Body by Blood

by Patrick Johnston

  “Absolutely. A federal law legalizing cloning is the best way to protect the rights of all involved.”

  The host turns to the camera. “Alabama State Attorney Shane Mease has defied a federal judge and issued an arrest warrant for the CEO of the largest cloning company in Alabama, who has violated the most aggressive anti-cloning state law in the U.S. Let us listen to Alabama Governor Maurice Whetley’s and State Attorney Mease’s press conference last week.”

  A screen plays a 3-D video of the Alabama State Attorney answering a question after one of his press conferences, a clip played incessantly by the media since last week. “We do not believe the federal government is unlimited in power.” The stiff red hair of his crew cut perfectly accentuates the unrelenting firmness of his tone and choice of words. “The Constitution does not grant your leaders in Washington the right to do wrong.” He waves and points as he speaks, more like a Pentecostal preacher than a politician. “They are lawfully limited by the Constitution to specifically enumerated powers, and they are prevented by state and federal constitutions, as well as by divine law, from executing innocent human beings apart from a trial by jury. We are issuing this arrest warrant for David Starr because of evidence that he may be guilty of crimes against humanity in the mass termination of what he considers to be defective dupes,”—he points a stiff index finger at the audience of journalists—“an act he freely confesses. The severity of that crime is not lessened by the fact he has found a federal judge to act as his accomplice.”

  A camera gets our facial responses to the clip. I chuckle disrespectfully and take a slow sip from my mug as I turn to Jim Cobb. He looks at the host and shakes his head in disgust.

  “Jim Cobb,” the host addresses the bearded representative of the pro-life movement, “fringe groups in the pro-life movement are comfortable with such radical words from the man who has become known as ‘Alabama’s cloven tongue of fire.’ They have applauded Alabama’s leaders as visionary and courageous for daring to enforce their statewide ban on cloning. You, on the other hand, have come out against him. Tell us why.”

  “I am against the termination of dupes. I think that they can be created, respecting the wishes of the host, but they should not be carelessly killed.” I nod approvingly as Cobb continues, “However, we are a nation of laws, with the U.S. Constitution being the law of the land. Alabama’s leaders are defying the law in issuing this arrest warrant. Alabama citizens can regulate the industry through the legislative process to prevent abuses and unnecessary terminations, but their leaders do not have the right to violate the Constitution of the United States, or our sacred separation of church and state.”

  These words bring a hail of applause from the studio audience. I was told the attendees were fairly representative of the general public, but it appears designed to lead to meager applause for the leftist brave enough to sit in the notorious ‘hot seat.’

  “Republican congressman Jerry Stinthal has proposed a compromise with which both of you are comfortable.” The host turns to me. “Is that correct, Dr. Verity?”

  “Yes. It was even endorsed by the Republican Speaker of the House. It would prevent federal funding of cloning and limit federal control over the industry.”

  “It would also prevent,” Jim Cobb adds, “the termination of unfunded or defective dupes without the consent of at least two licensed physicians.”

  “It would also ban the creation and exploitation of chimeras—embryos created by combining human and animal or plant DNA,” I continue, as the audience predictably howls its disapproval of such research.

  “Poorly inadequate measures, I’m afraid.” The Press Secretary has a tone that emanates the Administration’s utter disgust with Cobb and I. “What Dr. Verity and Jim Cobb do not understand is that all they are doing is postponing the inevitable and causing even more chimeras to be made in unregulated states. There must be federal control and a unified federal policy in order to prevent abuses, including preventing the creation of chimeras and bringing them to maturity. If you don’t want human-animal freaks in society, federal control is necessary. Federal leaders cannot sit idly by while . . . ” Someone shouts something near the entrance of the studio, and Aaron Little hesitates. We turn our heads toward the commotion.

  With the unwelcome interruption, I expect the host to break for a commercial until they have an opportunity to remedy the outburst of some infiltrated protester or the injury of some employee. The host, however, seems perplexed and unsure of what to do.

  The next thing I know, a gruff voice makes my hair stand on end.

  “Person . . . Vengeance . . . ” I cannot make out the words through the shouting. Then, crystal clear, I hear, “This is for all your victims!”

  A deafening noise and a bright ball of flame emanates from my right. I turn to face a blistering hot gush of wind, which pounds me in the chest like a sledgehammer, flipping me over the couch.

  8

  I WAKE UP IN A bed in a dark room to the beeping sound of my own heartbeat in a monitor.

  Where am I? A hospital?

  The heart rhythm’s green squiggly line is in sync with the pounding in my skull. My forehead is hot and tight, like I have been sunburned from falling asleep drunk midday by the pool.

  Why am I here? The events of the last several months are a blur. What was the last thing that happened?

  I try to glance at my watch on my right wrist, hoping to discover the date, but my right arm is in some type of high tech hyperbaric air cast, glowing like a black light in the relatively dark room. “Hello?”

  In a moment, a nurse answers through a speaker in the wall behind me. “I will be there in a moment, Dr. Verity.”

  The throbbing in my head that coincides with the beeping on the monitor eases in a moment, and I make out the President’s voice. A 3-D image is projected on the wall across the room.

  “Volume. Up. Up.” My tongue is thick and my mouth dry, but the computer understands my order nonetheless. The President is having a press conference.

  “ . . . Our hearts are with the family of Aaron Little. We grieve with them. Our nation lost one of its best and brightest this morning.” She sighs heavily. “It will be difficult to find a replacement . . . ”

  The Press Secretary is dead? I remember now. The host, the cameras, the explosion . . .

  The nurse enters the room and opens her mouth but I wave her quiet. “Let me, let me”—I motion to the image—“let me listen.”

  “Thankfully, the terrorist’s bomb was crude and rudimentary. Dr. Raymond Verity suffered severe head trauma, has a bleed in his brain, and broke his right wrist. He is still unconscious, but I have been told that there is still a chance of recovery.”

  A brain bleed?

  I begin to flail my extremities and discover a weakness in my left leg and left hand. I rub my left hand against my left leg. Sensation is poor on that side of the body.

  The nurse extends her palms toward me. “Be still, Dr. Verity. Everything’s stable, but I need you to be still.”

  She prepares to give an injection into my IV port, but I prevent her. “Stop. Don’t do that.”

  She freezes, unsure of what to do.

  “I had a, I had a, a stroke?” My words are slow and impeded by some stiffness in my tongue.

  “Shh. A reversible ischemic neurologic deficit, hopefully, not a permanent stroke. Your cerebral meninges tore over your right parietal cortex, probably from incomplete healing after your cerebral-ocular transfer. The bleeders have been cauterized, and you are stable, but not if your rising BP breaks the still fragile connections. Now, I’ve been ordered to give you this injection to calm you . . . ”

  “No. I said no.”

  A beeping on the monitor drains the smile from her face, and she nervously taps behind her right ear. “Dr. Cranton, you told me to let you know when Dr. Verity awakes. Well, he has, and he’s quite anxious and is refusing the midazolam injection.”

  “My vision is still affected.” My words are
slurring. “Is my face drooping?”

  “Please, be still, Dr. Verity.” She studies my facial features for a moment. “Blink hard.” I obey. “Blow out your cheeks like this.” I comply. “Uh, your neurological deficits look like they’re, um, they’re worsening.” She taps her ear again. “Dr. Cranton?”

  Dr. Cranton’s familiar voice on the speaker behind my head interrupts her. “I’ll be there in a few minutes, Megan. Dr. Verity, I’ve been watching you through the camera on the wall across from you. Please, be still, be calm. Your anxiety is increasing your heart rate and output and may require medical intervention if you do not calm yourself.”

  “His deficits are returning, Dr. Cranton.” The nurse looks toward the camera.

  “Calm down, Raymond! Nurse, re-take his vitals. Call a code if indicated. I’m on my way. And give him that injection!”

  “No!” I insist. “No benzos. I need to understand what’s going on . . . ”

  “Sue me then! Give it to him, Megan.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  I sigh, then reluctantly nod at the anxious nurse. She clearly does not wish to offend either doctor. She gives the injection. I follow Cranton’s advice, taking deep, slow breaths. I close my eyes, and the nurse pats my right hand which, thankfully, still has sensation.

  “Where is, where is . . . ” I want to ask where Morgan is, and I become upset at my slowness of speech.

  I hear my sister’s name on the TV, and I look to the wall.

  The nurse continues to urge me to relax as she takes my vitals. My ears are more intently attuned to the President’s press conference than her fretful counsel.

  A picture of my elderly sister’s prison processing photograph is flashed up on the screen as the President speaks. “She has been incarcerated for trespassing on the property of New Body Research Center four months ago on the very day that her brother, who co-founded the facility, was resurrected in his new body. We have evidence that her organization, Personhood Now, is responsible for the terrorist’s bomb that targeted and killed my Administration’s Press Secretary Aaron Little, as well as three NBS television studio employees.” They show a grainy clip of security footage of a man walking into the studio, wearing a backpack. “The organization’s leadership, including Tamara Verity, will be charged under strengthened anti-terrorism legislation proposed by my Administration and passed by Congress last year.”

  My sight gradually worsens during the President’s speech. I am blinking hard to try to focus. I try to speak to increase the volume, but my tongue is as heavy and numb as a frozen brick. I turn to the nurse, whose eyes widen at the increased rate of the beeping on the heart monitor behind me.

  She gently pats my cheek. “Dr. Verity?”

  Dr. Cranton rushes into the room and immediately taps a button behind his ear, shouting out an order I cannot hear due to a high-pitched squeal, like an ambulance siren, inside my head.

  I don’t want to die!

  Gradually, the room drains of all color, darkening to gray and then to black.

  9

  WHEN I AWAKE, MORGAN IS wearing a pair of spectacles and appears to be staring right at me with a blank look on her face.

  “Morgan?”

  She doesn’t answer. My vision appears to be more symmetrical, which is a relief. Morgan’s full lips tip up at the corners. I know that look well.

  “Morgan!”

  “Oh.” She takes off her spectacles. “I was reading a novel.” She stands and comes near the bed.

  “Romance novel via spectacles, huh?” Lying there in a hospital gown, I know I don’t fit her fantastic notion of an ideal lover, even with my six-pack. But who could possibly live up to the fanciful images in her novels?

  She nods. “Killing trees is so unnecessary.” She taps the button to contact the nurses’ station. “My husband’s awake.”

  I feel weak, but alert. My blurry vision has completely resolved. I press my hand against my left leg. “Yes! My feeling’s back.”

  Morgan rests her hand on my chest. “Their tests confirmed that it would be so.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Since the explosion? Three days.”

  I try to sit up in bed, but I’m covered in tubes and wires.

  “They repaired your damaged brain tissue with some experimental stem cell transplantation.” She smiles, pulls in closer, and kisses me on the cheek. “Ivan did it himself. They kept you sedated until the tissue healing matured. They’ve been feeding you intravenously, and using electrodes to keep your muscles toned, but you’ve shriveled a bit.”

  I yawn and pull against the wires. “Unstrap me, please.”

  She unstraps my wrist ties with one hand, and with the other presses her fingers into my toned abs. “That’s the laziest three days these muscles have experienced in eight years.”

  A fleet of nurses rush into the room, along with Drs. Ivan Wilkes and Cranton and two other physicians to welcome me back from the edge of the grave, and to congratulate themselves on another breakthrough in New Body science.

  * * *

  “Thank you, Madame President,” I say into the phone, trying to minimize my barely perceptible slur. I remove my slippers and lean back in the reclining leather chair they have brought into my private hospital room.

  “You take your time and get better. We’re getting a lot of mileage out of your handicap, so don’t you feel any guilt about not being on the field in front of the cameras . . . ”

  Handicap? My minimally weak hand and foot and my barely perceptible facial droop is hardly a handicap. “It’s almost completely gone, Madam President. Dr. Wilkes’ and Dr. Cranton’s procedure repaired my damaged brain tissue.”

  “Do me a favor. Fake the limp while walking the hospital grounds for a couple of days? I have a fleet of cameras there prepared for my impromptu press conference, which may be as early as tomorrow morning in front of your hospital.”

  “Here? I thought we weren’t exactly on speaking terms as far as the press is concerned.”

  She laughs. “Well, as it turns out, the Republicans have boasted a veto-proof majority behind your bill. In record timing. You’re a natural, and you get all the credit, Raymond.”

  “Wow.” Of all my accolades and awards, there are no words quite as pleasurable as personal praise from the President of the United States. She credits me for single-handedly harnessing the formidable power of the political right to unknowingly carry the President’s own agenda. “I can’t believe it worked.”

  “They raised a hundred million ameros for a campaign to fight us in the House, Ray. They’re idiots. The religious right waves the flags we knit for them and lobbies hard for the bills we trick them into backing.”

  My brother comes to mind, and I grimace. The right wing is teeming with religious opportunists with no principle but personal gain, and no accomplice so comforting as the undemanding divine grace that covers their hypocritical judgments and perpetual moral deficiencies.

  “You see, all your suffering has not been in vain, Ray. Thanks to your influence on the public, I have come around to your compromise, albeit reluctantly. You should know I still will accuse you of capitulating to the religious fanatics . . . ”

  “Of course.” This game is so entertaining. “I’ll be glad to fake the limp for a couple more days and be the target for your darts, as long as you will not hold offense when I throw mine.”

  She laughs. “Oh, I could kiss you right now.”

  “I assume that you do not want me at your press conference?”

  “You assume correctly. We’re not that close.”

  “Kissing enemies. Of course.”

  “The bitterest.”

  “Have you discovered who is responsible for the explosion?” There’s a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. “Madame President?”

  “Yes, I’m here. I thought you knew. It was your sister.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “Tamara? It’s politically expedient and serves your caus
e, I know, but . . . ”

  “Our cause.”

  “Yes, our cause. But I know that she wouldn’t have done that, and setting your investigators on her gives the real culprits time to cover their tracks.”

  “Have you even met her or spoken to her in the past 27 years?”

  “Well, no, but I know that she’s committed to peaceful activism. Peaceful. She’s the abortion clinic sidewalk counseling type. No guns. No bombs. Fasting and praying in jibberish are her weapons of choice.”

  “Well, the evidence points to her organization, I’m sorry to say. This terrorist attack happened under her guidance, not in spite of it.”

  I frown. I should pay Tamara a visit. “Where is she being incarcerated?”

  “If you’re thinking of visiting her, don’t. If it gets out to the press, it’ll hurt your influence with the public.” For the first time, I sense disappointment in her voice. “Will you call NBS, and have them run a piece on you from your hospital room?”

  I clear my throat. “Gladly.”

  As soon as I get off the phone with President Sayder, Morgan taps behind her right ear to conclude her phone call.

  “What’s got you so excited, Morgan?”

  “I’ll tell you at dinner tonight. At our favorite place, on the boardwalk overlooking the Bay.”

  I smile at her invitation. “Are they going to let me go?”

  “Yes, our date meets with Dr. Cranton’s approval.”

  “Always looking for a reason to celebrate, aren’t you, babe?”

  “Life’s too short to . . . ”

  She and I make eye contact. Her old cliché doesn’t apply now that we get a new body every 25 years.

  10

  AT THE BAR ON THE veranda, after two dances and three glasses of wine, I insist that she tell me this good news. “Stop putting it off. Just tell me.”

  She giggles triumphantly, so pleased with herself for keeping me suspended on the plank for so long. She leans back in her stool, her ankles propped up on the bar, taking the split in her dress all the way up her long legs, completely void of discretion in view of the crowds walking the boardwalk below. She certainly has a way of prefacing things.