Between the Shimmer & the Blinding

By Christopher S. Lee

To edit, or not to edit. That is the driving question in Christopher Lee's debut novel, Between the Shimmer & the Blinding. Sam and Clara face a literal life-altering decision: to edit or not to edit their unborn child's genes. While Sam struggles with the idea of erasing his family history after having lost his father to cancer, Cl

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885041713

Book preview

Between the Shimmer

& the Blinding

Between the Shimmer & the Blinding

Christopher S. Lee

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Christopher S. Lee

All rights reserved.

Between the Shimmer & the Blinding

ISBN

979-8-88504-065-5 Paperback

979-8-88504-621-3 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-171-3 Ebook

Contents

Author’s Note

1. Sam: Raleigh, NC. April 2004

2. Sam: Charlottesville, VA. April 2014

3. Sam: Washington, DC. Present Day, Monday 9:30 a.m.

4. Sam: Washington, DC. Present Day, Monday 2:30 p.m.

5. Sam: Washington, DC. Present Day, Monday, 8:30 p.m.

6. Shields: Texarkana, TX. August 1937

7. Clara: Washington, DC. Present Day, Tuesday, 5:25 a.m.

8. Shields: Himalayas. August 1945

9. Sam: Washington, DC. Present Day, Wednesday, 7:15 p.m.

10. Ann: Warm Springs, GA. March 1952

11. Clara: Washington, DC. Present Day, Thursday, 12:40 p.m.

12. Shields: Chicago, IL. December 1960

13. Sam: Washington, DC. Present Day, Friday, 6:40 p.m.

14. Ann: Rome, Italy. May 1978

15. Sam: Washington, DC. Present Day, Sunday, 4:30 p.m.

16. Ann: Philadelphia, PA. May 1985

17. Shields: Flagstaff, AZ. December 1995

18. Sam: Arlington, VA. Present Day, Monday, 9:30 a.m.

19. Sam: Washington, DC. Present Day, Monday, 10:32 a.m.

20. Sam: Raleigh, NC. April 2031

Acknowledgments

To my parents and children,

two generations of people

I’m honored to live between.

Author’s Note

I lost my dad to cancer two weeks after my twenty-first birthday, and I was never taught how to fill the void of this loss. Over time, in living life’s milestones without him, I realized it wasn’t a void; it was a juggernaut of unprocessed emotion, the human equivalent of dark matter spinning and searching for an outlet. He would’ve turned one hundred this June.

Dad always carried a stack of notecards in his front shirt pocket. To a frenetic child and then disinterested teenager, the presumed grocery lists never garnered much attention. But, years later, as Mom and I sorted his belongings, they emerged as the man’s innermost thoughts on religion, war, politics, and a myriad of other topics. What a gift. Through them, I could speak with my father from the grave. My nebulous dark matter now had one clear dimension to it: I would harness my love of writing to form that conversation into a book.

While this personal discovery was molding a cathartic writing project, science was producing parallel discoveries about inheritance that were re-charting humanity. DNA testing was uncovering ancestral links. Genetics was revealing how experiences and environment imprint themselves in our bodies and impact future generations. Biotechnologists were creating tools to edit genes with the potential to eliminate maladies that plague us, like the cancer that killed my dad. Each generation leverages history to create the future, but these advancements have amplified our power exponentially, allowing us to take evolution into our hands and rewrite the human story. My dark matter now had two dimensions: I would write a book exploring the links between Dad’s life and mine, between his DNA and mine.

But after working on that story for a few years, I found that it still lacked symmetry and a narrative focus. Then, in 2019, it happened. My wife was pregnant. For the first time, we became active participants in evolution and all that accompanies it. I was now at the center of generational links that would extend both backward and forward. I had found the third and final dimension needed to shape the story and mechanize my emotion. The question percolated up from the dark matter like a fortune in a magic eight ball: if given the choice to edit my child’s genes, would I do it, and what would that mean for preserving my father’s, and indeed all my ancestors’, legacy?

The revelation emboldened me, but the story remained out of reach, an abstract project for a person I wasn’t sure I could be. Every creative exploration of gene editing I had seen operated from a dystopian future, a science fiction platform. It was well-trodden ground upon which I had never stepped.

My experience in the topic was practical. I was working at a think tank exploring how gene therapies would impact our health system’s finances, which are designed to treat people over extended periods, not solve their problems before they surface. I was also involved in various initiatives to align incentives across our medical research system so that ailments like pediatric cancer garnered more investment. Debates on gene editing’s implications were flooding these scientific and policy communities. At what point does a therapy become an enhancement and are enhancements unethical? Should germline edits be allowed, with changes passing to future generations when they aren’t alive yet to consent? These questions aren’t dystopian. They are happening today in real life as some scientists push ahead with experiments despite a global moratorium. The intimidating abstraction I had felt about writing this book now morphed into reality. I wanted to bring that story to people not yet involved in the debate but who will live in a future impacted by it.

The resulting narrative portrays a couple’s struggle to decide whether to edit the genes of their unborn child to reduce disease risks. Between the Shimmer & the Blinding takes on the meaning of legacy and ancestry, showing how critical moments in our lives are shaped by the decisions and experiences of the generations that came before us. In the process, the book also challenges the notion of universal truths and explores the blurry thresholds upon which rest answers to our most existential questions. But in the blurriness lives humanity, our commonality, and the beauty of human connection. As our identities continue to stratify to the point of pixilation, this story shows we are more connected than not. All the seismic challenges we face as a society are imprinted in us and bind us together to preserve the promise of our shared future.

I hope you enjoy the book we wrote. I say we because dozens of my father’s notecards are in the dialogue, descriptions, and feature as part of the plot. They’re noted with a ∞ symbol throughout the text. As I put his words on the page, I could almost hear a droll response. Oh, come on, son! But as I’d wrangle the thought, his voice would evaporate back into a residue of prideful gazes and smirks that pushed me forward. His contributions—and my mother’s, through her memories of him—enabled me to produce a story that climbed over the wall of mortality.

I hope you find beauty in this fictional struggle and reflect on your own place in the arc of evolution. I hope you see how the ripples you create in the world impact others. I hope you can recognize yourself and your family members in these characters’ experiences and challenges. I hope this book helps you process any dark matter you may have inside, like it did for me. And, of course, I hope you come to your own decision on our central question. One day, you may be faced with it.

Christopher Lee

May 2022

1

Sam

Raleigh, NC. April 2004

He’d find me in the tub with a quart of my blood down the drain after a dark day, or facing the starved glare of some rabid animal, and he’d do what dads do. He’d save me.

But now there’s no one between me and the abyss.

My mind spirals into the unfamiliar void, inventing memories I wish were real as I stare into his face. Each of his wrinkles seems like a fault line to another dimension where history and future entangle, blessedly disregarding the present. I imagine him swinging me to the grocery store to fetch a forgotten ingredient needed for a holiday dinner. He’d pull out one of his ever-scribbled notecards to check the list he’d made. Together we’d experience all the pride-swelled occasions yet to come: graduations, meeting my wife, introducing him to his grandchild. He’d wrap a steadying arm around my shoulder. The child would be perfect.

The string of illusions chokes me and I close my eyes to hide in solitary darkness.

I didn’t make it in time. Dad. My hero. The man who’d lived all the pivotal lines in my teachers’ books: the Great Depression, the Second World War, the civil rights movement. The man I’ve always adored but am only now learning to know. He’s gone.

I touch his cheek, and its coldness shocks me. I’d give anything to know his views on the things I’ll encounter. To know how all his incredible life experiences shaped him and to see his reflection in my children’s faces. But in this moment, those perfect children I invented in my head feel as likely as his resurrection. If they do ever come, I’ll tell them all about their grandfather.

Unique footsteps break the solitude. Mom enters the hospital room, but her limp from childhood polio lacks its usual confidence. The metal-on-metal clicks of her leg brace barely puncture the static in my mind. I turn from giving Dad a solemn kiss on the forehead. All the machines are off now, and the room’s surfaces are a mosaic of blank whites. I lock eyes with Mom in a genetic-level-only understanding.

Her face is swollen from crying. Sam. Oh, honey.

The distance between my brain, heart, and tear ducts reduce to nothing. Mom. I’m—I’m… My lips tighten, and I bring her head to my chest to neutralize the need for explanation.

I had to call the campus police to find you. Her voice muffles against my shirt.

I know. I know. I didn’t have my phone. The officer that appeared at my door early this morning jarred my hungover body to life, but gaps in my memory remain from last night’s celebration of the end of spring classes.

It happened so fast, honey. And you’re here now.

As if by maternal telepathy, Mom catalyzes my regrets from the prior hours. Could I have gotten here faster? Two minutes after she finally reached me and told me to come, I was in the car, white-knuckling the steering wheel and heckling the accelerator. The pines lining the interstate bled together. I’d speculated about saving ten minutes by not filling the tank, but I had to, and would ten minutes have mattered?

No. I wasn’t fast enough.

Maybe it was better you weren’t here. And you did get to say goodbye… She trails off and the statement propels me back to the last moment I had with Dad.

I had gotten a call an hour into my three-hour drive, expecting it to be Mom with details about the reason I was scorching the highway from Charlottesville. But it was him.

Dad’s voice was a gargle. I knew it was him, but its strain wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. Not during this second bout of cancer. Not during his heart attacks. It was beyond all those moments of immense pain.

I’d told him to hang on. I’d said I loved him.

Three staccato syllables came back. I knew what he’d said to me, but he didn’t get to say it while we hugged goodbye. He didn’t get to say anything more. On his terms. It was through the phone, with the wind slapping the roof of the car he’d bought me.

Mom pulls back from my chest and looks up at my face. You know he loved you more than anything. More than absolutely everything. She reaches up to intercept a tear on its slow journey down my cheek. Even though it took him sixty years to realize he wanted children. She strokes the hair at my temple and purses her lips into a quarter-smile. We told you that story, didn’t we?

I take over for her and wipe my eyes. Yeah. Most of it, I think. I struggle to mimic her strength, my lip quivering.

Dad’s doctor drifts into the hospital room, his crisp white coat bright under the cool fluorescent light. Sam? Ann?

The final remnant of my adrenaline drains off. Mom and I swivel our heads in his direction, but our bodies stay anchored together. I feel her spine stiffen and I hear her leg brace click. She’s ever ready to protect me.

I’m so sorry. The doctor zeroes in on my eyes. Shields was… He clears his throat. "…Your dad was a remarkable man. With a remarkable family."

Was. The past tense further hardens my new reality, my future now without him.

2

Sam

Charlottesville, VA. April 2014

Isn’t there an old wives’ tale about hiding in the slaves’ quarters during your wedding, Sammy?

The primitive room absorbs my uncle’s drollness. Imperfect timber beams, hewn by the former occupants, juxtapose our smooth-cut tuxedos. This historic plantation is an ideal wedding venue if you don’t think about its past and stolen wills.

Clara and I met on a tour of these fields, and each time we returned their rolling sentimentality lulled our love closer to limitlessness. Plus, plentiful outbuildings like this one offered us a memorable backup plan in the event of rain, but today’s passing clouds and golden sun threaten little beyond the domination of small talk between newfound acquaintances.

The old wives were wrong, I reply, igniting a sparkle in his eye. I need a breather from the hugging and handshaking.

Well, mind if I join you?

I tilt my champagne flute as he slides through the doorway. It’s short by today’s standards but offers plenty of clearance for his frame that’s stooped by decades of factory work.

Wonderful ceremony, grand party, stunning bride. Amazing property. Of course, it’s more idyllic now that everyone’s here on their own volition. His eyes judge the room with characteristic joviality.

You sure about that? I say with a wink.

Hey now, everyone heard you answer that minister’s questions! No going back! His arm stretches across my shoulders the same way it has since I was a kid. My uncle’s an intelligent, complex person, but banter fills ninety percent of our relationship.

Yeah, yeah, I know. If anyone got trapped by this whole thing, it’s Clara.

I don’t disagree. You did good, kid, you did good. But she’s lucky to have you too. The pride that’s always under the surface peeks through his eyes. It’s obvious he’s feeling more than he’s saying but even on this day, having stood in for Dad like he has so many