+J.M.J.+
Flesh of My Flesh
By "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
I'm better known for my "A.I." fanfics (Jude Law fans: which see, please!), but I thought I'd take a brief break from them for a slight change of pace…but I couldn't completely get away from writing fics featuring a character portrayed by a certain divinely beautiful, outstandingly talented, green-eyed Englishman, could I??? I have to admit that Gattaca isn't really among my favorite films; I admire it more than I actually like it. The cinematography is remarkably executed and the script is very tightly written, but the ending brassed me off. Jerome (Eugene) didn't deserve to die, even if he chose it, and even if he was a bit of a jerk. So…hence this alternate ending fiction. I have to admit, there's a bit of me in Jerome (Eugene) here, since I've had problems with suicidal ideations. I also have to admit there's a lot of me in the female character in this (We both have the same condition, and our speech patterns are similar), but it it's hardly enough to warrant the "Mary Sue" label.
Disclaimer:
I do not own the movie Gattaca, its characters, concepts (including jargon), or other indicia which are the property of Sony Pictures, Andrew Niccol, et al.
Chapter I
ImPatient
Irony of ironies, all is irony…
They caught me in the act: first the Hoovers, then my family…
I had let myself get snarled up in the whole borrowed ladder operation involving the InValid Vincent Freeman just for something to do, to relieve the deadening tedium of my pointless existence. And what happened? The wretched broken ladder had to get himself snarled up in a murder investigation involving the death of one of the directors at the Gattaca Aeronautics Center, where, as I found, he'd once worked as a janitor. The morning Vincent/Jerome left earth with the exploration team going to Titan, I had it all set: I was, as I told him, doing a little traveling myself—into the next life, if there is one.
I had the perfect escape route: the large incineration chamber where Vincent had scrubbed himself clean of all loose hairs and skin cells each morning, erasing the evidence of his true genetic identity. For all genetic intents and purposes, he was Jerome Morrow. I was nobody. I was just the supplier of his passport: blood samples, hair samples, skin cells, even urine samples. He was welcome to it. People remember the gold medallists, not the silver medallists. The world would hardly blink when it heard I had disappeared without a single trace. Nobody hardly noticed when I tried to end the sick joke of my life the first time.
But as I dragged myself into the chamber, ready for blastoff, someone knocked very loudly at the outer door of my apartment. I ignored it and hauled my useless legs over the sill of the chamber.
The knock came louder, more insistent. "Mr. Jerome Morrow, open up!" an authoritarian voice called.
I settled myself inside the chamber, pulling my knees up. No turning back.
"We know you're in there," the voice said.
The hall door opened. They must have had the superintendent's key.
Just as I reached out to throw the switch and pull the door shut for takeoff, someone grabbed me by the wrists and hauled me out onto the floor.
I looked up at a bulky older man in a standard issue blue suit. Beyond him, two younger goons in similar suits had set to work searching the apartment.
"Who are you?" I demanded.
The tall man took out a badge with an ID from inside his jacket. "Lewin Pemberton, FBI, Identity Theft Division."
"You're mistaken," I said. "I haven't stolen anyone's identity."
"No, but you let an InValid borrow it," the Hoover said. "I see we came just in time to save the chief source of evidence from a fiery fate."
"Who told you I had anything to do with that?" I demanded, but I quickly bit my tongue.
That girl, Irene, Vincent's girlfriend, must have told them everything she knew. She'd found out what we were up to.
I suppose I should have made it a little interesting for the Hoovers by resisting arrest, fighting back, whatnot. I couldn't do much in my condition, and I didn't want to add to my list of charges either. They cuffed me and carried me out to a waiting van. I expected them to throw me in the clink, but instead, they brought me to the mental ward of a local hospital. I ended up lying in a bed with my arms above my head, wrists bound to the headboard.
That evening, my father showed up, the first time he ever came to see me since I came over here to the States, where the family had packed me off to get me out of sight.
"Seems like just yesterday," I drawled.
"Jerome, why did you do this?" he said, glaring down at me.
"What, trying to end this farce or loaning the ladder to the InValid?"
"Don't be ridiculous; I meant trying to kill yourself."
"Wouldn't it be cheaper then? You wouldn't have to pay me to stay off your back."
"You listen to me, boy. You almost gave your mother a second heart attack. We can't put up with this kind of nonsense. Am I clear?"
"You couldn't be any more clear than if you'd printed in huge block capitals."
"You are going to get yourself some professional help. You will find a reliable psychologist and you will work with that counselor, or else you cannot expect to see another penny from me."
"So what am I supposed to do? Just pick a name out of the telephone directory?"
"No. I'm going to ask your primary physician to refer you to someone."
"Let me be the one to do that," I insisted. "For God's sake, I'm twenty-nine years old; I'm not longer in knee pants."
"You act as if you were."
Later that evening, when the doctor came later to check and make sure I was still breathing, I brought up the subject—and to ask how long I had to stay there.
"We have to keep you under observation for a few days more till we can determine how fit you are to be released. But I know of at least one psychologist who would be ideal for you," he said. "I'll clear it with your primary care physician first."
"Man or woman?"
"I'll tell you when the referral clears."
After three days, the doctors decided I wasn't going to make another attempt on my life, so they removed the restraints and let me move about as much as I could in my condition. I stayed in my corner of the ward as much as I could. The place wasn't exactly Bedlam, but it was bad enough: drug addicts, manic-depressives, depression cases. There was one kid of twenty who was every bit as lucid as I was, but who kept urinating against the walls, regardless of what the orderlies told him.
InValids all of them, I realized. True, I had shared my apartment with the InValid Vincent Freeman, the one who got me into this mess, but that was a whole different matter. I could have turned him out if his presence had thoroughly bored me enough. But these…I couldn't escape from these except to avoid associating with them.
The wretched doctors kept me there for two weeks, to make certain I wasn't going to pull anything else. The Hoovers dropped the charges against me: I gave them the name and number of the ladder salesman who'd sold my ladder to Vincent, which reduced my penalty down to a $2,000 fine.
At the end of the same period, my physician, Lockheed, arranged for my first appointment with the shrink, one Dr. M. Koestelbaum. This allowed me permission to go home, but they had a visiting nurse come in twice a day to see that I hadn't choked myself with a lamp cord yet. I honestly think they sent this frumpy old bag in her sixties on purpose, probably has that broken rung that causes Alzheimer's.
Tuesday morning found me in the waiting room of Dr. Koestelbaum's office. I occupied myself with wondering what the M stood for. Probably Martin or Morris or Merton or Melvin. Or worse: Martha or Margaret. I saw her in my mind's eye: a dowdy dame in her late fifties, iron gray hair pulled back in a bun, cat's eye glasses and a thick layer of foundation covering up her mustache.
A middle-sized woman (middle-sized to someone who can look her in the eye instead of her midriff; everyone over the age of seven towers over me) in her late twenties walked in, clad in a long, loose-cut pearl gray tunic embroidered in purple around the hem, the cuffs of the sleeves and the high but collarless neckline and baggy pants of the same material, the kind of outfit you generally see Pakistani women wear. She was white to guess from her ivory colored skin and red-brown hair; not outstandingly beautiful but not ugly.
She smiled down at me as she walked by on her way into the office. I managed to return a brief smile, just to be polite. Probably the secretary…
A moment later, the girl in gray came out; she stooped down to my level.
"Hello, you must be Jerome. I'm Dr. Minerva Koestelbaum."
"Pleased to meet you," I managed. She held out her hand to me; I shook it just for the sake of formality. She had a gentle but firm handshake, almost like a man's.
"Shall we get started?" she asked.
I heaved myself out of the waiting room chair into my wheelchair. "The sooner we get started is the sooner I can get this the h--- over with," I said.
I wheeled myself after her as she led the way to the office door. She opened it and stepped aside, holding it for me. I glanced up at her face, expecting that pitying stare most people give me when they hold doors for me. But I didn't find it. She had a serene, quiet face, oddly like the face of the Japanese moon goddess on the scroll my mother had on the wall of her sitting room.
The office was a well-lit room, clean but not tidy, not the way I prefer rooms to be. Bookshelves lined the walls and what wasn't covered by shelves was covered with framed pictures: framed photographs and children's loud-colored scrawls of drawings. A black leather couch faced a couple of armchairs and beyond them, close to one wall, stood a hotdesk with a flatscreen monitor perpendicular to the desktop.
I made for the couch, lifted myself out of my chair and onto the upholstery of the couch.
"I was about to offer you the couch, but I'm glad you've made yourself at home," she said.
"I figured I'd keep to the psychologist clichés, the shrink with the patient on the couch," I said. All she needed to do to complete the picture was to wear rimless glasses and speak in a German accent.
She took an old-fashioned yellow pad of paper and a manila folder from the desk top and drew one of the armchairs closer to the couch and sat down opposite me.
"I hope you don't mind if I take notes," she said. "It's the only way I can keep track of the conversation; I used to use a voice recorder, but some people find it annoying."
"Whatever," I muttered.
She opened the folder. "I've also got your complete medical history here…Your full name is Jerome Eugene Morrow, you were born in Castlereagh, England, December 29, 2054. You are a Valid; you've had no major illnesses…you have a lot of reports on physicals, on account of your being—my!—a championship swimmer, went all the way to Frankfurt Summer Olympics of 2078. You must have a lot of fond memories of that."
"In a manner of speaking," I replied, not looking up.
"I'd better warn you, Jerome: I have a lie-o-meter built into my head; you can't lie or withhold the truth from me completely, no matter how hard you try."
I noticed her hands lacked any rings, wedding or engagement or otherwise; probably didn't have a boyfriend to give her any, and with her built in lie-o-meter, she probably couldn't get one.
"And…oh dear, it says here you were involved in a car accident about six months after you won your silver medal. Your lower lumbar vertebrae were smashed and your spinal cord was three-quarters severed. That must have been a terrible setback."
"I survived it, didn't I?" I shrugged.
She looked over the top of the folder, but she went on. "Your physician, Carlton Lockheed, referred you to me because you tried to suicide in an incinerator…I have to admit I've seen a number of suicidal people before, and most of them went pretty much by the textbook: trying to shoot themselves or drown themselves or overdose on sleeping pills. But yours was original to say the least."
I shrugged. "I wanted to be thorough."
"What led you to attempt this? Is that what's brought you here today?"
"You might call it that. My father threatened to cut me off from my allowance unless I got therapy. On account of the obvious, I don't have any other income."
"It sounds to me, from this and from your general attitude, that you don't want to be here."
"It's either come here or end up on the street."
"Well…if you don't feel ready to talk about this, maybe we can just spend this session getting to know each other a little better.
"I think you know quite a bit about me already."
Without turning her face away from me, she turned and put the folder back on the desk. "That's just a lot of facts about Jerome the organism. That doesn't tell me much about Jerome the human being."
"Well, you've found out one thing about me: you know that I don't wan to be here."
"Can you tell me why, or would you rather not?"
"It was my father's idea," I said. I told her about what led to my second suicide attempt; I didn't let out one word about the first, the event that landed me in this wheelchair.
"So you've been paraplegic for three years now?" she asked.
"For God's sake, call me what I am: I'm crippled."
"Okay," she said slowly. "Do you use that word to be blunt, or do you use it to whip yourself?" she asked.
I honestly couldn't reply. I didn't know.
I have to admit that woman got me thinking…
Helping Vincent/Jerome was probably the most decent thing I'd ever done with my life, but it had cost me. He had what I didn't. He had his dreams of reaching for the stars. Mine had died on the highway outside London. Vincent Freeman…of the two of us, he was the real free man, though I had more privileges.
Crippled.
I knew why I insisted on that word. I was crippled of soul as well as of limb.
But who was she to ask this question of me?
After Nurse Ratched, or whatever her name was, had gone for the night, Eckart, my only real friend, came up bringing along a case of vodka and a carton of Turkish cigarettes. He runs a racket on imports like this, as well as on less consumable and tangible commodities.
"I need some information," I told him. It took me a couple stiff drinks to get up the courage to admit that to him.
"What, you need another under the table background check?" he asked. "Besides, should you really be talking to me now that the Hoovers got you on the radar?"
"I just need a little information about a woman."
"Ohhh, that kind, eh? Don't want to get too interested before you find out the worst, is that it? Give me a name and a few identifying marks: Blonde? Brunette? Redhead?"
"No, it's much more professional than that." I handed him Dr. Koestelbaum's card. "This one. She's a shrink."
"This should be bloody easy. I bet you could do it yourself if your brain could get up off its a--."
"Watch it, Eckart."
"Sorry."
"I want her DNA record."
"Why, you suspecting her of being a borrowed ladder? Trying to curry favor with the Hoovers by turning in an illegal?"
"I just want to know who my father roped me into seeing for therapy, to see if she's competent."
Eckart took the card. "No problem." He made the card vanish before my very eyes, then pulled it out of my vest pocket.
"Don't lose that. My life is at stake," I warned.
He gave me a sidewise, jeering look, as if to say, 'you didn't seem so worried about your life when the Hoovers caught you'.
Next evening, Eckart had returned, holding up a CD-RW like a medal.
"Take a look at what I found, Jere," he said, putting the disk into the drive on my desktop. He punched a few keys.
A page opened up on the screen. Dr. Koestelbaum's picture appeared, along with a brief profile and a chart of her DNA.
InValid.
Genetic related defects: Overbite
Myopia
Allergies: pollen, dust, latex
Asperger's Syndrome
"Good God, I'm surrounded by InValids!" I groaned, pushing myself down in my chair.
"Yeah, it's an InValid who brings your cigarettes."
"InValids seem to be my lot in life. How on earth did she ever get qualified? Someone like her ought to be emptying the bedpans in the hospital, not treating mental patients."
"Including Valids like you, I suppose."
"I'm not a mental patient," I retorted.
"Then how come you're seeing her?"
"I told you, it's my father's idea."
"Well, you ain't gonna like what I got to say, but I'll say it anyway: I think you started this whole chain of events, whether you're troubled or not."
I looked up at him. He's so ugly I shouldn't let him near me: I might catch the uglies from him. At least he's so short I can almost look him in the eye; his olive tinted skin has a muddy cast to it and his face is so thin it reminds me of a skull. I suppose you could say I keep him around for the same reason the medieval scholars used to keep a skull on their desks. With him hanging around, I've got the skull though it happens to still be attached to the rest of the InValid.
He's right, dammit.
The next time I went in for another appointment with the InValid, I went in well armed with information.
I did a little research on my own about Asperger's Syndrome. It seems they're incredibly bright—for genetic defectives—but they tend to get stuck in their own little worlds, they fixate on narrow, bizarre interests—doorknobs, nineteenth-century bookbinding techniques, android movies—and they also tend to miss or fail to interpret social cues and non-verbal communication (eye contact, etc.). This could prove useful.
I suppose it was good I had a female therapist who's an Asperger's case: I could ogle her up and down but she wouldn't notice what I was up to.
I actually tried this. I was lying on her couch, eyeing her up and down from under lowered lids, wondering what that light, loose Pakistani tunic she wore concealed. I was just imagining how she'd look spread out on the floor, when she suddenly got up and stabbed a pencil into the back of my hand.
"What the h--- did you do that for?!" I demanded, pulling myself upright.
"You were ogling me," she said. "And I will not allow that kind of behavior in my office."
"How do you know?"
She knelt down to my level, her violet blue eyes on fire. "I'm twenty-seven years old, and I've seen men ogling me for fifteen years. I should know what an ogle looks like by now. Plus, you were looking at me through your lashes, which leads me to believe you had something to hide."
"How would you know? Can you process that non-verbal communication?"
She looked at me, her brows gathered.
"I didn't think so. You ought to be treated, not me." But even as I said this, her look changed.
"How did you find out?"
"That's not as important as how you got to where you are," I said. "You're an InValid."
"That's true," she admitted. "My parents were devout Catholics. They got married right about the time Pope Benedict XX promulgated his encyclical Humani Imago Dei, On Non-Therapeutic Genetic Manipulation. They obeyed its teachings and had me as a GodChild, the old-fashioned way. They raised me as if I were a Valid. They had connections: they knew people who could get me the necessary permits and have the exception clauses signed. There are legal ways: you just have to find the right lawyers. I made up my mind that if I couldn't fix the system myself, that I'd help people live to their best inside the system as it stands. And that's why I'm here to help you."
"In case you've forgotten, I'm a Valid," I reminded her.
"That's true. But you're every bit as imprisoned."
"Don't remind me," I snapped, looking down at my useless legs.
"I wasn't referring to that, I was referring to something else."
I knew what she meant, but I didn't want to hear it. "How could I be imprisoned? You were the one who had to buck the system."
"Let me tell you how it is with me, and maybe you can tell me how it is with you.
"Try to imagine what its like having the genetic identity chip on your National ID card scanned and having the same clerk or guard or whatnot ignore the Honorary Valid stamp on the card, just because the chip scanned InValid. Try having your ex-fiance reject you just because he found out your ladder has a few damaged rungs.
"Besides," she added, putting her head on one side with an innocently flirtatious smile. "With your looks, I bet a lot of girls don't notice your handicap."
"Oh, they notice, since they have to look down to look into my eyes—unless they're three foot dwarves," I retorted. "The only way I can get a date is if I pay for it."
"You need to try harder."
I was tempted to say, 'I could start with you', but I didn't want a sexual harassment charge added to the ladder-selling charge on my record.
"What woman wants…a cripple," I snipped, but even I could hear my voice wobble.
"Can you tell me why you use that word?"
I moistened my lips, but my tongue felt like sandpaper. "I think it's because my soul is crippled."
Then it happened. The water-works turned on in my eyes and I started sniveling like a baby.
Minerva put her hand on mine. "Go on. Get it out. You'll feel better once you get that out of your system."
She offered me a tissue. I pushed it away, hiding my eyes from her. But she took my wrists in her hands and looked into my face. Though my tears half blinded me, I could tell she was fighting back the tears herself. So much for the inability to process non-verbal communication.
I have to admit, I felt rotten, but I felt better when I got home. My hand went for the bottle of vodka I'd hidden behind the couch, but I stopped it.
I took a long hot bath that night. I swore I could feel something seeping out of my body, like a venom I'd kept bottled up in my veins for too long.
I slept that night like I hadn't slept in years, the kind of sound, satisfying slumber I used to have after a successful competition. Come to think of it, I suppose you'd say I had just had a successful competition, against my worst opponent.
To be continued…
Literary Easter Eggs:
Doorknobs, et al—The first two are actual fixed interests some people with Asperger's Syndrome have had, while the last is one of my own.