[Note: This story was written in response to a debate I had with someone about the "nature vs. nurture" argument.]
I lifted the carefully-folded napkin from my plate and spread it on my lap. The white cotton napkin was thick and soft, but it was quickly forgotten as the waiter brought the menu. Expensive food in a script like spidery wrought iron flowed down one side of the menu; a list of wines more expensive than my car deigned to grace the opposite side. Matti Sogni was a very expensive restaurant, the kind of place that diplomats from the UN complex down the street brought other diplomats, the better to impress upon each other how good they were at frivolously spending their nation’s money.
I nodded my thanks to the waiter when he brought my glass of ice water. Cool droplets had formed on the outside, clinging for dear life, briefly, before finally sliding down the stem to oblivion on the white tablecloth. My guest was late, but Manhattan at lunchtime is a busy place, where it is easy to be late and hard to care.
The waiter touched my shoulder and motioned to the man behind him. I rose, and we shook hands, but I didn’t notice; it was my first time meeting him in person, and my eyes couldn’t help but trace the jaw line, the nose, the deep brown eyes and thinning hair. He wasn’t tall, but neither did he seem short; he had a presence about him.
“Thank you so much for coming,” I began, perhaps a little too friendly I thought, and he smiled a brief, controlled smile.
“I am sorry for being late,” he replied, and we took our seats. He sat with a straight back, I noticed, and his charcoal pin-striped suit accented his Germanic features. Thin hair was respectably combed, but not over the top. Napkins fluttered into laps and menus presented themselves, and we concentrated on ordering our food from the hovering waiter. Once the menus were taken away, I made it a point of placing my small notebook and Cross pen on the table edge.
“May we begin?” I asked, and he nodded. It was an awkward beginning to what promised to be an awkward conversation, but it was Pultizer material, and that was my domain.
“Well, Mr. Hiller, I want to thank you for agreeing to talk with me. You’ve kept a fairly low profile these last few years, understandably. I understand that you’re an attorney here in Manhattan?” My Cross pen was poised over the first line of the tablet, ready to immortalize in ink any worthy snippet.
He took a deep breath, glancing down first at the tablet then at his napkin, which he straightened on his lap. “Yes, I’m a partner at the firm of Stroth, Gold, Adler, and Gross, on 36th and Lexington. I specialize in currency and commodities arbitration, and do almost all my work for the NASD.”
The pen scratched across the paper. Scratch, scratch, dot. “I see. What led you to pursue law?”
His eyebrows raised slightly, cynically. “If you’re going to make ends meet in Manhattan, Mr. Ames, it will most often be as a lawyer or a banker, and I don’t like banks. I understand that you yourself live in New Jersey?”
I smiled briefly. “In Red Bank, yes. An hour’s train ride, but not so bad, considering.”
He nodded. “And you like working for the Times?”
My turn to nod. “Finest newspaper in the world, sir. Would you have agreed to this interview if I worked for any less?”
He smiled again, and nodded. “Well put, Mr. Ames. Now, you may continue with your questions.”
I thanked him and began to look down my list of topics. “To begin with, Mr. Hiller, maybe we can discuss your rather unusual childhood. I believe that people would be interested in your beginnings and how you came to discover who you are.”
He sighed almost imperceptibly. “Of course. That is often what people ask first. Well, I was born at Winchester Hospital in Boston, surrounded by MIT scientists and Harvard doctors. My mother’s name is Doctor Jessica Hiller, my father is Doctor Fulton Hiller, and I have no siblings. My mother was unable to conceive, you see, but was fully capable of bringing a fertilized egg to term once it was implanted in her uterus. I don’t actually remember the moment of my birth, so you’ll have to forgive me if I gloss over that part.” A smile drifted across his face.
“I’d say my childhood was normal, but then I’ve only had one childhood to compare it to. My parents were incredibly busy people, and so I was raised by a succession of nannies and au pairs, with my parents checking in every so often. Still, it was a happy enough time, and I fondly remember it as innocent and carefree.” He stopped to sip a lemon-laced glass of ice water, his fingers leaving small islands of disruption in the condensation on its sides.
I tapped my pencil on my pad once, twice, before venturing on. “When did you find out that you were… what you are?”
The glass resumed its post by his plate, and he frowned slightly while slicing off a portion of the steaming fresh bread the waiter had placed at the edge of our table. “What I am… we may as well not pussy-foot around the question, Mr. Ames. You’d like to know what it’s like to be a clone, I suppose?”
I stopped in mid-reach, my glass of iced tea forgotten. I felt a chill down deep into the soles of my feet as I tried to gauge if I’d offended him. “Well, yes, although I wasn’t –“
He waved me off. “Don’t be worried about my feelings, Mr. Ames. I’ve been called far, far worse, and by people with supposedly higher breeding than you or me. Clone, doppelganger, ersatz, counterfeit, mimic, fraud… The truth is that I feel like I feel, and I’ve never known any different. I was born from a womb, as were you; I grew up skinning my knees and kicking around a soccer ball and doing everything else you most likely did as well. When people say “clone”, it conjures up an image of someone not entirely human, someone stamped out of plastic in a dirty factory somewhere in Singapore and sold in violation of original copyrights. It makes one think of mindless soldiers in some bad science fiction movie, as if cloning reduces one’s will and sense of self to that of a lobotomized automaton. Clone. A cheap cardboard imitation of a human.”
He paused while the waiter delivered our salads, spearing some watercress on his fork. “I am none of those things, Mr. Ames. My parents are two of the finest geneticists in the world, I was sent to the best schools, Cornell and Harvard and Yale, and I am a respected force in the financial securities community. I have a black belt in go-ju-ryu and I paint watercolors on the weekends. I am every bit as human as you, perhaps more human than many people you meet walking around Central Park, in fact.”
My cheeks were burning, and he saw. He held up one hand in supplication. “I apologize. In answer to your question, I was seven years old when someone first told me that I was an exact genetic duplicate of someone else. And not just anyone, but him. It made for a difficult adolescence, I can assure you. Kids can be cruel as it is, but with something like that hanging over your head… and there was nowhere to go to avoid it, because my birth and life were such a headline-making event, first for the mainstream papers… and later for the tabloids. ‘Nazi Baby Ate My Jewish Neighbor’, sort of thing. Disgusting.”
I swallowed a bite of baby spinach with apple cider vinaigrette and washed it down with iced tea. “So it was unintentional, you finding this out?” My pen was catching up on the dialogue on its own. Scratch, scratch, dot, scratch, pause…
“Indeed. I don’t know when my parents planned on telling me, but by the time I was nine, I had come to them too many times asking what the other kids meant when they said those words, ‘Nazi’, ‘clone’, and all the rest. They finally explained where I had come from but not who my progenitor was; that came later, after more taunting and more questions. It was a painful education, but I’m glad now that I was able to face it early and learn to deal with it while my personality and psyche were still developing.” He paused to look out the window, and we each ate a few bites of salad silently.
I wiped my mouth on my napkin. “Have you deliberately avoided certain activities or interests because of your heritage?” I asked, pen again poised to record his reply.
“I assume you mean politics or military service? Yes, I have. The parallels were simply too strong to be ignored; too many people would have made a fuss about it. Never mind that the United States of today is hardly the Weimar Germany of the 1930’s.” Our entrees arrived – his was a pasta fresca dish, mine a stuffed pullet. He continued. “And I am active politically; I make regular donations to the Libertarians, educate myself on policies and platforms, and vote my conscience. But I have never actively sought political office. And while I believe I would have been a very capable soldier, I also steered clear of that course, again because of the complications that it would have caused in people’s perceptions.” Scratch, scratch, pause, scratch, underline…
