Jurassic Park

Short Fiction | Matthew Dube

I had started to feel that particular itch, to test Trevor and our relationship when he invited me to travel with him to deliver a paper at a conference in Muncie. We’d been together maybe four months at that point, we really liked each other, but I started to wonder if I really knew him. A weekend out of town, together, was better by far than a weekend with him away and me in my apartment wondering, texting my sister on the phone and bluffing when she asked me what was what. 

Friday night, we landed at the Delaware County Airport, and Trevor talked to the taxi driver all the way back to our hotel so I could rest my eyes a little. In our hotel room, Trevor stripped naked and sprawled out on the bed with the little magazine that listed all the local attraction. “My presentation’s at 10am on Saturday,” he said, and gave a big yawn. “But after that, we’ve got the whole day. There’s a Buddhist monastery outside of town. Want to go spin the prayer wheels?”

“Actually,” I said, “There’s a family thing out here, if you were interested.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. “Of course. I didn’t know.” He folded up and the map and then walked over to fold me into a hug.

His presentation went well, and after we talked for a little bit with his colleagues. Trevor had kept the cabby’s card, so we called and got a ride out to the site, a small preserve outside of town in sight of a grain elevator and a tractor supply company store. The cabby and Trevor were still walking when we arrived, and I let them continue their easy banter. It gave me a minute alone at the end of the dusty road we stopped at. I was trying to catch my breath when Trevor walked up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder.

“This is a family business?” Trevor asked. “Is it, like, a boutique honey operation, a farm stand, something like that?” There were some plane trees along the path that gave us a little shade, and at the end of the path, there was a chain fence, but it wasn’t locked or anything, and we just let ourselves in and past the shed where a couple of golf carts were parked beside white buckets filled with corn kernels. 

“Not exactly,” I said. The animal smell was pretty intense. Shit, urine, and boredom is how I’d describe it. Trevor covered his mouth and nose with his hand and looked at me. 

“A petting zoo?”

“It’s easier to just show you,” I said, and walked a little faster till we were in front of a cage with straw scattered on the floor. Other than that, it was just raw bars, a haybale in the corner and a Pepsi machine where an old man was mashing the buttons then looking below for something to come out, patiently repeating the process like he expected a different result. “Trevor, meet my dad.”

Maybe it’s because he was still in the meet and greet mode of the conference, but Trevor stepped right up to the bars of the cage. “Hi,” he said. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”

But my dad—my dad’s clone didn’t respond. I looked closer at him. “He’s not wearing his hearing aids.” I stepped to the bars myself and pulled on them to get his attention. “Daddy!” I shouted. “Daddy!” He looked over at us and I mimed touching my ear lobes, but if he understood me, he wasn’t interested in talking to us. Instead he just went back to pressing buttons on the soda machine. 

“I don’t think it’s plugged in,” Trevor said. “Maybe we can find someone who works here. They can plug it in and we can get him a coke.” I took his hand and I pulled him away. 

“Let’s see if we can find my mother,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll be excited to meet you.” There were pressed dirt paths between the trees, and when a breeze blew the human smell of the place lifted a little. I should have found a map or something, but I didn’t know if there were even any live attendants on the property. I told Trevor, this whole project, it started because my aunt was into genealogy, and her research led her to find this branch of the family, they had a lot more money than we ever did, and the whole park—they called it a family preserve, and maybe that was right—was their idea. The last time I went home for Christmas, we all spat in red and green plastic tubes and sent them off; it was supposed to be like a present. These distant relatives, they said they wanted to catalog and display the genetic diversity of the family even though my immediate family, we all looked the same. That was the whole point, what made us family. Trevor and I saw another cage at about the same time, and I let his hand go and we walked toward it together.

It was my nephew. He was about sixteen. I can never remember just how old without doing math, but somewhere in there. When we walked up to his cage, he was hanging from the bars that made the ceiling, barking out a number every time he pulled himself up. He was ripped, and like boys that age, he wasn’t wearing a shirt. It made me sad for him, that he felt like he needed sculpt his body just to be liked. What happened to developing your personality, having unique interests? Trevor walked up to the bars and said, “Hey, I hear you know my girlfriend.”

My nephew cocked an eyebrow and dropped from the ceiling to the floor of his cage and walked over to us. He held his hand out and his posture relaxed, the muscles in his shoulders dropping into the lope of his motion. And then, at the last second, he pulled his hand back with a coughing laugh and ran his fingers through his hair. He turned his back on us and walked off to another corner of the cage. 

“Well,” Trevor said. “Two for you. I think your family really likes me,” Trevor said and turned to me, looking deflated.

“Not everyone’s like that,” I reassured him and me. “I want to see if we can find my mother.”

We walked down another dirt path toward a grove of trees and when we came under their shade, we saw another cage, this one occupied by a woman wearing a simple housedress, cornsilk blue with check. “That’s my sister,” I said to Trevor and walked up to the cage. “She’ll tell us where my mother is.”

“Cissie,” I said, and leaned my weight against the bars. “It’s so good to see you.” And then she turned to face me and I realized it was my mother. “Mawmaw,” I said, and almost fell to me knees I was so surprised to see her. She’d passed away when I was ten. I was more or less raised by my father, which means, mostly, that my sister and I raised ourselves. “Trevor,” I said, not even able to stand, “ this is my mother.”

She looked at us from the far side of the cage’s bars.

“She’s the most amazing of all,” I said. “They were able to reconstruct her from my sister’s DNA. There was a whole process, they had to scrape back an egg and then there’s all these chemical washes. But she looks just like her.”

Trevor stood beside me, helped me up with a tug on my upper arm.

“Mama, this is Trevor,” I said, and I could tell by the way she’d crossed her arms across her chest, elbows cupped in her hands that she understood me, that she knew how important it was to me that I had her approval. She took a step closer and tilted her head to look at us. Then, she broke down in tears, a mostly silent wail that she tried to pretend wasn’t happening. She nodded her head at us to hide her shaking, her mouth open and quivering like she was trying to remember a name, what she meant to say before she’d been distracted. She was and always would be my mother.

“What do you think?” I asked, turning to Trevor, a smile on my face that felt painful in my cheeks. I so much wanted him to pass the test.

“What do I think?” Trevor asked. “It makes me want to spit,” he said. “I never want to leave.”