NetBio, April 26, 2017

Howe, Gordie

(Gordon Howe), 1928—, Canadian hockey player. Possibly the greatest and most durable forward in the history of hockey, he played (1946—71) for the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League (NHL). With his two sons he joined (1973) the Houston Aeros and then (1977) the New England Whalers of the World Hockey Association, ending his career in 1980 with the Hartford Whalers of the NHL. Howe’s NHL career records include most seasons (26) and most games (1,767); his career record for most goals (801) was broken by Wayne Gretzky in 1994.

Act I

It is late April at the end of the hockey season. Play-offs start in two weeks. Phil Berger is thinking about practice, college, and his girlfriend Roxanne, all at the same time. Earlier in the week, Colby and Dartmouth had both sent him letters about a hockey scholarship. He would have preferred a better school with a better team–like Boston University. But BU hadn’t shown much interest in him, though he’d seen one of their scouts at a game three weeks back. Phil chides himself. Don’t get your hopes up. There are a lot of guys playing hockey these days.

The house is dark, but his mother’s car is in the driveway. The moon mingles the Victorian architecture and shadows of the trees. The result makes him uneasy. There is just enough light for him to find the front door key. Once inside, he turns on the hall light.

Silence.

He can hear breathing in the front room. He walks to the door. The light is behind him and he cannot see anyone. "Mom?" he calls.

The light comes on in the room, and Carol Berger, his mother, pulls her hand away from the lamp.

She hands him a flimsy. Its active surface shows the sports page of the Middlesex News. Phil recognizes Frank Hammett’s byline from previous articles. His mother keeps a scrapbook of every article Phil has ever been in. Phil’s picture leads the text of the article. The headline leaps out at him:

"Clone of Gordie Howe Playing for Hopkinton Hillers."

Phil chuckles. What a joker. He shakes his head at the thought of it. Phil’s good. But he’s no Gordie Howe.

"Is this the problem?" He holds up the paper. "April Fool’s is a little late this year."

"You were an in vitro baby," his mother says slowly.

"What?"

"From neither of us. My eggs were . . . unusable, and your father has the genes for Lou Gherig’s Disease. He didn’t want to saddle any child with that. The embryo was donated. We didn’t know the parents." She rubs her face in her hands. "We only knew the procedure was subsidized by a rich benefactor." She looks at him. "We had given up. We didn’t have the money. We were living in New Hampshire, and fertility procedures weren’t covered by insurance. We wanted a baby."

He shakes his head. "So what? It still can’t be true."

She shrugs. "I don’t know. All I know is, I got a call from two lawyers, one offering to represent us in suing Gordie Howe for compensation and one representing Gordie Howe warning us off. Dr. Robinson called me, too."

"Robinson?"

"The obstetrician who implanted the embryo."

"What did Dr. Robinson say?"

"He said he’d been approached by Frank Hammett with some documentation on the ‘irregularities in the implantation procedure.’ " She raises a hand and lets it fall in her lap. " ‘Irregularities.’ "

Phil tries to make sense out of what his mother is saying.

She stares out the window. "Somebody is taking Hammett’s article seriously."

More lawyers, publicists, and reporters call in the next week. In Massachusetts, hockey is loved as no other sport. All of Hopkinton is excited at the idea that there might be a budding Gordie Howe in their midst.

Phil’s father, Jake, insists visuals be completely turned off and the audio filtered. He refuses to return calls. Jake has spent his life trying to live correctly, to provide for his son and his wife. He works hard managing the plastics factory near the house, and when he comes home, he leaves technology behind. The Berger house is over a hundred years old and has only the minimum data feeds. Phil has always had to go to the houses of friends for immersion games or wide feeds. Jake spends most of his spare time in the summer working in his garden. In the winter, he spends it in his greenhouse.

Phil doesn’t know what to do with his father. Jake won’t meet his eyes. Jake avoids Phil, even though the house is too small for that. Normally, Jake would be clearing the garden, readying it for the coming spring. It’s a cold April and Phil is worried about him. Jake takes to sitting in the greenhouse, staring out the window. The honey berries will go unharvested. Phil wants to call Roxanne and talk about it, but she is learning French in France for the month and he doesn’t feel like calling overseas.

Besides, he tells himself, he doesn’t really believe it. He thinks this is some strange hoax being played out. He reads up on hockey history and wonders what it would be like to be Gordie Howe.

Response to Hammett’s article forcibly occupies the discussion sections of the local feeds all that week. By Sunday, the tone of the conversation has changed from questioning the ethics of a Gordie Howe clone playing against normal players to how dare Frank Hammett perpetuate such an obvious lie. It does not make any of the regional or national news feeds. Phil is relieved. Nothing is real until it hits the big feeds. Hammett is strangely silent and unavailable for comment. There is speculation that he is being closely questioned on verification of his sources. Hammett’s ambition to be a reporter for the Globe feed is discussed. The old Mike Barnicle scandal is brought up, and one editorial concludes that Hammett will be similarly fired. It looks as if the spotlight has moved from Phil back onto Hammett. Phil is just as glad.

The following Monday night, the Hillers play their next game in Leominster against the Blue Devils. Hammett’s article has had visible effect: the place is mobbed. Phil can’t get in. A lawyer named Dalton threatens him with an injunction and says that he represents Gordie Howe. Unsure of what to do, Jake and Phil back away and leave the rink. However, they park on an adjacent street and sneak in through the back entrance. Neither Phil nor the rest of the team can concentrate on the game. The Hillers founder and lose, four to two.

After the game, cars follow Jake and Phil. Jake takes to the backroads and eventually loses them. Phil wonders who they are. All he saw were people in windbreakers and ski-jackets, wool coats with gloves–their faces could have been anyone’s faces.

When Jake and Phil come in the door, Carol hands them a flimsy of the Boston Globe. The lead article, by Frank Hammett and Carl Weatherspoon, is about the "Gordie Howe Clone." The article continues, occupying most of the flimsy with a host of associated links. There are several pictures of DNA chromatographs and chromosomes, documenting the similarities between the Howe genotype and that of Phil Berger.

Phil feels as if the world has entered into some long, horrible tunnel. He shakes his head and stares at the pictures. This is his life on display without his permission. No. It’s more than that. He feels naked before strangers. He feels shame without knowing why.

He looks up at his parents. "How did they get this stuff? Don’t they have to . . . to ask permission or something? Don’t I have to sign a waiver? Don’t you have to sign a waiver?"

Jake shrugs. "I don’t know, son."

The doorbell rings. Outside are four men.

"Shit," says Jake.

Phil has never heard his father swear.

In the hallway, Jake turns to Phil. "Phil, this is Dr. Sam Robinson. Your mother told you about him. I’m not sure who the other people are."

Phil recognizes Dalton from the rink. The next two men enter. One is introduced as Dr. Murray Howe, Gordie Howe’s son. Phil needs no introduction to the last man; it’s Gordie Howe himself.

Phil is a big boy. He stands over six feet tall and weighs in at one ninety. He knows he is big; he likes the comfortable feeling it gives him when he walks through a crowd. He likes his own height and heft. When Howe walks in the house and they face one another, Phil suddenly knows it’s true. Howe is pushing ninety, and has shrunk as old men do. Age and punishment have changed Howe but even allowing for that, Phil doesn’t exactly have Howe’s face. It’s Howe’s body that convinces him. Young Gordie Howe shows through his carriage, his battered knees and ankles, his hands as they hang relaxed and ready from the elbow.

Howe’s eyes measure him in return. Phil can see that Howe is convinced as well.

"Did you do it?" Phil asks.

Howe shakes his head. "I have three sons already. I don’t need any more." He leans his head to one side and looks at Phil critically. "Are you going to claim I’m your father?"

Phil shakes his head in return. "I have a father. I don’t need two."

The meeting is concluded as far as the two of them are concerned, but they still have to wait for the others. They all sit down in the living room. Howe says very little. Phil and Howe’s attention are on each other.

Robinson explains what has happened. "In 1997, we were approached by the firm Meel and Weed from Detroit. Meel and Weed represented a couple that had been killed in an automobile accident with their embryos still in storage. The common practice at that time was to freeze extra embryos for possible later use or research. The parents of the deceased couple wished to allow the embryos to be used by infertile couples in their children’s memory. All of the participants were to remain anonymous." Robinson removes his glasses and rubs his nose. "This was not uncommon then and is not uncommon now. In addition, Meel and Weed’s clients were wealthy enough to provide grants for needy couples. New Hampshire did not require IVF insurance coverage then. We checked Meel and Weed’s credentials. We checked with the facility that was storing the embryos. We did not check the clients directly since they wished to remain anonymous but we examined their purported medical records. This is also not uncommon. After we received the embryos, we called the Bergers."

Robinson looks around the room in silence. "In the last week I’ve found that Meel and Weed’s credentials were a fraud. The facility we checked with does not exist. The credentials of the facility were a sham. I’d never have imagined such a thing. Neither had the Attorney General of Michigan. He is investigating, but after eighteen years, he is not hopeful."

Carole looks at Howe and Phil. "They don’t look that much alike. Maybe it’s all some scam."

Robinson nods. "That’s not surprising. In 1999, only the Dolly techniques were available. You have to understand how different a Dolly clone is from the genetic parent. There are three forces that act on the embryo: the non-nuclear contents of the egg itself, the nuclear DNA from both the egg and the sperm, and the developmental environment of the mother. In Phil’s case, only one of those three forces came from Mr. Howe. The remainder came from the unknown egg donor and Mrs. Berger."

Phil looks up. "Aren’t there other human clones? It’s been seventeen years. I can’t be the first."

"Good point." Robinson straightens his glasses. "Cloning still isn’t FDA approved for humans–even now, with modern techniques, there is a very high percentage of birth defects. But so what? Cloning is illegal, but that wouldn’t stop everybody. It’s hard to do even today, but that wouldn’t mean that somebody, somewhere couldn’t afford to do it in a rogue country. But we don’t hear about it. Why not?"

Carol says softly: "Who’s going to take a chance?"

Robinson points to Carol. "Bingo. In the first flush of enthusiasm in the years after Dolly, a few clones were produced." Robinson closed his eyes and shook his head. "Phil was one of several clones, most of which were unsuccessful. They started trying to clone humans shortly before Dolly was announced. Children were born without a brain or eyes, or with other forms of brain damage. That stopped human cloning for a long time. People barely take a chance with things like Down’s syndrome, much less something scarier. There were many other legal, safe, and cheap techniques to make babies. Unless, of course, you don’t care how many crippled babies you produce until you get the right one, and you’re powerful, clandestine, and unscrupulous."

Phil held his hands in his lap. "Like somebody who might have wanted to clone Gordie Howe, for instance?"

"Exactly." Robinson smiles thinly. "Of course, things have changed recently. New techniques have been discovered. The debate is starting all over again."

"Why?" Phil shakes his head, feeling groggy. "Why do it at all? Why do it here? Why Gordie Howe?" He laughs shortly, a sound like a dog’s bark. "This is New England! Why not Bobby Orr? Why not Ray Borque?"

"Who’s Bobby Orr?" Robinson asks.

"Never mind."

Robinson shrugs and picks up a briefcase he has brought with him. "I have brought with me some sampling equipment. If Phil and Mr. Howe both agree, we can confirm the story one way or the other by morning."

Afterward, everyone is standing, ready to leave but waiting for Robinson to finish preparing the samples for transport.

An idea occurs to Phil. "Dr. Robinson. How many embryos did Meel and Weed give you?"

Robinson looks up at him from the table, his face suddenly tired. "Fourteen."

"What happened to them?"

"Two were used in your procedure. The remaining twelve embryos were divided among five other couples." He pauses, then continues. "Three didn’t implant. One resulted in a miscarriage. There were two live births."

"Two?" Phil thinks of a brother. Someone with whom he can have this in common.

"Yes. He and his parents live in Nashua." Robinson stops again. "Oh, hell. You deserve to know. His name is Danny Helstrom. He has one of the worst cases of cerebral palsy I’ve ever seen."

Robinson calls the next morning. The results are unsurprising. Phil is a clone of Gordie Howe. Phil sits down, feeling depressed, though he expected the results.

There is still nothing about Phil on the national feeds, which makes him sigh with relief. Even a momentary glance from the national media would be make things difficult. The local feeds are also quiet. He hopes it stays that way.

Phil looks outside. The sky is bright and cold, blue as liquid oxygen. He stays home and takes his pond skates down to the lake. Skipping school is a privilege reserved for seniors.

He skates hard: sprint, stop, change direction, sprint, pivot backward, pivot forward. The tension leaves his body. He’s breathing hard, the cold sharp in his mouth and throat, his muscles loose as butter. Without thinking about it, he dodges between the ice fishing holes, skirts the shallows where the ice is thin, through the pipe under the bridge onto the canal feeding the lake.

It’s been a dry, cold winter, and even the canal is rock-hard. He draws his bare fingers across it. The surface freezes to his fingers for a brief moment with a feeling of sandpaper. Then, the sandpaper gives way, and he can feel the smooth solidity underneath. In a rink, this would be perfect hockey ice. This ice isn’t rink-flat, but frozen in bumps and waves. The ground bordering the water is lumpy with sticks and roots, and above him the branches of the trees have a dried, withered look. Around a bend in the canal, the road is out of sight and hearing, and the canal widens into a long pond. Boulders have broken the ice, and he skates between them, backward, forward, jumping over the small rocks. He wonders if he could have been a figure skater–what would Howe have thought of that? It bothers him that Howe’s opinion matters. He wonders what it would feel like to execute a double axel.

He tries to remember how he became interested in hockey instead of any other kind of sport. He can’t remember. He vaguely remembers learning to skate, pushing around an old milk crate and wearing a huge helmet. Then, he remembers being four and skating on the lake, playing pond hockey with older boys.

Phil stops and leans on a boulder in the pond. Sure, most of the other four-year-olds were barely skating, but it hadn’t meant anything to him. It was like being good at music or math. Just playing the piano didn’t make you Mozart. Just doing arithmetic didn’t make you Einstein. Just playing hockey didn’t make you Gordie Howe. He was always big. Most people had taken him for six when he was four. Besides, the six- and seven-year-old kids he’d been skating with were always better than he was. He had dreamed of playing in the NHL, of being the next Wayne Gretzky or Bobby Orr. Sure. What hockey-playing kid hadn’t? But he hadn’t felt exceptional. Gordie Howe had been truly amazing. Phil wonders if Gordie Howe had ever felt exceptional.

He thinks it’ll be good when Roxanne gets back on Friday. He wonders what she’ll think about dating the clone of Gordie Howe.

Anyone with a camera and a net-feed, professional and otherwise, finds the Berger house that afternoon. Phil doesn’t go outside or answer the door. Phil’s morning had been preserved by a confusion of streets in the online address databases. Instead, a family named Cohen had been harassed for hiding Phil Berger from the world.

Phil’s absence doesn’t stop the commercial media. That night, when the story breaks on the local feeds and broadcasts, Phil sees two students at Hopkinton High School discuss his life in detail on WHDH. Both the principal and vice-principal tell WBZ what a terrific and popular student Phil Berger is. Phil has never met any of them. Noticeably absent from the stories is any human being he actually knows. Grainy videos of him skating shuttle back and forth across the net.

When Jake and Carol get home, they have to push their way slowly through the crowd. Four broadcasting vans are queued in front of the house. The chief of police and Phil’s coach sit in a police car in Phil’s driveway. Phil didn’t ask them to do this, but he’s glad they did. They’re the only barriers between him and the reporters.

For the next few days, a police car takes Phil to classes in the morning. His coach takes him home after practice. Phil often finds himself standing in the living room, looking at the people outside.

The crowd changes after the first day or so. The local news feeds finally give way to national feeds as the debate heats up. Phil’s nuclear DNA comes from Gordie Howe, but his mitochondrial DNA and cytoplasm come from the anonymous woman who donated the egg. The hormonal environment and the birth experience came from Carol Berger. How can he possibly be called natural? Whose child is he? Can Phil inherit from Gordie Howe? Can Gordie Howe demand visitation rights? Does the anonymous egg donor have any claim on him? Gordie Howe and Phil Berger have resolved the situation between them, but that does not affect the coverage; the fact of Phil’s existence and Gordie Howe’s fame is enough to propel the story.

The national feeds take their own obligatory pictures of the Berger house and move on, leaving the field to the tabloids, net drones, and con artists.

The coaches of Boston College and Boston University happen to visit Phil on the same day. While they are arguing on the front lawn the relative merits of the two schools, a representative of the National Hockey League takes Phil aside and tries to get him to sign with the Boston Bruins. "Why wait?" he asks.

Roxanne calls him. She tells him she’s home but unsure how she feels about things. They should not see each other for a while. He stares at the phone wanting to punch something.

By Friday’s first playoff game against the Marlborough Panthers, Phil is feeling claustrophobic, angry, and bitter. The Panthers take an early two-goal lead by the end of the first period. The Hillers, expecting to be beaten, are disorganized and chaotic on the ice. Phil no longer cares.

The Panthers win the face-off, but Phil intercepts the pass and comes into the Panthers’ zone at full speed. At that moment, his rage and bitterness come together in him and it feels as if he is leaning into his body, grasping its strength like a man picking up a hammer. He sees the defenseman try to check him and checks him first, knocking him over. The goalie dives to intercept the puck, but Phil pivots backward and pops the puck over him to score.

He can hear the crowd roar as from a great distance. The ice has grown to fill his vision. His teammates pick up the pace with him, and by the end of the second period, the score is tied.

The third period is a war of attrition as the Panthers try to score. It is bruising, full-contact hockey, played almost entirely on center ice as both sides refuse to give up their zone. Then, with three minutes left to play, Phil goes in on the left, spins around the defenseman, and passes to his center, who scores.

The Panthers are fighting for a tie now. They pull the goalie to get six men on the ice. But it’s Phil’s world. The ice is as broad as the sea. It’s his breath and his muscle. The harder he pushes himself, the easier it gets. He is given a half-second opportunity from the corner of the blue line, and fires a shot into the open net. The defenseman cross checks him from behind after the whistle blows.

Phil’s reaction is as unexpected as it is unconscious. He turns and decks the defenseman. In a heartbeat, he is the center of a brawl. He’s thrown out of the game. The Hillers lose the goal and beat the Panthers four to three.

He is showering in the locker room, the water pouring over his head. He’s never played that well, ever. Maybe he needed to be hungry for it. He wasn’t the youngest of six like Howe. A trick of the noise and current bring him a snatch of conversation.

"So that’s what it’s like to play with Gordie Howe!"

Hammett writes up the game, calling it a Gordie Howe hat trick: one goal, one assist, one fight.

With Phil thrown out for the next game, the Hillers lose in the next round of playoffs and are out for the season. He returns to his classes and the story seems to die down. He sees Roxanne across crowds of mutual friends, but she is distant. So is he.

Act II

Over the summer, Phil works in his father’s plant, accepts a hockey scholarship at BU, turns eighteen. While the discussion continues, it has passed him by. He has disappeared from the national and state media, overshadowed by the politicians. Instead, the dialogue has moved into the State House and Congress. New cloning regulations are proposed in several states. MassPIRG contacts him about helping their lobbying effort. Phil doesn’t return their calls. Phil has become yesterday’s news, and he is grateful. He and Roxanne even take in a couple of movies, though they are both very careful with one another.

He reports to the BU Terriers two weeks before classes for hockey practice. No one mentions Gordie Howe. He feels their gaze watching and measuring him. He resolves to ignore it. Things appear to be working out. He’s starting out in the third line, which suits him just fine. He’d had his fill of visibility in the spring.

Practice goes well. The feeling he’d had in his last game, that sense of leaning into his body, has not left him. By the time the first game comes along, against the Air Force Falcons, he has been pulled from the third line and put in the second.

It’s a good game and the Terriers win with a single goal–Phil’s. He happens to be in the right place when it bounces from the glove of the Falcons’ goalie. While he played well, he has no illusions that the goal was anything but good luck.

The next morning, leading the Globe sports feed, Frank Hammett’s story lies below a picture of Phil popping in the puck: "Gordie Howe wins against Air Force."

Phil reads the story over an early dorm breakfast. Phil wonders which is real–as far as he was concerned, the goal was a fluke. According to Hammett, it was the result of his excellence of play stemming from Gordie Howe’s genes. In effect, Gordie Howe played for BU by proxy.

The warm camaraderie he’d felt during the practice weeks turns cold. Conversations dry up when he comes in the room. No one shuts him out of planning or discussion of games. But it is purely professional. Most of them, he realizes suddenly, are here on scholarship and not expecting to go into professional hockey. It’s a way to get through school. If Phil wins games for them, that’s good for them. But they don’t have to like him.

Perversely, this seems to work for him. In high school, he’d enjoyed a certain amount of popularity. Phil was never lazy, but he was not averse to substituting a big grin and a glib tongue for work. His talents had carried him in spite of himself.

Here, though, he speaks to few and finds himself trusting no one. He concentrates on his studies and on hockey. He returns his teammates’ professionalism with professionalism. They are close colleagues, not friends. His talents are an anvil and this coldness the hammer by which he forges his skill.

On the ice, the personalities and conflicts are left behind. The game exists to the exclusion of all else. On the ice, Phil is free.

It is no accident that he is brought up into the starting line by midseason.

Hammett has developed a pattern in his stories: if the Terriers do well, it is because they have Gordie Howe playing for them. If they do badly, it is because of an inadequacy in Gordie Howe’s clone. The language keeps the debate fresh. More than once, late at night, Phil, too exhausted to sleep, tunes into the sports feed, only to find the cloning debate in full swing, with him in the starring role. In November, in a fit of sudden, killing rage, he rips the display from the wall and throws it through the window. Phil’s room is on the sixth floor. It is pure accident that no one is hurt. He cleans up the mess that night before any reporters get wind of it. He does not replace the unit. He thinks about taking a yoga class or something to relax. The idea of a Hammett headline saying "Gordie Howe Takes Yoga" stops him.

Phil keeps reminding himself what had happened in his last high-school game; how a sudden burst of temper had cost him the rest of the playoffs. College hockey plays by the same rules: fighting gets you ejected from that game and the next. He keeps his temper under control. Still, he occasionally checks too hard or hooks too vigorously. His penalties mount.

By February, Hammett has accused him of bringing "NHL-style hockey to Boston University." Phil speaks little, works very hard, and only seems to come alive on the ice. His parents try to talk to him, but he answers in monosyllables.

Then comes the first night of the Beanpot.

Since 1952, the four hockey teams of Boston–Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern University, and Harvard–have played against one another for bragging rights and a bowl of beans: the Boston Beanpot. Boston College is paired up with Boston University in the first game–a rivalry within a rivalry. The game is fought like trench warfare. No inch is lost or gained; no goal is scored. Then, BC scores the first goal. Phil scores the second for BU on a breakaway. Both teams are playing better than they have in months. The game is full of hard and sweaty grace. Phil is at home with his teammates, with the game, with the ice.

In the middle of the second period, Phil is carrying the puck into the Boston College zone. He sidesteps the defenseman and goes around him. The defenseman turns and tries to hook him, but loses his balance on the pivot. Instead, the stick whirls high in the air and slaps the side of Phil’s helmet, directly over the ear, knocking him down. There is no injury, but the pain pins him to the ice for a moment. He stands and skates slowly toward the face-off circle. The defenseman protests the penalty. Phil looks around the arena, sees Frank Hammett watching him from the other side of the glass, shaking his head. Phil can almost hear what he’s thinking: "Not much like Gordie Howe. Gordie wouldn’t take that. Not him." Phil can almost read tomorrow’s article: "Gordie Howe’s Clone Not Up to the Original." It pounds in his chest along with his heart. He can see what will happen next.

The defenseman gives up arguing with the ref and starts to skate over to the penalty box. When he comes near, Phil pulls up with his stick and the defenseman goes down on his back. Without thinking, Phil lands on him with both knees. Then, Phil pulls off the defenseman’s mask and starts pounding him. This is no stylized violence like the NHL. Phil is out to kill him. This is not Gordie Howe, he is thinking. This is me.

His teammates pull him off. The defenseman curls on his side. The refs throw him out of the game. His coach screams at him in the locker room. Gordie Howe would never have done that! Phil is out for two weeks, and maybe for good. Everything seems to happen from a distance.

He puts on his clothes and goes outside into a deep clot of reporters. They’re just as far away as everything else. He just keeps walking, through the West End and downtown Boston. Past the Commons. Eventually, no reporters follow him and he is alone in the South End.

He finds a hole-in-the-wall bar on Columbus Avenue and orders a beer without thinking. As if it’s the most natural thing in the world, they serve him, even though he’s underage. Something about his abstracted manner and his size suggest he’s older than he is.

It’s the NHL for me, then, he thinks. Why not? Or the minors–there’s more fighting in the minors. At that moment, he thinks he could enjoy the minors.

It happens as gently as snow on ice. A man jostles him on the way to the john. An insult is exchanged. Phil swings. The two men end up on the floor. Phil rolls over on top, and for a moment as he pounds on the stranger, as he wanted to pound on the defenseman, as he would have gladly pounded Frank Hammett or even Gordie Howe, he loves this stranger as he has no other.

The bartender knocks him out with a sap, and he awakes, dizzy and puking, in the back of a police van. The nameless man he had been fighting is not there. It is only Phil and another, unconscious drunk. He leans back against the wall, wondering what happens next.

Phil finds out at the arraignment that the man’s name is Kenneth Roget. He has been released from the hospital with a mild concussion and missing teeth. Phil gets six months’ probation and two hundred hours of community service. Roget threatens to sue, but the DA points out that Roget has a history of bar fights and is already on probation for assault on his ex-wife. The DA gets Roget to settle for medical costs.

Hammett’s article reads: "Gordie Howe’s Clone Jailed for Assault."

BU kicks him from the team and out of the university. He moves back home, contented for the moment to do his community service. His parents try to talk to him, but he is sullen and uncooperative. They suggest he call his friends from high school. He leaves the phone untouched.

***

For his community service, he works as a janitor at the Framingham hospital. The simple and silent work suits him. He is invisible as he mops a floor or pushes a cart out to the trash compactor. Medical staff and visitors stream past him, oblivious. The patients, especially the chronic ones, strike up incidental conversations with him. One man, a paraplegic from a car accident, reminds him of the other Howe clone, Danny Helstrom.

That night, on impulse, he finds a single Helstrom in Nashua, though there are two others in nearby towns. Phil wasn’t sure how he should proceed. Call him? Could Danny Helstrom even speak? There but for chance and circumstance goes Phil Berger.

A woman answers the phone. Her voice is tired. Phil is surprised. He expected a recording. Jake and Carol have been screening calls for nearly a year.

"Uh, hi." Phil can’t think of anything to say. "I’m Phil Berger."

"Yeah?"

There is silence. "Is there a Danny Helstrom there?"

"Oh," comes from the other end. "That Phil Berger. Robinson said you might call. I figured it would have been last spring."

"Yes." There is silence on the phone. "Are you Danny Helstrom’s mother?"

"You bet. Grace Baker."

"Baker?"

"Danny’s father couldn’t take it. He split when Danny was two. Funny, huh?" She laughs bitterly. "You want to meet your clone brother? I think it’s a bad idea, but Danny would like to see you."

Danny Helstrom looks like Phil. At least, if Phil had been stretched thin and shrunken, then broken and reset, he would look like Danny. Danny has never been able to sit erect. He half lies across the wheelchair fabric on his right side. His fingers are long and graceful, and move gently and independently of him like the tendrils of a sea anemone. His voice is high and nasal. He weighs barely ninety pounds. Looking at Danny makes Phil feel obscurely ashamed of standing on two legs, of feeling his muscle and strength, of being able to speak. When Danny looks at Phil, it is out of Phil’s own eyes.

Danny smiles, quivering; half his face locks up and releases. He speaks. Danny only has partial control of the muscles of his tongue and lips; his words are a smear of long vowels, grunts, and hisses. Grace interprets for him: "He’s really glad you came up here. He thinks of you as his brother."

At first, Phil doesn’t know what to say. He’s not sure why he’s here. "Good, I guess," he says hesitantly. "Did Dr. Robinson test you, too?" It seems inconceivable that this broken creature could be a clone of Gordie Howe.

"Yeah," says Grace. "Gordie Howe. Just like you."

Danny says something to Grace. She frowns. "Are you sure? I should be here."

Danny gives her his half smile and replies. She shrugs, leaves the room, and returns with a black box fitted with a speaker. She attaches a microphone to Danny’s shirt, gives Phil a long glance, and leaves the room.

Danny makes a sound like a cross between a moan and a stutter. The box says in a monotone: "She’s trying to protect me."

More at ease with Grace out of the room, Phil sits down on the bed. "How come?"

"She thinks you’ll hurt me because I scare you." Danny half grins again. "Are you scared?"

Phil watches Danny. Something feels like it’s cracking inside him. "Yeah. You scare me."

Danny flops his head back and forth in a nod. "I could have been you. You could have been me."

Phil sighs. "Yeah."

"I know. Could be worse." He grins again. "Could have not made it at all."

Phil clasps his hands together. This is my twin brother. "Is that what you really think?"

Danny looks back at him. "Because of my body?"

"Yes."

"Yes. I do. I’d rather live."

"Okay, then."

"But you owe me."

Phil spreads his hands. "How do you figure?"

Danny tries to point with his finger but it trembles in the air as if underwater. Instead, he nods in Phil’s direction. "You got the legs."

Phil looks at himself. "Yeah."

"Tell me about hockey. Tell me what it’s like to play like Gordie Howe."

Phil lets his breath out slowly. Danny’s right. It’s the luck of the draw that Phil got the body and Danny didn’t. He owes for that luck. He has obligations to Danny, as close to a twin brother as he will ever know, because of that luck.

He thinks for a long time. It’s important to say it right, to express it. "If I could fly," he says at last. "It would feel like skating."

The Bruins call him. He does not return the call. The Ice Cats in Worcester, the Chicago Freeze, the Florida Everglades. He does not return the calls. He has the phone screen out sports agents. He does not understand why he’s doing this. It is only a minor assault charge. Professional players have done worse, taken worse penalties, and still played. He may not be Gordie Howe, but he could still play with the Amarillo Rattlers, for God’s sake. He’s at least that good.

Frank Hammett’s article reads: "Clone of Gordie Howe a Janitor in Framingham."

Something in him breaks.

He finishes his community service by June. Jake gives him two thousand dollars. Phil takes his car and leaves town. He tells no one where he is going, since he doesn’t know himself.

Let Frank Hammett write about that.

The principle around which Austin, Texas, revolves is heat.

It is late. Phil lies on the bed staring at the ceiling, waiting to go to work. His head is next to the window, the coolest spot in the room, but that’s not saying much. He shares a house with three strangers. He’d found the house advertised in the paper when he’d hit town in June. It was cheap, and he liked the idea of living with strangers. Later, he realized why the house was cheap. It’s made of brick, and the Texas summer sun turns it into a rock oven in the day, and the bricks re-radiate the heat at night. In the Texas winter, it is merely uncomfortable.

Every town has a hockey team these days and Austin is no exception. The Austin Ice Bats are resting comfortably near the bottom of the WPHL. Last week, against his better judgment, he’d gone to see them play the Amarillo Rattlers. He knew as soon as the game started that the Ice Bats would knock down his door if they knew he was here.

Phil tends bar in the Mexican side of town. The only Spanish he knows is "otra cerveza," "un tequila," and a list of other liquor-related words. He takes the money, sometimes dollars, sometimes pesos, and serves the drinks in silence.

Mainly, it’s hot. Even in February. One of the other bartenders has lived in Austin all of his life and says it didn’t used to be so hot in the winter. But now the February sun burns down and it’s in the eighties every day. Up North, he thinks, there are the January snowstorms followed by February, when everything freezes so hard you can’t even bury somebody until the spring thaw. Then, there’s March, when the ground gently softens under the wet snows, April, when it’s mud season, and a quick spring in May.

As he cleans the bar, he thinks of winter in Massachusetts, when the temperature starts to hover around zero, and the ice gets thick and draws all the water from the air and the ground starts to feel rough and bumpy as it freezes down. Everything comes down to essentials in a New England winter: bare trees, snow, frozen earth, ice.

Down here, it feels too easy to be winter. The Anglos sail on the man-made lake. They water their grass. They grow their flowers. February is just another month.

He corresponds with Danny regularly. Instead of the net, they send written letters, on paper, by mail. Except for packages and certified letters, physical letters are largely a thing of the past, having been replaced by photon packets moving at the speed of light. Danny started it and Phil responded the same way. Neither has ever talked about the comfort of holding a paper letter.

Phil’s letters go like this:

Danny,

I’m still working at the bar. We’ve got a little heat wave now so every night the place is packed. Lots of sweaty music. I’m tending bar on weekends so I get some more money. By the way, guess who I ran into down here? Roxanne, my old girl friend from high school. Seems she went to University of Texas. She’s been down here all this time and we never ran into each other. She came into the bar and recognized me. It was good to see her. She’s engaged to a nice enough guy.

My boss Guillermo took me camping out of the city a couple of weeks ago. I’ll say one thing about Texas. The sky is just as big as people say. We lay in our sleeping bags drinking Jack Daniel’s and just watching the moon go by.

Write and tell me about things up North.

Phil

Phil knows the process Danny goes through to write a letter. If he uses the voice writer, it’s a struggle to get the words out, a struggle to correct them when the writer makes a mistake. Phil has seen Danny sweating and shaking after leaving a note for his mother.

Instead, Danny usually prefers to use a specially fitted keyboard. The process is still slow and laborious, each key combination carefully thought out and forced through his trembling hands. But it’s easier than speaking. Such a letter might take Danny a week or more of concentrated effort. Each letter Phil receives feels heavier than his own, as if the effort has given it mass and heft. Phil keeps a box in his room and each letter from Danny is carefully flattened and stored there.

Phil wonders why he saves the letters so carefully. He thinks it might be the way Danny always talks about little things going on around him. Danny is home most of the time and the local world is most of what he sees. Other times, he thinks it’s because it was only an accident that Danny was the crippled one and Phil was born unmarked. Both could have been crushed by their birth or neither, or Phil could just as easily have been locked into the wheelchair by his own body and Danny been whole. As Danny had said the first day, Phil owed Danny something. Recognition, maybe. Acknowledgment. Respect.

But often, as he carefully smooths the paper wrinkled and creased by travel, he feels as if he is saving something important, a message in a bottle from another country. It is not as if he is saving the work of some great artist or poet–in fact, when he thinks about it, he wouldn’t save such things the same way or with the same reverence. No, this is more like saving letters from your father in wartime or your brother who lives across the world from you. The letters show your connection. You treat their letters as carefully as you would treat them if they were here but sick or dying, because by taking care of the letters, you’re taking care of your brother, or your father, or your friend.

Danny’s letters go like this:

Dear Phil,

I had a good day. I bundled all up and took the chair outside while Grace was at work. She hates it when I do that because she’s scared I’ll get stuck out there. But the sky had that big carnival glass bowl look and the snow was on the ground. I was able to scatter out some bird seed and pretty soon two gold finches, a cardinal, and a bunch of titwhistles were hopping all over me. I don’t know where the cardinal came from. I thought they migrated.

I’d like to see the sky you were talking about. Maybe Grace and I could come down later in the year.

Dr. Robinson visited. Guilt, I suppose. I told him I wanted to try the Twain treatment. I said it was a special device that combined the principles of the screw, the lever, and the inclined plane. You attach it to the upper part of your jaw and it extracts the entire skeleton. Then, you send the patient home in a pillowcase. He was going along with me until the extraction. He is such a serious man. Then, he got huffy for a minute until he saw I was baiting him. He laughed.

At one point, I went with him to the kitchen and bumped him two or three times with my chair. By the time he’d apologized a couple of times for me bumping him, he figured it out and turned into a pretty nice doctor. He gave me the straight skinny on what he knew both on the cloning and how it went so bad in my case.

I’ve been doing some net searches in the last couple of months about the cloning. I didn’t find anything. You should go up there and talk to the detective Dalton used. His name is Rice.

Austin sounds great but you belong up here. This is where you will end up; I feel it in my twisted little bones. Down in Austin you’re just marking time and three years is a lot of time to mark. Up here you could be doing something with your–and, I confess, our–life. It’s important to do more than tread water, even if you drown.

At least you could do the legwork for me and go up to Detroit and talk to Rice. I sure would like to find these people. I’d like to know why they cloned us and, more interestingly, why they revealed you alone. Maybe they have clone marketing plans.

Hey, you could take me with you and I could see another Big City: two in one lifetime!

Danny Helstrom

He gets a call from Grace. Danny is in the hospital with congestive heart failure. Come home if you can.

Phil thinks about Danny all the way from Austin to Massachusetts, about his twisted body, his half smile, his letters. Phil takes with him his collection of perhaps twenty letters as if they were talismans. He’d read them over before he left and thought about them during the drive. Phil wishes he had been able to write better letters in return.

Danny is able to smile at him when he gets there, but can do nothing else. He slips into a coma soon after. Grace signs the Do Not Resuscitate order, and, after a long two days, Danny’s heart gives out and he dies.

Phil and Grace sit in the room with the body afterward, talking of small things: the weather, the sun coming in the room, Danny’s letters. Danny’s body is small and still on the bed. Sitting together feels as natural as breathing.

When it feels right, they leave the room and tell the nurse. On the way to the car, Grace takes him and grabs his hand and turns him so he has to look her in the face. "Danny wanted me to tell you he couldn’t have had a better brother than you."

"Thanks," he mumbles.

The funeral is a small thing: Grace, Phil, Phil’s parents, Gustavo, the aide who had helped with Danny after Phil had left, Dr. Robinson. Gordie Howe sends a short note of condolence. Ill health has prevented Howe from attending. Danny had requested cremation; as far as Danny had been concerned, this was the end of the line for that body.

Driving to Detroit to meet a private detective is paying a debt. Rice’s office overlooks the river, and Phil can see the civic center in the distance, and, beyond that, Windsor, Ontario. When he enters, images of him, Danny, his parents, and Gordie Howe are being displayed on the wall along with annotated legal documents and forms.

"I reviewed our files and checked to see if there is any new information," says Rice, gesturing to the wall. "Nothing new has turned up in the last few years."

"Danny thought there was a connection between Meel and Weed and Gordie Howe. Gordie Howe played for the Red Wings for a long time when they were in Detroit. Could that be true?"

Rice looks suddenly tired. "You know, Dalton tried to make the same argument." Rice rubs his thumb along the edge of the desk. "Tell me, Phil, where did your parents meet?"

"In college. They both went to Brown University."

"But your mother was raised in Hopkinton. Your father came from Hopkinton, too. They never met in high school?" He gestures to the wall. "We have it all on file from the work we did for Dalton a few years ago."

Phil shakes his head. "They didn’t meet in high school."

"Yet they met, presumably fell in love, at Brown, subsequently married, and returned to Hopkinton. Was there a plan in that?"

"No. They just met in college."

"Exactly. A coincidence without an overarching plan. Coincidence is not evidence of conspiracy, Phil. ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ " Rice waves his hand in the air. "The truth of the matter is that we had very little to go on when we started looking for Meel and Weed. Subsequent investigation–including a regular check on new information–has yielded nothing. People often get away with things and it looks like this is one of those times."

Rice falls silent for a moment. "I’ve been in this business for about twenty-five years. When I was younger, I worked on a case interestingly similar to yours. Upon the death of her parents, a woman had discovered she had been adopted. Her parents had not understood that their new baby had been stolen in Texas, from an illegal Mexican immigrant family. She wanted to find her birth parents and was unable to do so through conventional means. She came to me. The adoption had been forty years before–sixty-five years ago, now. I went to Texas and searched through birth and death records for two weeks, both in Mexico and along the border. In the end, I came back here and had to tell her I couldn’t help her. She was heartbroken."

Rice stares at his thumb for a moment. "I’ve thought about that case for years. It’s one of those problems you keep trying to solve even when you know you can’t. I still send inquiries when I think of something. I still make calls. I say to you now what I wish I had said to her at the time: what’s done is done. You are a young man. Your past does not determine your future." He points to the wall. This time the pictures disappear. "That does not determine who you are. Only you can do that."

Rice stands, signaling he is done.

Phil rises with him. "Did she ever find her birth parents?"

Rice smiles. "No, but I managed to console her. I married her."

When he returns from Detroit, Phil is struck by how frail his parents seem. The house seems empty. When they ask him where he’s going next, he doesn’t know. He has some money saved and his car is still serviceable. They ask him to stay, but he shakes his head. He doesn’t think he can live here ever again.