Deconstructing Dylan (10 page)

She appeared to find a bit of the spotlight again in 1993 when it was reported that she was going to make her previous research available to anyone who wanted it
so that the work could continue. But what was she doing with her time, if not employed in genetic research? Meanwhile, it seemed that my father had become a bit of a mover and shaker in the pharmaceutical world, bringing several new anti-cancer drugs into public prominence — not that he invented them, just that he had moved into orchestrating their marketing. Guess he was a big-time drug dealer after all.

I slipped ahead to 1996 just as the lights began to blink on and off at the library. It was about to close. It seemed 1996 was a big year for genetics, a big leap for the entire field, especially in Scotland, where Dolly, the first cloned sheep, was born. There was a very small mention that my mother's early research had been part of what led to Dolly. And then this: “In a sad irony to this breakthrough, Mary Gibson's son died this past month as the result of a rare form of cancer. The science community grieves her loss.”

I felt the blood drain out of my head. Robyn stared at the screen.

“We're closing,” the librarian told us.

Robyn entered a query to the search engine: “Mary Gibson, Death of son, Obituary.”

The obituary appeared on the screen.

“Gibson, Kyle. Died at the age of nine from cancer in Glasgow, Scotland. Son of&hellips;” The date was March 15, 1996.

“You really have to leave,” the librarian said.

“Let's go,” Robyn said. She led me by the hand. Everything seemed out of focus and I sensed strange visual vibrations coming from the most ordinary things. I wasn't even sure I could trust the ground underneath my feet.

It had seemed warm when we went into the library but now the night air felt icy cold. Robyn drove more cautiously now as she tried to keep me calm.

“Okay, so you had a brother. He died and your parents were devastated. So devastated that they decided to hide the truth from &hellips; well, just about everybody. Including you. This is not good, but it's not the end of the world.”

“It means I don't really know who they are. They're strangers. How many other lies do you suppose they told me?”

“Don't go jumping into the deep end. Just chill on it for a bit.”

“Robyn, I'm so confused. Why wouldn't they tell me? Why didn't I know from the time I was a little kid? This doesn't make any sense.”

“Since when do parents make sense? My advice is that you should sleep on it. Say nothing right now. You'll freak them out if you do. Your mom at least is not going to deal with this well.”

I realized my hands were shaking. My voice was shaking, too. My whole body was shaking. “How could they do this to me?”

“When I learned that I was adopted, I thought I hated my parents at first for not telling me. I thought I'd never speak to them again.”

“So how did you deal with it?”

Robyn looked over at me. “I got over it and I got on with my life. What else can you really do?”

We were back in my driveway now. My parents' skid was not there. They were still out. I decided to take Robyn's advice. I wouldn't confront them tonight. I would listen to some music, read maybe, if I could get focused, and then go to sleep. Maybe everything would make more sense in the morning.

The book by my bed was
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
, a book that was about
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
. Robyn had said it would help me get my head around some of the difficult stuff she was interested in. I'd been trying to read it but was having a hard time with some of the ideas. The author, Sogyal Rinpoche, was talking about how the living needed to “help” the dead in their transition from this world to the next. He
referred to the first forty-nine days of the “bardo,” the transition time, as the most critical. But he went on to say, “It is never too late to help someone who has died, no matter how long ago it was.” Even someone who has been dead for a hundred years can benefit, he suggested.

I didn't really understand this but something about the idea resonated within me. Helping the dead. Here I was, alive, sitting in my room, still physically shaking from the shock of learning about my dead brother, someone I had never met, never even known about, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for him. How did he die? What kind of life did he have? I felt so sad and even lonely. I wished he had lived. I wished I had gotten to know Kyle Gibson, my long-lost brother. I wished he had been there to stand up for me when I was bullied or to pick me up when I fell. I truly missed this brother, felt angry that I had not had a chance to meet him. It wasn't fair at all.

My anger soon came back to bear on my parents. They had no right to keep such a secret. It seemed impossible that they had succeeded all these years.

The image of the photo swam up into my consciousness. It had been real. It was him in that other photo. It wasn't me at all. My brother and I must have looked very much alike.

I heard my parents come in downstairs. They were talking loud and laughing. I hadn't heard them like that
in a long time. How could they have done this to me? I kept thinking. My gut instinct was telling me to go down there and confront them. Tell them I knew and rage at them for not telling me about my brother.

Instead, I tried to read more of Sogyal Rinpoche's book. He spoke of
delok,
those near-death experiences that people in all parts of the world have shared. In Tibet these experiences were recorded and considered to be real information about what happens after we die. Sometimes, a person experiencing
delok
would go to a place like hell, then come back and warn his friends about how to avoid going there. Sometimes a
delok
person would meet others already dead and come back to the living with messages from them — messages that were taken very seriously.

In ancient times, certain well-practised religious leaders could intentionally travel to the world of the dead and return. Those around him or her would test the validity of the
delok
experience in a rather odd way: “The orifices of the body were stopped with butter, and a paste made from barley flour put over the face. If the butter did not run, and the mask did not crack, the
delok
was recognized as authentic.”

It almost sounded like some bizarre skin treatment that was offered at the cosmetic boutique in the mall. I closed the book and began to feel tired but it wasn't a good tired. I felt abandoned, lost. I lay down and
closed my eyes, tried to drift free of myself, but instead I thrashed back and forth in bed, restless and now sweaty. I kept thinking about what I'd read: Tibetans willing themselves into a temporary death state. And that business about helping someone who is dead, even if they had been dead for a hundred years.

How exactly do you help someone who has been dead a long time? How do you help someone you never met?

In my dream, I remember feeling hot. My body felt like it was on fire. My surroundings were blurred — hallways, tunnels maybe, a red tinge to everything. I was moving quickly through this place. I thought I was running but then realized I was on my back looking up at the ceiling. Faces appeared within my view and then they disappeared. Frightening faces &hellips; faces that showed fear. And then I was lying alone in a bed, still looking up at the ceiling. The ceiling now was white. I felt hot still. And then the pain began to grow.

Time was passing but it was not time in the usual sense. It went slow, then fast. The pain — and it was in every cell of my body — slowed time down against my will. Then something changed within me and the pain subsided. Time raced forward again only to decelerate to a near halt when the torment returned.

I was aware that I was asleep in my bed. I was aware that I had been reading about near-death experiences. One part of me was acutely aware that what was happening was a dream, that I was upset and even traumatized in my “real” world and this was a manifestation of it. But that did not alter in any way the concrete reality of what I was experiencing.

I kept trying to wake myself up, trying to open my eyes, but I was being pulled down, as if into the bed itself, or dragged through whatever building structure was beneath me, into the earth. I was being swallowed. And then this thought blossomed in my mind:
This is not you, Dylan. This is not happening to you. It is happening to someone else.
No. It
happened
to someone else. It is real and not real at the same time.

And then I heard a voice:
Help me.

Who was saying this?

Help me.
The voice was more faint. The energy was diminishing. Someone was dying.

Kyle was dying. I was experiencing his death.

Help me.

It is never too late to help someone who has died.

Help me, please.

But I didn't know how.

I was shaking my head side to side, trying to release myself — the real me — from the pain I was feeling. I was trying to open my eyes and it took all the energy in
the world to do this. I could see only faintly through a slight crack and I saw the faces of my mother and father. It was me this time speaking to them:
Help me.

And then it went pitch black and I sat bolt upright in my bed and screamed.

My mother arrived first in my room and my father close behind.

“Dylan, honey. Are you all right?” my mom asked.

I was sweating and breathing very hard. Panting. The sense of panic was still with me as my mother put her arms around me and looked at my dad with grave concern. My father touched the top of my head, trying to soothe me as he stroked my hair. That's when I realized the pain was going away. The heaviness that had been pulling me down was gone. I felt lighter.

“How did he die?” I demanded between gasps for air. “Exactly how did my brother die?”

My father looked at my mother. “I don't know what you mean,” he said rather unconvincingly. I was still trying to stop the spinning in my head, trying to wrestle some kind of sense into all this.

“Just tell me the truth. Tell me about the other boy in the photograph by your bed.”

You could have cut the silence with a knife. And then my mother spoke. “It was all very hard on us. We should have told you much earlier. I &hellips; we &hellips; made a decision under a lot of stress. I felt like I was losing everything. I felt so terrible. I wanted to die.”

I was sitting up in bed now. My father was rubbing his hand through his hair. “Dylan, when Kyle died, your mother became terribly depressed. Suicidal, even. I was afraid I was going to lose her, too. Kyle had a very rapidly advancing form of cancer, a painful form of cancer. His
treatment had been going well, and then he suddenly got worse. We went from feeling that everything was going to be okay to realizing that we were losing him.”

“He was only nine,” my mother said. “He had his whole life to live. It wasn't fair.”

I felt a chill go through me. I swallowed hard. “I think I somehow relived what he was feeling there in the hospital. That was what I was dreaming about. I was him.”

“It was just a dream. You couldn't possibly have those memories.”

“I realize that. It just seemed so real. I would like to have known him. I would like to have had an older brother.”

I studied my father's face and he seemed puzzled by something, not just worried but puzzled. “Dylan, how much do you know about your brother?”

I told them about the net search and the obituary I had read.

“Then you don't know the full story, do you?” my mother asked.

“How do I know what the full story is?”

My father took a deep breath. “Jesus.”

Something was beginning to gnaw at the back of my brain. The
full
story. What was it? “You had quit your research, right Mom? You had Kyle. You raised him. He was your son. When he died you wanted another child. That makes sense to me. I think I understand.”

“But there's more, Dylan,” my father said. “And you do need to know.”

“Maybe not yet,” my mother said.

I threw her an icy look.

“Yes, I do need to know. It's been long enough. If there is something you aren't telling me, please tell me now.”

“This isn't going to be easy,” my mother told my father.

He tentatively started. “You have some understanding of the research we were doing at the time in Scotland, don't you?”

“Oh my God,” I said out loud. I felt an icicle sliding down my spine.

“We didn't just want another child, Dylan. We wanted Kyle back. We wanted to give him a second chance.”

My mom reached out to touch me but I pulled back. “We took a gamble. We made a leap and we did it recklessly. We had been working with Ian Wilmut. We were doing parallel research, sharing some of what we each did but keeping some things, well, secret. It was all quite controversial. I knew that we could offer the medical profession a powerful new tool to cure diseases, even prevent diseases, if we could just stay on our path. But it wasn't easy. Funding came and went.”

“What we did, we did out of grief, love, and desperation,” my father said. “Wilmut's research had been
with animal cells. Ours had been with human cells. We used healthy DNA samples from Kyle. We used them in creating another pregnancy in your mother.”

“When you were born and we knew you were healthy and normal in every way, we were thrilled.”

“Oh my God. I don't believe I'm hearing this.”

“Dr. MacKenzie, the one we took you to see in Scotland, is the only other person who knows. And now you.”

My father rubbed his hands together. “Others picked up your mother's research where she left off. She had already dropped out of the scene and she decided to stay there. I shifted into working for the drug companies. We moved here. Started a new life. We wanted to raise you as a normal kid. We didn't want you to have to grow up under the scrutiny of the media, being the target of crazies. There were fanatics everywhere. People who hated us for what we were doing. We wanted what was best for you.”