Robert Wilson - The Divide

He abandoned the Corvette in the vast parking lot at Tsawassen, where the ferries left the mainland of British Columbia for the Gulf Islands.

It was a bright, clear autumn day. The ferry dock was at the end of a long artificial spit of land; the waiting room windows looked over the placid blue water. John stood in the sunlight watching as the Victoria ferry eased into dock. Peaceful here, but he was wound up with drug energy. Twitchy restlessness and fatigue poisons, strange little seretonin rushes from his overworked neurochemistry. He made his body calm, tried to suppress the raw-nerve tingling in his arms and legs. He thought of Susan Christopher.

The thought was unbidden but very strong. Another eruption out of his past, he thought, this one more recent. Another face. Well, he liked her face. He held it in his mind for a moment, and the influence was soothing. Her face was uncommonly revealing and it was possible to read every flicker of her psyche in it. Her timidity, of course, and her fear of him, and under that something else, a fresh grief … but these things did not define her. There was also an openness, a willfulness. Intelligence. And she liked him; she felt some connection with him.

A dim sexual urge fought through the amphetamine haze. But that was inappropriate … now and maybe forever. Sudden associative memories of old experiments, encounters in the dark. And this cynical, familiar thought: A man may be raised by apes. But does he love the apes?

In the blue Gulf water a ferry sounded its horn. John shouldered his knapsack and shuffled aboard.

The afternoon faded toward evening. Crossing the Gulf, standing alone on the windswept outer deck, he watched the peak of Mount Hood, ancient volcanic cinder cone, fading to red on the horizon.

He had come to Canada fifteen years ago. Memories of that time unreeled behind his eyes.

After he left the Woodwards, after a few years in transient jobs from Detroit to San Francisco, he decided he would be safer in Canada. Safer or, at least, harder to find. John understood certain facts about his past. He knew that his creation had been overseen by the American government in one of its more macabre incarnations—the CIA’s MK-ULTRA or some related institution—and that this agency had lost interest in him shortly before he was delivered to the Woodwards. He was also aware that he was a potential embarrassment to these powerful people and that he would be safer if he could become anonymous. Canada seemed like a good place to do that.

Money had never been a problem. He was able to bluff his way into almost any kind of work. He paid for fabricated ID and began with a typesetting job in Vancouver. He put his savings into small, solid investments; he anticipated the city’s urban growth cycles throughout the volatile 1970s and turned that insight into capital. He wasn’t wealthy—wealth invites attention—but within a few years he was at least independent. For a time, his most permanent address had been a houseboat anchored on the North Shore. In the summers, when he could afford the time, he used the boat to explore the B.C. coastline.

Those journeys had satisfied his appetite for isolation, at least for a while. But it was an appetite that, once briefly whetted, began to grow beyond all bounds.

The ocean fed it. The ocean was indifferent, calm and vast. The ocean did not pay John Shaw any particular attention; the coastal rocks and piney inlets ignored his passage. There were places where he could land, come ashore, and move among the dark trees as quietly as the Haida or the Kwakiutl of a thousand years ago. The isolation was a new discovery for him, a thrilling one. Alone, he could become what he was meant to be: a new thing, a fresh creature on the earth.

In the spring of 1984 he had liquidated the bulk of his savings and bought property on one of the more obscure and inaccessible of the inhabited Gulf Islands, a chain of rocky prominences paralleling the inner coast of Vancouver Island. The smallest of these were unmapped rocks and shoals that disappeared with the tide; the one he came to think of as his own was hardly larger. The entire southern tip of this island was in effect his property: a domain; a kingdom, though he did not think of himself as its owner or ruler. He was its citizen—its subject. He had ransomed his savings for that privilege. There was enough money left to keep him in provisions, to pay for a cabin and a wind generator, for the books and the PC terminal he ferried in from the mainland.

Alone, he had immersed himself in cellular biology. He recognized the irony: he was adopting Max’s specialty. But it was suddenly and overwhelmingly important to establish the link between himself and the rock pine, the sea otter, the sea itself. At the most basic level they were all very much alike, ribosomes and rysosomes, hydrogen and oxygen. Evolutionary history was inscribed into the substance of itself—organelles, once independent creatures, were imbedded in the cellular structure like the effigies of saints in the wall of a cathedral. Climbing among the shore rocks in late summer he observed blue-green algae in the glassy tide pools, prokaryotic cells, filaments of DNA floating free in the cytoplasm: primitive protein inventions. He handled shells washed up by storms, calciate rocks with the Fibonacci series imposed upon their shapes as if the clay itself had been possessed by mathematics.

This was the estate from which he had been disinherited. He was not even a genetic sport—the cells in his body, his DNA, were no more unusual than anyone’s. His progeny, if he produced any, would not resemble him. Max had intervened after conception, in the womb; had performed chemical modifications that operated at the level of transcriptase and RNA, skewed protein messages carried through cellular reproduction in the zygote. In effect, his blueprints had been tampered with. Specifically, the protein code for the construction of a human forebrain had been altered; the basic human neural command—to build a more complex cerebrum—had been amplified. He was born with voluntary motor control and cutaneous sensation measurably greater than the norm. Other cortical functions—the generalized sensory threshold, language skills, abstract thought—registered beyond the curve of expectation as soon as they could be reasonably charted. By the age of five years he was way off scale on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. He was “smart.” He was also not entirely human.

He was not human, but he was protoplasm, and he guessed he had come to this isolated place to prove that to himself. We are all cast out from some kingdom, he thought. It was how the process worked. Chordates exiled from the world of the invertebrates, air-breathing vertebrates exiled from the sea. Mankind itself, cast out from the animal kingdom into the high, chilling air of self-awareness and the anticipation of personal mortality. I am not unique, he told himself. Merely alone.

It was a kind of consolation. But it had faded through the long winter and he was left with a growing sense of morbidity. Alone, he turned his attention to cellular pathology. He read research abstracts. He built an elaborate add-on memory system for his PC and tinkered with its program protocols until he could use it to generate elaborate models of metastatic 3LL carcinomas. He came to understand disease and aging as the agents of thermodynamic necessity—the spring of life unwinding on itself. The universe itself, he thought, was a broken symmetry in the unimaginable unmaterial from which it arose, an eruption of imperfection. And life was both a product of that process and a mirror of it. We carry our corruption from the womb, he thought. Max had believed in the perfectibility of mankind. But that was a superstition. Bad teleology and bad thermodynamics.