Читать книгу Born in Syn - Beth Kander - Страница 24

At eighteen, Nathan Fell still walked with a pronounced limp.

He was irritated by it with every lurching step he took. He didn’t intend to give himself a lifelong limp when he launched himself off a swing at the age of six. He didn’t do it to punish himself, he did it to punish his brother—even back then, he knew the best way to hurt tenderhearted Howie was to do damage to someone Howie loved. That would wreck Howie, especially if Howie thought it was his fault.

It had worked, but the younger Nathan’s calculations were off when it came to the fall itself. He was aiming for a sprained ankle, not a snapped fibula. A temporary inconvenience, not a permanent impediment. But at least the experience had taught him a valuable lesson: We can’t always control the outcomes; that’s the real risk of anything worth trying.

Nathan finished high school at sixteen, having convinced his mother it would be best for everyone if he went to college at the same time as Howie. He wished they’d gone even earlier, maybe at fifteen and seventeen, but for some reason, Howie was unhurried. He took all four years at high school, and all four years to get his undergraduate degree. Of course, in high school, while Nathan broke academic records and avoided all social interaction, Howie broke hearts and won homecoming king. He enjoyed himself.

Nathan was mildly jealous of Howie’s social aptitude, but he was less interested in humans than he was in their building blocks. Unraveling humans’ genetic codes, exploring the potential for merging man and machine—that was infinitely more interesting than voting on “Paris in the Spring” vs. “Caribbean Beach Party” for prom theme.

Both Fell boys transitioned easily from high school to college. By sophomore year, they were titans on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Howie maintained his high school reputation as a smart, good-looking flirt who always stayed friends with girls after breaking their hearts. Nathan, meanwhile, was famous for his shocking youth and brilliance. He was slight of build and steely-eyed, but alluring in his own way—a lone wolf who limped around campus dreaming up new ways to change the very landscape of science. He was a man of mystery, attracting the attention of many a girl and even a few sharp-eyed intellectual boys, who wrongly thought they had guessed his closeted little secret.

Thanksgiving, sophomore year: Howie and Nathan drove from Cambridge back to Ann Arbor, barely speaking as they sojourned from one college town to another. They rarely interacted on campus, and had little to discuss. They would have to put on a show and chat with each other when their mother was there to observe them—better not to waste the small talk on the way there.

Lila Golden Fell still lived in the house where the boys grew up, which was too big for her. She claimed she couldn’t sell it because she’d never get what it was worth, and she liked her neighbors, and it would take so much work to get it cleaned up enough to go on the market. Her sons knew it was because their father lived there and died there, and so would their mother.

Lila never remarried. If Nathan were the sort of person to feel remorse, he would feel guilty about his mother’s solitude. After all, he accidentally killed her first husband and then ran off the only man she ever came close to dating after becoming a widow. That pasty preacher. But Nathan feeling guilty would do nothing to better his mother’s situation, so why bother?

Nathan was a calculator, an assessor; not malevolent, nor spiteful, but absolutely against prioritizing emotion over evaluation. This had come up recently, when he caved to pressure and went out on a date with a classmate named Linda.

Nathan and Linda went to a Thai restaurant just off campus. Nathan ordered a simple curry dish. Linda ordered an appetizer, a bowl of soup, and Pad Thai. When the bill came, Nathan took nine dollars out of his wallet—the cost of his curry, plus tax and tip—and handed it to Linda.

“What’s this?” Linda asked, baffled.

“My share of the bill,” Nathan said, wondering if Linda was an idiot.

“I sort of figured…” She hesitated, like she was going to say one thing, and then said instead: “…we’d just split it. Like down the middle. Dutch treat.”

Nathan blinked. “Your total is twice as much as mine. I’m not covering that.”

She gaped. “Do you have, like, Asperger’s?”

“I don’t know,” he said, setting his nine dollars on the table and leaving.

The exchange sent Nathan down a research rabbit hole, and in the end he decided that he probably did, in fact, have Asperger’s. He felt no need to have it confirmed by anyone beyond himself; he was certain he was correct, and appreciated the insights and strategies his diagnosis yielded him. Nathan liked being able to appropriately categorize things, himself included.

The Fell boys arrived at their mother’s house on Thanksgiving Day, late-morning, having driven overnight. Lila gave Howie a hug, and nodded her hello to Nathan, before helping them unload all the laundry they’d crammed into the back of Howie’s rusty old Toyota Tercel.

“Millie and the Reverend should be here in a few hours,” Lila told her sons after the first overflowing load of laundry was thumping around the old washer in the basement. “I told them Thanksgiving dinner will be at three this year.”

“Mind if I pop by the D’onofrios to catch some of the Lions game?” Howie asked.

“Sure, sure,” Lila said. “Just be back in time to help me set the table. Nathan, you going to go watch the game, too?”

Nathan did not look up from his book. “No.”

Lila chuckled. “That was a joke, kid. Howie, hop in the shower before you go to the D’onofrios. I love you, but you stink. Nathan, come read in the kitchen, keep me company while I chop onions. You know it’s gonna make me cry and I’ll need you to hand me a napkin.”

Howie obediently hit the shower, then bounded over to the neighbors to watch terrible football players play their stupid game. Nathan hauled himself and his book into the kitchen. For the next few hours, there was peace in the Fell home.

And then the Reverend and Millie arrived.

They arrived an hour earlier than they had estimated, which was exactly when Lila and her boys had expected them to arrive. They were always an hour earlier than their estimates. (“That’s how you know your father’s family isn’t Jewish,” Lila had said once. “Always early to dinner, never hungry.”) The household was ready for their early arrival. Howie made it back just before they knocked on the door, in time to hold it open for them with his big grin.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” Howie crowed, echoed softly by Lila.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” Millie chirped back.

Nathan and the Reverend just nodded their acknowledgment of the occasion.

Nathan generally appreciated his grandparents. The Reverend was stern, serious, and seldom spoke; all qualities Nathan admired. Millie never shut up, but she slipped him a lot of cookies back when he was small and valued such currency. She thereby cemented herself into his goodwill long ago.

“Did you watch the Lions game?” Millie asked Howie, knowing he had. He always watched the game. She always asked about it. Their holidays were less about meaningful tradition than rote repetition. Patterns, repeated annually.

“Man, yeah,” Howie said, shaking his head, as if somehow the team’s loss came as a surprise. “Lions were up 10-3 at the half, but then the Bears really kicked into high gear. I mean, coming out of nowhere! That quarterback, though—Evans? He’s going places. Bears pulled it out with a 23-17 win. Poor old Lions.”

“Lions and Bears,” Millie cued.

“And how ’bout them Tigers,” Howie continued the setup.

“Oh my!” Millie brought it home with the punchline.

Then the Reverend and Millie headed to the guest room to freshen up. Lila went to check on the turkey, instructing the boys to bring the good china up from downstairs and get to work setting the holiday table. And for a few minutes, it was just the Fell boys.

“So why’re you reading that book?” Howie asked, gesturing to the tome on genetic disorders as he began un-boxing a set of holiday plates.

“For fun,” Nathan said. The book was recreational reading for him, not assigned. He rarely felt a need to read the texts for his classes. They were rudimentary. He needed more depth.

“Ha,” Howie rolled his eyes.

He’s smart, Nathan reminded himself, before deciding at last to give a more candid reply.

“The subject—the book—it’s related to a new theory I’m developing,” Nathan said. “To be fair, I’m not the only one working with this particular theory—but I’m sort of, you know, adding my own twist.”

“What’s the theory?”

“That ultimately, the best way to eradicate genetic disorders—from Tay-Sachs and spina bifida to dementia—is to augment human material with better-engineered material.”

Howie stopped unpacking plates. “Better-engineered material? The hell does that mean?”

“Mechanics,” Nathan said. “Bioengineering. Not just ‘better living through science’—better life through science. Better bodies, better minds. The things we’re starting to be able to do with computers is also—”

“You’re talking about… what, robot-people? Cyborgs? Man-meets-machine? Like on The Six Million Dollar Man? ‘We have the technology’—”

“Not like that dumbass TV show,” Nathan snapped, already regretting confiding in his brother. “I’m talking about real science. A real opportunity to improve mankind. Not something inefficient like throwing a bunch of resources into rebuilding one stupid guy. An upgrade for the entire species. Designing people better. There’s so much potential for us to—”

“Nathan,” Howie said, shaking his head. “Come on, man. That’s messed up.”

“Stop interrupting me,” Nathan said quietly.

“Jesus,” Howie went on. “An ‘upgrade’ to the ‘species’? Look, I’m all for medical science, but you can’t ‘design’ people. That’s just wrong. You do get that, right?”

“No.”

“Be reasonable, Nathan. You can’t really think—”

“You’re the one who’s not thinking,” Nathan said, hating the rising pitch in his voice. “I am the one demonstrating all the reason in this conversation. You’re demonstrating emotion. Emotion is not reasonable! I want to move the world forward, you want to let it stagnate. We’re killing the planet, overusing resources, refusing to evolve. That’s not how it has to be.”

Nathan limped angrily to the other side of the table, shoving Howie out of the way and reaching into a cardboard box for the gleaming good china, grabbing a plate roughly.

“Hey, careful,” Howie said, but Nathan slammed the plate onto the table, shattering it.

Their mother entered the room, carrying a golden-roasted turkey on a giant platter. Her apron was tied loosely around her slim waist; her hair was streaked with gray and powdered white with flour, making her appear suddenly much older. She looked from Nathan, to Howie, to the shattered plate, and finally back to Howie. Her expression was tortured.

“You can’t even be civil on Thanksgiving? We haven’t even sat down, and I hoped—”

But Nathan limped from the room, dousing her hope with his scowl, furious at himself for opening up to his brother about ideas far too big for his small thinking.