The Book of Adam: Autobiography of the First Human Clone

  I considered incapacitating him with chloroform or slipping him a Mickey, but I knew they would leave traces in the body and the district attorney would realize that foul play was afoot. But there was one drug that wouldn’t cause suspicion. He already used it.

  Lyle Gardener was an insomniac. Not too surprising; any man plotting to be a god would have a lot on his mind at night. Not liking to swallow pills in his old age, he’d taken to a liquid “sleep drink” that he always poured into a glass of wine before retiring.

  That made it all too easy for me. I just had to figure out the correct quantity to make him sleep so soundly I could put the gun in his hand and force his finger to pull the trigger without waking him. Too little and he would wake up and kill me. Too much and his heart would go into cardiac arrest, triggering an alarm that would send emergency vehicles to his aid. If they successfully revived him, he might conclude that I was behind the overdose.

  In which case he would kill me.

  I researched his sleep drink and how large of a dose he was already giving himself, and guestimated an amount that would knock him out more than usual but not kill him. I felt about ninety percent confident that I’d guestimated correctly. If I’d learned anything from murder mysteries, there was no such thing as a perfect murder. Ninety percent would have to be an acceptable risk.

  My second concern was to avoid the nights he didn’t use his sleep drink. About once a week, even when we stayed at the cabin, he would welcome a female guest late at night, after Lily and I were put to bed. I eventually realized they were high-price call girls. I caught glimpses of some of them from my bedroom window as they approached the front door. Most of them were tall, beautiful blondes whose faces and hairstyles were reminiscent of an adult Lily. Some resembled my mother, but I tried not to think about that.

  I had to slip the extra sleeping potion into his wine on a night he wasn’t having visitors, and obviously I had to do it when he wouldn’t see me.

  On December 20, the third anniversary of my mom’s death, it all came clear. I would kill Lyle on Christmas Eve.

  *

  I could hardly contain my excitement. For one thing, I was confident he wouldn’t have any guests on Christmas Eve. He wouldn’t want a restless Lily to hear someone enter and think Santa Claus had arrived.

  Each year we left milk and chocolate chip cookies for Santa Claus. Though I was too old for such a thing, it still made Lily’s eyes brighten at bedtime. Lyle would drink the milk and eat the cookies after his daughter was asleep, even though he hated milk. Drinking it was the most unselfish thing I’d ever known Lyle to do, especially considering that he did it without anyone supposedly knowing that he was doing this charitable act. He could just as easily have dumped it down the sink. But it complicated my plan. He would taste the drug in the milk.

  My solution was to convince him to do away with this charmingly unselfish “milk” tradition. Instead of leaving milk for Santa like everyone else did, I’d suggest that we leave him a glass of wine.

  The only stumbling block I could foresee was Lily. If she found the whole wine idea offensive, Lyle wouldn’t do it. But on Christmas Eve, to my delight, Lily clapped her hands and laughed at the plan, apparently thrilled at the idea that our family had a special relationship with Santa, and could give him the drink he really wanted.

  “Well, I guess it’s settled then,” said Lyle to the happy girl on his knee. “I’ll break out the best bottle of wine I have, and maybe Santa will be extra generous next year.”

  Lily’s eyes got big for a moment, but then she frowned. “You can’t bribe Santa Claus, Daddy!”

  Lyle and I burst out laughing – real laughter. I don’t think either of us had known that Lily was aware of what a bribe was. It looked like kindergarten was teaching her well.

  “You’re right, sweet pea. Daddy was just kidding,” he responded, and shot me a knowing wink. It made me feel sick to my stomach, but I managed to keep grinning.

  We put the glass of wine and the plate of cookies out near the fireplace, and then Lyle took Lily upstairs to get her ready for bed. As soon as they were gone, I put on my gloves and measured out some of his sleeping potion using a small vial from the chemistry set Lyle had given me last year – another blatant encouragement to follow in my c-father’s footsteps, but one that now might come back to bite him. I carefully poured the measured amount into the red wine. Rinsing out the vial in the kitchen, I began imagining the courtroom drama that would unfold. The hearing for my mom’s attempted murder six years ago gave my imagination plenty to work with. I could picture the attorney asking me about the events of that night, and whether I had any idea that my great-grandfather was distraught.

  “No at all,” I’d respond. “I thought we all went to bed happy. It was Christmas!”

  “Of course,” my imagined attorney responded genially. “Can you describe what happened after you went to bed on Christmas Eve?”

  “I woke up to a loud bang and ran down the stairs. I called out for my great-grandpa, but no one answered, so I went into his bedroom.”

  “And what did you see there?”

  I would shake my head in mock horror.

  “Steady son,” the attorney would say, “I know this is hard.”

  I would gulp. “I saw my Great-Grandpa Lyle. Dead.”

  “Was there anybody else in the room when you arrived?”

  “No. Not that I saw.”

  “And where was the gun?”

  “It had fallen to the floor next to his hand.”

  “That’s all, son,” would be the attorney’s tender reply as he gently helped me down from the witness stand.

  Then the experts would begin to testify.

  “Due to the fingerprint sensors, could anyone other than Lyle Gardener have fired that gun?”

  “Absolutely not. And, in fact, tests proved that he did indeed fire the weapon himself.”

  Finally the doctor who performed the autopsy would come to the stand.

  “Did your autopsy reveal any hint of foul play?”

  “Not at all. The only kind of drug we found in his system was from the medicine he always used for his insomnia. We found traces of that in a wine glass near the fireplace with Lyle Gardener’s fingerprints and saliva on it. In my opinion, this could be nothing but suicide.”

  *

  It seemed foolproof. I smiled as I dried off the vial and put it in my pocket.

  Lyle was coming down the stairs as I was on my way to my room.

  “Good night,” I said as innocently as I could.

  “Come with me for a second, Adam.”

  He sounded friendly, but my heart leapt into my throat. Somehow he knew. Did he have secret cameras in the living room and kitchen? I followed him back down to the living room, searching to make some excuse, but with a growing dread that Lyle was about to kill me. I glanced at the front door. Should I make a run for it? But where would I go? It was more than a mile to the nearest neighbor. I’d freeze to death trying to hide in the mountains. I was trapped.

  He led me to the fireplace and turned, smiling and holding out a cookie.

  “Santa won’t miss one cookie,” he said.

  I forced a smile. “Thank you.” Was it poisoned?

  “Thank you for the great suggestion. Santa will sleep more happily tonight.”

  I nodded.

  He picked up the wine and cookies and led me into the kitchen. There he added his regular dose to the wine and poured me a glass of milk, and we ate and drank together. Lyle asked me about my studies and talked about Christmases with my c-father at the cabin. I watched every time he took a swig of wine. He didn’t seem to notice anything special about the drink, and seemed oblivious to my intense interest in his drinking of it.

  “I guess we better get to bed before Santa comes,” Lyle said, rubbing his eyes after the wine and the milk and the cookies had disappeared.

  I agreed. The cookies didn’t seem to be poisoned, and his wine was already taking eff
ect. I’d been worrying for nothing. Lyle wasn’t on to me after all.

  Table of Contents

  22

  By my calculations I had to wait two to three hours for Lyle to be in his deepest sleep. I lay in bed, going over the plot again and again until the monotony began to make my eyes feel heavy. I glanced at the clock. Only thirty minutes had gone by. With my adrenaline up, I hadn’t imagined staying awake would be a problem. I went over the plan again, but felt myself slipping into sleep. I set the alarm on my cell for midnight just in case.

  The next thing I knew my clock read 3:00 A.M., and I was late. Did my alarm ever wake me? I couldn’t remember. I felt flustered and stressed, my mind in a fog. I ran down the stairs and entered Lyle’s bedroom. He was breathing gently and steadily.

  I wasn’t. I put my gloves on and pulled the little golden key out of its hiding spot in the mattress. The key fit into the lock. As I turned the key and opened the door, it felt like I was watching myself do it from above rather than doing it myself. I saw myself crouched, staring at the gun in the drawer. Was I having second thoughts? Would I actually be able to fire a gun at a sleeping man’s head? Even Lyle’s? I began moving again, taking the gun out and slipping out the fake bottom to reveal the magazine. I slipped it into the handgrip, removed the safety, and stood up to face him.

  There I hesitated again. I needed to put the gun in Lyle’s hand. But what if he woke up? He couldn’t – not with all the drugs in his system. But what if he did? They’d been wearing off for two or three hours. He would have the gun in his hand. He would kill me right then. I could be dead five seconds from now.

  With that same detachment from before, I saw myself place the gun into the palm of Lyle’s hand; carefully wrapping his warm fingers around the grip and making sure his fingertips fell on the sensors. He didn’t stir.

  I turned the gun towards Lyle’s head. I was panting hard, my blood pounding in my temples. There was nothing to stop me now. I would kill the almighty Lyle who had intimidated me since my earliest memories and finally avenge my mother. If I could just bring myself to do it.

  But my stomach clenched. Something was wrong. Something about Lyle being so deeply unconscious that he let me put a gun in his hand and point it at his head without stirring. The cross-examination of the autopsy began playing in my head, the prosecutor asking the autopsy doctor about the drugs in Lyle’s system.

  “Did you notice anything unusual about the sleeping agent in Mr. Gardener’s system?”

  “Well,” began the doctor. “It seemed unusually high. Like maybe he was trying to kill himself with a drug overdose before he decided to shoot himself.”

  “But your tests revealed that he had consumed the drug approximately five hours before the shooting. Could Lyle Gardener have been awake five hours following the overdose on his sleep drink?”

  The doctor was confused for a moment. “Why no,” he said, “he couldn’t.”

  “So someone else must have forced him to pull the trigger while he slept.”

  “Yes, that’s the only way.”

  “And who would have done something like that?” sneered the prosecutor, turning towards the audience and directing everyone’s attention at me.

  The doctor stood up and pointed in the same direction. “It must have been the clone!”

  I had the gun ready to go. All I had to do was force his finger to pull back on the trigger. But would I be killing myself as well? Did I just now realize a gaping hole that would scuttle my scheme and leave me as the obvious murderer? How could I have missed such a conspicuous problem? If only I’d been born a little later and given enhanced intelligence.

  Something in the room caught the periphery of my vision, and I looked up to see my image reflected in Lyle’s bedroom mirror. Then it wasn’t me anymore, but Adam-1 in his grave, exactly like the vision in my nightmares. He began banging furiously on the mirror, trying to stop me. But was he trying to stop me for Lyle’s sake or for my sake – or for his own sake?

  The gun was wrenched out of my hand and pointed at me. I cried out in shock and fright. Lyle was glowering at me, completely awake, aiming the gun at my forehead.

  “Did you really think I’d let you kill me!” he bellowed, standing up and pushing me to the floor. He grabbed my shoulder with his free hand and began shaking me against the floor. “You’re dead, Adam, and you’ll never wake up!” He repeated the last two words, “Wake up! Adam, wake up.”

  I woke up with a start. Lyle was looming over me, but not with a gun. He was only gently shaking me awake. The light of dawn was filtering through my bedroom curtain. It was morning, and I’d slept through the opportunity to kill him.

  “There you are, sleepy head,” Lyle said. “Come on, we’re going to open the presents.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be right there.” My head was so hazy I don’t know if I actually managed to speak out loud.

  “We’ll be waiting,” he replied merrily enough, as if I hadn’t just now tried to kill him in my dream.

  After he left the room, I checked my cell’s alarm. It had indeed been set for midnight. I must have slept straight through it.

  I made my way down to the living room. He was seated in his leather armchair. Lily-2 sat by her mountain of gifts.

  “Yea!” she cried. I tried to look equally enthusiastic as Lily bounced up and handed me a present with a card attached. “Daddy said we should open these first,” she said, holding up a small box and card for herself.

  “You first,” I said before she exploded from pent-up excitement.

  She didn’t argue as she ripped open her Christmas card and scanned it.

  “From before?” she asked Lyle, her eyes lighting up even more.

  He nodded and smiled. “It was Adam’s wedding present to you. You were holding it the night you transitioned,” he said, a euphemism for Lily-1’s suicide.

  She tore away the wrapping paper from a little white box and opened it. With a great deal of ceremony, for a five year old, Lily-2 lifted a gold chain from the box that led to a locket attached at the end. She opened it up and gazed at the tiny, oval photos.

  “Look, Adam! It’s us!” She showed them to me. Portraits of our clone-parents right before they were married.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “Now open yours!”

  I opened the envelope and took out the Christmas card. Inside was a short note in Lyle’s handwriting.

  Deep sleep last night?

  My breath left me. He nodded at me, half-grinning around his pipe.

  “Now open the present.”

  Tears flooded my eyes as I forced my hands to unwrap the heavy present. Inside was a wooden box, and inside the box was some wadded-up paper. Each piece of paper had a picture of my murdered mother printed on it. It was a still shot from the holovideo he had sent on the 911 call as I hugged her limp body. A close-up. Only her lifeless face and eyes were visible over a tuft of my hair.

  I took the wads out one at a time, slowly unraveling each one, not stopping until I saw what lay at the bottom.

  “Well, what is it?” Lily asked.

  My fingers touched the cold steel of a pistol. It was identical to the one in his nightstand, but for one difference. This one didn’t have fingerprint sensors.

  How stupid I had been. It was clear now. Of course Lyle had the house monitored by hidden cameras. He also tracked my web use. He had pieced it all together, and had seen my wine-for-Santa Claus ploy for exactly what it was. He had turned it around and spiked the milk last night with some drug.

  “It’s a toy gun,” Lyle lied, answering the desperate Lily for me. “And it’s loaded.”

  I met Lyle’s confident, challenging eyes.

  “Would you like to use it, Adam?”

  My focus dropped back down to the gun. Was he bluffing about it being loaded or really giving me a chance to kill him? I pictured myself grabbing the gun and firing again and again into his evil body, Lily-2 screaming in horror as her fath
er’s blood splattered over her festively wrapped presents. Feeling the climactic rush and release flow through my body. Release from so much anger, pain, humiliation, and loss. I stared at one of the unraveled pictures of my dead mother.

  “Adam?” he persisted.

  I’ll never know if the gun was loaded or not. I was too frightened to call his bluff. I slammed the box lid down and ran up to my room in shame as Lily cried out for me to come back. I buried my face into my pillow and whispered the same three words again and again:

  “I’m sorry Mom, I’m sorry Mom, I’m sorry Mom…”

  ***

  The next few months were a time of steady fear. I knew then I couldn’t beat Lyle and lived only at his mercy. I did everything I was told without question, never daring to meet the old man’s eyes. And he looked down on me with satisfaction. My uncontested submission might have put him at ease, but my defeated capitulation gave him deep pleasure.

  In late April, Lyle had a massive stroke. He regained consciousness on April 29 and the doctors predicted that he’d survive with some impairment. But during the early morning of April 30, 2045, Lyle Gardener was pronounced dead.

  Relief filled me at the announcement, followed by despair that I’d wallowed in fear and cowardice instead of avenging my mother’s death. The power had been in my grasp, but my Hamlet-esque inaction had allowed my mother’s murder to go unpunished, and now the opportunity for vengeance was forever gone.

  As Lyle’s casket was lowered in the ground, and I held a crying Lily in my arms, I realized that I would never be able to forgive myself for that.

  I vowed to never run away again.

  Table of Contents

  Part II

  The Book of Lily

  Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

  – Mark Twain

  23

  It was the winter of 2022 when Lyle invited Adam-1 to “discuss their futures.” He had recently purchased the cabin for Adam and Lily, set among giant redwoods in a section of Sequoia National Park being sold off by the government in the form of 99-year leases for expensive, secluded mountain getaways. The lease was expensive, but the cabin was as rustic as it looked – a two-story, old-time pile of logs featuring four small bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen connected to a large living room via an open doorway, and a perennial smell of pine inside. It was not plugged into the grid, and had its own bank of solar cells for heating water, running the refrigerator, and offering electricity if you wanted to connect to the web. The wood-burning stove and kerosene lamps had no need of such modern eccentricities. Nor did the grandfather clock ticking thunderously away in the living room – the one Adam had first seen and heard in Lyle’s office. Lyle had made it his wedding present to Lily, a family tradition dating back to Lyle’s great-grandfather, a clockmaker.