NetBio, April 26, 2017

Howe, Gordie

(Gordon Howe), 1928–, Canadian hockey player. Possibly the greatest and most durable forward in the history of hockey, he played (1946–71) for the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League (NHL). With his two sons he joined (1973) the Houston Aeros and then (1977) the New England Whalers of the World Hockey Association, ending his career in 1980 with the Hartford Whalers of the NHL. Howe’s NHL career records include most seasons (26) and most games (1,767); his career record for most goals (801) was broken by Wayne Gretzky in 1994.

Act I

It is late April at the end of the hockey season. Play-offs start in two weeks. Phil Berger is thinking about practice, college, and his girlfriend Roxanne, all at the same time. Earlier in the week, Colby and Dartmouth had both sent him letters about a hockey scholarship. He would have preferred a better school with a better team—like Boston University. But BU hadn’t shown much interest in him, though he’d seen one of their scouts at a game three weeks back. Phil chides himself. Don’t get your hopes up. There are a lot of guys playing hockey these days.

The house is dark, but his mother’s car is in the driveway. The moon mingles the Victorian architecture and shadows of the trees. The result makes him uneasy. There is just enough light for him to find the front door key. Once inside, he turns on the hall light.

Silence.

He can hear breathing in the front room. He walks to the door. The light is behind him and he cannot see anyone. “Mom?” he calls.

The light comes on in the room, and Carol Berger, his mother, pulls her hand away from the lamp.

She hands him a flimsy. Its active surface shows the sports page of the Middlesex News. Phil recognizes Frank Hammett’s byline from previous articles. His mother keeps a scrapbook of every article Phil has ever been in. Phil’s picture leads the text of the article. The headline leaps out at him:

“Clone of Gordie Howe Playing for Hopkinton Hillers.”

Phil chuckles. What a joker. He shakes his head at the thought of it. Phil’s good. But he’s no Gordie Howe.

“Is this the problem?” He holds up the paper. “April Fool’s is a little late this year.”

“You were an in vitro baby,” his mother says slowly.

“What?”

“From neither of us. My eggs were . . . unusable, and your father has the genes for Lou Gherig’s Disease. He didn’t want to saddle any child with that. The embryo was donated. We didn’t know the parents.” She rubs her face in her hands. “We only knew the procedure was subsidized by a rich benefactor.” She looks at him. “We had given up. We didn’t have the money. We were living in New Hampshire, and fertility procedures weren’t covered by insurance. We wanted a baby.”

He shakes his head. “So what? It still can’t be true.”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. All I know is, I got a call from two lawyers, one offering to represent us in suing Gordie Howe for compensation and one representing Gordie Howe warning us off. Dr. Robinson called me, too.”

“Robinson?”

“The obstetrician who implanted the embryo.”

“What did Dr. Robinson say?”

“He said he’d been approached by Frank Hammett with some documentation on the ‘irregularities in the implantation procedure.’ “ She raises a hand and lets it fall in her lap. “ ‘Irregularities.’ “

Phil tries to make sense out of what his mother is saying.

She stares out the window. “Somebody is taking Hammett’s article seriously.”

oOo

More lawyers, publicists, and reporters call in the next week. In Massachusetts, hockey is loved as no other sport. All of Hopkinton is excited at the idea that there might be a budding Gordie Howe in their midst.

Phil’s father, Jake, insists visuals be completely turned off and the audio filtered. He refuses to return calls. Jake has spent his life trying to live correctly, to provide for his son and his wife. He works hard managing the plastics factory near the house, and when he comes home, he leaves technology behind. The Berger house is over a hundred years old and has only the minimum data feeds. Phil has always had to go to the houses of friends for immersion games or wide feeds. Jake spends most of his spare time in the summer working in his garden. In the winter, he spends it in his greenhouse.

Phil doesn’t know what to do with his father. Jake won’t meet his eyes. Jake avoids Phil, even though the house is too small for that. Normally, Jake would be clearing the garden, readying it for the coming spring. It’s a cold April and Phil is worried about him. Jake takes to sitting in the greenhouse, staring out the window. The honey berries will go unharvested. Phil wants to call Roxanne and talk about it, but she is learning French in France for the month and he doesn’t feel like calling overseas.

Besides, he tells himself, he doesn’t really believe it. He thinks this is some strange hoax being played out. He reads up on hockey history and wonders what it would be like to be Gordie Howe.

oOo

Response to Hammett’s article forcibly occupies the discussion sections of the local feeds all that week. By Sunday, the tone of the conversation has changed from questioning the ethics of a Gordie Howe clone playing against normal players to how dare Frank Hammett perpetuate such an obvious lie. It does not make any of the regional or national news feeds. Phil is relieved. Nothing is real until it hits the big feeds. Hammett is strangely silent and unavailable for comment. There is speculation that he is being closely questioned on verification of his sources. Hammett’s ambition to be a reporter for the Globe feed is discussed. The old Mike Barnicle scandal is brought up, and one editorial concludes that Hammett will be similarly fired. It looks as if the spotlight has moved from Phil back onto Hammett. Phil is just as glad.

The following Monday night, the Hillers play their next game in Leominster against the Blue Devils. Hammett’s article has had visible effect: the place is mobbed. Phil can’t get in. A lawyer named Dalton threatens him with an injunction and says that he represents Gordie Howe. Unsure of what to do, Jake and Phil back away and leave the rink. However, they park on an adjacent street and sneak in through the back entrance. Neither Phil nor the rest of the team can concentrate on the game. The Hillers founder and lose, four to two.

After the game, cars follow Jake and Phil. Jake takes to the back roads and eventually loses them. Phil wonders who they are. All he saw were people in windbreakers and ski-jackets, wool coats with gloves—their faces could have been anyone’s faces.

When Jake and Phil come in the door, Carol hands them a flimsy of the Boston Globe. The lead article, by Frank Hammett and Carl Weatherspoon, is about the “Gordie Howe Clone.” The article continues, occupying most of the flimsy with a host of associated links. There are several pictures of DNA chromatographs and chromosomes, documenting the similarities between the Howe genotype and that of Phil Berger.

Phil feels as if the world has entered into some long, horrible tunnel. He shakes his head and stares at the pictures. This is his life on display without his permission. No. It’s more than that. He feels naked before strangers. He feels shame without knowing why.

He looks up at his parents. “How did they get this stuff? Don’t they have to . . . to ask permission or something? Don’t I have to sign a waiver? Don’t you have to sign a waiver?”

Jake shrugs. “I don’t know, son.”

The doorbell rings. Outside are four men.

“Shit,” says Jake.

Phil has never heard his father swear.

In the hallway, Jake turns to Phil. “Phil, this is Dr. Sam Robinson. Your mother told you about him. I’m not sure who the other people are.”

Phil recognizes Dalton from the rink. The next two men enter. One is introduced as Dr. Murray Howe, Gordie Howe’s son. Phil needs no introduction to the last man; it’s Gordie Howe himself.

oOo

Phil is a big boy. He stands over six feet tall and weighs in at one ninety. He knows he is big; he likes the comfortable feeling it gives him when he walks through a crowd. He likes his own height and heft. When Howe walks in the house and they face one another, Phil suddenly knows it’s true. Howe is pushing ninety, and has shrunk as old men do. Age and punishment have changed Howe but even allowing for that, Phil doesn’t exactly have Howe’s face. It’s Howe’s body that convinces him. Young Gordie Howe shows through his carriage, his battered knees and ankles, his hands as they hang relaxed and ready from the elbow.

Howe’s eyes measure him in return. Phil can see that Howe is convinced as well.

“Did you do it?” Phil asks.

Howe shakes his head. “I have three sons already. I don’t need any more.” He leans his head to one side and looks at Phil critically. “Are you going to claim I’m your father?”

Phil shakes his head in return. “I have a father. I don’t need two.”

The meeting is concluded as far as the two of them are concerned, but they still have to wait for the others. They all sit down in the living room. Howe says very little. Phil and Howe’s attention are on each other.

Robinson explains what has happened. “In 1997, we were approached by the firm Meel and Weed from Detroit. Meel and Weed represented a couple that had been killed in an automobile accident with their embryos still in storage. The common practice at that time was to freeze extra embryos for possible later use or research. The parents of the deceased couple wished to allow the embryos to be used by infertile couples in their children’s memory. All of the participants were to remain anonymous.” Robinson removes his glasses and rubs his nose. “This was not uncommon then and is not uncommon now. In addition, Meel and Weed’s clients were wealthy enough to provide grants for needy couples. New Hampshire did not require IVF insurance coverage then. We checked Meel and Weed’s credentials. We checked with the facility that was storing the embryos. We did not check the clients directly since they wished to remain anonymous but we examined their purported medical records. This is also not uncommon. After we received the embryos, we called the Bergers.”

Robinson looks around the room in silence. “In the last week I’ve found that Meel and Weed’s credentials were a fraud. The facility we checked with does not exist. The credentials of the facility were a sham. I’d never have imagined such a thing. Neither had the Attorney General of Michigan. He is investigating, but after eighteen years, he is not hopeful.”

Carole looks at Howe and Phil. “They don’t look that much alike. Maybe it’s all some scam.”

Robinson nods. “That’s not surprising. In 1999, only the Dolly techniques were available. You have to understand how different a Dolly clone is from the genetic parent. There are three forces that act on the embryo: the non-nuclear contents of the egg itself, the nuclear DNA from both the egg and the sperm, and the developmental environment of the mother. In Phil’s case, only one of those three forces came from Mr. Howe. The remainder came from the unknown egg donor and Mrs. Berger.”

Phil looks up. “Aren’t there other human clones? It’s been seventeen years. I can’t be the first.”

“Good point.” Robinson straightens his glasses. “Cloning still isn’t FDA approved for humans—even now, with modern techniques, there is a very high percentage of birth defects. But so what? Cloning is illegal, but that wouldn’t stop everybody. It’s hard to do even today, but that wouldn’t mean that somebody, somewhere couldn’t afford to do it in a rogue country. But we don’t hear about it. Why not?”

Carol says softly: “Who’s going to take a chance?”

Robinson points to Carol. “Bingo. In the first flush of enthusiasm in the years after Dolly, a few clones were produced.” Robinson closed his eyes and shook his head. “Phil was one of several clones, most of which were unsuccessful. They started trying to clone humans shortly before Dolly was announced. Children were born without a brain or eyes, or with other forms of brain damage. That stopped human cloning for a long time. People barely take a chance with things like Down’s syndrome, much less something scarier. There were many other legal, safe, and cheap techniques to make babies. Unless, of course, you don’t care how many crippled babies you produce until you get the right one, and you’re powerful, clandestine, and unscrupulous.”

Phil held his hands in his lap. “Like somebody who might have wanted to clone Gordie Howe, for instance?”

“Exactly.” Robinson smiles thinly. “Of course, things have changed recently. New techniques have been discovered. The debate is starting all over again.”

“Why?” Phil shakes his head, feeling groggy. “Why do it at all? Why do it here? Why Gordie Howe?” He laughs shortly, a sound like a dog’s bark. “This is New England! Why not Bobby Orr? Why not Ray Borque?”

“Who’s Bobby Orr?” Robinson asks.

“Never mind.”

Robinson shrugs and picks up a briefcase he has brought with him. “I have brought with me some sampling equipment. If Phil and Mr. Howe both agree, we can confirm the story one way or the other by morning.”

Afterward, everyone is standing, ready to leave but waiting for Robinson to finish preparing the samples for transport.

An idea occurs to Phil. “Dr. Robinson. How many embryos did Meel and Weed give you?”

Robinson looks up at him from the table, his face suddenly tired. “Fourteen.”

“What happened to them?”

“Two were used in your procedure. The remaining twelve embryos were divided among five other couples.” He pauses, then continues. “Three didn’t implant. One resulted in a miscarriage. There were two live births.”

“Two?” Phil thinks of a brother. Someone with whom he can have this in common.

“Yes. He and his parents live in Nashua.” Robinson stops again. “Oh, hell. You deserve to know. His name is Danny Helstrom. He has one of the worst cases of cerebral palsy I’ve ever seen.”

oOo

Robinson calls the next morning. The results are unsurprising. Phil is a clone of Gordie Howe. Phil sits down, feeling depressed, though he expected the results.

There is still nothing about Phil on the national feeds, which makes him sigh with relief. Even a momentary glance from the national media would be make things difficult. The local feeds are also quiet. He hopes it stays that way.

Phil looks outside. The sky is bright and cold, blue as liquid oxygen. He stays home and takes his pond skates down to the lake. Skipping school is a privilege reserved for seniors.

He skates hard: sprint, stop, change direction, sprint, pivot backward, pivot forward. The tension leaves his body. He’s breathing hard, the cold sharp in his mouth and throat, his muscles loose as butter. Without thinking about it, he dodges between the ice fishing holes, skirts the shallows where the ice is thin, through the pipe under the bridge onto the canal feeding the lake.

It’s been a dry, cold winter, and even the canal is rock-hard. He draws his bare fingers across it. The surface freezes to his fingers for a brief moment with a feeling of sandpaper. Then, the sandpaper gives way, and he can feel the smooth solidity underneath. In a rink, this would be perfect hockey ice. This ice isn’t rink-flat, but frozen in bumps and waves. The ground bordering the water is lumpy with sticks and roots, and above him the branches of the trees have a dried, withered look. Around a bend in the canal, the road is out of sight and hearing, and the canal widens into a long pond. Boulders have broken the ice, and he skates between them, backward, forward, jumping over the small rocks. He wonders if he could have been a figure skater—what would Howe have thought of that? It bothers him that Howe’s opinion matters. He wonders what it would feel like to execute a double axel.

He tries to remember how he became interested in hockey instead of any other kind of sport. He can’t remember. He vaguely remembers learning to skate, pushing around an old milk crate and wearing a huge helmet. Then, he remembers being four and skating on the lake, playing pond hockey with older boys.

Phil stops and leans on a boulder in the pond. Sure, most of the other four-year-olds were barely skating, but it hadn’t meant anything to him. It was like being good at music or math. Just playing the piano didn’t make you Mozart. Just doing arithmetic didn’t make you Einstein. Just playing hockey didn’t make you Gordie Howe. He was always big. Most people had taken him for six when he was four. Besides, the six- and seven-year-old kids he’d been skating with were always better than he was. He had dreamed of playing in the NHL, of being the next Wayne Gretzky or Bobby Orr. Sure. What hockey-playing kid hadn’t? But he hadn’t felt exceptional. Gordie Howe had been truly amazing. Phil wonders if Gordie Howe had ever felt exceptional.

He thinks it’ll be good when Roxanne gets back on Friday. He wonders what she’ll think about dating the clone of Gordie Howe.

oOo

Anyone with a camera and a net-feed, professional and otherwise, finds the Berger house that afternoon. Phil doesn’t go outside or answer the door. Phil’s morning had been preserved by a confusion of streets in the online address databases. Instead, a family named Cohen had been harassed for hiding Phil Berger from the world.

Phil’s absence doesn’t stop the commercial media. That night, when the story breaks on the local feeds and broadcasts, Phil sees two students at Hopkinton High School discuss his life in detail on WHDH. Both the principal and vice-principal tell WBZ what a terrific and popular student Phil Berger is. Phil has never met any of them. Noticeably absent from the stories is any human being he actually knows. Grainy videos of him skating shuttle back and forth across the net.

When Jake and Carol get home, they have to push their way slowly through the crowd. Four broadcasting vans are queued in front of the house. The chief of police and Phil’s coach sit in a police car in Phil’s driveway. Phil didn’t ask them to do this, but he’s glad they did. They’re the only barriers between him and the reporters.

For the next few days, a police car takes Phil to classes in the morning. His coach takes him home after practice. Phil often finds himself standing in the living room, looking at the people outside.

The crowd changes after the first day or so. The local news feeds finally give way to national feeds as the debate heats up. Phil’s nuclear DNA comes from Gordie Howe, but his mitochondrial DNA and cytoplasm come from the anonymous woman who donated the egg. The hormonal environment and the birth experience came from Carol Berger. How can he possibly be called natural? Whose child is he? Can Phil inherit from Gordie Howe? Can Gordie Howe demand visitation rights? Does the anonymous egg donor have any claim on him? Gordie Howe and Phil Berger have resolved the situation between them, but that does not affect the coverage; the fact of Phil’s existence and Gordie Howe’s fame is enough to propel the story.

The national feeds take their own obligatory pictures of the Berger house and move on, leaving the field to the tabloids, net drones, and con artists.

The coaches of Boston College and Boston University happen to visit Phil on the same day. While they are arguing on the front lawn the relative merits of the two schools, a representative of the National Hockey League takes Phil aside and tries to get him to sign with the Boston Bruins. “Why wait?” he asks.

Roxanne calls him. She tells him she’s home but unsure how she feels about things. They should not see each other for a while. He stares at the phone wanting to punch something.

By Friday’s first playoff game against the Marlborough Panthers, Phil is feeling claustrophobic, angry, and bitter. The Panthers take an early two-goal lead by the end of the first period. The Hillers, expecting to be beaten, are disorganized and chaotic on the ice. Phil no longer cares.

The Panthers win the face-off, but Phil intercepts the pass and comes into the Panthers’ zone at full speed. At that moment, his rage and bitterness come together in him and it feels as if he is leaning into his body, grasping its strength like a man picking up a hammer. He sees the defenseman try to check him and checks him first, knocking him over. The goalie dives to intercept the puck, but Phil pivots backward and pops the puck over him to score.

He can hear the crowd roar as from a great distance. The ice has grown to fill his vision. His teammates pick up the pace with him, and by the end of the second period, the score is tied.

The third period is a war of attrition as the Panthers try to score. It is bruising, full-contact hockey, played almost entirely on center ice as both sides refuse to give up their zone. Then, with three minutes left to play, Phil goes in on the left, spins around the defenseman, and passes to his center, who scores.

The Panthers are fighting for a tie now. They pull the goalie to get six men on the ice. But it’s Phil’s world. The ice is as broad as the sea. It’s his breath and his muscle. The harder he pushes himself, the easier it gets. He is given a half-second opportunity from the corner of the blue line, and fires a shot into the open net. The defenseman cross checks him from behind after the whistle blows.

Phil’s reaction is as unexpected as it is unconscious. He turns and decks the defenseman. In a heartbeat, he is the center of a brawl. He’s thrown out of the game. The Hillers lose the goal and beat the Panthers four to three.

He is showering in the locker room, the water pouring over his head. He’s never played that well, ever. Maybe he needed to be hungry for it. He wasn’t the youngest of six like Howe. A trick of the noise and current bring him a snatch of conversation.

“So that’s what it’s like to play with Gordie Howe!”

oOo

Hammett writes up the game, calling it a Gordie Howe hat trick: one goal, one assist, one fight.

With Phil thrown out for the next game, the Hillers lose in the next round of playoffs and are out for the season. He returns to his classes and the story seems to die down. He sees Roxanne across crowds of mutual friends, but she is distant. So is he.

 

Act II

Over the summer, Phil works in his father’s plant, accepts a hockey scholarship at BU, turns eighteen. While the discussion continues, it has passed him by. He has disappeared from the national and state media, overshadowed by the politicians. Instead, the dialogue has moved into the State House and Congress. New cloning regulations are proposed in several states. MassPIRG contacts him about helping their lobbying effort. Phil doesn’t return their calls. Phil has become yesterday’s news, and he is grateful. He and Roxanne even take in a couple of movies, though they are both very careful with one another.

He reports to the BU Terriers two weeks before classes for hockey practice. No one mentions Gordie Howe. He feels their gaze watching and measuring him. He resolves to ignore it. Things appear to be working out. He’s starting out in the third line, which suits him just fine. He’d had his fill of visibility in the spring.

Practice goes well. The feeling he’d had in his last game, that sense of leaning into his body, has not left him. By the time the first game comes along, against the Air Force Falcons, he has been pulled from the third line and put in the second.

It’s a good game and the Terriers win with a single goal—Phil’s. He happens to be in the right place when it bounces from the glove of the Falcons’ goalie. While he played well, he has no illusions that the goal was anything but good luck.

The next morning, leading the Globe sports feed, Frank Hammett’s story lies below a picture of Phil popping in the puck: “Gordie Howe wins against Air Force.”

Phil reads the story over an early dorm breakfast. Phil wonders which is real—as far as he was concerned, the goal was a fluke. According to Hammett, it was the result of his excellence of play stemming from Gordie Howe’s genes. In effect, Gordie Howe played for BU by proxy.

The warm camaraderie he’d felt during the practice weeks turns cold. Conversations dry up when he comes in the room. No one shuts him out of planning or discussion of games. But it is purely professional. Most of them, he realizes suddenly, are here on scholarship and not expecting to go into professional hockey. It’s a way to get through school. If Phil wins games for them, that’s good for them. But they don’t have to like him.

Perversely, this seems to work for him. In high school, he’d enjoyed a certain amount of popularity. Phil was never lazy, but he was not averse to substituting a big grin and a glib tongue for work. His talents had carried him in spite of himself.

Here, though, he speaks to few and finds himself trusting no one. He concentrates on his studies and on hockey. He returns his teammates’ professionalism with professionalism. They are close colleagues, not friends. His talents are an anvil and this coldness the hammer by which he forges his skill.

On the ice, the personalities and conflicts are left behind. The game exists to the exclusion of all else. On the ice, Phil is free.

It is no accident that he is brought up into the starting line by midseason.

Hammett has developed a pattern in his stories: if the Terriers do well, it is because they have Gordie Howe playing for them. If they do badly, it is because of an inadequacy in Gordie Howe’s clone. The language keeps the debate fresh. More than once, late at night, Phil, too exhausted to sleep, tunes into the sports feed, only to find the cloning debate in full swing, with him in the starring role. In November, in a fit of sudden, killing rage, he rips the display from the wall and throws it through the window. Phil’s room is on the sixth floor. It is pure accident that no one is hurt. He cleans up the mess that night before any reporters get wind of it. He does not replace the unit. He thinks about taking a yoga class or something to relax. The idea of a Hammett headline saying “Gordie Howe Takes Yoga” stops him.

Phil keeps reminding himself what had happened in his last high-school game; how a sudden burst of temper had cost him the rest of the playoffs. College hockey plays by the same rules: fighting gets you ejected from that game and the next. He keeps his temper under control. Still, he occasionally checks too hard or hooks too vigorously. His penalties mount.

By February, Hammett has accused him of bringing “NHL-style hockey to Boston University.” Phil speaks little, works very hard, and only seems to come alive on the ice. His parents try to talk to him, but he answers in monosyllables.

Then comes the first night of the Beanpot.

Since 1952, the four hockey teams of Boston—Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern University, and Harvard—have played against one another for bragging rights and a bowl of beans: the Boston Beanpot. Boston College is paired up with Boston University in the first game—a rivalry within a rivalry. The game is fought like trench warfare. No inch is lost or gained; no goal is scored. Then, BC scores the first goal. Phil scores the second for BU on a breakaway. Both teams are playing better than they have in months. The game is full of hard and sweaty grace. Phil is at home with his teammates, with the game, with the ice.

In the middle of the second period, Phil is carrying the puck into the Boston College zone. He sidesteps the defenseman and goes around him. The defenseman turns and tries to hook him, but loses his balance on the pivot. Instead, the stick whirls high in the air and slaps the side of Phil’s helmet, directly over the ear, knocking him down. There is no injury, but the pain pins him to the ice for a moment. He stands and skates slowly toward the face-off circle. The defenseman protests the penalty. Phil looks around the arena, sees Frank Hammett watching him from the other side of the glass, shaking his head. Phil can almost hear what he’s thinking: “Not much like Gordie Howe. Gordie wouldn’t take that. Not him.” Phil can almost read tomorrow’s article: “Gordie Howe’s Clone Not Up to the Original.” It pounds in his chest along with his heart. He can see what will happen next.

The defenseman gives up arguing with the ref and starts to skate over to the penalty box. When he comes near, Phil pulls up with his stick and the defenseman goes down on his back. Without thinking, Phil lands on him with both knees. Then, Phil pulls off the defenseman’s mask and starts pounding him. This is no stylized violence like the NHL. Phil is out to kill him. This is not Gordie Howe, he is thinking. This is me.

His teammates pull him off. The defenseman curls on his side. The refs throw him out of the game. His coach screams at him in the locker room. Gordie Howe would never have done that! Phil is out for two weeks, and maybe for good. Everything seems to happen from a distance.

He puts on his clothes and goes outside into a deep clot of reporters. They’re just as far away as everything else. He just keeps walking, through the West End and downtown Boston. Past the Commons. Eventually, no reporters follow him and he is alone in the South End.

He finds a hole-in-the-wall bar on Columbus Avenue and orders a beer without thinking. As if it’s the most natural thing in the world, they serve him, even though he’s underage. Something about his abstracted manner and his size suggest he’s older than he is.

It’s the NHL for me, then, he thinks. Why not? Or the minors—there’s more fighting in the minors. At that moment, he thinks he could enjoy the minors.

It happens as gently as snow on ice. A man jostles him on the way to the john. An insult is exchanged. Phil swings. The two men end up on the floor. Phil rolls over on top, and for a moment as he pounds on the stranger, as he wanted to pound on the defenseman, as he would have gladly pounded Frank Hammett or even Gordie Howe, he loves this stranger as he has no other.

The bartender knocks him out with a sap, and he awakes, dizzy and puking, in the back of a police van. The nameless man he had been fighting is not there. It is only Phil and another, unconscious drunk. He leans back against the wall, wondering what happens next.

Phil finds out at the arraignment that the man’s name is Kenneth Roget. He has been released from the hospital with a mild concussion and missing teeth. Phil gets six months’ probation and two hundred hours of community service. Roget threatens to sue, but the DA points out that Roget has a history of bar fights and is already on probation for assault on his ex-wife. The DA gets Roget to settle for medical costs.

Hammett’s article reads: “Gordie Howe’s Clone Jailed for Assault.”

BU kicks him from the team and out of the university. He moves back home, contented for the moment to do his community service. His parents try to talk to him, but he is sullen and uncooperative. They suggest he call his friends from high school. He leaves the phone untouched.

oOo

For his community service, he works as a janitor at the Framingham hospital. The simple and silent work suits him. He is invisible as he mops a floor or pushes a cart out to the trash compactor. Medical staff and visitors stream past him, oblivious. The patients, especially the chronic ones, strike up incidental conversations with him. One man, a paraplegic from a car accident, reminds him of the other Howe clone, Danny Helstrom.

That night, on impulse, he finds a single Helstrom in Nashua, though there are two others in nearby towns. Phil wasn’t sure how he should proceed. Call him? Could Danny Helstrom even speak? There but for chance and circumstance goes Phil Berger.

A woman answers the phone. Her voice is tired. Phil is surprised. He expected a recording. Jake and Carol have been screening calls for nearly a year.

“Uh, hi.” Phil can’t think of anything to say. “I’m Phil Berger.”

“Yeah?”

There is silence. “Is there a Danny Helstrom there?”

“Oh,” comes from the other end. “That Phil Berger. Robinson said you might call. I figured it would have been last spring.”

“Yes.” There is silence on the phone. “Are you Danny Helstrom’s mother?”

“You bet. Grace Baker.”

“Baker?”

“Danny’s father couldn’t take it. He split when Danny was two. Funny, huh?” She laughs bitterly. “You want to meet your clone brother? I think it’s a bad idea, but Danny would like to see you.”

oOo

Danny Helstrom looks like Phil. At least, if Phil had been stretched thin and shrunken, then broken and reset, he would look like Danny. Danny has never been able to sit erect. He half lies across the wheelchair fabric on his right side. His fingers are long and graceful, and move gently and independently of him like the tendrils of a sea anemone. His voice is high and nasal. He weighs barely ninety pounds. Looking at Danny makes Phil feel obscurely ashamed of standing on two legs, of feeling his muscle and strength, of being able to speak. When Danny looks at Phil, it is out of Phil’s own eyes.

Danny smiles, quivering; half his face locks up and releases. He speaks. Danny only has partial control of the muscles of his tongue and lips; his words are a smear of long vowels, grunts, and hisses. Grace interprets for him: “He’s really glad you came up here. He thinks of you as his brother.”

At first, Phil doesn’t know what to say. He’s not sure why he’s here. “Good, I guess,” he says hesitantly. “Did Dr. Robinson test you, too?” It seems inconceivable that this broken creature could be a clone of Gordie Howe.

“Yeah,” says Grace. “Gordie Howe. Just like you.”

Danny says something to Grace. She frowns. “Are you sure? I should be here.”

Danny gives her his half smile and replies. She shrugs, leaves the room, and returns with a black box fitted with a speaker. She attaches a microphone to Danny’s shirt, gives Phil a long glance, and leaves the room.

Danny makes a sound like a cross between a moan and a stutter. The box says in a monotone: “She’s trying to protect me.”

More at ease with Grace out of the room, Phil sits down on the bed. “How come?”

“She thinks you’ll hurt me because I scare you.” Danny half grins again. “Are you scared?”

Phil watches Danny. Something feels like it’s cracking inside him. “Yeah. You scare me.”

Danny flops his head back and forth in a nod. “I could have been you. You could have been me.”

Phil sighs. “Yeah.”

“I know. Could be worse.” He grins again. “Could have not made it at all.”

Phil clasps his hands together. This is my twin brother. “Is that what you really think?”

Danny looks back at him. “Because of my body?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. I do. I’d rather live.”

“Okay, then.”

“But you owe me.”

Phil spreads his hands. “How do you figure?”

Danny tries to point with his finger but it trembles in the air as if underwater. Instead, he nods in Phil’s direction. “You got the legs.”

Phil looks at himself. “Yeah.”

“Tell me about hockey. Tell me what it’s like to play like Gordie Howe.”

Phil lets his breath out slowly. Danny’s right. It’s the luck of the draw that Phil got the body and Danny didn’t. He owes for that luck. He has obligations to Danny, as close to a twin brother as he will ever know, because of that luck.

He thinks for a long time. It’s important to say it right, to express it. “If I could fly,” he says at last. “It would feel like skating.”

oOo

The Bruins call him. He does not return the call. The Ice Cats in Worcester, the Chicago Freeze, the Florida Everglades. He does not return the calls. He has the phone screen out sports agents. He does not understand why he’s doing this. It is only a minor assault charge. Professional players have done worse, taken worse penalties, and still played. He may not be Gordie Howe, but he could still play with the Amarillo Rattlers, for God’s sake. He’s at least that good.

Frank Hammett’s article reads: “Clone of Gordie Howe a Janitor in Framingham.”

Something in him breaks.

He finishes his community service by June. Jake gives him two thousand dollars. Phil takes his car and leaves town. He tells no one where he is going, since he doesn’t know himself.

Let Frank Hammett write about that.

oOo

The principle around which Austin, Texas, revolves is heat.

It is late. Phil lies on the bed staring at the ceiling, waiting to go to work. His head is next to the window, the coolest spot in the room, but that’s not saying much. He shares a house with three strangers. He’d found the house advertised in the paper when he’d hit town in June. It was cheap, and he liked the idea of living with strangers. Later, he realized why the house was cheap. It’s made of brick, and the Texas summer sun turns it into a rock oven in the day, and the bricks re-radiate the heat at night. In the Texas winter, it is merely uncomfortable.

Every town has a hockey team these days and Austin is no exception. The Austin Ice Bats are resting comfortably near the bottom of the WPHL. Last week, against his better judgment, he’d gone to see them play the Amarillo Rattlers. He knew as soon as the game started that the Ice Bats would knock down his door if they knew he was here.

Phil tends bar in the Mexican side of town. The only Spanish he knows is “otra cerveza,” “un tequila,” and a list of other liquor-related words. He takes the money, sometimes dollars, sometimes pesos, and serves the drinks in silence.

Mainly, it’s hot. Even in February. One of the other bartenders has lived in Austin all of his life and says it didn’t used to be so hot in the winter. But now the February sun burns down and it’s in the eighties every day. Up North, he thinks, there are the January snowstorms followed by February, when everything freezes so hard you can’t even bury somebody until the spring thaw. Then, there’s March, when the ground gently softens under the wet snows, April, when it’s mud season, and a quick spring in May.

As he cleans the bar, he thinks of winter in Massachusetts, when the temperature starts to hover around zero, and the ice gets thick and draws all the water from the air and the ground starts to feel rough and bumpy as it freezes down. Everything comes down to essentials in a New England winter: bare trees, snow, frozen earth, ice.

Down here, it feels too easy to be winter. The Anglos sail on the man-made lake. They water their grass. They grow their flowers. February is just another month.

He corresponds with Danny regularly. Instead of the net, they send written letters, on paper, by mail. Except for packages and certified letters, physical letters are largely a thing of the past, having been replaced by photon packets moving at the speed of light. Danny started it and Phil responded the same way. Neither has ever talked about the comfort of holding a paper letter.

Phil’s letters go like this:

Danny,

I’m still working at the bar. We’ve got a little heat wave now so every night the place is packed. Lots of sweaty music. I’m tending bar on weekends so I get some more money. By the way, guess who I ran into down here? Roxanne, my old girl friend from high school. Seems she went to University of Texas. She’s been down here all this time and we never ran into each other. She came into the bar and recognized me. It was good to see her. She’s engaged to a nice enough guy.

My boss Guillermo took me camping out of the city a couple of weeks ago. I’ll say one thing about Texas. The sky is just as big as people say. We lay in our sleeping bags drinking Jack Daniel’s and just watching the moon go by.

Write and tell me about things up North.

Phil

Phil knows the process Danny goes through to write a letter. If he uses the voice writer, it’s a struggle to get the words out, a struggle to correct them when the writer makes a mistake. Phil has seen Danny sweating and shaking after leaving a note for his mother.

Instead, Danny usually prefers to use a specially fitted keyboard. The process is still slow and laborious, each key combination carefully thought out and forced through his trembling hands. But it’s easier than speaking. Such a letter might take Danny a week or more of concentrated effort. Each letter Phil receives feels heavier than his own, as if the effort has given it mass and heft. Phil keeps a box in his room and each letter from Danny is carefully flattened and stored there.

Phil wonders why he saves the letters so carefully. He thinks it might be the way Danny always talks about little things going on around him. Danny is home most of the time and the local world is most of what he sees. Other times, he thinks it’s because it was only an accident that Danny was the crippled one and Phil was born unmarked. Both could have been crushed by their birth or neither, or Phil could just as easily have been locked into the wheelchair by his own body and Danny been whole. As Danny had said the first day, Phil owed Danny something. Recognition, maybe. Acknowledgment. Respect.

But often, as he carefully smooths the paper wrinkled and creased by travel, he feels as if he is saving something important, a message in a bottle from another country. It is not as if he is saving the work of some great artist or poet—in fact, when he thinks about it, he wouldn’t save such things the same way or with the same reverence. No, this is more like saving letters from your father in wartime or your brother who lives across the world from you. The letters show your connection. You treat their letters as carefully as you would treat them if they were here but sick or dying, because by taking care of the letters, you’re taking care of your brother, or your father, or your friend.

Danny’s letters go like this:

Dear Phil,

I had a good day. I bundled all up and took the chair outside while Grace was at work. She hates it when I do that because she’s scared I’ll get stuck out there. But the sky had that big carnival glass bowl look and the snow was on the ground. I was able to scatter out some bird seed and pretty soon two gold finches, a cardinal, and a bunch of titwhistles were hopping all over me. I don’t know where the cardinal came from. I thought they migrated.

I’d like to see the sky you were talking about. Maybe Grace and I could come down later in the year.

Dr. Robinson visited. Guilt, I suppose. I told him I wanted to try the Twain treatment. I said it was a special device that combined the principles of the screw, the lever, and the inclined plane. You attach it to the upper part of your jaw and it extracts the entire skeleton. Then, you send the patient home in a pillowcase. He was going along with me until the extraction. He is such a serious man. Then, he got huffy for a minute until he saw I was baiting him. He laughed.

At one point, I went with him to the kitchen and bumped him two or three times with my chair. By the time he’d apologized a couple of times for me bumping him, he figured it out and turned into a pretty nice doctor. He gave me the straight skinny on what he knew both on the cloning and how it went so bad in my case.

I’ve been doing some net searches in the last couple of months about the cloning. I didn’t find anything. You should go up there and talk to the detective Dalton used. His name is Rice.

Austin sounds great but you belong up here. This is where you will end up; I feel it in my twisted little bones. Down in Austin you’re just marking time and three years is a lot of time to mark. Up here you could be doing something with your—and, I confess, our—life. It’s important to do more than tread water, even if you drown.

At least you could do the legwork for me and go up to Detroit and talk to Rice. I sure would like to find these people. I’d like to know why they cloned us and, more interestingly, why they revealed you alone. Maybe they have clone marketing plans.

Hey, you could take me with you and I could see another Big City: two in one lifetime!

Danny Helstrom

oOo

He gets a call from Grace. Danny is in the hospital with congestive heart failure. Come home if you can.

Phil thinks about Danny all the way from Austin to Massachusetts, about his twisted body, his half smile, his letters. Phil takes with him his collection of perhaps twenty letters as if they were talismans. He’d read them over before he left and thought about them during the drive. Phil wishes he had been able to write better letters in return.

Danny is able to smile at him when he gets there, but can do nothing else. He slips into a coma soon after. Grace signs the Do Not Resuscitate order, and, after a long two days, Danny’s heart gives out and he dies.

Phil and Grace sit in the room with the body afterward, talking of small things: the weather, the sun coming in the room, Danny’s letters. Danny’s body is small and still on the bed. Sitting together feels as natural as breathing.

When it feels right, they leave the room and tell the nurse. On the way to the car, Grace takes him and grabs his hand and turns him so he has to look her in the face. “Danny wanted me to tell you he couldn’t have had a better brother than you.”

“Thanks,” he mumbles.

The funeral is a small thing: Grace, Phil, Phil’s parents, Gustavo, the aide who had helped with Danny after Phil had left, Dr. Robinson. Gordie Howe sends a short note of condolence. Ill health has prevented Howe from attending. Danny had requested cremation; as far as Danny had been concerned, this was the end of the line for that body.

oOo

Driving to Detroit to meet a private detective is paying a debt. Rice’s office overlooks the river, and Phil can see the civic center in the distance, and, beyond that, Windsor, Ontario. When he enters, images of him, Danny, his parents, and Gordie Howe are being displayed on the wall along with annotated legal documents and forms.

“I reviewed our files and checked to see if there is any new information,” says Rice, gesturing to the wall. “Nothing new has turned up in the last few years.”

“Danny thought there was a connection between Meel and Weed and Gordie Howe. Gordie Howe played for the Red Wings for a long time when they were in Detroit. Could that be true?”

Rice looks suddenly tired. “You know, Dalton tried to make the same argument.” Rice rubs his thumb along the edge of the desk. “Tell me, Phil, where did your parents meet?”

“In college. They both went to Brown University.”

“But your mother was raised in Hopkinton. Your father came from Hopkinton, too. They never met in high school?” He gestures to the wall. “We have it all on file from the work we did for Dalton a few years ago.”

Phil shakes his head. “They didn’t meet in high school.”

“Yet they met, presumably fell in love, at Brown, subsequently married, and returned to Hopkinton. Was there a plan in that?”

“No. They just met in college.”

“Exactly. A coincidence without an overarching plan. Coincidence is not evidence of conspiracy, Phil. ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ “ Rice waves his hand in the air. “The truth of the matter is that we had very little to go on when we started looking for Meel and Weed. Subsequent investigation—including a regular check on new information—has yielded nothing. People often get away with things and it looks like this is one of those times.”

Rice falls silent for a moment. “I’ve been in this business for about twenty-five years. When I was younger, I worked on a case interestingly similar to yours. Upon the death of her parents, a woman had discovered she had been adopted. Her parents had not understood that their new baby had been stolen in Texas, from an illegal Mexican immigrant family. She wanted to find her birth parents and was unable to do so through conventional means. She came to me. The adoption had been forty years before—sixty-five years ago, now. I went to Texas and searched through birth and death records for two weeks, both in Mexico and along the border. In the end, I came back here and had to tell her I couldn’t help her. She was heartbroken.”

Rice stares at his thumb for a moment. “I’ve thought about that case for years. It’s one of those problems you keep trying to solve even when you know you can’t. I still send inquiries when I think of something. I still make calls. I say to you now what I wish I had said to her at the time: what’s done is done. You are a young man. Your past does not determine your future.” He points to the wall. This time the pictures disappear. “That does not determine who you are. Only you can do that.”

Rice stands, signaling he is done.

Phil rises with him. “Did she ever find her birth parents?”

Rice smiles. “No, but I managed to console her. I married her.”

oOo

When he returns from Detroit, Phil is struck by how frail his parents seem. The house seems empty. When they ask him where he’s going next, he doesn’t know. He has some money saved and his car is still serviceable. They ask him to stay, but he shakes his head. He doesn’t think he can live here ever again.

 

Act III

Portales, New Mexico, could be another country. Out here in the desert, halfway between Santa Fe and Lubbock, the names of the towns sound like private jokes: Clovis, Littlefield, House, Floyd, Levelland. Roswell is only an hour away, and people in Portales talk about UFO’s and flying saucers the way they mention the car wash and the drug store.

It’s an accident he’s in Portales. He had proceeded southwest from Amarillo on a whim once he realized the mountains in the distance were still a hundred miles away. His car boiled over and threw a rod. It’s spring and the flowers are everywhere, along the road, in front of the adobe and stucco houses. The colors are different from anything he’s ever seen. It’s as if every flower he’s seen before this shouted at him. These flowers smile shyly and whisper. He walks along the road and can’t think of words for the colors. Is this azure? Is that peach?

He gets a job tending bar again. Portales is twenty blocks by thirty blocks. After that, there are the ranches. After that, the desert. He keeps thinking of the winter in Massachusetts, the trees, the cold, the ice. Here, it has to break a hundred degrees to get a comment. Sweat disappears without being noticed. Open water looks like a miracle. In Massachusetts, everyone was a different shade of pale. Here, everyone is a different shade of brown. In Massachusetts, Jake had refused connections to feeds his neighbors thought indispensable. Out here, though the net is as close as a telephone or a cable line, there are no local feeds at all.

He takes a room above the bar and settles in. For the moment, he feels at home.

oOo

Every Friday night, a tiny dark man enters the bar. He has a thin, unsmiling face and flat steady eyes. Frank, the owner, points him out as Esteban Correleos. He drinks tequila at a table by himself until he passes out, around midnight. When Frank closes the bar, he picks Esteban up and sets him carefully on the porch. By the time Phil wakes up and comes downstairs, Esteban is gone.

After Phil has been working at the bar for a few months, Frank starts letting him close on weekends. He inherits the task of moving Esteban outside.

One night, as he is carrying Esteban to the front porch, Esteban wakes up unexpectedly. He stares right at Phil and makes a long speech in Spanish. Phil stares back at him blankly.

“Tequila?” Esteban says, finally.

“Sorry, friend,” says Phil as he puts him down on the porch. “Last call.”

“Sí,” says Esteban very sadly.

Phil takes pity on him and buys them both a bottle of Cuervo while he walks Esteban home. They spend the rest of the night drinking and talking. Esteban has lived in Portales all of his life. He repairs the ancient farm and ranch equipment used on the poor farms and ranches around the town.

He wakes on Esteban’s sofa. He lies there, feeling the nauseous glow of a tequila hangover. The first thing he sees is an old upright grand piano painted a ghastly orange. The initials CJC are carved into the side and some of the veneer is peeling. The ivory is missing on half the keys, exposing the ancient glue underneath. There are open music books held ready on the face of the piano and the stool is worn.

Esteban’s wife, Matia, startles him from behind. She is a gigantic woman, towering over him with a dancer’s grace. He looks up at her, and she silently hands him a dry flour tortilla as a cure for a tequila hangover. Phil hears a cough and turns toward it. Esteban is sitting in a chair to one side of him, chewing one thumb thoughtfully. Phil sits up slowly and looks around. The house is two stories, unusual in Portales, with a heavily carved stairway ascending into the dark upstairs. Phil can hear faint voices coming down the stairs. There are at least four children playing in the next room, though his hangover keeps him from being sure.

“How did you come to be here?” Esteban asks at last. His voice is surprisingly deep for a small man, and his English is precise and well spoken.

“From Amarillo,” says Phil, holding his head.

“That is not what I meant.” Esteban shakes his head. “You’re too smart to tend bar.”

“Frank’s not exactly dumb.”

Esteban ignores him. “Where are you staying?”

“Frank rents me a room.”

“Bring your things over here. Matia will have your room ready when you get here.”

“What?”

“You’re coming to work for me.”

oOo

At first, Phil resists. He has been making his own way for a while now and has little desire to have anyone take over his life. But Esteban’s utter disregard for his protests and arguments has its effect. Without quite realizing how, Phil finds himself living upstairs. He quits his job at Frank’s, which Frank does not appreciate, and starts working on hot, rusty tractors out in the desert. Esteban does not teach. Instead, he points to a non-descript piece of wire-shrouded Bakelite and says: “That belongs here,” pointing to an irregular opening in the engine. Phil learns by doing. In time, he discovers he has a talent for it. He wonders if Gordie Howe had ever torn apart cars when he was young. He wonders who Gordie Howe is outside of hockey.

Esteban has six children, ranging in age from six to twenty. The oldest is named Chela. Phil only knows that she works for archeologists out of Albuquerque and is home only between digs. He meets her coming in after living in the house for a few weeks. He opens the door and is assaulted by the crashing of the piano. Startled, he looks around, and sees a dark woman playing intently. Phil realizes that this must be Chela.

Chela is small even compared to Esteban. After a moment, she looks up from the music and sees him. Her eyes look sleepy and she smiles slowly. Her nose is big and bent.

“Who the hell are you?” she asks.

“I’m Phil Berger. I live here.”

“Hm.” She eyes him speculatively. “Do you speak Spanish?”

He shakes his head. “Not much. I’m still learning.”

Instantly, she turns her head and shouts toward the kitchen in rapid Spanish. Matia comes out, her hands covered with corn meal. The exchange is heated, and Phil does not understand one word of it. Matia waves Chela away in disgust and returns to the kitchen.

“What was that all about?”

She ignores him. “Have you ever been arrested?”

“What?”

She looks up at him. “What for?”

“Assault,” he says nervously. “I got drunk and got into a fight.”

“Drink a lot?”

“No! Not much at all.”

She spreads her hands. “Are you sure? Esteban brought you home drunk.”

“Not true. I brought him home. I just drank with him afterward.”

“How long are you going to be here?”

Phil sits down on the sofa. “I have no idea.”

“I see.” She sits comfortably on the piano stool, watching him. He feels uncomfortable enough to leave the living room and go back outside, irritated with himself.

From then on, Phil can never predict what she’s going to say. Her confidence makes him nervous and he avoids her, preferring the company of the younger children, who like him without reserve. On those rare occasions that he talks with Chela, Esteban and Matia supervise them so subtly that Phil is never aware of it.

oOo

Esteban’s family is from San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Each November, he takes Matia and his children there for the Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. He invites Phil along, but Phil declines. Not this year, he says.

Instead, he decides to hike up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Taos, where the Pecos River arises as a rumbling little stream. His life has been too hot and he longs for the cold and the ice.

Chela interrupts the conversation: “It’s pretty country up there. I’ll give you a lift. I have to go up to Raton anyway.”

Esteban looks at them both, shrugs. Matia starts to say something, but Esteban glances quickly at her and she stops.

“I have my own car,” Phil says quietly.

“It’s better not to drive alone.” She smiles at him sweetly. “Besides, it’s cheaper.”

Gas has gone up again, and a continuing discussion in the Correleos family is whether or not to buy a new electric vehicle. Esteban has been against it for some time, since most of his clients are still using ancient gasoline trucks and tractors.

The conversation is surprisingly easy between them as they drive north. As Chela’s little car reluctantly climbs into the high country, Phil watches the spine of the land gradually become visible. These are not ancient piles of rubble such as he grew up with in New England. These are bare scarps of rock, shoved through the surface of the earth like a knife.

It’s much colder than he thought it would be, and he’s worried he will freeze.

They stop at the edge of the Taos Wilderness, and Chela parks the car. He pulls his pack out of the back seat and adjusts it. When he looks up,she is admiring the mountains up above them.

On impulse, he says: “Want to come along?”

Chela grins at him. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

She pulls out extra clothes and hands them to him, then pulls out her own pack from the trunk.

“Excuse me?” he says. “I thought you had to be in Raton?”

She nods. “Next week. Do you think Papa would have let me come if he knew I might go into the wilderness with you?”

“Did you plan this?”

She smiles again and he likes the way her face brightens. “Let’s say I was hedging my bets.” She laughs and Phil smiles. Her laugh is deep and infectious. “Besides, you’ve never been up here. I have a bunch of times. I can show you things you’ve never seen before.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

She looks up at him, amused, shoulders her pack, and leads the way up the switchback trail.

At first, Phil is unsure what to talk about, and loses the easy comfort of the drive up here. Chela, for her part, does not press him, and for the first day, they only speak of the trip: should they try to camp at the base of yonder peak or the closer one, should they follow the mesa or take the edge trail down into the valley?

The trail they choose ascends the smooth shoulders of the high peaks before turning onto a long, gentle decline into one of the campgrounds. At the top, in the distance, Phil can see something that looks like a herd of deer. He looks at Chela. She nods and says, “Elk. They’ll be moving down when it starts to get colder.”

“Can we get closer to them?”

Chela shakes her head. “They’ll start to run pretty soon. Usually.”

“Usually?”

Chela doesn’t say anything for a moment. “When I was a kid, Papa brought me up here and took me camping in a little valley on the west side. I think I was ten. We came up on them at sunset. They didn’t move. We got so close I could have touched one.” She watches the elk in silence. “Papa said it was because they knew who I was.”

Phil turns to her. It is late in the day, and the shadow of the peaks has started to darken the valley, but there’s clarity in the light. The air is sharp, and there’s the cold metal taste of snow in the air. Chela’s face glows as reddish-brown as the earth. The whole world seems to emit its own light.

Who are you? he thinks.

That night, their breath coats the inside of the tent with frost as they talk. She speaks of first finding shards of pottery in the plowed land and wondering how they got there. He tells her of Danny’s letters. The ground beneath them feels changed. It is the most natural thing in the world to curl up together. Phil holds her close, enjoying the smell of her, the texture of her skin and the sound of her voice as they talk. Something in him lets go, and he closes his eyes as he falls asleep, convinced that he can feel the earth turning beneath him.

oOo

Gordie Howe dies on Christmas Eve at the age of ninety-nine. Phil is twenty-eight. He has been working with Esteban for five years. He sends flowers to Murray Howe. Murray replies with a short post, and they develop a correspondence. The following year, when Phil and Chela are married, Murray comes down for the wedding.

It is a warm fall night in Portales. The desert air has a chill, but the earth is still radiating heat. Murray and Phil are drinking beer, and from a broken picnic table in the darkness deep behind the house, they watch the people. Phil can see Jake and Carol talking with Matia and Esteban. He wonders what they are talking about. He is continually surprised at how well his parents and new in-laws get along.

The party is starting to wind down, though many of the guests are still dancing. Esteban has brought up a Marielito band from Santa Fe and the high tenor of the singer wafts over them.

“Does your new wife know about you and Dad?”

Phil nods. “I told her a couple of years ago. Esteban knows, too. I had to explain who Gordie Howe was.”

Murray laughs shortly. “Not something I’ve ever experienced.”

Phil pulls a plastic bottle from the pocket of his suit, along with two Styrofoam cups. He pours a viscous yellow fluid into them, and hands one to Murray.

“And this is?”

“Pulque. Esteban makes it himself.”

“Will I go blind?”

“The effect is temporary.”

Murray sips. He closes his eyes and makes a face. “Now, that’s a flavor not found in nature.”

“You get used to it.”

Murray opens his mouth experimentally. “Is it supposed to make your mouth numb like that?”

“That’s just part of the effect.”

Murray nods, and they fall silent. He points toward the house. “I’m glad I came down here. Dad was always a little worried about you.”

Phil smiles. “I never wanted to bother him.”

“Yes. I can understand that. He was sorry you didn’t go on into the NHL. He said,” Murray thinks for a moment. “He said he was glad that he knew about the cloning, but he wished you didn’t. So he could watch you. He thought you had what it took.” Murray stops for a moment. “He thought you made a mistake leaving Boston. You should have gone on in the minors. You would have made it to the NHL eventually.” Murray points to Phil suddenly. “Not that he disapproved of you. He understood perfectly.”

Phil looks back at Esteban’s house. Chela has joined Jake and Carol. Somebody says something—Carol, probably—and Chela bursts into laughter. He can hear it float in the air like music. “Thanks,” he says finally. “But I did okay.”

Murray shrugs. “So, are you going to stay around here?’

Phil shakes his head. “Chela wants to go back to Albuquerque. She wants to finish her degree. Wants me to go back to school, too.”

“Ah. She’s in archeology?”

“Yeah. Says she’s tired of working on other people’s digs. She wants to start some of her own.”

“And you?”

Phil shrugs. “I’m not sure. I like working with Esteban. I like working with machines.” He stares back at the party. “But I’m going to be thirty soon. There ought to be something more.”

Murray sips the mescal and makes a face. “You’ll figure it out.”

“Did Gordie ever work on old cars?”

Murray stares at him a moment. “I have no idea. Why?”

Phil watches Chela move in front of the window. She sees him and waves. He waves back. He is surer of her than he has been of anything else in his life. “No reason. Just curious.”

oOo

Albuquerque is a real city with buildings and businesses, and, at the heart of it, the University of New Mexico. After six years in a small town like Portales, Phil finds himself edgy at first. He discovers, though he remained essentially at rest in Portales, the rest of the world has continued to move. Any residual problems with the cloning techniques that produced him have been rectified, but there are still very few clones in existence. Advances in fertility medicine have made the obvious use of cloning unnecessary. There is a caution in the debate now that he didn’t remember from when it seemed to center around him. A surreptitious search for his name in the news brings up only a small article about Frank Hammett leaving the Globe Corporation to return to the Middlesex-Worcester News Group.

They find a small four-room house a few blocks from the university. The house has a yard perhaps twenty feet square and abuts against three other similar houses. Like other newlyweds, they explore each other’s bodies. They discover that in normal conversation, they speak English. When they make love, it is in Spanish.

A number of times in the last few years, when Esteban had been unable to build, borrow, or buy a part for the old tractors of the Portales farmers, he had called Frost Fabrications in Albuquerque and had the part made. Phil knows John Frost, and gets a job there.

Chela starts studying in earnest. Phil supports the two of them. Phil likes fabrication and Chela likes school, so for the moment they are happy.

Frost Fabrications builds parts for many clients like Esteban, and uses several old mills and other machines to do it. They joke about all the gray hair at Frost. Phil is the youngest person on the staff, and gets his share of ribbing.

There’s also a more modern section of the plant that receives fully-formed designs from different feeds across the country. Some of the machines connected to the feeds are automated and can build simple components without supervision. Phil is excited by the prospect, and before long, he leaves the manual fabrication part of Frost and is working exclusively with the telefabrication units.

Even Frost’s telefabricators are out-of-date. Phil reads about general fabrication systems that do not directly build components at all, but instead design and build microscopic automated tools that then build the components. There is research in this area going on at the University by a man named Mishra. John introduces them, and over the next year or so, Phil and Mishra exchange techniques.

Chela finishes in two years and starts to work for the Archeology department. Phil starts in the Mechanical Engineering department with Mishra as his advisor. He splits his time between Frost Fabrications and school. There’s little time for anything else. Working very hard, he finishes his degree in three years. Then, with a loan from Esteban, he and Chela buy the telefabrication business from John Frost and start Berger Operations.

One warm February night, with a glass of champagne and over a wonderful dinner, they ritually flush Chela’s birth control prescription down the toilet. Then, they make aching sweaty love in the heat.

By April, she is pregnant.

oOo

They name the boy Jake Esteban Berger, making both grandfathers swell with pride. He is a January baby. Days after he is born, Phil still finds himself holding the baby, searching the child’s face for signs of Gordie Howe. A few things must have come from him: the blue eyes, the shape of the hands. The rest, it seems, came from Chela. Phil’s eyes are settled in Chela’s dark face and framed by Chela’s black hair. Phil finds this comforting.

Little Jake is born in a mild January, and Chela and Phil make plans to take a leisurely trip late in the summer through Texas and the Deep South, up the Atlantic coast, stopping in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, before spending time with the Bergers. Jake’s second heart attack eliminates those plans.

Instead, Phil hastily leaves everything in Mishra’s hands. He, Chela, and little Jake fly out and land in Providence. An automated cab takes them the last hour directly to the hotel.

It is an odd spring for Massachusetts. Unseasonably warm weather has been suddenly shattered by winter storms. The result is ice over trees, flowers, bushes. It gives the place an odd sort of beauty. Phil sees azalea blossoms encased in glass. The birches in the front yard are bent over nearly to the ground with cathedral effect.

They drop off their bags and continue on to the MetroWest hospital in Framingham. Carol is sitting with Jake in the coronary unit. He is enshrouded in wires, tubes, and sensors. Behind him is a huge display unit, with perhaps two dozen windows showing his heartbeat, his oxygen, his breathing, and other information arcane to Phil. Jake’s heart is on an artificial assist, but he still looks thin and pale. His eyes light up when he sees little Jake. He reaches up his hands.

Phil glances at Chela. She nods. Against his better judgment, Phil gently puts the child in Jake’s arms. Little Jake is only four months old. Phil is ready to catch the baby if Jake’s hands fail him, but Jake carefully folds the infant in the crook of his arm, safely away from tubes and wires. He croons gently to the child. Little Jake watches him with an unwavering gaze, as fixed and eternal as a sphinx.

Carol explains the options to them. Jake can get a completely artificial heart, a human donor heart, a pig-derived heart, or keep the artificial assist. However, he does not seem to be handling the artificial assist well, and there are no human donors available. That leaves the artificial heart and the pig-derived heart. There is the very real possibility that if Jake cannot tolerate the artificial assist, he might have difficulty with the artificial heart. The doctors want him to take the pig heart. Jake is resistant to the idea and wants to hold out for a human donor.

Carol shakes her head. She looks as if she is about to cry. “I don’t know what to do with him. I really don’t.”

Chela holds her, murmuring over and over: “We’ll think of something.” She looks at Phil and points with her chin toward Jake.

Phil stands near his father. Jake is tickling the baby’s chin. Little Jake laughs and spits up. Jake cleans him up with a tissue from the nightstand.

“Dad—”

“Hush,” Jake says. “I’m busy.” He coos to the baby and tickles him again. Little Jake laughs and waves his hands in the air.

Jake looks up at Phil. “This is the best gift you ever could have brought me.”

“Dad. We have to talk about your heart.”

“No,” Jake says. “We don’t. It’s not your decision, Phil.”

“I know that. But—”

“I’ll lay it out for you.” Jake tucks Little Jake against his side. “I don’t want a pig’s heart in me.”

“It’s not a pig’s heart. It’s a human heart that was grown in a pig.”

“I don’t want it. This thing—” Jake points to the incision in his chest. “Is just barely good enough to keep me alive. I don’t want another one.”

“Dad—”

“So, it’ll just have to keep me alive long enough to get a real heart.”

Phil stares at him. “Even if it kills you?”

Jake nods slowly. “Yes. Even then.”

“Okay.” Phil closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Okay. I accept that. Now, explain it to me.”

“The pig’s heart—I just don’t want an animal in me. I don’t care if it started out as a human or a goat, I don’t want it.” He falls silent. “I thought a lot about this when I had my first heart attack. You know what you want out of a heart? Besides keeping you alive, I mean.”

“No. What?”

“You want it to do its job. You want it to keep beating day in and day out without you thinking about it and monitoring it and wondering if it’s going to stop this time because of a software error or a battery failure.” Jake touches Little Jake’s forehead. “You want it to be alive and part of you like you’re alive. I want a human heart, Phil. Is that so crazy?”

“No,” says Phil. He leans forward and carefully lifts Little Jake and holds him. “Let me tell you what I want. I want my son to know his grandfather. I want him to grow up strong and straight and know you like I did. I want him to know who he came from and where he came from and why. I can’t tell him that. Only you can.” He breathes for a moment. “That means I want you to live, fake heart or pig heart. Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Jake looks at him, startled. “You turned a little tough out there in New Mexico.”

“Can’t grow a thing without good seed. I got that from you.”

“Not from Mr. Howe?”

“Gordie Howe and the sons-of-bitches who cloned him gave me my body.” Phil leans over and touches the incision on Jake’s chest. “Only you and Mom could give me a heart.”

Jake doesn’t say anything. “Okay. You win. The pig’s heart, I guess. Better than some damned machine.”

There is a moment of joy in the little room. The doctors, waiting only for permission, schedule the operation for the following afternoon. Jake kisses Little Jake and is then given a mild sedative. When he becomes drowsy, he is wheeled away from his family.

He never wakes up. An unexpected embolism causes a massive stroke during the surgery, and he dies.

oOo

Phil returns to the hotel in shock. Over the next few days, as they make plans for the dead, Phil says little. When Jake is finally and completely in the ground and they leave Carol to return to Albuquerque, Chela guides him carefully through the airports, ensconces him in the car, and drives them all home. For days afterward, Phil sits in the backyard, staring at the back fence. Over and over in his mind he wonders, if he had not forced the issue would Jake still be alive?

After a week or so, Phil starts to return to daily routine. He gets up early in the morning and plays with Jake until Chela gets up. When she wakes up some time later, the three of them have breakfast, and he goes to the shop. He tunes the machines for the electronic orders, programs tricky aspects of fabrication where necessary, and pounds steel himself when the automated systems are overwhelmed. By late afternoon, he is exhausted. When he gets home, Chela is already there, having picked up Jake from day care. The three of them have dinner together. Chela puts Jake to bed while Phil has a beer. Afterward, they sit together. Sometimes, they talk. Often, Phil says nothing, feeling empty from when he gets up in the morning to when he goes to bed. The guilt weighs sluggishly in his mind. He worries at it, walks around it, tries to ignore it, tries to move it out of the way. Like a boulder on the trail, it changes the path of his days.

One night, he mentions it to Chela. She is in the bathroom brushing her hair. Little Jake is asleep in a crib near the wall.

Chela stops and carefully puts down the brush. She comes into the bedroom and sits on the bed next to him, and says, softly and gently, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Phil doesn’t know what to think. “It might have made a difference. Or maybe it was just fate.”

She shakes her head. “Your car could have broken down in Amarillo and we would never have met. Then, Jake wouldn’t have come out here for the wedding after his first heart attack, which might have weakened him just enough that he died in the surgery. Should you blame the car? Did the car make any difference?” She pauses and he waits for her to finish.

“It’s chance,” she says finally. “It’s all chance. Chance you came through Portales. Chance you stayed and took the job with Frank. Chance I didn’t get scarred in a car wreck when I was ten. Chance the kid I was with did. Chance I didn’t meet someone before I met you. Chance you weren’t with anybody at the time.”

“Chance I met Esteban?” He smiles.

She smiles back. “Not quite. Esteban had been going to that bar for three years, looking for a husband for me. Finally, he found one that I could stand.”

He barks a short laugh. “No! Really?”

Chela nods. “Absolutely. He figured he’d have a chance to look over everybody that came through town. He’d tried every other way since I was sixteen.”

“Did he want a drunk for a son-in-law?”

“Did he get one?” she counters. “It was chance that brought you in there. Esteban took advantage of it.” She lays a hand on his chest. “It’s not your fault. It’s not mine. It wasn’t Jake’s. It was just chance.”

oOo

Phil plants a small garden like his father’s back in Massachusetts. In the mornings, before Chela wakes up, he takes the baby into the backyard. Jake is five months old. The mornings are cool but not cold, and the baby lies on a thick blanket, watching Phil work in the dirt.

Phil finds himself talking to Jake. He talks about Gordie Howe, about the winters in Massachusetts, about a problem at work. He tells Little Jake about Grandfather Jake. He describes Jake to him, telling him about how he usually spoke evenly and slowly, with long silences between the sentences, and how it used to drive Phil crazy when he was growing up. He talks about Danny, and how crooked and broken he had looked on the outside, and how clear-minded he was on the inside, about the letters he wrote that Phil still keeps in a box in the closet. He talks about Chela, how he has never, for one single moment, been able to tell what she was going to do next. Still, as surprising as she is, she always seems to do the right thing. He tells the baby about learning Spanish, how the sounds felt in the mouth and on the tongue, how Phil couldn’t understand Spanish and English at the same time, though it seemed Chela could. He talks about the desert and Portales and Albuquerque and Austin and Hopkinton, how the desert is so similar to Massachusetts in winter and so different, how the mountains had appeared to him when first he saw them, looking for all the world as if they were a great reptile lying sideways and at rest.

All summer he works in the garden and speaks to little Jake. Chela does not interrupt him though at times he sees her watching them in the window. As the baby turns over, then crawls, he starts to notice little mannerisms he had always associated with Jake: a turn of the head, a roll of the eyes, a clasp of the hands. He wonders how that can be; the baby never really knew Jake and there is no genetic contract between them. One day, he is in the bathroom washing his hands and he sees himself in the mirror clasping his hands in the same way. He stares into the mirror. He can see no resemblance between him and his father, but he realizes that’s where he must have learned that movement. Little Jake must have learned it, and perhaps all of his grandfather’s mannerisms from him. It comforts him as he grieves. Jake Berger left no biological legacy to the world, but he lives on in what Phil has become, in what little Jake is becoming.

That November, Carol comes out to visit. She rents an apartment close to them and stays the winter. By April, she is ready to go back to Hopkinton.

Phil gives up his graduate classes at the university. He and Mishra form a partnership and the business doubles in size in just a few months. They hire new staff and still have too much business. Gradually, they find themselves brokering whole jobs to other fabrication firms around the country.

Chela, for her part, is in more and more in demand for digs in the area. She has become adept at relations between the Southwest tribes and the archeologists. All Indians have strong taboos about disturbing the dead, and most have a deep and justified distrust of archeologists. Chela has over the years earned the respect of the Navajo and Hopi, among other tribes, and is trusted by them. This has become her archeological specialty.

Phil and Chela look for a larger house, one with an adjoining apartment, and find one close to the shop. That November, when Carol comes down for the winter, they are ready for her, and she has her own place upstairs for the next five months.

Jake grows into a quiet, serious little toddler. Given to smiles rather than laughs, he talks early, and likes to help dig in Phil’s garden. Phil can keep the damage down to a minimum most of the time, but over the season there are shortfalls as Jake learns to distinguish broccoli from Brazilian pepper and tomatoes from toadflax. Each day as he watches Jake, he learns something about his own father or about Chela. The boy reflects his mother like the moon reflects the sun. Phil is grateful whenever he sees something of himself. It surprises him that he doesn’t feel upset that Jake takes so much after Chela and so little after himself. When he mentions this to Chela, she says he just doesn’t see it. Jake takes after Phil all the time.

Phil’s grief crusts over and smooths itself as time passes. He discovers himself feeling happy for no apparent reason. He finds that surprising, and the surprise itself is disconcerting. Was I unhappy all these years? He’s not sure.

oOo

Phil and Chela measure time in terms of Jake: Jake was five months old when his grandfather died, we bought the house when Jake turned one, we took such and such a trip when Jake turned two.

The week before Jake turns three, Chela is involved in some delicate negotiations between the Navajo, Hopi, and Paiute tribes over an archeological dig in the mountains near Colorado. That Friday, she races home from Shiprock on Interstate 64. It’s a pitch-black, moonless night. Her car slips on the icy bridge in Waterflow, over the Westwater Arroyo. The car tumbles down the ravine and lands upside down. Chela is killed instantly.

 

Act IV

Little Jake is in bed asleep when the policemen come and notify Phil. Phil immediately knows what has happened, without being told. There is a vast, cavernous silence that has opened up in the world, and everything seems distant, unreal, cold.

After they leave, he sits in the dark next to the phone. I should call Esteban, he thinks. I must pick up the phone and call Esteban. But he can’t make himself move his hands, can’t make himself stand. Carol. She’s just upstairs. Call her. But he can’t even turn his head. The only sound he can hear is the sound of Jake’s sleepy breathing from down the hall, in and out. It seems as if death has been taking slow steps toward him all his life. First, Danny. Then, Jake. Now, Chela. Little Jake breathes in a slight whistle. Phil wonders if it will stop. What would he do if Jake were to stop breathing? Would he be able to move then? Or would he stop breathing himself ?

I could die right now, he thinks. I could just let go and drift away. Did she feel that way?

It seems that Jake’s breathing is the only thing holding him to the earth at all.

He can see in his mind the highway through Waterflow. He has driven that road before. He can see the patch of ice forming on the bridge, sees Chela hitting the patch and the car turning, Chela panicking and trying to regain control.

I never taught her to drive on the ice, he thinks to himself. I never saw the need.

There is a hitch in Jake’s breathing as the boy starts to wake with the dawn. Phil shakes his head and stands up, able to move at last. First, he calls Carol and tells her. Then, he washes his face in cold water. He picks up the phone and dials Esteban’s number from memory.

“Esteban,” he begins in Spanish. “There has been an accident.”

After that, he waits for Jake to wake up.

oOo

Phil is struck by the dull tedium of death. As when Chela and his mother buried his father, there are endless details to be addressed. How is Chela to be buried? Should she be cremated? Where is it to take place? What kind of coffin? What kind of urn?

Matia, looking old and sad and grand, takes over. The funeral is a large and colorful affair to which Jake feels no kinship at all. She knows which relatives to notify, how to drape the casket, what flowers to send to which church. Esteban’s sole task is to grieve with Phil. Phil’s sole task is to grieve with his son.

Little Jake does not cry immediately when he is told. He asks again when Mama will be coming home. Each time, Phil starts the story again. Mama has gone away. She won’t be coming back. She will always love you, but she can’t be here any more. Jake listens, blue eyes intent. Then, he asks again.

By the time of the funeral, Jake has stopped asking. He does everything asked of him without complaint or comment. Not much is asked. He submits to every caress, hug, and embrace as if he were somewhere else. Only his clenched grip on his father has any life to it. It is so strong that Phil has to change hands often.

Once the immediate death tasks are done, Phil must manage the lesser tasks. He settles the insurance, makes sure the deed to the house is in proper order. When the insurance check comes in, he pays off the mortgage of the house. The rest he puts in a trust account for Jake. Mishra calls him to see if he’s all right. He asks when Phil is coming back to work. Never, Phil wants to scream into the phone, but instead says he doesn’t know.

He spends all of his time with Jake and Carol. Jake had crawled into bed with Phil the night after the accident. Phil hadn’t the heart to put him back. Now, each night, Phil wakes up to find Jake nestled spoon fashion against his chest.

Finally, after a month of mourning, he goes back to the shop. Standing there surrounded by automated machines, he realizes that he never wants to be here ever again. He walks into the office and sits down across from Mishra.

“Buy me out,” he says quietly.

Mishra reaches into the drawer and pulls out a document and gives it to him. “I thought you might feel that way.”

oOo

It is something he and Jake discuss, as much as a thirty-eight-year-old man can discuss anything with a three-year-old boy. When Carol leaves in the spring, they sell the house to follow her to Hopkinton. Matia and Esteban come up to see them off.

“You’ll be back,” says Esteban, looking up at him. He touches Phil on the chest. “We are in your blood.”

Phil nods in agreement. “Someday.” It’s all he can bring himself to say.

He hugs them three or four times. They can’t hug Jake enough. Finally, Jake, Carol, and Phil get in the truck, and the three of them start the long drive to Massachusetts.

oOo

This grief is harder to bear than the death of his father. This has unnaturalness to it, bitterness, a sense of outrage. On the trip to Massachusetts, Jake sees the Grand Canyon for the first time. Watching his son marvel, Phil feels he is witnessing Little Jake for two people, himself and Chela. He must see things for her as well as for himself. When they stop for a day to play in the park next to the Mississippi, he tries to see it as Chela might have seen it, for the first time. He wonders how Gordie Howe must have felt when his wife died.

When, at last, they come to the old house in Hopkinton, it is early summer and the lawn and gardens are overgrown. It is so different from New Mexico. He wants to feel as she might have, coming from her ancient Spanish ancestors, to see this place as fresh and new.

oOo

There are gaps of time over the summer and fall. A month might pass where he remembers nothing except what happens to Jake. It is as if Phil is only alive through Jake’s eyes and fingers.

Jake’s fourth birthday marks the anniversary of Chela’s death. Phil acts purposefully unexcited about the prospect. He is determined that Jake’s birthday not be permanently marred by the death of his mother. With Carol, Phil puts together a small party composed of Jake’s new friends and their parents. The day before the party, Phil finds Jake in the living room, standing before the old and beaten piano. The orange paint is just as ghastly against Carol’s New England wallpaper as it had been in New Mexico. Jake’s right hand is resting on the keys but not pressing them down, as if he were trying to feel the weight of the music in them. Tears are falling down his cheeks.

“Jake?” calls Phil softly. “What’s the matter?”

Jake draws his hand across the keys gently without making any sound. “Mama liked to play the piano, didn’t she?”

Phil comes and sits on the floor next to him. Jake doesn’t take his hand from the keys.

“Yes,” Phil says.

Jake lets his hands fall and crawls into Phil’s lap. “I want to play, too,” he says. “Can I learn?”

Phil can barely speak. “Yes.”

oOo

When Jake starts kindergarten, Phil is at a loss for what to do with his time. As long as he can work outdoors, he works on Carol’s house. Carol is nearing eighty now. Though she is still strong, the years have taken their toll. Phil builds an enclosed wrap-around porch for her and Jake.

Over the fall, Phil and Jake have fallen into the habit of getting up early, before the bus, and walking along the lake in the park nearby. Phil guards these times jealously. It is his favorite time with Jake. This year, the winter grows cold early and snows late, so that when Christmas rolls around, the lake is flat ice in all directions. In the distance, they can see kids playing pond hockey. Phil leans down to the edge of the lake. Under the initial sandpaper, the ice is hard and smooth. Perfect hockey ice. Thoughtfully, he stands again and replaces his glove.

Jake is looking at the game in the distance. “Let’s go watch them.”

Apprehensive but agreeable, Phil follows Jake around the edge of the lake until they are close to the boys. The scene is uncomfortably close to Phil’s childhood, and he coughs nervously.

“That’s hockey?” Jake asks.

Phil nods, thinking Jake must have heard about hockey in school. Hockey hasn’t been mentioned around Phil since before Jake was born.

“Did you ever play?”

Phil looks down at Jake. The blue eyes are all that he can see of himself in the boy. The rest is Chela’s.

“Yes,” he says finally. “A long time ago.”

“Were you any good at it?”

Phil nods. “I was pretty good. I haven’t played in a long time.”

“Is it fun?”

“It’s like flying.” He thinks a moment. “It was the most fun I ever had as a boy.”

Jake thinks for a moment. “Why did you quit?”

Phil shrugs. “It’s complicated. I had to leave home. I had to grow up. All that meant I had to quit.”

Jake thinks about that for a moment. “Can you teach me?”

Phil looks down at him. The nervousness and apprehension fall away. Christ, it’s been over twenty years! I’m a forty-one-year-old man. Isn’t it time I let that go?

“Yes, I can.”

oOo

He’s rusty on skates, but, after a few days of practice, sore muscles, and several bruising falls, he starts to remember his skill. It is as if a long dormant muscle is awakened. He finds himself enjoying skating again.

Jake learns to skate easily and is soon asking to play hockey. Without quite knowing how it comes about, Phil finds himself the team coach. They are a motley collection of five- to seven-year-old children, and he’s not sure he’s up to the task. They have a good, though unspectacular, winter season. Phil continues coaching over the summer season.

Each hot summer morning, he finds himself looking forward to coaching them with an eagerness that feels brand new. Every Tuesday morning, he is on the ice, carefully teaching them how to skate, how to hold themselves, how to keep their balance when they bump into each other. The mite league doesn’t allow checking; that comes later, when they eventually graduate to the peewee league. But Phil keeps it in mind. If they stay with it, the shift won’t take them quite so off guard.

There’s a coterie of parents and watchers there every morning. Most of them he gets to know, since they’re the parents of the kids on his team. He learns to deflect their anger and advice, their yells and threats. Twice he comes close to fights, but manages to avoid them. His size and manner keeps the worst of them at bay and reassure the rest. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that his team is doing pretty well in the league.

One old man keeps coming and watching them. He was big-framed once, but has now gone to seed. His clothes are dirty with stains around the elbows and knees. Phil can always tell when he comes into the arena, because the air suddenly smells of tobacco. The man never smokes but the smell is so embedded in his clothes that it travels in the ice-pure air of the rink. He has no connection to any of the kids and Phil keeps an eye on him, just in case the old man is thinking something unsavory. More likely, he thinks, it’s just to escape the heat. Over the weeks, Phil begins to think that he might know the old man, but he can’t remember from where.

In August, near the end of the season, the old man waves to Phil as the practice session starts. Curious, Phil skates to the stands.

“What can I do for you?”

The old man coughs for a moment and delicately wipes his lips. “Thought we should talk. I’d like to see you after practice.” His voice is faint but measured.

Phil shrugs. “Sorry. I have plans. Maybe next week—”

“I don’t think so.” He smiles faintly. “My time is precious.”

“So’s mine. I’m sorry to disappoint you—”

“I thought you’d want to talk to me.”

Phil looks at him closely. There is still that sense of nagging familiarity but he can’t place the old man. “Do I know you?”

The old man nods knowingly. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d recognized me. I’m Frank Hammett.”

Phil stares at him for a long moment, then breaks away and looks back at practice. “Okay. Why now?”

Hammett coughs. “ I have emphysema. Next week I might be dead.”

oOo

Phil sends Jake home with one of the other kids and promises to come and pick him up as soon as he can. He sits across from Hammett in the restaurant above the rink. Frank passes a cup of coffee toward him. “It’s still early in the day. Thought you might need this.”

“You know,” Phil starts, then stops. Starts again. “I thought for years what I might say to you if I ever met you. Now I don’t know what to say.”

Hammett grins and chuckles, then coughs. “Overcome by me in the flesh, eh?”

“Hardly.”

Hammett nods. “Not easy to know what to say to the guy that ruined your life.”

“You didn’t ruin my life.”

Hammett shakes his head. “Hey, don’t mess with history! I was there. I saw you playing back when you were in the pee-wees. I knew in time you’d make it at least to the minors. Then, I broke the story and it forced you to leave. Don’t try to absolve me of what I did.”

“I’m not.” Phil looks at his hands for a moment. “I had a life before you broke the story. I have a life now.” He thinks of little Jake, of Chela and Esteban, of Carol and his father. “Nothing was ever ruined.”

Hammett grunts. “I see. That is some small comfort, I suppose.”

“Did you know about me all that time?”

The old man shakes his head. “No. I watched you since you were a kid. But I watched a lot of kids. About a month before I wrote the story, I got an envelope in the mail with a set of DNA chromatographs. One set for Gordie Howe. One set for you. I had a friend in the Boston Police Department verify them in the national database.” He starts to fumble in his pocket for a cigarette, stops, and lays his hands on the table. “So I ran the story.”

“Why?” Phil leans across the table. “Why did you run it? You must have known what it would do to me.”

“I thought you said it didn’t ruin your life.”

“That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.”

Hammett nods and looks out the restaurant window onto the ice. An adult team is practicing drills. “I ran it because it was big news. I ran it because I figured that I couldn’t be the only one with the information, and I didn’t want to get scooped. I ran it because if I got a good story and I could milk it right, I’d get off the damned Middlesex service and onto the Globe staff. Why the hell did you think I ran it?”

Phil settles back in his chair. He shrugs. “All those reasons, I guess. Who sent the chromatographs?”

Hammett spreads his hands. “I never found out. I looked—I hear you looked, too. Dalton looked harder than both of us put together. Whoever did it covered his tracks extremely well and then let seventeen years destroy whatever was left. By now, the trail is so cold we’ll never know.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I came here to give you a piece of my priceless wisdom,” Hammett snaps. He pulls an ancient, bulging envelope out of his jacket. “And to give you this.”

Phil opens it and pulls out a collection of pictures. Each one is a study in blacks and grays, barred and spreading into one another. “The chromatographs.”

“I figure I owed you at least that much.”

Phil stares at the pictures. He’d seen pictures like this before, when Robinson had compared his DNA against Gordie Howe’s, his own and Chela, compared against little Jake the day after he was born. But these were the originals that had changed his life. They felt heavy in his hands. Gently, he put them back in the envelope.

“Thanks, Frank,” he says sincerely.

Hammett waves him away. “I don’t regret what I did. But I wish it hadn’t been so hard on you.”

They sat wrapped in silence for a while. Phil sips his coffee thoughtfully.

“You said you had emphysema?”

“Yeah,” Hammett says shortly. “Both lungs shot and I’m a poor transplant candidate.”

“Nobody’s a good transplant candidate.” Phil thinks of his father and drinks his coffee. “Why do you think they did it?”

“Which? Clone you or send the pictures to me?”

“I don’t know. Both, I guess.”

“Good questions,” Hammett says. “I’ve been considering those very questions for over twenty-five years. I still don’t have an answer, but here’s what I know. The cost of the cover-up, large as it must have been, is a whole lot less than it must have taken to clone you in the first place, so whoever did it had resources. They didn’t do just anybody. They chose a minor celebrity. A man people might know, but not an overwhelming star. Since no one is a villain in their own mind, we’ve got to figure they thought they were doing something good. So, they cloned you and kept you a secret for a long time. Then, selectively, they revealed you. Just you. Maybe you were the only one. Maybe there were hundreds of attempts. Hundreds of Howes. Maybe not—a lot of people tried to see if they were Gordie Howe after the feeds picked you up. But you were the only one reported and you were the one they exposed. Who knows what other people they might have cloned?”

Phil realizes that Hammett never found out about Danny. He resolves not to reveal that secret now. “Go on.”

Hammett works his hands in front of him like a man building a house. “The rest is speculation. Maybe they cloned you because they wanted to know before anybody else if it could be done. Or it could have been for future profit, or some rich old man’s fancy. Once it was done and the secret kept, they had an ongoing experiment they could watch for years.”

“Why Gordie Howe?”

“Why not? If you’re going to go through all that expense, who should you clone? Some unknown guy from Medford?” Hammett shakes his head. “Once you’re going to make the investment, it makes sense to choose somebody important. They wanted Howe for some reason, and got him.”

Phil nods. “Okay.”

“Then, when you’re seventeen years old, they reveal you. That’s the interesting part.” Hammett stops and drinks some coffee, swirls the cup for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “Britain okayed human cloning research in 2000 as long as it didn’t go to term. The USA was much more restrictive. A bunch of people in Italy cloned some kids for a few couples and it was a complete disaster. By the time you were in high school, nobody was cloning anymore, but the research had gotten almost routine and the payoffs were big: continuing stem cell lines, natural skin and corneas, a cure for myopia, transplant organs. People were starting to talk all over again about getting past the birth defects and other problems and starting human clone lines. Then, you were revealed and the debate changes. It’s not abstract anymore. Your career was over and you disappeared. But the debate went on. People who were ready to roll on cloning projects were suddenly putting on the brakes. Until, years later, we’re sitting here and clone lines aren’t even discussed anymore.”

Hammett leans on his hands, his face close to Phil’s. “When people first started buying cars, they drove them like they were buggies. They didn’t care about the sides of the road. There weren’t any stop signs or seat belts. Drivers were so unsophisticated they thought getting out of the way compromised their manly pride and preferred head-on collisions. People had to live with cars for years before they were smart enough to properly navigate a city street. Fifty years after cars were invented, you could certainly drive the wrong way down a one way street but only a fool or a drunk would do it.”

He waves his hand in the air. “It’s the same thing. Sure we could clone people now, and if you’re willing to wait the twenty years or so for them to grow up they might somewhat resemble their clone parent. But we don’t need to clone people. The way clones work is part of the world consciousness. The only reason you ever would clone a person is to get that person as a clone. You, Phil Berger, proved that was a pipe dream. You are not Gordie Howe, regardless of how much I ever wanted you to be. Now, we all know that: a clone isn’t a copy of the original. Its heritage is strong, but ultimately it’s just another person. Back when you were seventeen, that knowledge wasn’t part of people’s thinking.” Hammett stops, struggling for breath.

Phil leans back and laughs. “Calm down, big guy! So, you think they were doing us a favor?”

Hammett rests his hands on the table and smiles. “I think they were trying to buy us time until we were smart enough to drive on the right side of the road.”

“Then who could they have been?”

“Lord only knows, Phil. But they were smart. They figured us out root and branch.”

oOo

It’s early morning in February. The sky is still dark. Phil parks his car in front of the rink and waits until the manager opens the door. He hefts his equipment out of the back and follows him into the locker room. As always, he’s the first member of the team to arrive.

He quickly dons the equipment: shin pads, skates, and pants, elbow pads, shoulder pads, helmet and gloves. He leaves the locker room and steps out on the ice, warming up. He likes these first moments alone on the ice. It makes him reflective.

This is adult recreational hockey, not the NHL. He’s forty-nine, not eighteen. He wonders, not for the first time, what his life might have been like if he had never been revealed. Would he have been another Gordie Howe? Would he have had any career at all? It’s all chance, Chela said. He thinks of her. He thinks of Danny.

After this morning’s game, he will pick up Jake and take him to middle school. He’s lucky to have Jake. He’s lucky to have had Chela. And now, he’s lucky to have the ice again. But then, he thinks, the ice was always there.

After he warms up, he stretches. Then, he takes off his glove, kneels, and draws his fingertips across the surface.

It is smooth and hard; perfect hockey ice.

Copyright © 2010 by Steven Popkes.

http://www.stevenpopkes.com/

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2003