhood, only from when he’d met her up until before her cancer diagnosis and pregnancy, when she’d prohibited having any pictures taken.
There were pictures of them from their elopement, at the university, on a trip to San Diego, beaches, Vashon Island, around the old apartment, moving into this house. Looking through all of them, Cordo’s former urgency disappeared and he looked through the albums as someone from this world would look around if suddenly transported to Middle-Earth. He might have wandered somewhere in his brain for what reason had he started looking through these?
And then he saw long-black-haired green-eyed Lourdes standing cross-armed before her then prosperous garden in the backyard, a rainy day, the best kind of day, and Cordo stopped his dreamy wandering. He stared at this singular picture.
He looked over to Amelia’s albums. Though he had no pictures of her as an adult, he had a picture of her, about 14 or 15, standing cross-armed before her mother’s garden, which she’d kept alive until she moved into her own house.
Then, in Camille’s albums, there was a picture of her, taken not long after Hortense’s birth, of her standing cross-armed in front of the revived garden.
They all three looked not alike but the same and Hortense was already growing into the resemblance and that was all there was to it.
He went out into the dark hallway and stopped at Hortense’s bedroom door, thought about knocking but didn’t, perhaps asking himself why he would. Instead he left the house, driving in the late afternoon to the university.
Camille worked in a lab in the Allen Center for Computer Science & Computer Engineering, several streets across from the Plant Labs and Green House and Herb Garden where Tom had always taught and worked.
It was well dark when Cordo got onto campus and found Tom grading papers in his office, which was packed overcapacity with plant books, theses, dissertations, journals, articles, dead frayed plant cuttings, photometers, and radiometers from the ‘80s.
Cordo stole in, shut and locked the misty-glassed door, and sat upon the couch as Tom looked up, stunned to see Cordo and even more so to see how he looked—as though he were having a stroke. So awful did Cordo look that Tom threw off his glasses and stood.
“Cordo, what’s wrong?”
“What was Amelia doing in the lab?”
Tom couldn’t comprehend this question, pulled up a chair, sat in front of Cordo, trying to take a cold sweaty hand but Cordo pulled away.
“The same thing Lourdes was—researching asexual reproduction in plants.”
Cordo pulled out of his jacket pocket the three pictures of Lourdes, Amelia, and Camille and Tom looked them over, easily coming to the same conclusion as Cordo but he couldn’t, for the sake of his sanity, allow it to be true. But he looked just as pale as Cordo now.
“Was that what they were researching for Titus?” Cordo asked, voice airy and quiet with distance.
Tom reeled back, mentally sprinting to catch up.
“I don’t know, I really don’t. But I think so. Before Lourdes signed the confidentiality agreement, I asked her what the hell a pharmaceutical company wanted with an agricultural botanist. And she said they were interested because she’d done the most pioneering research into a specific kind of asexual reproduction called apomixis—”
“What’s—”
“—where a plant produces an embryo from the nucellus without—”
“Tom!”
“I’m sorry, it’s just…spontaneous, the female plants don’t need to be pollinated—inseminated—to conceive, they just…Think of it like the Virgin Mary. I don’t—that’s not how it is, in apomixis the offspring…”
He trailed off, looking back down at the pictures he still held.
“What?” Cordo asked.
Tom threw the pictures on his desk with some relief, hung his head, held the back of his neck.
“The offspring is a genetic clone of the mother plant…Every petal, every leaf, every hair the same…”
Cordo stared at Tom, a spouse weakly accusing another of infidelity, hoping to be proven wrong but, to the contrary, getting a confession.
“…But they’re born disease free. But if the disease is hereditary—”
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Cordo bolted up, shattering Tom’s thinking. “You’re fucking kidding me, tell me I’m crazy, fuck, anything but actually consider I’m…”
Cordo didn’t know how to finish. He remained standing as Tom stared into the oblivion of clutter in his office.
“Not long before Lourdes…everything,” Tom said, “…she gave me a key. She told me I should give it to Amelia or you if you ever asked for it. You didn’t but…”
Cordo studied Tom with all the intensity of Robert Graysmith studying the Zodiac killer’s encrypted messages.
“Did Amelia ever ask for it?”
“Yeah. When she was pregnant. I’d forgotten about it till then. She gave it back a few months before…told me I should give it to you or Camille if you ever asked. Camille did—when she was pregnant—hasn’t given it back yet.”
They stared at each other, trying to make sense of everything.
The next day, having been told Cordo had to fly to Los Angeles for the weekend in order to meet with some Hollywood types and discuss an adaptation of one of his novels, Hortense went to the university with Tom, spending the day reading and examining plant specimens under microscopes in his office while Tom and Camille were in class or lab.
Meanwhile Cordo’s bags remained unpacked. He infiltrated Camille and Hortense’s bedroom, which was immaculately kept even for females and despite their ages. The room was also soulless, such as would make sleeping impossible for anyone else, and such was the lack of color, of decoration, of life, even ghosts would not sojourn here—or maybe they would, hopelessly drab fatalistic ghosts, inexorciseable.
The bed was
a queen, made, and on the nightstands on either side were the women’s nightly reading materials—esoteric botany and neurology books whose words hadn’t been read in 50 years and then only by Ph.Ds.
Cordo started with the obvious—under the bed—but there was nothing, not even rogue pieces of paper from sprocket strips from the notebooks the women were always seen writing in. Then the nightstand drawers—nothing but notepads, pens, Post-Its, no lotion, aspirin, gum, sleeping masks, guilty-pleasure novels, ear buds, or any other typical accouterment that might be found in other women’s nightstands.
The dresser too proved fruitless—socks and underwear and bras of conservative natures—Camille was a 32B, the same Lourdes had been, the same Amelia had been—and old versions of Camille’s research papers, her bachelor’s degree in a folder. All that was left was the closet, a walk-in smaller than Cordo’s: no dresses or skirts but blouses and slacks, uniformly boring, crisp and unwrinkled, some coats, disused umbrellas, no purses, no favorite pieces of jewelry nor any at all, no mirror and makeup to speak of, a pair of ill-used tennis shoes each to wear on nature hikes, galoshes to slosh through mud, but otherwise they wore only dark Oxford shoes.
He moved blouses and pants to look behind them but soon exhausted all the space in the closet and so all opportunity to conceal anything.
Then he looked up and saw the removable rectangle in the ceiling into the attic crawlspace. He got the stepladder from his bedroom and got up and looked inside.
In all probability even he didn’t know what he was looking for. But the canvas rucksack lying just within reach of the opening was suspect. He pulled it down, returned to his bedroom to open it. He spread out the contents upon his unmade bed: four plastic zipper bags with sheared-off clumps of black hair and each of these bags was labeled in black permanent marker: LOURDES, AMELIA, CAMILLE, and HORTENSE respectively.
Moving faster, breathing heavier, Cordo removed the ambiguous four-inch two-pound black square from inside the bag also and turned it around until he found the manufacturer’s label on the back. An external hard drive with a capacity of five terabytes.
He attached this to his laptop but upon trying to access the files, he found them locked under password. He tapped his keyboard for a moment, then typed in “apomixis” and was permitted. He found three folders—PICTURES, VIDEOS, and DOCUMENTS, each more than 10 gigabytes.
He copied the hard drive’s memory onto his computer, then disconnected and replaced the hard drive in the bag. He almost put back the plastic bags of hair but stopped, thought.
From the kitchen he got four plastic bags, labeled them, and put a pinch from each clump of hair into the corresponding bag. Then he put the original bags in the rucksack and took it back up to the crawlspace above Camille’s closet. He made sure everything was in place before closing the bedroom door, perhaps remembering lack of attention to detail had been Paul Sheldon’s undoing.
He refrained from investigating the contents of the hard drive right then. He called Tom but he didn’t answer and so Cordo went for a walk around the neighborhood, trying to catch his breath and perhaps to create alternatives to what was consuming his mind.
During this walk Tom called back.
“Did you find anything?” he asked.
Cordo told him.
“I can’t look at it alone.”
He told Tom his plan.
After taking Camille and Hortense home that night, Tom told them Cordo’s meeting with the film producers had gone sour and instead of coming home, he wanted Tom to come down for a weekend getaway and so after Tom packed a bag, he left the house, saying he had to catch a redeye, though had he said nothing to the girls and left the house without exposition, perhaps neither Camille or Hortense would have cared, for a weekend was the same whether Tom and Cordo were there.
Tom met Cordo at a hotel in Seattle. When Tom entered the room, Cordo was deathly with anxiety but he had still not looked at any of it. Tom locked the door and shut the curtains while Cordo hooked up his computer to the room’s TV and went to the VIDEOS folder, which had a dozen hour-long videos from 29 years ago, made over the course of eight or nine months, and another 30 or 40 videos from the last 16 years, the latest of which was made a week ago.
But they started with the very first one, nearly three decades old. Tom and Cordo sat in chairs in front of the TV and pushed PLAY.
Lourdes appeared on the TV screen, sitting in front of her laptop in her old GA office, looking into the camera. A window behind her showed the night. She looked frail, pale. Cordo covered his mouth, cringed his brow, prepared.
She cleared her throat:
“Hi—hello. I’m…not at all sure what to call you. But I guess if you’re watching this, your dad named you Amelia. It’s been about a week since I conceived you, although I don’t know if we can reckon this the same way as traditional pregnancy. But we’ll get to that. What you need to know now…”
She took a heavy breath, blinked, half-smiled as a tear came down.
“You are the first asexually reproduced human offspring in known history.”
Tom and Cordo leaned back, believing and disbelieving at the same time.
Lourdes then went on to explain how her undergraduate research into asexual reproduction, specifically apomixis, in plants had earned her renown and eventually funding from Titus.
“In the initial interview, they asked me if I’d ever considered researching apomixis being applied to humans. I told them no, it was impossible for a variety of reasons. But they offered me a full-ride through graduate school, saying all I had to do was research for them on the side. Eventually I agreed. After I signed the confidentiality agreement, they made no bones about it: They wanted to synthesize and commercialize apomixis somehow. The value is that, in plants at least, apomictically reproduced offspring are genetically identical to the mother. So if you have a particularly good strain of oranges, for example, a strain that always yields well, you’d want to keep that strain going for multiple generations. Further, if a good strain suddenly develops a disease, the plant can reproduce a disease-free clone. So Titus said, ‘What if we could have applied apomixis to Freddie Mercury, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs?’ But that’s ridiculous, apomixis would be impossible for women and tenfold for men. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it…”
So she had begun a literature overview, she continued in further videos, and rattled off a number of names and long-winded article titles.
“The most promising work, what urged me to delve deeper into the idea, was ‘Comparative Genetic Mapping in Boechera stricta, a close relative of Arabidopsis’ by Schranz, Windsor, Song, Lawton-Rauh, and Mitchell-Olds. Their findings were that Boechera stricta and Arabidopsis, which are both apomictic species of Brassicaceae, developed that ability after an evolutionary reduction of their chromosome numbers, in Boechera’s case from eight to seven and in Arabidopsis’ from eight to five. What this means is that the genetic data, the trigger for activating apomixis is somewhere in those chromosomes, which fused and translocated for reasons that are still unclear—the randomness of nature. So if apomixis were going to be introduced to human DNA, it’d have to be extracted from the correct chromosome…”
Which meant she’d have to do experiments. She would have done her experiments and research on the apomicitic five-chromosomed thale cress, Arabidopsis thaliana, the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced. But she’d have had to have it ordered and imported from eastern Canada. On the other hand, the apomicitic seven-chromosomed Boechera stricta, Drummond’s rockcress, grew abundantly throughout Seattle, including on the university grounds.
“So I just ripped up handfuls of it and started experimenting on the seven chromosomes.”
These experiments were not scientific, she said: As each chromosome had 9,000 genes, each individual gene would have had to have been tested with independent variables and controlled before incorporating other variables.
“But I didn’t have the time to do all that.”
“So I was pretty sure I had cancer—breast, like my mother. But if I told anyone, they’d want me to start on chemo, which would have contaminated the experiments.”
So she’d kept her diagnosis a secret and begun her experiments in haste.
“My work with Titus provided me access to very sophisticated equipment and material I never could’ve gotten at the university. I had easy access to everything I needed.”
She extracted Boechera stricta DNA with isopropanol, then began the process of isolating genes, 10 at a time, and separating them in sterile cultures.
“I treated each culture with retinoic acid, testosterone, and estrogen—the measurements are in the DOCUMENTS folder—as well as one of my eggs each, which I’d extracted by the tens of thousands and frozen. Altogether I thought I’d conduct about 42,000 experiments, so for each gene there was really only enough eggs for one experiment. My blood would have been an acceptable alternative to my eggs, at least I hypothesize, if I didn’t have cancer—the DNA in my blood cells would have synthesized to produce a fetus with cancer but the eggs have unaffected DNA.”
She’d conducted experiments on all the genes in each chromosome, which all resulted in either the separation, stagnation, or the destruction of the egg until she got to Chromosome 3 and the GCUA sequence.
“The chemicals and the egg responded positively and, I believe, would have formed an embryo if the culture’s conditions had been more like the womb—electrolytes mainly but eventually proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, phospholipids, and urea. The egg eventually died but upon post-mortem examination, I found the egg’s zona pellucida had been anchored to by the cells created by the retinoic acid, Boechera stricta DNA, testosterone, and estrogen—which I’ve called RABSDNATE in the documents—but the egg hadn’t been penetrated for the lack of protein in the compound.”
Most Unnatural Page 17
