Alex Liang: Irreplaceable

Irreplaceable

Alex Liang ’21

When my brother returned from the dead, his footsteps echoed fatefully in the house. He arrived in an oversized white hoodie and slightly scuffed black jeans even though it was at least 80 degrees outside. According to the doctors, he had to be covered in clothes or else “risk sunburn or even skin cancer on his vulnerable skin.”

My mother guided him to a clear plastic chair, behind which hung a black-and-white photo of the first Andrew. After telling him to sit down, she pried off his shoes. Around us, the living room was bare, minus one long sofa, the plastic chair, and the massive black pig statue standing in the corner, which everyone passed when they entered our house.

Because my brother was born in the Year of the Pig, my mother liked to keep pig statues around the house. After my brother died, our house underwent a transformation, as if changing the decor meant starting fresh. The only room left untouched was my brother’s room, which my mother treated like a museum. Throughout the house, we now had tile floors instead of wooden ones, paintings instead of photos, throw rugs instead of bare floors. The walls were a baby blue tinged with gray.

Turning to me, my mother asked, “Well, where’s the ankle bracelet?”

I should have remembered to have the ankle bracelet ready, especially since we’d spent so much time reading and understanding the manual. Her inability to take off my brother’s left shoe strained her voice with frustration. I grabbed the bracelet off the couch and handed it to my mother, who strapped it onto my new brother.

Of course, we followed Lipstein Model 16 Clone Manual: Remember that for the first few days, your clone will have trouble eating, drinking, speaking, walking, and controlling his moods. Please keep sharp objects away from the clone, prevent him from wandering off on his own, and monitor his behaviors for the first two weeks. Speak calmly when addressing him and don’t forget to take care of his daily needs. If issues persist, call Dr. M’s service for advice.

While my mother placed Andrew’s shoes onto the rack, the clone looked up at me, as if trying to trick me into believing he was Andrew. His eyes were dark like tinted windows, the kind that he could see clearly out of but I couldn’t look into. Although I felt the need to be cautious, my instinct was to wrap Andrew in a hug. Still, his eyes told me that even if he returned my embrace, his hands would be cold on my back.

This Andrew’s face was certainly my brother’s, but different—his eyebrows were thicker. This was one of the many notorious problems with clones: they always missed a detail like the roundness of the jaw, the hook of the nose, or the curliness of the hair—a small disappointment, only noticeable after the clone had been brought home. He also reeked of cleanliness.

In the kitchen, I watched as my father poured hot water into a metallic cup and threw in a packet of purple taro powder and clear coconut jelly pellets for my brother to drink. The powder mixed into the water as Andrew sipped, forming an unnatural storm of pale purple swirling around translucent shards of jelly. My mom had replaced our countertops with steel and washed them with detergent until they shone, as if the clone would care about a glistening counter or the new hanging lights over his head. Nearby, white sage, the only flowers that grew in our backyard, slumped in a glass vase, no doubt another useless ornament that my mother had thought would satisfy the clone. Once the clone had eaten his snack, my dad commenced teaching him how to walk up the stairs.

After Clone Andrew fell on his third attempt, I followed my parents as my dad carried him up to his room like a baby. Original Andrew’s trophies sat inside a glass case in the corner, boasting his talent at wrestling. His certificates for horsemanship and scuba diving hung on the yellowing white wall next to photos of him standing on top of the new 175-story Emtrex Building, of him riding a dirt bike when he was twelve, and of him ziplining above a jungle in Borneo. As my parents set my clone brother on Andrew’s twin-sized bed, he gazed up at the pictures and turned towards me as if to ask, “Who?” Instead, he made a feral sound.

I told him the pictures were of himself and wondered at his ability to learn. It was amazing and terrifying that he was attempting to speak in his first few hours. In theory, he was a perfect clone—the same Andrew returning in the same body.

The designated naptime on the manual indicated Andrew needed to be asleep by 2:00 p.m., so my parents tucked him into bed while I stood by the door. My mother sat on the floor by Andrew’s bed, a blissful vigil, and I’m sure she watched him until he fell asleep and no doubt left after his quiet snores began.

I tiptoed back downstairs and down to the basement. My parents had set it up as a theatre and a place for karaoke, but we never watched movies as a family anymore, much less sang. I kept a mini-fridge stocked with bags of sugary drinks and ice cream. Sitting down on the couch that my brother and I had refurbished, I found my favorite spot where the bean bag we added supported my feet and the blanket we turned into a pillow found my back. I couldn’t help but think I was betraying my brother by being here in the basement alone, but I didn’t have a choice. He was gone.

I found myself here often, cuddled up against a blanket big enough for the both of us to share. But the new Andrew needed nap times, his own pillow and covers, and my parents didn’t trust me or themselves to let him fall asleep without being under their paranoid eye. In this way, every new clone was a reminder, an alarm refusing to turn off, of my brother Andrew’s accident on a dirt bike, which my parents bought for his twelfth birthday. They’d argued over what to do with the remains of the bike. My father insisted we either burn or at least dispose of the parts, but my mother forced him to keep the mangled frame of the bike in the corner of the garage, where it had begun to rust. Sometimes, I think they kept it as a token of their own ignorance. After my brother died, my mother sought refuge and my father seemed to disappear.

My dad used to wake up before Andrew and I went to school, but after Andrew passed, my dad just left small plastic bowls of cereal for me to choose from on the kitchen counter. He stopped fishing with his angler friends and quit playing the ukulele. On the coffee table, my father’s magazine subscriptions sat untouched and collecting dust.

On the other hand, my mother went a little crazy after Andrew’s death. Being a light sleeper, I heard my door grate against the floor when she came into my room after midnight. I pretended I was asleep and kept my eyes closed facing the wall, but I knew she stood there watching me for at least half an hour. During that time, I heard her whispering assurances to herself, “At least I have one son left,” then cursing at my ceiling, and then mumbling prayers towards my floor. It became a ritual for her to come at 3:00 and for me to fall back asleep at 3:45 when she left. I began to sleep on the side of the bed closer to the door so I could hear my mother clearly when she wept at three in the morning. I didn’t want her to notice I was awake because then I would cry with her, so I kept my eyes shut and let her complete her nightly communion.

Six months after Andrew died, I made my way into the kitchen for a snack after school and heard my parents debating cloning. It was a procedure that had been reserved for animals, but now, after the Ethical Cloning Law passed, it was an option for anyone with money.

My father thundered, “It’s unethical, irrational, unnatural, and expensive!”

And my mother shrieked back at him, “So was buying Andrew that dirt bike!”

Her voice was barbed wire, and it must have cut my father so badly that all matters of ethics and morality ran out of the room, just like I did after hearing my mother screech.

With Clone Andrew upstairs in his bed, I sat in the basement and turned on 2001 Space Odyssey, my brother’s favorite movie. The dramatic sound of the music reminded me of the previous clones we’d brought home to replace Andrew. I remembered hearing the anxious thump when the first clone stepped through the door. The same sound rang in my ears when the first clone chased a blue beetle onto the crusty ledge of a geyser at Yellowstone. Along the path, warning signs read “Dangerous Ground,” explaining that the crust around the geysers was too thin and could easily crack like ice. The water beneath was over 300 degrees. Hearing his feet thud past me as he leapt from the safety of the wooden planks, I called out, “Andrew, wait!” But by then, he’d slipped and the ground beneath him was already splitting apart. The second clone died in a similarly tragic fashion while we were on a skiing trip. Now, this clone was our third. Of course, I questioned whether the deaths resulted from a defect in the cloning process—perhaps some off-target effect—or maybe just a defect in Andrew. My mother had hoped it was neither, and I had to hope with her, but sometimes hope felt impossible, like wishing for gravity to stop. It was too much for me to think about, so I turned off the movie, opened up Crocodile Crossing, and spent the next few hours finishing the game.

“Come up and help me! It’s time to walk your brother!” my mom yelled from the stairs leading down to the basement, and I knew she would threaten to get rid of my console if I wasn’t out on the lawn in the next minute. Whenever my mother called the clones “your brother,” I felt annoyed, as if I had begged on Christmas day for a new Andrew, when in reality, I thought a dog would have been a better addition to our family.

As I opened the back door, I saw the clone sitting underneath the single tree we grew in our backyard, the sun shining through the thin leaves so that his face glowed with a green light. His eyes followed a butterfly that flitted around the tree, until it finally rested upon the branch where the shadow of its wings broke the sunlight and its silhouette was briefly on the clone’s face as well. It must have rained while I gamed; the smell of wet grass was powerful, and I could see the clone taking in the scent of the earth. My mother gripped the plastic end of the leash laced around the clone’s wrist. She tugged on it every other minute, needing a reminder that she was still tied to what she had left of her son. Dad paced through the grass in his leather sandals to his lawn chair, a cup of coffee in his hand, and sat down so quietly that the only noise I could hear was the wind and the swish of the leaves against it.

My mother finally broke the serenity by turning to my reanimated brother and asking, “Do you like it?” And I knew she asked about the house, with its black pig statues and empty planter boxes and neatly arranged patio furniture.

He gazed around looking at my parents and then at me, as if judging us or taking in our fragility, and replied, “I’m afraid.”

I was afraid, too, that my mother wouldn’t be able to stop and my father would never tell her to stop, either. I knew that, no matter what, the grief would be waiting for us.