My Darkest, Most Embarrassing Secret2
2006
Damn. Jesse's upset with me again, and I cannot blame him.
"Adam, I just spent five hours undoing all of the damage Brennan did to the Helix. For a total of eleven hours, we have been without a flightworthy Helix because Brennan doesn't take routine jobs seriously."
Everything Jesse said was perfectly true. He had even shown restraint while reporting Brennan's latest fiasco.
"He needs to improve his mechanical skills. Try to be patient with him," I replied lamely.
"He doesn't have any mechanical skills. In fact, except for those moments when a directed bolt of lightning is useful, he doesn't contribute around here. Why did you make him a permanent team member, Adam?"
There was a reason for bringing Brennan into the group, of course, and I did owe Jesse an answer on several levels. But I could not bring myself to tell Jesse the shameful, embarrassing truth: Brennan received special treatment because he was my son.
I was twelve years old, during my first term at Stanford. My classes were easy, so easy that my test scores were the highest by a wide margin. I made everyone else look bad. But, I did not understand that then; to me, classes were a game. I had no idea how much other students hated me.
My roommates especially hated me, but when they became unusually friendly one evening, I assumed that my charm had at long last won them over.
One reason why my roommates were hurting academically was their absorption with drugs and alcohol. Remember, this was 1971.
They had never offered me any of their chemical delights before. I should have realized that they were up to something when I was handed about nine pills in various shapes and hues, and a 7-Up to wash it all down.
Sometime later –my memory becomes confused at this point—one of them left the suite and came back with a really strange hippie chick who stank of incense and patchouli. Her bell bottoms dragged on the floor, the edges filthy and frayed.
Before I could focus on her properly, she had her clothes off, and was, well, all but assaulting me, with my roommates standing around cheering! If you've seen the Name of the Rose, you can visualize the moment.
My memories may be confused, but unfortunately, I do recall it all. I still reeked of patchouli the next morning. I hate patchouli.
My roommates tried to pretend nothing had happened. For that, I was thankful. I thought nothing about the incident for years, not until I had been at Genomex for nearly twenty years.
Even then, Paul Breedlove was thinking too much about the work we had done in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and feeling foolish guilt. Some days, he was more melancholy and reflective than others. During the Genomex employee picnic in 1997, Paul had a few too many beers. He was lapsing into a Germanic accent, and could be difficult to understand, but I clearly heard him say, "and I used you, too, Adam." I thought he might cry.
How I wish I had let the comment go by.
"What do you mean, Paul?"
"Back when you were at Stanford, I paid your roommates to manipulate you into, well, a semen collection." Paul sounded like he was talking about a livestock A I project.
"Huh?"
Unfortunately, this was not a private conversation. On the periphery of my sight, I noticed Mason Eckhart's head bob up from his plate of German potato salad. The man would have a taste for sour food.
"Yes, I wanted to use you in genetic experiments, but I didn't want to tell you what I was doing."
"O Dear God." I heard Mason faintly. But he stayed to eavesdrop on the balance of the conversation.
"And what were the results of those experiments?"
Briefly, I entertained a fantasy of being father to dozens of people excelling in many fields, children I could be proud of, who were almost as good as I was.
"Well, you have one son, born in 1980, and he has compiled quite a record…"
"Tell me all of the details."
"…a criminal record, Adam."
I must have fathered a real-life Professor Moriarty, a King of Crime, sitting at the center of a vast criminal empire!
Breedlove sighed. "At last check, he was wanted in four states. Mostly he's wanted for grand theft auto. He hasn't branched out into much else.
Grand theft auto? Is that all?
"Didn't he get any kind of education?"
"Only on the streets. He stopped going to school in the third grade. He's only marginally literate."
"How could anyone with my superior genetics turn out so…unaccomplished?"
"Adam, remember the tendency of organisms to return to the genetic average…"
"He sounds like he swung all the way to the other side of the bell curve." I thought I was exaggerating at the time, but this turned out to be true.
I searched for my son for several years, and when I found him, I made him a member of Mutant X. I dragged him away from his criminal life so I could keep watch no him, and never need to reveal him to be my progeny.
O the shame, the disgrace!
Unfortunately, I think that damn Mason knows all about it.