Page 34 of The Echo Wife
• Dogs. Sometime in the five years since the scan, Nathan had become slightly afraid of them. Not a phobia, but an aversion, a tension. Martine said he was bitten by a dog shortly before I first knocked on her door. I couldn’t remember a dog bite. I couldn’t even remember an injury.
• The sapphire. I never suspected that he would notice the fact that I didn’t wear it. It lived in a fire safe in the bottom of my closet, when we were married and after, and I always thought it had evaporated from his awareness the same way it had mine. But that wasn’t the case—apparently, it hurt his feelings. He was disappointed that I didn’t like it more, embarrassed by my disregard. The word Martine used was “crestfallen.” Even after all that time, he had been upset enough about it to tell Martine how he felt.
• Me. Of course. How he felt about me. How much he respected me. How much he wanted me. How much he loved me.
Martine was wrong about nothing.
Nathan, it seemed, told her everything. Even things that hadn’t been his to tell.
Things about my childhood. Things about our sex life. Martine knew it all.
I told myself that it didn’t make sense for me to be angry about it—what possible reason would he have had to lie to her about any of it, to conceal any of it from her? It’s not as though he needed to worry about breaking my confidence, not when he was already breaching my trust in such an irrevocable way. It’s not as though he needed to worry about Martine telling me what she knew—or, for that matter, telling anyone what she knew. She was isolated, and I was ignorant.
I’m sure Nathan didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.
Normally, I wouldn’t have done such a thorough assessment. The duplicative clones I developed were never intended to function as completely convincing stand-ins for the people they resembled—that was a cornerstone of the ethical justification for the research. Every time I applied for more funding, every time I appeared in front of a review board, every time anyone asked how my work was in any way prudent, I had to be able to prove that I wasn’t makingpeople;I was making tools.
It’s why Martine was so underdeveloped, so dependent. Nathan had clearly gotten access to one of my own early neural frames, but he couldn’t replicate my entire mind, my every thought process. He couldn’t make her a whole person, with self-direction and a fully developed sense of agency.
No one could.
That is the part I decided not to reveal to Martine. I discussed it with the only person I could: Seyed.
I didn’t trust him again, not yet—but I could feel the trust returning, seeping into me like meltwater into a basement, andevery day I leaned on him again just a little more. It felt good, having another person to share this enormous secret with.
It was nice, is all. Confiding in Seyed about the risks we were taking. It was a comfort. Seyed and I sat up at my kitchen table most nights over increasing volumes of whiskey and wine after Martine had gone to sleep, talking about the risks we were taking and the impossibility of the work we had taken on. We drank too much and didn’t eat enough, because our bellies were too full of the magnitude of our project to digest anything else.
In a way, I suppose we were trying to heal the thing that had become broken between us, because we needed to be whole in order to carry our shared burden.
This is the thing we had to carry: Even if we succeeded at the impossible thing, we would never be able to tell anyone. We couldn’t publish. We couldn’t even whisper. We would just have to sit on our achievement, letting the world remain ignorant of the possibilities we’d uncovered.
The possibilities we’dcreated.
“This is going to be groundbreaking,” I often said, a phrase that was becoming a trigger for the whole familiar litany. “We’re making a man. Not a subject, not a tool—aperson. We’re making a wholeperson,and we never even get to brag about it.”
Seyed’s answer shifted depending on how much he’d had to drink. On the nights when he was most sober, he disagreed with me. We weren’t making a person, he would insist. We were making a clone. A more complex clone, but still.
But during the course of our project, few of Seyed’s nights were sober. He was under a great deal of strain, I could understand that. There were several days when he had to manage the lab almost entirely on his own while I worked with Martine, and he was taking on a larger portion of specimen conditioning than usual. On those nights, when he drank enough to make his eyes glassy and his hands clumsy, his arguments vanished.
“We’ve always been making people,” he would slur, staring into his glass as though it could look back at him. “This whole time,that’s what we’ve been doing. It’s just different for you this time, because it’s a person youknew. But it’s not different for me, not really. It’s always been like this.”
But as Martine and I worked through the five-year-old catalogue of Nathan’s neural processes, I began to believe more and more that Seyed was wrong. I began to understand that I wasn’t going to be making a person I knew.
I began to see that I hadn’t known Nathan at all.
The morning I had my scrambled-egg epiphany, Nathan was already running late. He was anxious to get to work. He had spent the months prior embroiled in a pitched battle with another faculty member over… something. If I’d been a more attentive wife—if I’d been Martine—I would have known what the conflict was about, would have remembered why he was so upset. But Nathan’s problem was some heated, petty conflict in which I had never been able to feign interest, even when pretending to listen would have prevented an argument.
The problem was that if I’d cared—if I’d paid attention—Nathan would have wanted me to fix the problem for him. Oh, sure, he would have framed it as a discussion, as a back-and-forth about what I would do in his shoes, as brainstorming solutions together.
But in the end, I would inevitably find myself in charge of solving his problem, holding his hand as he figured out how to deal with problems he had almost always caused himself. Over the years of our marriage, I learned that it was better to ignore him when he started dropping heavy hints about his worries at work.
It was the only way he would ever learn how to handle things on his own.
I was doing it for the sake of his growth, really.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that on the morning I had my breakthrough, Nathan was looking for a fight. He was too much of a coward to have the fight he needed to have withwhoever was causing his problems at work, so he decided to take it out on me. He was looking to be angry about something.
When he walked into that smoky kitchen, he found his outlet.
