Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 08:38:35 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: One Clone: Dreaming

			   "One Clone: Dreaming"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


(This story is in memory of Michael, from a long time ago--I've
never forgotten you)


 Summer coming. And Timmy, who hated the name Timmy,
felt the bonds getting ready to burst. In the classroom that smelled
of varnish overlaid with the wafting aroma of newly cut grass and
onions coming through the long windows opened to the sounds of
freedom just there, just beyond reach. And he would be with him
again, because that was all that mattered, the rising in the boy, the
rising of names on blackboards that teachers had nothing to do
with. Lessons that could be learned in the summer parts of the
mind. As Miss Cromie droned on and on, reminding him of a tired
fly buzzing desultory arcs round him as he sat on his side yard white
painted flaked swing and pushed himself back and forth with the
tips of his tennis shoes.

 Boredom was a country these last weeks of school.
Boredom and Timmy's secret fantasies. How he loved the maturity
of himself. The straightness of himself. No one could guess he was
not Timmy at all, not the boy who had once, in his place, sat here
mid row middle seat, as the new Timmy's eyes half closed, then
sparked back up as he turned the page of the yellowed text book,
automatically following along as the teacher slugged the thick
muzzy air with her dry tongue and the boy next to him shook his
head to wake himself up, and the girl on the other side yawned and
stretched her legs out in front. Everything leaned. Everything
seemed important. Nothing seemed important. He was a chemist,
not the real him but someone further away. He was a medical
marvel. Come see the clone. Come see the batting averages of
magic turned science turned nuts and bolts turned reality. He
wanted to go home and tell his pale copy what he had learned
today. To thank the "real" boy for making him. For seeing further
than he had had any right to.

 For Timmy and for every other boy in the world on this day,
he felt his arms and legs tingly, he felt his thighs hot, he felt the
center of him a sexual territory, felt something that was wise and
sweaty and good and profound. And the afternoon turned onward
as though it had forgotten the time clock that was supposed to be
buried somewhere within itself. He gauged and he closed his eyes
and smiled to himself as he opened them and the dark spots came
flashing by, cartwheeling by. Timmy was not mad and he was not a
dreamer, not anymore. He had made peace with things the way they
were. And he was in love. Spring forecast: lonely and quick view
snaps of his sister and her boyfriend on the porch, making out on
the green painted flaked porch swing. Timmy left whistling to
himself. Timmy needing to make a copy of himself. It could be
done. And it would because no laws could be passed that would
stop the inevitable.

 It had been done. Proof positive sat in this wooden chair
with its stupid desk attached that his arms lay on, that he wanted to
lie his head on and go to sleep. Nobody knew or cared--yet--that
underneath his clothes, he had done some tinkering with the original
uninspired laughable Timmy's former body, that he had tweaked
and torqued and made small muscles bigger and made his body
creamy and the color of a lovely summer sunset seen through pink
glass. He was a ribbon of impossibility and if the teach ever got
through nattering he would show them. Show them the stuff he was
made of. The dream that was him that kissed the girl to his left and
hugged her and the boy to his right would look on with a kind of
hiss in his eyes because time wanted Timmy and Timmy was more
than what they saw. For he had a mechanism inside himself.
Something that was quietly coiled. Something that was more than
routine solitary when he skated his hand along himself in the
bathroom as he lay on the floor and conjured. What magic? Dream
it up! I'm your keeper. I'm your personal mage. And if you want
the sky opened, then I shall open it and cast your dreams inside, but
you better make damned sure you know what you want from those
dreams. Euclid. Scholar. Prometheus. The firebrand sitting here and
destiny on his shoulders. Imagine me. And I am thus here.

 Two hours ago, after gym class was over and the boys were
taking showers and goofing round and slapping each other with wet
towels and laughing and cursing and spitting to show what real men
they were, Timmy had sat on the wooden bench watching them,
curiously unafraid. They looked silly, those naked boys and half
naked boys, as they played roundelays with one another, as they
ducked and feinted down streams of water jets in the showers and
sprayed one another and talked about screwing this girl and that
one. And Timmy looked. He looked at their bodies and he felt a
peace come over him, the thin ones and bulky ones the toned ones
and the flabby ones. They seemed little shells of happiness that
cuddled inside each other because they somehow fit with one
another and the din and the shower throbs and the proud dicks they
sprouted, some of which sprouted into half erections, making sure,
the owners, that everyone knew the heft of the reason was for the
girls and them alone, all of it was part of the puzzle put together
with such seeming ease.

 Timmy had sat there on the wet bench dressed in his street
clothes and he was quiet inside himself. No machinery in there. No
circuits to worry about fizzing out or breaking. He was model
numero uno. He was the season of boy and time and machine and
more than what they were and he knew what they did as their
words overlay one another and they jostled and pushed for their
territory on the water soaked concrete floor, the smell of fungus in
the hot steamy air. And he wanted no one. Not like he used to. For
he was not the original. He adapted himself like a pastiche boy. He
adapted himself into work roads the others did not see. And if he
was clothed then he was really naked. If he was not looking at
anyone, then he was looking right at them. He heard their thoughts,
their sexual lusts, saw wisely their random unaware sex play, their
extreme childhood on the cusp of adult turn away and look back in
rueful memory.

 They didn't scare him anymore. He didn't dwell where they
did. He was obviated from the clan that he had never wanted to be
a part of, and he wanted to see his sister and her boyfriend make
out on the porch of a summer night, wanted to show them the cogs
and the machineries that were in them and not in him. He wanted
jacking off and he wanted the feel of cream rising inside him for a
nobler purpose. Not this fun house mirror stuff that was going on
around him, not these little animals who thought they were part of
something bigger and more profound cause they had discovered sex
and kissing and erections and could come and could do it several
times in a row and their mouths eating dreams as their voices and
laughter brayed all round him like a brown fever they had attained
for them and them alone, for no one else could possibly have a
corner on the market.

 And now in the scuffle of the last class of the day, he
listened haphazardly. It sounded muffled, far away and gone, stifled
and not just with the heat, as though everything was in a bell jar.
There were candles to snuff out. There was an image to get home
to. There were seedlings in him that grew more than lacquered
dreams. There was early morning in him that was more than waking
up to erection and rubbing it to heaven and then holding tight
clenched to himself as he rode the bumpy stair way back down to
all those reality leaves of gold waiting for him, that he slid into and
destroyed crackling as he cackled back. He had nothing more than
the day around him and the rabbit holes he hid in, and the dreams
Ricky had of going off with Jeffrey who had the hots for Monica
who really wished Tommy and Sara could get back together again
because they were made for each other, but if Tommy should ask
Monica out for an evening sometime, well, all's fair...

 The community budding nascent round Timmy whose penis
was bigger than his predecessor's, if it was wanted, or he could
make it smaller, he could make a bit of hair on his chest, he could
take it away, he could give himself a merkin, color it whatever the
other person wanted, or he could make himself hairless there, he
could make himself more muscular, he could make himself a dim
jock, he could make himself a Shakespearean scholar jock, nothing
mattered, he was everyone to everyone. The original half baked
Timmy had had zits. This Timmy did not. The original was horribly
himself which meant he was no one and this Timmy was anything
and nothing because that was the thing to be, nothing. So others
could make you into just what they wanted you to be. And if Kath
caught him sometime staring out the bedroom window at her and
Stevie on the front porch late night, then she could rattle her little
brother's cage, or try to, and he would not sit there and take it. He
would tell her what to do with Stevie, would tell her best how to
suck him off, would tell here what a boy/man liked in that
department and shock her, the formerly shy reticent brother who
blushed at every word spoken in the language of that particular
country.

 And when her jaw dropped open, he could laugh at her and
call her names and he could fly out the window into the blue as true
summer sky with the heedless clouds scudding along and the world
was the pearl that he kept in his hand and closed his hand over the
world and it went dark and silent, went quiet, and there would be
no more locker rooms with naked and partly dressed boys and
sprays of sex words and sprays of contentment expressed in
contempt because it was a rocky world and a boy has to take
shelter in callousness if he is not to die of fear and little pains that
add up to one fine day, homicide.

 Timmy would freeze frame the boys there in the locker
room. He would freeze frame the shower needles cascading down
the bodies. He would go up to each one of them and he would talk
to them. Say anything he wanted because when he released them
from the stop motion prison--if he released them from the stop
motion prison--they would not remember any of it. He would tell
them their days to come. He would reach out his hand and he
would touch them. He would feel their tits and their penises and
their buttocks and he would caress their faces with his hand. He
would feel their flesh touching out to him in quiet shameful
desperation, wanting even his hand to linger. He would feel so
sorry for them that his heart might break if he had a heart. They
still, oddly enough, did.

 Their skin, ruddy, alabaster, black, brown, needing
someone's hand, needing someone to tell them they mattered, that
they were big and brave and they would whip the world into
submission and it would be the key club or the football game or the
school newspaper that this boy or that was a part of and it would
matter, that it would not be huddling lonely at night over their
computers trying to find something beyond tomorrow, someone
who could tell them about forever, someone who could tell them
there was more to life than a droning history teacher or even more
droning English teacher, that sex for them would be the ending of
the world and the beginning of the next, that the new shadows in
their new creases had never existed in another mortal human being
before them and would never exist in another mortal creature after
them, that they were unique and for the ages.

 And he would tell them they were wrong. He would say it
gently like people said gentle things to Timmy, the things that hurt
the worst, that made him want to run away and never stop running,
Timmy who was in P.E. not as a token, not to just make him feel
better, who was a good basket ball player and could swing a bat
and hit a ball to left field as well as anybody else, who did too have
coordination, who wasn't a whimp and a screw up because that was
not his legacy, that was not his reason d'etre. And yet, clumsiness
was in his genetic make up, or it had been, in the other's. And he
would kneel before them in time stop in the locker room and he
would put his face against their thighs and he would feel the newly
soft hair of them and he would put his face against their penises, so
many different  wondrous forms and shapes they were, and he
would feel how warm, feel how safe, feel how the world came from
here and more every day and he would weep perhaps for the folly
of humankind, and for the folly of a boy who had created another
and called it himself because he couldn't take the world turning one
more second with things the way they were.

 You will fall in love three times, Jace, he would tell one
boy, holding him close, feeling the warmth of him radiating out like
a heater, the water darts caught in mid splash, caught in trajectory
to skin not yet reached, you will try not to but you will fall in love
three times and they will not love you and they will dislike you and
you will get a love affair with beer going and you will live in a
parabola of discontent, you will never see the one for you because I
am the one for you and you never knew it and if you did know it
then I would turn from you and I would smile and I would walk
away and your heart would be broken for the first time in your life
and you would feel you are in a little black box of turning wheels
and cogs and it would get smaller and smaller and you would cry
out in your sleep at night because night is when the pain burns the
brightest and you learn to fall in love with it.

 Timmy would touch Jace's flaccid penis and hold the small
fleshy balls and he would inhale boy and he would touch himself
then as well as he knelt on the wet floor and heard the day linger as
he put his hands on Jace's round tummy and stroked it gently, made
circles of magic with his hands on it, and promised him that he
would send him away to the rest of his days with the unaware
knowledge that someone once in high school pressed love into him,
that someone took a moment of time to say to him it's never what
you think and the tangle of jungle is something no one will ever
figure out and that's the point, tripping and falling is the point, but
if the grass is glass then you can see through it if you try and when
you do, see an image in me that I will hold for the rest of my life for
you and thus keep you as safe and protected as I know how.

 Reveries in class. Tagging slowly. Time linked to seconds
and then handed over to minutes and Timmy needing to get home
to his creator, thinking, everyone should know who their personal
creator is, have him right there with you, then you could talk things
over with him, tell him where he mucked up, where he blew it
altogether, where he needed to rework some things, so you could
go to factory that made you or it could come to you and you
wouldn't have to spend your whole damned life broken and trying
to fix yourself when it was impossible. He looked up from his book
as though his neck was made of heavy molasses, at the back of
Jace's neck, close enough to touch, close enough to hold fingers to
like to a winter stove in the depths of December snows and feel
warm for the first time. That's what they never tell you about being
a clone, you're cold a lot and you would give anything just to warm
up a bit, and differentness, it makes everything even more different.
Things, people, animals--they seem as if you have manufactured
them up as a joke and you find yourself wanting to apologize to
them for what you've done, for being an egomaniac, but of course
you can't, cause they would look at you as though you
were--well--an egomaniac.

 I am not insane, Timmy said to himself. Cars on a distant
highway trundled past, some motors coughing, some humming,
some echoing. He heard the voices of other teachers in other nearby
rooms, their voices equally as flat, undisturbed, swinging in that
cradle that said hold on, summer's almost here for us too, feel it
coming, feel it on little cat's feet whispering down the hot humid
close day, listen for it and let it take you away from kids and adults
and textbooks and who gives a damn?, if it's not going to be on the
test? and figure out for yourself why you a full grown adult can't
hack it in the outside world and have to come here under the guise
of being a teacher when all you want to be is a kid again no matter
how bad it might have been because it's better here than out there
where all the really mean children play so viciously..

 Timmy liked to jack off with his clone maker. He liked to be
naked with him and to look at the body that was a paucity of his
own. He liked to hold his creator close to him and feel the warmth
of the boy comfort the coldness of himself. He liked to feel his
maker's skin that was smooth as opposed to his own which though
flesh feeling and looking at times felt as though more like
upholstery than skin. He loved feeling the other Timmy grow
against him and he loved the feeling of hands exploring him like he
was the god instead of the other way round. His creator was more
and more pale every day. From hiding in the woods during the day,
from being alone while Timmy passed himself off as that weird
quite stupid kid. The Timmy clone was far smarter than the original,
but still maintained some of the clumsiness of his progenitor, and
hid his intelligence in the same lackadaisical bundle of bafflement
that the real Timmy had always stumbled around in. Timmy liked to
come on his pale twin's stomach and they would watch the come
and think could it create a baby?,  would it be clone or real?, how
could you tell?, are there lives in it that are now dying?, is it a sin
for a clone to jack off like everyone seems to think it is for boys to?
Is there a clone heaven? A clone hell? Send in the clones. A clone
for you, a clone for me, and we're a little happy one man family....

 Clone Timmy was better at sports than the original Timmy
had been. He allowed himself that, though he still played clumsy
and falling over his too large feet all the other times and no one
seemed to mind or to notice and so that was okay. He loved to be
with the boy who made him, the boy who was getting more and
more pale who seemed to be reenacting with his clone "The Picture
of Dorian Gray" and that made clone Timmy feel better, like he
would not need that particular wall socket anymore, real soon. That
he would be able to walk and run and tumble and fall and rush into
summer, this very summer perhaps, without worrying about his
power source and needing to rush back and recharge.

 He would stop time in the locker room tomorrow. He
would do this because he knew he could, even though he never had
before. He would go to the boys and he would tell who would be a
success and who would glide along and who would make a total
muck of their lives. Not that he really had any notion, but it would
be equal parts: gift, payback, allusion, illusion, sad songs, happy
tunes, all the notes maybe they could really play some day and in a
way he might create whatever their future held for them, be a little
part of them without their ever knowing it and that way become
immortal just a little bit in them.

 The old Timmy had never had the courage to look at the
boys in the shower and dressing and undressing for he had been
ashamed of his thoughts, ashamed of himself. The old Timmy had
simply dressed and undressed and dressed again as fast as he could,
looking at the dark floor in the room of flickering shadows from the
fluorescent light flickers and the smell of steam and the smell of
sweaty flesh and then that flesh was bitten into submission by the
showers and the whole gamut of feels and sounds and coronas of
life all around him while it seemed as though he had had no life of
his own, not ever, so one fine day last year he had gone home and
had created a more perfect version of himself, don't ask how, it's
for no one to know save the two of us, and like most creators and
creations, the miracles get lost somewhere in the middle and even
they aren't sure how it all worked out, just that it did and that was
enough.

 The old woman of at least 45, how could anyone be that old
and still exist?, didn't it just make her feel horrible being like that?,
accidentally broke the chalk on the blackboard and some of the kids
laughed and the old woman laughed a bit herself, then looked at the
clock on the wall and told them their homework assignment and
what to look for on the final exam next week. The hearts did not
clutch. There was not, for the most part, a fever frenzy of little mice
running up and down worrying about a good grade or a passing
grade or worse which it was best not to think about. They were all
just tongue tied with spring fever. It lazed in them like a sleepy cat
in the noon time sun yellow softness that came through the kitchen
windows as he snoozed away on the parquet floor happy and alone
in its own furry contented dreams.

 Some of the boys dreamed of the new baseball season,
hoping for the Angels to pull out all the stops this year and make
them proud. Some of the girls dreamed of what it would be like to
finally and at long last meet Elijah Wood and tell him they saw
"Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings" four times or
more and how their dreams had been made darker and more
complex with a wondered wounded hobbit worry now inside them
that needed more than what was hiding in tomorrow or in some jerk
boyfriend's jeans while the girls' own horizon had somehow
expanded as they gazed dreamily at the posters of Elijah on their
bedroom walls in all that pinkness of the room, as they got lost in
his eyes that said here lie blue skies and peaceful eternity, and, true,
there are dangerous forests to get through, but don't worry, I'm
here beside you, hold my hand and we will make it.

 Timmy put his left elbow on the desk and rested his left
cheek on that hand. He looked out the window at the almost
frightening blue sky and the green grass that all seemed to be a
movie dream and he felt the buzz of the school, like a bumble bee
holding in the air by somehow or other maintaining stasis with that
heavy weight that should not by all scientific accounts be able to be
so supported, thus Timmy the clone came into the world to be an
echo glass for others, to secretly love and to know things he could
not know, for there were just more questions, such as: why had his
creator bothered making him, because it was still all secrecy, and
heart pain fear of being found out, of being unmasked, while the
real Timmy retreated in the wood and if there were Tolkien elves in
there with him, and there weren't, then no elf help could possibly
bring Timmy back to life, back to himself again. Poor kid, the clone
thought, always running away, then he got too scared even to do
that, so here I am now running away for him. I love you, someone
had carved on Timmy's desk, from who knows how long ago.

 No name of the person loved or the person who loved him
or her. An idle wish on a halcyon spring day that was for all intent
and purpose summer. Timmy wished to rub his jeans crotch. He
wished to go to the rest room and jack off there. He wished others
to see him, to see how he had improved the bland forgettable was
he even really ever there? Timmy, to see how he could magically
presto chango right in front of them, so he could be nothing and
they would be everything and he would be their heart's desire and
they would wish him and want him and he would get colder and
colder inside with all their adoration, he would be winter and frost
and snow and ice and Tundra and the top of the world even with
their laying on of hands. Hands that would not heal him, only make
it all a thousand and more times worse.

 I can't see them alive, he thought. I see them as barely
moving statues. I sense the community around me, but I can't feel
the pulse of it, the thrum beat of it, the rush and push and quick
MTV slashes of everything, the short cuts mind and emotions and
bodies use, the rush of wind that is them reacting and acting to a
multitude of stimuli, all caught in gales of laughter and shouts and
whispers and candle flickers that burn so brightly, that turn and run
to the world, with fears large or small that make them for some
insane reason run faster, the quivering of them, the life in them, the
boys and the girls and the play it by ear on the run no scripts and
the procedures and knowing somehow where the boundaries are
and where the rules say you can cross them and if you mistake the
permission and get your face slapped or get beaten up you lick your
wounds and you come back for more and tomorrow there is the
new world a little different from the old one of yesterday and it
goes round and round like a marble and you're on it and running in
time in synch in beat in precession and you don't know how you are
doing it just that you are and if you think about it, if you ask why,
then you lose, then your candles don't burn as bright, then you are
whisked out of the community, pushed off the little blue marble and
you stand up in space standing on nothing looking down trying to
get back home and you can't cause it's not home and you don't
know what the hell you're going to do.....

 And the bell rang. And the students came alive, getting out
of their chairs, one or two almost knocked the chairs over they
rushed out so fast, and the school was a bee hive of scream child
freedom!!!! and Timmy looked forward to running home to the
woods and finding his creator and he would tell the boy what
school was like today and how many hoops he shot in P.E. and
nobody noticed but being good at stuff is its own reward and
Timmy the real would look at Timmy the clone with something akin
to awe and they would both feel good and they would lie down on
the hot almost woolly woodland smelling high grass floor and they
would hold each other and they would unzip the other's jeans and
they would touch to the fulcrum that both knew or used to know
would move the world itself. And clone Timmy would ask real
Timmy, am I warmer today?, do I not feel like a snowman today?,
do I not frost bite your hand while you hold me? And the real
Timmy would lie and say you do feel warmer, quite a bit warmer,
do I look as pale as I think I do?, am I turning into a ghost?, am I
just getting ready to be erased out of here?

 And the clone Timmy would lie with him and unbutton his
shirt and bee kiss his shoulder, and he would say you look better
today, you're not as pale, I can't see through you like I could even
yesterday, yes, you're becoming less transparent with every passing
minute and they would cling and they would hug each other for
they had created, one the other, in an attempt to put an end to
loneliness because they hadn't thought they could take the world
spinning round one more second with things as they had been, and
soon and very soon, they would merge together and they would be
a single entity and they wouldn't need to stop time in the locker
room and feel up the boys without the boys' noticing, and make
cracked predictions for their futures and put little secret love letters
in the boys' hearts, put in them little slots that would be a certain
design that only forever and a day the key that Timmy the clone
possessed would fit, thus leaving them unfulfilled and longing,
those boys in the locker room heading to wherever their out there
days would lead them trembling in autumn remembering spring
without remembering why they felt such a need for it. But soon
none of this would be necessary, soon two Timmys would be one
and they would be strong and bright and they would play basketball
and baseball and they would be acknowledged, for they would be
there, and everyone would by god know it.

 Thus thinking, Timmy had not left class. The only student
still there. The teacher looked at him as she sat behind her desk.
She looked at him in his wheelchair beside an empty desk that
would remain empty because he wanted to believe he was sitting
there, that he was like everybody else, that he was not weak and
crippled, that he was able to be blended into the crowd of students,
that no one noticed him, when of course everyone did, it would
have been impossible not to. She looked at him as he held his too
large head down, suspended on a celery stalk of a neck and
dreamed. She thought how sad that he can't be caught up, that he
can't be forgotten, that he stands out like a sore thumb, that
everybody is so constantly aware of him, that they stare at him, that
even she found herself looking at him too long sometimes, how he
must wish they would turn their eyes away. She went to him. Bent
over to him.

 "Timmy," she said, putting a hand gently to his chin and
softly turning his face up to hers. "Time to go home, Timmy," she
said with a sweetness in her voice the other children never heard
from her, which of course was a huge part of the problem, "let me
help you." He looked at her. He closed his eyes. His head felt so
massive, like a huge marble moon that cast him always in its
shadow. He pretended none of this was happening. He pretended
his hands, his thin tissue paper hands with long failed fingers that
could not hold a pencil or a book or turn a page, on his thin stick
arms, were not filled with palsy, did not always tremble. She took a
handkerchief and wiped his mouth and chin as she and the other
teachers did periodically for him, while the kids around stifled
giggles, or pretended to. She went behind his chair, pulled off the
brake and wheeled him out of the room and down the corridor.

 They always waited until the other kids had left. Timothy
had something to tell her as she wheeled him along the dark
corridor with its gun metal gray lockers on either side. Something
about his thoughts, about the wondrous thing that his maker had
created, a thing of perfection that just pretended to have flaws so
somebody would notice him, so somebody would pay attention to
the real him, for what else are flaws for, save for calling to like in
others? He had so much he wanted to say. He and his maker were
going to be just fine. They had done the impossible. The real
Timmy, who cared for him, who looked out for him and corrected
problems with his creation right there on the spot--oh how lucky to
have this god boy. Hands on manufacturing. He would have told
her that. If he had been able to talk. And if he could get the
thoughts ordered right. So embarrassed. All of them.

 As she wheeled him out into the hot sun and down the ramp
from the front of the building, his thoughts were like bright colored
electric charged minnows diving and dancing and racing the wind of
his mind, in the blue sky of static heat, burgeoning in him, needing
to prove who he was, but forever unable to, so he just closed his
eyes, lay his head back on the soft pillow always there, waiting for
him, as she wheeled him out to the sidewalk and round to the left
where his mother waited in her car, all the other parents and
students gone. Timmy's mother got out, and they maneuvered her
son; his teacher picked him out of the chair, and held his tiny
weightless body, setting him gently in the front passenger's seat,
while his mother, careful not to touch him, put his wheelchair in the
back of the car, then, she, not looking at the teacher or speaking to
her, only thinking yet again, he's not my fault, I didn't do it, got
back in the car, put on her seat belt, neglected to put on Timmy's,
shifted to drive, was ashamed, ashamed, as she drove her son home
again.

				    end