The Norma Gene

by M. E. Roufa

  “Well, you don’t have to,” Ed said. “But then I’d have to ask you again, and then if you said no again, then I might have to insist, and well, you know, it’s just a formality right now, but since it’s going to become an eventuality… let’s just say informal is better.” He laughed, that disarming laugh again, and Abe, seeing no other choice, allowed himself to be disarmed. One after another, Abe handed over all his means of escape—his cell phone, his wallet, his house keys, a handful of change. Seeing a hint of blue among the silver, Ed reached down and plucked the broken crayon out from underneath the coins. He studied it, then smiled at Abe as he pocketed it.

  “Super—my kid was looking for this.”

  26

  Nita sealed Abe’s things away into a small envelope, which she then locked into her briefcase, and took out two notepads, handing one to Ed.

  Ed smiled congenially. “All right, Abe. Sorry about all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Doctor’s orders,” he laughed. “Well, someone’s orders. Anyhow, now that we’re here I should probably ask you, are there any questions you want to ask us before we get started?”

  “Who are you guys?”

  “Oh, we can’t tell you that.”

  “Well, what is this place?”

  “It’s a research facility.”

  “A government research facility?”

  “Oh, no. We don’t work for the government.”

  “We don’t work for the government,” Nita echoed, a little too quickly.

  “So who do you work for?”

  “We can’t tell you that.”

  Abe sighed. Another dead end. “Okay. Well, what sort of research?”

  “Scientific research.”

  “Are you going to answer any of my questions?”

  Ed grinned. “Well, you could ask us the time.”

  Taking this as a hopeful sign, Abe did, after a fashion. “Okay. How long is this going to take?”

  “Oh I don’t know. As long as it takes, I suppose.”

  “A few hours?”

  Ed looked at Nita. Nita looked at Abe. Abe suddenly realized it would be quite a bit more than a few hours. He blanched. “A few… days?”

  “If necessary.”

  “That’s really not going to work for me. I have to get back to work. I really have to be at school on Monday. I already took off work all week for that stupid press conference. I don’t have any vacation left. If I miss any more, they could fire me.”

  “Oh, that’s all taken care of. We’ve called your employer and they won’t be expecting you back.”

  “But it’s my job. You can’t just do that!”

  “Of course we can. I’m sure they’ve hired an excellent substitute.”

  “But why didn’t you ask me? Don’t I get a say in this? What if I don’t want to be substituted?”

  “You don’t seem to understand,” Ed said. “You’ve been substituted. It’s done. And the new person is every bit as good as if not better than you were. To be honest, it sounded like they were relieved. Plenty of great history teachers out there. You’re interchangeable.”

  “I’m—what? This isn’t about how good the substitute is, Ed—this is about me! How could you give away my job?”

  “Ahhh,” Ed said. “Now, if that’s the troublei—f you don’t mind my saying so—you’re making a huge fuss over peanuts. It’s just a job. You had no right to it in the first place. From an existential perspective, you were substituted a long time ago.”

  “What?” Abe said, still not understanding.

  Nita spoke up. “Your current employment ‘substitution’ is irrelevant. Your DNA, on the other hand, was never yours to substitute. You shouldn’t exist.”

  “But I do exist. I’m still a person,” Abe managed, dumbfounded.

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that,” said Ed. “Of course you’re a person. You’re just not legally permitted to be alive.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” Abe asked. “I mean obviously, I am alive, right?”

  “Not till we say you are,” Nita responded.

  Ed leaned in. “Look. If you’re having Lincoln’s memories, you’re not purely biologically a clone. As it is, since you’re not registered as one, your legal status is automatically in question. Your social security number is invalid. The legal you died in 1865. So legally speaking, the current you doesn’t exist. We need to figure out who you are. And until then…”

  It was Nita’s turn to lean in. “You belong to us. We own you.”

  27

  It’s not well known how often the original Abe Lincoln chewed tobacco. At this moment however, Abe Finkelstein was particularly grateful for not having picked up the habit himself. Because if he had been one to chew tobacco, there is no doubt that at this moment he would have swallowed it. Nita couldn’t possibly have said what he could have sworn he just heard.

  “What do you mean, you own me?” he asked, not sure whether to laugh at the ridiculousness of the statement or allowing even for a second the possibility that she was serious. Not that she seemed to possess a funny bone. In fact, he suspected if any part of her anatomy ever dared to allow itself be called funny, her other body parts would shoot it. “Are you saying I’m your sla—” But well before his lower lip even began to make contact with the tips of his upper teeth to form the V, he realized that what Nita lacked in sense of humor, she more than made up for in lack of sense of humor about slavery. He shifted his question to, “Am I under arrest?”

  “We’re not cops,” Ed said, in his irritatingly reassuring voice. “We don’t work—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Abe interrupted him. “You don’t work for the government.”

  Ed smiled. “We’re just…” he paused, looking for the right words. “…very interested in you right now. Surely you must understand that you represent a unique case in the history of—well, of modern history. As far as we know, there’s never, ever been anyone like you before.”

  “I beg to differ.” Abe’s mouth was dry. “I think I could argue pretty persuasively that there was someone exactly like me. Even more like me, because he might actually know whatever it is you wanted me to tell you. Is there any way I could get something to drink?”

  “Later, Abe. First, if you don’t mind, could you tell me—us—sorry, Nita—exactly what was going through your mind at the press conference?”

  Abe thought about it. He thought about how they showed up in his house without knocking. He thought about how Ed’s car had no inside door handles. He thought about how they said they owned him. He thought of an option that he was surprised he hadn’t thought of before. “I want to speak to a lawyer.”

  Ed smiled again. “You bet.”

  Abe blinked. He expected more resistance than this. He looked around, feeling incredibly stupid. Should he get up? Was it that simple? “Okay,” he said. “I don’t have one, but I can get one if you can just let me have my phone.” He fidgeted. He started to get up, but Ed stopped him with a hand on his knee.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I thought…” Abe said. “I was going to…” He was missing something. Once again, the point when things decided to start making sense had been and gone without him. He struggled for the right words, but lost his verbs. “Lawyer. Phone call.” Adding, hopefully, “Drink of water, maybe.”

  “Oh. No.” Ed said, again with that godawful civil-servant-bearing-bad-news laugh. “You misunderstood. Of course there’s no problem with your talking to a lawyer if you’d like. No problem at all. To be honest, I’m surprised you didn’t ask sooner. The fact is,” Ed leaned in, so close that Abe could clearly see his pores, so clearly he could even count them if he wanted to, “I’m a lawyer!”

  Ed grinned at Abe as if this were the biggest stroke of luck in the world, at the same time nudging his elbow into Abe’s ribs jovially, in a way that was just the tiniest bit too hard to be entirely convivial. It was clear that Abe was supposed to laugh along. Abe laughed along. It was clear that Abe was supposed to laug
h along some more. Abe laughed along some more. It was clear that Abe was supposed to stop asking to talk to a lawyer. Yep. That was pretty clear too. Defeated, Abe wondered if he asked again for a glass of water, whether Ed would claim to be one of those too.

  28

  Habeas corpus nicely dispensed with, Ed leaned in toward Abe and flexed his hands forward in a back-to-businesslike manner. “Let’s try again, Abe,” Ed said. “The press conference. What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Abe said. “It just happened.”

  “What just happened? You remembered things?”

  “No—I just suddenly knew the answer to the question, and I answered it. I didn’t even realize what I was saying until I had said it. I don’t know what happened.”

  Ed started to write things down on his notepad. Abe tried to see what he was writing, but Ed’s arm shielded it from his view. He tried to tell from Ed’s face whether he was pleased or displeased with his answer. After a moment, Nita began taking notes too, though from the way her pen moved, her annotations were less substantive, terser. Or even had nothing to do with what he was saying at all—from the looks of it, she could just as easily have been making a shopping list. Eggs. Cat food. Armor-piercing bullets.

  “Was it a memory? A flashback?”

  “Not exactly. It wasn’t a real thought at all. I was just talking. It was like I was him. I mean, I wasn’t Abraham Lincoln. He was me. I mean, I knew the answer to the question because that was the answer to the question. It wasn’t a memory. It was just the truth. I don’t know what I’m saying. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Ed’s writing had become a maniacal scribble, too fast to possibly be legible. “Did you get that?” he asked Nita. She nodded and grinned, and continued taking her own methodical notes. Bag of oranges. Cyanide suppositories. “Did you get that?” he called out to the mirror, then coughed and turned to Nita and added “…uh, Nita?” in an approximation of the same loud tone, then looked at back at Abe as if to somehow pretend he hadn’t just talked to people behind the mirror and was actually asking Nita again. She rolled her eyes and nodded again. Abe wasn’t sure which was the bigger insult—that Ed felt it was a lesser evil to insult his intelligence and try to make him think that Nita was hard of hearing, or that he was still pretending Abe wouldn’t know there were people behind the mirror in the first place. Did he really think he was that stupid? Well two could play that game. Abe waved at the mirror, gave it the thumbs-up. Then at the moment Ed saw him, turned it into a clearly faked hair-combing gesture. The score was tied.

  “So you ‘were’ Abraham Lincoln?”

  “No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t think so. I was just, well, channeling him, I guess would be the best way I could describe it. I was him without ever actually being him. Or he was me? He was in me, maybe. I don’t know.” Abe was more confused than ever.

  “And then what?”

  “And then the next thing I knew, I was back in the hotel room.”

  “You passed out,” Nita said.

  “Ah, right,” Ed said, and jotted that down too. “That’s just amazing.” He sat for a moment, just looking at Abe. Abe fidgeted. He had now officially told them everything he knew. He was tired. He really really needed something to drink. But he had done what they wanted. Aside from the mirror-waving thing, he had cooperated fully. He thought for sure that they were done—but Ed still wasn’t done asking questions.

  “I’m getting sort of dehydrated, Ed. Could I just have some water?”

  “In time, in time, Abe. So has this ever… happened to you before?”

  “Once when I was on a class trip out in Arizona,” Abe said. “We were visiting Montezuma’s Castle. I left my canteen on the bus so I guess I didn’t drink enough, and the next thing I knew I was seeing these floaty spots and some weird old guy was standing over me asking who I was and if I was okay.”

  “And who was that?” Ed asked, practically breathless with excitement. “The old man? Andrew Jackson? Ulysses S. Grant?”

  “What? No. I don’t know who he was. Just some old guy.”

  “But some old ‘guy’ from the nineteenth century? You actually saw him?” Ed half rose out of his seat again with excitement.

  “What? No! A regular old guy. In Bermuda shorts. From Duluth. What are you talking about?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The last time I passed out. That was the only other time that I can remember. When I was 12. At Montezuma’s Castle.”

  “No, I asked you if your Lincoln channeling episodes had happened before.”

  “Are you sure?” Abe asked. “Because I know I remember Nita telling me I passed out. And then you asked me if that happened a lot. And then I remembered Montezuma’s Castle. And how I passed out because I got dehydrated because I didn’t drink enough. I could really use a drink of water or something,” he added hopefully.

  Ed refused to take the hint. “So now that you know my real question, Abe, have you had other occasions when…”

  It was Abe’s turn to ignore his hint. Well, not his hint, his pointed question. His possibly gun-pointed question, but so long as there wasn’t a visible gun, Abe was resolved to keep stalling on the bigger questions whenever he could. He had told them everything he knew. Anything he didn’t know that might lead to a further line of questioning and a longer stay here could only make things worse. And remembering the field trip had reminded him of something else that he suddenly realized needed to be said. Something he used to teach during one of his history units, back when he used to have a job.

  “You know, the funny thing about Montezuma’s Castle is—the Aztecs abandoned it around a hundred years before Montezuma was even born… it had nothing to do with him.”

  “Abe—” Ed interrupted.

  But Abe didn’t stop. “The first white settlers just jumped to the conclusion that it had to be Montezuma’s because he was the only Aztec guy they ever heard of. Also, it wasn’t a castle, it was a whole vertical city, but you see, they didn’t know vertical cities, and a castle sounded much more romantic, so when they named it, they threw the facts completely out the window, if they were even called windows.”

  There was a simultaneous concert of phlegm, as both Nita and Ed cleared their throats. But Ed spoke first. “That’s fascinating, Abe. Now if you don’t mind…”

  But Abe wouldn’t stop. “And the funny thing is that now, even though historians know it’s something more special and older and far more unique than anything having to do with either Montezuma or castles—even though everybody who knows any history knows this—they still call it Montezuma’s Castle, because people would rather believe they were seeing Montezuma’s place because they’ve heard of him, he’s famous, than some no-name Aztec guy’s vertical city. It’s just marketing. Do you get where I’m going with this? All people care about, really care about, is the famous name.”

  “Abe. That’s not important right now. Let’s get back to what it was like when you were, as you called it, channeling Lincoln. What did it feel like…?”

  Abe sighed. Clearly, Ed did not get where he had been going with it. He would never be a no-name original again. Then again, maybe he never had been. He wondered if there was a way to channel a drinking fountain into the room.

  29

  The air was damp, but the rain had ended for the night, so the voicemail recording said the meeting would go on as scheduled. Apparently Normalyn meetings never met on rainy nights, at least not in Florida, because too many of the Marilyns had shoe issues. Norma hated that she understood this and hated even more that she was secretly grateful for it. She wanted to wear a pair of beat-up sandals in defiance, just to show how little she was one of them, but she didn’t own a pair of beat-up sandals. She didn’t own a pair of beat-up anything. Even her flip-flops were well maintained.

  And the truth was, she wanted to look good for whoever would be there. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go, or whether she belonged there, and she was perfectly ready to turn
around and go home if nothing sparked for her in the first five minutes. But she couldn’t just show up looking like she didn’t care. Not when she knew that by definition every other woman in the room was going to be drop dead gorgeous. She needed to make as good of an impression as possible, just for her own sense of self-worth. She had chosen another of her mother’s castoff vintage sundresses, a pair of open toed slingbacks with kitten heels, and put her hair back in a loose ponytail, gathered at the base of her neck. It was a lovely, old-fashioned style that she knew she looked good in, but that Marilyn Monroe would never have been seen in, in any of her incarnations, having been born several decades too soon. She was willing to let every single woman there tell her she looked nothing like the blonde bombshell. She just hoped that someone else there would tell her that she was prettier the way she was. Wasn’t that the point of support groups?

  The Orlando meetings were held in a dance studio in an out-of-the-way strip mall, surrounded by a collection of non-touristy shops and closed storefronts: a computer repair company, an Indian restaurant, a business that made signs for other businesses. Despite the presence of this neighbor, the space itself had no sign at all, so Norma had to check the address twice to make sure she had the right place. She leaned against the glass doors, enjoying the feel of the cool metal of the handle where it made contact with her skin. The door wouldn’t budge. She leaned harder, putting her full weight against the door, but still it wouldn’t move. She knew she had the right day, the right time, the right address… she pressed her face against the glass, but the windows were tinted and she couldn’t see a thing. Stepping back, puzzled, she finally noticed a small button to the left of the door and pressed it. A buzzer sounded.

  Confident, she pushed the door again. Again, it refused to move. As the electronic lock on the door continued to buzz, she heard a faint crackling noise as an intercom speaker came to life to her left.

  “Pull the door, dear,” said the voice.