I never got used to Dad’s face once the treatments began, but in a way I got used to the fact of his face, the idea that every time I saw him, it changed. It felt far more like a personal regression than the advancement of his own transformation – his face growing younger made me feel younger in return, always looking into the eyes of a father that had only existed in memories of decades past.
At first, when he disappeared into the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Johns Hopkins Joint Security Research Clinic, I saw him infrequently in short, awkward video calls in which he explained in painful stuttering wheezes what the doctors had explained to him. He seemed so old then, so weak, pitiful, deluded.
“They’re going to replace my DNA, put in this new stuff, bit by bit, with viruses and lasers. My own DNA, all cleaned up, what a thing, eh son?”
I had smiled reassuringly into the phone, feeling sick. “I’m glad you’re helping with the research dad, it’s important stuff. How are they treating you? Better than the rest home?”
His cloudy eyes stared hard, but at the image of my face on his end, not the camera. The effect was disconcerting, like spying on someone else’s awkward parental confrontation.
“Research is with monkeys, boy, this is the real deal. They’re going to make me young, you’ll see.”
At the time it just made me ill. I had allowed this, allowed him to go in and be poked and prodded and experimented on when he should be living out the last years of hi life in peace and quiet. That he believed they were doing more than experiment on him was just another layer of guilt, another layer of evidence that his mind had slipped and that he deserved more from me than a few short video calls in which I did little more than humor him.
Now, sitting across the table from him, I feel ten years old. No, that’s not exactly it. As if I ought to feel ten years old. Glaring at me with his cool blue eyes, he looks exactly like the towering figure of my father that dominates my memory of childhood, though now he is shorter than I, wiry and sharp-faced, small frame radiating energy. The father of my childhood, now almost a stranger, my childhood terror of his power now the grown up terror of a very dangerous man.
It took me a while to accept that the treatments were doing something more than stimulating an old man’s imagination. Dr. Stevens asked me to come in for a chat after the first few months of treatments. I braced myself for the horrific news, but on the phone the doctor seemed relaxed, almost jocular.
“What we’ve been working on with your father is a technique that uses his own DNA from five decades ago to repair and replace his current DNA. You know your father worked for the CIA while he served in Viet Nam?”
That wasn’t part of dad’s old war stories, told and retold during my youth, but he had talked about the CIA with increasing frequency in his last few years at the rest home. I flushed with guilt, thinking how easily I had dismissed it as an old man’s delusion.
“So he really was a CIA operative? I guess I didn’t entirely believe… I mean, he only told me when he was in the home and…” I petered out before the man’s carefully blank stare.
“Operative may be too strong a word, but he was involved in a number of experiments conducted on soldiers in the field. Completely voluntary, by the way, if you are wondering. Blood and other samples were taken of all the test subjects, and in the case of your father’s cohort, the samples were frozen, preserving his twenty-two year old DNA. As you know, as a person ages, DNA becomes damaged -this accumulation of damage is responsible for many of the effects of aging.”
“So you can give him back his young DNA?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. There is more to it than that, of course, and damaged DNA is only one of many interconnected systems involved in senescence – aging – but with young DNA and therapies that promote cell regeneration, many of the effects of aging can be repaired.”
“Sounds great, I guess I had better freeze some blood for when I get old, eh?”
He laughed as if I had genuinely said something funny. “It’s still a very experimental process, I’m afraid it will be a very long time before it is something that can be offered to the general public, not to mention the ethical considerations. Anyway, Mr. Starkweather, your father is doing very well with the treatments, I asked you in because it can be very difficult when parents undergo major changes…”
The rest of it seemed cribbed from the same pamphlet the rest home had given me. Forgettable pablum about accepting changes, about respecting an elder’s choices and understanding that sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. I tuned it out, waiting for him to get to the point. How long would it be before the DNA treatment failed, how long before he died, and how bad would be the suffering and pain of genetic catastrophe?
Then dad came in, electric wheelchair humming. The changes were subtle, and would have been easy to dismiss as the placebo effect of his optimism, if not for the hair. The last wispy remains of silver had been shaved off, and his scalp, his entire scalp, was black with a quarter inch growth of thick hair.
“We expect your father to regain a significant portion of his mobility and strength, he is going to need your help and support when he leaves here, your patience as he re-enters society.”
My father watched me, blue eyes locked on mine, his smile slightly lopsided, the half-grin of my childhood come back to haunt.
(continued tomorrow, I promise!)
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