The Mirror Man

by Jane Gilmartin

  When the monitor switched on, the clone was at his desk with his office door closed, his head bent over a short stack of pages. The muffled voices of his coworkers could be heard in the hallway, just outside. Brenda’s voice rose above the din for a moment as she counted down the group to an uncomfortable delivery of “Happy Birthday” to someone called Tom. No one’s birthday escaped Brenda’s calendar. Nor their employment anniversary, promotion, new baby or impending retirement. She oversaw a collection schedule for the coffer and was on a first-name basis with a local bakery. Jeremiah had suffered through the ritual seven times himself. He’d smile and nod through the serenade and eat cake with a plastic spoon until, one by one, everyone figured out how to make a graceful escape back to their desks. When he could manage it, he tried to skip out on the gatherings for everyone else. It wasn’t always an easy feat. On more than one occasion, he’d actually hidden in the bathroom.

  Jeremiah watched the clone with a certain empathy and cringed when he heard Brenda’s cheery rapping on his closed door. He almost laughed when he saw his double snatch the telephone receiver and hold it up to his ear. When Brenda poked her head in, he covered the mouthpiece with one hand and offered her a shrug of his shoulders and an apologetic expression. “Sorry,” he mouthed. She nodded and ducked back out, closing the door behind her, and the clone slipped the phone back onto its cradle with a quick sigh of relief.

  “You don’t like cake or something?” Brent asked Jeremiah.

  “It’s the middle of the workday. Those things are a nuisance. One week there were three cakes in two days. He’s got work to do. Can’t blame him.”

  “Yeah, right, fake phone calls are so important. God, what a hard-ass.” Brent chuckled. “It’s cake. Loosen up a little, man.”

  A half hour later, when the coast was clear, they watched the clone slink out into the hallway and over to Brenda’s desk. She smiled at him and handed over a paper plate with a lopsided slice of chocolate cake on it.

  “I saved you some,” she said.

  “Thanks. I couldn’t get away. Sorry about that. I’ll be sure to stop by his desk when I get a chance. Tom, right?”

  “Tom. Not the editing Tom, the one in Accounting.”

  “Got it.”

  “Oh, Mr. Adams,” she said as the clone turned away, “while I have you here, I need to leave a little early on Friday, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure,” the clone told her, and attempted to walk away. She came out from behind her desk and moved in next to him, brandishing her cell phone in one hand.

  “My niece is coming in for the weekend,” she told him, scrolling through her phone and then showing him a photo of a skinny, smiling teenage blonde. “She’s visiting colleges. Can you believe it? They grow up quick, don’t they?”

  Jeremiah watched the clone smile lamely and inch away from her.

  “Isn’t Parker getting ready for the big college search?” she asked. Brenda made a point of knowing the names and approximate ages of everybody’s children. “He’s a junior this year, isn’t he?”

  “A sophomore,” the clone told her. “Pretty soon, though, yeah.” The clone smiled again and turned on his heels, sensing a reasonable escape. “Take whatever time you need on Friday,” he called over his shoulder.

  As the clone walked the short distance down the hallway back to his office, the ViMed camera hovered for another instant on Brenda, and Jeremiah saw something almost imperceptible change in her face. It stung him.

  “That was kind of rude,” Brent said.

  “He’s got work to do,” Jeremiah protested. “People can’t just sit around chatting all day, you know.”

  “Still.”

  Silently, Jeremiah agreed and made a mental note to look up Brenda’s birthday before he got out of here. He realized at that moment that he couldn’t remember a single one of those gatherings being organized for her.

  * * *

  After Brent left that evening, Jeremiah made a ham sandwich and nibbled at it absently as he took a closer look at Mel’s painting on the living room wall. All this time, he’d looked at it with a casual distaste when he bothered to notice it at all. Now that he knew who the artist was, he felt obliged to at least give it a second chance. He’d never understood the appeal of abstract art. If someone put that much effort into a painting, he thought, it ought to at least resemble something familiar. To his eyes, this still looked like a jumble of circles, something a child might draw. They ranged in size from a dime to a dinner plate, painted in grays and deep blues. Some overlapped, some seemed to recede into the distance. Some were bordered in sharp lines, others had edges that bled into the background.

  He positioned himself a few feet from the wall and stood there for a few minutes, tilting his head and squinting at it, but he couldn’t recognize any form in the thing. If it was supposed to elicit something from him, he didn’t know what it was, other than a slight sense of vertigo. Moving closer, he noticed there were places where the brush had pulled the paint up from the canvas in tiny ridges. Maybe it was meant to be tactile, he decided, and began to run his fingertips over it.

  It was then that he noticed, camouflaged perfectly in the center of a tiny gray circle, the smooth glass lens of a camera. It had been almost imperceptible before. But when he saw the glint of it, he knew instantly what it was. He immediately pulled back his hands and took an unsteady step backward, turning his gaze away, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. In the grips of that absurd sense of guilt, Jeremiah sidestepped over to the bookshelf, out of the camera’s view, and pretended to busy himself with the books. Every time he looked back at the painting now, his eye went directly to the camera lens, pulled there despite his best efforts. Now that he’d found it, it was the only thing he could see.

  He wondered vaguely if there were other cameras hidden anywhere. Not likely in this room, he decided. The position of the painting would have offered a clear, sidelong view of Jeremiah as he sat in front of the monitor each day to watch his clone. He figured that was probably the thing Charles Scott wanted to see.

  Still, he found himself examining the room, casually lifting books, fingering baseboards and checking the bulbs in every light fixture. He found nothing. A quick scan of the kitchen, with all its smooth, steel surfaces, offered no evidence of any additional devices. Even a tiny lens would have been readily visible in there, especially now that he was looking for it.

  Finally, he retreated to his bedroom, quickening his pace slightly as he passed by the painting, and examined every corner of that room. After an hour, when he’d found nothing, he switched off the lights and climbed into bed, where he spent a fitful night tossing and turning, unable to shake the feeling he was being watched.

  Chapter 16

  Day 90

  Brent wasn’t due until after eleven the next morning, and Jeremiah spent three hours slinking by the painting between the bedroom and the kitchen. Ordinarily he might have passed the time reading or watching the news on the monitor, but he couldn’t get himself to sit in the living room now that he knew Scott could be watching. So, instead, he ate three bowls of bran cereal standing at the kitchen counter and then took a shower until the water went cold. He was getting dressed when he heard Brent come in and went into the living room to meet him.

  “Come into the kitchen for a minute.” Brent was sitting on the couch, directly in line with the surveillance camera, and Jeremiah paused with his back purposely toward the painting. “I have a new smoothie recipe.”

  “Smoothie recipe? Okay, Jamie Oliver. But if it’s made with that fat-free yogurt, I’ll pass, thanks.”

  “I’m serious, it’s good. Just come in.”

  Reluctantly, Brent got off the couch and followed him to the kitchen. Jeremiah poured half a carton of low-fat milk into the blender, tossed in a few ice cubes and switched it on.

 
; “That’s your recipe?” Brent asked above the din.

  “I know this place is bugged,” Jeremiah blurted. “I found the camera. In Mel’s painting. I want to know if you knew about this.”

  “Bugged? What? There’s no way.” Brent looked at him with an expression of authentic doubt, enough to make him believe he knew nothing about it. It was possible, Jeremiah thought, that Brent was in the dark about a lot of things.

  “Go see for yourself,” he told him. “It’s almost exactly in the center, inside one of those little circles. You can see it if you get up close enough.”

  Brent left the room and came back a few minutes later, shaking his head in a way that suggested he’d found it. Jeremiah put two more ice cubes into the blender and turned the setting up to Puree.

  “I swear, Jeremiah, I had no idea.” Brent held his hands up at his shoulders in a show of innocence. “I had no clue. Are there any others?”

  “Not that I could find, and believe me, I looked. Why am I being watched?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Scott wants to see what happens when you’re watching the clone? The way the camera is facing, toward the center of the room, that’s the only thing he could see, I think—us on the couch when we’re watching the monitor.” He paused and shook his head slowly again. “I’m being watched, too, I guess. Maybe he’s doing it to make sure my reports are accurate. I don’t know. But I swear I had nothing to do with this. I had no idea.”

  “So, what do we do? Cover it up? Take it out?”

  “I don’t think so,” Brent told him. “I mean, that won’t do anything but show Scott we’re onto it. Maybe the best thing to do is just leave it there. For now at least.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” Jeremiah asked.

  “Of course it bothers me. But what else can we do? We just have to be careful, is all. We just have to watch what we say in there. Maybe slow down on the beers, I guess. Besides,” he added, “we’re not even certain it’s working. Maybe it isn’t even hooked up. For all we know it could be a decoy, maybe he wanted us to find it just to keep us on our toes. We could test it, I think.”

  “How?” Jeremiah added more ice to the blender and let it go. If Scott could hear through that device, he certainly wouldn’t hear them talking.

  “Easy. I can take it out and hook it up to the monitor. It’ll tell us if it’s active or not.”

  “Won’t he notice that?”

  “He’s not in the building right now. I just came from his office. He was leaving for a meeting. He won’t be back until this afternoon.”

  Jeremiah switched off the blender. “Could have told me before I used up half my ice,” he said. “But what if he has someone else monitoring the thing? How do we know he doesn’t record it and watch everything later?”

  “Look,” Brent said, “we either do this right now or we don’t. I say we do it. We have to find out.”

  He went into the living room and Jeremiah followed.

  “Help me get this off the wall.” Brent already had his hands positioned on one side of the mammoth painting. Jeremiah took the other end and, together, they lifted it up and off its hook. “Hold it there,” Brent told him, peering behind the canvas. “Okay, it’s definitely wired. Put it back, I’m going to take it out from the front.”

  Jeremiah watched as Brent gingerly twisted the tiny camera until it wriggled loose. He pulled it slowly outward, dangling by its wire, and then stopped to check something.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Yeah, I know what I’m doing. I’m a scientist, remember? It’s not brain surgery.” He disconnected the camera and the painting was left with an odd little hole where the wire came out.

  “Now,” Brent said, “I just need to access the cables behind the monitor. It should be just behind this panel.” He lifted a small door in the wall, just below the monitor, that Jeremiah had never noticed before.

  “Is this going to take long?” Jeremiah asked. “If that monitor is disconnected when the viewing starts, someone’s going to notice.”

  “We have time. I’ll have this hooked up in a few minutes. Why don’t you go make me a smoothie or something?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Then leave me alone and let me do this.” He pulled a thin cable out from the wall until he had enough slack to work with, hooked the end of it to something on the back of the camera and smiled. “There,” he said. “Done. Turn it on.”

  Jeremiah moved in front of Brent, grabbed the remote and hit the button. With Brent standing directly behind him, aiming the camera at the monitor, what appeared before him was mesmerizing: an image of the back of his own head, watching the monitor, which showed an image of his head watching the monitor, which showed his head again watching the monitor, and so on, seemingly into infinity. The effect was dizzying, so much so that he thought he might topple over if he looked at it too long.

  “Well, it works,” Brent said.

  “Turn it off,” Jeremiah told him. “Put it back.”

  “It’s kind of cool, isn’t it?” Brent began moving the camera slowly back and forth, making the image on the wall—and all of its infinite reflections—waver, until Jeremiah thought he might actually get sick.

  “Knock it off, Brent.” Jeremiah hit the button on the remote.

  The wall monitor went black and Jeremiah sat down while Brent put everything back to where it had been. When he was finished, there was no indication anything had been tampered with.

  “So, what do we do now?” he asked when Brent sat down on the couch. “Now that we know it’s real?”

  “Nothing,” Brent told him. “Like I said, we just be careful. We be ourselves and we do our jobs. That’s all.”

  “Easy for you to say. But I actually live here.”

  “Well,” Brent said with a smirk, “then I wouldn’t dance naked in front of the painting if I were you, difficult as that may be.”

  A few minutes later, the monitor switched on. As Jeremiah watched the clone stumble through four hours of his workday, he found it unsettling to realize that he was now the watcher and that his double had no idea.

  Chapter 17

  Day 94

  Jeremiah spent an uncomfortable week in his rooms. He ate his meals standing at the counter in the kitchen, and spent a lot of time in the bedroom, but he couldn’t stay out of the living room forever. There wasn’t much to do anywhere else. But whenever he was in there, on the computer or the treadmill, or practicing IF, he found himself trying not to look in the direction of the painting and hoping it didn’t appear obvious. Eventually, he realized he could move one of the chairs out of the camera’s view. It was an odd-looking arrangement, one chair pushed up against the wall on its own, but it afforded him a sense of semiprivacy and a place where he could read. Despite everything, Jeremiah was often happy for the long, quiet stretches when he could read. He had devoured half the New York Times bestseller list in the space of a few weeks, and had a growing log of books to request, ones he’d never found the time for in his old life. He was absorbed in a true-crime thriller when Charles Scott walked in the front door, unannounced, on a Friday afternoon.

  “Mr. Adams,” he said, “we need to have a talk.”

  In his own mind, Jeremiah sneered back at Scott: You’re damn right we need a talk, you spying piece of crap. In reality, he just looked up at him blankly from the chair.

  If Scott had any suspicions about the new furniture arrangement, he didn’t mention it.

  Jeremiah laid the open book down and walked over to the couch. He sat and put his feet up on the coffee table. “About what?”

  “I’ve just come from a meeting with Natalie Young. She tells me you’ve been asking a lot of questions about taking Meld.”

  “I don’t like taking it so often.”

  “She sets the schedule for when you take it, Mr. Adams. That is part of
her job.”

  “How do we know that’s safe?” Jeremiah put his feet down and leaned forward slightly. “She keeps saying it’s fine. But there isn’t enough documented information on that. I would know. I doubt anyone has taken this drug more than I have.”

  Scott sat down on the couch across from him and looked Jeremiah hard in the eyes with an unreadable expression.

  “She is taking it with you, Mr. Adams,” he said. “And she has no concerns about the frequency.”

  “She’s not the one being probed. Maybe it’s different. She’s isn’t even taking the same drug I am. I just don’t see the point in taking so much of it. I’m not convinced it’s safe. In fact, I think it might be taking a toll on me.”

  “How so?” Scott asked.

  “I’m having trouble sleeping, for one thing. Who knows what else it’s doing to me.”

  “We can have Dr. Pike check you out,” Scott told him. “I can set that up for tomorrow.”

  “Pike’s already checked me out. He says there’s nothing to worry about. He told me it’s stress. He prescribed a sedative.”

  “Then I would advise you to take your sedative and stop worrying. You will take the Meld according to Dr. Young’s schedule. It’s imperative to the project. We need to know how the cloning is impacting you. I’m afraid that is part of your contract, Mr. Adams.”

  “Ah, yes,” Jeremiah said. “The contract.” He would have liked to add that spy cameras weren’t part of his contract, but he bit his tongue.

  “What is it about the Meld that you don’t trust?” Scott asked. “I understand from Mr. Higgins’s recent reports that you’re also upset about the idea of your mother taking the drug. Meld is a miracle drug. It may actually help her, you know. There’s no telling what it will uncover.”

  “You might feel differently if it were your mother,” Jeremiah told him. “Taking Meld isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. You don’t know what it’s like.”