Our favourite game was "Chicken". When our parents weren't watching we used to swim as far out as we dared. It was always about who would get scared and turn back first.
Our arms chopped through the water creating percussive splashes. The night sky stretched above our heads, an unending body flickering from sight as we ducked under the water and rose frequently for air. We worked harder than we had any other time, our arms no longer branches of skin and tissue but strong, majestic biceps, cutting through the water's surface. I looked around myself whenever my head broke the surface, trying to catch a glimpse of the land and failing each time. We'd gone further out than we ever had before.
"Vincent! Vincent!"
My brother turned to face me in the water.
"Where's the shore? We're too far out."
"You want to quit?" My brother grinned at me. We could surely die, both of us, if we kept going.
"We're too far out!" I protested. My brother continued to smile
"You want to quit?" He asked again. His ego astounded me, I couldn't fail mine.
"NO!"
I watched each stroke of his in front of me. It was the first time my brother was actually leading me. I remembered us as children; him, the weak one, the one who would die young, the "invalid". I watched him push through the water, parting the waves like Moses; impossibly. Nothing that was determined at his birth allowed any of this to be true.
"How are you doing this Vincent?" I called out to him. My brother stopped once again and turned to me. I gasped for air, struggling to stay above the surface. Vincent's breath was clam. It couldn't be his heart that was allowing him. "How are you doing any of this?" My thoughts strayed back to GATTACA, the place he had dreamed of all our childhood but never had the body to get there.
"You want to know how I did it?" He asked, his tone more serious than I had ever heard him. "This is how I did it, Anton. I never saved anything for the swim back."
I froze in the water and, for the first time, looked up at my brother; an athlete, a champion, a winner at the top of his workforce. He was more a "valid" than I had ever been. I thought of all the letters and numbers in my genetic make-up and I thought of what his must have been; all of them defied before my eyes. Then, for the first time, I noticed something about my brother I had never noticed before. There was not a cell in his body that could have allowed any of this to happen. Then, surely, it was something else; something greater that allowed the impossible to be possible.
I never believed in the human spirit before that night; that night when my brother proved to me that impossible things can happen. Not miracles; that time when he beat me as a boy was a miracle, what I saw before me was no coincidence.
It was spirit; a strong spirit, capable of defying all things necessary to achieve its goal, to overcome all oppression. There is no gene for the human spirit.