It was three months too late, but I was moved by the understated eloquence of the high court’s decision when it was announced on the News & Justice satellite: Granted, what some might call a “soul” is merely an individual’s biological imprint, every bit as accidental as it is unique. In the course of accident, we are all born once, and we die but once. And no matter how ambiguous the relationship between science and chance, humankind cannot assign itself to the task of re-creating souls.
I’m not even sure I believe in souls, not really. But I wished I’d had those words for Denise when it still mattered.
She actually had the whole thing charted out. We were having lunch at a Loop pizzeria the day Denise told me what she wanted to do. She spread out a group of elaborate charts; one was marked HOME, one FATHER, one SCHOOL, all in her too-neat artist’s script. The whole time she showed me, her hands were shaking as if they were trying to fly away from her. I’d never seen anyone shake like that until then, watching Denise’s fingers bounce like rubber with so much excitement and fervor. The shaking scared me more than her plans and charts.
“Neecy, please wait,” I told her.
“If I wait, I might change my mind,” Denise said, as if this were a logical argument for going forward rather than just the opposite. She still hadn’t learned that doubt was a signal to stop and think, not to plow ahead with her eyes covered, bracing for a crash.
But that was just Denise. That’s just the way she is. Maybe that’s who she is.
Denise’s living room was so pristine when I arrived, it was hard to believe it had witnessed a trauma. I noticed the empty shelves on the music rack and the spaces where two picture frames had been removed from their hooks on the wall; but the wooden floors gleamed, the walls were scrubbed white, and I could smell fresh lilac that might be artificial or real, couldn’t tell which. Denise’s house reminded me of the sitting room of the bed and breakfast I stayed in overnight during my last trip to London, simultaneously welcoming and wholly artificial. A perfect movie set, hurriedly dusted and freshened as soon as visitors were gone.
Denise looked like a vagrant in her own home. As soon as I got there, I knew why she hadn’t wanted me to see her on the phone; she was half dressed in a torn T-shirt, her hair wasn’t combed, and the skin beneath her eyes looked so discolored that I had to wonder, for a moment, if Sean might have been hitting her. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been in an abusive relationship. But then I stared into the deep mud of my friend’s irises before she shuffled away from me, and I knew better. No, she wasn’t being beaten; she wouldn’t have tolerated that with Neecy in the house. Instead, my friend was probably having a nervous breakdown.
“Did he say why he left?” I asked gently, stalling. I didn’t see little Neecy anywhere, and I didn’t want to ask about her yet. I wished I didn’t have to see her at all.
Answering with a grunt rather than spoken words, Denise flung her arm toward the polished rosewood dining room table. There, I saw a single piece of paper laid in the center, a typewritten note. As sterile as everything else. In the shining wood, I could also see my own reflection standing over it.
“Haven’t you read it?” I asked her.
“Neecy’s in the back,” Denise said, as if in response.
“Shhh. Just a second. Let’s at least read what the man said.” My heart had just somersaulted, and then I knew how much I didn’t want to be there at all. I didn’t want to think about that child. I picked a random point midway through the note and began reading aloud in the tone I might have used for a eulogy: “ . . . You squeeze so hard, it chokes me. You’re looking for more than a father for her, more than a home. It isn’t natural, between you and her—”
“Stop it,” Denise hissed. She sank down to the sofa, tunneling beneath a blanket and pulling it up to her chin.
I sighed. I could have written that note myself. Poor Sean. I walked to the sofa and sat beside my friend. My hand felt leaden as I rested it on the blanket where I believed Denise’s shoulder must be. “So you two fought about it. You never told me that,” I said.
“There’s a lot I didn’t tell you,” Denise said, and I felt her shivering beneath the blanket. “He didn’t understand. Never. I thought he’d come around. I thought—”
“You could change him?”
“Shut up,” Denise said, sounding more weary than angry.
Yes, I felt weary, too. I’d had this conversation with Denise, or similar ones, countless times before. Denise had met Sean through a video personal on the Internet where all she said was, “I want a good husband and father. Let’s make a home.” Sean was a nice enough guy, but I had known their marriage was based more on practical considerations than commitment. They both wanted a family. They both had pieces missing and were tired of failing. Neither of them had learned, after two divorces, that people can’t be applied to wounds like gauze.
And, of course, then there was little Neecy. What was the poor guy supposed to do?
“She’s in her room. I already packed her things. Please take her, Paige. Take her.” Denise was whimpering by now.
I brushed a dead-looking clump of hair from Denise’s face. Denise’s eyes, those unseeing eyes, would be impossible to reach. But I tried anyway, in hopes of saving all of us. “This is crazy. Take her where? What am I going to do with a kid?”
“You promised.”
Okay, Mama. I will.
“What?”
“You promised. At the church. At the christening. You’re her godmother. If anything happened to me, you said you would.”
I thought of the beautiful baby girl, a goddess dressed in white, her soft black curls crowned with lace—gurgling, happy, and agreeable despite the tedium of the long ceremony. Holding her child, Denise had been glowing in a way she had not at her wedding, as if she’d just discovered her entire reason for living.
Tears found my eyes for the first time since I’d arrived. “Denise, what’s this going to mean to her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t . . . care,” Denise said, her voice shattered until she sounded like a mute struggling to form words. “Look at me. I can’t stand to be near her. I vomit every time I look at her. It’s all ruined. Everything. Oh, God—” She nearly sobbed, but there was only silence from her open mouth. “I can’t. Not again. No more. Take her, Paige.”
I saw a movement in my peripheral vision, and I glanced toward the hallway in time to see a shadow disappear from the wall. My God, I realized, the kid must have been standing where she could hear every hurtful word. I knew I had to get Neecy out of the house, at least for now. Denise was right. She was not fit, at this moment, to be a mother. Anything was better than leaving Neecy here, even getting her to a hotel. Maybe just for a day or two.
I couldn’t take care of both of them now. I had to choose the child.
“Neecy?” The bedroom door was open only a crack, and I pressed my palm against it to nudge it open. “Sweetheart, are you in here?”
What struck me first were the books. Shelves filled with the colorful spines of children’s books reached the ceiling of the crowded room, so high that even an adult would need a stepladder. Every other space was occupied by so many toys—costumed dolls, clowns, stuffed animals—that I thought of the time my parents took me to FAO Schwarz when I was a kid, the way every square foot was filled with a different kind of magic.
The bed was piled high with dresses. There must have been dozens of them, many of them formal, old-fashioned tea dresses. They were the kind of dresses mothers hated to wear when they were young, and yet love to adorn their little girls with; made of stiff, uncomfortable fabrics and bright, precious colors. Somewhere beneath that heaping pile of clothes, I saw a suitcase yawning open, struggling uselessly to swallow them all.
“Neecy?”
The closet. I heard a sound from the closet, a child’s wet sniffle.
Neecy, why are you in the closet? Did your daddy beat you again?
She was there, inside a closet str
ipped of everything except a few wire hangers swinging lazily from the rack above her head. I couldn’t help it; my face fell slack when I saw her. I felt as if my veins had been drained of blood, flushed with ice water instead.
Over the years, I’d talked to little Neecy on the telephone at least once a month, whenever I called Denise. I was her godmother, after all.
Neecy was old enough now that she usually answered the phone, and she chatted obligingly about school and her piano, acting and computer lessons, before saying, Want to talk to Mommy? And the child always sounded so prim, so full of private-school self-assuredness, free of any traces of Denise’s hushed, halting—the word, really, was fearful—way of speaking. It wasn’t so strange on the phone, with the image so blurry on the face screen. Not at all.
But being here, seeing her in person, was something else.
Neecy’s hair was parted into two neat, shiny pigtails that coiled around the back of her neck, her nose had a tiny bulb at the end, and her molasses-brown eyes were set apart just like I remembered them. If the girl had been grinning instead of crying right now, she would look exactly as she’d looked in the photograph someone had taken of us at my sixth birthday party, the one where Mama hired a clown to do magic tricks and pull cards out of thin air, and we’d both believed the magic was real.
Denise was in the closet. She was six years old again, reborn.
I’d known what to expect the whole time, but I couldn’t have been prepared for how it would feel to see her again. I hadn’t known how the years would melt from my mind like vapors, how it would fill my stomach with stones to end up staring at my childhood’s biggest heartache eye-to-eye.
Somehow, I found a voice in my dry, burning throat. “Hey, sweetie. It’s Aunt Paige. From California.”
“What’s wrong with my mommy?” A brave whisper.
“She’s just very upset right now, Neecy.” Saying the name, my veins thrilled again.
“Where’d Daddy go?”
I knelt so that I could literally stare her in the eye, and I was reminded of how, twenty-five years ago, Neecy’s eyelids always puffed when she cried, narrowing her eyes into slits. China-girl, I used to tease her to try to make her laugh. Here was my China-girl.
I clasped the child’s tiny, damp hands; the mere act of touching her caused the skin on my arms to harden into gooseflesh. “I’m not sure where your daddy is, sweetie. He’ll come back.”
Hey, Neecy, don’t cry. He’ll come back.
Staring into Neecy’s anguish, for the first time, I understood everything.
I understood what a glistening opportunity had stirred Denise’s soul when she’d realized her salvation had arrived courtesy of science: a legal procedure to extract a nucleus from a single cell, implant it into an egg, and enable her to give new birth to any living person who consented—even to herself. She could take an inventory of everything that had gone wrong, systematically fix it all, and see what would blossom this time. See what might have been.
And now, gazing into Neecy’s eyes—the same eyes, except younger, not worn to sludge like the Neecy quivering under a blanket in the living room—I understood why Denise was possibly insane by now. She’d probably been insane longer than I wanted to admit.
“Listen,” I said. “Your mom told me to take you to get some pizza. And then she wants us to go to my hotel for a couple of days, until she feels better.”
“Will she be okay?” Neecy asked. Her teary eyes were sharp and focused.
Yes, I realized, it was these tears ripping Denise’s psyche to shreds. This was what Denise could not bear to look at, what was making her physically ill. She was not ready to watch her child, herself, taken apart hurt by hurt. Again.
Neecy was dressed in a lemon-colored party dress as if it were her birthday, or Easter Sunday. Did Denise dress her like this every day? Did she wake Neecy up in the mornings and smile on herself while she reclaimed that piece, too? Of course. Oh, yes, she did. Suddenly, I swooned. I felt myself sway with a near-religious euphoria, my spirit filling up with something I couldn’t name. I only kept my balance by clinging to the puffed shoulders of the child’s taffeta dress, as if I’d made a clumsy attempt to hug her.
“Neecy? It’s all right this time,” I heard myself tell her in a breathless whisper. “I promise I’ll watch out for you. Just like I said. It’s all right now, Neecy. Okay? I promise.”
I clasped my best friend’s hand, rubbing her small knuckles back and forth beneath my chin like a salve. With my hand squeezing her thumb, I could feel the lively, pulsing throbbing of Neecy’s other heart.
I wrote this story for Sheree Renée Thomas’s groundbreaking anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, which featured works by luminaries such as Octavia E. Butler, Samuel Delany, W. E. B. DuBois, Steven A. Barnes, Nalo Hopkinson, Charles R. Saunders, and too many others to name. This anthology was a watershed in helping to define black speculative fiction, now commonly known as Afrofuturism.
When I wrote this story, there was much discussion about the cloning of a goat. I have always been puzzled by the public fascination with cloning, since people are so much more than their genes. This story answered my question: “Why would someone want to clone herself?”
Aftermoon
At six-thirty, the moon was already faintly visible in the waning daylight, patiently awaiting its turn to light up the streets in pale blue and gray. The After-Moon, Kenya always called it. It wasn’t the real Moon, the full moon; it only looked like it, except chewed smaller at the rims. The After-Moon was startling and nearly as beautiful, but it ultimately held no more allure for Kenya than it would if she were any other city-dweller tossed suddenly into its sight.
Kenya ignored the moon as she walked from the Clark Street subway stop toward her building, vanishing inside the purposeful stream of twilight home-goers. She felt it watching her—she always did—but she refused to look up. She’d decided a long time ago that just because the moon tried to talk to her didn’t mean she had to listen. Her grandfather had felt differently about that; but, then again, he was different in a lot of ways. Kenya was especially proud that she didn’t allow ghosts and memories to steer her life.
Kenya’s stomach growled. At dinnertime, especially during the summer, Brooklyn Heights always smelled like the sidewalks had been basted with butter, pine nuts, and garlic. All the take-out places had their doors propped open, trying to tantalize people like Kenya, who never planned their meals in advance.
But tonight, she knew exactly what she wanted, because she’d withheld it from herself the night before, when she’d wanted it most: a barely-seared, blood-red steak. The meat was waiting for her in her freezer at home, so she’d thaw it and cook it, maybe twenty seconds in the pan on each side. This was the only time of month Kenya knew exactly what she wanted to eat. Not a need, she reassured herself, just an appetite. Her grandfather might even be proud of her, if he’d still been living and could have shared a moonlight meal. Except, she reminded herself, he would have been irritated with her for the ritual of cooking the flesh at all. Not to mention how absurd he would think it was not to have hunted for her food first, making her own kill.
Kenya’s mind was on her hunger, so it was only an accident when she walked past a basement office she must have passed every day for nearly a year, dwarfed beneath the Indian/Chinese video store and a Northern Italian restaurant, Giovanni’s, that all the people in her building raved about. Today, the glint of the buffed brass sign caught her eye because it so perfectly complemented the day’s last light. The bold letters were embossed into the shiny plate in black: JACK REEVES, DERMATOLOGY. And beneath that, following Dr. Reeves’ mumbo-jumbo of degrees and licenses, it said in script: LYCANTHROPY.
Kenya’s first thought was to go in and give this quack a piece of her damned mind.
She wasn’t offended easily, but the sign set off sparks that made her teeth tighten. Maybe it was only because of the time of month, she tried to
reason with herself, but the nerve of this guy, this so-called doctor, poking such callous fun in a sign posted on a public street!
She wasn’t sure why she found herself descending the cracked concrete steps leading to the office door, because a doctor wouldn’t keep hours this late, and what was she going to do if he did? Still, sparks didn’t need reason; they improvised just fine. Maybe she’d slide a nasty note beneath his door. Maybe she’d write down his telephone number and lodge an anonymous complaint on his voice-mail. Ignorant fool, she thought. Before she realized it, she was fantasizing about the pleasure of ripping his face into—
The light was on, illuminating a waiting room beyond the glass door. A small, hand-written list of office hours taped inside proclaimed that Dr. Jack Reeves, Dermatology, was open until 7:00 p.m. on all weekdays except Wednesdays. Which meant he was still there. Good, she thought, and flung the door open to a cacophony of jangling chimes.
Inside the office, though, her mood softened, retreating from the unseemly places it had been trying to lure her. There was nothing unusual about the appearance of the doctor’s office. The light inside was bright, welcoming, making the waiting room and the gaily-colored magazines neatly fanned on the coffee table feel like part of a life-sized display case. Very familiar. And yet . . .
Thinking about it later, she wondered if maybe she had first been arrested by the smell. Her nostrils smarted for a moment from the thick scent of burning incense, before she relaxed and allowed herself to breathe in the luxurious smell. Part campfire, part lavender, part . . . cedar closet? Oh, it was something, that smell! It was a smell to bottle and steal whiffs from in the middle of the night.
But the office’s scent was nothing compared to the music. As soon as Kenya heard it, she spun around to search for the speakers, as if seeing the music’s source would somehow help her own it. She could not distinguish between voice and instrument—in fact, she could not say with certainty that the music was composed of either, just as it seemed to have no discernible melody—but she knew that it was music, meaning it was the very definition of music. Barely loud enough to hear, it thrilled against her ears.