The world turned upside down. I went to Carl’s office to have it out with him, but he had it out with me, and took some living cells from my neck, what’s more: the kind of good fresh bloodless tissue that’s rich in DNA: he could grow all kinds of me from that – he’s right. Ugly, headless, always miserable, always in pain: five-legged, three-headed, double-spined: every leg with perpetual cramp, all heads schizophrenic, and spina bifida twice over. If he wanted, if he could persuade them to do it, that is – and he is a Director of Martins Pharmaceuticals, isn’t he, and benefactor of this and that: an interesting experiment, he’d say, a favour. You do this for me and I’ll do that for you. Would they? Snip and snap, create a monster? Not if Carl May put it like that, probably not, but if he said, humbly, in the cause of knowledge, just let’s see if we can, just let’s see. Only the once, then never again. (For once is ethical, twice is not.) Then you never know. They might. But what should I care; what is it to do with me? ‘I’ wouldn’t suffer. The ‘you’s’ might. Poor distorted things.
I saw my husband run his hands through her hennaed hair, that’s what I remember, that’s what makes the ‘I’ suffer, become well and truly me, with a shock which got to my solar plexus. I know he despises her. I could tell. Yet still he ran his fingers through her hair. Patronizing little bitch, little whore: in my home, bathing in my bath, her hairs blocking my plughole. I know. It was all in the blue-foldered report of the Maverick Enquiry Agency: there it stuck, a hennaed hair, long and silky, catching soap scum. Disgusting. Bethany! To be supplanted by a slut called Bethany: me, Joanna May. It would be easier if she was called Doris, or Betty, a name so ordinary it was deprived of resonance: became what I wanted it to be.
The world turned upside down: inside out, round and about; fire burn and cauldron bubble: bubbling vats of human cells, recombinant DNA surging and swelling, pulsing and heaving, multiplying by the million, the more the merrier: all the better, the more efficiently for biologists and their computers to work upon the structure of the living cell, the blueprints of our lives, decoding the DNA which is our inheritance. A snip here, a section there, excise this, insert that, slice and shuffle, find a marker, see what happens, what it grows: record it, collate it, work back and try again. Link up by computer to labs all over the world. Bang, goes Mr Nobel’s gun, and off they go, false starts and fouling, panting and straining, proud hearts bursting, to understand and so control, to know what marks what and which – and better it. This DNA, this double helix, this bare substance of our chromosomal being, source of our sameness, root of our difference – this section gives us eyes, that segment of this section blue eyes, take it away and presto, no eyes – laid bare the better to cure us and heal us, change us and help us, deliver us from AIDS and give us two heads. And all of it glugging and growing in a culture of E.Coli – the bacteria of the human colon, tough, fecund, welcoming, just waiting around all that time to do its stuff at our behest – toss it, turn it, warm it, start it; nothing stops it. Well why not? Let the brave new world be based upon E.Coli – the stuff that gives us healthy shit. If our purpose on this earth is to salvage goodness from a material universe gone somehow wrong (which was what Oliver maintained) how more appropriately should it be done than by starting with shit and building up: creating not out of nothing, where’s the glory in that, but forging miracles from debris, detritus. Now there’s an accomplishment!
The vats are filled with pale, thin, milky translucent fluid, life itself, remarkably reflective of colour; slip, slop, plop. If the lab ceiling’s green, then the culture shines green. Change the colour at will. Violet most impresses the visitors, but who wants a violet ceiling?
If you’ve got a good cow, don’t breed from it, just repeat it: two by two, out of the ark. Take out the nucleus, cow-and-bull, mix in a newly fertilized cell, reintroduce an all-cow nucleus and what do you get, with any luck? Little twin clones, cow plus repetitions! I, Joanna May, beautiful and intelligent in my prime, now past it, am a woman plus repetitions, taken at my prime. Carl’s fault, Carl’s doing.
I am horrified, I am terrified, I don’t know what to do with myself at all, whatever myself means now. I don’t want to meet myself, I’m sure. I would look at myself with critical eyes, confound myself. I would see what I don’t want to see, myself when young. I would see not immortality, but the inevitability of age and death. As I am, so they will become. Why bother? Why bother with them, why bother with me? What’s the point? I can’t bear it. I have to bear it. I can’t even kill myself – they will go on. Now night will never fall.
I have never felt so old: I am all but paralysed. The back of my neck hurts where the vampire bit it. My heart aches where he struck at it.
I should have stayed home, as Oliver suggested.