by Sachi Parker
I looked at Mom, bewildered. She gave an existential shrug. “Keep reading.”
So I read another telegram, dated a few years later:
Looking down and thinking of you. I hope Steve is taking good care of Sachi. Please give her my love. Yours always, Paul.
So this Paul character knew my dad and me, and one could almost sense a bonhomie between them. But why would he have been concerned about my welfare? Why would he even have thought that Dad might not be taking good care of me? What business was it of his? And why had he been sending me his love?
I ran the name through my head, trying to make a connection. Paul, Paul…Did I know any Pauls? It wasn’t Paul Newman, was it? Mom had made one movie with him, What a Way to Go!, but he was already married to Joanne Woodward at that time, and they were a famously faithful couple…No, it wasn’t very likely. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t Paul Lynde. What did “looking down” mean, anyway? Looking down from where?
There were many more telegrams to get through. I read them one by one, trying to piece together the secret.
Still missing you terribly.
It’s cold up here.
Up where?
Can’t wait to be back on earth.
Back on earth? What the hell does that mean?
I waded through dozens of messages, trying to make sense of these cryptic pre-Twitter fragments. Finally I gave up and tossed the telegrams aside. “I’m not getting it, Mom.”
“Keep reading.”
“I don’t want to keep reading. Why don’t you just tell me? Who’s Paul?”
Mom took a deep, dramatic pause. It was the moment of the big reveal, and she was milking it.
“Paul…” She ran her hand across her mouth anxiously, and had to take yet another moment. Finally: “All right, I’ll just say it: Paul is your real father.”
There’s a curious sense of dislocation you get when you receive news that’s completely at odds with everything you’ve ever known and understood about your life. It’s like when you arrive at the trick ending of a movie such as The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects, and you discover that everything’s the opposite of what you thought, and all those baffling twists of logic resolve into a crystal-clear picture. Except in this case there was no sudden clarity, no “Eureka!” moment at all, just ever-deepening confusion.
“My real father? Paul is my real father? How come I’ve never heard of him? Where is he?”
“Right now, he’s in outer space.” Mom said this with disarming matter-of-factness and a quiet sense of pride.
“He’s in outer space?”
Mom made an equivocating gesture. “He’s on a mission for the government.”
“A mission? What kind of mission?”
She gave me a patient smile. “A secret mission, sweetheart. All I know is, he’s in the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters.” She pointed heavenward.
I looked blankly up at the ceiling. Mom explained that the Pleiades is a star cluster in outer space. There are seven stars altogether, seven, which is a very significant number in Christianity, Buddhism, practically all religions or mythologies: the Seven Days of Creation, the Seven Stages of Enlightenment, the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse.…She went on and on. I just nodded slowly. I had to abandon the Pleiades for the moment anyway, because there was a more pressing issue to confront.
“So, if my real father is in outer space, then…who’s Dad?”
“You mean Steve?”
“Steve, my dad.”
“Steve is not your dad. Paul’s your dad.”
I pressed on. “Okay, then, who’s Steve?”
“Well, Steve is no one, technically.”
“What does that mean?”
Mom took another long, measured pause. “Steve—how do I say this? Steve was created by the government.”
Now I had to pause. “Created? What do you mean ‘created’?”
“He’s a clone,” Mom said.
I stared at her a moment. “Dad’s a clone?”
“Steve’s a clone. Dad’s in outer space.”
I studied Mom’s face carefully for traces of a telltale smile, or any sign that she was holding in her laughter. She had to be joking, right? She had to be.
“I don’t understand. Dad, my dad, the guy I grew up with—he’s a clone?” Plummeting helplessly down the rabbit hole, I tried to put on the brakes. “Mom, are you serious?”
She seemed affronted. “Of course I’m serious. You don’t believe me?”
There was a hint of prickliness in her voice, and I realized I would have to dial back my incredulity a little or else she would shut down and I’d never get the rest of the story out of her. So I proceeded with a cautious reasonableness. “I believe you, Mom. I’m just trying to understand…You think the government cloned Dad?”
“They do it all the time, sweetheart. You see, Paul’s space missions are so top secret, even I don’t know what he’s up to. So the government had to create a second Paul, to avoid suspicion. In case the Russians found out.”
“Found out what?”
“It’s a secret. A very important government project—that’s all I know. With global implications. And I’m helping to support it. I send money every month. It’s my way of serving my country.”
I just stared at her. I didn’t know what to say.
Mom sighed. “I knew you would have a hard time with this. That’s why I’ve tried to keep it from you all these years. But look, the facts are all right there. He’s been sending me these telegrams all along.” She ran her fingers through the telegrams as if she were Jimmy Stewart on the Senate floor in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
It was true; the telegrams were right there. They genuinely existed. Someone must have sent them.
“Okay, if Paul is my real father, how come I’ve never met him?”
“You have met him. He comes down from space every now and then to visit. But we didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to upset you. They look so much alike, you just never noticed the difference. Sometimes it was Steve; sometimes it was Paul.”
“Can you tell them apart?”
Mom gave a small, secretive smile. “Well…” Choosing not to elaborate, she tried to reassure me: “Look, Sach, I know what you’re thinking. I’ve been skeptical at times, too. But I know for certain that Paul is Paul, and Steve is Steve. I know it.”
How did she know it?
She told me the Caesar story.
Caesar was the family dog, a boxer with the sweetest temperament. He was the pride of the household, and Mom and Dad both doted on him, Dad especially.
When poor Caesar finally died of natural causes, Mom was crushed. She had a bigger concern, though: How would her husband handle the news? “You know how much Paul loved that dog,” she reminded me.
“I know how much Steve did.”
“That wasn’t Steve. That was Paul.”
Every time I interrupted her, I got more confused, so I just let her go on with the story.
“When Caesar died,” she continued, “I had to break the news to Paul. But he was in space, so I called Steve in Tokyo and I told him, ‘Caesar died.’ And he took the news very matter-of-factly. ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh. I see.’ Didn’t faze him at all—which proved to me right away that Steve wasn’t Paul.
“So we discussed whether he should relay the news to Paul right away, or whether we should wait till the next time Paul came home and I’d tell him myself. Steve felt I should be the one to tell him, and I agreed.
“So it was a couple of months later now, and Paul was between missions. I had to pick him up at the airport, and we drove back to Malibu. I didn’t say a word; I pretended that everything was fine. Then we pulled into the driveway, and finally I had to tell him that Caesar wasn’t going to be there waiting for him; he was gone. And when Paul heard that—when he heard that Caesar was dead—he just fell apart. He was crying, he fell to his knees in the driveway, banging his fists on the ground, tears streaming down his cheeks—this was real pain
. He was in anguish. No faking. I’m an actress; I know acting. And he would have had to be the greatest actor in the world to fake that.
“So, obviously, Paul was Paul, and Steve wasn’t. Steve didn’t care at all about Caesar. It didn’t matter to him. Because, you see, you can’t clone a soul.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I was still having trouble wrapping my head around the initial premise. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sure it’s all true, but I still find it hard to believe. I mean, if the government really wanted to keep something secret, is that really the best solution they could come up with? A clone?”
Mom fixed me with a benevolently patronizing look. “Sachi, you’re very young, and you’re very naïve; you don’t know how the world works. The government does all kinds of crazy things. Do you realize they have surveillance satellites up there in space that can listen in on any conversation we have on earth? Wherever you are, if you’re out on a nature hike, or on a boat, anywhere—they’re listening.”
Mom suddenly looked toward the ceiling, raising a finger. In a hushed whisper: “They’re listening right now.”
She started yelling at the ceiling, defying those Orwellian transmitters: “I know you’re listening, but I’m telling her anyway! Because she’s my daughter!”
She waited a moment, as if expecting a response, and then turned back to me with a resigned shrug. “I’m probably in trouble now—but whatever. You deserved to know the truth.”
By this time I must have looked completely shell-shocked, because Mom placed a comforting hand on my wrist, patting it gently. “I know. You’re confused; you’re disoriented. It’s totally understandable. But I checked out Steve very carefully, and I knew he would take good care of you. Was it an ideal situation, being raised in another country by a clone? Of course not. But there’s always a struggle between public duty and personal need, and I think, all things considered, we managed to find the right balance.”
I needed a little time to sit with this information. In a way, I wasn’t completely surprised. It would be another year before Mom came out with her most talked-about and influential book, Out on a Limb, in which she made public her belief in reincarnation and the astral plane. She’d been developing these interests in private for years, so I was familiar with her unique perspective on the cosmos, and generally prepared for anything.
This, however, was beyond me. Mom, for all her eccentric notions, was still a fiercely intelligent woman, capable of cold, clear-eyed logic when the situation demanded it. How could she have come to believe that Dad was a clone? Where could she have gotten such a story? It was insane.
Yet…the telegrams were right there. They were real. Mom couldn’t have sent them to herself. They sat there in their box, mockingly real. They were saying, Rationalize all you want, sister, but we’re here and we’re not going anywhere.
When I considered their concrete reality in tandem with Mom’s unshakable faith, I found my own conviction wavering. It is a strange, secretive world out there, after all. Crazier things have happened, I guess. So maybe, I thought…it’s true?
Then a casual phrase dropped earlier came drifting back, and I grabbed at it as if it were a lone, spindly branch overhanging a waterfall.
“Okay, so wait a minute, Mom. You send money to the government for this? How much money?”
“Sixty thousand dollars.”
My jaw dropped. Sixty thousand dollars? Shipped into space? Oh, what I could have done with sixty thousand dollars! Gone to college, for one thing. “Sixty thousand dollars a year?”
She looked at me as if I had two heads. “A year? No, a month.”
I gasped. “Sixty thousand a month?”
“Of course. Space travel is very expensive.”
I had to get this on the record. “All right, since 1958, you’ve been giving the government sixty thousand a month?”
“No, it was a lot less back then, but as the years went by, we had to adjust for inflation.”
“Where do you send this money? NASA? Washington?”
Mom was being very patient now. “I send it to Steve, the clone. That’s the whole point. He’s supposed to be my husband, so it doesn’t look suspicious if it goes to him. And then he forwards it through the proper channels.”
Now the fog was starting to lift.
“He forwards it? Sixty thousand a month? That’s, what, seven hundred and twenty thousand a year?”
Mom was untroubled by this expenditure. She usually hated parting with money, but this was a special case. “It’s a lot of money, yes, but it’s for a worthy cause. We all have to make sacrifices for the general good.”
“Steve doesn’t have to make any sacrifices,” I observed. “Steve has a very comfortable lifestyle for a clone.”
Mom shrugged. “He has to keep up appearances.” She could see that I was getting at something unpleasant, and whatever it was, she was instinctively mounting a defense.
“He appears to be as rich as Croesus,” I told her. “You know, he goes to expensive restaurants every night? Every single night. He has a yacht in the Mediterranean, and his own private island in the Pacific. He drinks Dom Perignon for breakfast. Every breakfast! He has potatoes shipped to Tokyo from Idaho! Then he scoops out the insides and fills the potato skins with Beluga caviar. That’s his midnight snack.”
There was a pause as Mom processed this information.
“So, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying he has an awful lot of spare change. About sixty thousand a month’s worth.”
Mom was genuinely shocked. “You think Steve’s been taking your father’s money?”
“He is my father!” I exploded. “He’s not a clone! Steve Parker and Paul are the same person! The whole story is a fake. He made it up to trick you into sending him a check every month. Mom, he conned you! Dad’s a con man!”
The moment I said it was the very moment I realized it myself: Dad’s a con man.
This was something I had never allowed myself to consider, but as soon as it came out of my mouth, I knew it was absolutely the truth. I’d never quite understood what Dad’s business was, but now I knew: he was an operator, a flim-flam artist, a jet set Harold Hill. His job was to enjoy his own life at everyone else’s expense. And his biggest pigeon had been his own wife.
A Dweller on Two Planets—the epic story of Phylo the Tibetan, who lived in the lost city of Atlantis—that’s how it began. Dad gave Mom that book on the set of her very first movie, The Trouble with Harry. Mom had responded positively to its message and came to embrace the possibilities of reincarnation, telepathic communication, and other forms of expanded consciousness. Just as Dad had hoped.
Having laid the foundation, he was now in the position to convince Mom that he was two people: he was a space traveler cruising the Pleiades, and he was a clone of that space traveler. And one of the reasons he had to relocate to Japan was to keep anyone from detecting his clonehood. Once there, he needed Mom to finance his playboy lifestyle, so he appealed to her sense of patriotism and got her to bankroll the “space mission.”
It was an incredibly bold plan. The risks were obvious. If Mom hadn’t gone for it, their marriage would have been over in a New York minute.
Yet he knew that she would go for it. Like any great salesman, he could read his mark like a book.
He also had a masterstroke up his sleeve, and that was in bringing his daughter to Japan. It was a classic application of reverse logic: everyone (i.e., the Russians and various foreign spies) knew that a responsible mother would never send her child overseas to live with a clone, so Mom had to send me—it made the ruse complete.
This was also why Dad never spent any money on me; he couldn’t, because all that money was supposed to be going to the “government.” If Mom saw him buying me new clothes or taking me on trips or paying for my college education, she might get suspicious. So, for the sake of the scheme, I went without. At the same time, by raising me Japanese—docile, submissive—he co
uld guarantee that I would accept any outlandish situation without question. He really was a brilliant man.
Of course, the success of such a campaign was predicated on the unlikely scenario that Mom and I would never discuss the arrangement. Ever. Now we had discussed it, though, and the cat was out of the bag: Dad was exposed as a humbug, the man behind the curtain.
Now Mom was the one whose world had been turned upside down. Open marriage aside, Dad was her great lifetime love. She respected him, she adored him, she took comfort in the fact that he was her true soul mate and they would always be there for each other.
But he wasn’t there. Maybe he had never been. Maybe their entire relationship had been one elaborate con. “Paul” was my mother’s fantasy, and Steve—charming, enigmatic, high-living—was a con man.
At first I had felt a sense of triumph in disclosing the extent of Dad’s machinations to Mom. For once, I was the one who had the answers instead of the questions. I was the one who was in the know.
This quickly changed to deep sympathy for her. I knew what she was suddenly facing—profound betrayal, the loss of love—and my heart broke for her.
She stood with her arms folded, staring toward the floor, stoically weathering the emotional assault. I waited for her reaction.
Finally, she shook her head. “Ridiculous,” she said.
“It’s not ridiculous,” I insisted. “He is a con man. You know he is! He’s certainly not in the Pleiades. Do you know how far away that is?”
“Forty-three light years,” she said with fading defiance. “So what? You never heard of hyperspace?” She wasn’t giving up. She was holding on to the dream, come what may.
“Oh, Mom…How did you ever fall for this?”
Mom snapped. “I didn’t fall for anything! Your father is in space, and Steve is a clone! And that’s the end of it.” She grabbed the box of telegrams. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. You just don’t have the maturity.” She stomped back into the bedroom.