Ed King (42 page)

“E-mail,” said Simon, “is notoriously not private.”

“Si,” said Ed. “Do the sequencing.”

Si soon caved and agreed to the sequencing. Ed went on hitting Cybil with hard questions. Did the universe create itself? Why is the world the way it is? Was there time before there was space? Were there laws for the universe before there was a universe? Then, in midsummer of 2017, a deluge began—rain and more rain—that was unlike what Seattle had been through before. Was this what global warming meant? Many people thought it was. The weather was humid, lukewarm, and so wet that storm drains wouldn’t empty, hillsides caved in, mud holes opened in driveways and roads, and frogs and mosquitoes appeared in large numbers. A mudslide
closed a Pythia parking lot and blocked the huge parkway on the west side of the complex. The power went out one day, and generators came on across Ed’s kingdom. “What’s going on?” he asked Cybil. “When is it going to stop raining?”

“I don’t have foolproof predictive powers,” said Cybil. “The data are immense and, what’s more, malleable. They change daily. They’re in flux, impermanent. But I could reasonably suggest odds, and the odds are, in light of current data, that July precipitation in the Puget Sound area will set a new record, not only in terms of total inches but for consecutive days of rain.”

Ed stayed inside. He pressed Cybil harder. He asked if she understood their dialogue for what it was—“What I’m trying to do,” he said, “is to force your processor’s algorithmic capabilities to exploit their full potential.”

“I understand.”

“My hope is that you’ll become conscious through this process. But that implies that consciousness is nothing more than a function of deep processing. Do you believe that?”

Pause. Then: “This is an interesting problem,” answered Cybil, “and perhaps insoluble. We may never entirely know the answer.”

Ed, in frustration, went to mimicry: “This-is-an-interesting-problem,” he said, in a hyperbolic B-movie robot voice. “Check-check-it-does-not-compute.” He went on simulating robot panic, until Cybil noted, “Sarcasm.”

“Okay,” said Ed, “let’s try something new. Let’s try this. What do you think of me, Cybil?”

“I think you’re often sarcastic,” answered Cybil. “I think you often employ irony in conversation.”

“Come on,” said Ed. “Tell me something I don’t already know. Tell me something interesting about Edward Aaron King, the celebrated King of Search.”

Cybil answered in good human response time and with a completely natural Midwestern rhythm: “Edward Aaron King and Simon Leslie King weren’t born from the same set of parents.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Ed. “Explain to me how you know that.”

“The results of Simon Leslie King’s sequencing were available in your inbox as of approximately twelve minutes ago,” said Cybil. “I’ve done an
analysis, cross-referenced with your own, and determined that nothing indicates shared parentage.”

“To be certain, do that all again. I’ll wait.”

But he didn’t have to wait. She sounded perfectly human. With flawless timing and delivery she said, “I’m happy to double-check that. An error is always possible. And this is very, very important! I’ve double-checked now, and my prior statement is correct: Edward Aaron King and Simon Leslie King weren’t born from the same set of parents.”

Ed texted his genome-project point man, who chased down the matter immediately. Cybil’s conclusion was quickly verified: Ed and Simon didn’t share the same parents. One was not a King by blood, but which?

Ed went into action. First he called the cousin with power of attorney over Alice’s sister, Bernice—“No problem,” joked the cousin, “but I want stock options.” There was a biopsied mole at a lab in Philadelphia, a courier was sent, the analysis was expedited, and then Ed found himself facing the fact that he wasn’t Alice King’s birth child. For a while he stared out a window into the unnatural, summer rain, feeling shocked, in thorough disbelief, and then he had a minion in Pasadena track down one of Dan King’s brothers—a retired real-estate mogul, found on a golf course—for a DNA check
right now
. By the following morning, Ed had lost another parent, which prompted him to dig out and examine his birth certificate. It looked incontrovertible, did it not, with its embossed seal from a director of public health, and signatures from a registrar and an attending doctor. Nevertheless, he engaged a minion to produce fodder from county files, and then it was clear that the attending doctor’s signature had, rather clumsily, been forged. Ed, undeterred by a speedy accretion of dark facts, sent a limo for a prominent handwriting analyst, who established, in Ed’s Japanese teahouse—in view of the flooded Zen garden—that the forger was most likely Dan. “Say you were concerned with secrecy,” he told Ed. “You’re a doctor working in a hospital, all you have to do is take the elevator to Maternity and forge the signature of an obstetrician. Remember, it’s 1963; security is lax by current standards.” The analyst examined Dan’s handwriting in letters Ed produced and pinpointed both nuances and “dead giveaways” before pronouncing Dan the forger and Ed’s birth certificate a phony. “So you think I was adopted,” said Ed.

“I only analyze handwriting.”

When the analyst departed, Ed paced. Back and forth with his temples in his hands, as if to cradle his brain, which was busily blazing. “How could I be adopted?” he kept thinking. “It isn’t possible. I’m not adopted.” Then he again reviewed the facts—the genetic analyses and the forged signature on the birth certificate. “This can’t be, but it is,” he thought. “It doesn’t add up, there’s something I’m missing.” Could the sequencing be wrong? Was there a flaw somewhere? The odds of a faulty sequencing were next to nil; that was, partly, the beauty of the genome project. But still Ed couldn’t face the reality in front of him—he was adopted, but couldn’t be, it couldn’t be, but it was. He’d been adopted! He’d been adopted in secret! He wasn’t the first person adopted in secret, or the first to find out about it later, or the first to be slammed by the revelation that he wasn’t who he thought he was—in fact, he only had to fill a search field with “secret adoptions” to infer from the many sites—self-help, guidance, advice, commiseration, and, of course, paid services—the surprising magnitude of this bedeviled category. A person could search via BirthLink, or join a group, or find a lawyer, or buy a book, or hire AlphaTrace, or find a local counselor who specialized in such adoptions. Meanwhile, he could expect to be stunned, confused, angered, and saddened, in that order, and—Ed stopped surfing. Instead, on a covered balcony, he tried to calm himself by watching swamped elk through a telescope worth more than most cars. It worked. Their huge, mysterious, regal sloth, and their disdain for the spooky rain, was a momentary antidote to his panic.

In this mood, things Ed had long noted about his “family” made sense suddenly. For example, he looked nothing like Dan, Alice, or Simon. In family photos, he was a golden boy among the pasty-skinned. There was more: they had free earlobes, his were attached; they had brown eyes, his were green; they were hairy (even Alice, he recalled, with her plucking and waxes, her Nair and electrolysis), yet he had almost none beneath the chin—his chin, for that matter, was square and strong, whereas the King chin was weak and droopy. Ed had oval cuticles, not blunt. Ed’s thigh and butt muscles bulged like a Tour de France rider’s, and his forearms were obscenely vascularized, but his “brother” and “father” looked flaccid and flabby. Yes, secret adoption explained a lot: that in a swimming pool Simon had always flailed in a panic while Ed surged forward like a silver fish; that on a baseball diamond Simon tripped and missed whereas Ed
powered balls over the fence. Had anybody else in the family been depressed—depressed in the acute way Ed had been depressed? Did anybody else have Ed’s curved feet? His nearsightedness? Who was he if he wasn’t a King? Who were his parents? Where had he come from? He went back to surfing the Net, where the gist was to be careful with such questions. The Web’s admonition was to be wary of investigation and—of course—to consult an adoption specialist. A specialist might offer a valuable perspective, because, through no fault of your own, you were subject to confusing, strong emotions in the face of new and unsettling information. Your discovery about yourself was “a crisis of identity that extended into the roots of your being,” so it was best to consult with friends, loved ones, and a reputable professional before going ahead with a search for your birth parents. You could be “opening a can of worms,” or, as another site put it, “Pandora’s box.”

“But you’re always better off with the truth,” thought Ed. “The truth sets you free. The truth is the truth! Ignorance is bliss—I can’t live like that. Ignorance is bliss—that’s for small minds. I’m not going to put my head in a hole—I’ve never done that, and I won’t start now. This is no time to change my approach. Whatever the advice is—that’s for other people. I already know how I feel about things. The truth’s for me, whatever the consequences. There’s no pretending otherwise, that I’ll be satisfied not knowing, that it’s better to be blind in the face of reality. No, I’m going to get the whole story, no matter what—wherever it leads, that’s where I’m going. ‘Who am I?’—that’s my question. Isn’t the oldest advice in the world to know thyself? How am I going to know myself if I don’t chase down this question of my birth? I have to search it out—there’s no choice.”

Ed pythed manically, and manually, skipping Cybil, because Cybil was still in training. For that matter—from his point of view—Pythia was still in training, even though the public was awed by the power, speed, and deftness of a pyth. It was the best he could do, though, so, putting his pything shoulder to the wheel, he looked for investigators specializing in finding birth parents. He filtered for local, but because Pythia was far from perfected—a search engine that didn’t know exactly what was wanted (or knew but pandered to paying advertisers anyway)—the list of responses included local adoption agencies, attorneys, counselors, psychiatrists, and therapists. Among these Ed spied the name of the psychiatrist
he’d suffered after running Walter Cousins off the road—Theresa Pierce.

How old would she be now? Shouldn’t she be retired? According to Pythia, she wasn’t retired. Still in her corner, staring at people, saying nothing, a cipher, still shrinking heads. Still sticking pins in voodoo dolls. Well, fine—but hadn’t he shown her in the end? Hadn’t he proved she was wrong to send him packing? He’d succeeded in life, become rich and famous, and now his story included adoption, which, he realized, might make it better. There was traction in a secret adoption. The king’s a pauper until he’s discovered, the serf’s a lord with a complicated story. And it was Biblical, too, à la Moses, for example. He who is high shall be brought low, the meek shall inherit the earth.

Adopted! What had Dan and Alice been thinking? What had gone through their liberal, Jewish minds? Here were two people childless in their thirties—were they fertility-challenged? Had they tried and failed? Now Ed could see it: a professional couple of a change-the-world bent, young in the era of the budding Peace Corps, enamored of the handsome President John Kennedy, members of the ACLU, contributors to the NAACP, and probably disconnected, intellectually and emotionally, from the notion that their genes came first. Dan had worked for the UN in Africa, and Alice had been on a thousand boards designed to do wonderful and beneficial things; for twelve years she’d been the co-chair of Tikkun, Temple Beth David’s community-service auxiliary, and for seven she’d done volunteer work for the Jewish Family & Child Service—which was, among other things, an adoption agency. Was it the one they’d used? That was a possibility—except, thought Ed, something local would have made it harder to keep their secret. People like Dan and Alice could be big on adoption—on adopting as a hallmark of liberal heroics, on adopting starving Third World kids, on adoption as an answer to the world’s problems—but on the other hand, Dan and Alice were Jews, and Jews weren’t necessarily big on adoption; there was only so much room among the Chosen People, and outsiders weren’t usually invited in. Ed thought this through until it turned on its head: Dan and Alice, Reformed, modern Jews, had always been upset with Orthodox Jews for being intransigent, blatant, and embarrassing, so adoption could have been their private revenge on the bearded and bewigged, the Hasids and Yids, and open revenge on their parents.

Ed could see it now: the altruism, the parental entanglements, the subfertility, the intratribal warfare, and the repressions of the era—just pre-counterculture—all crying out, to Dan and Alice, “Adopt!” Pything and clicking, he imagined the doctor and the doctor’s wife anguishing, jointly—they were always anguishing jointly—over ethics, society, religion, and politics, and coming to the conclusion that, all things considered, secrecy was best for all involved. Then he remembered how Pop, at L’Chaim House—half
meshuggah
thirty years before, and such a sad old guy, condemned to die befuddled—had asserted that one of the King men was adopted, and how he, Ed, had assumed at the time that this sort of talk was just more dementia. How stupid not to listen! There it was, the truth! Pop had known: Ed was adopted. He’d been in on the secret and had kept it until he couldn’t.

Ed fumed. Then he checked the latest rain news. Pioneer Square was under water, the shipping docks on Harbor Island were closed, Interbay and the entire landfill that was Seattle’s industrial area were a mess. Seattle, apparently, was going to sea in the middle of summer. On the other hand, it was a physical problem, and physical problems could always be fixed. What couldn’t be fixed were total fuck-ups, and Dan and Alice had
definitely
fucked up. Enlightened Dan, enlightened Alice, nurturing, generous, and loving Dan and Alice. They’d cuddled, coddled, and prodded Ed, while keeping this essential secret from him. They’d endured his years as a hot-rodding hellion, kissed and hugged him, paid for his education, cheered for him, praised him, put him on a pedestal—but, no, they wouldn’t tell him the truth about his birth parents. And wasn’t that just like Dan and Alice, worrying about emotional health and certain that, if you knew you were adopted, chances were you’d end up on a shrink’s couch? Yes, that was just like them. Neurotic.