Prolific Donor

My brother—ever emotive, ever sentimental—did one of those 23andMe tests, which I had advised against, but that’s Harlan. Harlan and I are twins, extremely NOT identical—and were supposedly the product of donated sperm, plus a donated egg, which were combined and gestated in a surrogate mother. Three strangers, none of whom were our parents. We should have figured out that this was at least partially untrue—it’s a bizarre and improbable setup. Sometimes, people looked perplexed when I explained it to them.

In any case, while we have never known anything about our donors or surrogate, we did of course know the people who went to all this effort to set it all up—that is, our parents, or the people who raised us.

Now, I’m not against 23andMe in general. I concede it’s fine, maybe even wise, to know if you have a predisposition toward certain illnesses, some aberrant gene, but the rest of it seemed unwise, the bad kind of curiosity, and I believe that my opinion on this has proved out.

It is true, as Harlan pointed out when arguing for the test, that our parents were not particularly gifted at being parents. Despite the great lengths they went to in order to have us, they managed to be largely indifferent to us once we arrived. Harlan’s friend Thom’s dad taught Harlan to drive, and Harlan, in turn, taught me. We both got jobs as soon as possible—him at Ben and Jerry’s, me at the front desk of a tennis center—without even telling our parents (we forged their signatures on the permission paperwork—had, by then, already forged their signatures on lots of paperwork).

Our theory was that this parental disinterest might be because we were not formed of our parents’ stuff, of their DNA. Maybe that’s why they never managed to raise their heads when we entered, let alone hug us? Or maybe it was whatever caused them to delay having children so long in the first place—that is, maybe they just weren’t that interested in having children? Harlan hoped that peering into our genetic tea leaves would unlock some crucial information. And perhaps he was right on that score, but I’m still not sure of the value of this information.

When he called with the results, Harlan asked if I was sitting down, and I said I was, although I was not. I had been scooping Mr. Waffle’s litterbox and was now standing and holding the scoop in my left hand, my phone in my right.

“Looks like Mom was actually our bio mom,” he said. “Yeah, Uncle Dick is like—he’s on our thing—he’s right there—so yeah, he’s biologically our uncle. Which means she was our mom.”

I groaned, my mind whirling. Could there be some other explanation? Maybe Mom had a secret sister who gave up an egg, or this mystery sister did the egg and the surrogacy? I couldn’t even bring myself to say it. Maybe they had other secrets. This was the problem with the test. “Are you sure?” I said.

“Yeah, and that weird cousin—what’s her name? The one with the Catholic, the San Diego blah blah—”

“Yes.”

“She’s listed as a cousin.”

I groaned again. “Can she see you too? Like, can she see that you’re her biological cousin?”

“Um.” He paused. He hadn’t thought this through. “I guess so?”

“And you’re under your real name?”

Now it was his turn to groan. “It’s okay, Andy, I’ll fix it.”

I sighed, looked for a place to set the dirty litter box scooper down. “Why the hell would they lie to us about Mom—like, why not tell us she’s our biological mother?”

“I know. I have no idea. But the other thing is, the big thing—”

“No, no,” I said, “we already did the big thing.” It occurred to me that maybe I should be sitting down after all. “Please tell me we already did the big thing.”

“No. Our bio father—he’s a—” Harlan began, and I could hear the extreme reluctance in his voice, “he’s um—he was what’s called a prolific donor.”

“Prolific?” I said and set the scooper down on the windowsill and looked out across the courtyard at the condos over there in the east wing of this massive, modern building. The weightlifting guy on the third floor was watching TV and eating a bowl of boiled eggs.

Harlan explained that according to the genetic counselor he spoke to—23andMe had sent him a letter asking him to call, such was the complexity of this case—this father of ours had gone and donated at dozens of fertility clinics throughout the American West, and also Florida, and then, when he aged out of the clinics in the United States, in the early 2000s, he’d sought more permissive venues abroad—mainly in Romania, Vietnam, Mexico. But that was just what they knew about. He’d also offered his stuff up online to women he met in chat rooms.

Harlan had asked the beleaguered genetic counselor how this would be accomplished, these under-the-table deals, and the counselor had said she didn’t know, but it sounded like maybe he’d just give them a cup with semen in it.

“That’s …” I searched for a word—there were so many options—and I settled on, “disgusting.”

“Hey, be nice, that’s our dad you’re talking about,” Harlan said, letting out his signature loud, dark laugh.

“Did the counselor say anything else?” I said.

He sighed, the laugher still leaving him. “That’s plenty, right?”

“How many siblings do we have?” I asked, bracing myself. The weightlifter had started doing burpees. Burpees on a stomach full of hard-boiled eggs. I shouldn’t judge. Perhaps he was my brother, too?

“They don’t know. The best estimate is somewhere in the high hundreds, or maybe a thousand. We’re supposed to get a DNA test from anyone we want to procreate with to make sure they’re not our sister.”

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered and moved over to the sofa.

Our biological father’s name was Vance Giesey, and he was so prolific there was an entire article in the Los Angeles Times about his attempt to seed the world. Unfortunately, the article contained little actual information on him as a person—he refused to be interviewed and had no social media presence. All that was known was that he claimed to be an architect, a fact that Harlan, a real estate broker, clung to as an explanation of his own passion for home design and sales. In the early days of the internet, he’d gone into chatrooms and befriended women who were struggling with fertility and couldn’t afford the steep prices at clinics. And this guy had vigorous swimmers. He’d just give women a cup with fresh semen in it—which sounded spectacularly disgusting to me.

That night, I put the question to my girlfriend, Betty—why would our parents lie to us in this particular way? Why tell us we were from neither of them, when we were, at least, our mother’s biological children? In fact, assuming there was no secret sister—and surely there wasn’t—she’d presumably carried us, too. And, in fact, she had a scar on her abdomen, which I had assumed was a hysterectomy scar—hence the need for a donor egg, a surrogate to carry the baby, etc.—but now I realized that there was no donor egg, no surrogate, and we were probably born by C-section. I couldn’t remember if our mother had ever had pads or tampons in the house. Why had I assumed she’d had a hysterectomy? Or had they told us as much?

In any case, our parents hadn’t gone to such great lengths to have us after all.

Betty agreed Harlan shouldn’t have gone investigating in the first place. Then she said that they presumably lied in this specific way because they wanted to be on level ground. So we wouldn’t be hunting for ways that our father was more distant and our mother less distant. Or something.

My screen was full of Betty’s full cheeks; high arching, dark eyebrows—they were mischievous eyebrows—amused eyes; a sly grin always tugging at the side of her mouth. We’d never met in person. We’d met on a Discord server for developers building in AI. Every night now, for months, we sat and talked about our days, and Betty asked question after question. She was a librarian, coding on the side, and good at asking questions in a way that didn’t feel intrusive.

Betty’s own parents were, apparently, wonderful. She rarely went twelve hours without an in-depth text conversation with her mother, who was trying to convince her father to retire to a town called Georgetown, near Austin, where Betty lived. Betty didn’t seem to mind the constant contact with her mother—they argued often, but also traded memes and jokes.

Betty also had, from the sounds of it, lots of friends in Austin. I don’t have a lot of friends—don’t text anyone, really, other than Betty, and we don’t text that much either. So I understand we don’t have a lot in common, but I like that.

“Neither one of our parents were particularly—I mean, they were nice,” I said. “You know. I liked them. Friendly people. Like grandparents, or a kindly aunt and uncle.”

“Why do you never really talk about your parents?” she asked. “You’ve talked about them, but—” she trailed off.

“I don’t see the point in thinking about them. My mother is dead, and my father—he was never all there, and now he’s even less so. We talk once or twice a year.”

“But what’s he like?”

I sighed. I had no idea, really. “He’s got a wife. I don’t know. He used to be a professor of mechanical engineering. Maybe he’s got a mechanical mind.” It was a facile thing to say, probably inaccurate. “But maybe—he’s gotten sentimental in old age. Last couple years, as our annual or semi-annual call ends, he always sounds like he’s going to start weeping.”

“Poor guy. I’m sure he does cry,” she said. “He cries because there is so much that he wants to say but he has no way of saying it.” She had a sip of something. Was she drinking wine or juice? “And he has regrets.”

“We all have regrets,” I pointed out.

“I don’t,” she said firmly. “I refuse to regret anything.” She flung her arms wide for emphasis and knocked something over out of frame. “Uh, except that.” She disappeared for a moment. A pang seized in my chest until she returned, seconds later.

“I suppose Harlan doesn’t regret anything either,” I said. “Maybe it’s just me.”

“What do you regret?” she said.

Some regrets, in no particular order:

1. Stealing food (and later cash from the tip jar, which was supposed to be shared among us all) at Starbucks when I worked there during college. No, actually, I don’t regret stealing the food. Just the cash.
2. Not learning how to be more like Harlan when my personality was more malleable, before my traits calcified, got fixed. (This is my biggest regret.)
3. The time I dressed up like John McEnroe for the 1980s-themed office party (I’m a developer at Microsoft). I put on a curly-haired wig, wore tiny white shorts and a tight white polo shirt, a white headband. And I carried an old wooden tennis racket. The shorts were supposed to be tight, but later I realized they were too tight, and gave away too much. I think about it often, even now, two and a half years later. There are people at work I still avoid because they were there, and people who avoid eye contact with me.
4. Buying my condo in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, which has quickly become borderline uninhabitable due to the levels of random violence, anger, graffiti. We have a rooftop hang-out area with several grills—and the building is very modern, USB ports in the outlets. In a different dimension, the condo building would be perfect. But this is not a different dimension—this is this dimension, with the name MOJO tagged on every available surface.
5. The speeding ticket I got two months ago when I drove too fast on 15th, where I knew there to be a speed camera. I knew it, and I wanted to go fast. I wanted to get a ticket, maybe? I just wanted to break something in a small way, and what I broke was a very low speed limit.

Harlan and David hosted a BBQ a few days after the 23andMe results came in. They live in Greenwood, a couple miles north of me, and while it’s not as dystopian as my neighborhood—not as much a zombie apocalypse situation—there are more than a few roving lunatics with spray cans, foil, and undue interest in either fire and/or being in your personal space.

One such person burned down eight houses in a single night a couple months ago. This man pushed a grocery cart full of Molotov cocktails down Greenwood Avenue. He’d go down a block with one, smash a picture window, toss in the incendiary device, and continue on his way, bottles clinking in his cart. Next block, he’d do it again.

About half of the people at their BBQ were my brother’s compatriots who were, for the most part, extremely handsome and well-dressed. My brother is wonderful, but he is something of a cliché, and he certainly admits as much himself.

He and David have what, as far as I can tell, is the best relationship I’ve ever seen between two adults. They give each other space, but they also adore each other, and are affectionate, close. They have loud arguments somewhat often—“You wouldn’t know because you’re a rube who’d never heard of Brie cheese when I met you!” Harlan once declared. “I made you civilized!”—but are constantly laughing while they argue.

That night, Harlan had evidently already told everyone about his discovery because they all wanted to talk to me about it.

Terrance, who Harlan dated before David, cornered me on the deck and said, “Harlan says you hate all this DNA stuff, but I gotta say, I found out I have three cousins who I didn’t even know about. First cousins! We’ve hung out! They’re cool. Now I, like, know something about myself, and they’re, like—they’re awesome people.”

“That’s nice. But we haven’t learned anything like that so far,” I said. Terrance is absurdly handsome. I am straight—I don’t like men—but you don’t have to be gay to feel drawn to him. I’m not good at romance, I guess. Betty is not my first mostly online, or completely online, girlfriend. Sometimes, I blame the internet, but whatever Harlan has that gets him with someone like Terrance, or even David—I don’t have that.

“Look, you learned your mom is your mom,” Terrance said, voice tilting up, like this was a big thing we’d learned, and why deny it?

I pictured our mother from behind, bent over her flowerbeds, digging and digging, sweaty brown hair falling around her face, a big sunhat on her head. She was a hardy woman, stout as a Hobbit. Fleshy hands—I pictured them glistening with oil as she kneaded dark marinade into a big bowl of chicken breasts. This woman who I always understood to be not my blood relative, but instead someone who paid another woman to carry a baby forged in a lab with other people’s genetic stuff. Gestational surrogacy is exceedingly uncommon, and we’d seemed special in some way for having been born of this expensive, onerous process. And yet it was lie. Neither Harlan nor I are squat like our mother; we’re not meaty like her. “Why did she lie, though?”

Terrance shrugged. “Why try to understand people, Andy? If they’re not around to explain themselves, you just have to have faith that it made sense to them, that they meant well. She wasn’t trying to screw you over. You’ve gotta assume best intentions.”

A little later, after Terrance had excused himself, I texted Betty: Are you around? Can we chat?

A minute passed; two. Sure, quickly, she replied.

I opened our standing Zoom link, but she wasn’t on the screen. A big, black square, the shaded avatar of a faceless, generic, gray-toned female head inside. Betty’s name in the corner.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“I just wanted to see you,” I said.

“Ah—I’m at an event. For work. Are you okay?” she said. “Can we talk later? Can you call me in about two hours?”

Yeah, I said. I wanted to tell her that I loved her. But I couldn’t. And now she was pulling away. She was already far, far away, half a continent away, and now she was going farther. She had no regrets, and why would she? She had never seemed to doubt herself. She had only done what she wanted, and she had never seemed confused about what she wanted or why.

Last week, I had asked her if she wanted to visit me in Seattle. She’d pointed out that I’d made Seattle sound like a hellhole overrun with dick-pic graffiti on city hall and meth contamination on the public buses. There’s another regret.

So I said goodbye and went back for a second helping of grilled bratwurst and cold potato salad. I watched a tornado of bugs swirl in the low amber light. I poured myself a third glass of wine. There are lonelier people than me. But it was also true that I was desperately in love with a woman who I could not touch that night—had never touched.

Later, Harlan came over, half drunk, and leaned in, stage-whispered: “I did research. I found his address. Lives in New Mexico.”

“How do you know it’s him?”

“There’s a Facebook group. I joined it. You want to look?”

I glanced at Terrance, who was grinning, delighted.

When we were young, our parents were older than everyone else’s parents—they had us in their mid-forties. They’d try to sit and talk to us like we were adults. But we were kids.

In high school, the house was so quiet. I had my tennis, Harlan had his band, his dancing, his friends—he was everywhere at our school. Extreme extrovert. At my friends’ houses, their families would sit together and laugh and argue and talk; their parents knew all of our names. I’d sit and watch like an anthropologist gathering data.

We were in college when Mom died, and Dad sold the house and remarried a very striking Colombian woman, Carla, fifteen years his junior. It was better not to ask when that relationship had commenced. Carla is cautious, sober, with watchful pale eyes, and keeps her hair short, artfully messy. He retired, and they moved to Costa Rica.

The night of the BBQ, drunk in Harlan and David’s living room, we talked about calling Dad with our discovery, but what would we say? We talked about flying down there and showing up at his house. But then what? Sure, he had the answers, but neither one of us wanted to have that conversation with him.

“You know, we’re just waiting for him to die?” Harlan said to me. It was late, past midnight. The time to call Betty had come and gone a long time before. I didn’t even send her a text, but I guess she didn’t send me one, either. I was mad, I guess—being childish, throwing a fit. But I couldn’t talk to her about that either. So I stayed too long at Harlan’s house, drank too much. At some point, everyone was gone, and we had glasses of whisky, and I wanted to cry, so I did.

Harlan put his arm around me and held me close, and that made me cry harder. And then we talked about our father again and whether we had a responsibility to tell him what we knew or not. And then Harlan said it again, that thing about how we were waiting for him to die.

“I want to go meet this other guy, this prolific donor,” I said. “You opened this door, and now we have to go through it and see what’s over there.”

Harlan opened the laptop and introduced me to the Facebook group where ninety-five of our siblings had gathered to exchange notes.

Everyone posted pictures, and it was obvious. The wide-set, hooded eyes, the pursed lips. Other things varied, like weight and hair color, but eyes and lips were always there. We tended to be tall, too, it seemed.

I curled up, there on the sofa, and Harlan put a blanket over me, kissed me on the forehead. We have always only had each other. Of course, he has David, but David will never know him like I know him. David never saw him squatting on the muddy banks of a stream in the park near our house, trying to find worms. David never worried about him getting bullied in middle school and never, for that matter, felt his concern when the bullies turned their attention to the other twin.

Still, I had never told him about Betty, didn’t know how to explain it, didn’t know where to start. “I’m in love,” I said as he sat perched on the edge of the sofa.

“Who are you in love with?” he whispered.

“Betty. She lives in Austin. I have a picture of her on my phone. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

“Good for you, brother dearest,” he said, caution creeping into his voice. “Has she been up here to see you?”

“No. We just started talking and stuff, and we talk every night on video chat for like a few months—I mean, for a few months, we talk every night. At the same time,” I said.

His eyes filled with skepticism, unwarranted and unhelpful.

“We’ve had—we’ve done stuff together. And we talk. We do.” I was losing confidence, losing hope, hearing myself.

He winced. “Masturbating on Zoom isn’t sex.”

I didn’t show him the picture in the morning. Instead, when the sun was still new and the light pale, I snuck out, dragging my hangover and my shame to my car.

In the week and a half between the BBQ and the trip to Albuquerque, Harlan and David and I talked about Vance a fair amount. We Redfin-stalked Vance’s two-bedroom house, made jokes about how his descendants might divide the property one hundred ways. Harlan, calling upon his real estate knowledge, said it was unremarkable, but the staging had been good when they sold it to Vance, a few years earlier. Harlan pointed out how they’d painted the door turquoise—a bright, inviting color—which popped nicely against the adobe.

“People are like moths,” Harlan had said, pointing at the screen, “they need it to be bright. I always swap out bright light bulbs for super bright bulbs. It needs to gleam.”

But it’s often an illusion. Sometimes, Harlan will spray-paint over a grimy, old shower stall with white paint. The paint won’t last, of course; it’ll peel off after a few showers—a little surprise for the buyers—but it looks good in the photos. When he’s helping people buy houses, he always takes a thumbnail and sees if he can scratch off the white in the shower stall.

Harlan has handsome hands, lovely nails. I had never held Betty’s hands, but I’d seen them on the screen, and they looked delicate, small.

But the main question, of course, was why—why would someone do this? Vance had never given an interview, but there was plentiful speculation among us. David believed that Vance had done it for some kinky sex reasons.

Betty felt that it was something primitive, evolutionary. “He, alone, has created a huge branch in the Homo Sapiens tree, has single-handedly nudged evolution in his direction. Who else can claim that? He’s kind of—he’s, like, imprinted himself on the species or something.”

None of this seemed quite right. He never knew any of the kids. This was David’s point. If it were in any way about wanting to have a lot of kids, he’d want to know some of them. He’d seek them out. He’d be in that Facebook group.

“Maybe he is?” Harlan had said. “Maybe he’s in there, lurking? Do you not yet know how weird some men can be?” I didn’t answer. I didn’t really want to know, was the thing.

But Harlan came to agree with David, more or less. That Vance wanted to emerge from the room, flustered, and then hand his cup of still-warm semen to this clinic staff person, usually a sweet-natured woman. With the women he found online, it was much the same. Meet at a McDonald’s, and he’d go into bathroom for ten minutes, emerge with a small cup and a syringe, and then the woman would go into the bathroom. It was, obliquely, a form of sexual intercourse. For him, it was all a weird fetish, about watching this stranger’s facial expression when she looked at his deposit.

“Still kind of a megalomaniac thing,” Betty pointed out, when I shared David’s idea. It’d been several days since I’d seen her face.

The day after Harlan’s BBQ, when she again didn’t turn her camera on, I wanted to ask why but I didn’t know how to broach the subject. So we didn’t talk about it. The next night, it was the same, so I turned my camera off too. More days followed—just our voices and that dark female silhouette. I stopped dressing nicely. Nothing mattered quite as much. I missed her face—without her face, I struggled to understand her subtext.

I was losing the only woman I had ever loved, and I had no idea how to recover her. No one had ever taught me how to do this. For now, at least, I had her voice every evening before we fell asleep in our distant beds, our different time zones.

I still had a few screenshots I’d surreptitiously taken of her before she turned the camera off. That week, I looked at them often, and the selfie she’d texted to me early on. Shortly before we went to Albuquerque, I printed out a picture of her and put it on a clipboard propped near the screen. It did help, actually, but then it made me sad, so I removed it.

Vance Giesey’s Albuquerque house was not much to look at in person—a giant black garage door spread across the left side, squeezing the rest of the house out. Otherwise, the place was innocuous, no different from all the other adobe houses in the suburban neighborhood: clay tile roof, desert garden in front. The houses were all squeezed in, too close to their neighbors. Harlan and I stood there at the front door. We would have called or emailed, but for a guy who’d been roving chatrooms for years, he had surprisingly little online presence. Probably because he was infamous. We rang the doorbell. Or Harlan did. Nothing.

Harlan went around the side and opened the gate. I winced and pointed at our rental car, and then he shrugged and entered this man’s backyard. “You’re going to get us shot,” I whispered. The yard was clean and obsessively tidy, with perfect landscaping. All surrounded by a tall fence. In the middle: a small, kidney-shaped pool.

It was hot, so Harlan stripped to his underwear and dove in. That seemed unwise. We were definitely going to get shot. I sat at a table under the umbrella, rehearsing what I might say if the man showed up.

It wasn’t long before I heard a banging on a window and looked up, but there was no one there. I stood, arms up, and as expected, Vance Giesey came storming out of the house holding a black shotgun—not pointing it at us, but holding it with both hands, so we could see it.

“Don’t shoot! We’re not armed!” I blurted, and then, to my own surprise, I added, “I’m your son! We’re your children.”

“What?” he said and shifted the gun, so he was holding it by the stock with his left hand—no danger. I glanced at Harlan, who was smiling placidly, somehow. I recognized Vance from our research, but it was strange to see him in the flesh. Six-three, white beard, our eyes and lips, my brother’s apple cheeks. Not much to look at. Sire of untold hundreds.

“You’re Vance, right?” I said and smiled, non-threatening. “My name’s Andy. I’m one of your kids. Sorry to just show up—we couldn’t find a phone number or an email address.” I shaded my eyes with one hand, pointed at the pool with the other. “That’s Harlan, my twin.”

“Jesus Christ. About time,” Vance said and walked back inside. I thought that might be the end of it. Or maybe he was calling the police? “You want something to drink?” Vance yelled from inside the house.

Harlan rolled into a backstroke and swam the length of his short pool, already showing off for our dad.

“You have any iced tea?” I said.

That evening, Vance grilled some chicken breasts, some asparagus. He had the same grill that they have on the roof of my condo building. We asked him questions, and he talked. Told us he’d only been married once, briefly, a long time ago. Now he had a nice, orderly life, a lonely bachelor’s life—owned a company that wholesaled pavers and other landscaping features for large commercial corporate companies.

“Aren’t you an architect?” Harlan said, confused.

He laughed. “Oh no, that was a crock—at the time, the clinics believed anything. They wanted someone fancy, so I made up a thing.”

I watched the look on Harlan’s face as he processed this.

Ever since David made the case that it was kinky, it’d been stuck in my head. Now, looking at him, I couldn’t stop wondering if that’s what it was. It was maddening, this running list of characteristics, trying to measure each one against what I knew of myself, of Harlan. Was Vance like me? My uptightness, you might call it, my aversion to intimacy? I sensed something like that in him—lonely men, destined to remain lonely.

“Who’s your mother?” Vance asked.

“She’s dead,” I said. Harlan was squinting at him, finally and suddenly more suspicious. We were out under that umbrella. The sun was going down. There’d been a lot of small talk. Vance looked back at his house, dark and still. No movement inside, no pets, no roommates. It was odd that he hadn’t invited us in, but perhaps I didn’t want to know what was inside.

“What’d she die of?” He had a sip of his Michelob Ultra.

“Stroke,” I said. “A month in the hospital. They thought she might recover—but nope.”

He nodded. “The good news for you is that the Giesey clan lives a very long time. Not much cancer. Not much heart disease. Really strong genes. I had tons of tests when I first started going to the clinics. When were you born?”

“1995. Summer.”

“Oh, okay, so pretty early. Pacific Northwest? Yeah. I started going to clinics up there. Beautiful country, beautiful women. You must have been among the first. I was young, just getting started with helping these women—just, it broke your heart to hear how badly they wanted little ones. I was—let me see,” he said and cast his gaze up, doing math, and I caught an uncanny glimpse of Harlan right there in that gesture. “I was thirty-one.”

“You started late,” Harlan said.

Vance shrugged. “Never too late to start.” His eyes darted around the patio, like a furtive animal, perhaps. Or like one looking for prey.

“Why did you start?” Harlan asked.

“To be honest, just thought it’d be cool. I’m an only child, the last of my line. My marriage had already ended, and I didn’t want to marry again. It felt like if I died, what then? Somehow the Gieseys would vanish from the world, like we never happened. And I had a lot to give. More young folks in this world could benefit from that.”

“And then?” Harlan asked.

He shrugged. “They did all these tests, and the doctor said, ‘You know, you’re the perfect donor. Tall. Good IQ. No time bombs in your genes. Highly motile sperm—very energetic.’ It became a kind of calling, a vocation, I guess you could say.”

He shrugged. He had the same hands as Harlan, those perfect hands. My mind lurched toward Betty, who had said it was a terrible idea to come here. She had gotten mad at me two nights earlier when I told her we were going to New Mexico. She said it was impulsive. And it must have seemed so to her because I had failed to tell her about the decision when we’d made it, or during the ensuing week, as our departure approached. Still, her response infuriated me, and I snapped: “You just want me to stay where I am.” Too brusque, I knew; I’d let loose too much honesty. She’d hung up. And then she didn’t show up to our call the next night.

I would have called off the trip for her if she’d said she’d come to visit—or let me go see her, or if she would have turned her camera on, or anything. The longer she iced me out, the more it hurt, like some sprain inside of me, inside my heart. At times, I felt angry at her and ready to write her off, but that didn’t last.

After dinner of overcooked chicken and undercooked asparagus, Harlan finally confronted him. “Are you—did you enjoy meeting strange women and,” lowering his voice, whispering, he said it, “giving them cups of your offerings—semen? Is it a sex thing?”

My face burned hot, and I stared at my plate.

Vance laughed. “God no, what do you mean? Do you mean—oh no, that’s strange. No.” His tongue darted, eyes running laps around the patio. “I really just want to help these couples, these women who can’t have healthy offspring.”

Harlan said, “My boyfriend thinks it was a kinky thing.”

Vance shook his head, thinking. “Wait, you’re gay?”

That was surprising. You don’t need a particularly strong gaydar to figure out that Harlan is gay. His gayness is visible from outer space.

Harlan, equally confused by the question, tilted his head. “Is that a problem?”

Vance shrugged and snorted. “No, I just—never knew we had any gays in the family. It’s—I don’t know. Surprising.”

Harlan shot me a look.

“What does your dad think about all this?” Vance said.

“About my gayness?” Harlan said.

“No, I mean—” Vance said and made a gesture with his hand, encompassing all of us present on his patio. I noticed bugs in the water, dead, floating. Had they been there all day?

“We haven’t told him,” I said.

He looked at me, baffled. “What do you mean?”

“He doesn’t know about any of this. Doesn’t know that Harlan did a 23andMe.”

“He knows your mom used donor sperm, though?”

“Of course,” I said. “I assume so.”

“Sure,” Vance said. “But you’re not going to ask.” He stretched, reached both hands behind his head, and gazed with serenity at twilight’s first stars.

I’d seen enough. I stood up. It had been a mistake to find him, a mistake to do the 23andMe. It’d been a mistake to join the Facebook group. It’d been a mistake to hunt down Vance Giesey. Also, I never should have started dating Betty. All these regrets. Every day was a regret. I was looking forward to never talking to this man again. Thinking about him as little as possible for the rest of my life.

That night, in our hotel room, I still considered texting Betty, but didn’t. Harlan was sitting in the swiveling armchair, swaying back and forth, staring out the window, feet up on the windowsill.

“Why don’t you go see her?” he said. “This is weird. You should do a big, romantic thing. I can’t believe you never even asked her why she turned her camera off. Or asked her to turn it on.”

I sighed. “She doesn’t want me to show up.”

“How would you even know? What is up with all this silence, man?”

“I love her, you know. I’m scared.”

“How well do you even know her? You’ve never stood in front of her. You’ve never watched her walk across a room.”

My heart was caving in, slowly. It’d been caving in for a while. “I’m looking forward to being done with all this DNA shit,” I said.

Harlan made a noise, a sharp intake of breath. “Hey, I meant to tell you—I told Dad last week. I never wanted to keep it a secret from him. You were the one who insisted we not tell.”

I looked at Harlan. Was he kidding? “Wait, you told him about Vance and everything? Why did you tell him?” I felt a budding insistence within myself that I didn’t recognize.

He looked at me with pity. “Because it’d be weird not to.”

“What did he say?” I said. I didn’t want to know, and I did want to know. But also, like, Harlan had tricked me. Everything was constantly out of control, and he was making it even more out of control.

“He said it was just what you’d think—his sperm were no good, so they used donor sperm from the bank. They wanted it to be even, so they claimed it was all other people’s stuff.”

“Why lie about the surrogate?” I said. It made no sense.

“Why does anyone do anything? You’re in love with a blank screen.”

“Please stop. I need to sleep,” I said, but of course, I wasn’t going to sleep.

That night, late, I texted Betty. Told her I was in love with her. I’d never really told her that. But I was losing her, and maybe Harlan was right, maybe I was not talking enough. Wasn’t—I don’t know. Risking enough. So, I texted her that I was in love with her. Bring on the regrets! If everything I ever did became a regret, but not doing anything also became a regret, then I might as well.

After a while, she replied, you cant be in love, we dont yet know each other that well

That stung, but I replied: I want to know you

I watched the bubbles as she typed. Then the bubbles stopped. Eventually she sent me an image. It looked like a map. I zoomed in on the picture and saw it was a screenshot of Google Maps driving directions from Albuquerque to Austin.

That night, I wrote a note for Harlan in the bathroom light and left it on my bed. Then I snuck out, went down to the rental car, and set off. A big romantic gesture, Harlan had said. It was like in the movies. That’s what I told myself.

In the eleven hours on the road, I never listened to music, the radio. Nothing except the monologue in my head, the rehearsals for what I might say to her. The things I might say to my dad when we talked again in however many months. I might ask him why he always weeps when we’re on the phone, why he is sad when I end the call. I might ask anything.

But for a while, it was still just me, alone with the thoughts and no one to talk to, on the sage-smelling highway in the darkness. When the sun came up, I tried out my voice, tried asking things out loud, things I didn’t know if I wanted answers to, but I needed to say.

“Can you tell me,” I said into the rental car, wind roaring outside, “why you keep me away?” I said: “Why no camera? No, I mean, why’d you turn it off?” I said more, too, just to hear it. I said: “Can you tell me … can I tell me … can we … can we something, can we anything?”