Autobiography of the First Human Clone
Book One of The Books of Adam
Complete Novel - Parts I-IV
A Novel by Robert M. Hopper
Copyright© 2010 by Doublethumb Press at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition
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All rights reserved
Cover design by Rob Hopper and David Lowe
Coffin photo by Michel Bigras courtesy of BigStockPhoto
Baby photo by Beatrice Killam courtesy of BigStockPhoto
Lily photo by Christoph Riddle courtesy of BigStockPhoto
Redwoods photo by Rob Hopper
* Disclaimers *
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental or the result of portraying a real person’s fictional genetic twin being born at some point in the fictional future.
All fictional genetic twins of real persons are in no way meant to depict what their real-life genetic twin may do or say, nor has any character in this book been endorsed by any real person.
No real persons referenced in this book, living or dead, are implied to have endorsed this book, its concept, or support of human cloning or cryonics.
ISBN 1450560520
EAN-13 9781450560528
To Grandpa
Book of Adam’s Table of Contents
A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.
– Mark Twain
Prologue
Nine months after I died, my daughter gave birth to me.
It was more than fifty years after my birth when I first saw the recording of our umbilical cord being severed.
“May I hold him?”
I caught my breath. I hadn’t heard my mother’s voice in so many years. Her gentle intonations conjured forgotten memories of an old form of happiness, before shadows of loss and sadness began to dampen even the best times.
I walked toward my mom’s holographic image, my fingertips trying to touch the laser plasma that comprised her face. She looked so much younger than the images in my mind. Her blond hair untouched by gray, her smooth cheeks and chin unblemished by worry, her blue-gray eyes still looking like those of a child delighting in an unexpected present.
Her name was Sarah. She was the daughter of the man I was cloned from. And she had just become the mother of her father’s clone with my birth. Or “Adam’s Rebirth,” as the home video was labeled. A video discovered in one of my Grandma Lily’s storage boxes.
Lily is in the holotape as well, hovering nearby as the nurse begins wiping off my small body. “Is Adam okay?”
I tense when I hear my great-grandfather’s voice from behind. Lyle Gardener, the man who recorded the event. The man who made human cloning possible. I turn to see the doctor and Lyle reviewing the medical scans. “Everything’s in order,” Lyle says. “Fingers, toes, organs, and brain.”
“But is it really Adam? I mean, his soul?” Lily asks. “Does he remember me?”
The nurse finishes my initial cleaning. Lily opens her arms to receive me, but frowns as the nurse instead walks to Sarah’s side. She eases my newborn body into my mother’s arms. My tiny head wobbles so that my face looks up at hers. Naturally, on that night of March 11, 2034, I did not yet realize that my mother within whose womb I’d spent the previous nine months was the newborn daughter I had once cradled in my own arms.
“You have a beautiful soul,” my mom says, smiling before kissing me on my forehead and nose. “I love you, Michael,” she whispers, calling me by my middle name as she cradles me to her, not bothering to wipe away her tears, breathing in the scent of her newborn who had moments before been a part of her own body.
I notice my own tears as my fingertips again attempt to somehow touch the 52-year-old images around me. Did I have a soul? If so, part of it must have come from my mother. Sarah’s hologram closes her eyes as she gently rocks me back and forth, humming a familiar lullaby. She seems to have become oblivious to everything else. Oblivious to her mother and grandfather, to the doctor and nurses. Even to the throngs of people who had gathered outside the hospital in spite of a thunderstorm, the din of which I can just hear in the background.
A couple of the bystanders were awed; awed at me, awed at science, awed at the uncertain future my birth represented. The other thousand-plus were protesting “The Blasphemous Birth,” the baby created not by God, but by humans who believed they were gods. They saw the thunderstorm as a sign from an angry deity proclaiming the end of the world. As did Gabrielle Burns, the drenched woman standing quietly to the side, her calm face upturned to the hospital room window – the woman who would eventually murder my mother.
Even if I had known all this, my reaction would have been the same: the newborn image of me began to cry. A sure “sign” that the first human clone was a healthy baby boy, soul or not.
*
A half-century later, and the end of the world has yet to arrive. What did come to an end was my early fame. The widespread furor over my existence occurred while I was still the only clone, too young to realize what was going on, or to comfort my mother who bore the brunt of it. Cloned births became commonplace while I was a young child, removing me from the spotlight and affording me a mostly private life, if still not a peaceful one.
So why call renewed attention to myself by writing an autobiography? In part, I’d like to honor the memories of those who have touched me. I’d also like to set straight, or in many cases confirm, the rumors attached to my life. But it’s much more than that. Since my earliest memories, I’ve been told that I would be seen as the primary example of human cloning, and that humanity’s acceptance or rejection of human cloning might depend on how I was perceived. By writing this autobiography I hope to give others some insight as to what it was like to be the first human clone. I hope to help fellow clones deal with similar issues, and help convince non-clones that we are all human beings. Whether we are conceived naturally by a mother and father or, as in my case, manufactured in a laboratory from the cells of dead ancestors, we are neither more nor less perfect than others.
Most importantly, I hope to convince myself of this.
My dead ancestor’s name was Adam Silva Elwell, after my birth referred to as Adam Elwell-1, and he was my grandpa. Or, as far as some people are concerned, he was I. Which is why, unlike most autobiographies, the story of my life begins some sixty years before I was born.
Book of Adam’s Table of Contents
Part I
The Book of Sarah
I used to almost wish I hadn’t any ancestors, they were so much trouble to me.
– Mark Twain
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I was born too early.
That was how it began.
I received my clone-father’s journal on my eighteenth birthday. He handwrote his memoir late in life in the hope that his next birth – my birth – would correct the mistake of his initial one. I read it for the first time while sitting next to his grave, the setting of my recurrent nightmares since I was very young.
Adam-1 was born at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center on the sunny morning of June 12, 1974 to Michael and Sarah Elwell. Born too early. And his childhood stolen from him too early.
He was only seven years old when his father opened the door to his mother’s hospital room. Adam walked in alone, forcing his legs forward. His chin was trembling before he reached his mother’s bed. He felt like he should say something but didn’t know what, as if he’d forgotten how to talk to his mother. As if the person he loved most in the world was a stranger.
She looked like a stranger. Her bald head. Her emaciated body. Sarah made a weak smile, and then lightly petted his head. Neither said a word. There was only her shallow breathing and the sound of nurses passing outside the door.
The silence wasn’t broken until his mother began reciting familiar lines from their favorite book, The Hobbit, as Bilbo Baggins joins the quest, leaving his hobbit hole and setting off on his adventure.
Adam hid his eyes against her shoulder. He wanted to be near her, but he didn’t want to see her like this.
“I know, sweetie. I know,” she whispered. She kissed his head.
“Please don’t die,” he begged.
Sarah sighed. “I think I have to go, honey. I have to go on this adventure. But we’ll meet again in Aslan’s Country, okay?”
Adam didn’t answer. That was just another story they’d read. Made-up stories like the kind his father wrote. Places like Aslan’s Country and the Heaven mentioned in their ancient family Bible could be equally imaginary.
He held her tighter. She kissed him again.
“I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you too, Mommy,” he cried, but choked at the end.
She made a similar sound, as if mocking him. He felt her shudder and then relax. He pulled away, looking into her blue-gray eyes. They stared blankly through him, her chapped lips only slightly parted.
He prodded her timidly on the shoulder to wake her. The movement made her jaw drop down, her mouth falling silently open.
Adam jumped and must have screamed something. His father opened the door and a nurse rushed in behind him. Michael clutched him to his body and gently held his dead wife’s hand.
“We’ll get that,” the nurse said to Michael, glancing at the floor.
Adam looked down and saw that he stood in a puddle of his own urine.
His Aunt Mary pulled him out into the hallway and wiped his shoes. Michael came out of the room several minutes later, his face pale, eyes red and puffy. He embraced his son for a long time. Then he straightened up and slowly, silently led them out of the hospital.
***
Fifty years after his mother’s death, Adam himself was dying on a hospital bed.
“Where’s Sarah?” he asked, words he’d repeated for a half hour as the poison paralyzing his extremities moved slowly towards his heart.
“She’s on her way,” Lily answered again, more wearily by then. But Adam died minutes before his mother’s namesake, his daughter Sarah, rushed into the room.
His last journal entry, written the night before his death, appears to be an attempt to reassure himself: “It’s with great fear I end my life, but the hope outweighs it. With this cup I’ll escape the Gardeners, and have another mother named Sarah. My hemlock is not the cup of death. It is the cup of new life. The life I should have had.”
Yet I often wonder what was going through his mind as oblivion approached. Did he second-guess himself, wondering whether his dream of living forever had just slipped through his fingers of his own volition, fearing that he would never exist again?
Regardless, less than an hour after he arrived at the hospital, the man who had once sworn to himself that he’d never die was dead by his own hand.
Sarah reached the hospital shortly afterwards, Lyle Gardener a bit later. While Lyle talked with the doctors in Adam’s room, Sarah tried to comfort her mother in a private office. She told Lily how fortunate it was that Adam saved her by knocking the glass of poisoned wine from her hand, but Lily was despondent.
“I wish I’d drunk it too,” she mumbled, a shoulder strap of her evening gown dangling around her elbow.
Sarah grabbed her arm. “Mom! How could you say that?”
“I can’t imagine life without him. There’s nothing for me now.”
Sarah was quiet for a while. The last statement stung. She thought of her father’s clone with whom she’d soon be implanted, and wondered whether mentioning it would help her mother. On the other hand, she’d long since determined that her father’s clone would not be made to feel like he was the original Adam, but instead be raised to believe he was his own individual free to live any life he chose. It wouldn’t be right to tell her mother that Adam would soon be alive again.
“Adam would have wanted you to enjoy your life after him,” Sarah said as she righted her mom’s strap. “That’s why he knocked your glass away. If you don’t go on, then Dad’s saving you was in vain.”
Lily shook her head, then leaned slowly into her daughter’s arms and cried quietly on Sarah’s shoulder.
“Besides,” Sarah continued as she found a more comfortable position in which to embrace her mother, “I’m going to need your help raising my son.”
Lily stopped her sobbing. After a minute she raised her head from Sarah’s shoulder and looked her daughter in the eye, a glimmer of a smile on the widow’s lips.
“You’re right. We have to be strong for Adam’s rebirth. That’s what he wanted.”
Sarah smiled at her mother’s brightening, but worried over the choice of words. Adam’s rebirth.
Within a couple weeks of Adam’s death, a fetus was growing within the womb of his 33-year-old daughter. In that way my daughter would become my mother and, just like the old vaudeville song, I would become “my own grandpaw.”
Book of Adam’s Table of Contents
2
As he’d been the CEO of the widely known U.S. Cloning Systems, the largest subsidiary of Lyle Gardener’s Ingeneuity, Adam’s murder received some press. But it was nothing compared to the commotion over Adam’s rebirth when it was announced six months later. Sarah’s pregnancy was made public January 2, 2034 in a news conference that began with a low buzz (reporters figured USCS had made another boring, minor medical breakthrough) and quickly erupted into a firestorm that blazed among satellites, televisions, cell phones, computer screens, and every radio tower on the planet.
It wasn’t the first time such an announcement had been made. In 2004 the Raelians claimed to have cloned dozens of children, and by 2034 several more supposedly successful human cloning attempts had been proclaimed – none of which had been scientifically verified. But the world knew this announcement was different. U.S. Cloning Systems was a giant in its field, the organization most capable of pulling off such an achievement.
Two months of chaos followed. Politicians convened from recess early to argue and spout off sound bites. There were calls for more intensive government oversight of all companies dabbling in the science of cloning. Religious leaders invited the largest protests, some demanding that the company be shut down, the executives jailed, the mother jailed, and the baby taken away so that it would never know it was a clone.
Then came the next big revelation. One of the obstetricians let slip that my mother was a virgin.
Post-Mary virgin births had been documented going back to at least 1994 thanks to artificial insemination, and none of those births had resulted in a devil so far as anyone could prove. But for some, the new development made it clearer than ever that the Antichrist was on his way, mocking the original Virgin Birth. Others assumed my mom was a lesbian, stoking the homophobic fear that this was the beginning of a social revolution in which homosexuals would breed through cloning and propagate an unnatural family structure that would decimate life as we know it.
My mother attracted more attention than the baby she was carrying. Her doctors and USCS were largely successful in keeping the press and public physically away from her, but she did answer what questions she could via USCS spokespeople.
As for whether she was gay, she stated that her virginity was due to a fear of sexual intimacy stemming from a childhood incident, but that she had no problem with people believing she was gay. She simply found their bigotry sad and cruel, and she was grateful that she didn’t share it.
In response to the question of her fetus being the Antichrist, she said that it was only a clone created with her father’s DNA, which had been fused into her egg, mingling it with traces of her mitochondrial DNA. This made it even less clone-like than an identical twin, and unlikely to carry any genetic material from Satan.
Asked if she felt the endeavor bordered on incest, she answered that in her opinion it would only have been incest if her egg hadn’t been artificially inseminated.
And finally, as to why she had broken the law against human cloning, she replied that, although she personally was not interested in being cloned, she was of a mind that if she wasn’t hurting someone physically or financially, then no true crime had been committed. Thus she didn’t condone the anti-cloning law, which she felt was another example of government over-involvement in the lives of its constituents. More importantly, it was what her father wanted, and if she hadn’t been willing to deliver his clone, he would have used an artificial womb. And unlike her critics, she wanted his clone to start with as normal a beginning as possible.
Within weeks, criminal charges were filed against USCS and Sarah Elwell for violating anti-cloning legislation. There were even attempts to file lawsuits against me, claiming that Adam Elwell-1 had broken the law and that, as Adam Elwell’s clone, I should be held accountable as the same person.
Cooler heads prevailed. The courts ruled that I was a separate person and therefore not legally responsible for the sins of my clone-father. Although, it turns out, that was merely the tip of the legal iceberg. What rights and assets carried over? Was it now possible to take it with you? Questions over inheritance claims and more would require decades to iron out and, indeed, occasionally new cloning issues continue to crop up and befuddle my colleagues and I on the Genetics and Cloning Board.
Regarding USCS, they made it out of the courts relatively unscathed. As has often been the case, the well-connected corporate executives were never brought to justice. Lyle Gardener, a good friend of the administration and congressional power brokers, escaped all culpability by arguing he knew nothing about the secret experiments until he was told of the pregnancy. The company paid a small fine and was opened up to federal oversight, but the oversight proved to be lax to the point of insignificance.
The only fervor that didn’t mostly subside was that of some religious critics. One group tried to get a court to order my termination, claiming that to not do so would violate the anti-cloning laws. But the courts shied away from forced abortion. A couple other self-proclaimed pro-life supporters suggested I be executed immediately after birth, suggesting that I was not a child of God, did not have a soul, and therefore lacked humanity’s right to life.
Several people were eager to end my mother’s life as well, and USCS hired bodyguards for her. They proved helpful. There were two known attempts on her life before I was born.
The murder attempts and threats were played up by the media, eventually garnering sympathy from the majority of the population who began to see the anti-cloners as the extremists. Thanks to those few fanatics, the paradigm shift that USCS had hoped for was underway ahead of schedule. Which I guess is why a couple of those demonstrators out there on the dark and stormy night of my birth were there to welcome me into the world.
Book of Adam’s Table of Contents
3
My clone-father had asked that I be named Adam, and my mother followed his wishes. Instead of Adam Silva Elwell, I was christened Adam Michael Elwell-2 – the “Michael” for Adam-1’s father and the “-2” to indicate I was the second person to use the DNA. But while everyone else called me Adam or Adam-2, Mom always called me Michael or Mikey.
I don’t remember the tempestuous night of my birth captured on the holovideo found in my Grandma Lily’s belongings. The night that protestors cursed my existence while the rest of the world watched uneasily as news footage of the first human clone was broadcast, finally giving the monstrosity a face. But a face that looked less like Frankenstein’s monster and more like the Gerber baby.
Nor do I remember a time when I didn’t know that I was the clone of the man I considered my grandfather. Grandmother Lily and Great-Grandfather Lyle talked about him all the time, often comparing me to him physically or in little habits I had like not wanting to get my hands dirty at the beach. Grandmother Lily visited almost every day, forcing herself between my toys and me, or clutching me to her body. Great-Grandfather Lyle never touched me except to perch me on his knee every now and then. He always seemed to be examining me, and I felt self-conscious whenever he was around. Mom rescued me as often as she could from both of them. I counted on her for that. More than I realized.
Each birthday there were letters and holocards from my late grandfather congratulating me on another year, telling me that he knew I was making him proud and that he hoped I was being a good boy for Sarah. As I grew older the handwritten letters, videos and holovideos would give me far more information about him and glimpses into his life, but during my early childhood they gave me only the feeling that Grandpa Adam was the nice man whose holographic ghost I would sit in the lap of while he wished me a happy birthday, and whose genes (whatever those were) had made my life possible, and that this gave us a connection that was very special in some peculiar way.
I never had any reason to think there was anything special about myself in the eyes of the rest of the world. Mom didn’t watch the news much while I was awake. I did go to the doctors for tests and checkups every few days, but I assumed this was normal. The street I grew up on was a small, secluded court in an old section of La Jolla, and the few neighbors we met often stared at me but rarely said anything, and exchanged nothing but pleasantries with my mother. And by the time I was four years old, dozens of more clones were born and the media only cared about me when my birthday rolled around. Thus, when I began to form lasting memories, I was not recognized in public. People recognized my mother first and then realized who I must be.
My mom never did go to jail. A jury sentenced her to one year’s probation for her part in the illegal cloning. She left her job in child counseling to spend time with her new baby. Her inheritance from my clone-father assured her a lifetime of financial security, so she began working from home, volunteering for the United Nation’s UNICEF program, but mostly just playing with me, teaching me, and saving me from Lily and Lyle.
*
Even as my mother’s trial was going on, others had begun challenging the constitutionality of the anti-cloning legislation. A few atheists claimed that a cloning ban deprived them of the only sort of afterlife they could hope to have, and was therefore an infringement on their basic rights of life, liberty, and happiness – not to mention their freedom of religion, as their “religion” required them to be able to clone in order to reach their afterlife. A few new religious sects, including Christian offshoots, followed the same reasoning, arguing that cloning was the resurrection or reincarnation that their religions had been expecting, and they hadn’t realized till now that God or the spirit world would use human methods to resurrect or reincarnate the dead.
Those were intriguing cases that were initially defeated in 2034 and 2035. Several requests from death row inmates to be cloned were quickly thrown out as well. But in early 2036 the landmark cloning case began winding its way up through the courts.
Shannon Smith had captured the hearts of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in 2034, during the midst of the terrible Mideast War. More than three million were already dead, including almost 200,000 civilian Americans murdered in a string of terrorist attacks. The escalation to nuclear war seemed as inevitable as it must have felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ten-year-old Shannon wrote to Iran’s ayatollah, asking him if he wanted to kill all Christians and Jews, and saying she hoped everybody would stop fighting and live with each other in peace.
She was invited to Tehran for an audience with the ayatollah and then Jerusalem with the Israeli prime minister. The media and the people were fascinated by the sweet, adorable girl, and the video of her playing together with Iranian and Jewish children helped galvanize the public of all warring countries to reject vengeance and come back from the brink, giving political cover to leaders to end the war.
On August 25, 2035, an obsessive fan kidnapped Shannon, drove her up into the mountains east of Salt Lake, and strangled her. The New York Times called her the last casualty of the Mideast War.
Her parents claimed that they had the right to have another child using Shannon’s DNA. Not allowing Shannon to be cloned would perpetuate the murderer’s deed, and her parents deserved access to full reparation. In extenuating circumstances, the mother’s health problems left her body with no viable eggs, and the parents claimed that Shannon had expressed an interest in eventually being cloned when she saw Adam-2 in the news.
In a shocking 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court agreed with the parents. They told Congress that, as it stood, the anti-cloning law was an unconstitutional restriction on reproductive rights, recommending that cloning be allowed in cases where the original person was dead or in the case of couples who couldn’t reproduce naturally. A defiant Congress tried to pass an anti-cloning constitutional amendment, but the Senate failed to get the two-thirds majority by three votes. Lyle Gardener had powerful friends.
USCS worked their cloning magic on Shannon Smith and more than twenty others before Shannon-2 was born in November 2037. That year and the next saw a rash of new cloned births, all performed through USCS whose competitors were still behind in the race to commercialize the process. For most people, I was old news.
The Smiths lived in Salt Lake City, but they flew down to La Jolla for the cloning procedure and returned a few months after Shannon-2’s birth to meet our family. I had recently turned four, and their visit was one of my strongest memories from that period of my life. They told me that she was only the second cloned child. I still didn’t completely understand what being a clone meant or how it made us special from everyone else, but it was the first clue that in some way I was considered a unique person in the world.
The adults holotaped the historic meeting, took a lot of pictures and chatted, and I marveled at this tiny visitor who grasped her tiny fingers around mine as I bent over her carriage. We were destined to meet a couple more times at special functions as we grew up, and eventually became long-distance friends as adults. She also would join me as one of the members of the Genetics and Cloning Board.
“What was grandpa like?” I asked the morning after the Smiths left.
My mother smiled as she continued buttoning up my shirt, getting me ready for church. “Well, like all people, he had his good and his bad. He was really depressed when his mommy died. He was only seven, just three years older than you are now. Then your Great-Grandpa Michael died too, and your grandpa was really sad and lonely.”
I put my hand on my mom’s shoulder as I stepped into my shoes. “But you still liked him, right?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered, smiling as she tied my shoes. “I loved him. Whenever I was sad, he’d always try to make me happy. He loved me a lot.” Finished tying my shoes, she playfully held both my feet down so I couldn’t move. “He told me I reminded him of how much fun life was when he was your age. And that’s one reason why I want you to be whoever you want to be, and not just try to be who your grandpa was. I think he may have wanted you to live the life he started before his mommy and daddy died. So if you grow up to be whatever you want, you’ll end up making you both happy. Okay?”
I nodded, though I don’t remember fully understanding.
That night I dreamt my first dream about my c-father. I was ensnared in the clutches of an ugly, cackling witch who had chased me through the rooms of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. Her fingernails grew into long, curling claws and closed around me like a cage.
“I’ve got you now, Adam! And you’ll be with me here forever,” she said, and cackled again.
“He isn’t yours to keep,” my clone-father said from behind her.
She turned on him and hissed like a cat. “He’s mine! I’ve caught him!”
“Take me instead!” he responded, another Disneyland fragment from their staging of Beauty and the Beast.
She grinned hungrily, released me and snatched Adam-1 in her tangled claws.
“Run away,” he ordered.
“Daddy!” I called, reaching out to him. “I won’t leave you!”
He frowned at me. “This is my home. Not yours.”
And so I awoke with mixed feelings, thankful he’d saved me, disappointed he had sent me away. It was the first time I remember wanting a dad.
The next time I opened my birthday letters from my Grandpa or sat in his holographic lap, I did it with new eagerness. I sensed that, even though he’d never met me, he cared for me and wanted to protect me.
Shortly thereafter I had my first brush with death.
Book of Adam’s Table of Contents
4
There hadn’t been an attempt on my mother’s life since her pregnancy, and with us out of the limelight there seemed little reason to believe we were still in danger. But no one realized that Gabrielle Burns was still obsessed with us, stalking us, as she had the night of my birth.
She had dreamed of being a mother since she was old enough to play house, but Gabrielle suffered a miscarriage eight months into her first pregnancy. Complications left her barren. A few years later her husband divorced her, promptly married his mistress, and they had a child together.
Gabrielle became involved in a fundamentalist church where she formed the Cassandra Society, a group named after her unborn daughter, that lobbied and railed against the evils of abortion, extra-marital sex, birth control, artificial wombs and any sort of human intervention in the miracle of life.
She claimed that when she heard the first human clone was going to be born, her namesake, the Archangel Gabriel, told her that a great mission had been granted her. Cloning would doom mankind if she didn’t stop it. Humans would seek eternal life through their own means, forever trapping their souls in new bodies, never allowing those souls to reach God. Therefore, God was sending her to save humanity from itself.
Her first step was to send several urgent letters to Sarah warning her of the evil the clone would visit upon humanity. As March approached and it became clear that the clone would be born despite her warnings, Gabrielle changed tactics. First was a death threat. When that went unheeded, one of Gabrielle’s followers in her Cassandra Society posed as a nurse and tried to get into Sarah’s room with a silver knife. Nobody tied the attempt to Gabrielle until later.
That first attempt was foiled on March 5. Six days later, as news footage revealed, Gabrielle stood silently outside the hospital in the pouring rain as the devil baby was delivered. She did not join her colleagues and like-minded protestors who were screaming that doom was being born in the soulless child, for she knew it was a waste of breath. Gabriel had come to her that night in a flash of lightning and peal of thunder, bearing a message that the evil would be unleashed, and it would be protected by demons for four years, four months, and four days.
At the end of the time of his protection, the hand of God would scatter the demons, and Gabrielle was to strike down the Whore of Babylon and her unholy spawn. Her reward would be to become the Bride of Christ, and she would give birth to the child she had long desired – to the triumphant Christ Child himself.
The long-awaited four years, four months, and four days did not come soon enough for Gabrielle. A couple months before the appointed day, my mother and I met her in a park. While sitting on a bench feeding the birds on a Sunday afternoon, we were approached by a lanky, redheaded woman wearing a white dress. Her narrow face was mostly nondescript but for her large, dark eyes. The stranger asked if she could join us. Mom courteously encouraged her, and she sat next to me.
“You two look so familiar,” she said after watching the birds peck at our bread for a while.
Mom nodded. “I’m Sarah, and this is Adam.”
“Oh yes, of course!” she said with such false surprise that Mom wordlessly asked me to get off the bench and stand in front of her. “My name is Gabrielle. I’m about to be a mother too, you know. Isn’t it a wonderful thing, being a mother?”
“Yes it is,” Sarah replied, grabbing me from behind and tickling me. “Especially when you’ve got such a great kid!”
The woman frowned but then managed a faint smile. “Well, you’re all dressed up, aren’t you? Did you just come from church?”
“Uh-huh,” Mom responded. “We go to a Unitarian church. The minister there invited us while most were condemning us.”
“How nice for you. The Unitarians are very tolerant, aren’t they.”
It wasn’t a question, and Mom didn’t answer. Her eye had caught one of the stranger’s hands, which was clasped around something she couldn’t make out. But it had her attention.
“So many people are not that tolerant,” Gabrielle continued. “You never know what they’re going to do. They can take such a small thing as cloning and make it sound like it’s the end of the world.”
“Yes,” Mom said, “it’s people like that who’ll probably cause the end of the world. But I don’t think it’s the end yet.”
“No, not yet,” Gabrielle agreed. “But it will be a glorious day when it arrives and we can all be wed to God.”
Mom gave her a polite nod.
“But then you already are wed to God, aren’t you? The virgin mother?”
The question was so ridiculous that Mom didn’t initially notice the thorn of jealousy embedded in the woman’s voice. “Well, Adam can be a little angel at times,” she said, “but calling him the Son of God may be a stretch.”
“The son of whom, then?” Gabrielle asked, reaching out to awkwardly pet my head. I moved away from her, and Mom guided me to her other side.
“I guess that’s a question, isn’t it?” Mom admitted. “The son of his clone-father? The son of his clone-father’s parents? My son? Nobody’s son? But I don’t worry too much about his scientific classification – just so long as he lives a good, long, happy life. Probably the same as all mothers want.”
“Indeed,” the woman said. “That’s what all us mothers want.” She clenched her fist tighter in her lap, and we both saw a trickle of blood roll down her hand.
Mom stood up. “I’m sorry, but we have to go.”
“I’m sure we’ll meet again,” Gabrielle said, staying put and studying us over her blood-splattered lap.
Her eyes locked with Mom’s for a moment, and then Mom pulled me away.
Book of Adam’s Table of Contents
5
On July 15, 2038, I woke to the soft, clear morning of the fourth year, fourth month, and fourth day after my birth.
My mother took me to the beach at La Jolla Shores, a short walk from our house. Gabrielle followed us there.
We set out our blanket on the sand, stripped down to our swimsuits, sprayed on our Detox Sunblox and walked down to the water. As one of the last local people-safe beaches, and with only a narrow strip of sand to its name, La Jolla Shores was packed towel-to-towel that morning. But it didn’t matter to Gabrielle if there were witnesses to the assassination. She didn’t pretend to know what God had planned for her after she fulfilled her mission. Perhaps she was to be despised as a child murderer, or perhaps she was to be protected and even revered by people everywhere as God opened their eyes to the prophecy she was fulfilling, saving them all. It didn’t matter. The most important thing was that she would have performed God’s will, and would be rewarded with her own child by God himself.
As we made our way down to the water, God’s brilliant plan sparkled ever clearer. Christ had washed away the sins of the world through baptism. God needed the entire Pacific Ocean to wash away our sin. Gabrielle followed us to the water’s edge and waited.
Mom and I stopped when the water reached my waist. Holding hands, we awaited the next wave and jumped as it struck us, laughing as it swept us a little toward the beach, then preparing to do it again. The return water sucked the wet sand from under my feet, tickling, and looping some seaweed around my ankle. I tried to shake it free before the next wave came.
As we waited holding hands for the oncoming wave, my mother inexplicably turned toward the beach. A tall woman slightly older than herself and wearing a long white skirt and blouse was calmly walking through the water, only ten feet away, dark eyes fixed on us with an expression of jubilant peace. Walking into the water fully clothed. Coming directly toward us. Then mom recognized her – the disturbed woman from the park. Shouting something about “the finger of God.” The sun reflected off an object in her hand. A silver knife.
All that happened in a couple seconds, but by then Gabrielle was upon us.
The wave hit us, I jumped into it, and suddenly it was pulling me a few feet towards the shore. My mom had let go of my hands. She never let go of my hands! I floundered and spat out some seawater, my hands sunk into the muddy bottom. Then I heard my mother scream for help. I stood up in time to see her struggling with the woman in white.
As they fell over into the water, a couple of men splashed out to our rescue. One of them disarmed the woman and pinned her down while the other helped my mother to the shore. A lifeguard was sprinting over with a first aid kit. There was so much blood. The woman was screaming something about the “Whore of Babylon.” I ran clumsily out of the water to my mother’s side.
“Don’t worry, son. She’s gonna be fine,” said one of the men who had rescued us.
I was too scared and confused to take it all in, but my mom gave me a comforting smile as they tied a tourniquet on her upper arm. Soon an ambulance was on the scene, and they helped us into it.
“Don’t let them get away!” screamed the woman. “Can’t you see them?”
As the paramedics gave me a seat next to my mother’s gurney, a patrol jeep stopped near the shore and collected Gabrielle Burns. Her eyes found me through the ambulance window. I turned from her and watched as the paramedics worked on my mom.
“I’m okay,” she mouthed to me, and smiled.
I tried to nod, but couldn’t return the smile. It did reassure me. I believed she’d be okay. But not because of me. I had just stood there in the water as she had fought with the woman. She could have died. And I’d just stood there.
Book of Adam’s Table of Contents
6
The hearing that followed revealed the details of Gabrielle’s life and her obsession with my mother and me, but found her mentally incompetent to stand trial. She was sent to the psychiatric ward at Standley Memorial Hospital in La Jolla.
My mom was far more nervous from then on, especially as the year progressed. Gabrielle Burns wasn’t the only fanatic out to rid the world of clones. Possibly emboldened by Gabrielle’s attack, seventeen clones would be murdered by the end of 2038 alone. A member of the Cassandra Society sent mail bombs to four families with clone babies, killing eleven people, and then martyred herself when the police came to arrest her. Allen Fisher killed eight clones in widely publicized ritual murders that included torture and cannibalism. We rarely left the house by ourselves for a long time to come.
Reverend Al Lewis, who lived nearby, began picking us up for church, contending that we were less likely to be attacked if we were in the company of a minister. But his wife and their son Jack, who was a few months older than me, began driving to church separately. I realized much later that Reverend Lewis was still afraid we would be attacked, and he didn’t want to place his family in harm’s way. He knew he was risking his life helping us get to church.
I wish I’d known so that I could have thanked him.
During the weeks that followed the attack, Mom and I would often stay after the sermon and chat with Reverend Lewis in his private office. They were therapy sessions, but that was never mentioned, and I thought we were doing it because he had some office work to do before driving us back to our house. He shuffled papers around as he talked, like he was casually chatting with me as he got some filing done.
“Do you still feel scared about what happened on the beach?” he asked one Sunday.
“Sometimes,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Do you know why Mrs. Burns did it?”
“She said it was because she was a Christian,” I answered, focusing on the Bible on his desk.
Reverend Lewis nodded. “That is confusing, isn’t it? What’s important to understand is, just because a lot of people call themselves ‘Christians,’ they don’t all believe the same things or treat people the same way. No sir.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because everyone’s different, and we all have different ways of looking at the world and other people, and we’ve all got different ways of interpreting what we read in the Bible and what we feel in our hearts. One person can read the Bible and believe that God wants you to seek out possible sinners and stone them to death, while another person can read the very same Bible and believe that God doesn’t want you to judge others, and that He wants you to love and respect and forgive everyone and treat each other like equals, even your enemies. You can believe in a god of love and charity, or a god of hate, greed, and fear, or something in the middle. In the end, the kind of god you believe in probably reveals much more about your own nature than it reveals about the true nature of God.”
I just stared blankly. He tried to clarify.
“You see, some people, like Gabrielle Burns and those who support her or who hate you because of the way you were born, they read the Bible and think that you’re evil, and that God hates you for it, and that they should hate you as well. Although some of them might call that hate ‘love’ so it sounds like they still love their neighbor. You know, just because someone says they’re doing something out of love doesn’t mean they’re not really doing it out of hate.”
I didn’t know that, but before I could say so, he went on.
“Those Christians look for differences and for sins, and believe it’s their duty to root out such things and label them as evil. But other Christians think that’s not what God wants. When they read the Bible, they see a loving God who wants people to be good and kind to everyone, and who wants people not to judge one another but to treat everyone like equal neighbors worthy of respect. They think it’s a sin to be cruel to another person when that person isn’t doing anything cruel to them. Jesus says so again and again. He reached out to all the people that his society scorned – the outcasts like the poor, the sick, the tax collectors, the Samaritans, the Roman soldiers, and the prosti—,” he interrupted himself before continuing. “He loved all his neighbors, not just the popular ones. So how would have Jesus treated clones?”
He paused for my answer, but I didn’t know it.
“He would have loved you,” he answered for me, smiling, and making me feel surprisingly comforted. “And if Jesus was wrong, if God wants us to be hateful and cruel to one another, then why would any truly loving person even want to go to that God’s heaven? I surely wouldn’t want to go to some heaven ruled by a mean God who wanted me to treat clones like they were bad people. No sir.”
He conversed the same way he sermonized, a bit long-winded.
“Do you think being a clone is a sin?” My voice shook as I spoke, fearful of both the nature of his answer and its potential length.
Reverend Lewis stopped his filing. “I can’t believe being born is ever a sin. No sir,” he said. “It’s what you do with your life that matters to God, so long as God is truly good.”
A sigh of relief on both counts. Then I pressed my luck. “Do you think cloning is a sin?”
He hesitated with that one, probably not wanting to hurt me but not wanting to lie either. “First of all,” he began, and I cringed, “you always have to remember that just because someone says something is a sin doesn’t make it so. No sir. That said, I personally believe it’s wrong, but from a Christian perspective there’s nothing specifically about it in the Bible and, of course, only God really knows for sure. Regardless, I can’t believe a loving God would punish us for doing it since he didn’t leave any clear instructions on the issue, it promotes life rather than death, it doesn’t hurt anyone, and he made it physically possible for it to happen.”
I was a little hurt that he thought my being cloned was wrong. But I felt better knowing that God and everyone who called themselves Christians weren’t out to kill me. No sir.
Book of Adam’s Table of Contents
7
Besides limiting our freedom of movement and creating tension whenever we went out, the beach attack had the additional unfortunate effect of prompting Grandma Lily to come over more often. If such a thing was possible, she seemed even more paranoid about my safety than Mom.
“He’ll be completely home schooled, of course,” Lily said to Mom one day as she hugged me too tightly in her lap. My Clone Ranger coloring book lay on our old oak dining table, mere inches out of reach, but it may as well have been in another galaxy.
I saw my mom roll her eyes as she crushed some garlic cloves in the kitchen. Lily always had a lot of free advice to offer, and I’m sure it got on Mom’s nerves. Especially since they had significantly different ideas as to how I should be raised.
“He’ll go through virtual classes for the standard subjects,” Mom said, “and use the Hill Creek Junior Academy for group activities.”
“Group activities? But we can do group activities right here!” Lily responded.
“No we can’t, Mom. We can’t play baseball here or start a band or form a chorus. At the Junior Academy he’ll be able to play sports and get involved in the arts and socialize with other kids at lunch and do group science projects and stuff.”
“He doesn’t need all that crap!”
I think she was so livid she forgot I was on her lap. Grandma didn’t usually talk like that.
“Yes he does, and he’s going to get it,” Mom said calmly but firmly. She had a lot of patience with Lily, but I don’t know where she got it.
Lily pouted. “But we don’t know what kind of kids go there. Kids can be very cruel, you know.”
“I know,” Mom said, nodding heavily. “But there are plenty of cruel adults as well. Unfortunately, Mikey will have to learn to deal with cruelty.”
Lily put her face right in front of my nose. The smell of her heavy makeup suffocated me. “You don’t want to go to some nasty old school, do you Adam?”
It’s the question almost every kid dreams about getting asked, but most kids don’t have a Grandma Lily in their face. I didn’t really know what the school thing was all about, but I knew it could get me off her lap and in reach of my coloring book.
“I want to go to school,” I stated as firmly as had Mom.
Lily looked shocked, but Mom grinned. “Well then, it’s settled.”
To my relief, the stratagem worked. Lily dumped me from her lap. “We’ll see what father says,” she said, checking her bejeweled wristwatch while avoiding eye contact with both of us, spoken with a coldness I rarely heard from anyone but Lyle.
Mom stiffened. Like me, she was always uneasy around Lyle. It would be a long time before I knew why. Before I read about the night of her molestation. And how Lyle threatened to kill her and her father if she ever said anything.
Did that memory go through my mom’s mind as she considered her response? Did that memory go through her mind every day of her life?
“Grandfather has no say in the matter.”
“How dare you?” Lily said. “You’re just trying to take Adam away from me like you always did!”
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. You stole Adam from me as a child, and now you’re doing it all over again.”
“You think I stole Daddy from you?”
“You know you did, but you won’t get away with it this time, Sarah.”
Mom was silent a long time. I stopped coloring and looked at her. Saw her eyes glistening like they did when she was sad, trying not to let herself cry. It would be another fourteen years before I fully understood the tension between my mother and grandmother. My c-father’s journal made his preference clear:
The little bit of home life I afford myself is more tolerable than I expected, as I’m able to spend most of the time doting on Sarah. She’s another type of immortality – the type that nature has been providing for hundreds of millions of years. She reminds me of my mother. There’s an actress’s vibrancy about her, and her face has the soft, rounded, girl-next-door features instead of Lily’s chiseled beauty.
In Sarah’s eyes I see my mother, and even my own self, before my parents’ deaths. She loves out of an inner light that radiates from all people who have a true passion for life and the world around them.
I don’t share that passion for the world, but I guess I’ve always been drawn to those who possess it. I often take her alone to places where I can see that passion at its greatest, to the Zoo and Wild Animal Park – places I wanted to go to as a child. And I’ll never forget the trip to Scotland to honor the tenth anniversary of the death of Dolly, the first cloned sheep. Watching Sarah’s eyes brighten with discovery as we shared the sights and novelties of Scotland and Edinburgh and Dolly. She’d get so excited by the world that she’d laugh out loud in delight.
That was something I’d still see my mom doing more than twenty years later.
Lily was never close to her daughter. She was understandably jealous of Sarah for the true affection Adam showered upon the girl. The Dolly trip was one that especially rankled Lily, as the tenth anniversary of Dolly’s death was also Valentine’s Day. Adam not only forgot to give her a gift – he only remembered to wish her a Happy Valentine’s Day that night after giving Sarah a card. Fortunately for him, it took little for Adam to re-charm his wife. He made love to her, and all was forgiven. Or so it had seemed to him.
I put my crayon down, slipped off my chair, and walked into the kitchen. Mom saw me, smiled a little, and stopped crushing the garlic to pick me up. I felt her head lean against mine.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mom,” she said, “and I’m sorry if you think I stole Daddy. But Michael is not Daddy, and no matter what you think, he is going to school, and I don’t want to hear another word about it from you or Grandfather. Is that understood?”
And apparently it was. As far as I knew, Lily never said another word about it to Mom.
Grandma Lily did, however, have a few more words to say to me. It was just a couple weeks after the school argument. Mom had gone out for something and left me alone with Lily. We were sitting next to each other at the dining table doing some preschool math games. Suddenly she grabbed both my hands in hers and leaned over for greater secrecy, despite the fact that we were alone.
“Tell me, Adam. Do you have any memories from before?”
I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I wondered when Mom was coming back, and prayed it would be soon.
“Before what?”
“From before you were born again. When we were together.”
I shook my head. When was mom coming back?
“You don’t remember the lilies?” she asked, shaking my hands in hers.
I paused, trying to think of something to put her mind at ease and get out of this highly uncomfortable interrogation.
“Did I give you lilies?”
Such a bright and ecstatic smile I’m not sure I’d ever seen. Lily was a young-looking granny anyway. As I would discover years later by looking at photos, she went to surgical lengths to look younger soon after my birth. But at that moment she looked like a schoolgirl. Like the young girl who had first fallen in love with my c-father. I guess I’d said what she wanted to hear. Or, more accurately, she’d heard what she wanted me to say.
“You do remember!”
I shrugged. “Maybe?”
It was, indeed, a question. I didn’t think I remembered. I was just trying to guess where she was going with the whole thing. And although I could picture in my head some things from Adam-1’s life, I was pretty sure the pictures had been formed by the photos and the stories I’d heard growing up. I knew that Adam-1’s parents had sung The Rainbow Connection to him as a lullaby. When Mom sang it for me, I’d imagine my c-father at about my age in a different bed being sung to by my great-grandparents Michael and Sarah Elwell, pictures of whom hung not far from the dining table that had belonged to them. And there was the photo Mom loved of Sarah, Michael, and Adam-1 performing a home skit from The Chronicles of Narnia, and I could imagine myself performing in it with Great-Grandma Sarah dressed in a white terrycloth robe and sunbonnet as the White Witch, Great-Grandpa Michael acting as her minion dwarf (wearing a San Francisco Giants cap for irony), and myself instead of Adam-1 as Edmund clutching our family’s own version of Turkish Delight – a package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. So were they memories, or mere images I’d pasted together from photos I’d seen and stories I’d heard? Maybe I’ll never know for sure.
“How wonderful!” Lily continued. “Well don’t worry. Everything’s going to be the same again soon.”
“The same?” I echoed.
“Yes, the same – just like before. We’ll be together again. I’m coming, Adam!”
She’s coming where?
When was mom coming back!
*
Late that night the phone rang. Later than it ever rings. Mom began crying and saying things I couldn’t make out. There were footsteps, a light went on in the kitchen, and she came into my room, surprised to find me awake.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, raising myself up in bed.
“Sweetie,” she said, sitting next to me and giving me a hug, “I’m afraid your Grandma Lily has died.”