CHAPTER 3-1

Laura and Matt arrived at the restaurant together, right at 8:00.

Charles showed them to a table. Matt felt shivers, being with someone so much like Gene Tierney, being so confused.

 “I’m going to give you a hypothetical,” Laura said. “ Just a little background. Imagine you and I are collaborating on the script for a high-budget science fiction movie—3D, IMAX, Matt Damon, Kevin Costner, maybe Kiefer Sutherland--millions of dollars, lots of rogue government agents, plot twists, things blowing up everywhere, never knowing who the good guys really are, maybe even supernatural forces. No limit. You know, the boring repetitive usual.”

“OK.”

 “Here goes. Imagine the opening scene before the credits start, the cold open it’s called, but you know that, don’t you, Professor McFee? At the Plum Island government research facility (the block letters on the box, Matt thought), there’s a researcher whose work has to do with DNA replication. Behind his back his colleagues call him Dr. He-Who-Cannot-Clone-a-Mouse for his failure to produce results. What he’s good at is writing grant proposals. The Department of Defense and other government agencies are so keen on the idea of human replication that they shovel money at his lab. Or at least the lab they know about.

“OK, so this biologist/geneticist leaves Plum Island to go home for the day. He drives to a poorly-maintained mansion with overgrown grounds surrounded by a high fence. Think of Victor Frankenstein’s 19th-century mansion, but run-down. He goes in the front door, greets a house-keeper, and goes straight to the basement where a group of the top young brains in DNA research are working in a brightly lit lab many times the size of the official one on Plum Island. They have a huge room with banks of parallel processing computers capable of crunching unbelievable amounts of data. Our scientist goes to a special room where there’s a tank the size of a coffin.”

 “Let me guess. There’s a body in the tank. There’s always a body in a tank. Like amniotic fluid. I’m thinking of some of the Frankenstein spin-offs, like creating a Frankenwoman for the monster.”

 “Right. There is. He checks the floating body. He checks gauges, the temperature, his computer. Everything is good. One of the lab assistants comes in to say they have a DNA sample for their next project, from a funeral parlor, a hit-and-run, their youngest specimen so far. The original Victor Frankenstein sent his loyal grave robber to bring back body parts but this researcher’s lab rats only have to bring back a DNA sample, easily done any place dead bodies are found. We find out it’s a game among the young staff to see who can be most creative in snatching fresh samples from the newly dead, at funeral homes and morgues. They wonder if old DNA would work as well. This is an aside-- sorry to break the train, but maybe you know there’s research on some newly found dinosaur DNA leading to questions of eventually cloning a baby dinosaur. Dolly the sheep was a cloning breakthrough some time ago, but a baby dinosaur would be a scientific delight. OK, back. Are you with me?”

 Matt nodded. He was tempted to interrupt and tell her he had read about the perfectly preserved woolly mammoth with liquid blood that was found on an arctic island by Russians. They deciphered much of the ten-ton beast’s genetic code from a hair sample. They believed it might be possible to create one from this DNA information in the hair. And there was more, every day. But he let her continue.

“The next scene is a discussion with the head lab assistant, whose name is Curt, to reveal more of the project.”

Laura paused. It was registering with Matt that Curt was also the name of the student who told him about the Pelican Inn, who had, come to think of it, suggested the sabbatical. He had imagined Curt as Harry Potter, but maybe a better choice would be Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris. Disappearing at night into an alternate reality of the Paris of Hemingway’s time. Another Woody Allen movie. He never liked Owen Wilson. No, he’d stick with the Harry Potter image. Sometimes he imagined people as actors, other times as characters. Usually from movies, but sometimes characters from novels peopled his vast imaginary casting resource. His mother as Katherine Hepburn, both young and old. He thought of excusing himself to go to the bathroom, to pee or meditate or throw up, but he was afraid she would be gone when he returned.

“Are you with me?” Laura said. “Ok, so the conversation with Curt and the other lab guys--they are all guys--continue and we learn that this group has, after a number of botched attempts, successfully replicated fifteen bodies, all dead, from cadaver DNA.

“Stop for a minute. Is this to be cloning or replicating?” Which is it?”

 “In science fiction, clones begin as a fertilized egg and are born as babies. Replicants are fully replicated grown humans. Literally, our movie has replicants. May I continue?”

“Of course. Please tell me, what do you do with the bodies after they are copied from your DNA samples?”

“Good question. Because they’re not living humans, and never were, the team doesn’t feel any ethical remorse in disposing of them, that being no easy job you can imagine, when the postmortems have yielded all possible scientific data. One purpose of this project, as with 3D tissue printing, is to produce viable tissues and eventually organs for transplant.”

“There are already a lot of sci-fi movies about that,” Matt said. “Let’s see-- Coma, based on a novel by Robin Cook. People are kept in comas in body bags in a big warehouse for their organs. There’s another one --about a company that for a high price makes living copies of living people to provide exact copies of their organs when needed. Two of the copies decide to rebel. I can’t remember the name. No, wait. It’s The Island. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.” There are a lot more.

“Yes, a popular theme for the genre,” Laura said. “Our next scene opens with the staff talking about the, I guess you would say leader, employer, or mentor. Sometimes they call him Einstein. They wonder what Albert Einstein would have discovered had he lived now. If what he discovered of physics in 1905 had already been discovered by someone else. What would a young Albert of today have done with string theory, parallel universes, dark energy, black holes, the origin of life, the origin of the universe, quarks, prions --with all the questions that physicists today fight over. While our hypothetical guy is both a biologist and a physicist, he’s also a brain scientist --and maybe somewhat of a Buddhist as well. If Einstein at the end of his life was obsessed with Unified Field Theory, our doctor’s obsession is what he calls the Life Force, that which differentiates living protoplasm from dead meat. Think about it, Matt. One minute someone is living and the next minute dead. Imagine a dead body. What is the difference?”

“I don’t know.”

Kevin Costner wouldn’t be right for the role of the doctor. Or maybe he would. Or wouldn’t. Matt tucked that away to think about later.

“OK, so we follow our hero as he attends transplant operations, watches the heart of a brain-dead person as it slides into the chest of a person whose damaged heart has been removed and watches that heart begin to beat as if it belonged there. He visits hospice care and is present when a man, whose brain had done advanced math, whose heart had beat millions of times, whose alimentary tract had processed and moved about fifty tons of organic matter from mouth to the other end, whose family had done genealogy charts, in a second turn to static flesh.”

 Laura paused to let Matt think. Then she continued, “What and where was the Life Force? Was it locked in DNA? Was DNA a holograph of the human-- including, somehow, everything-- including all the memories? Including all memories of human kind? Jung’s archetypes of past generations? The Akashic Field, record of all human consciousness hovering in the cosmos? Going back to what? The first living cell? The first sinuous spirochete? Elan vital? Imagine this guy pacing at night in his mansion, chasing that concept. Could a head be transplanted? Could a brain be transplanted? Could memories be transferred? Where are memories in the brain? Are they in the brain at all, or stored in some energetic field? What happens when all the cells shut down? Referring to end of life, he never says the terminal D-word. Too religious. And he never says ‘soul’ either. But enough for today.”

 Enough? Matt wanted more. He felt as if he had just been forced out of a theater in the middle of a movie.

 “Laura,” he said. He liked to hear her name.

 “Yes, Matt.”  She smiled.

 “Who are the bad guys in our movie?”

 “I think you’re ahead of our script. We don’t know. We don’t have a clue yet. There’s always Big Pharma and the military, but that’s been so, so overdone. So maybe something spooky, surreal. We aren’t limited here to realism, you know. That’s the beauty of the beginning of a project like this. It would go in all kinds of directions. Maybe you can help with that. We don’t know.”

Again this “we.”

“Laura. One more question. Does he have a name, our researcher-star-hero-genius?”

“He’s only known by his nickname.”

“Which is?”

 A huge smile and again Matt noticed the slight crookedness of two of her front teeth.

 “We call him Dr. F, Matt. Short for Dr. Frankenstein.”

 Dr. Frankenstein. 

Of course.

CHAPTER 3-2

Matt spent the next day walking on the trails above the ocean, thinking about the script, stopping to make notes. So far it all worked except that it was nothing but a repeat of sci-fi movies already made--the mad scientist, the secret lab, the replicated bodies, the bad guys threatening to steal the scientific breakthrough and use it for nefarious purposes. Where could it go? The obvious next step was for them to replicate a living human but that had been done too many times as well. He imagined Laura playing that part, with Kevin Costner who hadn’t yet been replaced in his mind, but it didn’t work. Laura belonged in black and white with high definition Forties make-up, along with Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayworth, Veronica Lake, Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Olivia de Havilland. In the Snug with his laptop he googled a picture of Gene Tierney and tried to imagine her in 3D color IMAX sci-fi. Never in a million years. Wrong, all wrong. Maybe colorized, but never in a blockbuster.  Just as he couldn’t imagine Sandra Bullock, Keira Knightly or Julia Roberts in Casablanca or any classic black-and-white film.

 At their next meeting, Laura said, “So, Matt, by now you’ve come to the obvious conclusion that for a studio to put gobs of money into our sorry warmed-over science fiction, it has to have a twist, right? The obvious one being they figure out a way to replicate a living human.”

 “That would be a start, yes. And that’s just the idea I had walking in the hills.” 

 “Good,” Laura said. “So I want to try another thought experiment with you, some role playing to see if we can make it all more captivating. Are you game?”

 “Sure.”

 “Ok, first, do you know the Schwarzenegger movie The 6th Day?

 “Yes. It’s a conspiracy film about clones taking over the world. Replicants? Ok, from now on I’ll stay with clone. A cloning conglomerate illegally clones Arnold’s character. He goes home and finds a copy of himself making love to his wife. In a funny scene, he asks his partner: “Would killing a copy of myself be murder or suicide?” Very cute. A comic role, for the ex-governor of California.” Matt thought of the previous cognitive dissonance when the popular screen actor Ronald Reagan became governor of California. Still, Arnold was a shock.

 “Remember the scene when an agent is shot?” Laura said. “They take her corpse to the lab and take a reading of her eye with a laser-gun thing. Then they drag a generic body copy of her out of a plastic bag and put the laser-thingy to her eye and zap her. She wakes up swearing, since her last memory was of being shot. She has been restored right up to the last second of her life.

 “Cut to a flashback in our movie. It’s June 30, 1944 and Gene Tierney is in her dressing room brushing her hair after a day filming Laura. Her DNA is on that hairbrush. In our sci-fi plot, that hairbrush, kept in a Hollywood Star Museum, is used to create a perfect copy of her. With all the memories up to the moment she was brushing her hair, maybe thinking of the last scene she had filmed with Dana Andrews, wondering if she was doing a good job in this sultry role. Just like the clone rejuvenation in The Sixth Day.”

 “Right. With you.”

 “No incredulity?”

 “Credulity intact. Routine sci-fi so far.”

 “Good. So here’s where our plot gets better. And where you come in.”

 “Me?”

 “Skip a bunch of steps from corpse to living person--tell you later about all that--our copied person wakes up in the 21st century. She knows nothing past 1944. And here’s the catch. She doesn’t know how the first Gene Tierney’s life progressed after 1944. So how is she to learn that? Someone would have to teach her. Someone who knows more than anyone else about Gene Tierney’s biography. We need someone to develop that dialogue and to model the character who plays that role in the movie. Who knows? Even play that role in the movie.”

“Who?”

“You.”

“Me? You’re thinking of me?”

“We’re looking for someone who could tell our character if Laura was a successful movie, if she stayed married to Oleg Cassini, if she made any more movies, if they were any good, what happened to her mother or her friend Howard Hughes. Everything about her life after June 30, 1944.  And someone who would tell her how Gene died. Especially that. To answer your question: yes, dummy, yes, you. You, who have written the definitive Gene Tierney biography. who else but you could write this?”

 So they knew about his book. How could that be? The draft was in his trunk. What didn’t they know about? Who were these people? Nice of her to call his ragged manuscript definitive though.

 “Here’s a philosophical question for you,” Laura continued. If you knew how your life turned out and you had the chance to live everything after age twenty-three over, in another time and place, would you live it differently? What would you change?”

 Matt would have to think about that one. He would have to think a lot about that one.

 “So this is a complex psychological drama, with a sci-fi background,” Matt said. “And lots of state-of-the-art bad guys running around trying to steal the science?”

 “Yep, that’s pretty much it. Do you want to play? Will you develop our script with us?  We can pay you very well. You know Hollywood pays its scriptwriters very well. We have gobs of seed money. And we’ve rented the Pelican for the summer so we can all stay here and work on the project. Think about it. We need you.” Laura put her hand on his and looked into his eyes. “We really need you, Matt.”

She smiled.

“I need you, Matt.”

CHAPTER 3- 3

 When Matt went back to Room 5, he experienced a massive letdown. He knew he should be thrilled. Wasn’t his sabbatical supposed to be about writing? What better dream come true than to write a Hollywood script? His stupid novel was going nowhere. Maybe he would even get an Academy Award for best script-writer. He imagined George Clooney on the stage with Meryl Streep. Meryl opens the envelope, says “and the award goes to . . .” Matt stands up, turns to Laura, who gives him a big kiss, watched by the whole world. Matt, who has lost weight, worked out, saunters up the stairs to receive his statue.

 What an opportunity-- to collaborate with this spectacular mysterious woman and the rest of her team, whoever they are. So why the disappointment? He knew it was because reality had taken over what was the best escape dream of his life. He would say yes. Negotiate fees. Probably not well: he would be so bowled over by the number of zeroes that cool negotiation would go out the window. What a sap to have been caught up in the fantasy.

 This woman really looked like Gene Tierney. Maybe it was theatrical make-up. Maybe she had plastic surgery. Would she do something that extreme for a role like this? Especially when it was only in the planning stage? Maybe. But something else was bothering him.

 It was her teeth. Gene Tierney’s teeth were slightly crooked in front. He remembered that one of her contracts stipulated that she couldn’t have her teeth straightened because it was a trademark of sorts.

 Laura’s teeth were crooked in front. How could that be?

By the time Matt went down to meet Laura for dinner he was seething. He didn’t know what was going on, but somehow he was the brunt of some joke. And he didn’t like it. He waited for Laura on the window seat by the receptionist’s area. She came in the front door, greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and turned toward the dining room. He let her go a few steps and then said, sharply, “Gene!”

 She turned and said:  “What?”

 They looked at each other. He knew. She knew that he knew.

 “What’s going on?”

 She started to cry. He stood there. She continued to cry, without moving or wiping the tears from her face. Finally, he stepped forward and hugged her and felt his anger dissipating, a little. A long moment, then he pushed her away.

 “Look, I’ve been drugged and kidnapped and generally made a fool of and lied to. Mostly lied to. You’re somehow Gene Tierney and I don’t know how or why. There’s no movie, is there? So tell me, why are you lying to me? Or I’m driving right back to Pennsylvania. Tonight.”

 “Yes, we’ve been lying to you.”

 “Why?”

 “Because what we have to tell seems crazy. Because there’s danger. For us. For you. The film idea seemed clever. Please calm down. Let’s have dinner and I’ll tell you.”

 Charles seated them. Matt gave him a scathing look, since he was obviously in on whatever was going on. Laura ordered dinner and Matt, pouting, muttered that he would have whatever she was having.

 When their meals arrived, Laura began.

 “The universe is, what? Eight-plus billion years old?”

 “This is going to be a very long story if you begin there.”

 “No worry, speeds up. The DNA double helix was discovered only a few decades ago.”

 “By Watson and Crick.”

 “Right. And then just a nano-second of earth-time ago, the human genome was mapped,” Laura said.

 “And now, just a quark of a nano-second ago, if I may mix my metaphor, 3D printing of human tissue became possible.” Matt called on his limited reading of popular scientific journals.

 “Right,” Laura said. “Scientists printed human liver cells. They’re on the edge of being able to make a whole transplantable human liver. Maybe they have by now and we just don’t know. And how long after that before the replication of a whole human with a complete set of transplantable organs? And you know that cloning is now old hat.”

 “Dolly the sheep?” Matt guessed.

 “Dolly, yes,” Laura said.  “And it’s just as possible to clone humans as lambs. Just not publicly because of the sticky ethical questions. You know, Matt, the public doesn’t know about most advances in science until way after they’re discovered. Especially in fields with a lot of complications, patent issues and such. Brilliant people out there, in the shadows, using the Internet to connect in ways never conceived of before. Advances that had to go through months of writing and revising and peer review are now shared immediately on websites with a raft of critical comments in no time at all. Voila, Instant science.”

 Laura let some silence grow between them as Matt swirled around what she was telling him.

 “You’re a professor of film noir and science fiction. So you know how often science fiction has predicted scientific advances.”

 “Space travel, man on the moon, the Internet.”

 “And human replication. I bet you could name a dozen more films.”

 Matt felt confident here.

 “Sure. Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982. The Tirrell Corporation makes perfect human copies but with built-in decrepitude so they self-destruct in four years. Rutger Hauer and Darryl Hannah escape to revenge-kill their maker, who lives in a candle-lit room emulating the mansion of Dr. Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Dr. Frankenstein, that is,” Matt said.

 “Very good. More?”

 “Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s monster, of course, the real beginning of the genre, based on the novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Patched together from many stolen human parts and brought to life with a zap of lightning. Frankenstein’s monster would be a mess of DNA with all the different donors, right? Big organ rejection problem.” Matt was at home here.

“I never thought of that, but yes. Mary Shelley had no idea about DNA. But again, isn’t anything possible in science fiction? She was writing sci-fi. She studied Erasmus Darwin and based the idea of activating the monster by electricity on galvanism. OK. Now imagine a science fiction plot with a brilliant biogeneticist/physicist with a state-of-the-art laboratory who’s able to replicate a body from a DNA sample,” Laura said.

 “Not too far-fetched for routine science fiction.”

 “Play along with me,” Laura continued. “Consider there may be such a man with a secret lab and he has successfully replicated a full, living human from a DNA sample. Think of the movie plot we were discussing.”

 Matt felt his mind go blank. There was no way he could think this through right now, sitting with this enigmatic woman. It was too much. He waited while all the wheels and cogs and spinning metal parts that made up his mechanistic universe rearranged to accommodate the very unlikely possibility that Laura was speaking the truth. He needed time to think through alternate hypotheses. How else to explain Laura’s perfect likeness to Gene Tierney? Some frozen specimen for cloning, incubated, raised somewhere for more than two decades? Not likely. An android? A vampire? A zombie? Did she sleep in a coffin in the basement or rise from a grave? Not that: he already knew she slept in a bed. Would she turn into a monster? Matt's sense of reality had changed so much lately that he finally decided just to accept this surreal story as gamely as possible.

“Give this a moment to sink in before you react.”

 Laura let a silence grow between them. Then she said, “I’m part of a very advanced gene project.”

 “Gene? Gene Tierney?”

 She laughed

 “No, silly, gene as in genome, gene-sequencing, gene replicating. Messing with DNA.”

 “Oh. Did someone figure out how to change your DNA to be like Gene’s Tierney’s?” He was thinking of the TV series Beauty and the Beast: a soldier is injected with animal DNA and transforms into a hulk-like monster when provoked.

 “No. You’re missing the point. Let me just tell you, flat out. Are you ready?”

 “I think so.”

 “A brilliant scientist created me from a DNA sample that came from Gene Tierney on June 30, 1944, on the set of the film Laura. That’s why I use the name Laura. There. Now let that sink in before you say anything.”

 Matt stared at her. He thought: this is what being speechless feels like.

 “I don’t expect you to believe what I’m saying, now, right now, but there is no point in playing with bogus explanations. You’ll get a complete explanation to make it all scientific and sound when the time is right but trust me, trust us, to dole out the rest. Baby portions, Sweetie, so your brain doesn’t blow up.” She lowered her head and smiled, as if sharing a secret with herself.

 “Meet me again tomorrow and I’ll tell you more. Meanwhile, not a word, email, call to anyone. Not a single word. Imagine, if what I’m telling you is true, what the patent on creating a living human identical with another living human, could be worth.”

 She paused.

 “What you are seeing is possible. You will get an explanation. We are in a very dangerous place, Matt. So be very careful.”

 She saw him off thinking of something else, his mind full and spinning.

 “Matt, focus.” He looked at her.

 “I said we are in danger. We are trusting you. Do not be stupid. Stupid, Matt – don’t be stupid.”

 She kissed him on the cheek and was gone. She had a faint scent and he wondered if that was Laura’s scent--or Gene Tierney’s.

CHAPTER 3-4

 Matt spent the day writing at white heat. He finally had a story, something worth writing about. He had promised not to tell anyone, but surely typing away on his private computer didn’t count. Or did it? In movies, the laptop with the secret is always stolen. He password protected it, but hey--passwords are always bypassed. He changed his password to something more complex: it was “ilovegenetierney1944, written backwards. Who could crack that? He couldn’t help himself. He put his moral self on hold, put the whole conversation of ethics on hold--just for a day, just to get this down while it was fresh. The words were tingling at the ends of his fingertips. If he didn’t type them into his computer, his fingers would explode. Besides, he still didn’t believe it could be true. He still had no logical explanation for why this woman seemed to be so much like Gene Tierney.  And he could always delete the file with a keystroke. He would delete it with a keystroke. Tomorrow.

The next morning Matt was relieved to see Laura come into the back part of the inn, the greenhouse restaurant. She wore a white blouse and black jacket, again looking like a black-and-white movie, except for intense red lipstick.

 “So, I’m supposing you have thought about what I told you and are considering what it would mean if you suspended your disbelief for now. Like you are watching a movie. Until you saw how it all worked out. And you haven’t told a soul, right?

 “I haven’t.” Matt hoped he didn’t blush, thinking of his laptop. What if she could read his mind? He imagined pushing the delete key and felt resistance.

 “Today I’m going to tell you about Joe.”

 Matt’s heart careened around his chest when she added, “Joe, the man I love.”

 And then, “Joe who would have been the model for the part of the double agent in the movie, if there was to be a movie. Joe, whose job it is to protect us here at the Pelican.”

 That wasn’t the installment of this saga that Matt wanted. He wanted the Gene Tierney story. But he decided to go with Laura’s plan. Good enough to learn about Joe.

 “As a Navy Seal and then a member of Black Ops,” Laura began,  “Joe was sent into hot spots all over the globe to pull off high-risk rescues, to prepare cell phone access in advance of invading ground troops and sometimes to do the routine spy work that‘s the stuff of movies. He’s worked with numerous government agencies--CIA, Homeland Security, NSA, FBI—he was even loaned to the Brits. 

 “When Dr. Frankenstein first wrote grant proposals suggesting he was close to creating living beings, he had no idea that he ever would be able to actually do it. Now he regretted having leaked the possibility.” Laura paused, pensive.

 “Because his research promised to be able eventually to create perfect operatives from scratch, the Department of Defense and the secret agencies that threw money at him had elaborate fantasies of having ranks of identical soldiers that looked and acted like Sylvester Stallone armed with the highest tech weaponry. The DOD sent their best men (no women) to Plum Island and Dr. F played along and took numerous DNA samples, though none of them were used in his basement lab. They could have just sent DNA samples, but this is government inefficiency at its best, and besides, they were curious. Dr. Frankenstein generated a lot of paper work from all this to justify the project. It was his ethical decision not to replicate anything from a sample taken from a living person. When one of the lab assistants asked him why not, Dr. F only said ‘too creepy’.

 “Joe, though less muscular than the others, was as nimble as a gymnast. He was also expert with computers, especially Artificial Intelligence, and intuitive when it came to ferreting out criminals. They hit it off right away. Joe came back after his DNA swab, which went in the trash with the others. They had coffee. Joe asked questions. It didn’t take him long to figure out that Dr. F was scamming the government.

 “Dr. F, in a bind, had to let Joe in on his secret, the whole secret if he were to persuade him, loyal government employee that he was, not to turn him in. He took him to the mansion and revealed the latest cloned body, an elderly man who had died of Alzheimers. The research was progressing by leaps and bounds in gaining knowledge of how to print whole bodies that theoretically could be used for organ transplants. Not to mention, learning about Alzheimers. And of course Artifical Intelligence was a game-changer.

 “Dr. F confided to Joe that his deep fear was that if he could ever create a living person, not that he thought he ever could, what would prevent world leaders from getting their hands on the technology and making numerous copies of themselves? Dr. F named a few world leaders who, in his opinion, would not enhance the human race by their multiplicity. A thousand Trumps and a thousand Putins? Hence the high level of secrecy around the project, the second lab. Joe agreed with Dr. F’s ethics. He had seen too much violence and he had no trust in his own militaristic government. They had something else in common: they both were adept at outsmarting government agencies. Dr. F, increasingly anxious, paranoid even, about secrecy, asked Joe to guard him. Joe agreed, though he would have to figure how that would work when he was on assignment. His first job was quietly to vet all of Dr. F’s team. The second was to install a high-tech security system in and around the mansion.”

 Matt had decided to go with what was being told to him until he had enough information to feel on solid ground. Emotionally, though, as Laura told this story Matt felt jealousy and rejection. Gene Tierney, aka Laura, had leapt from the oversized screen of his home film studio into this fake-English breakfast nook, and one time into his bed (the fade to black there still bothering him, though he guessed, alas, nothing had happened). Now she was his script-writing partner, hiring him to tell her a story. Was that the final role for him with her? Now that she was, apparently, in love with this super spy. This bloody warrior archetype.

 Taking long walks in the hills above the ocean to sort out his feelings had become Matt’s daily routine between meetings with Laura. Because he was having trouble keeping up with the shifting realities of this crazy sabbatical, he alternated between thinking of what was happening in the present and imagining a film script, even though there was to be no film. Because of his envious feelings about Joe, he couldn’t imagine anyone to play the part. He gave up on a young Stallone. And without an actor to envision, Joe remained a pixelated image in his mind.

CHAPTER 3-5

 The next morning at breakfast Laura was sitting with a man whose back was to Matt as he entered the greenhouse. He turned around and Matt saw the gorgeous streaked-hair blond driver from the trip to Green Gulch. The one, Matt recalled, blushing, who had elicited erotic fantasies on the drive. The one he thought looked like Brad Pitt. At least this solved his mental casting issue.

 “Matt,” said Laura,  “Meet Joe.”

 “We’ve been having some fun with you,” Joe said, smiling. The damn man had dimples. Brad Pitt really was good casting for this guy, though his being Laura’s lover was upsetting.

 “You’ve been driving me insane,” Matt said.

 “Well, we had to keep you amused while some pieces were falling in place.”

 “Consider me really amused then.” Seeing Joe reminded him of being kidnapped, the missing time, and all the rest. What did he really feel? Amused? Not really. More like the brunt of a joke. A bad feeling from school days. Was Joe a bully?

 They ordered breakfast.

 Then Joe said, “Laura has told you about the job we have for you—telling her about the rest of Gene’s life. If, after all you know, you’re willing to join us.” As if he had a choice at this point. Matt would walk on hot coals if it meant staying with Laura. Finding out more of this story, this science fiction that was becoming more real by the moment. Even though Laura had told him she was in love with Joe. That part of the story still hadn’t been told. There were huge, gaping holes in the story of how Gene Tierney came to be sitting across from him, sipping cappuccino. Like how she knew so much about current events, current movies, the twenty-first century.

Never mind. Laura could put him on a leash and lead him around like a puppy. And something else. She was some kind of abstraction to him. Not a real woman. The subject of all those years of researching and writing her biography. Or was it the biography of someone else? She was, and was not, a real woman. If Woody Allen were directing this rare comedy-drama, he would take the opportunity to juxtapose reality and film.

 Joe and Laura watched Matt lost in thought. Then Joe began, “Some time after Laura’s, shall we say, creation? Dr. F closed down the lab at the mansion and gave his staff a long paid holiday—except for Curt, his most trusted assistant, pleading a need to catch up on the data they had before they would create another living body. In the evening, over drinks, he and Curt made a list of people they would enjoy creating in duplicate.

 “What if we could steal of morsel of Abraham Lincoln’s DNA from the museum? His blood from when he was shot, maybe a hair follicle,” Curt had said. Dr. Frankenstein was aghast at the idea of having to hide—or even kill-- Abraham Lincoln.

 “Joe looked for a safe house and came up with the Pelican Inn,” Joe said. “Dr. F made the owners an offer they couldn’t refuse for a long lease, gave the current staff a similar paid vacation and staffed the inn with Joe’s people. Joe came to California and set everything up, the security system and all, and found Rondo and Frida as body guards. You remember Rondo and Frida? Well, Rondo as body guard that is. Our clever Frida has other useful talents. She’s a computer genius, espeically adept with AI. She monitors everything with advanced surveillance equipment from a room on the top floor of the inn. Laura and I had been staying at the mansion. We spent months bringing her up-to-speed on the twenty-first century, and once we had hopped over the hurdle of letting her know it wasn’t 1944, which she took with amazing equanimity and even joy, we settled in for a crash course. She loved the idea of being in what was still to her, the future.” He turned to Laura. “Right, sweetheart?” They shared a moment.

 “But Dr. F was getting more and more nervous about security there, so right before you arrived, he flew us here in his private plane. So, now what do you want to ask us?”

 Many questions, but first, but first he began his job, the intimate conversation that would happen with Laura, with Laura who was Gene.

 “Laura, tell me in your own words how you felt when you found out you were living in the twenty-first century and not 1944.”

 “Dr. F and Joe didn’t tell me for some time. When I figured it out, it was a shock. But they were being so good to me, and some time had gone by. They brought me into the whole unique situation gradually. Everything seemed natural. So I didn’t freak out.” She laughed. “The biggest problem was they felt they were keeping Gene Tierney a prisoner. Which, of course, they were. They had to find excuses for me not to leave the mansion.”

 “Next question-- what about me? How did I get here?”

 “I hacked Netflix,” Joe said.  “And found how many times you had streamed Laura. Way more than anyone else. Ever.” Matt felt himself blush. “We checked you out. You’re single and good with fiction. And it wasn’t hard to find you were writing a biography of Gene Tierney. Besides--you’re low profile so we didn’t worry about your having connections with people who would be dangerous to us. So we decided it was time for you to take a sabbatical at the Pelican Inn and write a mystery novel.”

 “But how did you know I would do that?”

 Joe smiled. ”We set you up.”

 Then Matt got it. Curt, the student whose course of study was DNA replication. Curt, who worked for Dr. F.  Matt noticed he was already believing in the existence of Dr. Frankenstein.

 “Curt,” Matt said.

 “Curt,” Joe and Laura said together.

CHAPTER 3-6

 Matt continued to wake eager for the day ahead. His diurnal enthusiasm had taken a 10x leap. And for the rest of the day, he wrote madly in the Snug. 

 The next morning Laura was there alone. She looked pensive.

 Matt got coffee and they ordered breakfast.

 “Now for your job, my dear. Time to begin.” He waited.

 “I was cheerful when I first woke up in the new century. Gradually Dr. F and Joe told me more. I was Gene Tierney, that fact I knew and felt to be true in every cell and fiber, but another Gene, no more or less real than I am, had lived out her life and died. That I could never go back. That I, Gene Tierney, because that’s who I am to myself, was now to live out my own new lifespan in an alien time and place, what still feels to me like the future. The acting role Joe described caught my fancy until I realized it was not a role, or rather it was, but it was the only role I would ever have. I’m stuck here. All the people I knew—my husband, my friends— all have already by now lived their lives and are dead or ancient. My movie career, if I ended up having one back then, and I don’t know if I did, was done. And the life I have now is all cloak and dagger with real dangers. I love Joe and Dr. F is so sweet, but how am I to make a life?” A tear ran down her cheek.  Matt didn’t know what to do.  She wiped it with her napkin.

 “So here’s the thing,” she said.  “I’m desperately afraid to find out what happened to Gene Tierney, myself really, but let me call her the other Gene. Joe and Dr. F don’t dare tell me and that’s made me even more terrified. I’ve avoided any knowledge of her so far. It’s just too weird to be who you are and to know that who you are also already lived and died. If you see my point. I’m not handling that part of this whole thing very well at all.

 “We want you, Gene Tierney expert that you are, to be the one to tell me, gradually and gently, what happened to the other Gene. In some way that doesn’t make me freak out. Which, have to say, I’m on the edge of doing every time I think about it.”

 Matt had been thinking about this assignment since he first heard about it and had concluded that what they needed for this job was a really, really good psychiatrist. But who would that be? Who could be trusted?? Matt almost laughed at the thought that any proper therapist being told this story would lock up the whole group. No, Matt knew he was the right one for this job. But how to do it?

 “I’ll do it, yes. But we have to go very slowly, don’t you agree? We have to be careful about your feelings. And I suppose mine, too.” The feeling of being in love with her was something he kept a watch over. She was with Joe. She was his abstract goddess.

 Several nights later, about 3 a.m., Matt woke to a gentle knock on the door of Room 5. It was Laura wearing flannel pajamas and a robe. He let her in. She sat on the chair.

 “I’m frightened.” 

 He waited.

 “Joe won’t let me sleep in his bed any more because he says he can’t do that and be my bodyguard. Matt wondered if Joe had seen Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. So I’m sleeping by myself and I’m scared. All the security here makes me think the danger must be real.”

 “Would it be ok if I stayed with you?  No hanky-panky, I promise. Just to be sure no one from the Department of Defense or Homeland Security snatches me, freak that I am.”

 “How can I resist if you put it that way?”

 But what would he do if someone did try to snatch her? He imagined fighting off a SWAT team with night vision goggles clad in his pajamas. He was not Joe.

 Then, “What will Joe say?”

 “This is Joe’s idea. We trust you to watch over me.”

 Now he knew what fade to black meant in this movie. What it had meant the first night when he woke with her wedged against the wall. Nothing, that’s what it meant. Nada. Zip.

 “Ok.”

 Laura climbed in bed and snuggled into the wall. Matt got in slowly and faced the other way. If this was going to work, they would have to switch to a much bigger bed.

 CHAPTER 3-7

 Laura had news: That afternoon, Dr. Frankenstein was coming to the Pelican. Gradually, Matt had gotten over his fear of this mysterious man. Dr. F was, after all, a scientist, even if a strange one. It wasn’t as if he was into the dark arts or necrophilia or anything. He didn’t kill people. The opposite, actually. It occurred to Matt that maybe Frankenstein wanted to snatch his DNA and make a copy of him too. In case his job didn’t work out with Laura, they could start again with another one of him. At least Laura didn’t have to deal with her original as a contemporary as he would have to if they duplicated him.

 Matt  knew exactly what Dr. F would look like. He would be short and somewhat stooped. His face would be lined. He would have bleary eyes, though shining with vast intelligence. He would have a mass of unkempt white hair, like Einstein. Maybe he got that idea from Laura having told him the lab guys sometimes called him Einstein. When Matt came down for tea, Laura and Joe were sitting with a man. Matt felt a jolt of panic. So much for being over fear. As he approached the table, the man stood and put out his hand to shake Matt’s. He was at least 6’2”, around seventy, trim and fit. He had bright blue eyes.

 “Hello, Matt. I’m Dr. Frankenstein.”

 Matt searched his mental film archive for someone to cast as Dr. Frankenstein in his mind-movie of the Pelican Inn adventure. No question.  Dr. Frankenstein would be played by Charles Dance.

They had dinner by the fireplace, friends laughing, drinking wine, telling stories. Regular stories, no science fiction. Matt, relieved at Dr. F’s, what? --ordinariness, drank a little too much wine.

“Matt, I wonder if you would join me for breakfast tomorrow? Say eight o’clock? I imagine you have some questions for me.

“I do. I will.” Dr. F suddenly felt like Matt’s new best friend.

 The next morning when they met, Dr. Frankenstein ordered a substantial breakfast of items not on the menu. “Would you like the same?”

 Matt nodded.

 Frankenstein ordered another breakfast.

 “So, let’s get down to business, shall we? You have three things I expect you want to know. The first is, how did our dear Laura come to be? The second is what is the science behind the rather, if I do say so myself, amazing feat of her creation? And third: what do we expect from you?

 Matt just nodded. The summary was forthright and accurate.

 “Good enough then. About your role, details of that are for another day. As for the science, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

 Matt knocked his water glass over. Frankenstein laughed loudly.

 “Oh, you should see your face. You dear boy. Seriously, I will share with you various things of a scientific and technical nature. As for the experience of creating Laura, I’ve thought for a long time how to tell you. If you’re going to join our little team, and Joe and Laura assure me you are in all the way, all your chips are on the table, so to speak, then I owe you much more information than you’ve guessed so far. But how to tell it? I decided, back at my lab, with time on my hands, to write it up. You know, like a short story. So I did. I kept a journal that I intended to destroy, but I didn’t, so now I’ve decided to let you read it and the notes I’ve added just for you. You’re a professor of literature and film. Much better that you read it than listen to me trying to pull it together. I needn’t say that you must not copy any of it or show anyone, not that there is anyone here for you to show, and that you give it back to me at breakfast tomorrow. Then I will answer any remaining questions.”

 Frankenstein handed Joe an envelope.

 “Enough for now. Let’s eat!” Matt clutched the envelope and wondered if he had ever been so eager to read anything. His graduate school acceptance letter? Not even close.