by Sarah Gailey
Well. Alone except for Martine.
I wondered, then, sitting across from Martine, if I was any different. It seemed that no one was noticing the differences in the new Nathan. No one had detected the ways we’d softened him just a little, the tiny details we’d shifted or overlooked or even gotten entirely wrong. I wondered if I was close enough with anyone that they would have seen the same differences in me. If I had been replaced with a reasonable facsimile of the person I’d been, would anyone notice?
Martine, I thought. Martine would notice. She was close enough to me, had spent enough time with me, had seen me in a raw enough state—she knew the marrow of me. If someone took me away and replaced me with a thing that moved like me and talked like me and had my memories, Martine would be able to spot the stitches that held it together.
In those strange months of solitude—those four months of peace—I often wondered whether Nathan would have seen it. The original Nathan, the one that I had divorced, and the one that Martine had killed. Would he have noticed if I went away and came back just a little wrong? Or had he only been able to see the parts of me that he wanted to fix?
Had we ever seen each other clearly enough for that?
* * *
After the first month, Martine and I shared a last cup of tea at my house, and then she left with a promise to call me if anything went wrong.
She eased herself up out of her chair, bracing her hands on her back in a parody of pregnancy. She was just a week from her due date by then. Our farewell that day felt strangely professional, transactional: we’d done what we set out to do, and our business was concluded.
I wondered if I should hug her goodbye.
I didn’t.
* * *
I hired a new lab assistant.
Seyed had sent me a formal letter of resignation, citing a desire to live in closer proximity to his family, thanking me for the years of mentorship and growth he’d received in my employ. We had a tacit understanding, one we’d never discussed explicitly, but one that was necessary for both of our survival: he wouldn’t tell anyone about Nathan and Martine, and I would accept his resignation without reporting the thefts, and provide a letter of reference should the need arise.
I sent him a brief message acknowledging the letter, so he’d know I understood. Our ties were severed. He didn’t reply to it, but the word “read” appeared beneath it less than a minute after I hit send. It was enough. We were square.
HR processed his resignation as soon as I gave them notice. There was a fresh pile of résumés waiting for me the next morning.
My new lab assistant, Seyed’s replacement, lasted for about a month. The one after that hung on a little longer, six weeks. I suspect she was hoping to get fired so that she could collect severance, but in the end, she broke before I did. She rotated out of my lab, and I was reviewing the next résumé in the pile before the airlock finished cycling behind her.
In my weaker moments, I missed Seyed. Not just the way we’d worked together, the easy rhythm, the implicit trust I had in his competence. I missed him. Seyed had been the kind of person who I thought might have been able to see the differences in me, if I went away and came back. I had plenty of colleagues, plenty of peers, but almost no friends. I had colleagues. I had Lorna, vaguely, in the periphery of my life. But Seyed—he had been something like a friend.
The pain of what Seyed had done—his betrayal of me, my work, my marriage—it never really calcified into anger, the way it had with Nathan. I waited for the resentment to come, to sweep away the confused ache of his deceptions. I waited to feel glad that he was gone, waited for the moment when I would be able to tint all my memories of him with bitterness. I longed for that release.
It didn’t come. I couldn’t make myself overwrite the way it had felt to be understood by him—the way it had felt to trust him. I kept my new assistants at a polite distance. I told them that they could call me Dr. Caldwell, and if they slipped up and called me Evelyn, I didn’t acknowledge that they’d spoken at all. I kept things courteous with my other colleagues. I swallowed my occasional flashes of anger at the fact that none of them, not one, had noticed the strain I’d been under for the three months it took to make the new Nathan.
None of them had noticed the months that preceded the entire crisis, either. The awful weeks between realizing that something was wrong, finding out about his affair, seeing Martine, confronting him, moving out, filing for divorce. The sleepless nights and the fury and the sadness and the strange fog of everything suddenly being all wrong.
None of my colleagues had known about all that turmoil. No one except Seyed.
My anger at my colleagues was, of course, profoundly unfair. If anyone had noticed that something was wrong with me, I would have resented them; if they had commented on my state, I would have been livid, embarrassed, outraged at them for prying, indignant at any implication of trespass into my personal life. I was overwhelmed by the way my life fell into disparate pieces to be examined and recategorized—but I never would have confessed to that. I would never have admitted to struggling under the weight of the project Martine and Seyed and I had tangled ourselves up in.
It was unfair. It was unreasonable. Still, part of me was furious that my colleagues, who I hardly knew, had never cottoned on to the fact that something was wrong.
None of them had noticed me changing.
I found myself watching them more closely. Strangers, too—at the store, on the street. I watched the way they looked at each other, the way they avoided looking. The way people carefully dodged each other’s attention, half lifting their hands to politely acknowledge and preserve the space between them.
I wondered how many of them had people in their lives who would notice. If they went missing and came back different; if they lost night after night of sleep to endless fights; if their eyes were raw from crying alone in the empty rooms of an unfamiliar home. If they were distracted by the all-encompassing fear of Getting Caught, or aglow with triumph at having accomplished something so secret that they’d never be able to tell anyone what they’d pulled off.
If they were trapped in a home with a monster who’d made them to suit his awful, practical, deeply limited specifications.
Anyone who noticed would care. But who would notice? Who would pay close enough attention?
For the first time in my life, I had no distractions at all. There was nothing to pull my attention away from my work—and yet, obscenely, my work suffered. I stopped pushing myself. Still, the only person who seemed to notice my failure to innovate was my lab director, who pointed out that I hadn’t given him my expenditures report when I said I would. I moved that meeting back, back, back, and his requests for data grew more and more impatient. My funding for the next year wasn’t guaranteed, and I couldn’t even apply for it until I sat down with the lab director to hammer out the details.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I moved through my days with the knowledge, concrete and immovable, that there was not a single person in my life who knew me. No one knew the person I’d been before. No one knew the person I was, after. No one would have been able to spot the unsubtle wounds inflicted by the interval between my moment of glory at the Neufmann Banquet, when I received the greatest honor of my career, and my moment of glory at the flank of a green-and-white taxicab in the wee hours of an April morning, when I let my greatest accomplishment out into the world.
When the new Nathan went home with Martine, I became an alone-thing, more alone than I had ever been before. More alone, even, than I had been that first night in a town house full of packed boxes.
From that moment, I was the only one who knew what I truly was. I was the only one who knew what I had done.
To be alone with that knowledge was the most dreadful thing I had ever felt. It was a vast, deep, terrible kind of understanding. I knew, finally, how my mother had felt in the minutes before she had heard my sock feet padding down the stairs in the night. I knew that I had done
what I had to do, and I knew that I could never tell a soul. I knew that there was a part of me that would never be not-alone again.
My mother had spent the duration of her marriage to my father whittling pieces of herself away, leaving void space for him to whiff through when he swung his fury at her. Once he was gone, she grew to fill those spaces again—to take up the amount of room she should always have been allotted. I had wondered for so long why she stopped there, why she didn’t spread like a climbing vine, devouring the void he left behind. I spent my adolescence nurturing a quiet disdain for the way she failed to become a monster in his absence.
Nathan had, of course, fed that disdain. He had recognized a vulnerability in it, a weakness in the way I loathed the parts of me that mirrored my mother. The fear, the fluttering, the impulse to hide and apologize and placate. I was horrified by her willingness to accept her circumstances, by her failure to imagine that her reach could extend beyond her grasp. I tried to root out any part of me that might accept less than what I was capable of, and I dug deep, and still Nathan never let me feel like I’d dug deep enough.
Something felt different in Martine’s absence. I was alone the way my mother had been alone. She’d had me around the same way I had my new lab assistants around—I was present, and I needed to be managed, but I wasn’t with her, not really. That night, when she stood breathless in the living room, she carved out a hole in the world. She and the thing she had done were all that would fit there. She climbed inside of that space in the fabric of reality, and from then on, she was alone with what she had done.
That was the kind of solitude I came to understand. It took up space, the space I’d always sneered at my mother for failing to claim as her own. It was in the room with me, always, that lonely knowledge of all the things I could never tell anyone about. It curled up next to me in my bed at night, the soles of its feet pressed against my calves, and breathed my air. It looped its arm through mine and walked beside me.
I could never tell a soul about what had changed me, and if I never told anyone, then no one would ever know. No one would guess, just from looking at me, even if they came to know the person I was in the aftermath of making a new Nathan. No one would look at the seams that held me together and guess that they were scars.
Of course my mother decided to stop growing. Of course she decided that it was enough to simply be the person who she was without fear.
I still scolded myself at the moments when I resembled her. When I caught myself at the threshold of an apology, or when I twisted a napkin between my fingers, or when I realized my eyes were darting around a room, looking to see where everyone was. Every time I wanted to shrink myself down, I revisited the bitterness of her fluttering at the police, telling them how thankful she was for their kind words.
I still thought of her as a coward.
But I stopped fighting the knowledge that I could be the same kind of coward she had been.
There was a comfort there, in being hidden. I’d always known it. Being so alone was, in a way, safe. I wrapped myself up in it, burrowed down into the cool quiet decay of my secret.
Of course my mother had decided to stay where she was. Of course she had expanded only to fit the boundaries of her container. The appeal was deep and irresistible. It was the childhood sense of victory that came with fitting into an impossibly small space, tucking myself away into the dark. They’ll never find me here.
By accepting the isolation that came along with my secret, I could rest assured that no matter what, I would always be at least a little hidden. No one would ever know me, not fully, because no one would ever know what had happened.
There was a piece of me now that no one would ever be able to reach.
My life developed a steady rhythm. I worked at a mechanical pace, delivering progress in my research and avoiding conversations about the future of my lab. I ran through laboratory assistants at a reliable clip. I ate salads for dinner, prepackaged pasta. I drank wine. I walked around in my new neighborhood every few nights, aimless, trying to keep myself from becoming a recluse. I took out my recycling once a week.
I settled into the new way things were. I was doing well enough. Not flourishing, maybe, but there was nothing wrong.
For those four months, I had peace.
And then, in September, Martine called.
* * *
Their house looked the same as it had when the original Nathan was still alive.
There were small changes—Martine had planted bright chrysanthemums along the path that led to the house, and a wreath of red and orange leaves hung from the front door. But it still looked like the home that Nathan had wanted for his new life. A place for Martine to work hard at keeping nice. A place to raise a baby. The porch swing and the picture window were still there, just the same as they’d been on that crisp, surreal night when I walked across the lawn practicing the speech I would make to Martine about boundaries.
Nothing about the house looked different. Nothing about the house betrayed the blood that had spilled inside it.
On the night Nathan died, Martine had opened the door before I could land a single knock. Not this time, though. This time, I pounded away at the door, watching the leaves on the wreath shake.
It took her long enough to answer that I grew uneasy.
She’d sounded frantic on the phone, more panicked than I’d ever heard her. Please, you have to come to the house, something’s happened, I can’t talk about it on the phone, please, you have to come now.
I spent the drive to her house quietly praying that she hadn’t killed him again, deciding that I couldn’t save her a second time. But when she didn’t answer the door, I started to worry. Maybe she’d called for some worse reason, maybe she couldn’t answer the door, and what if we’d programmed the new Nathan wrong? What if we hadn’t softened him? What if we’d made him brittle, mutable, dangerous? What if we’d poured the foundation of him wrong, and he’d turned out even worse than the original?
Maybe that’s why, when Martine finally did answer the door, the thing I registered was relief. I sank with it, the weight of knowing that she was all right. It was a strange way to feel after so long.
She looked past me as though there might be someone with me. “You’re alone?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. I looked at her, then, not just at the fact of her whole and present, but at the details of her.
She was different. Of course she was different. Not pregnant anymore, for one thing. Slim, slimmer than me, her features winnowed down to sharp planes that I didn’t recognize from my own face. Her eyes weren’t quite sunken, but there was fatigue etched into her, the deep kind of fatigue that I suppose must come with a new baby.
She had cut her hair short. It looked good on her, modern and fresh, young. I would never have thought to cut my hair that way, and I immediately filed the cut into a resentful category of things I could never try because Martine had tried it first.
She was covered in soil. It was smudged across her face, worked into the creases of her clothes, under her fingernails. Eddies of loam-smell. I breathed it in and tried not to remember what that smell had meant to me the other times I’d been surrounded by it.
“Come inside,” she said. “Please. You have to hurry.”
There was a trail of earth in the entryway to the house. Muddy footprints led to the backyard. She’d been pacing, waiting for me. “What’s the rush?” I asked her.
“The baby’s asleep,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was answering me or just talking. Her words came too fast for her to order them properly. “Nathan’s at work. He has drinks after with—with someone, with his supervisor or something, I don’t remember, it’s—what time is it?”
“One-something,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“We have a few hours,” she said. “Good, okay, we have a few—you have to come, it’s—please, I can’t tell you, I have to show you, you have to see.”
I followed her thro
ugh the house, stepping around her muddy footprints on the tile. She walked in front of me, clenching and unclenching her fists over and over again. Dirt clung to the fine hairs that dusted the nape of her neck.
I watched her, the familiar way she moved through the world, and I bit back irritation at myself for having missed her.
Then we walked into the backyard, and I forgot everything I had been thinking. My resentment, and my relief, and my longing—I lost track of all of it.
I lost track of everything that wasn’t the bodies.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
There were twelve of them.
I had never studied specimen decay before that day. I could consider that a lapse in the scope of my research, but really, it just wasn’t ever necessary. Whenever a specimen failed during the development or conditioning process, we autopsied it and then cremated the cadaver immediately. There are no burials for biowaste. Specimens who were used outside of the lab, made to spec and then discarded after their usefulness expired, were likewise cremated; it was in the disposal clause of every contract, so that there wouldn’t be human remains floating around in the earth with the DNA of living people in their tissues.
Before that afternoon in Martine’s backyard, I had never seen what the tissues of a clone looked like after any amount of subterranean decomposition.
Most of them were still partially buried. Hands and faces and soft white calves sticking up out of the soil, each one less unearthed than the last. A shovel was next to the farthest-flung body, the blade sunk deep into the soft soil of Martine’s mostly demolished rose bed. The yard was a horror of holes, but the rose bed was the best-tilled section. There, in the wreckage where the flowers had been, were a dozen corpses uprooted in what I could easily read as an increasing frenzy.
The cadaver that was closest to the house, the fully uncovered one, was hardly touched by decay. Her head was pillowed by a torn-open plastic bag, one that looked to have been wrapped tightly around her face until just before my arrival. Knowing what I do now, I can guess why she was in such good condition: an intersection of the way clone tissues develop in stasis, soil pH, and the lime in the garden shed. So many boxes of lime—he must have bought them wholesale at the outset of his project, must have been planning for at least a few burials right from the beginning.