Page 47 of The Echo Wife
This man Martine and I were looking at, this senseless clone waiting to be woken up by the two women who defined him—this was the closest thing we could get to the real Nathan. This was the man we had known, the man we had loved, the man we had hated. The man we had buried. We reconstructed the frame of him, and we built a ghost in the shape of our memories, and then we shoved the two together. We fixed the frame and the ghost to each other by etching the sigils and scars of his life into his skin. We had made this man, together.
We had made him. And now, he was ready.
I pulled the curtain around his bed shut, so that when he opened his eyes, he wouldn’t be able to see the lab. Martine stood over my shoulder, white lab coat stretched over her belly, mouth and nose and hair hidden behind a surgical mask and cap. I draped a stethoscope around my neck, lifted a surgical mask over my own face.
We were in disguise, dressed as a believable lie, one he would have no reason to inspect too closely. Two doctors, protected from pathogens, professional, distant. Nothing to recognize. Nothing to remember.
We were ready.
I took him off the sedative that had kept him below the surface of twilight sleep for the previous week. We had pushed him deeper under for more disruptive procedures, let him drift closer to the surface of wakefulness in between. Now, without any sedative to drag him down into the dark, Nathan woke up quickly.
His mind was flexible, malleable, ready to accept fresh stimulus. His eyes fluttered open, and for a few minutes, he had the same vague stare as a newborn. The room wasn’t a room to him yet—it was shapes and colors, contrast and motion. His brain was digesting an overwhelming amount of input, forming patterns, attaching the patterns to vague memories that might make the patterns recognizable. For all our care to stay covered up, there was no real risk of him connecting our faces with the patterns he might have affiliated with us; his brain would see “mask” and “stethoscope” and attach those things to “doctor” long before it would attach my eyes to the complicated memory that was “Evelyn.”
We waited. Once he started blinking the hard, stuttering blinks of a freshly emerged swimmer, I said his name.
“Nathan?”
His face swung toward me, and, with what looked like great effort, he focused on me. His eyes found my mask, my stethoscope.There you go. Doctor.I lowered my mask, trusted that I would be anchored in his mind as Doctor, and that his brain would take that as settled. That it would focus on processing all the other input around and behind me. That he would be too overwhelmed to recategorize me.
I smiled at him. “It’s good to see you awake, Nathan,” I said. I would need to repeat his name a few times, make sure it stuck in his mind as his own. His consciousness was still a little plastic, just soft enough that I could leave a fingerprint in it as it cooled. This moment mustn’t go to waste. “How do you feel?”
“Uh,” he said. “I, uh. What—?”
“I’m afraid you were in an accident, Nathan,” I said. “You were in an accident on your way home from your vacation in themountains. You got home from your trip, and there was an accident, Nathan.” I nodded, kept smiling. His head bobbed a little, mirroring mine, following me.Good.“Some things might be a bit fuzzy. Nathan, do you feel all right?”
“Uh, a little sore,” he said. His first sentence. The cadence was almost right. “Feels like I got hit by a bus. Is there, could I have a glass of water? Please?”
Martine’s arm appeared in my peripheral vision, long and slender, and white as the flesh of a pear. She held a half-empty glass of water in her unshaking hand. When Nathan went to take it, she held on to it for a few seconds, until his grip was sure.
“Nathan, you’re in the hospital,” I said. “But you’re all right, Nathan. Just a slight concussion and some contusions.”
“I don’t remember the accident,” he said, his voice breathy from gulping at the water. Martine took the glass back. I heard her duck out through the curtain to get more, but I didn’t take my eyes off Nathan’s. He was still looking at me with open concern, with childlike trust.
“No, Nathan?” I said softly. “You don’t remember the car swerving into the crosswalk and hitting you, after you got back from your vacation in the mountains? You don’t remember the headlights in the rain, Nathan? You don’t remember how your head hit the pavement and the car drove away just as you lost consciousness? Nathan, wasn’t it a red car with a dent in the hood? Wasn’t a white kid driving, Nathan? Wasn’t a white kid with dark hair driving the car, the one that hit you after your trip to the mountains?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, but he said it slowly, and yes, there it was: a fingerprint in the warm plastic of his memory. “That’s… that sounds right. But everything is a bit fuzzy.”
A bit fuzzy.He was mirroring my language now. That was good—it would be useful over the next week, getting him to start using the little turns of phrase that had pocked the original Nathan’s speech. We would keep him lightly sedated, just abit fuzzy,for that interval. We would keep him impressionable.
“That’s okay, Nathan,” I said. “I’m sure it will come back to you.”
Martine reentered the room. Her eyes were glassy, but not red. She knew how to cry without getting caught. The motion of her entrance caught Nathan’s eye, but he looked back to me almost immediately.
“I’m sure it will come back to me,” he said. Then, blinking, looking hard at my face: “Has anyone called my wife? Does she know where I am?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Martine and I stood in the airlock that separated my lab from the rest of the building, letting the cycle run again and again. Every time the cycle ended, I hit the button on the wall that would make it start again. We stood uncomfortably close to each other, so close that we had to move our hands carefully to avoid hitting each other. We let the noise of the air cycle and the thick seal surrounding the inner door muffle our words so that Nathan wouldn’t be able to hear us.
“How did we overlook this?” I hissed. “Fuck.”
It was a massive problem, an oversight of catastrophic proportions. We had programmed this new Nathan to be as much like the old Nathan as possible. A little gentler, maybe, a little more suggestible, but not by much—not so much that anyone would notice a big, sudden change. We had put so much work into making sure that he was the person we’d known, the person who was petty and brittle and focused and charming and bold and impatient and selfish and curious and quietly cruel.
I had been so focused on getting the job done, on getting it done right.
I hadn’t thought nearly enough about what would come after.
