“You know she can’t possibly be mine, right? It’s been years since they sterilized me. She couldn’t possibly be my kid.” Allek followed the geneticist down the hallway to the elevator, with Trudy eagerly trailing behind. He had to find a way to get rid of her; he wasn't at a time in his life where he could take care of a child, especially not one who relentlessly brought up bad memories every time she spoke. “You know, she could be my dad’s. We haven’t had contact for a while. Maybe he has a secret child. Maybe this little girl is my sister or something.” He cringed at the very idea immediately after saying it out loud, but desperately hoped he was on to something.
“Mr. Branch,” said the geneticist, sounding exasperated, “your father has spoken to me already. You realize Dallas had a vasectomy operation after you were born, correct? That little girl is either yours, or-”
“That blood was mine!” Allek blurted out. He quickly bit his lip.
“Sir, please. We understand parenthood is scary, and you are unprepared, but we can’t offer you anything more. It's up to you to decide what to do with your daughter. I’m sure you could easily locate a babysitter on an island inhabited solely by children and childcare providers.” The geneticist boarded the elevator and raised an uncaring eyebrow at Allek. “Good luck then, Mr. Branch.”
Allek glared down at little Trudy. She almost-mockingly gave him an enormous open-mouthed grin.
***
It was Monday. Allek had decided that, after all his attempts, going back home was not in his best interest, so he simply spent the night at the hospital in his car. Trudy remained on the top floor in her patient room, undergoing an extensive identification process so that she could get an assigned dormitory and be introduced into the educational program at IOTH.
When the sunshine poured into the driver’s side window, the warmth woke Allek up. He exited his vehicle, scratched his face, and entered the building.
The hospital staff allowed him to shower in the men's locker room, and while he did, his clothes were cleaned and ironed for him by the housekeepers. He stared into the locker room mirror after he buttoned up his lab coat. He didn’t have to wear it on his days off, but he believed it made him look more authoritative. He quickly shaved the accumulated white-blonde stubble from his chin, then fastened his gray bandanna around his head. When he stepped out into the hallway, he calmly dialed the faculty office number from the wall phone, and waited for a voice. Fortunately, he received the answering machine, and from then on he explained that he was going to use a sick day due to the current events of his beyond-messed-up life.
“Heeey, it’s the man of the hour!”
In the waiting room, his best friend Mark was sitting cross-legged in the corner chair closest to the lavatories. He, like Allek, had decided to wear his lab coat over the weekend as well. An older angel child with long lime green hair and scraggly feathers was sitting beside Mark, doing his homework, which Allek assumed was for one of Mark’s science courses. Allek sat next to them.
“Calmed down enough to tell your best bud what’s goin’ down?” Mark asked, hanging his arm around Allek’s back.
“I dunno what I’m gonna do,” Allek muttered grimly. “She can’t stay at my house. She’ll die or turn human or whatever.”
The angel child glanced through copper eyes over his homework packet at Allek.
“You mean you like that little kid?” Mark asked, smirking. “Weren’t you just calling her a brat last night?”
“Well, the geneticist told me she’s my brat. Apparently my dad told her all she needed to know, like how my mom and dad were only children, and how I’m by myself too. I couldn’t even come up with an excuse to feed ‘er. You, you’re lucky. You could tell her the kid’s your brother’s or something. Not me, though. All evidence points to me. And what’s worse is that she’s got that pink hair.”
“I was thinking about that, too.”
The two professors sat without speaking for a moment, sadly thinking back of Allek’s two lost loves.
“I really need to speak to my dad about this. I think he might know what to do.”
Mark shook Allek’s shoulder’s in a friendly and motivating way. “Do what you need to, my man. And hey, if you really don’t want that kid, me and Mrs. Chariot,” by which he meant nurse Smithy, “will take her. I get tenure pretty soon and then neither of us have to worry.”
“Nice,” Allek congratulated his friend. “I’ll see you later. I’ll see you in class tomorrow, Clauss,” he said, smiling and waving goodbye to the angel child.
***
Dallas Branch’s office was enormous. From floor to the ceiling, everything about it showed his great wealth and taste. The floors were black marble, and in each corner were black granite statue busts of great scientists: Newton, Einstein, Hawking, and Tyson clockwise from the left of the door. On the marble was a large red velvet oval rug with IOTH Laboratories in gold written in the middle. There were large, wide bookcases on each of the mahogany walls, filled with texts dating as far back as the 17th century. Beside the bookcases and above the statues were mounted antlers of moose, red deer, elk and caribou. Plush magenta ottomans were scattered all through the room, as if Dallas or a maid of his had used them to clean hard to reach spots. Across the room, at least twenty feet in front of Allek, was a large black wooden desk with a golden plate that read his father’s name. The tall padded gray chair behind it was facing away from him.
There was a small circular table by the door on which there was a potted spider plant and a King James bible. Allek, assuming he, as family, was allowed to enter this office whenever he pleased, picked up the bible and flipped through the pages briefly. There were tabs and sticky notes in various places, as well as notes wedged in so they would not fall out. Allek didn’t know his father had even the slightest interest in religion.
“Myself and Dr. Sing, your co-worker’s father, once conducted an independent study on the origin of the island’s inhabitants,” came a deep and vaguely accented voice from across the room.
Allek quickly set the holy book down and stood, hands to his sides, in stiff undivided attention to his father. “I didn’t know you were in here...”
The chair on the opposite side of the room was now facing him, and his father was sitting in it. “Hello, son,” Dallas said, setting a mug of tea down onto a coaster. “I assume you’re curious about the little girl?”
Allek nodded.
“Have a seat,” Dallas went on, casually waving his hand towards the ottoman nearest his desk.
Allek did as he was told. Once he tugged the ottoman close enough to the desk, he noticed it was covered with notes and scribbles and torn up pages from various religious texts. Dr. Branch, an older, squatter man with square thick framed glasses, thick angry eyebrows and a sagging face, had his elbows on the desktop and his fingers all pressed together, looking thoughtful and stern.
“We once assumed that these children could be something beyond our understanding. They can’t die while they’re here, yet the natives have no recollection of parents. They can understand even the latest scientific breakthroughs in, oh...astrophysics...and yet cannot in any clear terms, explain how they got here. It’s quite odd. Once I dared to think they could be actual angels, like the ones that addressed the virgin Mary in the Christian bible...”
“C’mon dad, that’s dumb. All that stuff is made up-”
“We could discuss the veracity of organized religion,” Dr. Branch said, “but you aren’t here to ask about where the girl came from or what she is.”
“No...”
Dr. Branch turned his chair slightly away from Allek. “As I was saying, we conducted a study on the children, if they even are children, in private, which showed incredible results, Allek. If you could have seen, you would have been amazed.”
“What’d you do to them?” Allek asked, getting curious, and somewhat distracted from the reason he had paid his father a visit in the first place.
“No more than what we had already done when we tested their durability. We tested our theory: are the children angels? Do they hold divine status and power? Or were they simply highly evolved homo sapiens, capable of sin, or at least our human concept of sin?” Dr. Branch mused, then clenched his fist, “we wanted answers, Allek, so we asked them to lie,” he simply stated, unclenching his fingers. “Of course, we understood how unconventional the study was, and that we as scientists could be doing other things with our time to better humanity, but since the children had proven to be...‘immortal’, we thought, what could possibly go wrong?” He took a tiny sip of his tea and set it back down. “HHS gave us the get-go after months of inquiring, and we began construction on that small building on the eastern side of the island; that one overgrown by hibiscus and watermelons...” He noticed his son’s expression of annoyance from across the desk and got back on topic. “Well, we once used that building for our research. We brought three natives with us and gave them each an item of importance. From me it was a wristwatch, the one your mother gave me on my fiftieth birthday, and we told them to pick a room to hide their item in.”
“Where are you heading with this?” Allek asked, not sensing a moral or relation from this news to the situation he was in.
“Patience. As instructed, the children all hid their item and returned to us. When we asked which room our possession was hidden, the children all explained it was in a different room.”
“How is that at all considered research?”
“You know the children can’t lie, don’t you, son? Do you want to know how we gained this knowledge?”
“Fine. Sure.”
“When the test subject lied to us, they showed signs of pain. We hadn’t seen the children in pain before...well,” he paused to grin sheepishly, “I had, but Dr. Sing and our assistant had not. We had not seen them cry or squawk or even wince. They began to lose their feathers...” he continued, a lack of sympathy in his voice, “it seems to cause them serious agony.”
“And you kept on doing it.” Allek asked rhetorically, glowering at his father.
“Of course. Our experiment was proving to be quite educational.” Allek squinted. He felt that the experiment was more entertaining than educational to his father. “So we continued it. Later, we asked them to steal, since stealing is a sin in the majority of world religions. This brought up similar results, feathers lost, crying and squawking, et cetera... We could not ask them to commit any real crimes, of course, but we did ask them to pinch each other. That was Dr. Sing’s suggestion. He’s got quite the mind,” he chuckled. “One of the children caught on and pulled another’s hair.” Seeing Allek’s gawking face made Dr. Branch straighten himself up. “This caused them the most agony, inflicting pain upon another. You see, they avoid confrontation as often as possible, not for us, but for their own safety.”
“How do you know they aren’t just showing some sort of, I dunno, molting when they lose their feathers? How can you possibly know that they aren’t faking it?”
“Immortals have nothing to lose, Allek. Now where was I...ah, yes. We discovered something new about the children. One of the three, having acquired a fear of IOTH staff members, tried to run away. We assume he wanted to become mortal, so that we would cease our experiments and send him away as we did with the first test subject so many years ago. A reasonable thing to do, really. Unfortunately for the boy, his efforts failed. For us, though, it was a breakthrough‒he retained his feathers. One of the others followed him and immediately fell ill, then lost his feathers. The second child had to be deported to the mainland, with no recollection of his past or where he was when the transformation happened. We asked the child whose feathers and colors remained how he managed it, and he told us their rite of passage to the other side was sin. We questioned him on what it meant to sin, of course, because we know as well as you do, Allek, that sin is very subjective, but the child did not reveal the meaning to us, most likely because he does not know, himself. It is still unclear what that child did that was worse on their scale of morality than the other two that gave him this rite of passage.” Dr. Branch paused, glanced at the chandelier on the ceiling, and then resumed eye contact with his son. “That child is Clauss. He is in your Monday morning class. You may have noticed his feathers are fewer than his classmates', and his markings more like splotches?”
“I thought it was just some sort of exotic pattern‒” Allek thought of the child that had been doing his homework in the hospital waiting room with Dr. Chariot. He was hiding his face the entire time, and now he knew why. “How did you get away with this?”
“The children oblige to our every whim, Allek. Clauss was just like the rest until he witnessed his brother’s invincibility and memory fade into thin air. He has tried to follow, but it seems the only way he can join his brother is to, for lack of better understanding, sin himself to mortality. He seems to have accepted this, and knows that he cannot become mortal without excruciating pain. According to the professors we have assigned to monitor him, he has not tried to shorten the gap between life and death.” There was another short pause in which Dr. Branch inhaled slowly, then said, “Allek, this information is private.”
“So some invisible god in the sky, that you're still guessing about based off of your Jesus and your Buddha, who aren't real by the way, makes up his own morality code-this guy gets to abuse little kids by tearing out their feathers when they mess up? And how do you know they can’t get their feathers back? Did you ever bring that kid back up here? Did you ever put Clauss through some kind of test so that he could do 'good'? You know, acts of virtue based off of what outdated texts say are good works? Did you ever say ‘hey Clauss, help an old lady cross the bridge?’ Y’know, to generate merit?” Allek huffed, not wanting to believe that 'sins' like lying caused the angel children to physically change to the extent Clauss had suffered. If it was true, then every word little pink-haired Trudy had told him was the truth, since she had not appeared to suffer any loss of feathers or facial markings.
“Allek, enough. We have caused enough grief to the children already. If you really would like some answers, go speak to Clauss.”
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