Deconstructing Dylan (11 page)

“And you've turned out wonderfully. And now you have a big challenge ahead of you. You have to figure out what you are going to do with this knowledge.”

“The knowledge that I'm a clone or that I had a brother who died?”

“Both, I guess,” my dad said. “Although some experts might argue about what the true definition of the
C
word is, but you pretty much have it right.”

The confusion in my brain was massive. “What am I going to do?”

“You're going to have to get on with living the life you've already started,” my mom told me.

“But I don't know if I can.”

“Why?”

“Because I don't feel like I really know either of you. I don't know if I can trust you. And I'm not even sure I know who I am anymore.”

I asked to be left alone and my parents respected my wishes. As I began to regain my bearings ever so slightly, a mass of questions began to swarm in my head. If I was the product of my brother's DNA, wasn't there a good chance that I too would die from whatever form of cancer had struck him down? But that didn't scare me as much as the overwhelming confusion I was currently feeling about just who I was.

Which part of me, of my physical self and my identity, was me and which part had come from Kyle? I was confused. Beyond confused. Confused and angry. Overriding everything was a sudden fear that I would never be able to simply
be
myself again. If I told the truth to anyone, then I might end up being labelled and ridiculed. I vowed that I would keep my mouth shut. I would bury the secret and I would just go on as I had been.

In the morning, my parents were waiting for me at the breakfast table. “We need to work on a strategy of what we do now,” my father said. He saw the look in my eye. I was still very angry with them both.

“I already have a strategy,” I said. “I'm not telling anyone. I'm going to pretend you never told me, pretend I don't know.”

“I think that's the best option,” my mother said. I could tell from the sound of her voice that she had been crying.

“You want to take the day off from school?” my dad asked.

“No. I want everything to be just as it was. I want to go to school.”

“I'll drive you,” he said.

“I'd rather walk.”

The hike to school confirmed my resolve. I looked around at people driving by, at kids getting on buses, at old men and women walking slowly for their morning pleasure. I felt alone and cut off from them all. I felt different. When my mind drifted to thoughts about Robyn, I realized that she was perhaps my greatest problem. She knew enough to ask more questions but she didn't know the whole truth. And she'd be asking questions.

I saw her in the hallway and went in the opposite direction. I succeeded in avoiding her until fourth period. She grabbed my arm as we left English class. We both had free blocks then and I knew I couldn't just walk away from her.

“What did they say? Why were they hiding the truth about your brother?”

I took a deep breath and avoided looking her in the eye. “After Kyle's death, my mother went into a deep depression. When I was born, she was still deeply messed up and she convinced herself that the only way she could raise me without feeling the pain of the loss of her first child was to block it out of her life. My dad went along with it.”

Robyn looked at me and furrowed her brow. “But your parents are smart people, Dylan. They have PhDs, for God's sake. They know you can't just erase the past. They can't pretend their first son didn't exist.”

“Maybe that's why my mom is feeling so messed up now. Maybe it's why she drinks and takes those pills.”

“Hmm. I'm not so much worried about her right now. I'm worried about you, Dylan.”

“Don't worry about me. I'm okay.”

But Robyn looked truly worried. “This is probably incredibly weird for you.”

“It is.” I wanted to tell her I felt like one of those insects I'd read about. I'd just outgrown the hard casing
of my body. I'd cracked out of one skin and was tossing it off but I didn't have a hard new skin yet. I felt exposed and vulnerable and the only person who could really help me was right here with me. And I could never, would never, tell her the truth.

By the afternoon, I'd slipped into a kind of dull grey fog. My new shell was forming, tougher and harder than the last, more impermeable and I hoped permanent. After school, Robyn said she wanted to hang with me, wondered if I wanted to go to the mall and watch the shallow people shop. We could sit by the holo-fountain and make fun of them. It was a skill she had honed to perfection. But I said no. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to escape from this world in whatever way I could.

At home, my mother was in a videoconference with a white-haired intellectual somewhere else on the planet. I was glad she had continued to share her knowledge of stem cell research. That field of medicine had grown by leaps and bounds and, had she stayed with her work, she would probably have been at the top of it. Instead, she'd faded into the background, first to raise Kyle, then me — and to protect me from the outside world. She knew what kind of freak I really was.

Sleep eluded me, so I found myself sitting at my comp running a search for everything and anything about clones. I read about Dolly, tried to imagine how my story, the really big story, would have played out in the media
had it come to light. It became obvious that my parents might have even been prosecuted and put in jail. I read articles on cloning and ethics — bioethics, some called it. I watched vidclips of people with fundamentalist religious views — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — and realized how strongly they felt that cloning was somehow sacrilegious because it was tampering with something so sacred.

There were political ramifications, social ones, and finally I found an article with the title, “Does a Clone Have a Soul?” I sat back in my chair and pondered yet again whether I believed
anyone
had a soul. Robyn and I had been working at this. She was convinced we all did. Everyone died and moved on through those stages of death she'd read about in
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
. Your soul or spirit lived on and then you came back. Over and over.

But would that be true for me? I was different. Kyle had died and his soul, I am sure, went on to somewhere. Christian heaven or into the bardo stages and on to the next world. Maybe he had already returned in the form of another human being. But what if my very existence, my birth, somehow interfered with that process? At birth, I was the clone of my brother. Maybe I was the
same
baby he had been. As I grew I had become a different person, but genetically I was identical from the start. Did those religious people have good reason to have such strong opinions?

Or was Kyle's soul within me now, living and breathing as part of me? I had no way to begin answering this or any of the other impossible questions posed. Did I even have a right to exist? Not according to some of the hard-line thinkers. I was a freak of nature. A monster. And how was I going to live with that?

Certainly, there was a loud and active pro-cloning community of scientists and others out there. Husbands and wives who could not have children and wanted to could create a new life this way and build a family. And I came across stories of other parents who had lost young children and wanted the right to “bring their children back.”

Some others argued that an entire race of clones could be created as “cheap labour” or even slaves. After all, they would not be fully human; they would not have been conceived in the normal way. They would not need rights or privileges because they were not human.
They did not have souls
.

I dug all the way back to February 23 of 1997 and the first public reports about Dolly. One headline read, “Researchers Astounded &hellips; Fiction Becomes True” and the subtitle said this: “Dreaded Possibilities Are Raised.” And that was only about a sheep. A Dr. Silver from Princeton University said, “It basically means there are no limits. &hellips; It means all of science fiction is true.” And a so-called medical ethicist from Missouri added, “This
technology is not, in principle, policeable.” He suggested that soon scientists would consider cloning the dead.

This and other speculation seemed to scare the living daylights out of the public. But that was then, right? That was a long time ago.

Even though Wilmut defended cloning animals for the purpose of harvesting biological materials that would help haemophiliacs, people with cystic fibrosis, and more, he was thoroughly thrashed by much of the media and the public.

During those days following the news of Dolly, my mother was pregnant with me and she understood full well that she had to ensure that my birth was a secret. And it took its toll on her.

I kept poking away at the avalanche of information, digging randomly here and there. I soon realized how difficult it was to separate the facts from the myths about cloning. Around the end of the century, several radical cults had claimed they already had a cloned child among them. Several publicity-seeking parents had claimed
their
children were clones but had been proven to be liars.

Then there was the court case in California of parents, also genetics researchers, who had brought a cloned baby into the world in secrecy. When the child died of a birth defect in the brain, the truth came out. They were prosecuted and put in jail. The public had supported the prosecution.

Most tragic of all were the three cloned children in England. Each was born to a grieving parent, aided by a doctor who had taken on cloning as his mission in life. The children were healthy and had been in the spotlight up until a few years ago. Their families had been ostracized to the point that they were forced to leave their communities and move, seemingly disappearing. But they were no doubt out there somewhere, keeping secret the nature of their children. The doctor, another geneticist by the name of Eugene Benson, had himself been stalked and assassinated much in the way that pro-life fanatics had killed abortion doctors in the 1990s.

I began to realize that I was part of something much bigger than me. I comprehended why I had been kept in the dark and I understood why I needed to guard my secret.

But I had read enough to know that there were others like me out there. Any parent who had followed the fate of the researchers and the cloned children could see that the only sensible thing to do, if you were going to make use of the cloning technology, was to keep it a secret.

It was conceivable that I was the oldest cloned child of them all. And the odds were good that there were more and more coming into the world — here in North America and in other parts of the world. But few parents
would want their cloned children exposed to the scrutiny of the public and the potential danger it would bring.

I dipped back into the past again. An online magazine from 1997 called
Salon
had an interview with Ian Wilmut himself. It was titled, “Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume.” I didn't quite know whether to laugh or cry. When asked if human cloning was possible, even someone as committed to cloning research as Wilmut said, “It is possible &hellips; but we would find it ethically unacceptable to think of doing that.”

And I'd scavenged the net for long enough to know that the vast majority of citizens out there would still agree with that statement today. Genetic research had lurched forward with roadblocks at every corner but cloning was still, for most people, “ethically unacceptable.” So what did that make me?

I thought about Robyn and her commitment to avoid anything that was genetically modified, whether it was pants made from GM cotton or cornflakes made from GM corn. What would she think if she ever found out the truth about me?

I switched off the vidscreen and sat in silence. I began to wonder how long it might be before someone, some hotshot journalist, stumbled onto my story. It wouldn't take a genius or even a trained professional to follow the breadcrumbs, then take a poking look at all the researchers who were working in and around Ian
Wilmut back then. It wouldn't take long for this hot-shot to eventually focus on Mary Gibson and unearth the story of the death of her son. The birth of me. And if that all came out now, what would I do? What would my parents do?

The phone rang. I saw that it was Robyn's number. I answered and flicked on the phone's vidscreen for the call. Robyn had always insisted on that when we talked. She said she had to see my eyes when I spoke.

“Dylan. I just found out. It's Carla. She's dead. She was in Seattle. They found her in a rooming house where she was staying. She died alone. Drugs. I didn't find out until tonight. She never had a chance to stop running. Nothing I ever did to help did any good at all.”

And then there was silence on the line. Robyn was crying.

“I'll be right over,” I said.

Robyn was sitting alone in a cold pool of fluorescent light at her kitchen table. I opened the back door and walked in. She stood up and came to me, hugged me tightly so that for a moment I felt like I couldn't breathe. She was crying. I wanted to tell her how sorry I felt for her. I wanted to tell her that I knew everything was so unfair. My own confusion and fears were still with me, not buried, not background, but fully part of my compassion for the loss of her friend.

As I held Robyn to me, I understood that she would also feel a sense of guilt that she did not deserve. And there would be anger, too. I knew that.

“No one ever gave Carla a chance. Once you get a label, then that's it. No one accepts you for who you really are. If you're different and if you're not afraid to
show how different you are, there are some out there who will crucify you.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”