Scott let a trifling, contemptuous laugh escape his lips. “What makes you so certain?”
“You’ve taken Meld?” he asked. “Why?”
But Jeremiah knew exactly why Charles Scott would take the drug. With Pike’s help, it was a way for him to get a copy of his own mind while it was still relatively sound. He would need that, presumably, to implant into his own, healthy clone when the time came.
Jeremiah leaned forward, elbows on his knees, to assess the man’s expression when he lied about his reasons. He was close enough to be certain of it when he saw Scott’s head suddenly jerk to one side in an uncontrollable way, his lips tightening and his eyes darting and blinking rapidly for a good second or two. Jeremiah was silent, but the look on his face must have said enough. Scott looked strangely flustered for an instant, and then stood up and turned his back to Jeremiah without explanation.
“Is something wrong, Dr. Scott?” Jeremiah asked. “Are you okay?”
“You will take the Meld as you are instructed, Mr. Adams,” Scott said firmly, and he strode across the room and out the door without turning around again.
Jeremiah sat, stunned, staring at the door after it closed. There was no mistaking what he’d seen. That was some sort of spasm, a seizure or something. Had Jeremiah been looking the other way, he might have missed it. It was that brief, but it had happened, and it was proof of everything he suspected.
Chapter 18
Day 100
Early on a Thursday afternoon, Jeremiah and Brent settled in for a viewing he was certain would show the clone alone at his desk. He was surprised, then, when the cameras opened up, not in his ViMed office, but once again in his mother’s room at the assisted living home.
“Now what?” he asked cautiously, not really wanting to know the answer. Brent said nothing.
The clone, dressed in his work clothes, was standing just inside the doorway, his back to the camera, and his mother was flitting purposefully around her small room, gathering clothes from the closet and the drawers and stuffing them, unfolded, into a suitcase, which lay open on the bed.
“Mom,” the clone said, and Jeremiah was surprised at how much it continued to bother him to hear the word come from his double’s mouth. The only person in the world who had a right to call her “Mom” was Jeremiah. “Stop packing. I didn’t say you had to leave right this minute.”
“Well, if they’re throwing me out, then why wait?”
“No one is throwing you out, Mom. Will you just stop for a minute and listen to me?”
“You’re working with them,” she said, a small, sardonic laugh escaping her lips. “You’re not fooling me. You think I don’t know. But I see everything.”
An exasperated sigh escaped the clone’s lips just as Jeremiah sighed in exactly the same manner in the lab. Brent typed something into his laptop.
“I think you’re imagining things. No one is working against you, Mom. We’re all just trying to help.”
“Do you take me for a fool?” she asked. “They’ve been stealing my things. Putting drugs in my food. And now you tell me I have to leave. I say good riddance! I’ll leave right now. The sooner, the better. It’s not safe here.”
“Just slow down, Mom,” the clone said, moving toward her and taking a balled-up blouse from her hands. “No one is trying to hurt you. No one is putting anything in your food. This is foolishness.”
The clone led her by the shoulder and eased her to the edge of the bed. She looked away from him and shook her head.
“Foolishness,” she said. “That’s what you’d like me to believe. But I know what’s going on.” As if to illustrate that point, she poked a bony finger at her temple and repeated it. “I know what’s going on.”
“This is what I’m talking about,” the clone said carefully, and he sat down beside her on the bed. “You aren’t thinking clearly. This is why you have to move. You need to be in a place where they can handle these things. Somewhere they can take care of you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“No, Mom,” he said. “You can’t.”
“I need to talk to my son,” she said. The clone stopped and stiffened slightly. Jeremiah could see the muscles of his back tense up and the sight mirrored what he felt in his own body. “He’ll know what to do about this. Just go and call my son.”
“I am your son, Mom,” the clone said. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Jeremiah. It’s me.”
She looked at the clone for a long moment, as though trying to decipher something in the face.
“You can’t fool me,” she said at last. “You think I’m crazy? You’re not my son. I don’t know you. I think I’d know my own son.” She got up off the bed then and went back to stuffing articles of clothing, one at a time, into the suitcase.
“Mom,” the clone said, and left it at that.
In the lab, Jeremiah closed his eyes and said nothing. Brent was typing again.
“What the hell are you writing? Knock it off, Brent.”
“Did you hear what she just said?”
“She’s got dementia, for Christ’s sake! She doesn’t mean that!”
“I have to put it in there,” he said. “It kind of jumps out.”
Jeremiah turned back to the screen and watched as his double sat like stone while his mother moved back and forth again between the closet and the bed.
Jeremiah could barely move, either. In all the time since her memory had first begun to falter, there had never been a moment when his mother hadn’t known him. It was brutally upsetting. And in that moment, Jeremiah knew his clone was grappling with the same substantial shock. In a strange way, he had never felt more connected to the man on the screen.
“I’ll be back, Mom,” the clone said. “I need to speak to someone in the office and then we can talk about this more.”
A few minutes later, the clone was seated in Dr. Waterson’s office, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, holding his chin in his hands.
“I think we’d better go ahead and use the Meld on my mother,” he said. “She’s getting worse. Do you know, just now, she didn’t even recognize me? She had absolutely no idea who I was.”
Dr. Waterson blinked and stared at the clone for a brief moment.
“Mr. Adams,” he said, “your mother and I already took the Meld. Last night, in fact.”
“So, you know that the dementia has progressed,” the clone said.
“Actually, Mr. Adams, I’m not certain now that we’re dealing with dementia at all.”
“What do you mean?” the clone asked.
“What the hell is he talking about?” Jeremiah asked no one in particular.
“No,” Waterson said. “There are memory issues, certainly, that much we knew. But they are not consistent with what we typically see in dementia. They aren’t impacting the same areas of the brain. In fact, some of those areas actually seem somewhat improved, I think. Her short-term memory, for example, is fine. We may be looking at something altogether different.”
“What do you mean? Different, how?”
“You must remember, I am not a psychiatric doctor, Mr. Adams. I am not the right person to diagnose anything, but I have been trained in the use of Meld. I know what to look for. I saw clear evidence of mild depression, some definite paranoia and perhaps even schizophrenic disorder. We’ll need a brain scan to be absolutely certain, but the synaptic activity I sensed seemed well above what we’d expect in dementia. I actually feel her memory is fairly sound, under the circumstances.”
“How can this be possible?” the clone asked. “You’ve been talking about the onset of her dementia for a year now.”
“This guy is cracked,” Jeremiah said. Brent started typing again.
“If I’m not mistaken,” Waterson said, “there is a family history of schizophrenia, isn’t there?”
“Yes
,” the clone told him. “My uncle. Her brother. But she’s never shown any signs of that.”
“It’s not completely out of the question, though. These episodes of hers, the things I saw with the Meld, it may point to a latent tendency toward schizophrenia. Earlier signs of the disorder might have been missed for all we know.”
“I just never thought it would touch her,” the clone said. “I thought that, after all this time, she was fine in that respect.”
In the lab, Jeremiah wondered about the implications of that possibility.
“As I said,” Waterson told the clone, “I’m not the right person to diagnose this. I’m just relaying my impressions from the Meld experience.”
“Does this mean she won’t have to be moved, after all?” the clone asked.
“For the moment, I wouldn’t be opposed to her staying here with us. Emotionally, it might be best for her to stay. I’d like to bring in a specialist, perhaps even put her under the Meld again. That’s quite an exhilarating drug you’ve got there.”
“So I’ve heard,” the clone said.
For the next few hours, Jeremiah paid hardly any attention to the monitor. He had no desire to watch the clone drag through his day at the office after what he’d just seen. Instead, he allowed his mind to wander to thoughts that twisted back in on themselves until he felt dizzy: If his mother could slip so quickly into mental illness, what did that mean for him? Or had the Meld sparked something that had lain dormant in her all this time? What if he’d been wrong all these years about her? What if the things he’d always thought of as eccentric—all her moving around, her restlessness and curiosity—pointed to something more serious than simple quirks? He’d taken the drug more times than she had. Was it having the same impact on his own mind? Could the Meld suicides be related to some dormant insanity? And far more troubling, if his mother didn’t have dementia, why the hell did she suddenly not recognize the clone as her son?
Did she know?
Chapter 19
Day 102
On the night of their wedding anniversary, the ViMed cameras caught the clone and Diana upstairs in the midst of getting ready to go out. Diana was wearing a green top and black satin pants Jeremiah had never seen before. At the moment, she was shoeless, and the hems of the pants were getting caught under her feet as she walked back and forth between the mirror and her jewelry box. He wondered if they were going to the new restaurant in the shipyard that she had wanted to try. That he didn’t know these details annoyed him more than he thought it should.
“Did you give Parker money for a pizza?” the clone asked her.
“Yes.”
“And you checked the reservation today?”
“Honestly, Jeremiah,” she said. “It’s a Wednesday night at eight o’clock. I doubt there’s going to be any problems. Quit worrying.”
“Okay,” the clone said, “just checking.”
Jeremiah could understand the clone’s concern. They hardly went out at all anymore. He was out of practice at the art of securing a table anywhere nicer than a pizza place.
“Your wife is pretty when she wants to be,” Brent said.
“Even when she doesn’t want to be,” Jeremiah told him. She was. That much had never changed.
On the wall, the clone straightened his tie in the mirror and Jeremiah vaguely wondered whether he’d even bothered to comment on how Diana looked. He doubted it. He wouldn’t have thought of it himself if Brent hadn’t brought it up.
Diana checked her lipstick in the mirror, grabbed her purse and a black sweater and headed out to the hallway.
“I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said. “I just want to make sure Louie gets out to pee before we go.”
Ordinarily, it would have been him taking Louie out before they left. Jeremiah figured nothing had changed with the dog’s distrust of the clone, even with the medicine they were giving him.
The clone stopped at Parker’s closed door, knocked once and opened it before he went downstairs.
“We’re leaving,” he said. “We’ll be home around ten.”
“Yup,” Parker said without looking up from his computer monitor. “Have fun.”
“Is the homework done?”
“Yup.”
“Okay. Don’t forget to order that pizza before it gets too late. And keep an eye on Louie.”
“Yup, I will.”
The clone closed the door and headed downstairs and to the garage, where ViMed cameras followed him seamlessly. Jeremiah wondered for the hundredth time exactly how many cameras Scott had hidden around his house. By his best estimate, there must have been at least a dozen. His double hit the switch on the wall to raise the garage bay door and then the button on his key chain to unlock the car. Diana came into the garage holding Louie by the leash, her arm outstretched to keep him away from her clothes. The dog took a wide arc around the clone as he went to the door to be let back in. The clone glanced down at him with something Jeremiah recognized as unhappy resignation, and for the first time, he understood that Louie’s sudden aversion toward him must be hard on the clone. Jeremiah sincerely loved that dog so, presumably, the clone loved him, too. It must be awful. He’d never thought of that before.
When they got into the car, the cameras switched on from somewhere near the rearview mirror. For twenty minutes, Brent and Jeremiah watched as the clone and Diana rode in relative silence to the shipyard.
They parked and got out, and the camera stayed on inside the empty car, the only light coming from the red blinking car alarm signal on the dash. This was their view for the next two and a half hours while the clone and Diana were inside the restaurant. Presumably, Scott hadn’t anticipated the need to arm every eatery in town with surveillance equipment. During the lull, Jeremiah and Brent played crazy eights and poker and glanced sidelong at the wall every few minutes for signs of activity.
When the clone and Diana came back out to the parking lot, Jeremiah heard them before he could see them, Diana’s voice so belligerent that it startled him. He straightened, paying attention.
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have had that second gin and tonic before dinner,” she snapped. “You know you can’t drink on an empty stomach. Every time you do, it turns into a scene. Honestly, it’s embarrassing. We won’t be going back there again any time soon.”
“Good,” the clone said as he unlocked the door with some degree of difficulty. “I mean, come on, Diana. Two hundred and twenty dollars for dinner? For two people? For that price, they should have had someone cutting my steak and putting every bite in my mouth for me!”
“It’s our anniversary,” Diana said, her voice softening in volume if not in pitch. “Don’t you think we can afford to have one nice dinner on our anniversary without you complaining about the cost?”
“It’s ridiculous. And that was without a full bottle of wine.”
“Jeremiah,” she said. “Nice things cost money. That’s just the way it is. I hope you gave that poor waiter a decent tip. God knows he earned it.”
“I gave him the customary fifteen percent.”
“Honestly, Jeremiah. In a place like that, customary is more like twenty percent. You really are uncouth sometimes, aren’t you?”
“Am I supposed to answer that?” the clone sneered. “Or was that a rhetorical question? Sometimes I’m too uncouth to know the difference.”
“Can we just get home in one piece, please. I have to work early in the morning.”
“Of course you do,” the clone said, venom slipping into his tone. Jeremiah leaned back, exhaling. He was really walking on thin ice now. He’d do better to just stop talking and drive.
“He is definitely not getting lucky tonight,” Brent said.
Jeremiah could have told him that three hours ago, before they’d even left the house.
“Remind me next year,” Diana said to the clone, “th
at we should just stay home and have pizza on our anniversary.”
“Will do,” the clone said. “Sounds good to me.”
The remainder of their ride home was silent, except for intermittent stifled huffs coming from Diana. At first, Jeremiah thought she might be crying, but her indirect glances at the clone held more anger than anything else. She was seriously pissed, Jeremiah thought, and then decided he didn’t blame her.
“Happy anniversary,” the clone muttered when they pulled into the garage. He stopped the engine, got out of the car and was halfway into the kitchen before Diana had even unbuckled her seat belt.
Chapter 20
Day 106
Charles Scott did not often visit Jeremiah after-hours. When he did, he certainly never bothered to wait at the door until Jeremiah invited him inside. So, when he did just that, after eleven one night, Jeremiah was more than a little surprised. The encounter was made more awkward by the fact that he’d been practicing IF in his underwear again and hadn’t bothered to fetch his pants before Scott opened the door.
“Forgive me for the late hour, Mr. Adams,” he said, a slightly arched eyebrow his only obvious opinion on Jeremiah’s attire. “Something has happened, and I wanted to be sure you heard it firsthand before tomorrow’s viewing.”
Jeremiah stood up, intending to go to the bedroom to retrieve some clothes, but Scott put a hand up to stop him.
“What is it?” Jeremiah asked, suddenly alarmed.
“Perhaps you should sit.” Scott motioned toward the couch. Jeremiah stared at him and remained standing. Scott sat down and inhaled deeply.
“What is it?” Jeremiah asked again. “Is it Parker? Diana?”
“Your wife and son are fine, Mr. Adams,” Scott said uneasily. “But I’m afraid your mother has passed away. It happened just over an hour ago. The clone hasn’t even been notified yet, but I thought you should know as soon as possible. I’m very sorry.” He looked at him with an expression that was difficult to read, but leaned more toward curious than sorry, as though he was studying his reaction.
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