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Louis B. Shalako: THE CLONE

Joanne was the most beautiful woman in the world, or so I thought, right from day one. I was eighteen, and she was twenty-three. She worked behind the candy counter at a local department store. I worked the stock room, unloading trucks and carting the stuff around to all the various departments.

I would always say, “Hi, Joanne!”

And she would always say, “Hi, Dummy!”

It was like her little pet name for me, and I liked it, too.

It wasn’t my first job, but it was the first one where there were all sorts of attractive young women to interact with, and since I had dropped out of school in grade ten, I probably didn’t have much experience in social situations involving the opposite sex. Mrs. Beauvais, M-Five, the lady in charge of store security, would unlock the door and let me in first thing in the morning. The main central aisle led past the candy department. I naturally had to walk past Joanne, barely twenty-five feet away, and it was easy and conventional enough to say, good morning. Even though the first time I did it, my heart palpitated and my pulse-rate shot up considerably.

When her smile lit up her face and eyes, my feet seemed to float above the ground rather than actually walk upon it. When she spoke to me, or smiled and waved, it meant a great deal. It was a kind of revelation. She was so beautiful, and I was so shy, so gangling, so clumsy and unsure of myself.

I suppose in my own narcissistic way, I misunderstood what it all meant, which was nothing. The truth is, and I can see it now all these years later, I only saw it from my own point of view, never hers – I never looked at it from her point of view. But she had no reason to be shy, or awkward, or even silent. She really was a gregarious and popular person. It was so natural for her. She never had to find the courage, or even just to try and work at it.

It was love at first sight. While the physical description could fit almost anyone, and it is kind of irrelevant, she was a tall, honey-brunette, with clear, almost greenish hazel eyes, and she wore those fuzzy cashmere sweaters that both revealed and obscured much; and left it up to the healthy imaginations of interested young men. She always smelled so good, and was always beautifully made up for work. God had done a good job when He put her together. While the more prurient details of how her slacks stretched and strained across her marvelously-formed derriere may be of little interest now, at the time the fact that this girl would actually talk to me, and kid around with me, made a certain impression, a big impression in fact. I guess she was all woman, and I was still mostly a boy.

Back in those days, in the late 1970’s, if you had looked up awkward, in the dictionary you would have seen a picture of me or someone very much like me. Tongue-tied and sweating, it was all I could do to imagine her soft touch, her kiss, or what her pointed, high-mounted breasts would look like. Yet in some innocent ways, we talked and flirted back and forth, and I guess you could say we got along all right. It was when I was alone, at home in my room, that the imagination really went to work. But imagination failed me when I wondered why anybody like that would be so nice to me. Was it even really possible that she liked me?

I was so shy, and so much in love with her that I was just plain miserable, with loneliness and despair, and a kind of lust that only a young man of that age can understand with any clarity. But I never could work up the nerve to ask her out. I just didn’t have the guts or the confidence.

After working at the department store for five or six months, enjoying my vision of her at work, and suffering through the cold and lonely nights, I got home one day to discover a phone message, a little note on the kitchen table. A local factory wanted me for an interview, and soon enough I had a much higher-paying job, bagging fibre-glass on the line. From a previous wage of $3.10 an hour, I immediately went up to $6.90, and even more when afternoon and midnight shift premiums were factored in. That was good money for an eighteen year-old in 1978. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I was always good at making money, for some reason. Relationships, now that’s quite a different thing.

I couldn’t reasonably say no to such an opportunity, and in fact that was what everyone did in those days. They tried to get, a good job in the plants, and the general attitude was that, you would be set for life. Most guys laughed at university, and took a job in the plants, where you would be making the big bucks right off the bat, and could buy a brand-new car, get out of the parents’ house, and start getting laid. Most of them guys quickly got married and settled down into having kids, bitching about life and making all sorts of payments.

My aspirations were no different at the time. I wanted nothing better or different for myself and Joanne … I would have married her in a heartbeat, although I don’t recall if I ever tried to imagine or visualize her pregnant.

Anyway, I could never stop thinking about Joanne. I would be standing there, bagging up fibre-glass on the night shift, and thinking about her, her face, her hair, her body. I was one lonely guy, as I had never had a real girlfriend in my life. Her beauty was the bait that had drawn me out of my desperate shell. She was the first girl that made me screw up my courage and speak up.

With all my new-found wealth, I got a small car loan and bought myself a used MGB, a kind of soft, faded, sunshine yellow colour. And with all my new-found confidence, I went out to the department store where I used to work one day, and asked Joanne out on a date.

Much to my amazement, and despite the five-year difference in our ages, she agreed to go out on a date with me. I suppose I did all the wrong things. I took her to the wrong sort of movie, took her to the wrong sort of restaurant, the kind you go to when you’re hungry and not just trying to impress someone. We went for a drive in my MGB, which had a leaky roof and a hole in the muffler. There was no radio in the car. I told her that I liked listening to the engine, but that was definitely not cool. I never tried to kiss her, or grab her; or anything like that. The trouble was, I worshipped her, and idolized her, and I also respected women in general. I was a nice, shy, lonely guy, and I was way out of my depth. Why then, did she go out with me a second time?

And why go out with me a third time?

I guess we’ll never know, but she must have had some initial attraction, although I have never really considered myself handsome. But I am tall, and perhaps I was, a cute guy, at some superficial level in her eyes.

And then one day came the inevitable let-down. It’s strange, but I had no clue that it was coming. I called her up on the phone, as I had promised, or we had agreed, at the end of our last evening out. And she let me down.

She was nice about it. I suppose she had done it before, but it had never happened to me before. And I was so much in love, the worst kind of love that I had ever felt in my life. There wasn’t much to say, when she told me, “This doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”

A few days later, I was cleaning out my car, for I had absolutely nothing to do, nowhere to go, and it was a way of taking my mind off of her, or so I thought. That’s when I found one single strand of Joanne’s hair. It was kind of stuck on the top of the passenger side seat-back, and I knew it was hers instantly. I cried when I saw that hair. I sat in my shitty little sports car, with the ding in the door and the dent in the back bumper, smelling inside like motor oil, and burnt anti-freeze, and a smell like wet rugs and the engine running a little rich, and I cried. Like some love-sick puppy, like some sophomoric dumb kid, I held onto that strand of her hair, and bawled my eyes out.

I eventually put that strand of her hair in an envelope, and wrote her name on it in my own blood, I swear to God. And there you have it. I was still thinking about her fifteen years later. I grieved for her and for myself. What a sap. And even now she hasn’t really gone away – you never really forget the first big love of your life. As a little kid, I had crushes, but as a young man I also had glands, and I suppose I knew what it was that I had lost. I had lost the love of my life.

***

The wheel of fate has come full circle. After thirty-five years, I am now the CEO and Chairman of the Board, of Clone-Tech LLC; a limited liability company that I own.

About three years ago, I was cleaning out some moldy old cardboard boxes in the back of the garage. They had been there ten years at least, since my second wife Barbara, now deceased, put them there in one of her rare fits of aimless activity.

Just on an impulse, I opened up one of the boxes before tossing it into the pile for disposal, and I recognized a little metallic trunk badge, with the letters ‘M-G-B,’ in their chromed, die-cast metal. Now the letters were a little pitted by corrosion, but it was enough to bring back a smile of fond remembrance. And then as I stood there holding the badge, I saw that envelope. It’s hard to believe, but when I thought of her, when I saw her name written in blood there on the thing, my heart started pounding, and my hand shook a little when I picked it up out of the box. And it all came flooding back with a rush.

All the pain; all the hope; all the limitless optimism, and idealism of youth. All the innocence.

All the longing, all the despair, all the agony came back, too. Everything. It all came back, even the smell of her came back, but surely that had to be all in my head? Surely one strand of hair could not preserve enough of her scent to be detectable after all these years? God; all these decades? But it was. It was her.

My firm had been working on the latest, most advanced cloning techniques for many years, and we were the best in the business. My next move should have been obvious to me, but I simply put the thing in a drawer in the garage, and forgot all about it for quite a while. I’ll be honest, I did give my head a shake, but I still didn’t understand it, even after all these years.

***

Meetings are the bane of my life, they take so much time. Everyone has to be consulted, and everyone has their little digressions, which they see as contributions, to make. But at a meeting one day, one of our senior scientists reported that he was developing a new technique, and he used a phrase. It was a phrase that set me to thinking.

“All we need is a human hair to reproduce the living, breathing, thinking person, complete with their fundamental knowledge and identity intact,” and of course I thought of that damned hair.

And the rest they say, is history, and like much of history I hope it stays buried underground where it belongs. I worked very closely with the science boys over the next little while, even delegating some responsibilities to my oldest son by my first marriage, although he had no idea what we were up to down in the lab.

Once the project got properly underway, I went back to the more usual round of product development, more mainstream research and development, which involved the growth of single organs and organ-clusters, each specifically tailor-made for the individual patient. Our big money-maker was chunks of pre-matched skin, which was essential to prevent rejection by the patients, so I was busy enough to almost forget the thing growing in the lab. I went back to mergers and acquisitions, and lobbying on The Hill.

One fine morning my interphone buzzed, and I saw by the display that it was the lab.

With suddenly trembling hand I picked up and said, “Yes?”

“She’s ready, and boy, are you going to be impressed,” the voice of Doctor Phillip Maastricht gushed, waxing enthusiastic for the boss.

But by this time, I had hung up on him, and was halfway to the door.

***

I stood there in a state of total dread, staring in a kind of fascination at the tall, strawberry-blonde woman with the startling blue eyes to the Doctor’s left. The young woman standing there eyed me speculatively but said nothing, and thank God for that.

“You idiot!” I grated out at Doctor Maastricht.

“What? What?” he gasped in shock and dismay.

I must have made some sight, I must have been livid with rage and shock, and sheer disbelief.

“That’s not Joanne!” I bellowed. “That’s my fucking mother!”

Doctor Maastricht just cowered there, gasping and with his knees knocking.

“But! But! I did what you asked! I thought you wanted her back!”

“Oh, my God,” I groaned, I mean I was truly floored by all this.

And it suddenly occurred to me that I must have given my mother a ride in my little yellow sports-car, back when I had first bought the damned thing. In a trice it was over, and she lay dead at my feet. One twist of the neck had been enough. Doctor Maastricht stared at me wild-eyed, looking ready to faint dead away himself.

“Keep your fucking mouth shut about this,” I told him and stalked away in a kind of disoriented shock and a kind of awe at the tricks Fate can play.

And I knew that was pretty much it for me.

***

Donald, I love you very much, and I can never say how proud of you I am. Please tell your brothers and sisters that I love them too. Burn this after reading it. Transfer Doctor Maastricht to Angola, and then let him take early retirement. Give him whatever he wants. By this time I am dead and the company is yours. All the papers are right there in the drawer to your right. Please privately bury your clone-grandmother in the family plot. We have a death certificate for her, never mind how, and I guess the best thing to do with me would be cremation. My body will turn up, I promise you. Scatter my ashes over some desert somewhere.

Please forgive me, my son.

Louis Bertrand Shalako lives in Canada. He studied Radio, Television, and Journalism Arts at Lambton College of Applied Arts and Technology in Sarnia, Ontario. He enjoys cycling and swimming, and is a lover of good books. He lives with his elderly father, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, in a small war-time bungalow filled with books, cats, and model airplanes. Louis feels extremely fortunate to have retired early, and to have the opportunity to write full-time. He still has his health, and that’s the main thing, according to Louis.

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