EPTPan to the ideal American family. A successful, Algeresque American Dad, staunchly traditional, rich brown hair graying at the temples. A blonde-haired, blue-eyed Bund Deutscher Madchen in the passenger seat, who supports female empowerment in Saudi Arabia but opposes it in her home state, on the high-value donor list of twelve different family values groups. Two sons in the middle seats of the Lincoln, both in matching blue shirts and champagne khakis, the third at Wake Forest. One is listening to a bimbo on a cell phone so cutting edge, it will be replaced within two weeks. The other is either admiring the tire treads mounted on the concrete walls or daydreaming.
On the way to the state bioethics convention, hosted by one of those organizations whose name ended with the word Life, Chris Dodson dreamt of aborting himself. He heard the onboard GPS happily chirp their current location: three permanently congested freeway interchanges away from the convention center. Bored, Chris switched to the memory channel in his head. Ah, his favorite rerun—the one memory which he had never experienced, yet was responsible for his hate, his anger, his pain.
Cue to white walls bathed in fluorescent light, the color of sterility everywhere. Small speckled sepia floor tiles, designed to soothe the anxious minds of parents as they waited for the tests to finish on their children inside. Flip on mood music: the artificially reassuring drone of a trained, certified MD, accompanying a melody of sobs from an instrument topped with blonde hair.
At six months, Jonathan Carmichael Dodson was diagnosed with a disease worth about one hour of Barbara Walters minus 15 minutes of commercials. Without a transplant of stem cells to replace his degenerating bone marrow, he would not live past his fifth birthday. Being a staunchly religious man, Bill Dodson refused to take stem cells from discarded embryos. Kenneth, robust and athletic, was not a suitable donor, so Bill and Karen prayed and prayed and then won the 3 in 10 odds that go with having HLA-matching children.
Again, another baby, the same crib-like prison and God and His Children wallpaper, minus some cord blood. Jonathan’s first injection of cells appeared successful. Then came that fateful day when he wouldn’t stop bleeding. A second injection was required; Chris was the only available donor. He was five. Too old for baby stem cells, but barely old enough to donate adult stem cells.
This is where it gets PG, Chris thought. An allogeneic bone marrow transplant requires hundreds of insertions of a rather large needle through skin, through flesh, through bone, into the spongy interior of the human pelvis. This is done in order to be extract enough marrow to perform a successful transplant. The process, done on an adult human, is usually mildly tiring, but usually harmless. A five-year-old kid is not an adult. Nor is a seven-year-old. Nor is a ten-year-old. Chris Dodson had donated a liter of bone marrow in four operations to his older brother by age 12. In the final transplant, Jonathan finally received enough marrow to survive on his own. It took Chris another two years to finally realize why he was “anemic” for most of his childhood. Of course, by that time, the symptoms were gone, but the names stuck. Chris was forever the fat, unathletic kid who never fit in socially. The lack of social respect and introversion stuck too. He was always on the outside, he thought. Never like Jon, Mr. Alpha Male, Mr. Smile.
Chris blamed his father for not just growing him to three months, aborting him, and using his stem cells then—it would have spared him a lifetime of misery. He also blamed Jonathan—even after finding out that Chris was the one who had saved his life, he never once said thank you. Fucking bloodsucking vampire. And Bill and Karen never even asked him to—as far as they were concerned, they had two sons to care for.
And so as the tire treads changed into an undulating snake, and the congestion on the other side of the jersey barrier grew steadily more severe, Chris sat, bored, plotting his moves, biding his time.
I’ll be there for you. When you least expect it.
