Eve and Adam (22 page)

“What the hell are you talking about, Gold?”

Dr. Gold comes ambling back. He’s not concerned, just curious. “The subject. Adam. He’s not there anymore.”

– 39 –

Evening has disappeared. It takes me a while to realize this.

In the meantime, I’m getting medical attention. A doctor named Johanna has detected a possible irregularity which requires her to listen to my heartbeat. This requires me to take off my shirt. I’m sitting on a gurney with the curtains drawn around us but other doctors and nurses—Adele, Laura, Stephanie, and Steve—crowd in to assist.

“How old are you?” Dr. Adele asks.

“That depends,” I answer. “Do you mean what is my apparent age? Or my actual age?”

“I just want to know if you’re over the age of consent,” Dr. Adele says, and the others laugh nervously. She frowns. “What is the age of consent, anyway?”

“Eighteen,” someone says.

“I don’t suppose you’re eighteen, are you?” Dr. Stephanie says.

“Eighteen hours,” I say helpfully. “Depending where you count from.”

“He looks eighteen,” Nurse Steve says.

The curtain slides back. It’s Evening and a girl.

I have seen the girl in my memory. Her name is Aislin.

“Really?” Evening says, glaring at Dr. Adele, who lowers her stethoscope and mumbles something I can’t hear.

“It’s … oh my God, it’s you.” Aislin seems to be surprised in some way.

“Come on, Adam, let’s go,” Evening says.

“It’s you,” Aislin repeats.

“Yes. It is me,” I say. I suspect that is close to being a joke. “I am Adam. Adam…”

It occurs to me that I don’t know my last name. All the doctors have last names. I can see them on their name tags. Obviously, people have them, and I am people, therefore I should have one. But Terra Spiker has not put that bit of information in my head.

“Let’s go!” Evening says impatiently.

But I’m frozen in place. The enormity of it. The strangeness of it. There are people all around me and each of them has a last name.

How dare they create me and not even give me a name?

“What’s my last name?” I demand.

“What? Who cares?” Evening snaps. “We have to go!”

Another doctor appears. He stares at Evening. He looks down at her leg. Up at her face. She recognizes him.

“You’re Evening Spiker,” he says.

“Right. Um, good to, uh … You treated me, didn’t you?”

“You’re walking?”

“I am,” she says.

“Unassisted.”

“Yeah, I, uhhhhh. Have to go.”

“I have to see the leg,” he says.

“Nah, it’s just a leg.”

“Please. Please. Indulge me.”

Evening says, “I’m shy.”

“Show me the leg. Please.”

Evening sighs. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Everything is coming out.” She tries to pull up the leg of her pants, but that doesn’t work, so she unbuckles her jeans and drops them to her ankles.

She has nice legs. Very athletic and shapely. But I have no idea why this man needs so badly to see them.

“Holy crap,” the doctor whispers.

Evening sighs. “Show’s over.” She pulls her pants up. “Now, we have to go.”

She grabs my hand firmly and yanks me after her.

We rush through a crowd of people in a waiting room. I see children sitting with their parents.

Do I have parents? No, I don’t.

It bothers me. Even as I’m dragged along, it bothers me. I know—I’ve been told—that I’m different, so it’s not a surprise. It’s just that I’m not simply different, I’m unique.

That should be a good thing, perhaps, but it doesn’t feel good.

“I want a last name,” I say as we reach the outside.

“Kind of busy,” Evening says, and we race to board a bus. We find seats. People gawk at me. I’m getting used to it.

“I don’t like this,” I say. It’s true. I feel bad. I feel strange.

Aislin sits across the aisle from us. “I’ve always liked the last name Allbright.”

“Adam Allbright?”

“My name’s Aislin, by the way.”

“Yes, I’m aware of your name.”

She holds out her hand, very formal. She smiles. She has a nice smile. Different from Evening’s. But nice. Someone has recently struck her. She has a bruise on her face, and I can see the individual fingermarks.

I shake her hand and try out the name again. “Hi, I’m Adam Allbright. Adam Allbright, nice to meet you.”

Evening is looking back and forth from me to Aislin. I ask her if it’s appropriate for me to call myself Allbright.

“Call yourself whatever you like.”

“Adam Allbright,” I say. “That’s me.”

– 40 –

Aislin is not drooling.

It takes me a while before I notice.

Granted, her boyfriend is in the hospital fighting for his life. But I’ve known Aislin for a long time. Aislin memorizes the face and form of every single attractive male who comes within sight.

Aislin doesn’t look at guys and drop them into a simple binary system of “cute”/“not cute.” She does detail. Amazing detail. If she can’t actually see detail, she extrapolates from what she can see. Show her a guy’s neck, she can draw his chest. Show her a bicep, she can tell you what his thighs are like. Show her a thigh and you really don’t want to know just how much she can extrapolate.

It’s her own weird genius.

Aislin is not even looking at Adam. Maybe it’s overload. Maybe it’s just too much for her to process. But she almost seems shy. Aislin. Shy.

I guess I’m relieved. I don’t want to have to tell her to back off. Adam is mine.

According to the app on my phone, we can get off this bus and catch another bus heading back across the Golden Gate to Tiburon. It will take a while, though. Should I take a taxi?

Am I in a hurry? To get the money for Aislin, I’ll have to confront my mother. Which means I’ll end up telling her everything. Can I do that?

“What the hell have I gotten myself into?” I ask no one.

Adam says, “I don’t know.”

No, I decide. I’m not in a hurry.

I have to find my anger again. My mother used me as a biological experiment.

Yeah, and thanks to her I still have two functioning legs. Thanks to her I’ll run again.

Thanks to her a lot of people dying in harsh hellholes aren’t dying anymore. Or yes, they’re dying, but we all die. They aren’t dying today, right now, of some vile disease because my mother created Spiker Biopharm.

Instantly, all those terrifying photos come back to me. Way too high a price to pay for my leg. But was it too high a price to pay for saving countless lives? Are the two things even connected?

Couldn’t my mother have done one without the other?

We get off the Muni and onto the bus for Marin County. I don’t want to think anymore.

Aislin sits alone. Adam sits with me. He barely brushes against me, but that touch—two square inches of shoulder, six square inches of thigh—is charged with electricity.

“Are you sad?” he asks.

“Am I sad?” I’m going to blow him off with some facile, jokey, ironic answer. But his is not a face you joke with.

And his eyes. They’re Solo’s eyes—they’re the same incredible blue, anyway. But there’s something different about Adam’s eyes. They’re earnest. Utterly sincere.

“I guess I’m nervous. Or something,” I say. “All my life my mother was this perfect, slightly overwhelming person. Well, you’ve met her.”

“I don’t know many people,” he says. “I don’t really know how to judge her.”

“Then take my word for it,” I say.

“Your word as my soul mate?”

So he does have a sense of humor. The sense of humor I programmed into him. Not mean. Sweet, ironic. Just the way I made him.

“Anyway, my mother,” I continue, “was so high up, not even a pedestal really conveys it. It was like she lived on a cloud and I was just a regular person far down below her.”

“And you also had a father?”

“I was a lot closer to my dad. He was the mid-point between me, little Evening Spiker, and the almighty Terra-Mother. We worked that way. Me to my dad to my mother. Then he died and all of that … Some families, maybe it would have made us closer. With us, no. My mother was still way, way up there.”

“Up in the clouds.”

“Figuratively. You get that, right?”

“Yes. I know that people don’t live in the clouds.”

Maybe that’s a joke. I don’t know. I turn to look at him.

We are toward the back of the bus. The seats are tall. No one can really see us. Aislin’s dozing.

“What the hell am I going to do with you?” I ask Adam.

“Do you have to do something with me? It’s my decision what I do with myself. Right?” He genuinely isn’t sure.

I avoid answering directly. “I don’t even know what I’m doing with myself. What if they actually arrest my mother? What, I live with my grandmother?”

“Do you have to live with her?”

“I don’t know if I’m exactly ready for my own house,” I say.

“Freedom,” he says, and he gives the word surprising urgency.

“Responsibility,” I counter.

“Do they go together?”

“So I’ve heard,” I admit.

His beautiful eyes—eyes that I try not to remember as floating loose and unattached—look into my eyes. Eyes that he has never seen loose and unattached. Fortunately.

I have the advantage on him. I can remember everything about him. He can only seem to look into my soul. I can pretty much actually look into his.

“Does this mean you are responsible for me?” Adam asks.

“Do you want me to be?”

He frowns. There’s an instant of panic in his eyes. It surprises me. How has he moved so quickly from childlike naïveté to existential panic?

“I don’t know what I am,” he says.

“You’re Adam Allbright,” I say, and I try to flash a smile.

“I find you beautiful, but…” He stops himself.

“I like the part about ‘beautiful’ more than whatever was going to come after ‘but,’” I say lightly. Because what else am I going to do when the most beautiful boy in the world is seated beside me and several inches of him are pressed against me and I swear the taste of his breath is sweet in my mouth?

Joke.

“Do you want me to say you’re beautiful?” he asks. He seems concerned.

“Who doesn’t like flattery?” I ask.

“But it’s not flattery. It’s what I feel. I feel that you are the most beautiful—”

And that’s when the bus lurches as it heads onto the Golden Gate Bridge and oh I’m even closer now and he doesn’t pull away and I start to but I don’t. It’s not possible to pull away.

I kiss him.

He does not kiss me.

His lips are the lips I gave him.

I slip my hand beneath his arm and around his body, the body I made for him, the hard muscles I programmed him for.

Adam pulls back, gasping for air. His eyes are clouded. “I don’t know what to do.”

Of course, I know exactly what he should do. Biology, folks. Evolution. We’re all just animals, right? Right?

Right?

I touch his chin. It’s perfect. Chiseled, with a slight cleft. Sculpted-by-Michelangelo perfect.

Just the way I ordered it.

“Kissing’s easy,” I say, and I’m suddenly glad Aislin is asleep so she can’t hear me. “Whatever you do, it’ll be perfect.”

We kiss.

It’s just the way I ordered it.

When we come up for air, I turn to see if Aislin’s still asleep.

My face burns when I realize she’s wide awake and watching us.

I wait for the applause or the sarcastic, leering remark. But all she does is nod. Her smile is almost wistful.

Adam turns. He blushes, too. I must have programmed him with that gentle self-consciousness. “Hello, Aislin,” he says.

“Hello,” she says back.

“Lovely weather we are having,” Adam says, and before you can say “what the hell is going on here?” they are having an awkward, first-date kind of chat.

I suddenly feel like a fifth wheel, so I retreat to a seat near the front. When Adam starts to follow me, I tell him to stay and talk with Aislin.

I don’t know why. It just seems right.

There was something about that kiss. It was like a beautifully executed guitar riff, played without any feeling.

It was … not perfect.