The Life Not Lived
by Fariel Shafee
Am I a monster? The vacuum in my heart and the disappointments, the sense of loss are still so vivid. Where should I start my story? Maybe the ending was the beginning. I feel the winter afternoon five years back in my little house by the lake. I can see the old walls with light blue wallpaper, the swans floating on the lake, the wilderness bordering my fence and a white coffee mug on my table.
“Ms. Elena.” Mary, my young maid, knocked on the door and declared her presence with a rustic, high-pitched tone. “I am going to leave. Are you okay?”
“All fine. Busy,” I said curtly.
“Take it easy.” She sounded relieved. Her footsteps soon became faint. I was all alone in the bleak yellow building nested between birch trees in a quiet forsaken nook of a mid-sized town.
I was seated on an aluminum chair in my lab. It was a large room facing my backyard and filled with light that bounced in through big windows. The smell of a motley of biological compounds and solvents pervaded the air. Bottles with green and yellow liquid stood on a line of steel tables. These were enzymes and amino acids, lipid rafts floating on seas of aqueous colors. There were petri-dishes with unseemly gray and sickly yellow growths splashing out on those tables as well. Then, next to the single unbroken whitewashed wall, there were several large silvery refrigerators that held the jars with brewing compounds. The incubators were in the other room.
I had spent a large part of my life in this lab far away from mankind. It was my personal lab, and I had created it painstakingly. At first, I came here in the evenings, after winding up my day job as a technician. My humble abode was a two hours’ drive from work. But the secluded peace I got was worth it. I was in my own world and I was the boss of my own projects here. The lab was still small then: several jars sitting on a table, a computer, a notebook filled with formulas that could sell.
“Make it! Almost there!” I had shouted from time to time all alone as my cell lines multiplied and sometimes died. Five hundred, five hundred point five, six hundred parts in a thousand. For years, I had redone almost the same routine using slightly different parameters, choosing what looked right and then initiating processes that had only a limited probability of succeeding. That is how I paint my life, or most of it. But what if one day that life is just gone, and there is nothing of me left: no body, no name, no work? I cannot get back the time lost, but I shall not let this world break me down, use me as it wishes, throw me out like trash! I shall live on, defeat time.
I now stared at my hands. The skin was saggy and wrinkled. I had acquired a limp. Eating sugar was forbidden. I also took blood thinners. Time had eaten me up after all. I would die soon. But I wanted to swear to time before it consumed me. I succeeded. My little cells grew. They took shape. I went where no one had trodden. I created the most amazing thing, here, in this lab. But did I win? Did my win come with a loss I never wanted?
Anna had left. She had been with me for fourteen years. She was small, fluffy and sweet when I first held her next to my bosom: large blue eyes, soft, milky skin.
“Look at the ball of light!” I’d point to the moon with Anna seated on a high chair next to me in the porch. The baby would giggle.
Her smile was oblivious to all the shortcomings of life, ignorant of the disappointments waiting. But I was there, wise and hardened, one who had weathered the harshness prying in the corner.
“I shall keep you safe, baby,” I would whisper. I thought her fingers would always curl around mine, and those eyes would look for solutions in my actions. “She shall always need me.” I smiled when she cried the first time she saw a lizard, and when she had fallen from the couch. “I know the way, dear. I know how to be safe. I know how to get it right.”
* * *
But Anna suddenly didn’t need me. She wanted just that life that was unseen, the journey that would make her grow old, regretting for her mistakes. “I don’t want to see you again!” she had screamed before disappearing.
* * *
It was a rainy day. I was getting ready for my supper. “Look, there’s salad and chicken roast.” I had knocked on her door. “Come out and have supper. Then we shall go over your essays.” Anna did not reply. “Get out of your room, young lady. I still have five hundred cals to add to your chart. Then you need to practise.” I had been firm. The young girl still ignored me. I had then walked back to my room, gotten the keys.
“Come out.” I had been cold. “You will have to succeed. These tantrums will not make that any easier.”
Anna had looked back at me in a flash. It was the same little girl I had once wanted to cuddle. But she suddenly looked different. I had seen the same blue eyes that day. They looked fierce though, and determined. She did not want to succeed. She wanted to have her own way filled with the dilemmas and lapses I had already survived.
“My life could have been much better if I’d had a mother like myself,” I had pointed out. I indeed remembered how I had once stood inside a small cold room, my eyes puffy and red, because I had thought a young man with a charming smile, sharp blue eyes and tanned biceps had laughed and put on his shirt in a small dorm room. “Seriously, you honestly thought I was into you?” He was cruel. I had genuinely believed his smile. Any young girl would have.
Then I remembered the stormy night I woke up with no sensation in my legs. A light was flashing on my eyes, and I could hear whispers in the background. The room smelled too clean and yet too filled with sickness.
“She woke up,” someone declared. “We thought she would be gone.”
“I told you not to move to that neighborhood.” It was Mother’s voice. “And you left the door open.”
“The man had a gun. You are lucky,” someone else proclaimed. “We will need to take your statement, ma’am.”
I was paralyzed for a year. I sat on a wheelchair and saw the birds, read books, envied the people walking in the sun.
What if life was not so unfair? What if we knew that consequences of our actions? I could have landed the top job had I not forgotten to read one extra page. Mother would have been still alive if I had known how to spot a stroke. Now this girl, too, wanted to leave. She did not want to take it from where I had stopped and use all my enlightenments. I knew that from her eyes, from her stiff lips, she wanted to take her own chances.
“That’s not how it’s supposed to happen,” I whispered to myself. “You will make the same mistakes once again.”
That’s not why I had worked so hard. It felt as though my entire life had been wasted. Something screamed inside me that moment, something evil but unfathomable. “This is not right,” a voice spoke to me in my head. “You have to stop it.”
“I always want the best for you,” was my cold reply to her that afternoon. “I would do nothing that would make you less than what you deserve to be! You have to have trust in me. You, lady, need to be grateful.”
I then locked the gate, the only point of exit from the house encircled with an electric fence atop a stone wall. The backyard ended in a jungle where wolves howled on moonlit nights. She could not drive my car. The road to the nearest grocery store was long and lined with hills.
My hound, Edward, was also housed in a white wooden kennel by the gate. The dog was an old friend who had once helped me get rid of prying loggers, and he was nearly blind now. Yet his growls were filled with the ferocity of his yesteryears.
Anna would get the point and behave, submit, I was sure.
The girl did not say a word. Her room was locked, silent. She was reading, I thought, or listening to music. I did not open the door. I let her think, reason, cool down.
But she did not eat for a day. Mary brought back the plates untouched, stacked with fruits and potatoes and chicken. Even the slice of chocolate cake she loved.
“You told her, didn’t you?” I inquired. Mary nodded.
“You have to eat,” I was soft to Anna in the evening. “You mean the world to me.”
Anna indeed did.
* * *
Anna was special, very special. Not just because she was filled with life — growing, learning — she was a box of stored time and more promises. I had to keep that little box safe.
It was a sacred box, the answer to my lifelong devotion.
But she now threatened to open that box, the Pandora’s box, and let out all the curses. “You cannot grow weak, grow unreasonable, get sick!” I cursed outside her door the next morning.
Then I decided to give her time to grasp the reality. I sat in the backyard all day and watched crows. There were two younger ones in a nest far up on the taller branch. Then I saw a red kite trying to touch the clouds. I, too, had wanted to touch the sky once.
I returned with a glass of chocolate milk that evening, hoping to see her sorry, complying. But I walked into an empty room.
Anna was gone. Her new rose pink linen bed sheet was crumpled on the floor and her blue sandals lay by the tub. Her tee shirt was on the bed. She did not want the chocolate milk. She had not even read a book; all were stacked nicely on her shelf. The street outside was long and narrow. She had no money on her. She had no friends who’d let her stay for the night. She also had no phone.
I do not know how she broke the lock hanging on the main gate. It was made of steel and she did not have any axe or saw.
Some of the steel bars were twisted, and the gate lay flung open, as though this house had no more privacy, as though a wild beast had bared this house open for destruction. The older beast once seated by the gate to intimidate outsiders had succumbed to this other more powerful creature. Edward lay in a pool of blood, mangled into a ball.
I do not know how she had the heart to kill the dog. The creature had a life, one to be cherished. But somehow this new entity slowly growing in this house sprang out to a larger world with a craving so intense that she did not bother about the blood and mayhem caused in the process of breaking free.
Sometimes, I failed to understand Anna’s thought processes. But that’s not how it was supposed to be. She was not supposed to be about death. She was meant to be for life, the one I did not have but always longed for.
* * *
As I sat alone in the lab after Anna’s departure, I saw a white embossed album peeking from my computer table’s drawer. I had wanted to throw that album out the day she had deserted me but, instead, I turned the pages quietly, watched her transform into a lithe and tall figure while my equipment lay scattered.
Her hair was dark and long, reaching her waist. My hair was cropped to the shoulder. But I had longer hair when I was young. “You don’t do fancy styles at this age. You work your way up first.” Anna was also thinner than I, almost like a runway model from Vogue. I had the height, too, but I was chubby. She did not eat too many carbs; I never let her. “You know, the kids always taunted me for my looks. I was geeky, nerdy. But see, if I tried, I could have been amazing.”
Anna did not go to school. “Who is she, really?” I was too scared that someone would suddenly walk up and challenge me! So I taught her everything I knew myself: algebra, geometry, history and physics.
In recent times, I had been bolder though. We had visited malls and parks together. I had even driven her to a club and, from a shady corner, watched her dance. People stared at us at times. Anna felt uncomfortable then. Amazingly, I did not feel scared, threatened. I was proud of my daughter: the one with the smooth skin and the rosy lips.
Anna could have been my own youth, almost. Perhaps she was the youth I should have had. I touched my face and felt a large scar on my left cheek. Anna’s skin was smooth, rosy. A nasty boy had pushed me onto barbed wires near the playing ground when I was in school. That’s how I had been disfigured. Maybe I looked fragile to that little boy, or maybe I just looked funny with my geeky glasses.
No, I’ve figured it out now. I did not have the confidence needed to brush him off, to show him his place. I thought he was bigger, more powerful. I had dragged myself beneath him. “I’d never let this happen to you,” I had whispered to Anna when she was a little girl. “That was just straight wrong. He never should have!”
How I protected the little girl!
I thought of the day she screamed at me again. “I am not you!” she had declared. “I want to have my life!”
“Ungrateful!” I wanted to shout as I sat in the quiet, empty lab. I had nurtured her, had brought her up from a tiny dot. Alas, how I had also shaped her mind, had taught her about life, had procured the right books! I had read to her. Sung her lullabies, taught her the ropes of life.
“I don’t like any of these books!” she had declared, looking at the science fiction and history volumes I had laid down on her table. But I did not let go of Anna as I had let the bully get his way in school. I was going to stand my place this time. She was not going to bully me, not Anna!
I was calm. “I know you do. You will like them once you try them.” I knew better than she did. How would she argue the facts! After all, I knew every base of her gene, and I knew me.
I had lived my life, already, but not Anna. She did not know. I knew what had happened in my past and how it was supposed to be, what I did wrong. I also knew my pains, my fears and my joys. Finally, I had tested my DNA. I knew every base, and I knew Anna: her DNA, her cells, the level of hormones inundating the small ball that became this person. She was me, after all, the next best thing to a time machine. I had made her from my own skin cell.
“Look, I am not you.” She was calm, as though I needed to learn from her. “You remember how you can’t drink milk, cough when you swallow nuts? I don’t do that.”
“No, I took those out. I changed those parts of your DNA.” I wanted to tell her the hard truth about how I had created her to be another me but without the baggage, so I could live the life I wanted, without making mistakes. But I could not explain that to her. It wasn’t legal to manufacture people, like robots. I did that secretly, weaved my dreams in my secret lab for many years all alone.
She was the closest thing to certainty I had. Yet, sometimes, I did not get her. I was unsure how she could open locks, get home from the grocery store so quickly or actually memorize full books in a few days. I also did not understand her when she hated blueberry pie or eighties music. That’s not how it was supposed to be. I made every calculation right. That’s what I devoted my life to.
“You have to listen to me!” I shouted the day she dropped out of her violin class. It was a brave move on my part to take her, my copy, to that group. But she had to fulfil my dreams.
“I have to have my own life,” was her answer.
“And I have to have mine, the time I lost in making you,” I whispered to myself.
She did not eat for a day. I waited for her to apologize, to come back, to hand me back my life, my time, my work, my assurance.
But then she was gone, leaving behind the withered, frail me standing all alone near a hole through which time poured out too fast.
Copyright © 2024 by Fariel Shafee
