(2 of 4)
Regulations required that we remain at the spa four weeks, lest new tissue samples be called for or some other dreary flaw need mending. The spa itself was bags of fun. Most evenings felt like the Polo Lounge in the old days, and dinner was as star-packed as Morton's on a Monday night.
Thus the snowy Canadian winter passed in a zing. One unexpected treat for me was the arrival, shortly after myself, of veteran film star Lori Breckner, who had been my date for the 1998 Academy Awards ceremony, and who played opposite me in the critically successful box-office dud Car Crash 500. ("Yes, Don, I know movies are young young young. But what do a bunch of brats in Glendale know about pain?")
Oh, it was a happy, happy time. Lori and I would sit by the windows, sharing our hopes and dreams about how much our new children would love us, of how we could steer them away from certain types of drugs that they might have too much fun with and toward those cosmetic procedures that would flatter their looks. "Imagine," Lori dreamed aloud one night. "Knowing what seasons your colors are before you're even born! Lucky, lucky children."
While sipping Reverse-Scriptase martinis, Lori and I glanced outside to see the hundreds of beautiful Hereford mommies, glorious and dumb as posts under the great Canadian sky, chewing vitaminized, antibioticized alfalfa while inside each of them our own future little fan clubs incubated. "Look, over there, the one with a white patch on the eye, No. 388--that's yours, honey!" Bliss.
Lori and I discussed how we would transmute all our self-knowledge into our clones so completely that when we died we would technically still be alive--our "death" merely being a technical bookkeeping notation. Imagine feeling as if you are sharing a soul with five others! Lori was indeed a special woman to me. She was the only one I'd met who could connect with me on my own level. We were fated for each other.
And then came that dark morning when we stepped down for coffee and brioches to see the staff aflutter, alarms flaring like hangovers and a platoon of Mounties interviewing grieving guests. Other patrons were on the pay phones calling their lawyers to alter their wills. "What's gone on?" I asked a passing nurse. Fretful, she told me the news: cattle rustlers.
Dissolve into: the Chicago stockyards. Cut to: ...Sorry about the movie jargon. I can't help it. Being a part of the posse was the most real thing that had ever happened to me. Lori too. We looked at each other and said, "It's just like a movie!" I felt so close to this woman.
Lori and I were on scanning duty, fluoroscoping cattle like airport carry-on bags as they galumphed through our stockyard receiving line--a novel pre-slaughter activity back then, but now compulsory in the U.S. and Canada. We found two cows, each containing seven embryos--obviously not ours. These cows were then removed to the bmf, the Bovine Midwifing Facility. Only full gestation would reveal the tots' genetic identity. Software mogul? Pop-song diva? Corporation head? Somewhat like waiting for Polaroids to develop over a period of years.