Page 21 of The Echo Wife
She nodded, running a fingernail along the crease in the dish towel. “I understand.”
“Under no circumstances—”
“Right.”
“Martine, you havenoconception of what would be involved in something like that.”
Martine hung the dish towel on the handle of the oven, tugged at the edges of it until it was perfectly centered over the glass in the door. She didn’t say anything for a few seconds. When she finally spoke, her voice was so soft that I almost instinctively asked her to repeat herself—but she was so clear, so careful, that I understood every word.
“You’re right. I don’t have any conception of what’s involved. Perhaps you could explain it to me.”
I stared at her, my head swimming. She stared back at me with a patience I’d never practiced. Her face was placid. She stood, cool as cream, looking like she could wait forever and never need to so much as sigh about it.
“Well,” I said at last, buckling under her steady gaze, “I suppose the first thing is, we would need to dig up the body.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
In interviews, I sometimes say that science was my first love. That is a friendly kind of lie. The truth is that I’ve never loved science. Loving science would be like loving my own fingernails, or my lungs, or my lymph. I’ve always had science, always lived it and leaned on it; I’ve never had reason to love it or hate it any more than a mushroom loves or hates the soil it grows in.
My first love was Nathan, and he made a fool of me long before he created Martine.
He was smart and funny and I loved the way he touched me, like his hands had questions and my skin could answer all of them at once. We met each other’s friends, went to the beach, watched movies, spent hours reading together.
We talked about our work constantly, borrowing ideas from each other, slowly building a dream of changing the world together. I told him about my budding ambition to develop a system of hormonal conditioning, and his face lit up, and he said I was most beautiful when I was being unabashedly brilliant.
It didn’t feel like flattery. It felt like love.
And it was easy, being in love with Nathan. It was easy beingaroundhim—he never made me feel afraid, never left me wondering whether I’d said something wrong. Even our fights were easy back then, a matter of unraveling miscommunications and reassuring each other of our good intentions.
It didn’t occur to me at the time to be irritated by how quickly he folded when we had those easy fights. I thought he was being reasonable.
It didn’t occur to me to suspect the way he talked about loving my mind.
I was young, and I was accustomed to a very different kind of man.
It didn’t occur to me to watch for cowardice the same way I watched for anger.
It should have been simple enough to clone Nathan. A matter of routine sequencing and reproduction, no different from any other subject. It should have been easy.
It was not easy.
Sampling wasn’t an issue. Once we dug up the body, there was an abundance of tissue available to work with, and taking the sample was even easier than usual, since he was dead. There was no need to take care with the sample size or location, no need to be cautious or conservative.
It was the easiest sample I ever took, even though I took it while standing in a damp hole in Martine’s backyard, choking on the awful sweet-rot smell of decay and turned earth. Two weeks in the ground had rendered Nathan soft, overripe. His skin hung loose and wet, drooping like worn-out nylons. I took a large sample, large enough that I felt confident about our ability to get a full sequence. Martine turned away when I took the sample, so she wasn’t looking while I did it, but she flinched violently at the sound Nathan’s flesh made when I cored his abdomen. She also refused to look at the cooler I used to transport the cylinder of tissue.
The sample was only about four inches in diameter, and I packed it tightly to keep it from bruising in transit. Martine handed me zip-top bags filled with cold water—better than ice for packing the delicate, decaying tissue, less likely to cause accidental damage—but she kept her eyes on the sink the entire time we were preparing the sample for transport. She wouldn’t look at any of it, even though it was all her doing.
I suppose Nathan didn’t program her to have a strong stomach.
Getting into the lab went just as smoothly as taking the sample did. We arrived in the middle of the night, when I anticipated the only other people on-site would be security staff, underpaid guards who would recognize my face and ignore my guest. All we had to do was get into the lab, prepare the equipment, sequence the sample. Dispose of the excess material. Leave the incubation accelerator to do its work overnight. I should have returned the next morning and found a toddler-sized lump of loose tissue floating in a sea of synthetic lymph and amnio.
It was a perfect plan, and it should have been easy to execute. Get the sample, process the sample, develop the specimen.
But it wasn’t that simple. Of course it wasn’t.
I pulled into my reserved parking space a few minutes after midnight. The empty parking lot felt liminal and vast, deshabille in its stark vacancy. Martine sat silently in the passenger seat, her hands in her lap. She stayed there as I got out of the car and popped the trunk. She didn’t unbuckle her seat belt until I tapped on her window and raised the soft-sided cooler to eye level.
