The Frankenstein Candidate Read online

  One of those experts then proceeded to defend the bill, called the Americans First Employment Bill or the Jones-Brackmann bill, after the senators who proposed it. Jones was a Democrat; Brackmann was a Republican. Any corporation listed in the U.S. was to be barred from increasing overseas employment by more than it increased its American workforce in any given calendar year. If passed, it was to take effect in March 2020. The media spinners had quickly commenced the advertisements to sell this measure to a public hungry for remedies.

  It was time to end the conspiracy and the waffle, thought Stein.

  It was not the sort of half-baked political measure that Stein would normally have missed observing in the making. Nor would he have missed its impact. The impact on his personal wealth hardly mattered. By all accounts, he was still worth between one billion and two, depending on where various world markets were on the day you measured his wealth. He had converted three hundred million of that into cash, which he held in accounts in various currencies around the world, and held another three hundred million in gold.

  No, it was not about personal wealth. Nor was it about his ego—he certainly had missed other opportunities and threats in his stellar twenty-year career. True, Alpha’s shareholders would be impacted, but given the global breadth of their investments, the impact was minimal.

  No, Frank Stein was incensed that politicians kept making the problem worse—all the while lying, deceiving, and evading the issues that the public was being kept in the dark about. The show must end, he thought. It was time to take the camera backstage and expose the naked emperors of political power.

  The anger was understandable, but it was the intensity of his rage that he could scarcely explain. It made his decision easier.

  Many a billionaire had become a philanthropist in his later years: Hughes, Moore, Carnegie, Gates, Rockefeller, Buffett—the list was long. Stein had certainly long considered that option. This, however, was different. This was an exposé that the nation needed. The poor could be helped more by ending deception than by philanthropy. Besides, he thought, charity suited those who carried a measure of guilt over their wealth, but he felt none. Devoting the rest of his life to a crusade against deception was his way of giving back to society.

  “But you could be killed,” one of his closest friends said.

  “Doesn’t matter what you say, the media will spin it the other way,” one of his trusted advisers said.

  “Alpha’s shareholders need you,” one of his corporation’s board members said.

  They were the only three people Stein called to seek counsel.

  By afternoon, he was calling them again, just to let them know his mind was made up. They kept pleading with him, asking him to reconsider, to reflect on it a bit more. However, by evening, he had begun assembling a campaign team that would not use any media specialist. At Alpha, he said he would resign immediately as the company president but remain as the chairman of the board.

  The legacy of his life was not going to be wealth. He was going to be the boy who called the emperor naked. Decision made. He felt a lot better now.

  Pouring himself a glass of champagne, he switched on the television. The coverage showed the growing queues for food. Queues for food…in California? Yes, it was happening. In the State Medical Centre, which offered free access to medical care, the emergency centers had two hundred people crammed into a waiting room fit for forty. The crisis coverage continued, showing ghost towns that had been created by rows of beautiful, unoccupied, foreclosed houses from Fresno to Orange County.

  Frank Stein switched the television off. He was going to fix things, once and for all.

  Wasn’t this the country where you could say anything you wanted?

  It was the summer of 1969. Frank was born to a middle-class Jewish couple, Joshua and Dora Stein, in Anaheim, California, on July 20, 1969—the day mankind set foot on the moon.

  Dora Stein watched a little television monitor mounted in the corner of the delivery room as Frank virtually choreographed his entry into the human world at precisely the moment Neil Armstrong first uttered the words—“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  Dora and Joshua were deeply religious. They were Ashkenazi Jews who arrived from Poland in 1968, a newly married couple who had been granted permanent resident visas on account of their refugee status, courtesy the Soviet-sponsored anti-Zionist campaign. In the U.S., the Sixties was a counterculture decade marked by irreverence for all things good and bad: sexism and homophobia, but also industry and thrift as well as academic and technological achievement. Although the moon landing was obviously a scientific and technological achievement, Dora saw in it a foreshadowing of the arrival of a messiah of sorts. Joshua too saw something divine in the timing of Frank’s arrival. Joshua believed that the joyous sense of confidence that he spontaneously felt was because God had looked after the men floating in a vulnerable capsule in the vast darkness of space and guided them to safety—it must be an auspicious day—so God would look after Frank.

  He also thought it meant that Frank would become a scientist. Not that Joshua disliked scientists—he loved the idea of Frank becoming a NASA engineer or a medical doctor, but he did not want Frank to abandon his Jewish traditions. So Joshua made sure that both Frank and his sister Daniela, who was born three years later, attended a local Jewish elementary school.

  Joshua and Dora ran a small pharmacy and regularly attended the synagogue. Home was a little three-bedroom cottage in a middle-class suburb where copies of the Old Testament and Hebrew scriptures abounded.

  It was obvious that little Frank was a precocious child. As above average that the Jewish elementary was compared to other schools in the neighborhood, Joshua and Dora could barely wait until Frank could be packed off to a more challenging school. Oxford Academy at Cypress, an academically selective senior high school, enticed them. Frank passed their entrance exam with flying colors. Aged eleven, he soon found himself at one of the most academically advanced public educational high schools in the country.

  At first, Joshua and Dora were extremely happy. Dora would do the early morning drive to drop Frank off at school and come into the pharmacy late, which actually was before nine in the morning, but for the Steins…well, that was a late start. Joshua would drive him back from school, and Frank spent a lot of his spare hours with Daniela in the back of the shop waiting for his parents to wrap up the day’s work, which often wasn’t until after nine at night.

  The Oxford Academy encouraged Frank to look at everything objectively. Most of the syllabus was science and mathematics oriented, but even in the humanities and languages, Frank had teachers who would set objective criteria for evaluation, challenging tradition, and always encouraging the quest for improvement.

  It was at Oxford that Frank met and befriended kids of a non-Jewish heritage. It was at Oxford that Frank first met girls. It was at Oxford that he met teachers who were not overly religious; in fact, some even professed a kind of atheism that at first shocked him. It was at Oxford that he met his first set of close friends: Quentin Kirby and Bob Zimmerman. They were both tall, athletic, and clever, and from Caucasian, Protestant, well-off families, the kind of families that would normally have avoided public schools at any cost if it were not for the fact that this was the Oxford Academy, the most magnetic of the magnet schools in the West.

  So often did Joshua and Dora talk about the moon landing that Frank thought he was ordained to become a physicist. He excelled in the sciences and mathematics, subjects that Oxford held very dear. He studied hard and was quite easily the highest-ranking student in seventh grade. Frank envied Quentin and Bob. They were not quite as clever as Frank, but they were still very smart in their own right. They played football, they were on the school rowing team, and even at twelve, they already had girls two or three years their senior giving them second looks.

  Joshua was getting greatly concerned that Frank’s extensive homework was preventing him from attending the synagogue
. Frank hardly ever read the Tanakh anymore. Gone were the days when father and son would sit together at night with Frank asking pressing questions about the Torah and the commandments and Joshua patiently answering them all, proud that he had a son so bright. Dora assured Joshua that Frank’s foundations were well laid in Judaism and now it was time to let go, to let him become the man he was destined to be.

  “He will never forget his roots,” she said. Joshua nodded, only half-convinced.

  Joshua became hesitant about Daniela even sitting the Oxford Academy exam.

  “It’s not for two more years, why worry now?” Dora said.

  Eighth grade was a turning point for Frank. One fine day, a month into eighth grade, a skinny, short, freckled, orange-haired, and anemic looking boy turned up at the school.

  “Hi, I’m Frank,” Frank said when he saw the new kid standing alone on the playground.

  “Hi, I’m a liar,” the skinny guy said.

  Frank laughed. This guy wasn’t such a geek after all, he thought.

  The little guy had all sorts of quirks, but Frank liked him. At first, Quentin and Bob didn’t feel he would fit in; Frank was atypical for them as it was. But eventually, Frank persuaded them to include the new kid in their clique.

  His name was Mardi Tedman. Mardi had an astonishing amount of raw intelligence. If ever there was a quantum physicist on campus, it was Mardi. Even Frank had to take a back seat. In eighth grade, Mardi topped the school in all the subjects he undertook. This happened again in the ninth grade.

  But Mardi was a very lonely boy. He just simply didn’t fit in. Diagnosed with the high-end autism Asperger’s syndrome, his IQ test results were between 180 to 210, depending on whether the test was a nonverbal Raven’s or a verbal one. Typical of Asperger’s, Mardi did better on the nonverbal, once scoring 210—equal to the highest that any human being had ever tested in the past fifty years. Devoid of social skills, Mardi simply found it too hard to make friends, save one—Frank. Frank made the effort to understand him because Mardi could explain things to Frank better than even his teachers could. Where others saw a geeky nerd, Frank saw a soul crying for attention. Frank actually liked the fact that he was no longer the star pupil—it meant he was more liked and made more friends. His parents were the ones concerned about his loss of status.

  “Maybe it’s for the better,” Joshua said. “Maybe once he knows he is not always first, he will come back to the synagogue.”

  “I know my son,” Dora said. “He likes a challenge.”

  They were both wrong.

  Frank, quite simply, thoroughly enjoyed the fact there was a student cleverer than him. Over time, Mardi managed to endear himself to Bob and Quentin as well, and the foursome had become…well, quite a formidable foursome.

  Eventually, Joshua reconciled himself to what Frank was.

  “He is who he is, Joshua,” Dora said.

  “Yes, maybe he is not a messiah after all,” Joshua said, but he was smiling.

  “Whoever said he was?”

  This was when Frank’s relationship with Joshua dramatically improved. Joshua no longer scolded him about not attending the synagogue, but Frank started to come anyway. Somehow, he found time to read the Tanakh every other day once again.

  Joshua and Dora were very pleased.

  Frank’s bar mitzvah, the Jewish male coming-of-age ceremony, had already been delayed because of his non-observance. He was almost fourteen. They wasted no more time once Frank returned to his religious texts. It was done within a week.

  “Hey, Mardi, do you ever attend church?” Frank asked Mardi one day.

  “What’s church?”

  “Oh, Mardi…you’re funny.”

  It was when Frank was fifteen that things changed dramatically. Daniela had just turned twelve. He had accompanied his parents and Daniela to her bat mitzvah. Orthodox Jews rarely celebrated the bat mitzvah, the female equivalent of the bar mitzvah. Now, nearly two decades into their stay in America, Joshua and Dora had become liberal Jews, at least relative to their upbringing.

  Frank had never seen Daniela so happy. She looked so liberated. Frank wondered why women everywhere were not treated as the equals of men in spiritual matters. At least school was different.

  For a bat mitzvah, it was rare to have a party afterward, but Joshua and Dora were over the moon. They had yet to tell Daniela that her effort to get a place at the Oxford Academy had been successful. Daniela was prancing around at the party when they showed the letter to Frank, promising him there was even more cake at home to go with the news when they broke it to Daniela.

  The bat mitzvah had been held out of town to avoid offending their orthodox friends in the neighborhood. On their way back in the car at night, Frank thought his family had never seemed happier than right there and then. Dora and Joshua were a world away from the Poland they had long since left behind. Daniela could not stop laughing. Joshua was at the wheel, and Dora was nuzzling up to him, with Frank and Daniela in the back seats.

  An oncoming SUV veered marginally off the road. Frank remembered seeing its headlights. That was the last thing he remembered.

  He woke up in a hospital a day later. He was groggy and numb and in a great deal of pain. He was not able to move his leg. He was hardly able to speak. Finally, he opened his mouth wide enough to ask for his mother. A nurse arrived. She gave him some medication. It made him drowsy. He kept fighting the drowsiness.

  “Ma,” he said several times before his brain accepted defeat via his veins.

  “Father?” he asked when he woke up again. This time, a male nurse appeared.

  Yet again, he was given something, against his will.

  His brain fought it hard. The battle was lost once more.

  The next day, a female nurse took him to another room to see Daniela. She was bandaged from head to toe—unconscious or asleep, he could not tell.

  “Is she?” he asked.

  “She will be all right. In a couple of weeks,” the nurse said.

  “Ma…?” he was too scared to even ask.

  The nurse asked him to wait. He looked at the clock on the wall. It seemed like an eternity, but half an hour later, the nurse was back with a doctor and another man in some kind of uniform. They took the elevator to the basement of the hospital.

  The nurse held his hand. He recognized he was in a morgue. He collapsed.

  Minutes later, he came to.

  “We need you to identify the bodies,” the man in the uniform said.

  Frank nodded.

  “Your uncle and aunt are coming soon.”

  He didn’t remember giving names and numbers, but he must have. They arrived an hour later.

  The closest of kin were his father’s brother, Abe, and his wife, Leeba. Two weeks later, Abe and Leeba took Frank and Daniela home.

  The first night after coming home, Frank sat up late watching television.

  “Can you try to go to sleep now?” Aunt Leeba asked.

  “No, I’m not sleepy. Leave the fire on,” he said.

  Eventually, the rest of the family retreated. Frank was waiting. He collected his father’s holy books—every one of them, including the ones from the master bedroom where Abe and Leeba were sleeping.

  “What do you want?” Abe asked as Frank tiptoed in.

  “Just the Torah. I am going to read about God tonight,” he said.

  “Good idea.”

  Abe nodded off to sleep.

  Frank waited for another forty minutes to make sure everyone was asleep. He then threw every holy book in the house into the fire.

  The state appointed Abe and Leeba the guardians of Frank and Daniela. Uncle Abe took over the little pharmacy as a trustee. Abe had no business experience at all. He sold medicines at half the production price if someone merely said they were poor. Two years later, by the time Abe realized he needed to sell the business, it was bankrupt and no one wanted to buy it.

  In those two years, Daniela had slowly managed to crawl out of her hole. She
had finally managed a smile or two. Frank was seventeen and attracted to girls, but he always came home with Daniela on the bus back from Oxford. She needed him, he thought. He needed her too, but he could not even admit it to himself.

  Uncle Abe was very orthodox. He was even more troubled by Frank’s newfound atheism than Joshua would have been. Nevertheless, Frank’s mind was made up.

  “Where was God when we needed him?” he asked. Abe had no answer.

  It was Mardi who had all the answers for Frank. First, step by step, Mardi took him through not only the theory of evolution but also the extraordinary amount of accumulated scientific evidence.

  “Evolution is not a theory anymore,” Mardi said, “it’s a fact. Under the right laboratory conditions, adaptations can be replicated.”

  Next, Mardi took Frank on a long voyage of psychology and the need for a God idea. Frank now understood his father’s religiosity in a new light.

  Were it not for Mardi, Frank may have given up on everything. Mardi made Frank not only persist in his own life and pull it all together, but he even inspired Frank to look after Daniela. The formidable four were often seen as twosomes. Mardi and Frank had grown apart from Quentin and Bob but occasionally they still hung out together. Frank and Mardi cared about principles; Quentin and Bob cared about their friends and their social status.

  Frank never forgot the time he accidentally bumped into an unemployed youth on a road on the way to school. It had only been three months since the accident that killed his parents. He was still in a haze.

  “Sorry,” was all Frank could summon. He thought it was all he needed.

  That wasn’t good enough for the youth. All of a sudden, his open-handed slap smashed into Frank’s cheek. Three steps behind Frank was Quentin. He saw it.

  Quentin was sixteen then, and the youth and his two friends were in their twenties.