The Genius Factory (15 page)

I asked Tom about his band, Infernal. He said that Infernal was dead but he had a new band, Durga. He was writing all the lyrics. Durga sounded like ICP and Twiztid, he said. A friend with a small studio had invited Durga to record a CD and was going to release it. Tom offered to play a track for me. He booted up another computer—the one he recorded on at home—and opened the Durga folder. He considered playing “I Wanna Fuck You” or “Ghost Cat” but clicked on “Shut My Eyes.” Behind a thumping bass line, I heard Tom’s voice:

No weapon is mightier than the pen.

The whole world goes dead when I shut my eyes.

It sounded awful to me—a horrible combination of screaming and droning. But I could hear my own adolescence in it. If I were seventeen again, I would probably like it a lot. It was relentless, loud, and passionate—a close cousin to the barbarous testosterone-laden crap that I listened to at Tom’s age.

Upstairs, Darian had awakened. As soon as we heard him, Tom headed back up to the living room. Tom hoisted him out of his baby swing and carried him over to me, displaying him like a trophy. Tom beamed at Lana, the boy, and me. “The first grandchild from the Repository!” he announced. Darian whimpered. “I think he needs a bottle,” Tom said. He trotted to the fridge, poured some sterilized water, measured out the formula, shook the bottle up, and started feeding it to his son. It was a sweet and incongruous moment—a seventeen-year-old boy in a sociopathic T-shirt who would rather be playing Halo with the Columbine Crew, patiently feeding and burping his son.

“I don’t really feel like a dad a lot of the time. It’s like I am babysitting. I am not responsible enough yet,” Tom said. “I get yelled at for playing too many video games, for not waking up to feed him. He comes first now. That’s really new to me.”

Lana smiled and interrupted Tom. “You’re a very good dad. You have a hard time waking up to take care of him, but you are a very good dad.”

As Darian finished the bottle, a guy and a girl emerged from the basement and ducked into Tom’s bedroom. Tom quickly excused himself, walked over to the bedroom, and beckoned them to come out. A little shamefaced, the couple returned to the basement. Tom came back, annoyed and amused. Whenever those two were left alone, Tom explained, they sneaked off to have sex. They shouldn’t be doing it, he said, and they definitely shouldn’t be doing it in his room without his permission.

I suddenly realized how condescending I had been toward Tom. I had been smugly thinking of him as the long-haired oddball who had knocked up his illegal immigrant girlfriend, who was scraping along with a dead-end job and only the vaguest idea of a future.

I was all wrong. Tom had grown up in a dreary suburb where kids dreamed small. Tom was the only one of his friends who held a real job (almost the only one who held any job). He was taking a full load of classes; his friends barely managed one. He was the guy who was writing the songs and cutting an album; it might never sell more than seventy copies, but he was doing it. He had gotten Lana pregnant, but he was doing right by her. He was marrying her, raising their son, getting her a green card, supporting her through school. Yes, he lived in his mom’s house. Yes, he wanted to goof around and play Halo all the time. He was still a teenage boy, after all. But he was seventeen going on forty-three. He wasn’t a genius. He knew that. But he was capable, and that counted for a lot more in his life. He was keeping it together when no one else was bothering to.

The family piled into my rental car for a ride to a nearby restaurant. I asked Tom how he and Alton were getting along, what it was like to have a brother. Tom slumped in the front seat. He said they had stopped e-mailing a while ago. They had had “trouble relating,” and Samantha had suggested to Mary that the brothers take a breather, give Alton a little more time to grow up.

“His mom said I was a bit too ‘mature’ for Alton. I had told him I was in group therapy and why I was in it, and I think she didn’t like that. She said maybe we should get back in touch in a year.” Tom paused for a second, rankled by the “mature” line. “However much Alton is maturing, I am having to mature
a lot
more.” He nodded toward Lana and Darian. Tom tried to play it cool about the breakup with Alton, but he couldn’t hide his disappointment. Again and again during my visit, he would return to Alton and Samantha’s rejection. Tom was baffled by their brush-off. His brother had been yanked away, and no one would tell him why.

To change the subject, I asked Tom about why he had chosen “Darian” as the pseudonym for his son. Tom adored fantasy novels, and I knew that his son’s real name had come from one of his favorite fantasy novels. The pseudonym had, too, Tom said. Darian was the hero of a book called
Owlflight.
“It’s about a boy who loses his parents and then finds himself, finds love, and ultimately finds them again in the end.” Tom’s symbolism was not lost on me. He had found love in the form of Lana; now he needed to find the lost parent, the vanished Donor Coral.

Tom started talking about “him.” He didn’t have to say who that was. “It is just not fair. I don’t even know his name, and I don’t think I will ever know it. For Darian, I wish I could find out who his grandpa is. And for me, I
really
want to know. I want to know who he is and what he did. And I would like to meet him, even just once.”

Tom asked me if I knew where the Repository’s records were stored. I said that I wasn’t sure but that Hazel in San Diego might have them. Tom thought about this for a moment, then said, “I’m thinking of going out to California and getting a job with whoever has the records—not tell them who I am—and then sneaking a look at my file.” I started to laugh at this but realized Tom was serious.

I had done enough reading about children of donor insemination to know that Tom was unusual. Most “DI” kids his age aren’t interested in their donor fathers. According to psychologists I have talked to, DI kids tend to be most curious about their donor fathers just
before
adolescence. That’s when kids start to construct their own identities, when they are still attached to their parents but breaking away. It’s at that age when kids fantasize that their parents are pirates or princes, so it’s understandable that a lost dad would fascinate them. But once adolescence hits, the interest usually wanes; they form friendships that matter more than family, fall in love, make their own way in the world. Only much later, when they are married and having their own children, do they wonder again about their genetic origins and lost dads. Tom was in the heart of adolescence, yet he was fascinated with his donor father. I told him how exceptional that was, that he was acting more like a thirty-two-year-old than a seventeen-year-old.

Tom puzzled over it, then said, “But it makes sense for me, because I was becoming a dad myself. I guess that’s why I have been thinking about him so much.”

He continued, “When we found out Lana was pregnant, we signed up for this welfare program to pay for pregnancy and birth. They sent someone over to the house to tell us about pregnancy. The person usually gave Lana some homework. And one time she gave Lana a family tree to fill out. Lana was supposed to fill it out for her side of the family, and I was supposed to fill it out for my side. But it was pretty awful when I sat down to do it. My mom does not know who her real dad is. My dad—that is, her husband Alvin, not my donor dad—doesn’t know who
his
dad is. And then my dad is not even my dad, and I don’t know who my dad is. Basically, we are a family of bastards.”

“So what did you write down on the family tree?” I asked.

“I just put question marks. It was depressing.”

The man Tom had considered his father for seventeen years was no longer really his father. The man who was Tom’s biological father was missing. The boy who had briefly been Tom’s brother was no longer talking to him. Tom’s life was full of absence.

Tom blamed the emptiness on his mother, mostly. Her mistakes had left his life in such a mess. Physically, Tom and Mary were not much alike, but their emotional temperature was similar. Mary was abrupt and Tom was naive, but they had the same spirit of openness. They told each other the truth, or a lot more of it than mother and son usually did. Lana’s arrival had divided them a little—Tom was torn between his two women. And Tom was growing up. Their relationship was the heart of the family, and it was fraying. His search for his donor father had placed new strains on it.

Tom’s anger at Mary poured out at dinner. Tom started by razzing her for having chosen the Repository. He said she hadn’t considered how going to a genius sperm bank would mess up the family.

“Because I went there, I think you have advantages that other people don’t have,” Mary countered. She turned to me and made her case: “What I did gave them a better chance in life. I know things were always easy for my kids, maybe because they had better genes. I did not have problems that other parents did. Yes, I did focus on their grades. I had a fit when Jessica had a D, and I think I should have. Not enough parents do.”

Tom responded. “The bank was selfish for you and the donor. The donor said, ‘I am better than the average person, so I should be in this sperm bank.’ In theory, it looked like a good idea, but when you get down to it, it is a Nazi idea.”

Mary got more defensive. “Don’t you think that girls always seek certain qualities in men? What is the difference if you do it with a donor or a boyfriend?”

“You never got to know the donor,” said Tom. “You were presented with a sheet of paper. You could only make the choices they gave you to make.”

Mary answered, “You don’t understand. I got married at nineteen. I was married for six years and kept trying to have a baby and I couldn’t. You don’t know what that is like.” Mary looked pointedly at Darian and Lana, then went on, “I still think the Repository was good, and I don’t like it when you suggest I did something wrong.”

“I
don’t
think you did something wrong. I think you made the best of a bad situation. But think about what it’s like for me. I
can’t
know who my dad is,” said Tom.

Tom started to complain about Alvin, his dad, her husband. “I remember that he would call us ‘your kids.’ He used to tell you, ‘Clean up after your kids.’ ”

I asked Jessica if Alvin was now aware that she knew the truth about him. Jessica smirked. “I think Mom just told my dad by accident.” Mary looked pained. Mary said that when she had spoken to Alvin on the phone the day before, she had mentioned that I was coming to talk to Jessica and Tom. “He said, ‘Oh, Jessica knows now, too?’ Then he was really quiet.”

None of the Legares had much sympathy for Alvin—they knew him too well, I guess. Still, I couldn’t imagine how humiliating this must have been for him. Maybe he had been an indifferent father to Jessica, but at least he had been her father. Now she knew he wasn’t even that.

Mary took this opening to mention that she was planning to serve divorce papers on Alvin when he returned home from his current road trip. Tom had been expecting a divorce for a long time. Now that it had arrived, it was bittersweet. He was glad for his mom, who was certainly going to be happier. But he felt a little sad for himself, too. He had lost his dad once when he had learned about the Repository; now he was losing him again to divorce.

After Mary mentioned the divorce, I told the Legares about one of the odd things I had noticed in my reporting on the genius sperm bank: in most of the two dozen families I had dealt with, the father was notably absent from family life. I knew I had a skewed sample: divorced mothers tended to contact me because they were more open about their secret—not needing to protect the father anymore—and because they were seeking new relatives for their kids. I had heard from only a couple of intact families with attentive dads. While good studies on DI families don’t seem to exist (at least I have not found them), anecdotes about them suggest that there is frequently a gap between fathers and their putative children. “Social fathers”—the industry term for the nonbiological dads—have it tough, I told the Legares. They are drained by having to pretend that children are theirs when they aren’t; it takes a good actor and an extraordinary man to overlook the fact that his wife has picked another man to father his child. It’s no wonder that the paternal bond can be hard to maintain. When a couple
adopts
a child, both parents share a genetic distance from the kid. But in DI families, the relationships tend to be asymmetric: the genetically connected mothers are close to their kids, the unconnected fathers are distant. I suspected that the Nobel sperm bank had exaggerated this asymmetry, since donors had been chosen because mothers thought they were
better
than their husbands—Nobelists, Olympians, men at the top of their field, men with no health blemishes, with good looks, with high IQs. Of course sterile, disappointed husbands would have a hard time competing with all that.

Robert Graham had miscalculated human nature. He had assumed that sterile husbands would be
eager
to have their wives impregnated with great sperm donors, that they would think more about their children than their own egos. But they weren’t all eager, of course. How could they have been eager? Some were angry at themselves (for their infertility), their wives (for seeking a genius sperm donor), and their kids (for being not quite their kids). Graham had limited his genius sperm to married couples in the belief that such families would be stronger, because the husbands would be so supportive. In fact, Graham’s brilliant sperm may have had the opposite effect; I told the Legares about a mom I knew who said the Repository had broken up her marriage. Her husband had felt as though he couldn’t compete with the donor and had walked out.

When I finished, Mary responded that the sperm bank hadn’t shattered her marriage. It had been doomed anyway. But Tom said he thought the rest of my description of strained families applied to them. He and Jessica were very alienated from their dad, and maybe that was the sperm bank’s fault. Tom angrily challenged his mom: “Why didn’t you stop to think about the gap we would have with Dad?”