The Experiment

by John Darnton

  Tizzie's face drained of color.

  "I think you know why," replied Skyler. "Let's not talk about the possibilities right now."

  "Okay. I'll go along with that."

  "For a while, at least."

  Tizzie handed her empty glass to Jude.

  "How about another drink?" she said.

  "Sure."

  When Jude left, Tizzie put her hand on Skyler's arm and smiled at him. He couldn't help himself—he lifted his hand and placed it on top of hers. He was afraid he was almost trembling.

  "I know it's not easy," she said.

  He didn't trust himself to say anything but looked at her full in the face. His stare was intense.

  When Jude returned, they sat in silence for a while. Finally, Skyler spoke up.

  "Let me ask you something," he said to Jude. "In your mind, am I your clone or are you my clone?"

  "You're my clone."

  "How so?"

  "Because I'm older."

  "I see."

  "You don't agree?"

  "Let's just say that's not the way I see it."

  "How do you see it?"

  "We both came from the same egg. You just got to use it first."

  On the way out, Jude turned to Skyler and grinned. "By the way," he said. "There is one more thing."

  "What?"

  "I have it on good authority that your wisdom teeth are going to come in over the next year or so. And I'd say you're probably going to develop what they call a 'dry socket.' And take it from me, it's going to hurt like hell."

  ¨

  Jude took the subway to South Ferry, and as he was climbing the stairs to the Staten Island ferry terminal, he took a detour. He had come to a decision—but he wasn't proud of it.

  He walked to a newsstand and ordered a pack of Camel filters. He ripped off the cellophane, rapped the pack against his left forefinger, and pulled out a cigarette. Amazing, he thought, how all the practiced ancillary rituals of smoking live on. How long had it been?—two years almost.

  Moving quickly, lest his conscience intrude, he lit up and inhaled deeply. He almost keeled over. He felt as if an invisible hand had grabbed his lungs and squeezed them. He was dizzy, then faint. A long-ago familiar light-headedness set in. He felt his blood racing though his system as if his veins had suddenly contracted. Then came the beautiful calm.

  But it was followed by a paroxysm of self-loathing. How could he be so weak? He tried to keep it at bay with rationalizations: how often, after all, is a fellow's life turned topsy-turvy by forces beyond his control? Who could stop at a time like this? He flicked the cigarette down with his middle finger—another old habit—and heard it hiss as it struck the water. He boarded the ferry.

  Raymond was nowhere in sight. He checked his watch: exactly ten p.m. No confusion there. He walked around the ferry twice on both decks and checked out the passengers sitting on the wooden slat benches or leaning upon the outer railings—the businessmen and blue-collar workers returning home, the secretaries staying late for a few drinks, lovers out on a cheap excursion. What a stupid idea to meet here. When Jude had called Raymond at home to set a place and he'd suggested the ferry, it had struck Jude as melodramatic. How many late-night movies had he been watching on television? But Raymond had insisted he needed to take the ferry anyway. Where could he be going at this hour? Maybe Jude was on the wrong one; maybe he should go back and wait for the next. He glanced back at the stern and, beyond it, the ferry slip. Too late. The thick tie lines were already off, and the boat was churning in the water, bouncing off the tires hanging from the wooden piers, which groaned.

  He walked back to the passenger cabin, and something on the deck below caught his eye, a wiper washing the window of a black Lexus. Jude thought he saw a hand inside moving, beckoning. Of course, that would be Raymond. He always liked good entrances. And here was an added advantage for a paranoid FBI man: it's hard to bug the inside of a car.

  "How're you doing?"

  Raymond waited until he was inside with the door closed before he began the perfunctory formalities. Jude was in no mood to waste time.

  "Not so good, to tell you the truth. I feel like shit, actually. I can't sleep. I can't work. I'm in the middle of something that I can't make sense of. I'm being followed by a couple of psychopaths, and I think I'm in danger."

  "Yeah. And your health is going to suffer, too, if you keep smoking like that."

  "So you saw me back there."

  "Like I always say, being observant is just a question of being observant."

  "You could have said something—I've walked around this boat three times."

  "Four, actually."

  Jude looked at him. He was a reasonably handsome man two years shy of forty with a narrow face, sad-looking brown eyes, cheeks slightly scarred by acne and tufts of white hair flowing around the tips of his ears. He was wearing an open-necked blue shirt, expensive-looking.

  He looked back at Jude and bobbed his head. "Why don't you tell me about it? Start at the beginning."

  "You know the beginning. It was that New Paltz murder, but how it figures in all this, I still haven't worked out."

  "Remind me."

  "It was a Sunday, I got the assignment and went up—"

  "Who gave it to you?"

  "What does that have to do with anything?"

  "I've been doing this a lot longer than you. Just answer the goddamned question."

  "Well, it was the weekend editor, a guy named Leventhal. What does that have to do with anything?"

  "Let me be the judge of that. I notice the Mirror didn't play the story big."

  "No, not at all, a couple of paragraphs in the back."

  "They tell you why?"

  "No, they just said another story was better. That's the editors' prerogative—deciding where the stories go, and they're, you know, jealous of it."

  "Yeah, I can imagine. A place like the Mirror. And to think I always thought they just threw them against the wall to see which ones stick. Anyway, go on."

  "Well, you know what I found out up there, which wasn't much. The guy McNichol picked as the victim turned out to be a local judge, which you told me. And he was alive and kicking. The strange thing is, when I walked into his court and he saw me, he practically had a fit."

  "Hold on, not so fast. Why did you go back? Were you told to follow the story?"

  "No, not at all. Here is where it starts to get weird. You see, I'd been hearing that a guy was walking around who looked like me, exactly like me, a double. And one night he turns up in my building, just like that, and that's what he is—an exact double. I thought at first that he's some kind of long-lost identical twin. Except that he's not—it turns out he's younger."

  Jude looked at Raymond and expected to see a look of surprise or maybe skepticism on his face, but if it was there, he couldn't spot it.

  "Do you mind if I smoke?" Jude asked.

  "No, what the hell. But I thought you stopped."

  "I did, but I hated being a slave to my willpower."

  "Very funny. But you didn't answer the question—why did you go back to New Paltz?"

  "You see, the corpse, the dead guy up there, had a strange wound on his thigh. I told you about it before. It was about the size of a quarter, and it looked like somebody had gouged it out, maybe because there was some kind of identifying mark there. At least, that's what McNichol thought. And my double, whose name is Skyler, by the way, it turns out that he has a mark in the exact same spot. So I made the connection."

  "What was the mark?"

  "It was a tattoo of Gemini—you know, twins, the zodiac. And that's what he—I mean, Skyler—said they were called on the island. Gemini."

  "Island?"

  "Yes. He said there was a whole bunch of them, just like him, and they were raised on an island by people who were doctors and who took care of them and kept them in really good health."

  "I see."

  Jude had the feeling, now that he was laying it all out, th
at the story sounded too ridiculous to be taken seriously. He felt faintly foolish, and half hoped that Raymond would make fun of him and that somehow the whole thing would just disappear. But Raymond didn't do that; he seemed to be paying close attention.

  "And did he tell you where this island is?"

  "No, believe it or not—he doesn't know. He got out by stowing away on a plane, and he doesn't even know what state he was in."

  "And where is he now?"

  "He's somewhere. It doesn't matter. It's not important."

  "Maybe it is important. Maybe he's in some danger—have you thought of that?"

  Jude was silent. He had thought of little else over the past few days.

  "Go back to the judge a minute. You said he was upset to see you?"

  "I walked into his courtroom while he was presiding. As I said, he took one look at me and practically fainted. He had to leave the bench."

  "And he didn't look familiar to you?"

  "No, not at all. I never saw him before in my life."

  Raymond was silent for a while, turning on the ignition and pressing a button to lower the window on the driver's side to let the smoke out. He peered into the darkness of the car deck and, apparently satisfied that no one was there, back at Jude.

  "So who else knows about this?"

  A tiny alarm bell went off in Jude's brain.

  "No one."

  "No one at all? You've just been keeping this all bottled up by yourself?"

  "Who would I tell? I mean, you have to admit, it sounds pretty crazy."

  "No girlfriend, nothing?"

  Jude shook his head no—a sort of halfway no.

  "You said some guys were after you—following you."

  "I don't know if it's one guy or two. If it's two, they look just alike—big guys with a white streak in the hair. Skyler says they're from the island. It sounds like they're some kind of enforcers. I saw them on the subway. I tell you, something about them makes my blood run cold."

  Jude went to put the cigarette out in the ashtray, but saw that it was filled with coins and some kind of tablets.

  "Zantac," said Raymond. "For my stomach ulcer. Days like this, I need it. Let's go outside."

  They climbed the stairs and walked to the open deck at the stern. It was a magnificent night filled with lights—the blinking lights of stars, the warm glow of cabin lights on yachts and tugboats in the harbor, the tiny pinpoint lights in the skyline rising up behind like a cartoon cutout. The tiara on the Statue of Liberty glowed green.

  "Raymond," said Jude. "I need to know what's going on. What can you tell me?"

  "Not much."

  Raymond was not looking at him, just talking off into the night.

  "It's sketchy," he said. "There's a group, I don't even know the name—the name seems to keep changing. It started sometime in the sixties, medical researchers and doctors, a bunch of smart kids. Most of them were connected to Johns Hopkins, Harvard and schools around Boston, N.I.H. They centered on a brilliant researcher, one of these incredible charismatic types. You know what I mean—once you meet them and you fall under their spell, you're mesmerized. You're convinced they can do anything and that they have the keys to the universe and you're willing to give up everything and follow them anywhere.

  "This guy got in some kind of trouble at some medical school. We don't know what exactly—the records are missing, which is typical of this group, by the way, it covers its tracks. We don't even know the guy's name. Anyway, he was doing some pretty far-out research, stuff involving longevity or gene mapping or molecular biology. I don't know, but apparently he was pushing the boundaries with his experiments and ran afoul of some regulations that try to control all of this, and he either got the boot or picked up his tent and moved on. And a bunch of medical people moved with him. They ended up in Arizona for a while, and got tied in with some big-money people, mostly in California. In particular, one billionaire, a guy called Samuel Billington. He had it all, but apparently didn't want to lose it to the grave—one of those eccentric types who think they're above everything, they should even be above the laws of physics. So he bankrolled them sometime in the mid-seventies before he died. A lot of good they did him."

  Raymond fell silent. Jude thought he was just pausing, but it seemed that he had come to the end of what he wanted to say.

  "And then what?"

  "Not much to say. The trail goes cold."

  "It goes cold? You mean it just stops?"

  "Not so much that. There was no one to really follow it. It wasn't a high priority."

  "You say you don't even know the guy's name?"

  "No. We know a name he uses later—Rincon. We assume it's an alias. There are no medical school records anywhere under that name."

  "But the island—you know where it is, what goes on there?"

  Raymond shrugged. "It's not really an active file. There're a lot of these groups around, cults of all kinds. There's no reason for an active investigation. We've got no indication anyone's breaking any laws."

  "But those guys, the Orderlies..."

  "A couple of guys on a subway. Got to do better than that."

  "Raymond, for Christ's sake. Skyler looks just like me. But he's younger than me."

  "Yeah, I know all about the tests."

  Jude was surprised by this, but kept it to himself.

  "What does that tell you?" he asked.

  "What's it tell you?"

  Jude was frustrated by his evasions.

  "Somebody made him, for God's sake. He's a clone."

  Raymond didn't blink an eye.

  "And I know you know that. And I know you wanted me to figure it out. Why else would you have given me the ID on the judge? You wanted me to make the connection."

  "Don't be crazy. How could I know that your guy would have some kind of tattoo?"

  But Jude knew that he was close to the mark.

  "You want me involved, right? You want me to do your work for you—the rabbit that gets the dogs running."

  Raymond straightened up and looked toward the bow.

  "Listen," he said. "We don't have much time left. Here's what we've got to do. You tell me where your guy—what's his name, Skyler?—you tell me where he is and maybe at least we can put him under some kind of protection. Make sure nothing happens to him."

  "No, I can't do that."

  Raymond shot him a hard look. "So you really don't trust me. After all this time, all we've been through, you really don't trust me."

  "It's not that, Raymond. It's for his sake. The less people know about him, the better."

  Jude could tell Raymond was not buying it. But Raymond didn't leave any doubt.

  "Don't bullshit me," he said.

  "Sorry. I've got to do what I think right."

  Raymond looked over his shoulder again. "I see we're there," he said in a tone with a hard edge. He seemed to be trying to convey the sense of just how wrong Jude was. "I gotta run."

  He turned to go, but Jude grabbed him by the arm.

  "Raymond, c'mon. This is my life we're talking about here. I need something to go on. I need some help."

  Raymond shook his hand off. His voice dropped low. "I can't. I don't really have anything to tell you. You're in the shit. You've grabbed a monster by the tail. You don't know what kind of monster it is or how dangerous it is or how big it is or how sharp its teeth are. But you should know this—be careful, be very careful. Act wisely. Think every move through. And don't trust anyone. Anyone—no matter how close."

  Then he went below. Jude watched the line of cars pull out and drive off onto Staten Island, and then he waited fifteen minutes for the return trip to Manhattan. All the way back across the harbor, leaning on the railing that was rocking softly with the boat's movements, he thought about what Raymond had said and felt angry all over again.

  ¨

  Jude called the clerk on the Metro desk and said that he would be out for a few days, maybe longer. The clerk asked him what was wrong, and when
he said he had come down with a cold or possibly the flu, he knew he didn't sound sick. Hanging up, he was convinced the clerk's "get well soon" was sarcastic. Screw it. He had bigger things to worry about.

  He packed quickly for himself and Skyler, throwing a couple of shirts and pants into a bag, and drove across town to Tizzie's place, where Skyler had been staying after refusing to return to the room on Astor Place. The two of them were waiting on the front stoop, sunning themselves as if they hadn't a care in the world. What an incongruous sight, Jude thought, as he pulled up. Tizzie waved and stood up reluctantly and reached with her arms way above her head and stretched, arching her back. She was wearing khaki shorts and a blue workshirt tied at the midriff. Coming upon her unexpectedly like that, Jude was struck by her beauty. He got out and tossed her the keys. She opened the trunk, tossed in her small duffel bag, and plopped down in the front seat. When he turned on the ignition, she promptly spun the radio dial until she found some Mozart. Skyler got in the back, and Jude drove off.

  He went down Eleventh Avenue and took the Lincoln Tunnel, reflexively checking in the rearview mirror to see if a familiar car was on their tail. Leaving the tunnel and climbing the winding ramp and then cruising the elevated highway through the New Jersey meadowlands, Jude felt better. The city was dropping away behind them. He looked at Tizzie, who smiled, and he realized that it was the first smile he had seen from her in a long time. She had been distant and peculiar since this whole thing began.

  "It's good to get away" he said. "Arizona, here we come."

  "Three people in search of a deep, dark secret," she said.

  Jude peered in the rearview mirror at Skyler, who was gazing out the window at the oil refineries, looking preoccupied and worried.

  "C'mon, Skyler. Cheer up. If you behave yourself, maybe I'll take you to see the Grand Canyon."

  Skyler caught his eye in the mirror, and by way of response he gave a half smile. Jude felt a small but familiar emotional swell rise up within himself, the desire to take care of Skyler and protect him and make sure that no harm came to him. He was like a younger brother.

  ¨