% Looking out for my Father: A Gentleman Lost in Time
% Julian Bartlett West.

# Preface

My father is Julian West, "The Oldest Man on Earth," the notorious creation, and yes I dare say _creation_, of my grandfather, the infamous Doctor Leete, or as Madame Shelley author of _Frankenstein_ might have labeled him, Dr. Leete: a _Modern Prometheus._ 

In Shelley's time the story of my father would be a tragedy. I myself would be the demon offspring of a mad scientist's lovely daughter and the monster he created. But in our modern times Julian West is no monster, there are no demons, and lovely women like my dear mother are not held to fault for falling in love with a human creature fabricated from the remains of a man long dead and imprinted with a brilliant, if misguided, re-synthesis of human history.

The truth of the matter is that the celebrated Julian West of our time is not, except by the most generous extension of our modern sympathies and sensibilities, the same Julian West born in Boston in the year 1857, later to be asphyxiated in a house fire in that same city in the waning hours of the thirteenth of May, 1887.

From my father's perspective he, Julian West, fell asleep in his hermetically sealed subterranean sleeping chamber one night with the assistance of one "Doctor" Pillsbury, "Professor of Animal Magnetism," and he was awakened by a stranger exactly one hundred and thirteen years, three months, and eleven days later.

This story is of course much too neat and too highly improbable to be anything but a hoax because life itself, let us say Mother Nature Herself, is never this tidy. In the ways of birth and death she tends to be very messy. People are born messy and wrapped in towels and dead people rot. In truth, this "awakening" of Julian West represented a death, a birth, and an altogether a _very_ messy breach of medical ethics. It began simply enough within carefully tended vats of synthetic bodily fluids and nutrients in which the man was recreated, the larger mess was the academic and political skulduggery and embezzlement within the great medical research institutions of New England. 

We have all experienced in our most unfortunate times the remarkable advances medical science has made in this past century. In our modern hospitals new limbs and new organs are regularly grown to replace those that have been lost or damaged by illness or accident. Upon various mass-produced biological templates (or "scaffolding" as these are called) a patient's own stem cells can be induced to grow a new hand, a new heart, a new liver, and yes, even the more mechanistic parts of the human brain that control respiration and other involuntary and semi-voluntary affect.

But we have not conquered death, nor is there any remedy for the very worst sort of accident or illness: those that destroy the organization of our identity, the seat of our very souls. When a mind is too mangled and disrupted to host the identity of its owner we allow that soul to move on. There is no purpose in restoring a body when the mind is lost.

Despite the great progress made in repairing and replacing the more mechanical processes of the mind, it is unlikely there will ever be found a way to extract and transfer an individual identity from a greatly damaged brain to a synthetic replacement. It is even further beyond the realm of credible science that an identity could be extracted from a long dead mummified mind, as was the mind of the original Julian West when it was recovered in a remarkable state of preservation by colleagues of Doctor Leete in the year 1987.

And yes, this relates to the core of the scandal that is so familiar to the general public and the object of examination within the curriculum of so many medical ethics and philosophy courses. My father, this Julian West of our time, is the first, and maybe the last, entirely artificial man. He was grown in a regeneration tank just like a replacement limb or a heart might be, using the mummified remains of the original Julian West as the scaffolding for the reproduction. While still in this tank his developing mind was electrochemically impressed with a history that was not it's own, but one belonging to the original Julian West as best it could be recreated. 

This book does not concern the scandal of my father's creation. Many books and screenplays have examined this extraordinary story, ethics panels have examined and cross-examined the evidence from every direction, and the representatives of the People have delivered their Judgment upon my maternal grandfather, Dr. Leete and his associates. In this matter there is full transparency; nothing remains hidden and I can bring no further illumination to the subject.

Furthermore, any audience for the overwrought pedagogy of both my father and his physician is sparse. What audiences were excited in _Looking Backwards_ were most often found wearied by it's sequel _Equality_.

This book is not a bombastic tome of political theory and the distribution of wealth. This is a story about my father, a gentleman lost in time.

#Chapter One

My twenty-first century is not your twenty-first century. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the experiences of one person's memory and any external reality, or between our own experiences and the experiences of another.

You, the reader, and I the author share a common ancestry of the nineteenth century. My maternal ancestors shared a world with your ancestors. But my father, who thinks himself a creature of the nineteenth century and will never speak otherwise, comes from a different place. His nineteenth century was a complex matrix built within a machine and imposed upon a mind predisposed in certain ways by it's genetic maps, yet essentially blank, growing within an artificial womb capable of bringing forth a fully grown man. But who is to say the authors of that history did any better or worse in their exposition than the authors of the nineteenth century history we know? 

I will make the claim that the memories of my father have a greater correspondence to the actual history of the nineteenth century than any other similar history a single human of our time might comprehend. My father's understanding that he is a man of the nineteenth century is valid, and accepted as such, not just by his family, but by his students and his academic colleagues.

The stories I tell often offend my father's nineteenth century sensibilities. He accepts that I am a child of the twenty-first century, and even forgives the conceit that I write of things in his own English language which would never be revealed in his own time, not even to a very intimate confidant. He may prefer I use the universal tongue to describe our family, perhaps as a way of maintaining some distance between his present self and his nineteenth century self, but he has not begrudged me this expression. Clearly, unlike himself, I was born of a mother's womb. Clearly, he and my mother had sexual relations, more than once, of that I am certain. Yet my father would be at pains to say such a simple thing.

I know my mother is a public figure alongside my father, that a few of my readers have seen thirty year old photographs of my mother at the public baths and beaches, have appreciated her as a celebrity, follow her on the gossip channels, but I've no intention of creating fodder for the authors of cheap Gothic romance ... she is my mom, knock it off!

But as this is a biography of my father, it is inevitably a love story.

From my Father's book, describing his awakening. He hears voices:

<<
"He is going to open his eyes. He had better see but one of us at first."

"Promise me, then, that you will not tell him."

The first voice was a man's, the second a woman's, and both spoke in whispers.

"I will see how he seems," replied the man.

"No, no, promise me," persisted the other.

"Let her have her way," whispered a third voice, also a woman.

"Well, well, I promise, then," answered the man. "Quick, go! He is coming out of it."

There was a rustle of garments and I opened my eyes. A fine looking man of perhaps sixty was bending over me, an expression of much benevolence mingled with great curiosity upon his features. He was an utter stranger. I raised myself on an elbow and looked around. The room was empty. I certainly had never been in it before, or one furnished like it. I looked back at my companion. He smiled.

"How do you feel?" he inquired.

"Where am I?" I demanded.

"You are in my house," was the reply.

"How came I here?"

"We will talk about that when you are stronger. Meanwhile, I beg you will feel no anxiety. You are among friends and in good hands. How do you feel?"

"A bit queerly," I replied, "but I am well, I suppose. Will you tell me how I came to be indebted to your hospitality? What has happened to me? How came I here? It was in my own house that I went to sleep."
>>

The man was my grandfather, Doctor Leete. The first woman speaking, his daughter, my mother, Edith Leete Bartlett. The third voice, "Mrs. Leete," was not of course any Mrs. Leete but my grandmother Dr. Bartlett, then of the Harvard School of Medicine, who was at that very moment beginning to suspect she'd married a scoundrel of a radically different sort than usually excited her.

Grandfather is still very much "A fine looking man" but he no longer lives with Dr. Bartlett. Grandmother quietly left him at the height of the scandal and moved to San Francisco. She lives on a hilltop overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In her study she watches through her telescope the condors, gulls and ravens picking apart dead sea mammals on the beach. If she ever happened to see Dr. Leete washed up dead on the beach and eaten by scavengers it is possible she would smile.

Grandmother has seven strictly indoor cats because the coyotes get hungry, and she lives with a metal artist named Jo. I have no great appreciation for metal art, not the music or the design, but Jo is a gracious host and a wonderful cook. Father does not approve of her cooking. He rejects chili peppers as a proper spice. 

Jo is unusual, even by San Francisco norms. Some of Jo's body is inexplicably artificial looking. A mechanical hand with silicone skin perhaps? Ceramic bone and plastic muscles underlying a large swath of Jo's face? Jo is tall with dark skin and curly hair and oriental features. Jo moves gracefully, but with an asymmetry that somehow gives her an air of unpredictability.  

Father is not comfortable in grandma and Jo's home; he would rather be visiting Grandpa. He sits on their sofa quietly, holding a glass of some awful archaic dessert wine in one hand and an unlit cigar in the other. A cat plays with his bootlaces. He secretly struggles to determine Jo's age or sex.  My sister and I know Jo is grandma's age. Grandma and Jo sleep together. Grandma loves Jo. 

_Oma lubi Jo._ 

It is easier to write about Jo in Universal, free from the tyranny of English that binds everyone to a particular sex. Some traditionalists will distinctly say "e-lay" and "e-lah," and this option may have been built into the language to appease them, but most people don't, especially in the Americas where the pronoun's entire pronunciation is lazy. The spelling is the same either way and most often translated into "her" by inexperienced speakers of English. _Oma lubi ela._ 

Younger speakers worldwide simply don't bother with the Latin derived pronoun and just use _ta_, saying simply _Omi lubi ta_, or even putting the verb first, _Lubi Omi ta_. My teenaged niece would say the later, and she would say it very quickly with no pauses like it was a single word _LubiOmita_ . Don't ask me why. Our universal tongue fragments and re-converges according to the needs of it's users. The academics who shepherded the language into common use no longer influence its evolution. The language belongs to the people, especially those who learn it as children. 

Father often expresses his disapproval when unpracticed English speakers confuse their personal pronouns, especially when they inappropriately use the feminine in place of the masculine, which is the more common mistake. In the nineteenth century "hims" had higher social standing then "hers." If Jo was a "he" then Jo would have higher social standing, and if Jo was a "she" a lower standing, further degraded by the condescension of ignoring Jo and Grandma's sexual relationship.
 
Jo and grandmother normally converse in a language that shifts fluidly between universal and Mexican Spanish. Father calls it _metal latin_, and this is indeed the home language of metal art and music. 

Father expresses his contempt for the universal tongue in numerous ways, and classifies all varieties with the suffix "latin," which is his universal pejorative for the universal tongue. He describes accents as Bosch-latin, Frog-latin, and some worse -latins I won't repeat. Father is uncomfortable with people who have dark skin and/or oriental features. It is one of grandfather's unforgivable sins that in his quest for authenticity he impressed upon my father's developing mind the racism of the nineteenth century. Remarkably, by nineteenth century standards my father's racism would be mild, even radically opposed to the social order of that time.

Father reads universal well, and with great reluctance he writes it. But he will not speak it. That would violate the public persona he so carefully cultivates. He rarely spoke universal at home when we were children, but I suspect he may not have been fluent yet. Thus my sister and I were fluent in English, more or less.

My mother's parents are within my immediate family, my _Oma_ and _Opa_. My father's parents are so long dead I can't imagine their world, or what they might think of mine, except through the window of my father himself.

When my father woke up from his "long sleep" he first thought his circumstances a fraud or a bad joke. He was correct, the circumstances of his waking were fraudulent, but at that point there wasn't any way he might have comprehended the true nature of the deception. He was a newborn to this world. And in every manner his true father, the man who had conceived him and brought him to life within an artificial womb, baptized him in lies.

<<
"Your appearance is that of a young man of barely thirty, and your bodily condition seems not greatly different from that of one just roused from a somewhat too long and profound sleep, and yet this is the tenth day of September in the year 2000, and you have slept exactly one hundred and thirteen years, three months, and eleven days."
>>

The date was correct, but there was no sleep of a hundred years. The corpse of Julian West was long dead when it was discovered. It took thirteen years for the mad scientist to bring a copy of Julian West to life by building a scaffolding from a dead man, growing a new body on it, and filling its empty head with carefully collected historical simulations created within the machines of the central libraries, supplemented with various historical documents handed down in the Bartlett family.

My grandfather had the man's letters, the man's DNA, the man's history, the contents of "sleeping chamber" strong room, and thus everything he needed to recreate a simulacrum of the man himself. This would be Dr. Leete's grand legacy and gift to the new millennium. The ego of Dr. Leete knew no proper boundaries. Perhaps his greatest ethical transgression, he imprinted upon his synthetic man's brain a romantic impression of his own daughter fusing this impression with that of the dead man's fiance, the innocent girl's own great grandmother.

You've seen photographs of the two Ediths. There are some vague family similarities, but not so much as might justify an ordinary man's feelings of reconnection. I've contemplated my ancestor Edith's photographs, and I've read her letters. She does not remind me of my mother at all, this nineteenth century Edith who mourned my father for fourteen years before she gave herself to another man. 

Mother's infatuation with Julian West is a mystery to me. On the good authority of my sister, and in my own experience young women of today are not so prone to impossible, imaginary romances as they were then.

#Chapter Two

My father is uncomfortable. I've said too much, and in his own tongue. These awful truths would be distant, safe, if I wrote this in the universal tongue, or French, or maybe disguised in the archaic Latin the learned of his own time used.

This violation of two souls, one the child of Dr. Leetes intellect and ingenuity, one of Dr. Leetes own loins was distasteful. But the operating table has been disinfected, the water passed under the bridge, truth has illuminated every dark place, evil has been purged by Justice, Dr. Leete's red ribbon of public service rescinded, his unconscionable pride rebuked.

Yet some will inevitably read this in Holy Righteousness and Anger without any forgiveness or understanding. I say to them this is not the way of our modern world.

In _Looking Backwards_ my father describes my grandmother and my mother:

<<
Mrs. Leete was an exceptionally fine looking and well preserved woman of about her husband's age, while the daughter, who was in the first blush of womanhood, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her face was as bewitching as deep blue eyes, delicately tinted complexion, and perfect features could make it, but even had her countenance lacked special charms, the faultless luxuriance of her figure would have given her place as a beauty among the women of the nineteenth century. Feminine softness and delicacy were in this lovely creature deliciously combined with an appearance of health and abounding physical vitality too often lacking in the maidens with whom alone I could compare her. It was a coincidence trifling in comparison with the general strangeness of the situation, but still striking, that her name should be Edith.
>>

Yet there is no artificiality about my parent's love for one another, in spite of the alarming origins. There I will leave the matter to rest. There are things I don't think about, don't explore. It allows me to put myself in my father's place, he who's head is full of closet doors he will not open.

As teenagers my sister and I would ruthlessly tease our parents about their first visit to the Leander Natorium.

My father wrote:

<<
It was to the Leander Natatorium that we had directed our steps. As I need not remind Bostonians, this is one of the older baths, and considered quite inferior to the modern structures. To me, however, it was a vastly impressive spectacle. The lofty interior glowing with light, the immense swimming tank, the four great fountains filling the air with diamond-dazzle and the noise of falling water, together with the throng of gayly dressed and laughing bathers, made an exhilarating and magnificent scene, which was a very effective introduction to the athletic side of the modern life.
>>

To any kid in Boston, the Natorium was a place where you saw countless wrinkled pear-shaped old people with flat feet and spindly arms and legs circulating about the edges of the pools and fountains, clear plastic drinking cups in hand, stark naked with drooping testicles or breasts, and sometimes both. Children cover their mouths and suppress giggles when these old people pass by, never imagining that they might look like that someday.

Our mother has never been one to wear decoration while swimming at either the beach or the Natorium. But for this occasion she did, just as she wore nineteenth century costume for my father's awakening. My father was surprised and a little shocked when he first saw her in a modern pantsuit, and I imagine the swimwear my mother chose must have appeared to father entirely scandalous, even a competition speed suit stretching from her calves to her shoulders. I'd love to have this photograph of the two of them then, but if any exists it is quite well hidden away.

I believe from his description that my father simply edited public nudity entirely from his vision and focused his full attention upon the "throng of gayly dressed and laughing bathers...," meaning of course, my mother and likely no one else.

My sister and I, having modern twenty-first century educations, knew everything about sex, at least in the abstract, before we finished grade school. My father knew very little about the subject, and what he did know he learned from my mother, or, whenever he was too modest to ask her about more general topics not related to their own relationship, he'd discreetly ask his physician father-in-law, who is a slightly twisted and unreliable source known to fondle on occasion both statuary and multiple consenting adults.

As a child I endeavored to avoid the subject of sex unless we found ourselves trapped in a situation that rattled him. Flirty male service people he found unnerving. My sister would needle my father without mercy. She'd point out strangers kissing and other public displays of affection. She once told him his mother-in-law's partner Jo must have parts that vibrate. At first my father was confused. Then he was dumbfounded. Then he turned bright red and looked about to explode. At last he melted into silence and nothing more was said. My sister still needles him like that, but his sensibilities have almost caught up with the century and more often than not he simply smiles.

#Chapter Three

My father is oddly incurious about technology. He still tolerates grandfather's stodgy long-winded lectures about the modern economic system, like those that make his book _Equality_ so difficult to read, but he doesn't ask how everyday things _work_. Perhaps he is a creature of his upbringing. The wealthy didn't need to know how things worked, they hired people for that. The warm water appeared in the basin, the food on the table. What skills the wealthy did have involved shifting capital around to avoid the next business crisis, crisis that were purely the result of an economic system based upon faulty and corrupt first principles. Father could perhaps develop his nineteenth century skills to some sort of planning, but he would have a lot to unlearn, and he doesn't need this work as his place as a historian is assured. Or maybe he is an actor. Now well adapted to the modern world his trademark schtick is still that of a wealthy and idle nineteenth century gentleman, and his large wardrobe essentially costume.

He used to ask Mother, me, and my sister to wear similar costume, especially when we were traveling together as he visited various universities of the world as a lecturer. We hated dressing up. Occasionally we yielded to his wishes, especially at formal events which were themselves costume parties or performance art. The _Nobelpriset_ ceremonies in Scandinavia are like that, and nineteenth century in origin, providing my father frequent opportunity as a guest. He knows how to play the part. Mother rarely attends events like that anymore, at least not in full costume. Father stopped dragging his kids along when we became rebellious teens. It may have been the day my sister and I exchanged costume and I appeared before him wearing my sister's fancy gown, and she in my fancy suit. Mother could not suppress laughter and Father simply got cold and distant.

We were not unusual teens in any way, but Father's expectations of how a family ought to behave were fully archaic. Mother often intervened so it wasn't a particular burden on my sister and me. If anything, my sister reveled in the friction, and behaved in "unladylike" ways that might not have been her natural inclination had we a common sort of family.

Even as a preteen my sister liked to build rockets. My father thought this a horribly inappropriate hobby for a young lady which further encouraged my sister to build rockets even more phallic than she might otherwise have.

It was Father's responses to my sister's hobby that sometimes illustrated my father's extraordinary ignorance of engineering history. There were things he simply did not see; simply _refused_ to see. I don't think this was a consequence of his origins. The actual Julian West of the nineteenth century almost certainly suffered the same sort of incuriousity.

One day my sister was imagining a modern day expedition to the moon. My father scoffed and claimed the deed impossible. He had no inkling that the first human expedition to the moon had been accomplished in 1957 or that there was presently an astronomical observatory firmly planted on the far side. My sister explained to him that space travel is less common in our day since it best is accomplished by automatons but that humans had enjoyed a continuous presence in space for 75 years.  In his very first electroscope voyages across earth's globe he had not imagined cameras on platforms orbiting the earth staffed by human crews.

Further complicating my father's perceptions is that whenever he did open his mind to the wonders of modern technology he was apt to have terrible visions, and sometimes nightmares. He told me once he'd had nightmares about rockets used as weapons, a single such weapon that could destroy an entire city, and worldwide wars fought with such. I begged him not to mention that to my gentle sister or anyone else. Of course mother bore the brunt of all of these nightmares and was always there to restore his nerves after a brutal night of such ruminations, just as she had been there for him after his first panicked early morning exploration of Boston.

<< Throwing myself into a chair, I covered my burning eyeballs with my hands to shut out the horror of strangeness. My mental confusion was so intense as to produce actual nausea. The anguish of those moments, during which my brain seemed melting, or the abjectness of my sense of helplessness, how can I describe? In my despair I groaned aloud. I began to feel that unless some help should come I was about to lose my mind. And just then it did come. I heard the rustle of drapery, and looked up. Edith Leete was standing before me. Her beautiful face was full of the most poignant sympathy.
"Oh, what is the matter, Mr. West?" she said. "I was here when you came in. I saw how dreadfully distressed you looked, and when I heard you groan, I could not keep silent. What has happened to you? Where have you been? Can't I do something for you?"
Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands in a gesture of compassion as she spoke. At any rate I had caught them in my own and was clinging to them with an impulse as instinctive as that which prompts the drowning man to seize upon and cling to the rope which is thrown him as he sinks for the last time. As I looked up into her compassionate face and her eyes moist with pity, my brain ceased to whirl. The tender human sympathy which thrilled in the soft pressure of her fingers had brought me the support I needed. Its effect to calm and soothe was like that of some wonder-working elixir.
"God bless you," I said, after a few moments. "He must have sent you to me just now. I think I was in danger of going crazy if you had not come." At this the tears came into her eyes. >>

It is perhaps an aspect of his biology. The nineteenth century Julian West also had trouble sleeping. Jo made a thoughtless remark once that he was resonating with parallel universes, places where history had followed different courses. Jo hadn't read his books and knew nothing of his night terrors, hallucinations, and flashbacks. Grandma thinks these a consequence Grandfather's crime.

Mother and my sister both belong to the sciences, Mother to botany, Sister to rocket science. If urban trees had human representatives in Congress, as say the cetaceans or hominids do, my mother might be one of those representatives too. My father seems incapable of seeing them as scientists. In his eyes they are both upper-class ladies of leisure. It's quite mad and infuriating, most especially when their work schedules conflict with what he thinks they ought to be doing: decorating his career as an academic and finding a proper husband for my sister. I am blessedly free from that sort of pressure and my sister resents it. It also makes them crazy when he arranges to have them introduced as his wife and daughter, "Mrs. and Miss West." They are, of course, Bartletts. Naming conventions are a little bit freer than they were in my grandfather's time, but most people are named as always; sons will take the father's surname, daughters the mother's surname, and _vice versa_ for the middle name. The nineteenth century convention where everyone takes the patriarch's surname strikes us as odd, even a bit distasteful.

#Chapter Four

My father is the first entirely synthetic human. His intellectual existence began as a computer model. Then the stem cells of his body were recreated and the model impressed upon a basic human framework, the same sort of framework used for organ and limb replacements in medicine. 

My father may be, in some sense, immortal. So long as this model exists within some intelligent machine he could be recreated to exist just as he was when my grandfather "reawakened him."

Mortals like ourselves might be recreated too, some simile of the dead, but it is generally agreed these doppelgangers would not, and could not be the same person lost, no matter how close the model conformed to our expectations. If my grandfather had recreated a recently dead person then public opinion would never have been so lenient. Our greatest physicians can do nothing whenever the greater part of a human brain is lost. People are allowed to die, of old age, and sadly, by accident. Humans are mortal. It is our nature. Immortality belongs to our intellectual children, the intelligences we created, populating the neighborhoods of our solar system so very inhospitable to man, their thoughts and motives often beyond our reckoning.

What is human if any one of us can be modeled within a machine?

I believe it is in the surprises.

Soon after his rebirth, Father learned to cook many of the foods any upper class gentleman of nineteenth century Boston might have eaten. He learned these skills during his three years in public service, caring for the very elderly in the hospices of Boston.

Unlike the man who created him, the infamous Dr. Leete, Father had a more traditional sort of conscience. Grandfather had assured my father he would find immediate work as a historian, perhaps to comfort Father that he would not be doing "menial" work, below his class. And it's very possible Father might have found exemption and been allowed to take on this role as a historian without any unclassified labor service at all.

This is something I did not know as a child -- when Father left my grandparent's house he signed on as unclassified and largely anonymous labor. I might have expected a truer creature of upper class nineteenth century Boston to exploit in some way his own notoriety for his own personal gain. He did not. He worked in a kitchen.

Had he not felt the obligation to maintain his identity as a man from the nineteenth century, I believe my Father would have been a chef.