The Children of Hawkins National Laboratory

011, as her name suggests, was my eleventh child. I hesitate to call them experiments. They are as individual to me as their wrist tattoos. Over the decades, many young ones have called me “Papa.” Precisely why I had our tattoo man add the zero. When I wasn’t kidnapping a child in rural Indiana, I would sire one from good old-fashioned lust. Something about my silver mane, sensible dress, and feathered sideburns makes Hoosier ladies knock-kneed. Though 011 was our most powerful and irascible subject, El’s predecessors also yielded interesting findings. I submit these to scientific inquiry.

001 taught me a great deal, though his powers were quite mild. With a hard stare, he could bend spoons, but only plastic ones. He could force people to sneeze. He had a fantastic argument about why astrology makes complete sense. Instead of getting nosebleeds after draining his powers, 001 got super-dense eye crusties. As the years turned to decades, we drifted apart. Last I heard, 001 is a freelance graphic designer living in Jersey City. Though most parents are reluctant to admit, children are like pancakes; your first one is always a dud.

002, a.k.a. the “Big Deuce,” could never access the Upside Down, a world I often think of as the Vale of Eternal Dandruff. Rather, 002 frequented the Rightside Up, an attic-like space where the Monster stores its junk.

003 still lives with me. I’ve been constantly emailing him links for apartment rentals, but he can’t take the hint. His only power is raiding my fridge.

004 escaped and changed his name to Geraldo Rivera.

005 was my most aesthetically ambitious. To better interact with the Monster, we made her look terrifying, but our budget was not up to snuff. This was during the Nixon administration. People are not as nostalgic for that time. After a ton of proprietary surgical procedures, we finally sculpted 005’s face into a cabbagesque vagina dentata. On the night we made contact, however, the Monster wanted to talk solely about ooze: the most effective Earthly cleanser, how to scrub it off whites, etc.

006 was even scarier than 005. Scientifically, we reasoned he might frighten the Monster into talking about something other than laundering ooze. Alas, it was not to be. It is my hypothesis that the ooze makes the Monster upset enough to kill. We pressed on, ripping additional portals in space-time, encountering many Monsters, infinite baby Hitlers, and buckets of dandruff. I worried we’d be lost forever, but then I heard the sweet sound of synthesizers. Someone pressed a Stephen King book in my hand. The Tommyknockers, as I recall. Not his best work.

007 became some kind of British government agent.

008 was a scientific breakthrough, and a personal nightmare. Her powers were honed from the start. Instead of a sensory deprivation tank, all 008 needed for astral projection was a mug of Sleepytime tea. But the bills were mounting. I suffered a crisis of faith. What was I doing here in this Midwestern lab? Was I becoming a “mad scientist,” living in a world of increasingly identifiable cinematic references? i.e. was my entire life a lie?

009 was a test tube baby, with DNA spliced from the previous eight. At this point, I felt like I was running a daycare. Our holding cells did little to contain the screams of sleep training. Toys littered multiple planes of existence. My hair turned arctic. One night, with 009 cooing and 005 biting my ankle, I had the most wonderful breakdown. I realized children are machines of nostalgia. One minute they’re defecating themselves, the next they are talking and propelling objects through telekinesis. By growing so quickly, they obliterate the past. I was holding on too tight to what I wanted my lab children to do, turning them into Cold War extrasensory killing machines. Not letting them just be.

With 010, the lab was finally able to achieve real progress. Not only did we further explore the Upside Down, we killed the first Monster, eradicated most of the ooze with a simple baking powder solution, and even started selling real estate there. Hawkins Gazette christened the place “UpDow,” naming it a “Hot Transitional.” Eventually, another Monster returned, and my project would be taken up once again, with 011. For a while, though, everything was fun and Reaganomics. I spent a lot of quality time in the remaining ooze lagoons. It does wonders to the skin.