nonfiction
by Michael Meyerhofer
How To Live Inside a Lock of Hair
When I was a kid, I watched John Carpenter’s Starman with my dad. In the film, a friendly alien takes on the appearance of a woman’s dead husband in order to learn more about our species. As we watched the alien—first shown as a ball of light—flip open a scrapbook then glide through a carefully preserved lock of the dead man’s hair, my father explained that hair contains human DNA, which you can theoretically use to clone a whole person.
At least, that’s what he meant. I was eight, after all, so he informalized his rhetoric to something like, “If you go through a strand of somebody’s hair, you can make someone who looks just like them,” then turned his attention back to the television when I was too speechless to pepper him with questions.
Thing is, I took him literally. For the rest of the movie, the week, the year, I kept imagining that if we could only shrink ourselves small enough, the mere act of strolling down a corridor made of keratin would automatically flip the switch, invoking a kind of genetic magic that causes humans to blossom like corn seeds.
Thus, every trip to the barber, every stray eyelash caught by a playground breeze, became a potential maternity ward, utterly asexual yet somehow capable of warping the laws of physics so that in a millisecond, two hundred and six bones and some forty trillion cells could simply emerge as my father assured me Adam had: fully formed, wide-eyed, toes wiggling in the soft cool mud of creation.
You might think there has to be a single moment when I realized my error, when the whole misunderstanding crumbled like a monument in a hurricane—replaced by the far more complex and enigmatic nature of a world where spiraling bits of matter self-replicate simply because it’s all they know how to do. Perhaps I saw a strand of hair under a microscope and realized it looked more like a spear than a miracle, tapered at one end so that even if someone got in, they could never get out.
But like losing one’s belief in Santa Claus or democracy, the change happened gradually, due less to critical thinking than forgetfulness. Teachers traced the outlines of cells with fingerbones of chalk, the glossy pages of a textbook granted color and personality to something smaller than the head of my mother’s insulin needles, and I lost my grasp on a cosmos where mere skulls routinely grow a hundred thousand chances to start over.
Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five books of poetry—including What To Do If You’re Buried Alive (free from Doubleback Books)—as well as a fantasy series. His poems, stories, and nonfiction have appeared in The Sun, Brevity, Missouri Review, Southern Review, Rattle, BULL, and other journals. For more info and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.