Chapter Four
NOVEMBER 21st, 2011
I consider myself to have a scientific mind. I don't know if that's something a person is born with, or whether he or she endeavors to acquire it as life goes on. At any rate, I tend to look with suspicion upon urban legends, old wives tales, and general suppositions; and when someone starts a conversation on socioeconomics with the statement: "Well, it's a known fact that ...," I can't help but physically cringe.
And so, keeping that little predilection in mind, let me try to dispel some of the common conceptions about identical twins. Yes, they tend to be emotionally close, but then, so do other siblings who are generally near in age. And yes, they sometimes form little bonds ... unique mini-languages, for example ... but then, so do other intimate childhood friends. It's not that our mother (may she rest in peace) didn't try. She gave us rhyming names and dressed us in identical cutesy little outfits. But from very early on, it became pretty evident that Tod and I were identical in appearances only. He loved crowds and I loathed them to the point of nervous illness. He was extroverted, I introverted. He was the jock, I the nerd. In high school, we'd even started having outward differences, for while the PE requirements had kept me in physical shape, Tod had gained twenty pounds on me ... all of it pure muscle. He was in baseball, football and, at least for a couple years, basketball. He finally goaded me into trying out for the track team, but the only thing I actually placed in was the two-mile, and that only when the other teams couldn't come up with the required number of participants and all I had to do was finish.
I did, of course, join most of the academic clubs, while Tod never even considered them. But, as friends, we tended to feed off of each other's attributes. I got him past critical exams on lots of occasions. I mean, he may have been a jock, but he was a remarkably intelligent one, and there didn't seem to be a subject made that he couldn't get at least a "C" in through an all-night cram-session and the right tutor (i.e., me). On the flip-side, he often got me dates ... almost always with some discarded love interest. I was more than satisfied to settle for his cast-offs, which was clearly much more than I was capable of attracting on my own. I never actually got to go "all the way" with these girls, but it gained me a LITTLE experience with the opposite sex in high school, anyway.
We went our own ways to college, me with a scholarship to Berkley, then on to grad work at the UCLA Nuclear Engineering School, while Tod got a baseball scholarship to USC. He won two MVP's while there, and was picked up right out of college by the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Dodger's AAA farm team. That first season, he caught a cleat in a slide, resulting in a horrific collision at second base and a fractured right knee that had no chance of ever healing sufficiently to allow him to play again. We make quite a pair, huh? A ball player who can't play ball and a nuclear scientist who can't get near anything radioactive.
That fateful evening, not quite a month after my having "enslaved" Elaine, found him sitting in that same living room on that same couch with an Amstel Light in his hand and shaking his head in disbelief, while I nursed my beer and sat across from him in the overstuffed chair.
"Bro," he urged, holding up his hand and silencing me, "you're jumping all over the spectrum here! Slow down! I appreciate you trying to hand me a little slice of nirvana, but you're not making a whole lot of sense! Let's start at the beginning. What are these "tests" that you've flunked?"
I leaned back and took another swig of beer before explaining. "They're called 'Tumor Marker Tests,' and there are several types of them. They're blood tests. One was a PSA, the standard test for prostate problems ... and it can be high for a lot of reasons, not just cancer. The other is called an AFP ... I'm not going to get into technical names for these ... and it tests for liver cancer and a couple other things. It doesn't mean anything dire at this point. They'll retest again in a month, since both are notorious for false positives. And we're still a long way from determining anything, anyway ... there would be biopsies, scans and other tests first."
"But you think maybe the bone marrow transplants didn't work?" he asked, concerned. He had a right to be. He'd gone to a lot of time, pain and effort to do that for me.
"Quite the opposite," I said. "We know that they DID work. All the Total Blood Count tests show that they did. But that's just for my immune system. Healthy blood doesn't necessarily prevent cancers."
"Well, why are you so hot to trot with this little sex scheme of yours now?" he asked. "Seems to me like you've got a long way before you have to go to this extreme. You can do it yourself."
"That's the problem. I can't. My sperm count is in the toilet. It's only about two thousand."
"Two thousand WHAT?" he asked.
"Two thousand sperm per milliliter."
"Two THOUSAND?" he asked incredulously. "Dude, all it takes is ONE!"
I barked a laugh and shook my head. "You sound like Elaine. She's made that her battle cry." I tried to explain it to him in simple terms. "Tod, the sperm count of a sexually healthy thirty-year-old male can be as high as two hundred MILLION. It's considered abnormally low if it's under twenty million." I leaned forward for emphasis. "Look, suppose there's a cruise ship sitting off the coast of Santa Catalina Island. Now, suppose you take a speedboat and launch it from Long Beach, but you leave without a compass and in pea-soup fog that lasts for the whole twenty-six miles. What do you think your chances are of hitting it? Realistically, they're not actually zero ... but they're just about as close as you can get to it. If you launch two boats, you've doubled your chances, but ...."
"But two times zero is still zero," he muttered, nodding.
"The average ejaculate is three to five milliliters," I went on. "There's a REASON that there are a quarter billion of those little buggers wriggling around in there. If both participants are healthy and TRYING to get pregnant, it takes them three months, on average, to achieve their goal. My chances are one fifty-thousandth of that. That comes to roughly twenty-five hundred years."
"I am NOT going to go in for this for the next three months!" he groused. "No way!"
I laughed. "Just leave it to the old scientist, my friend. There are ways to dramatically improve the odds. In fact, if you follow my suggestions, there's a really good chance we'll only have to do it once."
He sighed. "Okay, let's shift gears. You've turned your pretty little Elaine into some hypnotic sex slave zombie, according to what you've just told me. Why the hell don't you just force her into insemination?"
"She's still Elaine," I insisted emphatically. "She hasn't really changed ... I've just given her the chance to do what she really wants to do. And what she WANTS to do is be sexually submissive. So ... now, she is. But you still can't make a hypnotic subject do something she doesn't want to do. And she simply refuses to believe what I've just told you. She still continues to cling to that 'It only takes one' ideology. I can't convince her, even under the deepest trance, to go in for the procedure. She wants to wait."
"So why don't you? It doesn't sound like things are imminent at this point. Have a little fun with her and wait until things get dire?"
I sighed. "I'm feeling mortal, Tod. Elaine wants something very much ... something that I can't give her, even though she clings to the idea that I can. Now, my cancer tests are starting to go sour ... and I want to have the chance to get to know the little munchkin myself."
