In the spring of 1984 he had liquidated the bulk of his savings and bought property on one of the more obscure and inaccessible of the inhabited Gulf Islands, a chain of rocky prominences paralleling the inner coast of Vancouver Island. The smallest of these were unmapped rocks and shoals that disappeared with the tide; the one he came to think of as his own was hardly larger. The entire southern tip of this island was in effect his property: a domain; a kingdom, though he did not think of himself as its owner or ruler. He was its citizen—its subject. He had ransomed his savings for that privilege. There was enough money left to keep him in provisions, to pay for a cabin and a wind generator, for the books and the PC terminal he ferried in from the mainland.
Alone, he had immersed himself in cellular biology. He recognized the irony: he was adopting Max’s specialty. But it was suddenly and overwhelmingly important to establish the link between himself and the rock pine, the sea otter, the sea itself. At the most basic level they were all very much alike, ribosomes and rysosomes, hydrogen and oxygen. Evolutionary history was inscribed into the substance of itself—organelles, once independent creatures, were imbedded in the cellular structure like the effigies of saints in the wall of a cathedral. Climbing among the shore rocks in late summer he observed blue-green algae in the glassy tide pools, prokaryotic cells, filaments of DNA floating free in the cytoplasm: primitive protein inventions. He handled shells washed up by storms, calciate rocks with the Fibonacci series imposed upon their shapes as if the clay itself had been possessed by mathematics.
This was the estate from which he had been disinherited. He was not even a genetic sport—the cells in his body, his DNA, were no more unusual than anyone’s. His progeny, if he produced any, would not resemble him. Max had intervened after conception, in the womb; had performed chemical modifications that operated at the level of transcriptase and RNA, skewed protein messages carried through cellular reproduction in the zygote. In effect, his blueprints had been tampered with. Specifically, the protein code for the construction of a human forebrain had been altered; the basic human neural command—to build a more complex cerebrum—had been amplified. He was born with voluntary motor control and cutaneous sensation measurably greater than the norm. Other cortical functions—the generalized sensory threshold, language skills, abstract thought—registered beyond the curve of expectation as soon as they could be reasonably charted. By the age of five years he was way off scale on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. He was “smart.” He was also not entirely human.
He was not human, but he was protoplasm, and he guessed he had come to this isolated place to prove that to himself. We are all cast out from some kingdom, he thought. It was how the process worked. Chordates exiled from the world of the invertebrates, air-breathing vertebrates exiled from the sea. Mankind itself, cast out from the animal kingdom into the high, chilling air of self-awareness and the anticipation of personal mortality. I am not unique, he told himself. Merely alone.
It was a kind of consolation. But it had faded through the long winter and he was left with a growing sense of morbidity. Alone, he turned his attention to cellular pathology. He read research abstracts. He built an elaborate add-on memory system for his PC and tinkered with its program protocols until he could use it to generate elaborate models of metastatic 3LL carcinomas. He came to understand disease and aging as the agents of thermodynamic necessity—the spring of life unwinding on itself. The universe itself, he thought, was a broken symmetry in the unimaginable unmaterial from which it arose, an eruption of imperfection. And life was both a product of that process and a mirror of it. We carry our corruption from the womb, he thought. Max had believed in the perfectibility of mankind. But that was a superstition. Bad teleology and bad thermodynamics.
As time passed, he had traveled to the mainland less often. When he did, he began to attract attention. His Levis were thin and sun-faded; he had grown a beard. He was astonished at his own reflection in the window of the night ferry to Tsawassen. Here was some feral creature, sun-darkened and wild-eyed … where was John Shaw?
What was John Shaw?
But he knew the answer. John Shaw was an invention—the lifework of Dr. Kyriakides.
How strange it must be, he thought, to create a human being—or a facsimile of one.
But I’ve done that, he thought. I do know what it’s like.
He had invented Benjamin.
Waves of memory were triggered by the thought … memory, and the faint, disquieting sensation that something alive had moved inside him.
Coming back to this place now, it seemed as if he had never left.
He bought a week’s rental on an aluminum motor launch from one of the larger islands, and made his way directly to the cabin, avoiding the main docks at the civilized end of the small island and beaching the boat in a rocky inlet. He secured the boat against the incoming tide and followed a crude path to the cabin from the shore.
The cabin hadn’t changed much. The weather had pried up a few boards, and dry rot had taken out a corner of the porch stairs. A window was broken. Hikers had been here—he found a limp condom and the remains of a six-pack discarded in the back room. Forbidden pleasures.
Violation and trespass. He swept all this away, down the back steps into the bushes. There was a small storage closet built into the rear of the cabin, which no one had bothered to loot; it contained mainly maintenance supplies and he was able to mend the broken window with a sheet of polyethylene. Night was falling fast. John moved into the lengthening shadows of the pines beyond the cabin and gathered windfall for a fire. It had been a dry autumn and there was plenty of loose kindling. He startled a deer, which regarded him with wary eyes before it bolted into the bush.
He had a fire blazing in the stone fireplace before the sky was entirely dark, and enough kindling set aside to last the night. Come morning he would chop firewood. The weather was clear but very cold.
He rolled out his sleeping bag in front of the fire.
He was immensely tired.
He gave himself permission to sleep. Now, here, finally. But sleep wouldn’t come. Strange how it was possible to be crazed with fatigue and still wide awake. Too many amphetamines, he thought, for far too long. He was still, on some level, speeding.
He wrapped himself in his down jacket and went outside, walking a few feet down a dark path to a slab of granite overlooking the water. He gazed at the cold, wholly transparent sky and listened to the rustle of dry leaves against the windward wall of the cabin. He felt his aloneness. And he understood—quite suddenly—that it was that once-glimpsed sense of connection that had brought him back here. The need—even if he was dying, especially if he was dying—to feel himself a part of something. If not humanity, then this. This stark, unforgiving, lovely night.
But there was nothing of him in this wilderness. He had expected to find at least an echo of himself, of his isolation, in sky and sea and stone; but the sky swallowed up his voice and the rock rejected his footprints.
He shuffled inside to wait for morning.
9
Amelie did her best to ignore the note on the kitchen cupboard. Problem was, it refused to go away.
She pretended it didn’t exist. When she came home from the restaurant and found it, that first time, the note was like something washed up in a bottle: indecipherable and strange. Must leave. Try to understand. What did that mean? It didn’t even look like Benjamin’s writing.