The Frankenstein Candidate (5 page)

“He will never forget his roots,” she said. Joshua nodded, only half-convinced.

Joshua became hesitant about Daniela even sitting the Oxford Academy exam.

“It’s not for two more years, why worry now?” Dora said.

Eighth grade was a turning point for Frank. One fine day, a month into eighth grade, a skinny, short, freckled, orange-haired, and anemic looking boy turned up at the school.

“Hi, I’m Frank,” Frank said when he saw the new kid standing alone on the playground.

“Hi, I’m a liar,” the skinny guy said.

Frank laughed. This guy wasn’t such a geek after all, he thought.

The little guy had all sorts of quirks, but Frank liked him. At first, Quentin and Bob didn’t feel he would fit in; Frank was atypical for them as it was. But eventually, Frank persuaded them to include the new kid in their clique.

His name was Mardi Tedman. Mardi had an astonishing amount of raw intelligence. If ever there was a quantum physicist on campus, it was Mardi. Even Frank had to take a back seat. In eighth grade, Mardi topped the school in all the subjects he undertook. This happened again in the ninth grade.

But Mardi was a very lonely boy. He just simply didn’t fit in. Diagnosed with the high-end autism Asperger’s syndrome, his IQ test results were between 180 to 210, depending on whether the test was a nonverbal Raven’s or a verbal one. Typical of Asperger’s, Mardi did better on the nonverbal, once scoring 210—equal to the highest that any human being had ever tested in the past fifty years. Devoid of social skills, Mardi simply found it too hard to make friends, save one—Frank. Frank made the effort to understand him because Mardi could explain things to Frank better than even his teachers could. Where others saw a geeky nerd, Frank saw a soul crying for attention. Frank actually liked the fact that he was no longer the star pupil—it meant he was more liked and made more friends. His parents were the ones concerned about his loss of status.

“Maybe it’s for the better,” Joshua said. “Maybe once he knows he is not always first, he will come back to the synagogue.”

“I know my son,” Dora said. “He likes a challenge.”

They were both wrong.

Frank, quite simply, thoroughly enjoyed the fact there was a student cleverer than him. Over time, Mardi managed to endear himself to Bob and Quentin as well, and the foursome had become…well, quite a formidable foursome.

Eventually, Joshua reconciled himself to what Frank was.

“He is who he is, Joshua,” Dora said.

“Yes, maybe he is not a messiah after all,” Joshua said, but he was smiling.

“Whoever said he was?”

This was when Frank’s relationship with Joshua dramatically improved. Joshua no longer scolded him about not attending the synagogue, but Frank started to come anyway. Somehow, he found time to read the Tanakh every other day once again.

Joshua and Dora were very pleased.

Frank’s bar mitzvah, the Jewish male coming-of-age ceremony, had already been delayed because of his non-observance. He was almost fourteen. They wasted no more time once Frank returned to his religious texts. It was done within a week.

“Hey, Mardi, do you ever attend church?” Frank asked Mardi one day.

“What’s church?”

“Oh, Mardi…you’re funny.”

It was when Frank was fifteen that things changed dramatically. Daniela had just turned twelve. He had accompanied his parents and Daniela to her bat mitzvah. Orthodox Jews rarely celebrated the bat mitzvah, the female equivalent of the bar mitzvah. Now, nearly two decades into their stay in America, Joshua and Dora had become liberal Jews, at least relative to their upbringing.

Frank had never seen Daniela so happy. She looked so liberated. Frank wondered why women everywhere were not treated as the equals of men in spiritual matters. At least school was different.

For a bat mitzvah, it was rare to have a party afterward, but Joshua and Dora were over the moon. They had yet to tell Daniela that her effort to get a place at the Oxford Academy had been successful. Daniela was prancing around at the party when they showed the letter to Frank, promising him there was even more cake at home to go with the news when they broke it to Daniela.

The bat mitzvah had been held out of town to avoid offending their orthodox friends in the neighborhood. On their way back in the car at night, Frank thought his family had never seemed happier than right there and then. Dora and Joshua were a world away from the Poland they had long since left behind. Daniela could not stop laughing. Joshua was at the wheel, and Dora was nuzzling up to him, with Frank and Daniela in the back seats.

An oncoming SUV veered marginally off the road. Frank remembered seeing its headlights. That was the last thing he remembered.

He woke up in a hospital a day later. He was groggy and numb and in a great deal of pain. He was not able to move his leg. He was hardly able to speak. Finally, he opened his mouth wide enough to ask for his mother. A nurse arrived. She gave him some medication. It made him drowsy. He kept fighting the drowsiness.

“Ma,” he said several times before his brain accepted defeat via his veins.

“Father?” he asked when he woke up again. This time, a male nurse appeared.

Yet again, he was given something, against his will.

His brain fought it hard. The battle was lost once more.

The next day, a female nurse took him to another room to see Daniela. She was bandaged from head to toe—unconscious or asleep, he could not tell.

“Is she?” he asked.

“She will be all right. In a couple of weeks,” the nurse said.

“Ma…?” he was too scared to even ask.

The nurse asked him to wait. He looked at the clock on the wall. It seemed like an eternity, but half an hour later, the nurse was back with a doctor and another man in some kind of uniform. They took the elevator to the basement of the hospital.

The nurse held his hand. He recognized he was in a morgue. He collapsed.

Minutes later, he came to.

“We need you to identify the bodies,” the man in the uniform said.

Frank nodded.

“Your uncle and aunt are coming soon.”

He didn’t remember giving names and numbers, but he must have. They arrived an hour later.

The closest of kin were his father’s brother, Abe, and his wife, Leeba. Two weeks later, Abe and Leeba took Frank and Daniela home.

The first night after coming home, Frank sat up late watching television.

“Can you try to go to sleep now?” Aunt Leeba asked.

“No, I’m not sleepy. Leave the fire on,” he said.

Eventually, the rest of the family retreated. Frank was waiting. He collected his father’s holy books—every one of them, including the ones from the master bedroom where Abe and Leeba were sleeping.

“What do you want?” Abe asked as Frank tiptoed in.

“Just the Torah. I am going to read about God tonight,” he said.

“Good idea.”

Abe nodded off to sleep.

Frank waited for another forty minutes to make sure everyone was asleep. He then threw every holy book in the house into the fire.

The state appointed Abe and Leeba the guardians of Frank and Daniela. Uncle Abe took over the little pharmacy as a trustee. Abe had no business experience at all. He sold medicines at half the production price if someone merely said they were poor. Two years later, by the time Abe realized he needed to sell the business, it was bankrupt and no one wanted to buy it.

In those two years, Daniela had slowly managed to crawl out of her hole. She had finally managed a smile or two. Frank was seventeen and attracted to girls, but he always came home with Daniela on the bus back from Oxford. She needed him, he thought. He needed her too, but he could not even admit it to himself.

Uncle Abe was very orthodox. He was even more troubled by Frank’s newfound atheism than Joshua would have been. Nevertheless, Frank’s mind was made up.

“Where was God when we needed him?” he asked. Abe had no answer.

It was Mardi who had all the answers for Frank. First, step by step, Mardi took him through not only the theory of evolution but also the extraordinary amount of accumulated scientific evidence.

“Evolution is not a theory anymore,” Mardi said, “it’s a fact. Under the right laboratory conditions, adaptations can be replicated.”

Next, Mardi took Frank on a long voyage of psychology and the need for a God idea. Frank now understood his father’s religiosity in a new light.

Were it not for Mardi, Frank may have given up on everything. Mardi made Frank not only persist in his own life and pull it all together, but he even inspired Frank to look after Daniela. The formidable four were often seen as twosomes. Mardi and Frank had grown apart from Quentin and Bob but occasionally they still hung out together. Frank and Mardi cared about principles; Quentin and Bob cared about their friends and their social status.

Frank never forgot the time he accidentally bumped into an unemployed youth on a road on the way to school. It had only been three months since the accident that killed his parents. He was still in a haze.

“Sorry,” was all Frank could summon. He thought it was all he needed.

That wasn’t good enough for the youth. All of a sudden, his open-handed slap smashed into Frank’s cheek. Three steps behind Frank was Quentin. He saw it.

Quentin was sixteen then, and the youth and his two friends were in their twenties.

Quentin grabbed the youth’s arm and yanked so hard that he pulled it out of the shoulder socket. Someone grabbed him from behind. His elbow swung back in a circular motion, and Frank heard the cracking sound of a rib. The third man was in front of Quentin now, a knife in his hand.

His eyes were so fixated on Quentin’s face that he never saw Quentin’s front-loaded kick smash into his groin.

“You okay, kid?” Frank heard as he was dusting himself off.

“Thanks…you were terrific.”

“Brazilian jiu jutsu,” Quentin said.

“Why did you risk yourself?” Frank asked, weeks later. “He would not have taken it any further than a slap.”

“Because you are under my protection,” Quentin said.

“Does that mean authority?”

“Yes.”

“But I am under no one’s authority,” Frank said, “Still…I owe you one. Big time.”

Frank never forgot the lesson he learned from that encounter. One day, a year later, he was walking toward the bus stop with Mardi when Mardi was threatened by a gang of older students.

“Hey, little bird, did you finish my homework?” It was a tall boy in a beanie.

“He is not a little bird. Leave him alone,” Frank intervened.

“Did someone ask your opinion?” an even taller boy said.

“It’s okay, Frank,” Mardi said as he handed over some papers.

The boy in the beanie took them, sneered at Frank, and the gang began to leave.

Frank glared as Mardi nonchalantly remarked, “It took me only six minutes to finish, Frank. Let it be.”

But Frank strode toward the gang and, surprising the boy in the beanie from behind, snatched the papers from him.

Before the boy could turn, Frank had ripped the papers into shreds.

The boy in the beanie grabbed Frank’s neck. That was the turning point. The boy in the beanie had started it. Frank yelled out “
Ki!
” so loud that it froze everyone within fifty meters as he smashed his knee into the boy’s groin. The boy went down.

“Do your own homework, Jerry. It’s good for you.”

There were four others in the gang. No one moved.

Mardi watched from a distance, not quite comprehending why Frank would do such a thing. Frank left the mob gaping, their jaws collectively down to their chins.

“It was for you, Mardi. Don’t let yourself get used like that.”

Mardi smiled at Frank—he had few social graces, but he had connected.

Frank continued to spend endless amounts of time learning from and discussing various matters with Mardi. His grades suffered a bit, but two years later, they were all graduating from high school and headed for university. It was the fall of 1987.