The Mirror Man

by Jane Gilmartin

  “Where is everyone?” he asked again, as though the dog not only had that information but might somehow answer him.

  Back in the kitchen the clone made himself a tuna sandwich and filled the dog bowl with food. Jeremiah noted again that Louie likely had to pee and shook his head. No one was taking care of his dog.

  The clone took the sandwich into the living room, slumped back in his chair and turned on the news. For about ten minutes Jeremiah and Brent watched as he sat there, unmoving, Louie lying down unheeded by the front door, and they listened, along with the clone, to the headlines and weather report. When the door opened, Louie jumped up with an exuberant welcome for Parker, who bent down to kiss him on the head and then finally let him out into the yard.

  “Is Mom with you?” the clone asked.

  “No. Why would she be with me?”

  “She’s just later than usual, is all. Second night this week, isn’t it? Where have you been?”

  “At a friend’s house, working on a science project.”

  “What friend?”

  “You don’t know him,” Parker told him. “A kid from class.”

  Jeremiah turned away from the monitor when Brent let out an involuntary chuckle.

  “What?” Jeremiah asked.

  “That kid has been smoking the ganja,” he said. “Look at his eyes. He’s totally wasted.”

  “No,” Jeremiah said, and looked closer at the image of his son on the screen. “Parker’s not into drugs. He doesn’t smoke pot. There’s no way he’s stoned.”

  “Sure,” Brent said with a grin. “And I don’t drink beer. Look at him!”

  “He’s not!” Jeremiah insisted, noting Parker’s glassy gaze with growing concern.

  “It’s not that big of a deal,” Brent said. “Tell me you didn’t do the same exact thing at his age.”

  “He’s never been into drugs. Who is this kid he was with?” Jeremiah leaned in closer to the monitor and willed the clone to push for information. He didn’t, of course. He wouldn’t. Idiot.

  “Did you finish the science project?” the clone asked, clueless.

  “Yeah. Is there any dinner?”

  “There’s tuna. Have you talked to your mother today?”

  “No.” Parker let Louie back in and disappeared into the kitchen. The clone followed, hopefully, Jeremiah thought, to barrage him with questions and accusations, shake him by the shoulders, maybe ground the kid or throw him into a cold shower. Instead, he just stood in the doorway and watched his son make a seriously munchie-size sandwich. Yeah, Jeremiah admitted to himself, he was totally stoned. From the look on the clone’s face, he knew it now, too, and the fact that he still said nothing made Jeremiah want to jump through the wall and just take over. What was he waiting for? Say something! You’re supposed to be his father!

  “You’ve been staying after school a lot lately,” he said, a hint of accusation lacing his tone.

  “I told you, I was working on a project. You’re the one always saying I need to get my grades up.”

  Parker started to devour his sandwich and slipped Louie a bit of tuna from his finger. The dog wagged his tail delightedly and sat rigidly at Parker’s feet, staring up at the food as though he could make it fall to the floor by the power of his own rapt attention.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Jeremiah said to the monitor. “He’s not going to just let him get away with this, is he? What the hell is wrong with this asshole?”

  Brent scribbled something down on his notepad, glancing at Jeremiah from the corner of his eye.

  “Oh, knock it off, Brent!”

  “What? This is my job, remember?”

  “Fuck you,” he said, and turned back to the scene in front of him.

  Parker made a move for the back staircase, Louie at his heels, and the clone asked where he was going.

  “I have more homework.”

  “Why don’t we go get an ice cream first? We haven’t done that in a while. What do you say?”

  Good move, Jeremiah thought, have a nice talk in a nonconfrontational way. For a moment, he was almost sort of impressed, knowing that, had it been him standing in that kitchen, he might not have played it so cool. He might have started screaming and searching Parker’s pockets for a pipe.

  “I can’t, Dad,” Parker said, avoiding the clone’s eyes, and went up the stairs, two at a time.

  “Follow him!” Jeremiah urged uselessly.

  Instead, the clone just started cleaning the mess Parker had left on the counter and, infuriatingly, began humming a mindless tune into the heavy silence of the kitchen. For a moment, Jeremiah entertained the idea of playing another game with his son. Maybe he could tweak Clyde’s outfit, swap the Ramones T-shirt for something with a subtle antidrug message: Drugs Are for Absolute Fucking Losers. Do You Want to Destroy Every Brain Cell in Your Head? But he knew he couldn’t parent his son through a video game, and he couldn’t trust himself to make contact again.

  Once the counter was sufficiently cleared, the clone reached up to a high cabinet over the refrigerator, took down a bottle and fixed himself a tall gin and tonic, light on the tonic. Jeremiah winced. A mixed drink on a Tuesday was unheard of. The clone must have been feeling the strain, he thought.

  Settling back in front of the TV, the clone rotated through the channels and sipped his drink until the front door opened again sometime around ten o’clock. Diana came in without a word of greeting, dropped her purse on the floor by the hall table and went straight to the kitchen. The clone got up and followed her. Jeremiah could see his face had settled into a hard expression, his brow furrowed and his lips tightened.

  “He looks pissed,” Brent said.

  “Can you blame him?” Jeremiah snapped. “He’s probably sick and tired of this by now.”

  “Working late again?” the clone said. Diana turned and offered him a half smile.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That same case. Is Parker home?”

  “In his room.”

  “Did you eat?”

  “I made sandwiches.”

  “I had something at the office,” Diana said, although the clone hadn’t bothered to ask. “I’m exhausted. I think I’ll take a shower before bed.”

  “I bet you’re exhausted.” There was a hint of accusation in his voice. “All these late nights. Takes a lot out of you.”

  In the lab, Jeremiah scrutinized the monitor. Was the clone finally going to do what he himself could never do? Was he finally going to confront her?

  Diana stared at the clone for a long moment without a word and then shook her head and started toward the stairs.

  “Wait,” the clone said. Jeremiah held his breath. “Why don’t we have a drink? You can tell me all about this case that’s been keeping you away every night.”

  Diana’s eyes narrowed. “I’m tired, Jeremiah. I don’t want a drink. Besides, it’s nothing you’d be interested in.”

  “Oh? Try me,” the clone said. “I think I’d be very interested. Especially if you decided to—oh, I don’t know—actually tell me the truth for a change.”

  Her silence felt like it filled both the kitchen where she stood and the lab beyond. Jeremiah could feel Brent staring at him, but he kept his eyes on the monitor, waiting.

  “What are you talking about? Tell you the truth about what?”

  “About what it is that’s taking you away from your family,” the clone said. “What is it that’s so much more important to you than your own son? Or should I ask who?”

  Diana glared at the clone in a way that Jeremiah had never seen before. It was as though he could see something physically shift in her as she held him in her gaze. And that shift smacked of something final. For a minute, he wondered whether she was about to lash out and slap the clone across the face. If she had, it wouldn’t have surprised Jeremiah.

  Instead,
she took one measured step closer to the clone and, when she finally spoke, her voice was low and cool, almost devoid of emotion. “You’ve changed, Jeremiah,” she said. “I don’t even know who you are anymore. But you’re not the same man I married.”

  Jeremiah felt a wave of dread rise up inside him. Why, of all the things she might have said, had she decided on those exact words? He understood why she’d said it. She was angry. She’d felt trapped. In any other scenario, it would have meant nothing. But it echoed eerily what his mother had said just before she was murdered. Those were words that could get her killed.

  Jeremiah closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands. He could hear Brent typing something rapidly into his laptop. He sat up, startled, and looked at him.

  “Brent,” he said quietly. “Don’t.”

  “Jeremiah, this has to go into my report. You know that. They’re going to see it. If it’s not in my report it’ll look suspicious.”

  Jeremiah let his eyes linger for an instant on Mel’s painting and then looked again at Brent. “Come in the kitchen for a minute,” he said. “I’m going to make a smoothie.”

  “We’re not done with the viewing. There’s still twenty minutes left.”

  “Fuck that,” Jeremiah said. “Come in the kitchen.”

  Over the racket of the ice in the blender, Jeremiah implored Brent to leave Diana’s words out of his report.

  “Look, Jeremiah, I’m sorry, I really am. But I have to put it in.”

  “You know what happened with my mother. You know as well as I do what those words will sound like to Scott and his goons. You can’t put it in there.”

  “Look,” Brent said, “I know you’re upset. I know you’re worried about this. But I think they’re going to be focused on something else here. They’re going to be looking at the fact that the clone thinks she’s having an affair. Maybe that’s what’s really got you all riled up here. That isn’t an easy thing to hear.”

  “No, that’s not it,” Jeremiah said.

  “You know, maybe the clone’s got it all wrong. We don’t know for sure that she’s having an affair.”

  Jeremiah sighed. “No,” he said sarcastically. “Maybe she’s joined a knitting circle and she’s going to surprise me with a new blanket for my birthday. She is having an affair. I already knew about it. I’ve known about it for a long time, before any of this even started. But that’s not what I’m worried about. You know what I’m worried about.”

  Brent added more ice to the blender and hit the button. “It was just something she said in the heat of an argument, Jeremiah. It isn’t that bad. She didn’t mean it like that.”

  “And what my mother said was just because her memory happened to be failing her. It doesn’t matter to them. We both saw those emails. They’re prepared to neutralize any threats. You know what that means. You saw it. You have to leave her words out of your report.”

  Brent sighed. “Maybe I can gloss over them and focus on the affair. But they were said, you know. They’re going to see the tape of that viewing. They’ll see it whether I put it in the report or not. But I don’t believe they’re going to hurt her because of this. It was just an argument.”

  Jeremiah added more ice to the blender. “You know, Brent, there are things you don’t know about Charles Scott. He’s not just in this for the science, to make a better future for mankind. This is personal to him. Believe me. And I don’t think he’ll stop at anything to see this through. He’s got too much to lose. More than you even know.”

  Brent looked at Jeremiah with an odd mix of confusion and pity and shook his head. “Let’s just finish the viewing,” he said. “Then I suggest you take one of Pike’s sedatives and go to bed. You’ve got to relax. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

  Reluctantly, Jeremiah followed him back to the living room, took his place on the couch and averted his eyes from the screen and from Brent. He had to do something. But without Brent’s help, he didn’t see what he could do.

  He had to find some way to warn Diana, to warn the clone. There had to be a way to stop this.

  Chapter 25

  Day 147

  Two days later, standing in the little galley kitchen in the lab, Jeremiah tried again to convince Brent the whole situation was spinning dangerously out of control, and again, Brent seemed reluctant to see it.

  “It’s been two days and nothing’s happened. Diana is fine. You’re just under a lot of stress,” he said. “Between your mother, and the affair, it’s a lot to handle. Maybe you ought to talk to Natalie about your marriage. That is part of her job, after all. You should take advantage of it.”

  “My marriage is my business. It doesn’t have the slightest impact on the clone or this project or anything else. And I don’t care about the affair. It doesn’t matter. What I care about is Diana. Why can’t you understand that?”

  “I do understand,” Brent said, annoyance creeping into his tone. “But why can’t you understand that we need to be careful with this. We can’t afford to do anything that would raise suspicion right now. Let’s just play along for now and keep our eyes open.”

  “Play along? We have to do something, Brent. If Charles Scott has the slightest suspicion that Diana knows something, she’s in trouble. Real trouble. You have to help me.”

  “You keep saying that Scott is behind this,” Brent said. “But we don’t know that. What we saw implicates the army, the people behind the scenes. Scott is a scientist. He’s in this for the science, Jeremiah, and that science is sound.”

  “You’re being played for a fool, Brent. Charles Scott isn’t the champion you think he is. He’s not in this for the betterment of the species, for the good of mankind. There are things you don’t know. You have to help me.”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “I don’t know. Find her. Just tell her to watch her back. Tell her she has to stay at home. Scott won’t try anything with all those cameras around. She’s safer in the house. If you could just tell her. Just try.”

  “I can’t do that! I’d lose my job if I so much as glanced at Diana on the street. Are you out of your mind?”

  “Your job? That’s what you care about? Your job?”

  “Well, yes, actually. I do. And so should you. If I’m gone, Jeremiah, you have no one on the inside.”

  Jeremiah shook his head. “You still believe in this, don’t you? Even after what we saw in those files. You still believe in this project? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I’m a scientist. There’s still some merit in this, some intrinsic value. That’s what I believe. Cloning is inevitable. It’s the future.”

  “Even with all of the ethical implications? The laws against it? That doesn’t concern you?”

  “Well,” Brent said, “they make a lot of things illegal that probably don’t need to be. I’m not talking about whole clone armies or cloning the pope. There are good uses, too. I think that’s worth preserving.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, what if we could clone da Vinci or Albert Einstein or Shakespeare?”

  “Yeah, but it wouldn’t really be them. Without the Meld they don’t actually have minds of their own. How do we know what they’d decide to do? Who’s to say a clone would even come close to the genius of the originals? What if a clone Shakespeare started writing zombie fiction? What if Einstein’s clone decided he’d rather just be a barber? Besides, you saw the emails. We both know they don’t want to clone Shakespeare.”

  “This technology works,” Brent said. “In the hands of the right people it could still do a lot of good. I’m sorry, but I still think that’s why Scott is doing this. That’s the point of this whole thing.”

  Jeremiah laughed. “That’s not the point. Why is Scott actually doing this? What is he getting out of it? Ask yourself that. What’s his end game? Why is this so important to him? It isn’t
the science. Believe me.”

  “Fine. If you want to look at it like that. There’s money to be made. There are patents and rights. There’s power. ViMed is going to get the lion’s share of that for the next hundred years or more, and Charles Scott is at the helm. What’s so wrong about that? Jesus, they’ll probably call the whole procedure the Scott Method or something. That’s immortality, Jeremiah.”

  Jeremiah shook his head and smiled. How could someone manage to be so correct and so off the mark at the same time?

  He wasn’t going to be able to convince Brent of anything. Not yet. Not in time to help Diana. If he was going to do something, he’d have to find a way to do it on his own.

  “Immortality,” he said finally. “You’re probably right.”

  They went to the living room, where Brent took his lab coat from the closet, and Jeremiah fell heavily onto the couch and put his feet up on the coffee table, trying to appear more relaxed, even as his mind was racing for a solution.

  “Another exciting afternoon watching my very successful double duplicate my every move at the office,” he said. “The suspense is killing me. You think he’s going to dial the phone with his left hand or his right? Yeah, this science is all so important.”

  “Quit complaining,” Brent said. “If you’re that bored, then we’ll just play cards while he works.” He sat down and began dealing out cards for poker. “Stud High,” he said, and threw a beer bottle cap into the pot, in lieu of money, which Jeremiah hadn’t seen or needed in several months.

  Two rounds in and several bottle caps richer, Jeremiah looked up from a lousy hand when the clone took a phone call that, judging from his expression, was anything but good news. It was a quick and one-sided conversation, but Jeremiah heard enough to grasp that the Meld shit was about to hit the fan again in a big way.