Choto Temple

I had been told that generally on our daily weekday interviews, Zerzinski would be free to talk to me from 9 til 11 each morning, and 2 to 4 each afternoon. A nice amount of time, and a nice way to break it up, I thought. As I also wondered about the particular activities he was engaged with during all those other hours.

The generalities were things many people were familiar with. The particulars, far less so. Not only had Zerzinski not given any interviews in a decade, but no member of the Choto Temple or other people like that had so far given any interviews, either. Adding to the mystery and intrigue of the whole thing.

The air was delightfully crisp when I walked the few minutes from my lodging to Zerzinski's house. The sun was only reaching parts of the canopies of the trees, and dew was still hanging on the leaves.

I knocked on the door, and after a few moments Zerzinski answered it himself.

"Come on in. I was just steaming milk."

I followed him back inside, after removing my shoes. I could hear the sputtering of an espresso machine primed for some milk-steaming. And then the familiar sound of a beaker of milk being steamed. I walked toward the sound, and saw Zerzinski in his kitchen.

"Mariko's not around?" I inquired, feeling stupid after doing so.

Zerzinski smiled slightly. "People come and go. She'll be back."

Sensing perhaps the question behind the question, he continued. "I like to do things myself."

He poured milk into the waiting saucers, both already containing perfect little shots of espresso. The crema on top of each shot glistened with the familiar light brown bubbles that indicate it was done right.

"No flowers or pine trees or hearts or anything, eh?" I teased him.

"I've never figured out how they do that, either. I keep meaning to ask Mariko to show me."

We walked together back into the living room, and I plopped down my recorder between us, and got out my notepad.

"You slept well?"

Zerzinski sipped his cappuccino as he asked the question, looking at me intently.

"Very well," I said. I wondered whether he knew just how well I had slept. The next thing he said indicated that whether or not he knew, he suspected.

"You look happy."

"I usually am," came my somewhat coy reply. "But last night did involve some unexpectedly happy developments."

"That sort of thing can happen around here." He paused for a moment. "You smell a bit floral, Dan. You use perfume?"

He seemed to anticipate my reply. "She was rubbing her face on my stomach quite a bit, and she had something tenaciously flowery on. It's still there, after a pretty darn soapy shower this morning."

"She's marked you with her scent," he informed me nonchalantly.

I was curious to know more about this, but I was feeling that journalistic urgency to get going with the interview, and start the story at the beginning as I had been planning.

"Before we get back to our story, Robert, do you have any thoughts about what we talked about yesterday? Sometimes a night of sleep results in reflection happening..."

"Well, one thing that occurred to me, maybe particularly because of the magazine you work for, and thinking about the difference between my relationship to the world, and specifically to sex, BD vs AD - I was thinking, for one thing, what is the distinction between, say, a rock star and me, you know?"

"I like your train of thought here, that's juicy. What's the difference? Our readers want to know!"

I was trying to sound appropriately cynical. And succeeding, judging from Zerzinski's wry expression.

"OK, well basically the thing is this. There are certain personality types that go for other personality types, right? So if you're an expressly polyamorous guy like I usually declared myself to be, you end up hooking up with women who also identify that way. Which is a wonderful bunch of women, but it's a limited pool.

"Same with rock stars hooking up with groupies, for another example. Not everyone who likes a band wants to sleep with their members. It's a certain select group who does. And that goes for most things. Like if you have a lot of money. There are women who want to hook up with you because of that, but there are a lot of women who wouldn't want to."

"I'm following you."

"So after the diagnosis, suddenly the type of woman who wanted to have sex with me, well, there was no longer a type, as far as I could tell. It's not like everybody wants to, by any means. But if there's a type, I have no idea what it is."

"Do you think," I asked, "there's a type of woman who joins the Choto Temple?"

"Yes, that's true. But for regular clients, like back at the clinic in Portland, or with the Purification Temple, it's not like that. Which definitely ends up having pros and cons."

I wanted to ask him more about that, but I thought it would probably become clearer if I got him to start telling stories rather than continuing with the philosophical stuff.

"Tell me how the diagnosis happened initially, Robert. Walk me through that if you would."

"OK, well, I was at home. I had just gotten there, from school. I remember I was really tired. I hadn't slept so well the night before. Which was common for me at that time.

"I had broken up with Marta not long before then. And I was so used to sharing a bed with someone I could cuddle up with. Sleeping alone, I wake up more, it's not so good for me."

I nodded with a certain amount of enthusiasm, trying to communicate that these little details were exactly the sort of thing we wanted.

"So I got home, and sat down on the couch, and then my phone was ringing. The guy on the line said he was the chief scientist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

"You picture a chief scientist as being a reserved kind of person, but this guy sounded really excited, like he might just start giggling uncontrollably at any moment. Though he didn't.

"I wondered if it was a crank call from one of my students, but the voice sounded very clearly adult. And he had a mild South Asian accent that I didn't think any of my kids could make up. But I still wondered.

"So then he asks if I'm the same Robert Zerzinski from New Canaan, Connecticut who donated sperm for research purposes on such-and-such a date, during a sperm collection drive. Once he determined that this was in fact me, he sounded even giddier.

"He said they found some very unusual things about my sperm. But that he couldn't say anything over the phone. And would I be willing to fly to Atlanta on Monday. He quickly added that the CDC would pay me for my time, put me up at the Hyatt, and send me plane tickets.

"I never take sick time because I just don't tend to get sick. So I had a week to take off no problem.

"I called the school and told them I'd be away for at least a couple days the next week. And on Monday morning I was on a shuttle to Westchester airport.

"Life got really, really interesting that day, and also full of complicated moral dilemmas for this sensitive, soon-to-be-oversexed, feminist musician from New England. And the shit has never let up since."

"The phone call was the moment it all changed, eh?"

"Well, I suppose it was a slightly gradual process, over the course of that day.

"When I landed in Atlanta, there was a guy in a suit with my name on a sign meeting me where I exited. He was a limousine driver. That was the first time I had ever been picked up at an airport by a real limo. Not that I had previously felt incomplete due to my lack of time in limos, but there you go.

"And there in the very spacious back seat of the limo with me was the guy who had called me, the chief scientist at the CDC, and the geneticist that had done most of the research that they were both so excited about.

"The chief scientist was an older guy from India named Karthik, and the geneticist was a woman in her thirties from South Carolina named Charity, of all things. They were both gushing from the moment I sat down."

"What were they gushing about specifically?"

I knew, basically, but wanted to hear his account of the day as fully as possible.

Zerzinski smiled with a look of remembering. Just the kind of moment a journalist is hoping there won't be any interruptions. And there weren't.

"It was wonderfully geeky. We barely got past introductions, before they were excitedly batting around terms like 'Spectacular Anomaly.'

"They were saying really dramatic things like 'science does not yet have a way to explain what we have witnessed in the laboratory. Your DNA is completely exceptional. When your sperm comes into contact with ovarian tissue, the chromosomes in the tissue it encounters

change.

That's not supposed to happen, but it does. We have it on film.'

"So I'm like, OK, but what does that mean exactly, this change?

"And then Karthik starts to get even more dramatic. 'Robert,' he says, 'you are the closest thing to a miracle cure that I have ever seen or heard of before.'

"I remember he paused, for dramatic impact, after saying that. It was memorable because the rest of the time they were both geeking out a mile a minute, exactly like you'd expect for a scene in a sci fi movie.

"'Cancer,' Karthik said, 'is caused by many factors. There is a huge environmental factor. There is also a huge genetic factor.

"'We don't know about the long-term, or the impact on environmental factors. What we do know is that under the right circumstances, when your sperm comes into contact with ovarian tissue, it changes the DNA of the ovarian tissue in such a way that it consistently transforms the chromosomes that increase the likelihood of a woman getting ovarian cancer.

"'Your sperm dramatically lowers the risk of cancer for women, basically.'

"I remember I must have looked shocked or something, because suddenly they both leaned toward me, looking concerned.

"Very empathetic for scientists, I thought. I remember the first question I asked after that. Which was the beginning of months of my brain being on permanent overdrive. I didn't realize the brain was really a muscle until that day.

"But after that day it really felt like one. Hurting from thinking too much about ethics, as well as logistical nightmares, politics, security... You name it, it somehow reared its head in this completely absurd drama.

"I said, 'so you're going to use your discovery to work on a vaccine or something then? And you'll name your discovery the Charity Vaccine, and then Glaxo Smith Kline will make billions?'"

Zerzinski paused again, recollecting more details.

"'Oh, don't get me started on Big Pharma,' Charity said.

"I knew I liked her then. I like people with a conscience, whoever they may be.

"Then Karthik jumped in. 'Robert,' he said, 'our intent is eventually to synthesize a vaccine that mimics what your sperm does. But at this point,

we don't know what it's doing

.'

"I remember he really emphasized that point. He was trying to communicate just how weird this thing was.

"He kept saying my name for emphasis, too. 'Robert,' with that lovely accent, that thing they do with the r's.

"'Robert, at this point, you are the only source of this, this' - it was funny to hear a scientist searching for a word to describe something anatomical, but he was - 'this stuff. You are the only source.'

"How long, I asked, did he think it would take before they could synthesize something and market it to the masses and all that? I vividly remember his response to that one.

"'I haven't a clue. Years.'

That's when it really started to sink in."

"What started to sink in, exactly?"

"That this was big. That I had no idea what it was going to mean. And nobody else did, either, really. Other than just a lot."

Without any prompting, Zerzinski continued the story.

"There was a lot of traffic on the highways. Took a long time to get to the CDC. It was nice to get out of the car. You still can't stand up in a limo, no matter how comfy the seats are."

"What went on in there?" I asked.

He paused, clearly lost in thought.

"It was my first brush with fame, basically. I mean a sort of fame unlike anything I experienced as a touring musician, you know?

"This was not like a rapt audience - one or two members of which might perhaps be thinking about having sex with you at some point if that sort of thing worked out somehow. This was a whole other level of things. And it's been like that most of the time ever since."

"Can you describe the difference? What was it like in there? How were people looking at you? What were they saying?"

He didn't really need prompting, but I felt like I should act engaged.

"Well, I mean first of all, these were scientists and folks who spend a lot of time with scientists. They all understood the chemistry involved. Which I didn't, I might add. I mean they didn't understand the mysterious part, but..."

"And they still don't!" I had to exclaim.

"Right. But they understood that they didn't understand it, you know?

"They understood what repeatedly happened when the sperm made contact with ovarian tissue under the right conditions. They understood that this guy coming in was a one-of-a-kind total freak of nature who had what they well understood to be a very powerful ability to influence the lives and perhaps even lifespan of a lot of people. At least potentially.

"And they had all been briefed, I later learned, by none other than the FBI, that people should be completely mum about my identity. So that probably added to the mystique."

"So they were looking at you funny?"

"Awe might be an appropriate word. I'm sure I can easily sound like a complete narcissist. In so many ways, for so many reasons. But this is not about me. I just happen to be the vehicle, for better or for worse."

"Was the FBI there at the CDC to greet you, too?"

"Yes. They waited until I had been 'debriefed' by the scientists, and then they sat me down."

"What was the gist of their message to you?"

"That I should be careful. And not reveal my identity. And that if I were thinking of revealing my identity, he said the FBI was not in the business of providing 24-hour security for private citizens. And that I would need that kind of protection if people knew who I was. And that if I were identified I should be prepared to hire bodyguards."

"That must have been intense to hear."

"Exactly. Very. That was a big one. Bodyguards. I've never even given a moment's thought to the idea of bodyguards my entire life.

"I asked him to explain why he was so sure I would need that kind of security. And he said, if what the scientists were saying was true, then basically I should think of it like there are these various precious metals that are worth different things, depending on various factors, such as their availability on the market.

"'You," he said, meaning me, 'you've got a precious metal in your pants. Except your pants is the only place it exists. That makes it a very scarce resource, right?'

"How am I possibly going to afford bodyguards? I teach high school."

"'Don't expose yourself,' he said. 'Be careful. Don't tell anyone. And, honestly, even if you're talking to people here who already know, don't do it on the phone or by email.'

"That was funny. Yes, we're spying on everyone, and we don't trust ourselves, basically was what he was saying. Or maybe he didn't trust the NSA, I don't know. I certainly don't trust any of them."

Both of our cappuccinos were cold now, barely imbibed at all. I noticed this after Zerzinski did, as he was reaching to take a sip, and we both noticed the crusty brown ring around the inside of our cups. Still tasty, though, we both agreed.

"Would you say there was a sexual element to the way the people at the CDC were looking at you?" I asked.

"Well," he said as he grimaced slightly, "there seemed to be a bit of a distant, shyness with the men. Which I couldn't quite put my finger on. Maybe scientists are generally shy. Or maybe they were jealous, or confused, I don't know.

"The women, however, were universally very friendly, and occasionally a bit giggly on the sidelines. They weren't acting so much like respectable scientists, I thought. Not that they were acting especially foolish or anything.

"But basically you could say the excitement began in earnest that very evening."

He looked at me as if expecting something.

"I'm listening," I said, lamely.

"Charity came to visit me in my hotel room."