by M. E. Roufa
At the overlapping point between hard science and psychology, the field of Clonology came into being. Clonologists were scientists who could understand the genetic nature of a clone’s physiology, analyze his or her psyche, and who could also master the life history of the alpha parent so as to best understand the conflicts a cloned individual was facing at every turn. Clonologists were like dramaturges in the theatrical world. They were uniquely capable of understanding how clones thought, and drawing conclusions about why the ones who turned out most like their genetic parents were able to do so, and why so many others were so self-destructive. From a pure research perspective, clonology provided fascinating insights but little information that could be empirically proven—clones, after all, were people, and people refused to behave like lab rats, no matter how frequently you offered them cheese.
But even beyond most parents’ refusal to allow their children to be handed over to Science for study from infancy, there was another obstacle. Like most branches of highly advanced science that required multiple degrees, clonology had a fatal flaw: pure research was profoundly expensive, and there was no money in it. On the other hand, if you were a clone, having a clonologist was like having your own personal Sherpa. An ordinary therapist could only guess that you made certain mistakes because of lingering pain from how your mother raised you. But if you had a clonologist, you could know for a fact that one of your chromosomes made you do it. In other words, a clonologist with very little shame who could put enough conviction in his voice could make a lot of money indeed.
Harold had been a very good clonologist.
17
Abe shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. He didn’t like where this conversation was heading. At all. And he couldn’t figure out any way to steer free of the deadly iceberg he saw fast approaching. He was already feeling the chill spreading below the surface, tightening in his groin. He did his best to turn back. “That’s a pretty big career change. What made you switch?”
Harold smiled. He didn’t even seem to notice the conversational focus had changed at all. If anything, from the way he seemed to take the question in stride, Abe got the impression that he was hoping he would be asked that exact question.
As a matter of fact, he was. “Well, I was hoping you would ask that, Abe,” Harold said, leaning against the wall comfortably and inviting Abe to do the same. Abe realized with dread that instead of steering into safer waters he had made a mistake of titanic proportions. Whatever Harold wanted from him, he was going to be dragged under whether he liked it or not.
“The fact is, I was never in it to make a buck. You probably can’t tell by looking at me, but I was a nerd back in school, really into science, and kind of a history buff, and I thought clonology was the best way to put all that together—I mean, I’m a people person too, you can tell that I’m sure, but the history and the science thing, that was the real pull. But when it came time to go out and work for a living, and start sitting down and doing the research on primary sources—well, you know, real people—they’re boring. You know what I mean? I would be doing chronological write-ups on these truly ordinary ordinary people. I mean, who wants to read the month-by-month biography of the guy who patented a new kind of corrugated box cardboard? But that’s what got him rich, and that’s what made him feel important, and that’s why he wanted a Corrugated Box Junior, so there I was, finding out that he was sad on rainy days in March, and had a weird aversion to wicker, or whatever.”
“Wicker?”
“Wicker. Made his skin crawl. Couldn’t be in the same room with it.”
“You’re making this up.”
“Why would I make it up? Anyway, who else would come up with a new way to corrugate than a guy who couldn’t sleep at night because he kept seeing all these woven raffia laundry hampers coming to attack him? Or is it rattan? Whatever wicker’s made of. Whatever. Guy was a nutcase. But that’s the thing. It was the only interesting thing about him.”
“Sounds pretty interesting to me.”
“Okay. Maybe he was a bad example. You’re missing my point. Most people who I had to work with didn’t even have that. You go to school, you get test cases. They’re not Joe Wicker.”
“His name was Joe Wicker?” This may have been the greatest thing Abe had heard, ever.
“No, his name wasn’t Joe Wicker!” Then, realizing there was possibly a joke lurking behind the misunderstanding, Harold again grinned and pointed at Abe. Oh no, Abe thought. This again. Sure enough, it came.
“You’re very funny.” But a lot of the earlier jocularity seemed to have gone out of it. Harold continued, “I was just calling him that, as an example. You’ve never done that?” He was getting frustrated, and starting to look again like he had at the opening, on the night they had met. The conversation kept getting away with him, and this was obviously much further than he wanted it to go. “My point is, in when you’re first going in for your Master’s in Clonology, they don’t teach you that people are boring. They don’t get you started on ordinary case histories of ordinary people who only want to pass along their own ordinary DNA. It’s too uninspiring. Just like they don’t train doctors with sore throats and broken pinkie fingers.
“They start you on the histories of people whose histories are fun to read. Sports stars. Society leaders. Rock legends. That’s how people first get into the discipline. They have you do your workups on famous clones. First you study the historical figure, then you study the reason they decided to be cloned, or the reason the person who bought the DNA decided to have them cloned, get the psych workup there, then meet the people or read the transcripts depending on if you’re first in line on that particular clone. Then by the time you meet the actual cloned person, you’re ready for whatever they throw at you. With a famous person, it’s fun. You actually care how the kid’s going to turn out, whether he’ll be like the alpha or not. You root for them. It’s just not the same with real people.”
Abe was dumbfounded. He couldn’t believe what he just heard. “Not the same as with real people?” He knew that Harold didn’t mean “real” in the same way that it actually meant in English, as if he were made of wax or a wind-up toy or an animal of some sort—but still. He had never heard anyone refer to clones as not being real people before. He didn’t know what to say. He had always prided himself on being against racism, against sexism, against all -isms, really. Well, against all the bad -isms, anyhow, not the good -isms like feminism and socialism and Buddhism. Judaism he was still on the fence about, but then so were most Jews. And like most Jews, he always assumed that when faced with an overt statement against a group of people, he would immediately and unequivocally stand up and not let the racist/sexist/anti-Semitic/homophobic/intolerant statement go by unchallenged. And yet here was a blatantly xenophobic statement, not just aimed at a group of people, but at his group of people, and he was going to say nothing? But how could he say something without exposing himself? Even though he was completely aware of the hypocrisy within his silence, and even though he was crushed under the weight of history, of centuries of knowing that the fear of exposure itself was what ought to compel him to say something, that oppression began when ordinary people were afraid to speak out—he couldn’t bring himself to speak. He was not an ordinary person. And what would he be speaking up for, or against, anyhow? The criticisms leveled at him were hard to differentiate. Ordinary people were boring. Given the choice of being a real person, or someone unique (even if only unique by way of being the precise opposite of unique), which would you choose?
And Harold wasn’t even done talking. He had settled in, his back against the warm brick of the school building, the sun beating against his balding forehead, but he wasn’t even breaking a sweat. It looked like an extremely uncomfortable position, but somehow he didn’t look at all ill at ease. However much more there was to this story, Harold would take that much time. When Abe fidgeted, Harold ignored it. When he interrupted, Harold bulldozed over him as if he hadn’
t spoken. Abe realized that he was being wound up, that all this was leading to a sales pitch that Harold may have made dozens of times before. Or that he had planned out well in advance. He wasn’t sure whether the realization made things easier, or worse.
“So I graduated, and I got into the real world, and I found that I had to choose my job market. If I wanted to stick to the kind of clones I liked—celebrities, famous people, the really juicy guys—it basically meant staying in academia. Because let’s face it, you have to have inside connections if you’re ever going to make it at that and meet anyone firsthand. It’s all about who you know. I mean literally. That or go for where the money is and deal with the real people. So I did the regular people first for a few years, because six years of post-grad isn’t cheap and you have to pay off the rent somehow, plus justify the time and expense and all that, but my heart wasn’t in it. You know, I was a great clonologist. Really. I was solid. You should have seen my billings. But I was a star-fucker at heart, and all I was getting was nobodies. I can spot a celebrity clone a mile away. But what am I gonna do, chase them down and offer them therapy? Most of them already had someone anyway. Or they couldn’t afford it. But, as it turned out, they didn’t have agents.” He snapped his fingers on both hands and brought them together in a syncopated clapping movement with a smile. “So I threw in the towel and now I do a little bit of therapy, and a lot of impersonator-repping. It’s a pretty good living. Kind of my own little niche. Thanks to all my training, you understand, I’ve got a very good eye.”
At that, Harold straightened up. He brushed some dirt from the back of his trousers with his hand, and leaned backwards a bit to look Abe in the eye. Even knowing what was coming next, though, Abe couldn’t help but be surprised.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Harold said. “And you can’t fool me.”
18
What do you want from me?” Abe asked. It was a few days later, at a nearby chain restaurant. Once it had become clear that Harold wasn’t going away, and that the conversation wasn’t going to be any easier or more pleasant, Abe had only manage to stall for time by agreeing to meet again. This place, a “casual dining” establishment whose menu was virtually indistinguishable from any other in the same category, and completely indistinguishable from any in its franchise, was as good a choice as any. The walls were an explosion of “wackiness,” with fake taxidermied elephant heads competing with fake traffic signs and possibly fake / possibly real musical instruments on the walls. The impression it gave was that of a madcap decorator gone wild, but Abe was certain that if you went into any other restaurant in the same chain, you would see the exact same saxophone turned at the exact same 37-degree angle and spaced exactly the same distance from the same rabbit in a goalie’s mask. Or possibly they had five or six different Corporate-approved designs to “mix it up.” But the menu never varied, whether you were in a “zany” place like this one or a “down home” place like the one at the other side of the strip mall, or the middle of the road no-nonsense place across the street. Americans wanted their restaurants themed differently, but they needed the comfort of sameness when it came to food. One nation, under grilled chicken, indivisible. With a side of fries.
Abe ordered a southwestern chicken sandwich with a side of fries. Harold ordered a Cajun chicken sandwich with curly fries. Neither one was fooled by the sauce that they were getting anything different from the other. But both felt satisfied with their individual choices.
“Well,” Harold answered, sizing Abe up with a look that was more honest in its intentions than any Abe had seen in his face before. “To be honest, I don’t know. At first, I just wanted to tell you that you really should reconsider doing the impersonator work. You could make more than whatever it is you’re getting teaching. And full-disclosure, from an agent’s-commission standpoint, I don’t want to let go of that. You’re doing yourself a disservice. It’s not rocket science, sure. It’s not even real acting, not Shakespeare, anyhow, obviously. But it’s easy money and all you have to do is show up. And then you’re left with tons of free time to go and devote yourself to higher calling stuff, whatever that is for you. I don’t care. So long as I get my cut. So at first I just wanted to track you down out of greed.”
“No, thank you,” Abe said.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re too honest for that. Honest Abe. But that’s the thing. The more I thought about it, the more I thought about you… Abe, who are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. You’re not supposed to be here. There are no Abraham Lincoln clones. You don’t exist. You’re not supposed to, anyhow. I mean, I would have majored in you. I was a history major in college, I did my Master’s focus on historical clones—if your case study was out there, I would have seen it. You weren’t there. Does anyone know about you?”
Abe sighed. “Not till now. And if you don’t mind, I’m trying to keep it that way. It’s not really who I am.” He looked down at his sandwich, half embarrassed, half annoyed. He had always suspected that a conversation like this was probably coming, he feared that it would be inevitable, but no matter how many times he had thought it through, he never bothered to work out a road map of what he would say should the eventuality arise. Still avoiding Harold’s eyes, he took a french fry and toyed with it on his plate, lining it up side by side next to another until the two shoestrings matched perfectly. Then he added another. He could feel Harold looking at him, either weighing what to say, or waiting for him to continue talking. Or waiting for him to look up. He tried to find a fourth fry to match the others, but it was getting harder to find another that was the same exact length to be in full harmony with the other three. Finally he found one, placed it in line, then found it tapered to about a quarter of an inch too short. He could feel Harold watching him. Trying to look nonchalant, he ate the fry. Then he scooped up the other three and ate them too. He wouldn’t let Harold think they had any significance. They had no significance. But everything he did in front of Harold seemed fraught with meaning, whereas just a few days before, everything was normal. He looked at Harold, hoping to find him looking at anything except for him. But no, sure enough, Harold was watching.
“Fries,” Abe said. He gestured toward the fries, trying to seem casual. He ate a few more, as if to prove a point.
“Mnn,” Harold grunted.
There was an awkward pause as each man considered how best to change or return to the subject. For all his bravado and salesmanship, Harold was unsure how to deal with Abe now that he had him pinned. His glow of triumph was replaced with the sullen dissatisfaction of a child who finally managed to break his unbreakable toy truck. He had found the single greatest, possibly the single most important person in current American cultural history, and that person was abjectly refusing to have any part in his own importance. He had never met anyone before who didn’t want recognition, let alone fame. Harold was stymied.
The truth was, no matter how many times Abe pictured how he might be discovered, the scenario had never quite played out like this. He knew that it probably couldn’t be a secret forever; that if he ever got married he would have to tell his wife, for example. And possibly his doctor in a decade or so, since he knew there were bound to be some health problems down the line, which he was going to need help to fight off. He might not have Marfan’s Syndrome to worry about (genetic testing had ruled that one out, not that he’d be letting historians know), but untimely death by assassination made it difficult to know what medical challenges a Lincoln who avoided bullets might have encountered in old age. There had been a couple of girlfriends he had thought about telling, and one who he was pretty sure had guessed, but to his relief it had never come to a moment of revelation. Always at the last moment, or when it seemed like a last moment was nearing, he would manage to turn things, or change the subject, or get there first with a well-practiced, “People are alwa
ys telling me I look like a clone of…” and laughing it off. And the idea was so preposterous, so impossible, so literally and even legally not-possible, that the people would always laugh it off with him. When he was young he had been tormented with fears of being “found out,” “caught,” unmasked like a superhero in a comic book, his powers taken away and maybe even being forced to leave his family for being abnormal. But as he got older, the fears diminished into simple fears of embarrassment, not wanting to be seen as different or to stand out in any way. Just wanting to blend in. And now as an adult, the fear had mellowed into mild twinges of paranoia whenever anyone looked at him a second too long, or said his full name, or paused and gave him a look when they read it.
And here he was, completely and totally discovered, and he didn’t have a clue what to say. After all the years of dreading this day, he would have thought he would have had some battle plan drawn up, some speech prepared, some something to say. Never in a million years would he have believed that his response to being outed as Abraham Lincoln’s first and only clone would be “Fries.”
And he certainly didn’t figure on being brought to light in a place like this, of all places, surrounded by ersatz memorabilia and stuffed walruses and waiters with “old-timey” suspenders while suburban stay-at-home moms coaxed their screaming children to eat just one bite, just one bite of their chicken fingers and then they could get dessert. He wasn’t expecting any fanfare, but he would have liked a bit more gravitas. A realization that floored him, because he had always prided himself on not wanting to be discovered. He had wanted to stay undetected so long that it had become a virtue in his mind, like humility to the Puritans. And now he realized that what he was feeling wasn’t simply annoyance at being found out—it was also something else. After spending his entire life in hiding, to be revealed not with a crash of cymbals but with the buzz of a kazoo… he had to admit he was disappointed.