Deconstructing Dylan (9 page)

I turned off the compscreen and looked out the window. We were back in the suburbs again. Fewer trees, brown lawns, a concrete sameness to the businesses and stores, a kind of gloom about the homes, even. I wondered what my great-grandparents would make of this world I lived in.

By the time we were home, I felt confusion rising up inside me. My mother seemed much more cheerful now. It could have been the doctor visit. It could have been the scrip. She gave me a hug and I showed her the fossil we had found. She seemed impressed.

“I'm taking your mother out to dinner tonight,” my father announced. “You're welcome to come, Dylan.”

I never went out with them for dinner so I knew he was just being polite. “No thanks,” I said. In truth, I was glad they were doing something together. Maybe
this was my dad's attempt to reconnect with his son and his wife — all in one day — after so much time away. Nonetheless, confusion and sadness were welling up inside me. Something about watching that sequence of my great-grandparents as they aged. Slipping away from each other, maybe just like my parents were doing as they spent so much time apart. Slipping away from each other. Slipping away from me.

An hour later they were gone and I was alone with my thoughts. I cruised the net looking for information on the fossil I had found and for information on my great-grandfather. He had had a lot of press coverage in his day. Then I looked up my mother as I had done several times before. She too had garnered significant press coverage but it wasn't all good. Her genetics and stem cell research was highly regarded in the science community but her notoriety had fuelled fundamentalist religious groups opposed to “meddling with human life.”

I followed her career from the mid-1980s. There were pictures as well. She was young and she was beautiful. She even had that fire I had seen in my father's grandfather's eyes — ambition. There were vidclips I could access that presented an articulate, vivacious, media-savvy scientist. In some, I saw my father hovering behind her, as if watching over her, protecting her.

What was I searching for, anyway? Why was I snooping on my parents' past like this? Was it just
curiosity or was I afraid of something? Afraid that something had been hidden from me, just as Robyn had said. I switched off the vidscreen and grabbed the university psychology text I had bought at a used book sale.

Under “Paranoid personality disorder” it said, “Subject is suspicious of others, fears that others are talking about him behind his back, blames others for things that go wrong, expects to be treated poorly, believes information is being withheld or hidden.” Well, that sure seemed to describe me. Maybe it was me who had mental issues, not my mother.

What I needed was a reality check. There was only one person I trusted. I called her.

“Robyn, can you come over?”

“It's a bad time,” she said. “I just got a call from Carla. She sounded pretty messed up. She's back home with her parents. I'm not allowed to see her but we had a long talk on the phone. I think she'll be okay but I'm pretty wasted from dealing with her.”

“Okay, it's just that&hellips;” I couldn't complete the sentence. The silence was a powerful plea, I guess, an incomplete thought hanging there in mid-air, then coursing down the phone line to Robyn who had her own worries.

“Is your mother okay?” she asked.

“Yes, she's all right. She's out with my dad.”

“Then it's you, right?”

“I don't know how to explain what I'm experiencing right now except to say that I'm feeling confused and really, really lost.” That was the best I could do to make her understand.

“I'll be right over. I'll take my parents' skid.”

She looked like she'd been crying: reddish eyes, face slightly puffy. I shouldn't have stared.

“I look like crap, I know,” she said.

“How's Carla? Think she'll be okay?”

“I don't know. She sounded really bad. She called me to say she was leaving again. Her parents were trying to be cool but it wasn't working. I tried to meet with her but she refused. She said she didn't want to cause anyone more grief.” Robyn took a deep breath. “I'm afraid I'll never see her again.”

“There must be somewhere she'd be safe, someplace she'd be accepted.”

“Must be,” Robyn said darkly, not believing it. “Right now, her parents were her best chance. They're not that bad. They just don't understand. I could have helped her if she'd let me. And now it's too late.”

Hearing about Robyn's friend made me feel, for a brief instant, less concerned about me, about my confusion. Just having Robyn there made me feel better. I hugged her and kissed her on the top of her head. I felt
her warmth against me and tilted her head up so I could kiss her on the mouth. She allowed me to do so once, then pulled back.

“You didn't call me over here just because you want to make out, did you?”

“No,” I said. “I called you because I thought I was losing my mind.”

“Sanity is relative. We live in an insane world. Any thoughts that you have that are totally rational probably make you feel crazy because they don't fit in with what's going on out there in this nutso freaking world.” She was both angry and funny at once.

I explained the weird conversation with my father about my great-grandfather and about the old photo images I saw in the skid. I called up some of the news clips of my mom, too, for her to see. Then I went into my parents' bedroom to bring back the altered photo of me. But it was gone.

Paranoid personality disorder set in again.

“Help me search their room,” I told Robyn.

“No way,” she said. “Parents' bedrooms are creepy enough. But I'm not going to go rooting through their personal stuff. God, who knows what you might find.”

I was surprised that Robyn was squeamish about this but suddenly even more surprised at myself for suggesting that we go through their things.

“Let's just go to Tibet right now,” I said. “How much do you think a one-way ticket is?”

Robyn took a deep breath. “Carla ran away and look at the mess she's in now. I wanted to run away on several occasions but didn't. I figured out that whatever problems are in your life when you're home, they go with you wherever you go. You can't just leave them behind. It's like emotional Velcro.”

“Damn. How come you are both beautiful and smart?”

“Because I was born that way. And I worked with it.”

“You seem so confident. You know who you are and you don't seem to care what the rest of the world thinks.”

“Should I take that as a compliment?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Dylan, I don't know what all this is about. But I have another little story for you and you'll have to hold onto your hat.”

“I don't have a hat.”

“It's an old expression, dingo,” she said. “When I was fourteen, I had a blood test because I thought I had mono. I took a peek at the results and noted my blood type. Turned out I just had a low-grade infection of some sort. It was nothing. But just out of curiosity, I looked up my parents' blood types in the med archives at home. I was a snoop in those days. I was curious about everything. My blood type was completely different.
I did some research and came to the conclusion that I could not be their biological offspring.”

“And you were sure?”

“One hundred percent. I had been adopted as a baby and they had not told me. I went through the roof. How could they have held this back? I was really angry.”

“So you confronted them?”

“Yes. And they lied. I don't know what they were thinking but they lied. They tried to cover up the truth. They said they were afraid I couldn't handle it. I got madder and madder. I also wanted to run away.”

“But didn't.”

“Got as far as the mall and later slept in an unlocked skid. When I arrived back home, they told me the truth. And they were right. It shook me up, turned my world upside down. I mean, I looked like the product of my parents. Everyone said they could see my father, see my mother in me. But that had something to do with the agency that placed me — as a tiny baby — in their care.

“For a long while after they told me the truth, I wished that I did not know. I was so confused about who I was that it made me crazy. Really crazy. I did crazy things. My parents, in their own way, were right. They probably should have told me from the time I was young but they were afraid that it would cause me grief. They knew I already had hurdles to
jump over since my adopting mom was white and my father was black.”

“But you got over it?”

“Not easily. Once the tragedy of it all sank in, I became truly depressed. They tried to ease me into it by telling me one new bit of the story at a time but when I put it all together I was reeling.” She took a deep breath. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“I'm sure.”

“It goes like this. I was born in South Africa. Both my parents were HIV positive; both ended up with AIDS and were dying. They were poor. They didn't have access to the Western AIDS drugs. I was healthy, though. I didn't have the disease. But no one in South Africa wanted to adopt me, a baby who had come from parents with AIDS. I was too small to remember any of this but I know now the story is true. As my parents' health grew worse, I was turned over to an orphanage run by a Dutch organization. There was a twenty-four-year-old volunteer there from Nova Scotia. She made the contacts back here and she found a couple willing to adopt me. At first, Immigration turned down their request to bring me here for adoption. I was an AIDS baby in their eyes and it didn't matter that I was healthy. The young woman who was trying to help me didn't give up on me, though. She made some contacts and came up
with a forged birth certificate, flew with me to London and then here. Once I was in the country, my parents hired lawyers and there was no way that I was going to be sent back. All this while I was still sucking on a bottle and wearing diapers.”

“You know what?” I said. “I think I'm going to give up on trying to sort out this puzzle. I have a hard enough time figuring out who I am as it is. Suppose it turns out I was also adopted. What if I'm not who I think I am at all?”

Robyn pursed her lips. I looked directly in her eyes. And beautiful eyes they were. “You need to know. It seems unlikely you were adopted but we can probably find out pretty quick.”

“Med records?”

“Can you access them?”

I knew my father's archive site. I also realized that I now knew his access code. I thought about it for a second or two. Did I really want to do this? “Aw, hell,” I said. I entered the site quickly and punched in a blood type query for the family.

“What the heck is this?” Robyn asked.

Instead of showing three sets of blood types, it showed blood types going back several generations. There was great-grandpop Kyle and his wife and even his parents before him. “Well, they are geneticists,” I said. “I guess they had a healthy curiosity.”

Robyn studied the information. “Well, if you were adopted, they were pretty picky about the blood type.”

“So you don't think that's likely?”

She shook her head. “I'm no expert but, based on this, I'd say you are the son of your parents. No doubt. Have any photos of your grandparents?”

I used my father's access code again to show some of the archival images. My grandparents on both sides, then my great-grandparents. Robyn stared at that image of my great-grandfather, Kyle. “Holy shit,” she said. “Look at that face. Do you have anything of him from when he was younger?”

I scrolled through some images until I found one of him at maybe eighteen.

“Spitting image,” she said. “I can't believe the resemblance.”

I don't know if I was relieved or confused. Now I was thinking, well, if I was adopted, what would be the big deal? I wouldn't be the only kid to ever be adopted and not told. I was watching Robyn now as she looked at the old images on the vidscreen. God, she was beautiful. I
was thinking, here I am home alone, parents out for the evening. I'm with this beautiful, exciting girl &hellips; time to give up on my neurotic worries and focus my energy on her. I brushed her hair with my hand and then put an arm around her.

She wasn't taking the hint. “Cowboy, show me some more of the news stuff about your mom.”

I revisited the TV clips and some of the newspaper articles from 1985 and 1986. The research, the threats, her perseverance. But some kind of glitch seemed to prevent me from accessing info after that. I kept trying to find more information from various public sources, but nothing came up.

“Your parents have NetNanny or something?”

“No. What do you think I do, spend my spare time at holo-porno sites?”

Robyn clicked away at the mouse. “It just seems like some program is preventing your access to what you are looking for.”

I went back to my dad's personal archive and entered his password again, but I couldn't get any further. Access was denied. Probably an automatic program had monitored my intrusion into his personal files and now kept me out. Nothing personal, just an automatic response, a security program.

“Spooky,” Robyn said. “Very spooky. Maybe they're into something illegal.”

“Robyn. These are my parents. They have their problems but they are not selling secrets or dealing drugs or communicating with aliens. I'm sure of that.”

“But they have secrets. Big secrets.”

“Maybe I should just back off.”

“I say we go to the library. Pub access terminals. Your gear is fenced in. You're not going to find what you need here.”

Robyn drove recklessly to the downtown library. We had an hour before it would close. We waited ten minutes for comp access and then we went snooping on my mom again. It seemed like she was just plain out of the limelight by around 1987. They'd moved back from Scotland and my father had taken his first non-research job. The stem cell thing really heated up but my mom seemed out of the picture. The only reference I could find about her then-current activity concerned her statement that she wanted to “raise a family,” which drew sudden praise from her detractors, conservative religious types who were quoted as saying she had come to her senses and that motherhood would change her. But this was 1987. I wasn't born until 1997, a whole decade later.