litlinks 2018

Faultless Flaws

by Bella Volk-Loone, Radford College

The woman who stood over me was intimidating. It didn’t help that she was holding a buzzing needle beside my head. Glinting metal studded her ears and mutilated her face, enormous disks of dull grey implanted in her cheeks and lobes. I wondered how she could stand so erect without a suggestion that she felt weighed down. Her skin stretched over the frame of her bones like some mystical, living painting. Pinks and greens, letters and numbers, pictures and symbols. She was both an artwork and artist. I was a blank canvas.

She studied me critically, as if not sure what to make of me.  “Never been asked for this before. You PPs are nuts.”

PerfectProgeny. The technology that conceived me. It was five years after my brother was murdered that PerfectProgeny became a raging trend and my parents had the courage to try again for the flawless child they had envisaged. They don’t usually talk about him, but mum had given me the overview and told me to never mention it again.

Four months pregnant with my brother, Mum and Dad had gone for the usual suite of prenatal screenings. They discovered their unborn child had severe vitiligo, a pigmentation disorder that both my parents carried, buried deep in their own DNA, but a genetic mutation that would surface – literally – when like met like.

The pregnancy was terminated. To this day, they claim they had my brother’s interests at heart. They insist they wanted to spare him the pain of disfigurement, a life-time of self-loathing.  We see ourselves the way we are seen by those closest to us, I’d like to remind them. What a load of bullshit, I’d like to say.

I’m sure there was heart-break. Undoubtedly relief.  The confusion of regret.  Mostly I think the burden they carried after the murder was more guilt than pain.

Maybe it was the yearning to move past this guilt or perhaps it was simply opportunity born of their wealth that enticed them to use the technology. The program was promoted as a ‘fix’ for the world: the breeding of generations of children genetically modified to better suit our society, to feed its appetite for perfection. Generations of me.

Mum recalled her first foray into PerfectProgeny as if it were an online shopping experience, except with more exciting choices on offer. But no try before you buy. No thirty-day return policy. Caveat emptor! Let the buyer beware indeed. Let the bought beware even more.

They discussed the options when choosing me, the way you’d debate the swatches of colour for a new sofa, the number of windows you’d have in the house you were building, the finish on your bathroom fittings in an ensuite extension.

Blue eyes. Despite both mum and dad having green.  Female. Forgetting that their first child was destined to be a boy.  Skin fair. A paler, flawless version of my Hispanic parents, the skin I would have inherited naturally.

My name: C2H83SA. A unique alpha-numeric code that titled the document outlining my genetic makeup. Once my body might have charted itself as a series of neatly typed medical results in a pathology report; now a piece of paper was the blueprint for the building of my body.

I am invincible according to my digits. Tailored to the conceived ideal of my parents and society. A paver in the road to the reign of perfection. Mum always said she did it for me. But I reckon she was thinking of me as much as she was thinking of my brother, ending our lives before they began.

“My own designs.” The woman handed me a holographic binder of patterns with pride.  “Take your pick.”  I handed it back without looking inside, reached into my pocket and brought up a picture on my tablet. The image took me back.

As a five-year-old, entering the brass gates of the PerfectProgeny Ladies School, I had to strain to see the top of the red brick castle where my genetic potential was going to be realised and shaped, according to the prospectus my parents pored over each evening. Nurture filling in any small gaps that nature may have missed, though you could hardly describe the process by which I came into being as natural.  I scanned the walls for cameras; it seemed there were cameras at every corner these days – whether to protect PPs or to monitor the experiment was not clear. We were segregated from the disadvantaged, ‘not so gifted’ children.

In the first few years, I was oblivious to it – the homogeny.  For all the superficial variation, there was a sameness to us all.  Eventually I understood that it’s not the colour of eyes, hair or skin that make us different, rather the unique flaws. We were being taught to despise imperfection, but I found myself rejoicing in the rare occasion I came across it.

I recall once, towards the end of my primary schooling, walking home and chancing across a mother and her disabled child in the local park. I suppose the daughter had cerebral palsy or something – she was struggling to walk, to bend over to collect autumn leaves. What caught my attention was not the girl’s disability, but the way her mother looked at her: with adoration and delight.  It struck me that mum and dad had never looked at me like that. With pleasure, yes, with admiration and self-congratulation, but never with that quality of love. I was constantly surrounded by physical perfection, yet I had never seen anything as beautiful as the connection between this child and her mother – love magnified by suffering.

In high school, a new girl, C3H83SA, enrolled in my class. Her skin was a shade darker and more radiant than mine. Slim, muscular build. Ocean blue, clear eyes. Small, ski-slope nose. Blonde, highlighted hair. Her mannerisms were unmistakably familiar. It was like having a twin with whom you shared nothing, yet everything. A reflection in a broken mirror. A mirror I was determined to never look into again.

A steep staircase had led me to the basement where I was now lying back on the tattooist’s chair. PerfectProgeny had seen tattoo parlours relegated to the underbelly of the cosmetic industry.  Licensing was strictly policed and ones like the type I needed – prepared to work on a fifteen-year-old, prepared to colour outside the lines you might say, operated only within the black market.

“So, circles about this size?” the tattooist queried, forming a circle of 10cm radius with her hands.

“But irregular,’ I corrected. ‘Each patch should be different from the rest.’

“I make these patches chocolate brown?”

“And leave the complement patches as my natural pigmentation.”

“First time a kid with skin like yours has wanted to cover it up. Are you sure this is what you want?”

“Certain.”

I’d shown her a photo of a young boy with vitiligo – an old picture that was a copy of a worn and faded portrait, one of only a few available on the web. A picture the government hadn’t yet got their hands on. His spots symmetrical like the butterfly paintings we did as kids – folding the paper in half so each wing mirrored the other. You could cut the picture in half and never match it to another individual.

This was the sort of boy my brother might have grown into. Flawed in the eyes of some. Perfect in mine. Unlike any other. The child my parents should have kept. The child who would have taught them to love perfectly.