+J.M.J.+
Flesh of My Flesh
By "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
Didn't want to keep you in too much suspense…I got into this fic so much that, in addition to doing a lot of heavy-duty 'Net research on spinal cord injuries (apologies to the lady who was doing research on a different topic via the same medical info site, whose printouts kept getting mixed up with mine!), I also went out and ordered the soundtrack CD to help me get the "feel" of the film into this fic. It's some of the most incredible film music I've ever heard: lyrical, minimalist, sensuous, stark, hopeful, devastating…(Also note: if I got any of the finer details, plotwise or astronomical, wrong, please bear with me: it's been a while since I saw the film, and I'm also a little rusty on my planetology).
Disclaimer:
See chapter I. I also don't own the famous "Serenity Prayer" which appears here.
II Validation
To be utterly frank, this InValid got me using brain neurons I'd been ignoring…
Whether I liked it or not, Dr. Koestelbaum got under my skin in the worst way. I stopped gritting my teeth every time I had an appointment—and per order my physician and my father, I went in twice a week. She never failed to keep me amused, watching her methods in action was some of the best performing I had ever seen. But right when I thought I could skirt some issue and get away with it, she would insert something I hardly expected. And what she lacked in Validity she made up for in persistence.
"Tell me about your family. What was it like for you growing up? What was your relationship with your parents? What was their relationship like from what you could see? Did you have any brothers or sisters?"
"What, do you want to know what it was like to grow up as a genuine Valid?" I asked.
"No, I was asking you about your family in the subjective sense."
"All right, I see what you want from me.
"My father was in bioengineering, so of course he had the jump on all the new research and genetic engineering techniques that came out. Mum came from a wreck of a titled family, the Flytes of Marchmain, which had fallen on its luck, one of the younger daughters, so it hardly mattered who she married so long as he was respectable.
"They decided to improve the stock one step further. They removed the latent tendency toward heart disease and senility in Mum's family, removed the glaucoma and arthritis that plagued my father's side. They made sure I would have my mother's dark good looks and my father's eyes and intellect. Oh, and they lengthened something on my chromosomes, something wasn't right and it caused shortened life expectancy."
"The telomeres, the ends of the chromosomes."
"Yes, that sounds right."
Her hand kept moving, writing the whole time I spoke, but she paused for a second, as if jotting down an observation.
"So, they implanted what would eventually become me on the 29th of March. Nine months later to the day, I popped out; I guess you'd call me a Christmas present, though my parents knew exactly what they were going to get: a male child, utterly perfect in every respect. My father used to boast that I didn't let out a peep as the nurses took the blood sample to check and make sure none of my rungs had cracked or shattered. But I was 100% pure Valid; my parents got their money's worth, close to a million Euros worth of genetic manipulation."
"So, did you have any brothers or sisters?"
"No, it was enough trouble for them to make me, as I later found out. I think I used to pest Mum about wanting a little brother, but she always told me she couldn't have another child, that she'd had trouble having me: her heart gave out a moment after my birth. I was fine, but Mum had to be resuscitated.
"All the while I was growing up, my father never let me forget for a minute who I was and what I was. 'You're a Morrow: we give our 200%, and I put 200% into making you what you are today'."
"The first part at least is fairly good philosophy…but it all depends on what spirit you do it in."
"In that case, I suppose my father was completely in the wrong spirit about it."
"He sounds as if he does. The fact that he's used threats to get you into therapy…"
"I'm here, aren't I? This is Jerome Eugene Morrow you're speaking with."
"But you keep coming back here, and you keep talking about what's bothering you."
"It's either that or out on the street."
"My lie-o-meter is picking up a signal. I think you really want to be helped." She leaned forward slightly, looking at me. "I think the inner Jerome, the real Jerome, the one whom the outer Jerome keeps trying to silence with sarcasm, wants to come out into the world."
"You can blame my father for that."
"Yes, he was a large contributor to your problems, but it's never that simple. There are always many other factors.
"Tell me about your mother. What was she like?"
"If you'd been around her any length of time, your lie-o-meter would be ticking like a sped-up clock.
"She gave everyone the impression that she and I were very close, when we weren't."
"It's interesting you should put it that way."
"Why?"
"Because you keep referring to your father as 'father', but you often refer to your mother as 'Mum'."
"It's an old habit. My father didn't want to be called anything less than 'father'. As I was saying… She made most of the decisions about my schooling and activities, hired the best tutors for me, saw to it that all my needs were adequately met and then some. You'd say she spoiled me; it didn't take long for me to figure out that I could get around her very easily. I don't think she quite knew what to do with me, so she kept my schedule packed to make certain she was never stuck with me. She left most of my basic care in the hands of a succession of nannies and governesses. I honestly believe she was terrified of me, as if I were some freak of nature."
"Why do you say that?"
"Whenever she actually hugged me, it was very stiff, wooden, it never felt right, only forced. It was like being hugged by a robot."
"That might be another part of why you've built these walls around yourself. You're afraid of being hurt by people, so you distance yourself from them. But that only hurts you more."
I wasn't about to argue that. She'd found the crack in my armor, the soft spot under the dragon's wing. Suddenly I had nothing to say in reply to this. My usual acerbic wit failed me when I needed it the most. Or was it somehow supposed to do that?"
A shadow drifted over me. I realized I'd closed my eyes. I opened them and looked up.
Minerva knelt beside the couch, looking down at me. "Sit up," she said.
I pulled myself upright, facing her.
"Do you want a hug?" she asked. "Do you think you need one?"
"I…I don't know…" No one had ever asked me that, so I hardly knew how to reply. "I…suppose, yes."
"It's not that kind of a hug," she said. She put one am around me, behind my head, the other across my chest and pressed me to her shoulder. My hand went to the crook of her elbow, intending to push her away, but I drew her to me. I stopped myself: I couldn't have the stereotypical male-patient-falling-for-his-female-therapist kind of scenario on my hands, for obvious reasons.
I couldn't remember the last time anyone had touched me and held me like that. Most of the local escort services had me blacklisted as being too nasty, amongst other reasons (Eckart found this out for me). Vincent used to carry me from my bed to my chair, but that was out of necessity and duty.
I made sure I didn't cry this time. She'd seen me in tears before, she didn't need to have to see me like that at every appointment.
She let me go slowly; I kept my eyes averted from her slightly.
"How doe you feel now?" she asked.
"Dreadful," I said. "Thank you," I added.
"You're welcome."
I'd started sketching again. I'm certainly no Hogarth, but I'm good at simple portraits—this is no 'dumb jock' here. My parents, especially my mother, went to enough trouble with me to see that I had a well-balanced education.
I started roughing out a few things, nothing major, after Nurse Rutherford (that's sort of close to Ratched, isn't it?) had come by that evening to see if my pulse was still beating.
The intercom buzzed again. "Hey, Jerome, you alive in there?" Eckart's deep slightly sandpapery voice.
"Get going, I'm busy," I retorted.
"Doing what? Or do you have company?"
"None of your business. Now be off with you!"
The door opened and Eckart stepped in. I tried to ignore him, but he walked right up to me. He looked down at my pad, cranking his head around to get a better look at it.
"How did you get in here?" I demanded.
He held up a lock pick, pointing at it with his other hand. "One of the tools of my trade. It's helped me out of some tight situations."
He pocketed and leaned over me, resting his pointy chin into my shoulder. "Now what have we here?"
I'd sketched a few things, a circle, a sphere, a cube, a fern frond, an eagle, a female profile. "Oh, just a few scratches."
He leaned over my shoulder, his eye on the female profile. "Looks a little like the Frau Dokter InValid, or am I mistaken?"
"Probably your InValid eyesight."
He grinned in one corner of his mouth. "Sooo, our Diogenes in his barrel has started getting interested, eh? Does she do other things for you besides shrinking your head?"
"Far from it," I said. "It's just a female profile."
"You must be interested, you're getting defensive."
"Now what brought you up here?"
"Just checking up on you like a good friend; you haven't placed an order in a while, so I started to get a little concerned, thought maybe you'd taken a turn for the worse."
"I'm cutting back," I said, glancing at the ashtray on the table at my elbow. I'd only smoked two cigarettes all day.
"Ahhh, doctor's orders?"
"Yes."
He looked me in the eye. "Get a note from her, I'm not convinced. For all I know you could be doing this to get into her good graces—amongst other things."
"For god's sake, she's an Asperger's: she barely knows anything about romance or sex except in the abstract."
"Done your homework on her broken rung, I see."
"Just so I'd know what I was getting into."
He nodded ever so slightly, eyes slitted. "I see." He turned away but he kept his eye on me. "Well, since you obviously don't need me, and so you won't have another second to accuse me of illegal entry, I'll be off with myself."
He went out, closing the door behind him.
I reached for the paper knife to cut out the female profile, but I merely cut out the sheet and stuck it into the back of the pad.
"Why did you choose swimming?" Minerva (Dr. Koestelbaum) asked.
"What makes you ask that?" I asked.
"I'm just curious, trying to fit together all the artifacts that comprise your life."
"Like a number of things, it was Mum's—my mother's idea. Our house was near a pond, and Mum figured it would be impossible to keep me away from it, so almost as soon as I could walk and hold my bladder control, she had me enrolled in swimming classes so I wouldn't drown. I took to it like the proverbial duck takes to water. One of the instructors noticed how strong a swimmer I was even at an early age, so Mum made it a fixture on my schedule."
"You must have enjoyed it."
"Sometimes I felt more at ease on water than on dry land."
"Why is that?"
"I don't know…To put it in a New Age way, I guess I just felt one with the water or something."
"That's a good thing to have: life ultimately arose from water, and our bodies, like the surface of our planet, is comprised two thirds of water. But some people don't have this gift, to feel one with the water."
I didn't doubt it, but the statement seemed a little odd, unless it was just part of the Asperger's.
But she went on. "I'm not one of them, I'm afraid."
"Then how do you take a bath? With a sponge? Roll in dry sand?"
"No, at least it's not that crippling. It's just that I sink like a rock if I try to swim. I can't tell you why I do this, it' just part of who I am, just as being able to commune with the water is part of who you are.
"So who got you into competing?"
"That was my father's idea. He got me a trainer when I was fifteen, an older man, Ewan Muggeridge, a thorough slave driver, but you have to be if you're going to polish the best of the best, and I was the best…should have been the best."
"I was about to ask you about the Olympics, but if you're not ready to talk about that, you don't have to."
"No, you're the one asking all the questions; I'm supposed to answer them."
"You don't have to answer them if they make you too uncomfortable."
"Isn't that what this treatment is all about, making me uncomfortable so that I can eventually straighten out?"
"You don't want to make yourself too uncomfortable, you have to pace yourself."
"There's very little that makes me uncomfortable any more." She said nothing to this, but she had an odd smile as if I'd tripped her lie-o-meter yet again.
"They called me the water sprite because I seemed to just fuse with the water. Regionals, nationals, the European Union, the world championships: people used to say of me that when I showed up at the meet, the rest of the entrants may as well have gone home. Six regional gold medals, five nationals, four European Union titles, three world titles, I was unbeatable, the finest of the finest. Then the Olympics…My father wanted me to enter sooner, but Muggeridge insisted I wasn't ready yet…that was the next challenge."
I paused for dramatic effect.
"What happened there?" she asked, encouraging.
"I don't know what happened. 1,500m freestyle…I gave it my all, my 200%. But the entrant from Kenya bested me by half a second and two tenths of a point."
"That narrow a margin? You must have been disappointed."
"Disappointed didn't begin to describe it. I was humiliated. This n----r InValid from Nairobi bested me, for god's sake! Gabriel Mkasa won the gold; Million Euro Morrow got the silver.
"My father was all over my back in the worst way. 'How could you do that? What have you been doing or not doing?'" He ranted at me for months."
"So, in addition to the bad feelings, the disappointment and humiliation of your own you were experiencing, you had to endure your father's reproaches, his disappointment and how he took it out on you."
"If I had a choice, I'd rather that he'd beaten me with his fists instead of cutting me up with the edge of his tongue."
"'Sticks and stones may bruise your bones, but words cut even deeper."
"Exactly."
"What did your mother think of all this?"
"She didn't let on with her own feelings. She kept saying I just had to train harder for the next Olympics, but I knew she was secretly sharing the same feelings as my father."
"This sounds like a silly question, but it's something I've wanted to ask you: Did you ever swim the English Channel?"
"No, that was supposed to follow the Olympic gold I should have struck. But an accident on the highway outside London buggered that dream."
She had an odd look in her eyes, as if her lie-o-meter had been tripped again. I waited for her to start grilling me about the accident. She didn't; perhaps she decided she'd pumped me enough for one session.
I tried to keep the memories where they belonged, in the back of my head where they belonged, but no matter what I did, they kept trying to surface. Things around me just jumped out to remind me: an ad on the 'Net for a tour of London an item in the paper about a road accident...
I figured a couple decent slugs of vodka would black out the images trying to form in my head as I settled down for the night, but I'd been cold sober for too long.
I should have slept like a dead man, but my memory was very much alive…
In my dreams, it was as if it were happening all over again.
It was late in the evening. I was driving home from the city after a long day of training which I wasn't able to put my heart into.
I'd planned it very carefully, make it look like an accident. A nail would pierce the right rear tyre of my car, requiring a simple matter of getting out to change it.
Headlamps glowed in the near distance. I glanced up to see two lights approaching in the gloom.
I looked away, stepped back slightly, the jack in my hand.
The light splashed over me. A horn blared. Brakes screamed.
The left corner of the front bumper struck me in the middle of my spine. Pain shot up my nerves into my skull. Everything flashed bright, then fell to blackness.
I figured I had died, but the worst happened.
Still in the memory, I woke up. I couldn't move. I found myself strapped into a framework that looked like some torture device from a Russian jail.
The nurse in attendance answered my question: My spine had been shattered in two places and the nerve cord had been severed just below my rib cage. The framework was to stabilize my vertebrae while they fused again.
I was in traction for four months. There were surgeries that could have fused my spinal cord, but I was still in too poor condition for that. Besides, I didn't want them. The doctors told me I was lucky to be alive and that the cut in my spine was clean, easily fused. If only I'd taken another step back…
To say I woke up from that long night of remembrance with a hangover is an understatement. My head felt as if someone had been hitting it with a complete bound edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The sunlight scalded my eyes sheer through my closed lids. I pulled the covers over my head and stayed put for most of the morning.
At ten, someone lifted the covers from my face. I squinted up at a blur that looked like Nurse Rutherford.
"Have you been drinking again, Jerome?" she asked.
"It was just to help me sleep," I said, covering my face with my arm to block out the light and the sight of her.
"Do you want me to bring a sleeping pill tonight?" she asked.
"No, thanks, I'll be all right."
She brought one anyway, one of these natural things made of herbs. She stayed with me to make sure I took it. Even if she hadn't and I'd stockpiled them, there was not way I could possibly suicide on that stuff.
"Nurse Rutherford called me yesterday to say you'd been drinking again." Minerva—Dr. Koestelbaum—said at the next session the following day. My head had stopped aching, but my eyes were still sore.
"I'm highly unlikely to repeat it," I said. "I lost my knack. I never used to get hungover."
"So why did you relapse?"
"I was trying to keep from remembering the first time…" I told her about the accident that wasn't so accidental.
She listened in silence, her eyes open, rarely blinking, as if that would somehow help her to hear me better.
"I didn't think it was an accident," she said when I had finished.
"What, your lie-o-meter again?"
"Yeah, that started ticking like mad during our last session, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.
"So, what happened after that? How did your family handle the incident?"
"I had my father fooled at first. For the first time in his life, he actually showed me some genuine sympathy. But my mother somehow put two and two together, especially when I refused the surgery for the severed cord. I expected my father to start berating me all over again. Instead, as soon as my bones had fused, he got me the apartment here in Northern California and settled me here. Get the disappointment out of sight and out of mind. He pays me to stay away."
"No wonder you tried to suicide again," she said. "You have the pain of your own disappointment over the outcome of the Olympics, you have the pain from being handicapped after the accident, and you have the pain of your father pushing you away and sending you to live in a foreign country to get you out of the way. But I'm sensing that there's more."
"I'm afraid I'm not ready to talk about that," I cut in, beating her to her usual disclaimer.
"All right…in that case, I'll tell you something very interesting I dug up since I last spoke to you:
"I did a little research, comparing the scores of the past silver medallists for 1,500m freestyle," she said.
"And what, if anything, did you come up with?" I asked.
"I'll admit it took a lot of heavy lifting, but I know where to look. There's something you need to know: you may have gotten the silver medal, but you set a new record for a silver medallist which still stands after last years Games."
"So what are you trying to tell me: this cloud has a silver lining—no pun intended."
"That's exactly what I'm trying to tell you."
I looked away. "But only you and I know this."
"But you know it, and you should be proud of it."
"That still doesn't fix what happened."
"I know. But it might help change your feelings about what happened. It's just something to think about."
I replied to this with silence.
"So…since your injury and your recovery, what have you done with yourself?"
"Not much. There's little I can do in my condition. I've painted a few still lifes and sold them, added to my income."
"You're an artist? My, you're a regular Renaissance man."
"Mum insisted that I take up painting and calligraphy amongst other things, to keep me from turning into a boor."
"I wish more parents would do that with their kids: when I was in high school, the next door neighbors' kid used to hit on me. He played hockey, and I think that's the only thing he did."
"I know the type, typical of InValid athletes."
She smirked. "He was a Valid."
Oops.
That evening, Eckart came by just before Nurse Rutherford showed up, so he hid himself behind a closet door while she examined me. She never knew he was there: his small size and the tricks of his chosen trade made him virtually disappear. After she'd gone, I almost forgot he was there, until he suddenly stepped out of the closet.
"Quite a broad you got looking after you," he said. He reached into an inner pocket of his too-big trench coat (which he wears all the time, despite the fact that it rains only three months of the year) and drew out a bottle of vodka, which he set on the table beside me. "It's on me: sort of a keep-up-the-good-work present in case you need it."
I pushed it back to him. "I don't need it."
He stepped up to me, felt my brow—his palm felt clammy and cold on my skin—then checked my pulse.
"Jerome the metronome the doctors must call you," he said. Looking me in the eye he added, "I see we are on the mend."
Four months had passed since Vincent/Jerome had left. From what I had heard, he would be three months from his destination. From time to time, I used to look up at the night sky from my window and wonder a little how he was faring up there.
For some strange reason, a copy of Astronomy Today turned up in the waiting room of Minerva—Dr. Koestelbaum's—office. I picked it up idly and leafed through it.
The cover article was about the moons of Saturn. A two-page spread of a computer-designed chart of the planet and its satellites caught my attention. My fingertip found Titan, a small greenish-goldish orb.
I turned over the page and found a sidebar about the mission to Titan, which featured an in-flight photograph of some of its crew, including "Navigator 2nd class, Jerome Morrow", at work.
At that moment, Minerva—Dr. Koestelbaum—came into the room. I set the magazine aside a little too quickly.
"I saw you reading that astronomy magazine," she noted once we got inside her office. "Thinking of reaching for the stars?"
"I was just glancing through it," I said. "It reminded me of something."
"Reminded you of what?" she asked.
"It reminded me of a friend of mine…an InValid I once knew, fellow by the name of Vincent Freemen…He was born in the wrong era. He had dreams, that one, dreams as big as the universe. He'd have made something of himself if he'd been born in the pre-genome era. But the cracks in his rungs held hm back.
"So I loaned him my ladder. Granted, he looked nothing like me—his hair was lighter than mine and his eyes weren't half as pretty as mine—but who looks at the photos on ID's any more? He needed my genetics to get into the training center at the Gattaca Aeronautics Institute, since they have the most meticulous genetic screening and security methods: Blood samples, urine samples, you name it. He couldn't risk leaving behind any of his own genetic debris, stray hairs or loose skin cells, so every morning he was up at the crack of dawn, scrubbing himself down with a dry brush in a small incineration chamber set up in my apartment and so destroy all trace of his genetic identity.
"While he was out during the day, working and training at the institute, I prepared the samples he would need: scrubbing off skin cell samples and collecting them with a small vacuum to fill tiny containers he would discreetly empty in likely places at the institute; combing out loose hairs, drawing blood with which he would fill small fingertip sachets. The urine samples were the simplest to collect, since it's already collected in a pouch I wear strapped to my leg under my trousers.
"Oh, I even had to record my heartbeat so he could playback the sound over a small "amplifier" on his chest during physical training sessions: he had a dicky heart, a murmur or something like that, whereas mine's as regular as clockwork. So we had to mask that little quirk of his, otherwise he'd blow his cover."
"So how long did this last?"
"Eighteen months…eighteen of the craziest months of my life. But it gave me something with which to fill the hours of my endless days. He borrowed my body: I borrowed his dreams.
"But you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men going all awry. One of the directors at the institute was found beaten to death with a computer keyboard. They called in the FBI to investigate, and this was just a week or so before Vincent was to leave on the mission to Titan. The Hoovers, as they call the agents who went in to investigate, found a stray eyelash near the crime scene, a loose one Vincent must have failed to scrub off that morning and which conveniently dropped off him when he joined the crowd of onlookers gathering around the director's mangled corpse.
"So of course they found it belonged to one Vincent Freeman, an InValid who had previously worked at the institute as a janitor, but who had left nearly three years before. Of course they implicated him; they sent one of their agents to question me when he was out, but they found me instead. Because Vincent was using the upstairs of my apartment, I had to literally drag myself up the stairs. He cost me a lot of trouble, that youngster."
"But you helped him fulfill his dream."
"At what cost? Before he left, I made up a lifetime supply of genetic samples so he'd never have to rely on me again. He had a purpose in life. I had a lifetime of emptiness, as far as I could see. He could reach for the stars and touch them; I can't even stand erect. He has a life to live. I know that I was helping him to live a lie, but my conscience isn't a sensitive one."
"We'll put the moral implications aside for now: You helped Vincent fulfill his dream; very few people in his position get that kind of help."
"Except you."
"I could have been in his place. I could have ended up borrowing someone else's ladder. But I didn't have to."
"Some folk get the lucky breaks. Vincent Freeman wasn't one of them."
"Sure he did: he met you."
"He used me!" I retorted. "I prostituted my genome for him."
"But now he's going where he once only dreamed of going, where very few people—even Valids—have gone, even though we have more manned flights each day than there used to be in a year. You gave each other validation."
"What?"
"I said you gave each other's lives validation. I think you met Vincent Freeman for a reason."
"Why, to remind me of how closed in I am?"
"Yes…and no. He touched your life so you could restart your dream."
"My dream, if you wrote that down on your yellow pad, was to strike gold. Now I can't walk or empty my bladder like a normal adult…or hold my own with a woman."
"I was going to ask you someday if you ever had a girlfriend."
I shook my head. "I had plenty of female admirers, but I never had time when I was training. Now it goes without saying."
"Do you have any other friends besides Vincent?"
"I have a couple old friends back in England who write me from time to time. I suppose I could add Fillip-Josef Eckart, but I don't let on about him."
"Why not?"
"He's a black market racketeer, something of a hacker, a part-time pimp of sorts. Not the breed of character you write home about. He gets me a discount on a few items you can't find in the bargain stores."
"I see," she said, astutely. "I suppose we all have a friend at one point or other in our lives whose presence is a guilty pleasure. When I was in medical school, I was friendly with a girl who was a stripper. One thing that brought us together was the fact that we were both a little weird each in our own way and we didn't judge each other for it."
"I suppose you could class my friendship with Vincent a mutual weirdness society: he's an InValid, I'm a crippled Valid."
"I see you're still using that word," she noted. "Let me share something with you." She got up and went to her desk.
She came back and put a laminated card in my hands "This is something I use myself. Call it what you want: a prayer a meditation, a mantra. It's helped me. If you like, we can read it together."
I looked at the card. "Why not?" I shrugged.
"God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; and Wisdom to know the difference."
I shook my head. "I don't believe in God."
"Why not?"
"Because as far as I'm concerned, He walked out on our species a very long time ago."
She wagged her head. "It would appear that way at times. But I think He's letting us grow in the best way possible by finding things out for ourselves. Even if you don't believe in Him, He believes in you. If nothing else, ask a Higher Power to help you out."
"Maybe I should have this thing tattooed on my arm," I said.
"If that helps you remember it best," she said, smiling with laughter.
I went home and dug up my calligraphy set. I spent much of that afternoon and early evening rendering the meditation in the manner of a 13th century illuminated manuscript.
Next day, I ventured out to a frame shop and bought a gilded wood frame for it.
I hung the illuminated copy in a prominent place in the front room where I couldn't possibly fail to see it.
I started on another, simpler design for the bedroom, later that day, when the charwoman came in with her dust mop.
I looked up from my pad to see her leaning down, studying the illuminated copy I'd just hung up.
"Mr. Morrow, sir, did you draw this?" she asked, cautiously. I usually ignore her presence.
"Yes…do you like it?" This was the most I'd ever spoken to her at once. I wondered where that came from.
"Oh yes! the colors are so pretty, like jewels," she said. She's a simple sort, the type I usually go out of my way to avoid because I find them so aggravating. But her artless little comment penetrated. I've heard people gush over my artwork, part of me has always wondered if they really meant it. This woman could just about put a clumsy sentence together and somehow it had more depth to it than all the fine phraseology of a roomful of art connoisseurs.
"Thanks," I managed.
When she had gone, I meditated on the words. That first part I was tempted to put in second place, so that it started off with "Courage to change the things I can", but when I tried to put it all together that way, I barked up against the last phrase, "Wisdom to know the difference". I realized that as intelligent as I was, I utterly lacked the wisdom to know what I really needed, to know what I could change and what I couldn't.
At the next session, Dr. Koestelbaum asked me if I'd been meditating on the Serenity prayer.
"So far as I know, I can't change the fact that I'm paraplegic," I said. "I've probably waited too bloody long for the surgery to do any good."
"I don't know about that: I have a friend who's a neurosurgeon who's had some success curing paraplegics with nerve grafts grown from adult stem cells," she said.
"I just had an idea."
"What?"
"I found out at age twenty-one that my parents had three embryos made when they made me. Perhaps one of them is sill extant. They get stem cells from those, don't they?"
"Not as much as they used to." A pause. "Jerome, you just don't want to go there."
"Why not? It would be ideal: the tissue would be a perfect match."
"For starters, those embryos are very small human beings; they have a human genome. They just have to develop and grow into full-size human persons. And for that matter, even if they weren't, you'd jeopardize your health and the outcome of the operation."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean ESC's, embryonic stem cells and tissue grown from them, have caused the development of teratomas, pre- and protocarcinomic tumors."
"Excuse me, I speak five languages including Esperanto, but whatever it is you're babbling there, that's not one of them."
"Sorry, I do that by habit, I'm afraid. In layman's terms, it means if you got a nerve graft from embryo stem cells, your spinal cord would turn cancerous and you'd be back in the wheelchair again, with your spine rotting away from cancer. Your last state would be worse than you are now."
God, she could be as blunt as I could.
"So what about adult stem cells?" I asked
"Nothing has been known to result from those and they've been using them much more than they've used ESCs, for about fifty years now."
"In that case, maybe I should look into that…But have I waited too long?"
"There's only one way you can find that out."
"And that is?"
She leaned close, looking deep into my eyes. "I think you're smart enough to know what that is."
To be continued…
Literary Easter Egg:
"the Flytes of Marchmain"—I swiped this from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited because I like the names.