Bloodchild and Other Stories

  I majored in biology. Non-DGDs say something about our disease makes us good at the sciences—genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry.… That something was terror. Terror and a kind of driving hopelessness. Some of us went bad and became destructive before we had to—yes, we did produce more than our share of criminals. And some of us went good—spectacularly—and made scientific and medical history. These last kept the doors at least partly open for the rest of us. They made discoveries in genetics, found cures for a couple of rare diseases, made advances against other diseases that weren’t so rare—including, ironically, some forms of cancer. But they’d found nothing to help themselves. There had been nothing since the latest improvements in the diet, and those came just before I was born. They, like the original diet, gave more DGDs the courage to have children. They were supposed to do for DGDs what insulin had done for diabetics—give us a normal or nearly normal life span. Maybe they had worked for someone somewhere. They hadn’t worked for anyone I knew.

  Biology school was a pain in the usual ways. I didn’t eat in public anymore, didn’t like the way people stared at my biscuits—cleverly dubbed “dog biscuits” in every school I’d ever attended. You’d think university students would be more creative. I didn’t like the way people edged away from me when they caught sight of my emblem. I’d begun wearing it on a chain around my neck and putting it down inside my blouse, but people managed to notice it anyway. People who don’t eat in public, who drink nothing more interesting than water, who smoke nothing at all—people like that are suspicious. Or rather, they make others suspicious. Sooner or later, one of those others, tinding my fingers and wrists bare, would fake an interest in my chain. That would be that. I couldn’t hide the emblem in my purse. If anything happened to me, medical people had to see it in time to avoid giving me the medications they might use on a normal person. It isn’t just ordinary food we have to avoid, but about a quarter of a Physicians’ Desk Reference of widely used drugs. Every now and then there are news stories about people who stopped carrying their emblems—probably trying to pass as normal. Then they have an accident. By the time anyone realizes there is anything wrong, it’s too late. So I wore my emblem. And one way or another, people got a look at it or got the word from someone who had. “She is!” Yeah.

  At the beginning of my third year, four other DGDs and I decided to rent a house together. We’d all had enough of being lepers twenty-four hours a day. There was an English major. He wanted to be a writer and tell our story from the inside—which had only been done thirty or forty times before. There was a special-education major who hoped the handicapped would accept her more readily than the able-bodied, a premed who planned to go into research, and a chemistry major who didn’t really know what she wanted to do.

  Two men and three women. All we had in common was our disease, plus a weird combination of stubborn intensity about whatever we happened to be doing and hopeless cynicism about everything else. Healthy people say no one can concentrate like a DGD. Healthy people have all the time in the world for stupid generalizations and short attention spans.

  We did our work, came up for air now and then, ate our biscuits, and attended classes. Our only problem was house-cleaning. We worked out a schedule of who would clean what when, who would deal with the yard, whatever. We all agreed on it; then, except for me, everyone seemed to forget about it. I found myself going around reminding people to vacuum, clean the bathroom, mow the lawn.… I figured they’d all hate me in no time, but I wasn’t going to be their maid, and I wasn’t going to live in filth. Nobody complained. Nobody even seemed annoyed. They just came up out of their academic daze, cleaned, mopped, mowed, and went back to it. I got into the habit of running around in the evening reminding people. It didn’t bother me if it didn’t bother them.

  “How’d you get to be housemother?” a visiting DGD asked.

  I shrugged. “Who cares? The house works.” It did. It worked so well that this new guy wanted to move in. He was a friend of one of the others, and another premed. Not bad looking.

  “So do I get in or don’t I?” he asked.

  “As far as I’m concerned, you do,” I said. I did what his friend should have done—introduced him around, then, after he left, talked to the others to make sure nobody had any real objections. He seemed to fit right in. He forgot to clean the toilet or mow the lawn, just like the others. His name was Alan Chi. I thought Chi was a Chinese name, and I wondered. But he told me his father was Nigerian and that in Ibo the word meant a kind of guardian angel or personal God. He said his own personal God hadn’t been looking out for him very well to let him be born to two DGD parents. Him too.

  I don’t think it was much more than that similarity that drew us together at first. Sure, I liked the way he looked, but I was used to liking someone’s looks and having him run like hell when he found out what I was. It took me a while to get used to the fact that Alan wasn’t going anywhere.

  I told him about my visit to the DGD ward when I was fifteen—and my suicide attempt afterward. I had never told anyone else. I was surprised at how relieved it made me feel to tell him. And somehow his reaction didn’t surprise me.

  “Why didn’t you try again?” he asked. We were alone in the living room.

  “At first, because of my parents,” I said. “My father in particular. I couldn’t do that to him again.”

  “And after him?”

  “Fear. Inertia.”

  He nodded. “When I do it, there’ll be no half measures. No being rescued, no waking up in a hospital later.”

  “You mean to do it?”

  “The day I realize I’ve started to drift. Thank God we get some warning.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Yes, we do. I’ve done a lot of reading. Even talked to a couple of doctors. Don’t believe the rumors non-DGDs invent.”

  I looked away, stared into the scarred, empty fireplace. I told him exactly how my father had died—something else I’d never voluntarily told anyone.

  He sighed. “Jesus!”

  We looked at each other.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He extended a dark, square hand, and I took it and moved closer to him. He was a dark, square man—my height, half again my weight, and none of it fat. He was so bitter sometimes, he scared me.

  “My mother started to drift when I was three,” he said. “My father only lasted a few months longer. I heard he died a couple of years after he went into the hospital. If the two of them had had any sense, they would have had me aborted the minute my mother realized she was pregnant. But she wanted a kid no matter what. And she was Catholic.” He shook his head. “Hell, they should pass a law to sterilize the lot of us.”

  “They?” I said.

  “You want kids?”

  “No, but—”

  “More like us to wind up chewing their fingers off in some DGD ward.”

  “I don’t want kids, but I don’t want someone else telling me I can’t have any.”

  He stared at me until I began to feel stupid and defensive. I moved away from him.

  “Do you want someone else telling you what to do with your body?” I asked.

  “No need,” he said. “I had that taken care of as soon as I was old enough.”

  This left me staring. I’d thought about sterilization. What DGD hasn’t? But I didn’t know anyone else our age who had actually gone through with it. That would be like killing part of yourself—even though it wasn’t a part you intended to use. Killing part of yourself when so much of you was already dead.

  “The damned disease could be wiped out in one generation,” he said, “but people are still animals when it comes to breeding. Still following mindless urges, like dogs and cats.”

  My impulse was to get up and go away, leave him to wallow in his bitterness and depression alone. But I stayed. He seemed to want to live even less than I did. I wondered how he’d made it this far.
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  “Are you looking forward to doing research?” I probed. “Do you believe you’ll be able to—”

  “No.”

  I blinked. The word was as cold and dead a sound as I’d ever heard.

  “I don’t believe in anything,” he said.

  I took him to bed. He was the only other double DGD I had ever met, and if nobody did anything for him, he wouldn’t last much longer. I couldn’t just let him slip away. For a while, maybe we could be each other’s reasons for staying alive.

  He was a good student—for the same reason I was. And he seemed to shed some of his bitterness as time passed. Being around him helped me understand why, against all sanity, two DGDs would lock in on each other and start talking about marriage. Who else would have us?

  We probably wouldn’t last very long, anyway. These days, most DGDs make it to forty, at least. But then, most of them don’t have two DGD parents. As bright as Alan was, he might not get into medical school because of his double inheritance. No one would tell him his bad genes were keeping him out, of course, but we both knew what his chances were. Better to train doctors who were likely to live long enough to put their training to use.

  Alan’s mother had been sent to Dilg. He hadn’t seen her or been able to get any information about her from his grandparents while he was at home. By the time he left for college, he’d stopped asking questions. Maybe it was hearing about my parents that made him start again. I was with him when he called Dilg. Until that moment, he hadn’t even known whether his mother was still alive. Surprisingly, she was.

  “Dilg must be good,” I said when he hung up. “People don’t usually … I mean …”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “People don’t usually live long once they’re out of control. Dilg is different.” We had gone to my room, where he turned a chair backward and sat down. “Dilg is what the others ought to be, if you can believe the literature.”

  “Dilg is a giant DGD ward,” I said. “It’s richer—probably better at sucking in the donations—and it’s run by people who can expect to become patients eventually. Apart from that, what’s different?”

  “I’ve read about it,” he said. “So should you. They’ve got some new treatment. They don’t just shut people away to die the way the others do.”

  “What else is there to do with them? With us.”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like they have some kind of … sheltered workshop. They’ve got patients doing things.”

  “A new drug to control the self-destructiveness?”

  “I don’t think so. We would have heard about that.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “I’m going up to find out. Will you come with me?”

  “You’re going up to see your mother.”

  He took a ragged breath. “Yeah. Will you come with me?”

  I went to one of my windows and stared out at the weeds. We let them thrive in the backyard. In the front we mowed them, along with the few patches of grass.

  “I told you my DGD-ward experience.”

  “You’re not fifteen now. And Dilg isn’t some zoo of a ward.”

  “It’s got to be, no matter what they tell the public. And I’m not sure I can stand it.”

  He got up, came to stand next to me. “Will you try?”

  I didn’t say anything. I focused on our reflections in the window glass—the two of us together. It looked right, felt right. He put his arm around me, and I leaned back against him. Our being together had been as good for me as it seemed to have been for him. It had given me something to go on besides inertia and fear. I knew I would go with him. It felt like the right thing to do.

  “I can’t say how I’ll act when we get there,” I said.

  “I can’t say how I’ll act, either,” he admitted. “Especially … when I see her.”

  He made the appointment for the next Saturday afternoon. You make appointments to go to Dilg unless you’re a government inspector of some kind. That is the custom, and Dilg gets away with it.

  We left L.A. in the rain early Saturday morning. Rain followed us off and on up the coast as far as Santa Barbara. Dilg was hidden away in the hills not far from San Jose. We could have reached it faster by driving up I-5, but neither of us were in the mood for all that bleakness. As it was, we arrived at one P.M. to be met by two armed gate guards. One of these phoned the main building and verified our appointment. Then the other took the wheel from Alan.

  “Sorry,” he said. “But no one is permitted inside without an escort. We’ll meet your guide at the garage.”

  None of this surprised me. Dilg is a place where not only the patients but much of the staff has DGD. A maximum security prison wouldn’t have been as potentially dangerous. On the other hand, I’d never heard of anyone getting chewed up here. Hospitals and rest homes had accidents. Dilg didn’t. It was beautiful—an old estate. One that didn’t make sense in these days of high taxes. It had been owned by the Dilg family. Oil, chemicals, pharmaceuticals. Ironically, they had even owned part of the late, unlamented Hedeon Laboratories. They’d had a briefly profitable interest in Hedeonco: the magic bullet, the cure for a large percentage of the world’s cancer and a number of serious viral diseases—and the cause of Duryea-Gode disease. If one of your parents was treated with Hedeonco and you were conceived after the treatments, you had DGD. If you had kids, you passed it on to them. Not everyone was equally affected. They didn’t all commit suicide or murder, but they all mutilated themselves to some degree if they could. And they all drifted—went off into a world of their own and stopped responding to their surroundings.

  Anyway, the only Dilg son of his generation had had his life saved by Hedeonco. Then he had watched four of his children die before Doctors Kenneth Duryea and Jan Gode came up with a decent understanding of the problem and a partial solution: the diet. They gave Richard Dilg a way of keeping his next two children alive. He gave the big, cumbersome estate over to the care of DGD patients.

  So the main building was an elaborate old mansion. There were other, newer buildings, more like guest houses than institutional buildings. And there were wooded hills all around. Nice country. Green. The ocean wasn’t far away. There was an old garage and a small parking lot. Waiting in the lot was a tall, old woman. Our guard pulled up near her, let us out, then parked the car in the half-empty garage.

  “Hello,” the woman said, extending her hand. “I’m Beatrice Alcantara.” The hand was cool and dry and startlingly strong. I thought the woman was DGD, but her age threw me. She appeared to be about sixty, and I had never seen a DGD that old. I wasn’t sure why I thought she was DGD. If she was, she must have been an experimental model—one of the first to survive.

  “Is it Doctor or Ms.?” Alan asked.

  “It’s Beatrice,” she said. “I am a doctor, but we don’t use titles much here.”

  I glanced at Alan, was surprised to see him smiling at her. He tended to go a long time between smiles. I looked at Beatrice and couldn’t see anything to smile about. As we introduced ourselves, I realized I didn’t like her. I couldn’t see any reason for that either, but my feelings were my feelings. I didn’t like her.

  “I assume neither of you have been here before,” she said, smiling down at us. She was at least six feet tall, and straight.

  We shook our heads. “Let’s go in the front way, then. I want to prepare you for what we do here. I don’t want you to believe you’ve come to a hospital.”

  I frowned at her, wondering what else there was to believe. Dilg was called a retreat, but what difference did names make?

  The house close up looked like one of the old-style public buildings—massive, baroque front with a single domed tower reaching three stories above the three-story house. Wings of the house stretched for some distance to the right and left of the tower, then cornered and stretched back twice as far. The front doors were huge—one set of wrought iron and one of heavy wood. Neither appeared to be locked. Beatrice pulled open the iron door, pushed
the wooden one, and gestured us in.

  Inside, the house was an art museum—huge, high ceilinged, tile floored. There were marble columns and niches in which sculptures stood or paintings hung. There were other sculptures displayed around the rooms. At one end of the rooms there was a broad staircase leading up to a gallery that went around the rooms. There more art was displayed. “All this was made here,” Beatrice said. “Some of it is even sold from here. Most goes to galleries in the Bay Area or down around L.A. Our only problem is turning out too much of it.”

  “You mean the patients do this?” I asked.

  The old woman nodded. “This and much more. Our people work instead of tearing at themselves or staring into space. One of them invented the p.v. locks that protect this place. Though I almost wish he hadn’t. It’s gotten us more government attention than we like.”

  “What kind of locks?” I asked.

  “Sorry. Palmprint-voiceprint. The first and the best. We have the patent.” She looked at Alan. “Would you like to see what your mother does?”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re telling us out-of-control DGDs create art and invent things?”

  “And that lock,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. I didn’t even see a lock.”

  “The lock is new,” she said. “There have been a few news stories about it. It’s not the kind of thing most people would buy for their homes. Too expensive. So it’s of limited interest. People tend to look at what’s done at Dilg in the way they look at the efforts of idiots savants. Interesting, incomprehensible, but not really important. Those likely to be interested in the lock and able to afford it know about it.” She took a deep breath, faced Alan again. “Oh, yes, DGDs create things. At least they do here.”

  “Out-of-control DGDs.”

  “Yes.”

  “I expected to find them weaving baskets or something—at best. I know what DGD wards are like.”