"One Clone: Dreaming"
by
Timothy Stillman
(This story is in memory of Michael, from a long time ago--I've never forgotten you)
Summer coming. And Timmy, who hated the name Timmy, felt the bonds getting ready to burst. In the classroom that smelled of varnish overlaid with the wafting aroma of newly cut grass and onions coming through the long windows opened to the sounds of freedom just there, just beyond reach. And he would be with him again, because that was all that mattered, the rising in the boy, the rising of names on blackboards that teachers had nothing to do with. Lessons that could be learned in the summer parts of the mind. As Miss Cromie droned on and on, reminding him of a tired fly buzzing desultory arcs round him as he sat on his side yard white painted flaked swing and pushed himself back and forth with the tips of his tennis shoes.
Boredom was a country these last weeks of school. Boredom and Timmy's secret fantasies. How he loved the maturity of himself. The straightness of himself. No one could guess he was not Timmy at all, not the boy who had once, in his place, sat here mid row middle seat, as the new Timmy's eyes half closed, then sparked back up as he turned the page of the yellowed text book, automatically following along as the teacher slugged the thick muzzy air with her dry tongue and the boy next to him shook his head to wake himself up, and the girl on the other side yawned and stretched her legs out in front. Everything leaned. Everything seemed important. Nothing seemed important. He was a chemist, not the real him but someone further away. He was a medical marvel. Come see the clone. Come see the batting averages of magic turned science turned nuts and bolts turned reality. He wanted to go home and tell his pale copy what he had learned today. To thank the "real" boy for making him. For seeing further than he had had any right to.
For Timmy and for every other boy in the world on this day, he felt his arms and legs tingly, he felt his thighs hot, he felt the center of him a sexual territory, felt something that was wise and sweaty and good and profound. And the afternoon turned onward as though it had forgotten the time clock that was supposed to be buried somewhere within itself. He gauged and he closed his eyes and smiled to himself as he opened them and the dark spots came flashing by, cartwheeling by. Timmy was not mad and he was not a dreamer, not anymore. He had made peace with things the way they were. And he was in love. Spring forecast: lonely and quick view snaps of his sister and her boyfriend on the porch, making out on the green painted flaked porch swing. Timmy left whistling to himself. Timmy needing to make a copy of himself. It could be done. And it would because no laws could be passed that would stop the inevitable.
It had been done. Proof positive sat in this wooden chair with its stupid desk attached that his arms lay on, that he wanted to lie his head on and go to sleep. Nobody knew or cared--yet--that underneath his clothes, he had done some tinkering with the original uninspired laughable Timmy's former body, that he had tweaked and torqued and made small muscles bigger and made his body creamy and the color of a lovely summer sunset seen through pink glass. He was a ribbon of impossibility and if the teach ever got through nattering he would show them. Show them the stuff he was made of. The dream that was him that kissed the girl to his left and hugged her and the boy to his right would look on with a kind of hiss in his eyes because time wanted Timmy and Timmy was more than what they saw. For he had a mechanism inside himself. Something that was quietly coiled. Something that was more than routine solitary when he skated his hand along himself in the bathroom as he lay on the floor and conjured. What magic? Dream it up! I'm your keeper. I'm your personal mage. And if you want the sky opened, then I shall open it and cast your dreams inside, but you better make damned sure you know what you want from those dreams. Euclid. Scholar. Prometheus. The firebrand sitting here and destiny on his shoulders. Imagine me. And I am thus here.
Two hours ago, after gym class was over and the boys were taking showers and goofing round and slapping each other with wet towels and laughing and cursing and spitting to show what real men they were, Timmy had sat on the wooden bench watching them, curiously unafraid. They looked silly, those naked boys and half naked boys, as they played roundelays with one another, as they ducked and feinted down streams of water jets in the showers and sprayed one another and talked about screwing this girl and that one. And Timmy looked. He looked at their bodies and he felt a peace come over him, the thin ones and bulky ones the toned ones and the flabby ones. They seemed little shells of happiness that cuddled inside each other because they somehow fit with one another and the din and the shower throbs and the proud dicks they sprouted, some of which sprouted into half erections, making sure, the owners, that everyone knew the heft of the reason was for the girls and them alone, all of it was part of the puzzle put together with such seeming ease.
Timmy had sat there on the wet bench dressed in his street clothes and he was quiet inside himself. No machinery in there. No circuits to worry about fizzing out or breaking. He was model numero uno. He was the season of boy and time and machine and more than what they were and he knew what they did as their words overlay one another and they jostled and pushed for their territory on the water soaked concrete floor, the smell of fungus in the hot steamy air. And he wanted no one. Not like he used to. For he was not the original. He adapted himself like a pastiche boy. He adapted himself into work roads the others did not see. And if he was clothed then he was really naked. If he was not looking at anyone, then he was looking right at them. He heard their thoughts, their sexual lusts, saw wisely their random unaware sex play, their extreme childhood on the cusp of adult turn away and look back in rueful memory.
They didn't scare him anymore. He didn't dwell where they did. He was obviated from the clan that he had never wanted to be a part of, and he wanted to see his sister and her boyfriend make out on the porch of a summer night, wanted to show them the cogs and the machineries that were in them and not in him. He wanted jacking off and he wanted the feel of cream rising inside him for a nobler purpose. Not this fun house mirror stuff that was going on around him, not these little animals who thought they were part of something bigger and more profound cause they had discovered sex and kissing and erections and could come and could do it several times in a row and their mouths eating dreams as their voices and laughter brayed all round him like a brown fever they had attained for them and them alone, for no one else could possibly have a corner on the market.
And now in the scuffle of the last class of the day, he listened haphazardly. It sounded muffled, far away and gone, stifled and not just with the heat, as though everything was in a bell jar. There were candles to snuff out. There was an image to get home to. There were seedlings in him that grew more than lacquered dreams. There was early morning in him that was more than waking up to erection and rubbing it to heaven and then holding tight clenched to himself as he rode the bumpy stair way back down to all those reality leaves of gold waiting for him, that he slid into and destroyed crackling as he cackled back. He had nothing more than the day around him and the rabbit holes he hid in, and the dreams Ricky had of going off with Jeffrey who had the hots for Monica who really wished Tommy and Sara could get back together again because they were made for each other, but if Tommy should ask Monica out for an evening sometime, well, all's fair...
The community budding nascent round Timmy whose penis was bigger than his predecessor's, if it was wanted, or he could make it smaller, he could make a bit of hair on his chest, he could take it away, he could give himself a merkin, color it whatever the other person wanted, or he could make himself hairless there, he could make himself more muscular, he could make himself a dim jock, he could make himself a Shakespearean scholar jock, nothing mattered, he was everyone to everyone. The original half baked Timmy had had zits. This Timmy did not. The original was horribly himself which meant he was no one and this Timmy was anything and nothing because that was the thing to be, nothing. So others could make you into just what they wanted you to be. And if Kath caught him sometime staring out the bedroom window at her and Stevie on the front porch late night, then she could rattle her little brother's cage, or try to, and he would not sit there and take it. He would tell her what to do with Stevie, would tell her best how to suck him off, would tell here what a boy/man liked in that department and shock her, the formerly shy reticent brother who blushed at every word spoken in the language of that particular country.
And when her jaw dropped open, he could laugh at her and call her names and he could fly out the window into the blue as true summer sky with the heedless clouds scudding along and the world was the pearl that he kept in his hand and closed his hand over the world and it went dark and silent, went quiet, and there would be no more locker rooms with naked and partly dressed boys and sprays of sex words and sprays of contentment expressed in contempt because it was a rocky world and a boy has to take shelter in callousness if he is not to die of fear and little pains that add up to one fine day, homicide.
Timmy would freeze frame the boys there in the locker room. He would freeze frame the shower needles cascading down the bodies. He would go up to each one of them and he would talk to them. Say anything he wanted because when he released them from the stop motion prison--if he released them from the stop motion prison--they would not remember any of it. He would tell them their days to come. He would reach out his hand and he would touch them. He would feel their tits and their penises and their buttocks and he would caress their faces with his hand. He would feel their flesh touching out to him in quiet shameful desperation, wanting even his hand to linger. He would feel so sorry for them that his heart might break if he had a heart. They still, oddly enough, did.
Their skin, ruddy, alabaster, black, brown, needing someone's hand, needing someone to tell them they mattered, that they were big and brave and they would whip the world into submission and it would be the key club or the football game or the school newspaper that this boy or that was a part of and it would matter, that it would not be huddling lonely at night over their computers trying to find something beyond tomorrow, someone who could tell them about forever, someone who could tell them there was more to life than a droning history teacher or even more droning English teacher, that sex for them would be the ending of the world and the beginning of the next, that the new shadows in their new creases had never existed in another mortal human being before them and would never exist in another mortal creature after them, that they were unique and for the ages.
And he would tell them they were wrong. He would say it gently like people said gentle things to Timmy, the things that hurt the worst, that made him want to run away and never stop running, Timmy who was in P.E. not as a token, not to just make him feel better, who was a good basket ball player and could swing a bat and hit a ball to left field as well as anybody else, who did too have coordination, who wasn't a whimp and a screw up because that was not his legacy, that was not his reason d'etre. And yet, clumsiness was in his genetic make up, or it had been, in the other's. And he would kneel before them in time stop in the locker room and he would put his face against their thighs and he would feel the newly soft hair of them and he would put his face against their penises, so many different wondrous forms and shapes they were, and he would feel how warm, feel how safe, feel how the world came from here and more every day and he would weep perhaps for the folly of humankind, and for the folly of a boy who had created another and called it himself because he couldn't take the world turning one more second with things the way they were.
You will fall in love three times, Jace, he would tell one boy, holding him close, feeling the warmth of him radiating out like a heater, the water darts caught in mid splash, caught in trajectory to skin not yet reached, you will try not to but you will fall in love three times and they will not love you and they will dislike you and you will get a love affair with beer going and you will live in a parabola of discontent, you will never see the one for you because I am the one for you and you never knew it and if you did know it then I would turn from you and I would smile and I would walk away and your heart would be broken for the first time in your life and you would feel you are in a little black box of turning wheels and cogs and it would get smaller and smaller and you would cry out in your sleep at night because night is when the pain burns the brightest and you learn to fall in love with it.
Timmy would touch Jace's flaccid penis and hold the small fleshy balls and he would inhale boy and he would touch himself then as well as he knelt on the wet floor and heard the day linger as he put his hands on Jace's round tummy and stroked it gently, made circles of magic with his hands on it, and promised him that he would send him away to the rest of his days with the unaware knowledge that someone once in high school pressed love into him, that someone took a moment of time to say to him it's never what you think and the tangle of jungle is something no one will ever figure out and that's the point, tripping and falling is the point, but if the grass is glass then you can see through it if you try and when you do, see an image in me that I will hold for the rest of my life for you and thus keep you as safe and protected as I know how.
Reveries in class. Tagging slowly. Time linked to seconds and then handed over to minutes and Timmy needing to get home to his creator, thinking, everyone should know who their personal creator is, have him right there with you, then you could talk things over with him, tell him where he mucked up, where he blew it altogether, where he needed to rework some things, so you could go to factory that made you or it could come to you and you wouldn't have to spend your whole damned life broken and trying to fix yourself when it was impossible. He looked up from his book as though his neck was made of heavy molasses, at the back of Jace's neck, close enough to touch, close enough to hold fingers to like to a winter stove in the depths of December snows and feel warm for the first time. That's what they never tell you about being a clone, you're cold a lot and you would give anything just to warm up a bit, and differentness, it makes everything even more different. Things, people, animals--they seem as if you have manufactured them up as a joke and you find yourself wanting to apologize to them for what you've done, for being an egomaniac, but of course you can't, cause they would look at you as though you were--well--an egomaniac.
I am not insane, Timmy said to himself. Cars on a distant highway trundled past, some motors coughing, some humming, some echoing. He heard the voices of other teachers in other nearby rooms, their voices equally as flat, undisturbed, swinging in that cradle that said hold on, summer's almost here for us too, feel it coming, feel it on little cat's feet whispering down the hot humid close day, listen for it and let it take you away from kids and adults and textbooks and who gives a damn?, if it's not going to be on the test? and figure out for yourself why you a full grown adult can't hack it in the outside world and have to come here under the guise of being a teacher when all you want to be is a kid again no matter how bad it might have been because it's better here than out there where all the really mean children play so viciously..
Timmy liked to jack off with his clone maker. He liked to be naked with him and to look at the body that was a paucity of his own. He liked to hold his creator close to him and feel the warmth of the boy comfort the coldness of himself. He liked to feel his maker's skin that was smooth as opposed to his own which though flesh feeling and looking at times felt as though more like upholstery than skin. He loved feeling the other Timmy grow against him and he loved the feeling of hands exploring him like he was the god instead of the other way round. His creator was more and more pale every day. From hiding in the woods during the day, from being alone while Timmy passed himself off as that weird quite stupid kid. The Timmy clone was far smarter than the original, but still maintained some of the clumsiness of his progenitor, and hid his intelligence in the same lackadaisical bundle of bafflement that the real Timmy had always stumbled around in. Timmy liked to come on his pale twin's stomach and they would watch the come and think could it create a baby?, would it be clone or real?, how could you tell?, are there lives in it that are now dying?, is it a sin for a clone to jack off like everyone seems to think it is for boys to? Is there a clone heaven? A clone hell? Send in the clones. A clone for you, a clone for me, and we're a little happy one man family....
Clone Timmy was better at sports than the original Timmy had been. He allowed himself that, though he still played clumsy and falling over his too large feet all the other times and no one seemed to mind or to notice and so that was okay. He loved to be with the boy who made him, the boy who was getting more and more pale who seemed to be reenacting with his clone "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and that made clone Timmy feel better, like he would not need that particular wall socket anymore, real soon. That he would be able to walk and run and tumble and fall and rush into summer, this very summer perhaps, without worrying about his power source and needing to rush back and recharge.
He would stop time in the locker room tomorrow. He would do this because he knew he could, even though he never had before. He would go to the boys and he would tell who would be a success and who would glide along and who would make a total muck of their lives. Not that he really had any notion, but it would be equal parts: gift, payback, allusion, illusion, sad songs, happy tunes, all the notes maybe they could really play some day and in a way he might create whatever their future held for them, be a little part of them without their ever knowing it and that way become immortal just a little bit in them.
The old Timmy had never had the courage to look at the boys in the shower and dressing and undressing for he had been ashamed of his thoughts, ashamed of himself. The old Timmy had simply dressed and undressed and dressed again as fast as he could, looking at the dark floor in the room of flickering shadows from the fluorescent light flickers and the smell of steam and the smell of sweaty flesh and then that flesh was bitten into submission by the showers and the whole gamut of feels and sounds and coronas of life all around him while it seemed as though he had had no life of his own, not ever, so one fine day last year he had gone home and had created a more perfect version of himself, don't ask how, it's for no one to know save the two of us, and like most creators and creations, the miracles get lost somewhere in the middle and even they aren't sure how it all worked out, just that it did and that was enough.
The old woman of at least 45, how could anyone be that old and still exist?, didn't it just make her feel horrible being like that?, accidentally broke the chalk on the blackboard and some of the kids laughed and the old woman laughed a bit herself, then looked at the clock on the wall and told them their homework assignment and what to look for on the final exam next week. The hearts did not clutch. There was not, for the most part, a fever frenzy of little mice running up and down worrying about a good grade or a passing grade or worse which it was best not to think about. They were all just tongue tied with spring fever. It lazed in them like a sleepy cat in the noon time sun yellow softness that came through the kitchen windows as he snoozed away on the parquet floor happy and alone in its own furry contented dreams.
Some of the boys dreamed of the new baseball season, hoping for the Angels to pull out all the stops this year and make them proud. Some of the girls dreamed of what it would be like to finally and at long last meet Elijah Wood and tell him they saw "Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings" four times or more and how their dreams had been made darker and more complex with a wondered wounded hobbit worry now inside them that needed more than what was hiding in tomorrow or in some jerk boyfriend's jeans while the girls' own horizon had somehow expanded as they gazed dreamily at the posters of Elijah on their bedroom walls in all that pinkness of the room, as they got lost in his eyes that said here lie blue skies and peaceful eternity, and, true, there are dangerous forests to get through, but don't worry, I'm here beside you, hold my hand and we will make it.
Timmy put his left elbow on the desk and rested his left cheek on that hand. He looked out the window at the almost frightening blue sky and the green grass that all seemed to be a movie dream and he felt the buzz of the school, like a bumble bee holding in the air by somehow or other maintaining stasis with that heavy weight that should not by all scientific accounts be able to be so supported, thus Timmy the clone came into the world to be an echo glass for others, to secretly love and to know things he could not know, for there were just more questions, such as: why had his creator bothered making him, because it was still all secrecy, and heart pain fear of being found out, of being unmasked, while the real Timmy retreated in the wood and if there were Tolkien elves in there with him, and there weren't, then no elf help could possibly bring Timmy back to life, back to himself again. Poor kid, the clone thought, always running away, then he got too scared even to do that, so here I am now running away for him. I love you, someone had carved on Timmy's desk, from who knows how long ago.
No name of the person loved or the person who loved him or her. An idle wish on a halcyon spring day that was for all intent and purpose summer. Timmy wished to rub his jeans crotch. He wished to go to the rest room and jack off there. He wished others to see him, to see how he had improved the bland forgettable was he even really ever there? Timmy, to see how he could magically presto chango right in front of them, so he could be nothing and they would be everything and he would be their heart's desire and they would wish him and want him and he would get colder and colder inside with all their adoration, he would be winter and frost and snow and ice and Tundra and the top of the world even with their laying on of hands. Hands that would not heal him, only make it all a thousand and more times worse.
I can't see them alive, he thought. I see them as barely moving statues. I sense the community around me, but I can't feel the pulse of it, the thrum beat of it, the rush and push and quick MTV slashes of everything, the short cuts mind and emotions and bodies use, the rush of wind that is them reacting and acting to a multitude of stimuli, all caught in gales of laughter and shouts and whispers and candle flickers that burn so brightly, that turn and run to the world, with fears large or small that make them for some insane reason run faster, the quivering of them, the life in them, the boys and the girls and the play it by ear on the run no scripts and the procedures and knowing somehow where the boundaries are and where the rules say you can cross them and if you mistake the permission and get your face slapped or get beaten up you lick your wounds and you come back for more and tomorrow there is the new world a little different from the old one of yesterday and it goes round and round like a marble and you're on it and running in time in synch in beat in precession and you don't know how you are doing it just that you are and if you think about it, if you ask why, then you lose, then your candles don't burn as bright, then you are whisked out of the community, pushed off the little blue marble and you stand up in space standing on nothing looking down trying to get back home and you can't cause it's not home and you don't know what the hell you're going to do.....
And the bell rang. And the students came alive, getting out of their chairs, one or two almost knocked the chairs over they rushed out so fast, and the school was a bee hive of scream child freedom!!!! and Timmy looked forward to running home to the woods and finding his creator and he would tell the boy what school was like today and how many hoops he shot in P.E. and nobody noticed but being good at stuff is its own reward and Timmy the real would look at Timmy the clone with something akin to awe and they would both feel good and they would lie down on the hot almost woolly woodland smelling high grass floor and they would hold each other and they would unzip the other's jeans and they would touch to the fulcrum that both knew or used to know would move the world itself. And clone Timmy would ask real Timmy, am I warmer today?, do I not feel like a snowman today?, do I not frost bite your hand while you hold me? And the real Timmy would lie and say you do feel warmer, quite a bit warmer, do I look as pale as I think I do?, am I turning into a ghost?, am I just getting ready to be erased out of here?
And the clone Timmy would lie with him and unbutton his shirt and bee kiss his shoulder, and he would say you look better today, you're not as pale, I can't see through you like I could even yesterday, yes, you're becoming less transparent with every passing minute and they would cling and they would hug each other for they had created, one the other, in an attempt to put an end to loneliness because they hadn't thought they could take the world spinning round one more second with things as they had been, and soon and very soon, they would merge together and they would be a single entity and they wouldn't need to stop time in the locker room and feel up the boys without the boys' noticing, and make cracked predictions for their futures and put little secret love letters in the boys' hearts, put in them little slots that would be a certain design that only forever and a day the key that Timmy the clone possessed would fit, thus leaving them unfulfilled and longing, those boys in the locker room heading to wherever their out there days would lead them trembling in autumn remembering spring without remembering why they felt such a need for it. But soon none of this would be necessary, soon two Timmys would be one and they would be strong and bright and they would play basketball and baseball and they would be acknowledged, for they would be there, and everyone would by god know it.
Thus thinking, Timmy had not left class. The only student still there. The teacher looked at him as she sat behind her desk. She looked at him in his wheelchair beside an empty desk that would remain empty because he wanted to believe he was sitting there, that he was like everybody else, that he was not weak and crippled, that he was able to be blended into the crowd of students, that no one noticed him, when of course everyone did, it would have been impossible not to. She looked at him as he held his too large head down, suspended on a celery stalk of a neck and dreamed. She thought how sad that he can't be caught up, that he can't be forgotten, that he stands out like a sore thumb, that everybody is so constantly aware of him, that they stare at him, that even she found herself looking at him too long sometimes, how he must wish they would turn their eyes away. She went to him. Bent over to him.
"Timmy," she said, putting a hand gently to his chin and softly turning his face up to hers. "Time to go home, Timmy," she said with a sweetness in her voice the other children never heard from her, which of course was a huge part of the problem, "let me help you." He looked at her. He closed his eyes. His head felt so massive, like a huge marble moon that cast him always in its shadow. He pretended none of this was happening. He pretended his hands, his thin tissue paper hands with long failed fingers that could not hold a pencil or a book or turn a page, on his thin stick arms, were not filled with palsy, did not always tremble. She took a handkerchief and wiped his mouth and chin as she and the other teachers did periodically for him, while the kids around stifled giggles, or pretended to. She went behind his chair, pulled off the brake and wheeled him out of the room and down the corridor.
They always waited until the other kids had left. Timothy had something to tell her as she wheeled him along the dark corridor with its gun metal gray lockers on either side. Something about his thoughts, about the wondrous thing that his maker had created, a thing of perfection that just pretended to have flaws so somebody would notice him, so somebody would pay attention to the real him, for what else are flaws for, save for calling to like in others? He had so much he wanted to say. He and his maker were going to be just fine. They had done the impossible. The real Timmy, who cared for him, who looked out for him and corrected problems with his creation right there on the spot--oh how lucky to have this god boy. Hands on manufacturing. He would have told her that. If he had been able to talk. And if he could get the thoughts ordered right. So embarrassed. All of them.
As she wheeled him out into the hot sun and down the ramp from the front of the building, his thoughts were like bright colored electric charged minnows diving and dancing and racing the wind of his mind, in the blue sky of static heat, burgeoning in him, needing to prove who he was, but forever unable to, so he just closed his eyes, lay his head back on the soft pillow always there, waiting for him, as she wheeled him out to the sidewalk and round to the left where his mother waited in her car, all the other parents and students gone. Timmy's mother got out, and they maneuvered her son; his teacher picked him out of the chair, and held his tiny weightless body, setting him gently in the front passenger's seat, while his mother, careful not to touch him, put his wheelchair in the back of the car, then, she, not looking at the teacher or speaking to her, only thinking yet again, he's not my fault, I didn't do it, got back in the car, put on her seat belt, neglected to put on Timmy's, shifted to drive, was ashamed, ashamed, as she drove her son home again.
end