There are a few conditions I must follow for a successful regrowth. I need a stem cell sample. Somatic. Otherwise, I cannot ensure a perfect match. Half of the money needs to come up front. The other half after. No gifts or tips. Cash only. You must have exhausted all other medical options. This is a last resort treatment.
•
The most interesting part of a home is the vulnerability that shows itself in design. Today, fault lines tremble beneath a glass house. My clients chose this location on a hill between tectonic plates, just as they chose to have a son despite testing positive as carriers for cystic fibrosis. The entire front of the house is glass, revealing a modern living room and minimalist dining room. The interior smells like window cleaner.
“The California brush fires can’t get us up here,” Mrs. Ramirez explains. She offers me a plate of cookies. Her hand trembles as she holds it out. The shaking knocks an Italian wedding cookie to the floor. It shatters.
“The view is just incredible,” says Mr. Ramirez. He gestures to the dining room’s glass wall as he kneels to wipe up crumbs.
They stare at me intently, wide eyed and hopeful. The tour of their house is so earnest, so warm, just like their feelings for their son. Their eyes dart this way and that as we talk, always returning to the contract on the table. It is already signed and dated.
“Just trust me. I will do my work and deliver him back to you, whole, in six months.”
They sigh, tasting the good intentions in my words, before they are convinced. They slide a white envelope and a small medical sample jar towards me across a glass table, along with the contract. I tuck them all into my briefcase and return to the lab.
A look into someone’s DNA is their most intimate exposure. Thousands of nucleotides combined in a unique sequence give you a picture of them with no lies, no tainted stories. The gel on the table, markers racing down the algae in blue, paint the only accurate picture of a person. How rare and beautiful it is for any particular individual to even exist.
Sandro has returned to his first form: a single cell. Just forty-six chromosomes, some organelles, and a delicate membrane. Pure, untouched by this world. With a micropipette and the right enzymes, I change him.
“We’re going to patch you right up, baby,” I whisper, my breath fogging up my plastic spit shield. Sandro jiggles, chromosomes unfurling. “You’ll be as good as new. Your lungs are going to be so pink and shiny.” I shake a tube of transport proteins into the petri dish. They suck his bad genes out like lemonade from a straw. I leave him to grow.
Sandro’s stem cells, complete with a fresh genetic code, burble happily in their tank. They are sweet, almost endearing, like that. Sandro’s translucent mass doubles in size as I watch, bathed in his amber glow. They’re all so beautiful like this, children growing big and strong in their broth. The whole row of tanks beyond him hums peacefully, backlit and glowing. What a force of nature they are! They are proof that the universe is infinite. Anything can be rebuilt with the right tools, even glass houses shattered by earthquakes. Anything but the complex architecture of a soul.
•
Sandro Ramirez wakes up with his pupils dilated, his eyes still adjusted to the dark of the incubator room. By the end of his maturation, he could blink and look around. He absorbed, but did not process, his surroundings. If he had memories, he probably would have panicked.
He stretches out across my lab table. His face is the expression of innocence, unaware he is unclothed like Adam and Eve before the fall. His skin is still soaked in the broth, fresh and unblemished. I do not know the genetic code for the soul. Muscles and organs rebuild themselves, but I could not program a gene to retain Sandro’s memories or soul.
Sandro’s lack of speech did not preclude me from speaking to him. With shortness of breath, I explain his new heart. I wish that he could write it down, but he can’t hold a pen just yet. He blinks at me, doe-eyed and unafraid. The universe must have been made to be seen by those hazel eyes. I think I understand what it means to be a mother, to create a life.
When the cold air hits him as the air conditioner turns on, a noise escapes his lips. I turn it off, and he learns the rewards of speech. We move in this dance for months, until he is trained in both the intricacies of verbal expression and his predecessor’s life. He can use buttons. He can identify Aunt Cosima. However, relearning Sandro Ramirez takes longer. He cannot figure out how he likes his coffee, or whether he keeps the sheets on in the summer. His parents will surely teach this to him.
With the first reanimation, I wondered if their memories were hidden deep in the woodwork of their minds. I don’t believe so anymore.
•
Sandro’s last lesson is the courage to start a life. Without courage, he won’t be able to learn how to be a son, a nephew. It is hard work for him to rebuild a life shattered like glass. I hold my breath for the first week he is home, hoping that his flaws have been fixed, that he is ready to play the part of the real Sandro Ramirez, not the nearly identical fake.
His parents were eager to take him back to the glass house, where his favorite meal was waiting. They nearly threw the final payment at me from across the room before collecting their son.
I am alone with the tanks. They hum and glow, my quickly developing children stewed in amber liquid. I wish I knew how I liked to unwind after a release. She never taught me. I’ve tried wine, a book, a bath. None quite clicked. Today I decided to test out buttered toast, see if I like it.
Before leaving the lab, I pat my urn for luck. Our quickly fading time was spent on procedures, on the overwhelming importance of my work. She did not stop to tell me whether or not I like cream and sugar in my coffee. But I’ll exonerate her blind side.
With the cancer brewing in her blood, she was medically speaking, a glass house on a fault line, but she did not live without a lifeline. She was smarter than the Ramirez family, cheating death before it could catch her.
I think I may like buttered toast.
Katie Krantz is a writer and undergrad at the University of Virginia. She is pursuing a combined M.A./B.A. in English and Judaic Studies. Her work can be found on sites such as McSweeney’s, Ink&Voices, and the Tulane Review, among others.
Photo courtesy Stocksnap
