b e n ' s c l o n e
I watched him stuff things down into the duffle bag, relentlessly packing. There was the washboard stomach now five years from protruding over his belt buckle and ten years from preventing him seeing his penis. There was the mop of thick brown hair he was going to miss so much, curse my mother's father's genes. What about his inevitable Type-I diabetes? Or the inexplicable kidney stones that will start plaguing him in his mid30's?
"I get it," I said at last. "I made you. Giving you life was my choice, making you just like me. So I deserve the blame—completely—for the hand I've dealt you. I chose to give you all my faults and defects, and I'm sorry for—―"
"This has nothing to do with me being a clone," he interrupted. "This has to do with you being a bad father. People come up with the stupidest reasons for having children. Some figure they're a failure at everything else in life, so they do it to have one accomplishment. Other's do it for love, something that depends on them completely. Others for the power trip…." He trailed off, shaking his head.
He drew the duffle bag tight, and stared at it, slumped over on the floor at his feet, "I wish there was a competency test for having children. I mean, this is the future of our species we're talking about here, and the only criteria for getting into the next generation is finding some way to reproduce."
He slung the duffle bag over one shoulder and pushed past me. I could only stare at his room, trying to understand, looking for the insight that would prevent this. It was the first time I had seen his room without suspicion or criticism. There was a lot of me here.
I heard the front door open. "If you go down this route, you'll end up just like me," I shouted, and I couldn't blame him for not believing me. How could he know that just this once I was speaking in his best interests, because they were mine too?
The door shut. I knew the rest of this story, and was glad I didn't own a dog.
I spent the rest of the afternoon pouting in the living room, sipping scotch from a coffee mug until the sun set and I was alone in the dark. A week ago I saw an article in the paper about a surgeon successfully transplanting the head from one monkey to another. He thought the process could be repeated on
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