The Book of Adam: Autobiography of the First Human Clone

  ***

  Nine days later we went out to Evelyn’s grave for what would have been her fiftieth birthday. Hannah didn’t join us. Visiting her daughter’s grave bothered her too much.

  We stood there for a long time, seldom talking. The only sound was the rustling of the leaves. The wind played with Evelyn’s hair as she squinted into the wind and the setting sun, staring at the gravestone as her fingers brushed back and forth through the petals of flowers we’d brought.

  “Do you think she knows we’re here?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. The truth was, I sort of thought she did know, but my logical brain and agnostic leanings kept me from vocalizing such mystical musings.

  “Sure she does, Evie,” Cain reassured her, lightly rubbing her back.

  Her fingertips left the flowers and rested on the headstone. “Is it sad to be dead?”

  Neither Cain nor I answered that one. If Evelyn-1 answered, only her clone-child heard the response.

  “Ever since the play, I’ve been dreaming of her,” Evelyn said, her voice shaking. “She’s flying above me like in the show, but instead of lifting me up to heaven, she pushes me away.”

  I started to put my arms around her, but was hesitant to intrude.

  “Do you think she doesn’t want me?”

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and sat down beside her. “Of course she wants to be with you. But not yet.” I put my arms around her, remembering my father sending me away in my childhood dream. “Not for a long time.”

  “But she knows.”

  I kissed her hair. “She knows what?”

  “She knows…” I felt her grip tighten on my arms, “…that I’m glad I got to live.”

  I thought her relationship with my wife was one of easy harmony. It had never occurred to me that Evelyn-2 might be haunted by suppressed guilt. Shannon Smith-2 had described the same feeling once. I suspect a child whose mother dies giving birth may experience similar emotions. A guilt no one should have, but shadows them throughout their lives. My eyes glanced at Cain. He was staring at his mother’s headstone.

  “Evelyn,” I began slowly, “she would have wanted you to be grateful you’re alive. She’d only be upset if you didn’t enjoy your chance at life.”

  She leaned her head against my chest.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” I said.

  She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “What’s wrong?”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off Evelyn’s headstone. “I abandoned her.”

  Evelyn-2’s head moved away from my chest and she looked at me. “What?”

  I swallowed nervously. “In Central Park. When Lily fired. I didn’t move. I just stood there.” I covered my face. “I didn’t even squeeze her hand.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When she saw Lily with the gun, she squeezed my hand.” I felt my body start to retch as I dredged up the shameful secret of that night. A secret that Evelyn either never remembered or never mentioned, and one that I never brought up. “And I did nothing.”

  Evelyn-2 was silent.

  “And when she died in our bed, her hand was on top of mine. She’d squeezed my hand again, and again I did nothing.”

  Still Evelyn was silent. As was Cain.

  “I married her. I put her in danger. And whenever she needed me…” I shut my eyes, feeling those moments. Feeling her warm palm against mine, fingers interlaced. And then the pressure of her fingers tightening, palm pushing against mine, hoping for some response. Some reassurance. Waking to feel her limp fingers covering mine, her frightened, dilated eyes permanently open from the moment death took her, facing her death alone as I slept. “I wasn’t there.”

  Cain was staring at me with an expression I couldn’t read. If I hadn’t given him enough reasons to hate me, maybe this had done it.

  Evelyn put her arms around me and sighed. “She didn’t care about that,” Evelyn said. “But if you want, she forgives you.”

  Could Evelyn forgive me through her clone? To what extent could we act as the proxy for our dead clone-parents? Evelyn-2 saw her life as an opportunity to add to her c-mother’s existence in a positive way. And despite some guilt, she seemed at peace with that relationship.

  It occurred to me that I might be able to find a similar peace. I had fought my clone-father’s legacy since childhood. Instead of fighting, I could accept our relationship and focus on how to make the best of his legacy. My mom had told me to live as I would want to, and by so doing I’d make my clone-father happy too. It might be true, and believing it to be true would be a tremendous relief. But I wasn’t sure if that was doing right by him or being presumptuous. Would I want my clone-son to assume he knew what I had really wanted, or atone for sins when I desired no atonement, or forgive people I wanted to continue hating?

  As Evelyn-2 comforted me, I decided that was exactly what I would want. If Evelyn could forgive me from the grave, I could forgive my c-father for his faults and tackle the future as if we were on the same side, father and son. And the moment that I thought that, I felt the lightness of relief begin to ripple through every inch of my body.

  But, as much as I wanted to, I didn’t accept Evelyn’s forgiveness through her clone-daughter. I wanted to hold on to that guilt. We all do things we regret. I wanted to draw inspiration. To try to be better.

  The sun set on the cemetery, and we got up to leave. I walked up to the stone and gently rubbed it, hoping she somehow really was around. Something white caught my eye. Lying on the green cemetery lawn behind her headstone was a single lily. Had she come up here on Evelyn’s fiftieth birthday? Or had the lily been left on a nearby grave and blown across the grass? I glanced around, but Lily wasn’t there. I wondered if she had ever left Lyle and escaped the hell I’d done so little to pull her from. She would be twenty-three years old, five years after I’d accompanied my son to Lyle’s to ask Lily to come with us. Five years in which I’d done nothing. She was a grown woman now, I told myself. There were laws and restraining orders. There were a million reasons for being unable to help Lily.

  I followed Cain and Evelyn toward the car. Cain slowed his pace to walk beside me. He put his arm around my shoulders. I almost cried at that. “You okay, Dad?”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding, and then surprising us both by embracing him.

  But I wasn’t truly okay. I was shaken up, as my nightmares soon made clear.

  Most of the imagery was the same. It was nighttime in a graveyard, and I was standing over my clone-father’s grave as usual. When I looked down into the pit, the framed mirror was there, and I saw myself lying down there. The image mimicked my movements, and then beckoned me down to it. Impelled, I lowered myself into the grave and accidentally cracked the mirror. The image grabbed me through the cracks and pulled me down.

  But in the past we had always fought silently, me knocking his nose away before he pinned my hand with a shard of glass and climbed out to bury me alive. Now, Adam-1 began talking to me.

  “What have you done with my life?” he demanded, his fingers wrapped around my neck, choking me.

  I struggled to free my neck from his grasp, eventually gripping his wrists to pull his hands away. “I’ve saved us.”

  “You’ve ended us. You were supposed to live forever. Instead you turned your back on the one man who had that power.”

  I pushed him off me. “He killed your daughter!”

  We stopped fighting.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Adam-1 said. “She was his granddaughter.”

  I dropped my hands to my sides, done with the physical fight. “Lyle killed her.”

  Adam-1’s face contorted in anger and anguish, then he grabbed a shard of the mirror and pinned my hand, climbed out and left me flailing in the grave. All three of them stood above me as before. Lily frowned as Lyle and Adam began tossing dirt into the pit, slowly covering the mirror and burying me alive.

  I reached out to Lily as far as the glass al
lowed. My eyes pleading as Lily-3 had once pleaded while Lyle drove her down the street. She walked away.

  I looked to my side and saw Cain and Evelyn-2 lying next to me in the grave, their eyes open wide in that awful blank stare. I pulled out the shard that pinned my other hand and started slamming my fists into the mirror.

  “He killed your daughter! He killed your daughter! He killed your daughter!” I shouted over and over until I woke up in a cold sweat.

  Even after waking I could still hear the dirt being dumped on the lid of my mirrored coffin. I called the light on, expecting to see them all standing in my bedroom. There was no one there. I pulled my blankets from the bed, fearful of finding the bodies of Cain and Evelyn-2 lying next to me, but I was alone.

  I left the light on for the remainder of the night.

  Table of Contents

  69

  Nine months later, the holiday season rolled around. It was a time of great optimism. We were on track, or even slightly ahead of schedule, to conduct the first brain transfer into a completely artificial body on January 31. Confidence by the medical team was high.

  Evelyn had started second grade, and that December 13 she turned seven. Cain came over early to help me get the place ready for Evelyn’s birthday party. I blew the balloons up, and he twisted them into indiscernible balloon animals. By the time Hannah and Martin arrived with Evelyn, the floor was littered with blue, pink, and yellow pastel knots of balloons.

  We all shouted, “Surprise!” Evelyn blushed but smiled. She hit Cain in the shoulder with such a wallop that he almost lost his balance. He acknowledged her unexpected brutality with bemused pride, calling his “mother” out for child abuse.

  Soon Evelyn was carefully peeling open the wrapping on her presents in an effort not to tear it. The baubles inside included a couple ceramic tigers, a homnivision game that would immerse her in a land where she could interact with roaming lions, cheetahs, and other wildlife, and a book by her favorite poet, Shel Silverstein.

  “Uncle Adam?” she asked when she had unwrapped the last present.

  “Niece Evelyn?”

  “Can we watch Winter Wonderland? I want to see you and my c-mom when you guys were in second grade.”

  It struck me so hard I had to catch myself. Friday the 13th. The night of Winter Wonderland, exactly forty-three years before. Evelyn’s clone had been born on the anniversary of our first marriage. And now her clone was a second grader as we’d been. Again it seemed to me that my life was coming full circle. That it was all a death vision, and that soon I would be lying dead by my mother on the kitchen floor.

  “Can I say no to the birthday girl?” I asked, trying to erase the image from my mind.

  She cocked her head. “Well…you shouldn’t.” She smiled.

  I forced a laugh. “I’ll go get it.”

  The truth was, I wish I could have said no. I loved the fond memories of Evelyn holding my hand as I skipped/lurched beside her, and of how beautiful she looked in her little wedding dress. But it also reminded me of the night in Central Park, and the night she died.

  I watched the video while leaning against the back wall, hoping to avoid attention. But of course people looked at me when I “skipped” out on stage. Then Evelyn-2 paused the hologram and grabbed me by the hand, leading me out to stand in the positions of my younger self and her young c-mother. She hit the play button and we pantomimed the holographic images, including Evelyn yanking me back to the altar. Evelyn-2 laughed out loud as I stumbled back to her side and indicated that Parson Brown could marry us. I smiled, trying to enjoy the moment with her. But I was lost in a Valentine’s Day, the night I lost my other Evelyn.

  After all the guests left, Hannah and Martin gave Evelyn-2 her last gifts. Evelyn cried when she opened the box with Evelyn-1’s backpack.

  “Thank you, Mommy,” she whispered, and brushed away some tears as Hannah hugged her.

  The last present was a birthday letter from Evelyn-1. Letters to our clones were private, but Evelyn started sharing hers with Cain. She felt her c-mother would have wanted it that way after she learned that Cain’s clone-father had died in Evelyn’s womb.

  I don’t know what it said. But that year’s letter might have mentioned me. For one thing, Evelyn-1 was seven when we met. For another, Evelyn-2 was troubled the rest of the evening, and I suspected her mood was due to the letter.

  “Do you want to read your new Silverstein book with me?” I asked her after we had all finished our dinner.

  She frowned and didn’t look at me. “You don’t have to.”

  I was taken aback. “Hey, Evelyn. I never do it because I have to,” I said, trying to keep my voice cheery. “I do it because I like to do it. But if you’re not in the mood tonight, then we don’t have to.”

  She looked at me as if it was difficult to do, and shrugged. “Well, I guess we can.”

  We read A Light in the Attic, me reading a page and her reading one and then back again. During one of her turns she paused and looked deep in thought, using her fingers to brush her hair back behind her ears. It brought my attention to her freckles, all perfectly placed the same as her clone-mother’s. Her physical likeness was uncanny, even for clones.

  “Uncle Adam?”

  “Niece Evelyn?”

  “Do you just like me because you were married to my c-mom?”

  So that’s what was bothering her. Reading about how her c-mother remembered me in the letter, coupled with seeing the video of our marriage in Winter Wonderland, must have made her wonder whether my affection for her was the same as her affection for me, or if I was simply being nice to the clone of my wife. In my head I scoffed at the idea, but then I forced myself to wonder if it might partly be true. I looked down into Evelyn-2’s expectant and vulnerable eyes. I wasn’t very good at coming up with speeches on the spot, but I knew my answer had better be good or I could crush the heart of a beautiful little girl.

  “You never have to worry about that,” I began carefully. “I did love your clone-mother so much more than I’d ever dreamed it was possible to love anyone, and I’d love you just because you were so important to her, but that’s not why I love you.” I rested my forehead against hers. “I love you because you’re sweet, and kind, and intelligent, and creative, and you share my love for reading and writing, and because you are who you are. You’re not the same as your clone-mother, but you have some of her traits that I loved the best, and you’re different in ways that I really and truly adore.”

  She examined my face. Then she smiled, dropped the book to her lap, and wrapped her arms around me. Without another word she picked the book back up and began reading the next poem.

  Table of Contents

  70

  “So you’ll be there New Year’s Eve?” Evelyn-2 confirmed with Hannah as we gathered our coats to leave.

  We were going up to the cabin a couple days before the Christmas holiday, and would spend the week there. Hannah and Martin were going to his son’s apartment in New York for Hanukkah, which was beginning on December 23 and ending on the 30th.

  “Of course we will, sweetie,” Hannah answered, cupping Evelyn’s face in her hands and looking deep into her eyes. “And we’ll call you every day from New York.”

  As we said goodbye, she whispered in my ear. “Keep them safe.”

  This Christmas would be twenty-five years after Evelyn was shot and Cain’s clone-father killed, and when Lily-2 had killed herself. I know Hannah would have rather spent that anniversary with us, but they hadn’t seen Martin’s family in over a year.

  I nodded rigidly, not out of defensiveness but from the memories.

  But on Christmas Eve, I tried to blot such dark memories from my mind. We spent the day putting up a fresh Christmas tree that filled the room with an even stronger aroma of pine than usual, decorating it with ornaments old and new, stringing popcorn and cranberries while our favorite carols played throughout the cabin’s interior and the fire crackled in the hearth. We sang along
with the music and laughed about old times. Blue-4, spread out in front of the fire, stared into the flames. Now benefiting from canine AIS, old Pierre-3 was still with us. And despite the lack of enhanced intelligence, he had an uncanny ability to scent out his gifts and kept trying to open his Christmas presents early.

  After our traditional viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life and Scrooge, we had our first major argument of the evening. We could open one gift each or go outside and make a snowman. It had been three years since we’d enjoyed a white Christmas, so in the end I lost the argument.

  We bundled up and grabbed flashlights and essential snowman accoutrements like a carrot, gloves, and coal substitutes (a pair of sunglasses had to suffice – this was California after all).

  “You stay away from your presents,” I warned Pierre as we headed towards the front door.

  Pierre growled, his ears flattening, body stiff, and began barking. It should have been amusing, but I knew it was something else.

  “You okay, Pierre?” I asked, scratching him around the neck while looking towards the window overlooking the porch. I couldn’t have seen anything even if there was someone out there. Cain and Evelyn were looking at Pierre and then me, waiting for instructions.

  Keep them safe.

  “Cain, go get the gun to be on the safe side.” I let go of Pierre and headed over to lock the door.

  But neither of us took more than three steps before we heard footsteps at the front door. It opened. Lyle-2 walked through the door, followed by Lily-3.

  We all stopped. Except Blue. She left her warm bed by the fire and slinked behind a chair. Pierre growled, barked twice.

  Cain’s voice didn’t sound nervous at all. He sounded happy. “Lily?”

  “What is this?” I asked Lyle. It didn’t seem real. Couldn’t really be happening. Another dream. “Get out of here.”

  Lyle-2 pulled a gun from his coat and held it down at his side. He nodded to Lily. She hardly resembled her c-mothers at all. Her body was too thin, her eyes hollow. They were bloodshot, as if she’d been crying. She looked at Lyle, then Cain, then me. She opened her mouth like she was about to say something.