Becoming the Story

by L. E. Henderson

with me here. I decided in college not to have kids. Babies are super cute, but the world has enough people. I wanted to devote my life to creative pursuits like writing.

  But every time I would read a book on biology, I would see the same irritating word repeated over and over: “successful;” The successful organisms were the ones that reproduced.

  I am all for Charles Darwin, but that word “successful” slaps a value judgment on a blind natural process. According to this definition of success, Sir Isaac Newton, Emily Dickinson, and Nikolai Tesla were unsuccessful.

  After reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, I think this definition of success is all wrong. According to him, the real winners in reproduction are the genes. Genes only want one thing: to make copies of themselves. They do not really care how they do it. In fact, the whole point of making people at all is so that the genes will have a host that will fall madly in love and send them marching out into a healthy new host.

  If the first host dies a horrible, agonizing death afterward, that is all perfectly fine with the genes, as long as they get to escape into a new person first. Wake up, people. Our genes are farming us.

  Richard Dawkins compares genes to viruses. When you have a bad cold, the virus hijacks cells for the purpose of copying itself and makes you sneeze. When you do that, you spread the virus into the air where other people breathe it in. The whole self-copying cycle begins again. Same with genes, except that the genes create their own hosts, which includes you and me.

  Genes are sketchy bastards. Never trust them. If you ever see a gene coming at you, at night, in an empty parking lot, run like hell!

  In fact, I am pretty sure I know who made the writers of the biology textbooks use the word “successful” when it comes to reproducing: A gene made them write that. In fact, I would not be surprised if a gene seized the pen from the writer and wrote the whole thing itself.

  If I could be really be immortal by reproducing, I should be able to see the world through the eyes of my far-future grandchildren. Through them, I should be able to eat moon-rock ice cream and taste it. Through them I should be able to skim the surface of Mars in a jetpack instead of being a dusty and earth-bound remnant of the distant past.

  But it seems silly to vent about that now. Here I am. This really happened. The big “D.” I think I expected more of it, but now that I am here and can see it for what it is, it all seems very… disappointing. But not in the way you are thinking. If I have any major complaint it is that it is not scary enough. No pain. No irrational obsessions. No worries about what I need to do next. Just a kind of sigh.

  Still, it is hard to look back over my life and wonder what it was all for. All of my petty jealousies, silly compulsions, my fretting over bad hair days, and anxiety over slights from other people, real or imagined.

  I think about all the journals I kept throughout my life, all part of my effort to make sense of the relentless march of days. And I think about all of my stories, conceived in great ambition or in a frenzied bid for fame or wealth or admiration.

  Would I have done anything differently if I had truly believed this day would come? Really believed it down to the core of me? I really cannot say. For the most part, I think I did the best I could.

  The actions that stand out gold-rimmed in my memory are the ones where I was able to step outside my routine and say, “What a strange and beautiful and horrible and fascinating thing it is to be alive. Maybe I should look around. Maybe I should enjoy this while it lasts” – not when I was rushing from one frantic activity to the next.

  Those were the times when I made the best and most conscious decisions; the times I was most alive and most acutely aware. Maybe that is also why I wrote in journals, to recreate that state as often as I could, although I did not get to write in my journal every day.

  I never got to write a journal entry about how it felt to be born because when it happened I barely knew. I did not even know it was going to happen. It just did, and I was stuck with the way things were.

  Then, as soon as I got used to the idea of being alive, someone told me that someday I would die. But in the time between those two points, I had options. I had no say over my destination, but I could create my own path. And my path has brought me to this point where I have decided to take what I have sought, and fought for, and longed for: the final word.

  Maybe that is the real meaning of everything: that in all the confusion, in all of my comings and goings, in all of my stumbling progress, I was able to have some say in how it all happened.

  Enough ruminating. This Lite Brite pattern is dimming fast. I feel like I should say goodbye. Adios. Au revoir.

  But those words are too boring, too expected, too dull. I would rather select my own. So, what do I want to be my final word? I have always loved the onomatopoeia words like “moo” or “crash,” but those will not do.

  If I am going to get a one-up on death, I need to be more thoughtful. Maybe a longer word would be better, like “sussuration,” meaning a soft murmur or a whisper. But no, it is not quite right. An idea is whispering to me, like a breeze, a sussuration that is getting louder.

  Hey, I think I have it, the perfect final word, eloquently succinct, unforgettable, and deeply felt. Hey death: Thpppffffff!

  Yeah, that one. I really like that one.

  Rational Therapy, Inc. 

  26 year old Katy stared at the “Pythagorean playground” with mistrust, a yard full of soaring geometrical structures leading to cube of a clinic. This was not like any psychiatric office she had ever seen. But then, that was the whole point. 

  Normal psychiatrists had failed her, had given her sedatives and asked her questions, which were pointless since she had already answered those questions to herself many times.

  She needed therapy that could tell her things she did not already know. She had been told that this was the place for that. Here, she was told, therapy depended on learning. What she would be learning, she did not know.

  The Rational Therapy Institute was secretive and reputed to be “experimental.” Patients could only enroll by invitation, though visitors, attracted by the unusual park, could explore the exterior grounds and take photographs.

  The secrecy, some conjectured, was a publicity stunt. The patients who had received treatment from the institute had been forced to sign a contract promising not to divulge the type of treatment they had received.

  The media had a field day. The institute stopped cars with its towering geometrical structures, its pyramids and orbs of blue and red marble. Katy followed the stone path to the rectangular door, went up a short set of stairs, latched onto a circular door knocker, and banged.

  A tall man opened the door, his hair steel-gray, sideburns framing his face severely next to an unsmiling face. “Ah. I see that you came,” his voice was deep and flat, but his eyes were alert and appraising.

  She had expected “hello” or “how are you doing?” and had been prepared to answer accordingly. But what was the answer to the non-question, “you came,” a simple and obvious observation? She opened her mouth but nothing would come out.

  She stepped inside, expecting soft lighting and antique furniture to match the door knocker. Instead she found an almost empty foyer with severe white walls and white marble floors. The only furnishing was a small wooden table next to the door stacked with papers. A mirror graced the wall across from her. The lighting above it was harsh and revealed her every flaw. She turned away.

  “If you will come with me,” the man said. The flatness of his tone unnerved Katy. The office at her previous psychiatrist had been lushly furnished with puffy carpeting, soft lighting from lamps, and bucolic landscape paintings.

  But here, nothing had been done to comfort patients. No flowers adorned the foyer, no magazines were displayed on a coffee table, and her host reminded her of Dracula, except not as charming. Still, Katy could do nothing else but follow.

  Her sandals thumped self-consciously against the hard surface o
f the marble floor. The marble tiles made Katy anxious because tiles had lines and Katy did not like lines on floors. She tried to never to step on any of them. She could not explain why. But then, that was part of why she was here.

  She expected to be taken to a waiting room, doctors always had waiting rooms, but instead she was ushered directly into a spare office with straight hard-back chairs, a desk, and sedate bookshelves made of plain, unfinished wood next to a whiteboard. The nameplate on the desk said “Maxmillion Elmsworth, Logical Practitioner.”

  There was a rustling sound from an adjoining room. She tried peaking to see who it was, but before she could, a man emerged, wearing the same kind of suit men wore at funerals. He was younger than her original host. His hair was darker, a shoe polish black. “Oh good,” he said. “You came.”

  The same mild surprise, the same unwelcoming greeting. This was like no medical facility she had ever visited. Where was the friendly “customer service” she had been taught to expect? She wondered if there was a manager she could complain to.

  As if reading her thoughts, the man forced his lips to smile, though she could see little warmth in his eyes.

  “Um, hi,” she said. “Good to meet you.” She held out her hand. The doctor only stared at it in mild amusement until, suddenly self-conscious, she settled into one of the hard wooden