Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone: but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

- the Gospel according to John

My father - I don’t know what else to call him - asked me to “preface the whole thing” with that. I’m not too sure what it means. Of course I know it’s from the Bible and so on, but I haven’t actually read the thing. One of the main points he stressed was that I shouldn’t read it until I was sixteen. He said it was an important book, but a dangerous one to just give to kids. I got in some big fights with my foster parents about that one. They were pretty religious and wanted to raise me as a Christian. We eventually decided that I would go to church with them, but that I wouldn’t have to study the Bible or any of that stuff. I had to fight really hard for that and I was pretty proud when I won. He (my father) told me that, too. “Stick to your guns,” he said. “Especially when it’s tough. Especially when it looks like there’s no way you’ll win. You’ll always feel good about it later, no matter what happens. And when you do win, it is so very sweet.” He was right about that one.

I guess his - my - story is pretty well-known, though it’s been a long time since there was anything big about it in the papers. Once in a while I get a reporter from some second-rate paper dropping by to look me over, but they never seem to do much with it. I must be too normal for them. Ha. The doctors and counselors and researchers are the biggest problem - there are a million of them, and they all want to poke me and prod me and fool around in my head and ask me dumb questions and make me take stupid tests. Then they sit around and chew on pens and scratch their heads and whisper to each other, staring at me like I’m a talking dog or something. I hate it, but my foster parents told me it’s really important and might help a lot of people. My father never said anything about it one way or the other, so I go along with it most of the time.

Anyway, I didn’t know the whole story myself until about two years ago. I had to run around and find bits and pieces here and there, and try to figure out what was true and what was not. It was hard because people don’t like to talk about it with me. My foster parents were no help: I think they’d be just as happy if I forgot the whole thing. His friends are the worst about that, actually, which surprises me a little. You’d think they’d be the most ready to help. They always get really uncomfortable around me, though, and always have something important to do. And there was just an unbelievable amount of crap written about it at the time. A lot of people hated him, I guess. Some people even called him a “monster”, though I’m not sure why. When I look through those old papers, there was a lot worse stuff than that going on right then. He said that, too, on my twelfth birthday: “A lot of people will tell you some really bad things about me. Really bad. But always remember, you are me and I am you. If they say something about me and you can’t see that about yourself, they’re probably full of shit. Most people are. Don’t be afraid to tell them that, either. There are a lot of people with big brains who just fill them up with stupid ideas. Weird but true.”

Okay, the story, briefly. About seventeen years ago, sometime during the spring of 2000 (double-O, they called it then), my father was diagnosed with cancer. It was a terminal case from the outset, apparently. According to the newspaper articles, the doctors estimated he had six to twelve months to live. The story has it that when they told him that, he shrugged and said, “That’s enough.”

At the time he was living in Warsaw, Poland, and running a firm there. They say he leveraged his company’s assets to acquire a small Polish biomedical research company while he was driving home from the doctor’s office. That afternoon he drove over to the lab and told them to clone his DNA and insert it into a dozen fertilized eggs, or he’d close the company down. A couple of them resigned in protest, but eventually the others went along with it. Countries had just started to make the procedures illegal at that point, but Poland hadn’t gotten around to it. “Europeans don’t move too fast,” he said. “Doing business there is like shooting fish in a barrel. You’ll see what I mean when you get there.” I haven’t been there yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

He had some trouble finding a place to put the egg. He said he went to his sister first, because he wanted to “maximize the similarity of the pre-natal environment.” She was horrified by the whole idea. Against nature, she said. She won’t even see me now. It’s too bad. My father said a lot of nice things about her and said I should get to know her, if I could.

Eventually he had to pay a woman a lot of money to agree to carry it. She’s pretty well-known now too, of course. Surrogate mothering was pretty common in those days, apparently, before they just started using the incubators for most kids. He decided to use an American woman because of citizenship issues, and he eventually settled on Allison Moore of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He didn’t tell her it was his clone, of course. He also had to pay off the scientists who did the initial cloning so that they wouldn’t squeal on him when they found out he was really going through with it. “Don’t make the mistake of assuming you can buy everybody,” he said. “You can’t. But if you can figure out who you can buy and who you can’t, you’ll be ten steps ahead of everyone else.”

They had to use two of the eggs. The first pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage after six weeks. Me#1, down the tubes, as it were. The second time it held, and we all went a good five months without any problems, one big happy family. My father was working like a madman to get as much money together as he could before he died (thanks, Dad!), my mother was getting fat and happy, and I was splitting cells like nobody’s business.

And then, of course, word of it leaked out and all hell broke loose. Nobody knows where the original leak came from. My father always suspected his sister. She was a big-time environmental activist, totally against any kind of genetic manipulation or anything like that. She was arrested once for burning a field of soybean plants that had been modified to give higher protein yields. I mean, how can you protest against soybeans? You can imagine how she felt about her brother cloning himself.

My father was already in some pretty serious health problems by that point. He had the cancer everywhere: it was crusing around in his blood from organ to organ like a roller coaster. He refused to have anything operated on, since it would cost too much money. He explained,  “We all knew I was dead as a doornail. They just wanted to take all my organs out and leave me hooked up to a bunch of machines at two hundred dollars an hour. I said, ‘Sorry guys, I keep my dignity and my boy keeps the money.’ They didn’t like that too much.”

But like I said, as soon as it got in the press, the whole world seemed to go crazy with it. They figured out pretty quickly what had happened: the fertility clinic said they had nothing to do with it, they’d just gotten a set of fertilized eggs from some place in Poland. It didn’t take too long to find the guys who had done the procedure. They said they’d been forced into it, of course: just following orders.

It was the end of the world, as far as the opinion columns were concerned. Two days after the story broke, there was a huge article in the New York Times by some guy called William Bennett. It was the first of many, but to this day it’s still my favorite: “THE TOWER OF BABEL, BUILT ANEW?”:

Maybe somewhere out there in the great moral wasteland of America are some people who remember a book called the Bible. In the first part (yes, the thick, hard part) there is a story of a certain people who had the arrogance to think they could build a tower high enough to reach heaven. They lived in a time of great peace, harmony, and prosperity, when man was united and spoke with one language. And the wisest among them thought to themselves, ‘we have conquered the earth - what is to stop us from conquering heaven as well?’ So they built their tower. God was so angered by this incredible arrogance that he struck down the tower, destroyed the city, and scattered man across the globe with hundreds of different languages so that it would never happen again.

In having the audacity to clone himself and plant the cloned embryo in an unsuspecting womb, James MacQuestan has made a startling step toward rebuilding this tower. Let us be clear: this is not a case of a questionable application of biogenetic technology. This is a blatant attempt to usurp God’s role, a dying man’s desperate ploy to deny his own mortality, at whatever cost to humanity...

The middle part is pretty boring. But the end was interesting, and had important consequences.

I would have thought that such an act was so far removed from the essence of human nature and the core of civilization that it would not even be considered, let alone attempted. Now that it has, let us ensure that it not be tolerated. I am writing this article in a hotel room in New Hampshire, where tomorrow I intend to bring suit in state court that this monstrous birth be prevented from occurring. I call on Congress to enact immediate legislation to prevent this from happening in the future. I call on private biotechnology firms to sign statements that they will never assist or accommodate such misguided projects in the future. I call on...

He called on everybody. He called on me a few years ago, incidentally (a few short months before he was himself diagnosed with terminal cancer - he would go on to be arrested for trying to violate precisely the same anti-cloning laws he helped to initiate. If only my father and mother had lived to see that one!) But when he came to see me he was still in fine form, fat and red-faced and puffed up with self-importance. He walked with a cane, I remember: it had a great big silver head on it, bright on top but tarnished nearly black underneath.

He looked down at me, not offering his hand. “So, you’re little Ralph Good.”

I just looked at him. “No sir, I’m James MacQuestan.”

He looked confused. “I thought they named you Ralph Good...”

“They tried to,” I replied. They had. I thought I was Ralph Good until my sixth birthday, when a friend of my father’s sneaked me the first videodisk. It was pretty short. He looked tired and sick, not like in the TV footage from back then. He apparently made the disks right before he died. “James,” he said. “I’m sorry we couldn’t meet in person. I don’t know what they’ll have told you by now, but I’m quite certain it’s not correct. I am your father, of sorts. It would be more accurate to say that I am you. In the past, and in the future, I hope. I don’t want to go into it right now, but you will understand when you’re older. For now, just remember one thing: your name is James MacQuestan. Don’t trust anyone who tries to tell you different. Happy birthday, son.” The man had given me the disk and told me to give it to my foster parents and tell them I had seen it. I’d known before that they weren’t my real parents, but they’d just told me my parents had died when I was very young. After they saw the video they freaked out, of course, but eventually told me as much of the real story as they thought I was ready for. I give them credit for that: they didn’t want me to live a lie.

***

My father came back from Poland when the story broke, and immediately became a media sensation. He didn’t do anything to help calm things down. His friends tell me he enjoyed the attention immensely. “Your father was an ornery son of a bitch,” they told me. “He liked to piss people off.” I can understand that. Surprise, surprise. He mailed in a response to Bennet’s article which he had written on the plane ride over. They decided not to run it because it was “too inflammatory,” but a couple of other papers got their hands on it somehow and printed it: 

A lot of accusations have been leveled at me over the past few days. I’ve been called a madman, a criminal against human nature and biology, a pretender to the throne of God. There have been calls (in what is quite nearly a serious newspaper) for the forcible abortion of my clone. Both I and the woman who is carrying my clone have received numerous death threats.

I must say I fail to see the problem. I am certainly no criminal against biology - I am merely trying to ensure that the highest possible proportion of my genetic material is carried on to the next generation. Any biologist will tell you that is a natural urge. It is what drives the evolutionary motor of the world.

As to the charges that I am a criminal against human nature - well, Mr. Bennett is certainly correct when he labels me a “dying man desperate to deny his own mortality”. But again I ask you: what could be more human than that? We are the only creatures on this planet who recognize and dread our own mortality. The need to deny this is the story of human history. Our need to establish communities, states, and religions all spring from a deep wish to create something beyond ourselves, something which will survive, even as we pass on. The strength of any religion is that it promises the believer eternal life: it says the death we fear is not the end, but a new beginning. The God for whom Mr. Bennett presumes to speak is the personification of this, it is simply the man who has cheated death...

The only charge to which I will plead guilty is that of desiring to usurp the throne of God. I admit it, and proudly. I see a day, not too far in the future (though too far for me) when man will finally learn how to cheat death. We will simply grow new organs to replace defective ones: we will clone ourselves, and transplant memories to fresh new bodies as easily as we now move a flower from a pot to a garden. And on that day we will be able to dispense with these old, false gods once and for all, and begin to build the Kingdom of Heaven where it truly belongs: right here.

They asked him in an interview on national television what he thought the significance of the birth would be. “Its significance will be ultimate,” he responded. “It heralds our first step toward immortality. It will be the first true resurrection in the history of the world.” It’s a funny scene - as soon as he says that, the lady interviewing him looks like she’s going to be sick. She couldn’t even say anything, just sputter. 

Bennett won his case, of course. They don’t take kindly to that sort of talk up in New Hampshire. The court ordered “that the pregnancy be terminated immediately, and that Mr. MacQuestan make no further attempts to have cloned embryos carried to term until a legal framework for evaluating these activites has been established by the appropriate legislative bodies.” The court also noted that there was nothing preventing my father from going the normal surrogate route - having his sperm fertilize a donated egg, and the resulting embryo implanted in someone’s womb. 

The whole country went nova at that one. “Hillbilly Judge Orders Forced Abortion!” The headlines screamed. There was absolutely no precedent. Could you force someone to have an abortion? My mother was up there, crying on national television. “I won’t let them take my little baby!” Women’s groups went berserk. “A ghastly attempt by the phallocracy to extend its control over womyn’s bodies,” pronounced Mary Dailey, “reminiscent of the unapologetic medical terrorism of the Nazi era.” The religious right was deeply split. After all, I was almost in my final trimester, and New Hampshire law prohibited abortions even during the second trimester. “I find the prospect of Mr. MacQuestan successfully cloning himself repugnant,” said a notoriously conservative senator from the state, “but I find abortion more so, under any circumstances. Let her carry the child to term.” The other senator disagreed. “It’s a demon child. Get rid of it.”

My father’s only comment walking out of the courtroom was “I hope they finally move the first presidential primary out of this neanderthal backwater. These people shouldn’t even be allowed to vote, never mind influence the rest of the country.”

They made an emergency appeal to the State Superior court to block the order. Meanwhile, the Governor issued a parallel executive order for the abortion to be performed. My mother was ordered to report to a hospital in a neighboring town within seventy-two hours, where a court-appointed physician would carry out the procedure. The state legislature was scrambling to put something on paper, but it was too divided to accomplish anything useful except scream at one another in front of the C-SPAN cameras.

Forty-eight hours later, the State Superior court ruled that the fetus   - that would be me - was illegally conceived and was therefore not entitled to protection under the law. Ouch.

Things got really weird then. My father and mother blockaded themselves up in his old family house. There was a huge crowd of people gathered there, from all over the country. One of the newspapers wrote:

Mr. MacQuestan and Ms. Moore have holed themselves up in MacQuestan’s lovely nineteenth century farmhouse on the outskirts of Dover, New Hampshire. They are guarded by an unlikely alliance of supporters - women’s rights activists, gun-toting libertarians, and conservative Christian anti-abortion leaders. Tension between the groups is obvious but restrained. ‘At least they [the anti-abortion activists] are doing something besides bombing clinics,’ sniffed the leader of a woman’s advocacy group.

The groups have blockaded entrance to the house and challenge the authorities to try to get by. ‘If we let ‘em take this feller’s little boy, they might be a-comin’ fer my guns next,’ explained a camouflaged member of an armed troop of men calling themselves The Sons of Liberty. ‘If they try, we’ll plug ‘em so full of lead they’ll be labeled an environmental hazard.’

‘I’m just happy to see so many expressions of support from so many diverse quarters,’ said Mr. MacQuestan.

Surrounding the house at a respectable distance is a cordon of protesters, also a bizarre mix of tie-dyed ecologists bearing placards against genetic manipulation, and religious groups infuriated by MacQuestan’s self-proclaimed desire to ‘usurp the throne of God.’ The protesters are held at bay by local police, who report few problems in containing the crowd.

A sort of standoff began on the third day, when the abortion deadline expired. The police were reluctant to force their way in, “to drag an innocent woman off to the hospital for a non-consensual abortion,” said a young officer on condition of anonymity. At the same time, the State Supreme Court was making an emergency review of the case. The governor himself had arrived on the scene. “Well,” he said, “I’d like to see my boys go in there and get that pervert, but I guess we’d better wait and see what the court says.” At his appearance he was jeered at roundly on both sides of the police line. 

It’s a little strange to see people writing in the newspaper about whether you should live or die, before you’re even born yet. The counselors didn’t want me to see any of that stuff: they were worried that it would “traumatize” me. I looked at it anyway. My father said, “Never listen to a psychiatrist. They give weak advice for weak people. If you want advice, go to your friends. Or listen to these disks. Ha. That’s a joke, son.” My foster parents make me go, but I just make fun of them. They say that’s because I “harbor residual feelings of bitterness stemming from a perception of being abandoned and unwanted as a child.” Someday I want a job where I get paid a lot for asking dumb questions and writing down a bunch of fancy words.

The State Supreme Court struck down the orders as unconstitutional.   My mother’s rights would have been violated, apparently. Hey guys, what about my rights? They always just talked about “the fetus in question,” but I had arms and legs and eyes and even a little jimmy at that point.

***

My father and mother were married just as she entered the eighth month of pregnancy. They were a funny looking pair. I saw a picture of them just before they went to the ceremony: he was at death’s door, slouched in a wheelchair, IV tubes going into his arm, but still with that evil little smile he always had; she was as big as a house, with metallic orange, curly hair piled high, wearing a purple velour dress. 

It was not a big wedding. My dad’s family had stopped talking to him, for the most part, and only his oldest and closest friends had stuck by him. My mother’s family thought she was out of her mind, but they still came. They still talk to me once in a while, actually, but they’re pretty dumb. Her brother gives me beer when I ask, which is cool. My father confessed on the last tape that “I didn’t really love your mother. I just had never been married before. I’d always said I would never be married, so I didn’t want to leave any promises unbroken.” He says some pretty weird stuff on those tapes. His friends tell me he was like that all the time. 

My friends say it about me, too. 

I’ve got one last picture of them, when they’re coming out of the church: she’s holding the bouquet of flowers, getting ready to toss it, he’s looking right in the camera and smiling (it’s actually kind of a happy, wholesome smile, not like all the other ones I saw, which seemed kind of bitter and sarcastic). There’s a crowd of people in front of them, the bridesmaids and the best man are in the background, it’s a bright clear day and the sun reflects whitely off the walls of the church. 

Nobody will talk to me about how it was when they shot them. From the newspaper reports, I gather my father took it right in the face and died immediately. My mother was hit on her right breast. The guy had used some kind of high-powered hunting rifle - it made a hole so big it almost took her whole arm off. One of the other guests, a girlfriend of my mom’s, was hit right in the spine while she was waiting for the bouquet. She’d gotten right up close to my mom so she’d have a good shot (Ha!) at it. See where being greedy gets you? 

It was awfully messy. A crowd of reporters were there at the wedding, so there are a lot of high-quality pics of the whole scene. That picture of the bouquet in a pool of blood even won a bunch of big awards. You still see it in “photo-retrospectives of the twentieth century” and crap like that. Traumatizing? Not particularly. You see worse on the news every night. 

They kept my mom alive long enough to pull me out of her womb. Apparently she went into labor as soon as she was hit, even though she was unconscious. They didn’t fool around with that, though. Cut her open and yanked me right out, God bless their quick little hands. 

They never caught the guy. A reporter once asked me how I felt about that. “You mean that I would want my parents’ murderer caught and punished, or that I might worry about my own safety?” The second was ostensibly the reason they changed my name. That kind of went out the window when I started telling everyone my name was James MacQuestan, though. Both, she said. 

I was fourteen then. I said, “Well, my father was just about dead anyway, so I don’t think that’s such a big deal. I feel bad for my mother, but I don’t feel such a big connection to her. I mean, she wasn’t my real mother. As for my own safety - I don’t know. I know a lot of people hated my father, but this guy would have to be pretty crazy to come kill me, too. I didn’t really have anything to do with it. And if he’d wanted to, he probably would have done it by now.” 

Let’s hope so, anyway. 

***

Today is my sixteenth birthday. I got my last disk today from my father: his friend gives me a new one every year on my birthday. He said they were originally supposed to go until I was twenty-one, but he was killed before he could make the last five. If I’m mad about anything, it’s that. 

So I opened the Bible for the first time on my own today. I looked up the phrase my father told me to put at the front of this thing, and I ended up reading most of the ‘Gospel according to John.’ I like this Jesus guy. He seems cool. I especially like the bit where he asks the people, “Who do you say that I am?” They give an answer, but you can tell they don’t really know. They think they do, but they don’t. 

Who do you say that I am? 

Ha, sorry, couldn’t resist. But it’s a question. That’s what my father told me on this last disk, right at the end after all of the other stuff. “You are becoming a man,” he said. “If you are as much of a stud as your father, you’re already getting laid. Ha, don’t worry about it if you’re not. It will come with time. 

“Okay, this is serious. The time is coming when you start to become your own person. A developed personality, with your own thoughts, ideas, needs, wants. The question you need to answer is: who are you? And by that I mean, are you me, or aren’t you? 

“I don’t know if you’ll be me or not. I hope you are, because then I’ll have accomplished my goal - I’ll have beaten death.”

Here he paused, looking down at his hands, which trembled. I was pissed off, watching, but I waited to see what he would say. 

“I know that probably pissed you off. It would piss me off. Fuck you, I’d say, I’m not a vehicle for you to preserve your goddamn ego. And I’d be right.” He laughed. “This is pretty weird. Am I talking to myself, or aren’t I? If I am, I’m not telling you anything you won’t figure out on your own; but if I’m not, the whole thing is flawed and it doesn’t matter a rat’s ass either way.

“To hell with it. Doesn’t matter for me. But it’s probably something you’ll want to figure out. If I were you - that’s a joke, son - I’d write it down. I mean the whole thing, everything you can find out about what happened. I find it clears the head and lets you sort things out a bit. To give it the proper air of pretension, I’d preface the whole thing with this quote from Jesus in the Bible - I think it’s from John - ‘Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone: but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’” He rubbed his eyes then. “Okay, that’s enough for now. I’ll see you next year, son. Happy birthday.”

Thanks, Dad. 

Who do I say that I am? 

I look just like him. I sound like him: I talk like him. Every word he says strikes a chord deep within me, like it rises up out of my own soul, my own mind. But when I think like that, I’m enraged. No, I shout to myself, I am my own man. I find out what he did, what hobbies he had, what kind of girls he liked, what classes he took, and I avoid it all like the plague. I play golf. I date blonde girls. I’m taking Latin. 

But that’s him, too. I can feel it. “In Spanish,” he said, “they have a great word, roncaizquierda. It means literally ‘left-turning screw’. It means you always go the wrong way on principle, just out of orneriness. That’s me, the left-turning screw. And I’ll bet my bottom dollar that’s you, too.” 

Maybe I’m lucky. All my friends are trying to figure out who they are. I’ve got a box full of videodisks that tell me who I am. They’ve got big expectations to live up to: I just have to try not to get my head blown off on my wedding day. 

But I don’t know...when I watch my father in those interviews, when I read the things he was writing then, I like the edge he brought to everything. I can feel the power of his words, I can imagine the rush he had as he turned Respectable America on its ear. That feverish light he had in his eyes as he proclaimed himself God, while the pompous gasbags who were running the country were frothing at the mouth over it all; I can taste the adrenalin of that moment. 

Maybe it’s not such a bad heritage to have after all. Maybe James MacQuestan has been quiet for too long. Maybe I’ll type this up and send it out, just to see what happens. Just a little nudge to remind them - you thought you got me, but maybe you didn’t. 

Anyway, the acorn never falls far from the tree.