Prom night at the Perkins School for the Blind, in Watertown, Mass., is in many respects just like prom night anywhere else. Kids get dressed up, they listen to loud music, they dance. They think about graduation and they dream and worry about the future.

But in other respects, prom night at Perkins is unlike prom nights at most other high schools across the land. For one thing, most of the students are blind. Those who are sighted have poor vision. But virtually no Perkins students have blindness as their only handicap. Helen Keller, the school's most famous alumna, was deaf and blind and had lost years of prime learning time before the miraculous intervention of Anne Sullivan, her nearly blind Perkins teacher. Helen Keller would fit in perfectly at Perkins today. To these kids, mere blindness is almost trivial.

It's hard to pigeonhole Perkins students. Some of the students use wheelchairs or walkers, but others are athletes. Some have autism, many have mental retardation, but some score 800 on their college boards. Some look like Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman, others have facial deformities. Some are gifted musicians; others are deaf. And once in a while there is a gifted deaf musician. Some of the seniors, upon graduation, will be going off to college; others will take up residence in a group home or move back in with their parents. Some listen to Eminem, others to Randy Travis, and some have tastes that are totally inscrutable.

But the one thing all Perkins students have in common is that they have lived the trauma of being different. They are mutants and they know it. And some, the more sophisticated among them, know that had prenatal genetics tests for their conditions existed 15 or 20 years ago, they wouldn't even be here.

On prom night last spring I spoke with several Perkins students about this whole topic. I particularly remember one student named Jakob. He's a 20-year-old junior who has several profound disabilities and who has been in and out of hospitals much of his life. Like Helen Keller and like many of his own friends, he has had several brushes with death -- most of them in his first 10 years. He has had eye surgery, experimental drugs that nearly killed him, and emergency brain surgery at 6 o'clock one morning to keep his head from exploding. He has the kinds of conditions that lead people to choose abortion rather than carry to term damaged fetuses -- sometimes after using a "quality of life" calculus that is beyond my comprehension.

He's a smart but socially awkward guy, traumatized by 10 years of isolation and ostracism in mainstream schools but now perfectly at ease at Perkins, who reads fantasy books by the truckload -- holding them 2 inches from his face until his eyes fatigue and turn inward.

I asked Jakob how he felt about the idea that, thanks to the Human Genome Project, in the future, kids like him and his friends need never be born. (Although Jakob's disabilities were caused by prenatal infection and not by a genetic abnormality, that's academic. He well knows that he's just as much a mutant as any of his friends.) He thought for a few seconds, and then said in a voice dripping with irony, "Hello, justifiable holocaust."

Jakob, by the way, is my son.

Later I spoke with Jane, a "program aide" at the Perkins School. She's a 22-year-old woman with a resemblance to Gwyneth Paltrow who was nearing the end of her third year working the late shift in the Lower School. There her job was to help blind, sick, crippled and often enraged children learn "life skills." Skills like eating their meals, dealing with their back and leg braces, changing their tampons, accepting their fate -- which sometimes was that they were dying and their parents had abandoned them -- and singing themselves to sleep.

Jane had been a student at Bennington College before dropping out and coming to work at Perkins. Her high school career had involved good grades in honors classes and lots of activism and leadership. Among dozens of other activities she founded the local chapter of Amnesty International, and upon graduation she had been awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Prize of the Stone Soup Foundation. In fact, although Jane has blond hair and blue eyes, the local chapter of the NAACP gave her its most prestigious stipend in recognition of her work on behalf of oppressed people everywhere. That was but one of her seven scholarships. Funding agencies were tripping over each other to pay her college bills. They couldn't get enough of this working-class kid who was so passionate about justice, so hardworking, so funny, so friendly and so smart.

Jane's college career went on hold when she went insane. After experiencing the crescendo of a classic mania that astonished all who witnessed it -- featuring giving away everything she owned, going without sleep for 10 days, having a long intimate conversation with God, and writing a grandiose but illegible manifesto in permanent marker on dozens of square yards of freshly painted dormitory walls -- she spent the next month in the psychiatric ward of Massachusetts General Hospital. Even when filled with enough tranquilizers to subdue an elephant she stayed awake another four days, talking of miracles.

Jane has bipolar disorder, a genetic mental illness with a 20 percent mortality rate, more deadly than many cancers. Her disease had been in remission for years when I spoke to her for this story, but it is always lurking. Even before Jane was discharged from the hospital, people were telling her to forget about having children, because any of her children would be as fucked up as she was and thus clearly not worth having. So I asked her how she felt about that and about the high likelihood that genetic conditions like hers would be detectable soon by cheap genetic tests, that bipolar nut jobs like her would disappear from the earth because fetuses with her markers would be aborted as not worth having.

"Oh, it makes me a little bit angry," she said. "Because, yes, I'm fucked up, but I'm not that much more fucked up than the average person. So it seems unfair. But really? It makes me sad. It makes me so sad to know that I'm not considered good enough to be a mother and to think that maybe they're right, that people like me shouldn't be born. Being a mutant is a lonely condition. It just makes me lonely and sad."

Jane, by the way, is my daughter.

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End of Part 1.

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