The Genius Factory (14 page)

Doron Blake became Graham’s mascot. Women read about the prodigy boy or saw him on the television, and they responded—sometimes with delight, sometimes with horror, always with fascination. By 1984, two years after Doron’s birth, more than one thousand women had applied for Graham’s special sperm.

CHAPTER 7

A FAMILY OF BASTARDS

A
fter Samantha Grant told me she had found Dr. Jeremy Taft, the Miami plastic surgeon she was sure was Donor Coral, I avoided Tom for a few months. Not calling Tom removed any temptation I might have to spill the secret to him. I also wanted to give him time to get to know his half brother Alton, Samantha’s son.

A few nights before Christmas 2002—eighteen months after we first talked—Tom phoned me at home. After a couple of pleasantries, he dropped the bomb: “I’m gonna be a father—a boy, a son. On January 31, that’s when he’s due. We’re going to call him Darian Jacob Legare.”

I was so addled that the only thing I could think to say was “January 31, that’s my birthday, too.” I did some quick math in my head and figured out that Tom was all of seventeen years old. The last time we had spoken, he had seemed barely old enough to think about girls, much less get them pregnant. I recovered enough to congratulate him and ask who the mother was. (I hadn’t yet seen the e-mails he had sent to Alton mentioning a girlfriend.)

“Her name’s Lana. She’s Russian. And I forgot to say, we’re getting married. I met her a year ago—she was in my class at school. I’m in love. I really am. No one believes me, but I actually proposed to her before I knew about the baby. I proposed on our six-month anniversary, and a few days later she found out she was pregnant.”

I asked, doubtfully, how they were going to support themselves. Tom said he had a plan, sort of. He had graduated from high school a year early, and he was already more than halfway to his associate’s degree. Lana would stay home with the baby for a while, and then she’d get certified as a massage therapist. Oh, and since she and her parents were illegal immigrants, Tom would figure out how to get her a green card once they got married. As for his own career, he was working at his mom’s company. The job wasn’t great—he was a file clerk—but they liked him and gave him full benefits. The company also paid for his classes, which he took nights at the local community college. He and Lana didn’t have their own place, so they would split time between her parents’ house and his mom’s. By the time Tom finished explaining all this, he sounded exhausted—and overwhelmed.

The conversation was depressing me. Building a life out of string, chewing gum, and paper clips was hard enough for anyone, but when you were seventeen and engaged to a pregnant illegal immigrant . . .

Tom kept talking. He said he had called because he had a question for me, something he and his mom had been wondering about. “Am I going to be the first kid from the sperm bank with my own child? Is this the first grandchild from the Nobel bank?” There were only a couple dozen Repository kids older than Tom, and I hadn’t heard about any who were married or parents. I told him that I didn’t know for sure but that I would be shocked if he wasn’t the first parent. “All right!” he exclaimed. “I set the record!”

Tom and I had known each other for a year and a half, but never met, so Tom invited me to visit him in Kansas City after Darian’s birth. Tom was excited about my visit. Being a Nobel sperm baby was what made him special. Until I had come along with my odd questions, no one had ever taken an extraordinary interest in him; he had been a regular kid from a regular dysfunctional family living in a regular suburb of a regular city. He had never done anything remarkable—never broken a school record or won a state prize. For the first time, he was at the center of something that the outside world cared about. He was flattered that I would travel all the way from Washington just to meet him. I also sensed that Tom wanted to see me because he was feeling daunted by impending fatherhood. He didn’t know a lot of fathers—his friends were all seventeen, after all. I had talked to him a little about what it was like to be a dad. I didn’t think Tom desired my advice, exactly, but maybe he welcomed the idea of some father-bonding with me.

I flew out to Kansas City on a Friday morning in March, a couple months after Darian’s birth. The day was raw and gray. I drove through endless suburbs. The Legares lived in practically the last subdivision outside the city; just beyond their development stretched fields, all the way to Saint Louis, perhaps. Their house had beige siding and green shutters. It looked friendly. There were cute little statues of squirrels on the lawn.

It was midafternoon by the time I finally rang the doorbell. A middle-aged woman answered the door and introduced herself as Mary, Tom’s mother. Tom was still at work, she said. She added that her husband, Alvin—the way she said “husband” made it clear that the word had only a technical meaning for her—was on the road, as usual. Mary introduced me to Tom’s fiancée, Lana, who greeted me halfheartedly. She was sprawled on the living room couch watching a monstrous TV. Lana was small and pale, with a pretty Slavic face and owlish glasses. She was wearing black nail polish and a creepy black Insane Clown Posse T-shirt. Every few minutes she would check on baby Darian, who was dozing serenely in a swing next to her. He was blond, square-headed, and cute.

There was very little furniture in the house, no family pictures, no sense that it belonged to anyone. I was surprised, because Mary had seemed so familial. As soon as she hung up my coat, Mary gestured to the empty spaces and said that it was not her house, it was a temporary rental. Her house, which was a few blocks away, had burned down the month before, she said. They had lost almost everything, including a dog and two cats. That was why they had so few things.

Mary and I sat down in the kitchen to talk before Tom got home. She was short, red-haired, pretty, and plump—though down forty-six pounds on the Atkins diet, thank you very much. Her eyes were bright and blue; she was cheerful; and she was argumentative. Mary worked her tech support job from home, which allowed her to keep an eye on the comings and goings of Tom, Lana, and her daughter, Jessica. Mary said she liked having Tom and his friends around, eating her food and commandeering her TV. Being here meant that they were not out doing much worse. Just as she was telling me this, a friend of Tom’s wandered into the house, helped himself to soda from the fridge, and flopped down on the couch next to Lana. He introduced himself as one of Tom’s bandmates. He said he “kind of” lived there, or at least crashed on the floor a lot.

Mary and I were just out of Lana’s earshot. Mary told me how worried she was about Tom and Lana. “I want them to get married now, as soon as possible,” Mary said. “Lana could take the baby right back to Russia, and there is nothing we could do about it, unless they’re married.” Mary’s suspicions ran deep: she said she had made Tom get a DNA test when Darian was born, just to make sure that Darian was his. He was. (Mary’s DNA-test demand had been a bitter pill for Tom, he later told me. He was searching for his own father. Yet at the same time his mom was trying to get him to lose his own son.)

Mary had to field a call from work, so she pulled Jessica out of her bedroom and told her to talk to me. Jessica, who was fourteen, seemed as though she’d rather do anything else, but slouchily obliged. She barely resembled her mother or the pictures I had seen of Tom. She was very thin. Her face couldn’t decide whether it was going to be beautiful or belligerent. Right then, it was both. She had deep-blue cat eyes, wide cheeks, and an expression that was all at once scornful, cynical, sullen, and smart. Jessica was the biological daughter of Donor Fuchsia, the Olympic gold medalist, which she had learned when Tom spilled the secret to her.

To make conversation, I asked her about the pentagram pendant hanging from the black choker around her neck. “I’m a Wiccan. We believe in hurting none.” She had a languid, worldly wise voice. She showed me the book she’d been reading when Mary had interrupted her,
Witch Child.
I asked her about school. High school ruled over middle school, she said. She was a freshman, she loved it, her grades were dropping from As to Bs and Cs, and she didn’t care.

Mary, who was now eavesdropping, dropped a manila folder on the table. Inside were letters from the Repository and a copy of the donor catalog. The pages were lightly browned at the edges.

“During the fire, I was going to go back in to get jewelry and valuables,” Mary said. “I asked Jessica what she wanted, and she told me, ‘I want you to get my dad’s folder.’ So I went and got it. It still smells like smoke.” I sniffed it: it did smell singey. “It is very interesting that she wanted that. She was afraid that she would lose what little she did know about the donor.”

Jessica leafed through the folder.

“That is the only thing that I have connecting me to my real dad,” Jessica said. “That was the first thing that popped into my head. Even if it is a little thing, a piece of paper. I don’t want to lose it.”

Jessica kept talking about Donor Fuchsia and the sperm bank. Discovering her Nobel sperm origins, she said, had made her more tolerant, more decent. “I used to be much more of a bitch. Finding out made me look outside my box and realize there is a whole world out there. I have a dad out there, a real dad among those millions and millions of people. It made me stop judging and made me realize different kinds of people are normal. I am giving people a chance that I wasn’t giving them. I realized my brother is not a long-haired freak.” Before she had known the secret, she said, she and Tom had never talked. Now they were tight. She listened to his music, even dated one of his friends.

But unlike her brother, whose obsession was pulsatingly obvious, Jessica seemed blasé about her sperm origins. “I did have a lot of curiosity about the donor when I first found out. I wondered if I would ever get to meet him. But I don’t need that to know who I am. Now it doesn’t really matter to me.”

I told her that I was acquainted with some of her half siblings—other kids born from Donor Fuchsia. Did she want to e-mail or meet them? She shrugged. She didn’t care.

When I had talked to Mary about her daughter in earlier phone conversations, she had seemed to blame Jessica’s falling grades, sudden lack of interest in ballet, and stoner friends on her new uncertainty about her identity. Learning about Fuchsia, Mary suggested, had rattled Jessica. Talking to Jessica, I wasn’t sure about that. Maybe she wasn’t slacking because she was confused about Donor Fuchsia. Maybe she was slacking because she was a teenage girl, and that is a teenage girl’s job.

Tom arrived home from work at 5
P.M.
My first impression was that Jessica had been right: he
was
a long-haired freak. He had a broad face, tending to plumpness. He had blue eyes beneath a deep brow, a wide, strong chin with a great cleft struck out of it. Blond stubble traced his jaw. He was tall, with broad shoulders, but he was carrying an extra twenty-five pounds in the belly. But his hair! It was dirty blond, straight, and thick. When he shook it out of its workday ponytail, it fell in a cascade halfway down his back. It was amazing hair, a lifetime of hair. Tom looked like a Goth—I don’t mean a Goth kid, I mean an actual Goth. He would not have looked out of place wearing a leather jerkin and swinging a mace. (This is intended as a high compliment to Tom, an avid fantasy gamer.)

As soon as he greeted me, Tom rushed into his bedroom, stripped off his button-down work shirt, and slipped into a T-shirt for one of his favorite bands, Twiztid. The T-shirt said “Freek Show” and had a picture of some nutcase in white pancake makeup. Three quarters of Tom’s wardrobe, I would discover, consisted of black T-shirts for Twiztid or Insane Clown Posse, all of them with pictures of nutcases in white pancake makeup.

Tom was accompanied by a bunch of friends. I couldn’t really tell how many; sometimes there seemed to be three, sometimes four, sometimes six. Most of them were wearing band T-shirts and black trench coats. They all had long hair, and they all seemed to be named Mike or Matt (except the girl). They looked very Columbine, but in a sweet way. They were soft-spoken, polite, and good-natured—nerdy, not scary. Tom explained that his house had become a kind of clubhouse for his posse because he had the best video game setup, because his mom didn’t mind having everyone around, and because he and Lana had to be home with the baby anyway. So every Friday night, and lots of other nights, a dozen of his friends came over and spent the night gaming and otherwise fooling around.

Mary shooed the Trench Coat Mafia out of the kitchen so we could talk. They headed to the basement and stayed up till 5
A.M.
playing video games and three-dimensional chess, eating Twix bars, and—when more girls arrived—exchanging back rubs.

Tom, Mary, and I remained upstairs in the kitchen. Tom grabbed a full two-liter bottle of Sam’s Cola from the fridge and started chugging straight from the bottle. By night’s end, he had finished that whole bottle and a second one—filling him with enough sugar and caffeine to wake a dead man. In Tom’s food pyramid, Sam’s Cola ranked as the most important of the three basic food groups. Candy and Burger King were the other two.

Tom was glad to see me. Beneath an ominous appearance and mumbling voice, he possessed a profound sweetness and eagerness to please. Words tumbled out of him as he caught me up on his life. He was proud of Darian, proud of Lana, proud of his job, proud of his college classes—which he was managing to ace despite work and baby. He was thrilled to be engaged to Lana. He delightedly waved his hand in front of me to show off the promise ring Lana gave him and asked Lana to come over to show me hers. Tom’s showing off was endearing, not cocky. He was doing the right things, even though they were hard, and he wanted to share that with me.

After a little bit, Tom badgered me to come downstairs so he could show off his video game setup. “Did you see the basement?” he asked me. “It’s like we robbed an electronics store!” He led me down into the expansive playroom, where the Trench Coat Mafia was silently arrayed around one of the three computers, murdering aliens (or maybe one another) on Halo. “We have everything,” Tom bragged. He pulled out his Sony PlayStation 2, an old Atari, an Xbox, a Sega Genesis, various Nintendo systems, and several game consoles I had never even heard of. Tom said he was even building an “arcade game emulation”: he was going to mount a computer like a 1980s video arcade terminal and use it to play cool old-school games such as Space Invaders and Centipede. “I’m lucky I have Lana and Darian because otherwise I would spend all my paycheck on games,” he said, not kidding at all. The basement also had a pool table, an air hockey table, and an army of Dungeons and Dragons metal figurines. He bumped one of his friends off Halo so that I could try it; much mirth ensued at my ineptitude. Tom and his friends traded insults in some weird gamer dialect. Someone said, “I put it on mimic, dude.” Everyone laughed.