Page 33 of The Echo Wife
She nodded again. “Sure,” she said. “So, do you have a map for Nathan?”
I pulled my tablet out of my bag, pulled up a file, and showed it to her. “This is from five years ago. He helped me test a new scanner. It’s the same scanner we use now, so we have all the data we would have otherwise, even if it’s old.” I tapped the screen, showing her an image of a thin slice of Nathan’s brain. It was highlighted in colors that would mean nothing to her. “It’s not ideal, but it’s what I’ve got.”
Martine studied the image. She touched a patch of bright green with the tip of her index finger. When she made contact with the screen, the image vanished, replaced by a long string of data I’d never bothered to analyze. “You said that ‘we’ had work, but it sounds to me like you’re the one who has work. What am I here for?” She said it simply enough, but her eyes flicked to mine when she asked what she was there for, and I felt the weight of Nathan’s death behind the question.
I set the tablet down. “We have a five-year-old scan of Nathan’s brain to work with, right?” I asked. “Well, Seyed and I can run the analysis to help us get a handle on what traits we would have programmed into a clone of the person who Nathan was then. But… he’s different now than he was when we ran that scan.” I cleared my throat as Martine looked away. “He was different, I mean. In the moments before his death, he would have reacted differently to a lot of stimuli than he would have when I took that scan.”
“I didn’t know him five years ago,” she whispered.
I clenched my fist in my lap, then stretched my fingers wide. I reminded myself to stay calm. I reminded myself to stay focused. “That’s probably for the best,” I said. My voice seemed to come from a far-off place. “You won’t have as many biases as I will. You’ll be able to give a more immediate analysis of his behaviors.”
She looked at the brain scan with naked longing. I wondered,briefly, if I’d made a mistake. Martine breathed in through her nose slowly, visibly composing herself piece by piece—her forehead smoothing, her mouth softening, the desperation in her eyes ebbing away like sand through clenched fingers. “Right,” she said once she appeared to be calm again. She pointed once more to that bright green section of brain. “What does this part mean?”
I pulled up the supplementary data, trying to remember the experimental systems we’d used for mapping back then. “That’s his amygdala,” I murmured. “Memory, emotion, attention—it’s a good place to start. We usually program that one early.” I found the section of the supplementary notes that corresponded to the slide she was looking at, and read the first bullet point aloud. “‘Amygdala stimulus in response to memory related to image 785-W.’ Hang on, all the images are here too.” I opened the W folder, found the seven-hundreds subfolder, and there it was.
785.
Me.
“Oh,” Martine said softly, tilting her head to try to see the picture the right way up. I wore a low-cut white dress, with a sapphire pendant resting halfway between the hollow of my throat and the nock of my breasts. My hand rested on a disembodied elbow, and I knew that Nathan’s father was just out of the frame. In the photo, I was beaming, my eyes bright.
In the photo, I looked like I’d never been more sure of anything in my life.
I couldn’t think of what to say. It all felt so unnecessary, so melodramatic.There’s no need to make it a production,my father growled deep in the recesses of my mind. But there was no getting around the facts, regardless of how mawkish they felt.
“That slide,” I said evenly, “is a snapshot of Nathan’s amygdala responding to a photo of me walking down the aisle on our wedding day.” I returned to the page of supplementary notes and pointed to his oxytocin levels, his endorphins. “These are elevated, which tells us that he feels—that hefelthappy.” I did notsay that the levels reflected that Nathan still loved me at the time the scan was taken.
I let myself believe that Martine wouldn’t be bright enough to put it together.
She pushed her chair back from the table without speaking. Her chair scraped against the tile, shrill and sudden, as she stood. She stalked across the lab and threw open the cupboard Seyed had been raiding when we caught him just a couple of days prior. I clenched my jaw, but I knew better than to try to predict what she was doing or why. She had proven that in the garden the night we buried Nathan.
She returned to the table with a fresh notebook in one hand and a box of ballpoint pens in the other. She opened the notebook, made a bullet point on the first page, and wrote “785-W: Amygdala” after it. She looked up at me with my mother’s gray eyes and my father’s hard, flat mouth.
“So,” she said, her voice as clipped as mine usually was. “We’ll need to change that in the next draft. How do we do it?”
Five years before, when I had taken the test-map of Nathan’s brain, he had still loved me. He had loved me enough to come into the lab on weekends for a month, while I perfected my method for running the scans. He had loved me enough, too, to come into the lab on weeknights, bringing food so we could share dinners without disrupting my eighteen-hour days. I was trying to solve what felt like a thousand problems at once, back then. I remember leaning across the table and kissing my husband, and thanking him for being one of the only things in my life that didn’t need fixing.
Nathan loved me, I believed, and at the time, that was enough for me. I thought it was enough for him, too, back then.
But I couldn’t figure out when that changed. Surely it was before the scrambled-egg morning. A decision like the one he made, to begin stealing my notes, to take my research and use itto end our marriage—that’s not a decision that happens because some eggs are bad.
The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once, if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens by inches, in a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.
I’ve been over it so many times. Our life together, our marriage—I’ve spent more nights than I can count awake and wondering where all those tiny moments were. When was the first moment that Nathan looked at me with disdain? How many times was he resenting me without me realizing it? Where did all that indifference live?
I can find a lot of the moments, but they don’t seem to be enough. They come together like the skin of a person, but without bones or muscles or a central nervous system to hold the thing upright. I’ll never know what I missed.
I’ll never understand enough to be satisfied.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
All told, it took Martine and me two weeks to complete our initial review of Nathan’s cognitive mapping.
Here are some things that I was wrong about:
• Green beans. Nathan didn’t like them. He never had. I had never read that part of his initial scan closely, didn’t check his food preferences against what I’d thought was true. Why would I? He’d been telling me he liked green beans for years, lying for some reason that was forever opaque to me. Martine knew he hated them. She said that he thought they tasted like sulfur.
