Page 51 of The Echo Wife
“He’ll call,” she said, putting a brave tremble into her voice. “He’ll want me to know where he is. I’m sure I’ll hear from him any minute.”
Nathan spent another week in recovery.
He imprinted on his own name, his age, the facts of his life. He clung to whichever memories we reminded him were important. Martine and I helped him to identify the patterns that he could hang a consciousness on: here’s how to talk, here’s what to look for. He learned to see what we told him to see, and he was too busy learning that to pay too-close attention to the rest of it.
I occasionally caught Martine in contemplative moments, and it wasn’t hard to discern what she was chewing on. The thing we were doing to this new Nathan was precisely what the original Nathan had done to her, once, in a time she didn’t remember. A time she had forgotten by design. He had told her that her name was Martine, and that she was his wife, and that she loved him.
She had believed him.
The line between her brows grew a little deeper. It wasn’t my concern—Martine was who she was, what she had been made to be, and I couldn’t make myself responsible for her feelings about it. I never asked her about those moments of reflection. I demanded her participation in the final stages of Nathan’s programming.
She never faltered. Just as she had never hesitated during Nathan’s conditioning, she never once buckled under the strain of his final proofing. I told myself that was a sign that she was okay with everything. I decided not to pry up the edges of it.
I didn’t need to know.
And so, during the new Nathan’s final week in the lab, I didn’t ask.
The morning they left the lab holds a surreal clarity in my memory.
It was early when we walked out of the airlock, still half-dark.The air outside the laboratory building was cool but edging away from crisp; the year was lunging toward spring.
We had called the taxi from the phone in the laboratory instead of using an app. It was Martine’s suggestion, doing this thing the old-fashioned way so that there wouldn’t be a digital trail connecting her to the lab. I summoned the car while running my fingertips over the old takeout record, the running tally: S, E, S, E, S, S, S, E, E, S, E.
Martine’s name and phone number were still written there too, in Seyed’s precise lettering.
We walked Nathan out to the parking lot together. He was sedated to the point of stumbling so he wouldn’t be able to retain a memory of where he’d been. Martine had dressed him in clothes that belonged to the original Nathan, a sweater and slacks and shoes that had gone unoccupied for nearly five months. It seemed strange that they should fit him so perfectly, a coincidence to remark upon, except that, of course, it was no coincidence at all.
It was craft.
Nathan leaned his weight on Martine as he stepped out of the laboratory for the first time in his life. The eyes that belonged to this version of Nathan had never seen anything beyond the curtain that surrounded his bed. He was sedated enough, of course, that he was hardly seeing anything even then—the world would be a blur, vague and huge, for the first few weeks of his new life. Soft enough for his brain to gum on. Shapes and noises and patterns, gentle and digestible.
The halls of the building were as dark and liminal as they had been the night I first brought Martine to the lab. The taxi was waiting already by the time we got out to the parking lot. It was a white taxi with green doors, and the windows were smudged from the inside, where some other passenger had pressed their hand or rested their head against the glass. The driver didn’t look up from his phone when we opened the back door.
Martine helped Nathan into the car, her hand on his elbow. She climbed into the backseat after him. She was seven and a halfmonths pregnant then, huge already. Carrying high, or so she told me. She struggled a little with the seat belt, maneuvering her belly with care. Beside her, Nathan’s head lolled against his window, leaving new smudges on the glass, overwriting whatever had been there before him.
I closed the door after Martine once she was settled. I watched closely to make sure that she was tucked all the way into the car, that she wouldn’t get caught by the closing door. She turned her attention to getting Nathan buckled in. She was still hunched over him when the taxi began to pull away, too occupied to look back at me. I watched them drive off into the morning. The taillights and turn signal of the taxi were strangely anticlimactic, too practical for the gravity of the moment.
I stood in the parking lot with my hands wrapped around my elbows. I couldn’t make myself move for a long time after they left. It felt important that I stay, just in case. It felt important that I wait to be certain.
It was done.
They were gone.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
I had four months of peace.
Peace, or something like it.
Martine and I met up a few more times over the course of Nathan’s first month at home, checking in, making sure that things were going according to plan. She came to my house each time. It was a place where there was no risk of anyone seeing us together, asking awkward questions that would get her found out. Each time, when she walked in, I had a sense that she was checking on things, making sure that the house was the same place she’d occupied for the months of the new Nathan’s development. Seeing that the space she had carved out for herself was still vacant.
We drank tea, and she updated me on his progress. He was brilliant, she said. He told his friends and colleagues everything he was supposed to, everything we’d stamped into him during that ductile period just after we woke him up for the first time. He had told people all about his research trip in the mountains. Some time at a cabin, a retreat to get his head on right about the divorce. An accident just when he was coming home. A head injury, a concussion, nothing serious but enough that he was a little off. His memory was fuzzy about a lot of things. Yes, he could still work. No, there was no need to check in on him.
“They all buy it,” she said on her last visit. “Without hesitation. They believe him so much more easily than I thought they would. None of them seem to think he’s acting strange.” She drummed her fingernails against the side of her teacup. “I guess he wasnever really close enough with anyone that they would notice the little differences.”
“No,” I said. “I suppose he wasn’t.”
