The Mirror Man

by Jane Gilmartin

  “Jeremiah Adams. Twenty-two Dorsey Road in Riverdale.” The answer was correct and fully automatic. “I should call my office,” the clone said, “and my wife.”

  Scott switched the monitor off but continued to stare at the blank screen with something approaching amazement. The expression seemed unnatural on his face. When he turned back to Jeremiah, he was fully composed again, his features aligned in their usual studied neutrality.

  “Seems to have worked,” he said. “The clone has remembered the accident exactly as it was recorded, and there is no sign of amnesia.”

  “Remarkable.” Jeremiah shook his head. “It’s absolutely incredible.”

  “And a promising start to our adventure. I’ll leave you to rest, Mr. Adams. I imagine you must be tired from the morning’s activities. The bedroom is just through there.” Scott nodded toward a closed door on the far side of the room. “And remember, if there is anything you need, use the phone.”

  Scott left, swiping the key card against a panel to open the door. It closed behind him with a quiet but significant click.

  Chapter 3

  Jeremiah stood in the middle of his new living room. There was almost complete silence, except for a steady hum coming from somewhere above his head. It must have been some sort of air circulation, he decided. He began to explore his surroundings.

  He was happy to note a few of his favorite authors on the bookshelves and delighted to see a complete set of Shakespeare, small books bound in ancient-looking cracked red leather. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and found it stocked with all the necessities, but in a wide enough array to cover any taste: three kinds of milk, five different juices and an assortment of fruits and vegetables, many of which he didn’t even like. There were two six-packs of beer from a microbrewery he’d never heard of. At least, he thought with some relief, Scott had stopped short of hiring someone to snoop through his home refrigerator and duplicate its contents here.

  In the bedroom, he sat tentatively on the edge of the king-size bed and noted the total lack of any feminine touches in the decor. There was no vanity table or makeup mirror, no tall lingerie chest like the one Diana had at home. The attached bathroom was bigger by far than the one they shared and had both a shower and a claw-foot tub, as well as a doored-off toilet. High shelves in a walk-in closet held a full wardrobe in his exact size. He absently fingered the assortment of khaki pants and jeans, T-shirts in every color and a hanging rod that held about twenty-five casual buttoned shirts. There wasn’t a suit or tie to be seen. He wouldn’t need business attire for a solid year, he realized.

  Back in the living room, he picked up the landline phone. It had no dial on it, no way to call out. Before he even put it to his ear, he heard a woman’s voice on the other end.

  “Hello, Mr. Adams. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Oh, n-no,” he stammered. “I was just testing the phone.”

  “I see. Have you had a chance to go through your provisions? Is everything satisfactory?”

  “Yes, yes, fine. They seem to have thought of everything.”

  “Well, if you should ever require anything from the outside—specific food, books, even furniture—all you have to do is pick up the phone and we can usually arrange it for you,” she said. “We can handle most requests.”

  “Well, I might let you know I probably won’t eat the asparagus. You can cross that off the shopping list.”

  “I’ll make a note of it, Mr. Adams. Anything you don’t eat you can deposit in the composter. There’s a small door just behind the kitchen sink.”

  “I’ll make a note of that,” he said. “Oh, and that beer you got me, I prefer something simpler. Budweiser would be fine from now on.”

  “Noted,” she told him. “But that request was from Mr. Higgins.”

  “Mr. Higgins?”

  “Yes, Brent Higgins. He’s the data analyst that will be working with you each day. He’s scheduled to come and see you this afternoon.”

  “I know who he is. I just wasn’t aware he was going to be making beer requests.”

  “Since he’s going to be spending so much time in there with you, I suppose he has a few extra benefits,” she said. “I can get that beer to you by this afternoon. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Something for a headache, maybe?”

  “The medicine cabinet in the bathroom is fully stocked. You should find what you need.”

  “I’ll look, then. Thanks. Sorry to bother you.”

  “It’s not a bother, Mr. Adams. It’s my job.”

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I’m Andrea,” she said. “I’m the day shift. At night, you’ll speak to someone else.”

  “Thanks, Andrea.”

  There were at least three different things in the medicine cabinet that he could have taken for a headache. He was also covered for a sprained ankle, allergies, upset stomach and, apparently, a sudden attack of killer zombie bees. It was as well supplied as any pharmacy. He swallowed two tablets with a glass of water. Then he loosened his tie, took off his work shoes and stretched out on the mammoth bed. It was unexpectedly comfortable.

  Despite the headache and the after-effects of the sedative, Jeremiah’s mind raced. He was amazed at the exactness of the clone. Everything about the appearance was precise, right down to the smattering of gray in the hair. And when he’d heard the thing speak for the first time on the monitor, he was struck not only by the voice but the intonation and the slight hesitation before it spoke. It was a habit Jeremiah had noticed in himself. It was positively eerie how accurate it was. And he knew for a fact that the similarities didn’t end there. Aside from the Meld duplicating thought patterns, behavior and the rest, the clone was a perfect copy of Jeremiah inside as well—right down to the molecular level, right down to the slightest cellular makeup. Dr. Pike had seen to that.

  The first time he’d met the good doctor, for what Jeremiah had assumed would be a simple routine exam, he’d been put into a room-size scanner, strapped into a severe-looking chair that jerked around by way of hydraulics and had his entire medical history recorded. The machine, created by a team of ViMed scientists and specifically for use in this project, had completed a medical probe unlike anything in history. It detected everything, and left Pike with an exhaustive list of every childhood illness Jeremiah had ever suffered, every metabolic imbalance, every virus, vaccination and injury. It had even picked up on the fact that Jeremiah had broken the same arm twice, once at the age of seven, and again at twenty-two. The injuries had left him with the disturbing ability to rotate his left arm several degrees farther than his right. His clone, Pike had told him, would be able to do the same thing.

  “Where did ViMed get the funding to develop tech like this?” Jeremiah had asked, astonished.

  “Meld is quite a profitable drug, Mr. Adams,” Pike told him. “Its release provided substantial cash flow for other avenues of research.”

  “And just in time, it seems.”

  “There are also some well-endowed investors behind this project. Interested parties with deep pockets,” Pike said.

  After the scan, Jeremiah had been injected with experimental nanotechnology that had served as a vaccine against any further viral infections and most bacterial illnesses from that point up until the cloning. The measure ensured that he and his clone would start out medically identical in every way. The idea of microscopic robots swimming around inside him had unnerved him, but Scott had only scoffed when Jeremiah asked about it later.

  “It’s perfectly harmless, Mr. Adams. If it makes you feel better, I’ve tested it on myself without adverse effect.”

  It hadn’t made him feel better at all. In fact, he found it disturbing that Scott would subject himself to untested technology when he must have had a lab full of rabbits at the ready. There was so much about him that Jeremia
h found disturbing, though.

  It was reasonable, he supposed, in the quiet of the room, that his thoughts drifted to his family. He’d left them that morning and wouldn’t return for an entire year. He hadn’t even been able to say a proper goodbye. During his walk with Louie that morning, he’d lingered a bit longer than he usually did, allowing the dog to sniff every tree they passed and giving him an extra lap around the block. Scott had cautioned him to act normally, not to give anything away by altering his usual routine. But Jeremiah had found that almost impossible. He knew that an imposter—an inhuman copy—would be coming home in his place for dinner that night. He was leaving them in the hands of an untested science experiment. How does anyone act normally knowing that?

  So, as Parker brushed by him out the door to make the school bus, Jeremiah had given his son a quick, impulsive kiss on the top of the head, a gesture so out of character that both Parker and Diana had paused and stared at him like he’d just lost his grip on reality. Jeremiah had made a show of shrugging it off. But what, he wondered now, would his clone do with that memory? They had erased the memory of why he’d done it, certainly, but Parker and Diana had seen it. Presumably, the clone would need to remember that moment in case it ever came up in conversation. The effort of wrapping his brain around that enigma wasn’t going to help his headache, he decided, and he almost welcomed the disruption of someone knocking at his front door.

  Before he could get himself out of bed and into the living room, Dr. Natalie Young had already let herself in. She’d have to, he figured, since he was incapable of even opening his door from the inside.

  “I wasn’t expecting you, Dr. Young.” He looked down at his shoeless feet with some apprehension.

  “You have just seen the clone for the first time. I thought it might be a good idea to have a talk, Mr. Adams,” she said, and motioned for him to take a seat on one of the couches. She sat on the other, directly across from him. She crossed her legs at the ankles, adjusted her computer pad on her lap and smiled at him in a way that was at once demure and expectant.

  Just like the first time he’d seen her, Jeremiah was struck by the idea that she looked more like a model playing a scientist in some rock video than she did an actual scientist. She was a beautiful woman for her age, which Jeremiah guessed was near either side of forty. The fact that she sported black-rimmed men’s eyeglasses and wore her silvery-colored hair pulled back in a tense knot behind her head was an obvious attempt to work around her looks. It almost had the opposite effect.

  But Natalie Young was all business and a woman of few words, as he supposed most psychiatric doctors needed to be. She seemed to be waiting for Jeremiah to say something.

  “Have you seen it?” he asked.

  “I have, briefly.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I’m more interested in your thoughts,” she said.

  “Well, they got the nose just right.”

  “And everything else, I’d say.”

  “Yeah, everything else. It’s strange to think that thing will be going home tonight, having dinner with my family, walking my dog.”

  “How does that make you feel, Jeremiah?”

  “I don’t know, nervous, I guess. But this is what I signed up for, right?” He tried to smile but he had the sense it didn’t come across right.

  “Why don’t you tell me how you spent the last night with your family. What was that like?” she asked.

  “It was just normal, I guess. A normal night. You know, dinner, some TV.”

  “I can’t imagine it felt very normal for you,” she said. “You are literally being replaced, Jeremiah. You must have been feeling something on your last night with your wife and son. Did you do anything special? What was going through your mind?”

  In fact, there had been a great deal going through his mind the night before. On his drive home, he had thought of soldiers. How many times had he seen on the evening news the syrupy stories of young men or women returning home from war to welcoming crowds and weepy families? How many times had he cringed as the cameras invaded the intensely private moment when a father or mother sought to surprise a young child with a visit to a kindergarten class? He was always struck by how silent a child’s joy could be. Most of them just ran into the arms of a parent and burrowed in with hardly a word, lost in some transcendent relief. And despite the fact that he always felt like he was intruding, watching something that no one else should be witness to, he typically choked up at the sight and couldn’t look away. It was brilliant media manipulation, something he could admire.

  But what the cameras never captured—what they never seemed to care about—was what came beforehand. How did these people say goodbye? He doubted that was as silent a thing. More likely there were moments of tension and fiery exchanges. Fear and uncertainty coming out as unintended anger, the way it had for him in the weeks leading up to the cloning. He imagined frustrating, terrible things that no one would want to watch. But at least, he thought now, those were shared fears. Jeremiah hadn’t even had that comfort. He couldn’t even tell his family he was leaving. He couldn’t say goodbye to them.

  He would have liked his last night at home to be special somehow, even if he was the only one who knew why. He had come home with a decent bottle of wine and stopped short of buying flowers for Diana. If anything were going to make her suspicious, he realized, it would have been flowers. He hadn’t done anything like that for a very long time. Neither had she.

  “I suppose I would have liked to explain a few things to them,” he told Natalie Young. “I sort of feel like I was cheated out of that.”

  “What would you have explained?”

  “Well, it hasn’t been easy these past few weeks, you know. I’ve been a little on edge with all of this. I haven’t been easy to live with.”

  “Go on.”

  He recounted for her an evening about a week before when he had gone upstairs to Parker’s bedroom door fully intending to maneuver his way into playing a computer game with him.

  Parker hadn’t even looked up from the screen when Jeremiah spoke to him from the doorway. It was like he wasn’t even there, or like he was a figment that couldn’t penetrate the laser fire and bomb blasts of the game. So, without even meaning to, Jeremiah had let everything inside him come out in a burst of anger that—to Parker—must have looked like it came out of nowhere. And once it began, Jeremiah hadn’t known how to reel it back in.

  “You’re on that thing twenty-four hours a day! You’re wasting your life with this crap!”

  Parker had said nothing, but Jeremiah saw his face redden with a tormented mix of anger and the frustration that comes from not being able to do anything with it. Jeremiah could see that his son was fighting to keep himself quiet.

  “From now on there are going to be rules. You hear me? You’re not going to be on that computer whenever you want. You can play for one hour after school and then one hour after your homework is done. Do you understand?”

  “My homework is done,” Parker said without looking up. “I already finished it.”

  “Good. So, turn that goddamn thing off and clean your room or something. Read a book. I don’t care what you do, but just turn it off.”

  He turned on his heels and almost ran into Diana, who was standing in the hallway with an empty laundry basket, her eyes wide in quiet surprise. Jeremiah just shook his head and skirted past her down the stairs where he sat heavily on the couch and turned on the TV. She followed him.

  “What on earth prompted that?” she asked icily. “What’s gotten into you lately?”

  “Nothing’s gotten into me,” he snapped. “The kid needs to grow up. Someone around here has to be the bad guy. It might as well be me.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s ridiculous. He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s a kid. He’s playing his games. What’s so bad about that? You think he’s the only k
id his age who does this?”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t care about other kids. We need to have some limits.”

  “Jesus, Jeremiah. There are limits,” she said. “He knows that, and you would, too, if you bothered to pay attention. I’ve already told him that he can play until he goes to bed once he’s done his homework. He needs his downtime, you know.”

  “Yeah, well, now there are more limits. What’s so wrong with that?”

  Diana had called him unreasonable. Looking back on it, he could understand why.

  “I would have liked to apologize,” he told Dr. Young now. “I should have said something. But what could I say?”

  Dr. Young was quiet for a moment and looked at Jeremiah as though she might have something comforting to offer. But in typical fashion, she didn’t, and only gave him another question.

  “How long have you and Diana been married?”

  “Almost sixteen years.” As he said it, he was struck by the fact that it would be his clone celebrating his wedding anniversary in a few months.

  “And Parker, he’s sixteen?”

  “Yes, last month actually.” Jeremiah noted a look of mock surprise on her face. “I think I can see where this is going,” he said. “Yes, we got married in a hurry. But you do what you need to do, right? I don’t think any of this is relevant to the experiment.”

  “Everything is relevant to this experiment, Jeremiah. I’m simply trying to establish some background. We need that.”

  “Seems to me you got all the background you needed when we took the Meld together. Wasn’t that the idea of taking it before the cloning? To get a baseline? Some background?”

  “Well, yes,” she said, “but the Meld doesn’t always give a complete picture. And what we do glean from it is somewhat dependent on what you’re thinking about at the time it’s administered. It isn’t a precise science.”