The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  Because of that, I had never paid enough attention to recognize when he was hiding something. Hell, I never paid enough attention to recognize when he had been bitten by a dog. I had no idea whether Nathan had been a good liar or a terrible one—I doubt I ever would have spotted a tell on his face, even if he had one.

  Maybe that’s what he wanted from Martine. Maybe it was more than obedience, more than a willingness to give him a baby. Maybe he wanted someone who would pay attention to him.

  But no, it had to have been something more than that. He had wanted someone who would pay attention to only him. Someone whose goals and hopes and fears and desires would be solely influenced by his needs, by his whims.

  It was why he’d tried to murder Martine for asking whether her own desires mattered to him. Before that moment, she had been an unblinking gaze directed at Nathan. In the instant when she had asked permission to consider herself instead, she had failed him. She had failed him in the exact same way that I had been failing him all along.

  Martine found me there in the kitchen, watching my tea grow cold.

  “What are you doing up?” I asked, trying to remember the details of her sleep-function programming. I couldn’t recall the mechanism we’d used in the iteration of programming that I suspected Nathan had stolen. It all felt so far away in that moment.

  “I woke up to use the bathroom and saw that you were out of bed,” she said. Her voice still had the rough edges of sleep in it. “Are you okay?”

  I refilled the kettle and considered the question. “No,” I said. “I’m not okay. But I’m okay.” Martine sat in the chair I hadn’t been occupying and watched as I pulled down a mug for her. It only occurred to me to ask her the same question after the silence between us had stretched long enough for the kettle to boil. “Are you okay?”

  “No.” She said it slowly at first, as though she were trying it out. She repeated it again, this time with more conviction. “No, I’m really not.”

  I gave her a cup of the mint tea she’d been drinking in the mornings. I sat down across from her and looked at her. The line in the center of her forehead was a little deeper. Her face looked softer than it had when we’d first met. This, I thought, is what I would look like if.

  I cleared my throat and decided to try to be the kind of person who knew how to say the right things.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

  “I’m scared,” she said. “That appointment today was scary, and I don’t know if I can do this, which is a scary thing to think about.”

  It was the first time I’d heard her express doubt, and she’d done it so immediately, so openly. She hadn’t tried to hide it at all.

  My instinct was, of course, to ask her if she still wanted the baby—but I remembered her outburst in the car earlier, her vehemence. Her hurt. Her anger. I sipped my nearly cold tea and waited, hoping she’d continue on her own, but she simply mirrored me, drinking her own tea. “What’s scary about it?” I finally asked.

  “I’m alone,” she said. “I was never supposed to have to do this on my own. Nathan was supposed to be with me the whole time.” She set her tea down and sat back in her chair, ran her hands over her belly. She wasn’t looking at me. “I don’t know how to do anything, you know? And I have no idea what I’m missing. I didn’t know that the bleeding could be a bad sign. I didn’t know that there were books I was supposed to be reading, or classes I could attend. What am I going to do when the baby comes? How am I going to take care of it, without him there to tell me how?”

  I shook my head. “You shouldn’t have to,” I said. “This isn’t fair to you.”

  “No,” she agreed. “It’s not.”

  I stood up then, walked through the kitchen and into the living room. I returned holding an old biology textbook. I’d used it as a yearbook at the end of my first year at the boarding school my mother sent me to when I was thirteen. The insides of the covers were thick with signatures, and more than a few of the illustrations had been defaced. I handed it to Martine.

  “This might help,” I said. Seeing the look on her face, I hesitated. “Can you read?”

  “Of course I can read,” she murmured, opening the book to the first page of text. It showed a long double helix of DNA, each nucleotide color-coded. “That was one of the first things Nathan taught me. Why will this help?”

  “Well, you don’t know anything about your body, really,” I said. She frowned at me, but I continued. “I mean, you don’t know how it works, or why it does things. Right?”

  “Right,” she said. “So you think I should learn about it?”

  I nodded. “I think it might make you feel better about, you know. What’s changing.” I tried very hard not to look at her belly. “And if there’s anything you don’t understand, you can ask me. Or Seyed.” I hoped, on a deep level, that she would ask Seyed. “And tomorrow I’ll see if I can find something for you to read about pregnancy. And childbirth.”

  She smiled at me. It was a warm smile, a real one. It didn’t look like it was calculated to make me feel welcome or calm. She thanked me, and even as she was saying it, her eyes slipped away from mine and fell back to that strand of DNA. She took a sip of her tea and began to read.

  After a moment, she stood up and walked out of the room. She returned with the same legal pad she’d been using in the lab to record Nathan’s traits for programming. She flipped to a fresh page and wrote down a word. She wrote in tidy, even cursive. When I asked what she was doing, she answered without looking up again.

  “I’m writing down words I don’t know,” she said. “So I can ask about them all at once, instead of one at a time.”

  I swallowed a smile of my own. “Can I show you something?”

  She looked up at me with her eyebrows raised. Standing next to her, I flipped to the back of the book. I showed her the glossary, the index, the appendices. “A lot of the things you have questions about will be here,” I said.

  She beamed. She looked up the word she hadn’t understood—macromolecule. Her lips moved a little as she read the definition. She turned back to the first page of the textbook and, tracing the lines with her index finger, reread the paragraph with the word in it. “Oh,” she murmured.

  She turned the page, and I realized that, to her, I had disappeared. She had been starved for the information that was suddenly at her fingertips, the information that my bookshelves were filled with. The information that, ultimately, had created her.

  I padded back up the stairs and went to bed, and sleep came more easily than I could have hoped. When I woke a few hours later, Martine was still at that little table. She was reading about the human skeleton. The legal pad was covered in her neat, careful cursive.

  She was still smiling, and she was still reading, and she was so absorbed that she didn’t even hear me leave the house. I eased the front door shut behind me, locked it, and got into my car to head to town. There was still one brick-and-mortar bookstore downtown, I was certain of it. They would have the things Martine needed. The things that would help her understand how to have the baby, how to give birth to it and raise it and survive on her own.

  For the first time, I was certain that she could do it all.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  After two and a half months of development, specimen 4896-Zed was ready for conditioning.

  The clone’s progress could not have gone more smoothly. His growth timeline was perfect: forty-five days of neural priming while his tissues developed, thirty days of programming. We pushed hormones, stimulants, suppressants, and steroids to shape the personality of the man he would become. We built him core-to-surface, structuring his adrenal responses to help with the more complex modeling that would need to follow.

  I wished I could have shown him to the lab director as proof of concept. This works, and I did it so cheaply that you didn’t even notice it. Now leave me the fuck alone and let me work in peace.

  Specimens were always sedated th
roughout the active process of conditioning—and during a specimen’s first week out of the tank, we kept them completely unconscious. It was simpler that way. We didn’t need to explain why we were doing the work that we were doing. We could shape them efficiently, without hesitation, without apology.

  But specimen 4896-Zed was still unfinished—and it was our job to finish him.

  We drained his tank on a Wednesday.

  * * *

  The first time I ever broke someone else’s bone, it was an accident. I was playing a game of tag and ran hard into one of my classmates. He landed wrong, and he broke his thumb. He didn’t cry at first, just stared at the wrong new angle of his thumb in bewilderment. It wasn’t until a teacher came running that he realized something was wrong. It wasn’t until that moment that he started to wail, the way children do when they see that an adult is afraid for them.

  The second time I broke someone else’s bone, it was on purpose.

  It was a failed specimen, one of the first. She had grown too quickly for her own blood supply to sustain. Her fingers and toes were black, rotting, and I knew that the rest would quickly follow. I drained her tank, pushed a bolus of secobarbital, and waited for her to die.

  It was cowardly of me, wanting to practice on a dead clone rather than a live one. I can admit now that I was afraid—I didn’t know if the pain of the fracture might cause even a sedated specimen to wake up, to flinch, to shout. To cry. I didn’t know how much force might be required for me to do the thing right, and I didn’t know how well she would metabolize a sedative, and I was afraid.

  Once she was dead, I broke her wrist. I gripped it tight and twisted it hard and fast, and I felt the snap of bone reverberating through my fists. It was so much easier than I had expected—so much easier than I had feared—that I let out a giddy little laugh.

  Later, of course, I would realize that the specimen’s bones had been brittle. They had grown faster than they should have, and part of her nutrient balance had been miscalculated such that her long bones were particularly weak.

  The next time I needed to break a specimen’s wrist, I struggled. More difficult bones—the humerus, the femur, the skull—required my patience and my sweat and, more often than not, Seyed’s help. Still, every time I felt a bone break under my care, I felt the same flash of euphoria.

  Every time, I had to suppress that same laugh. I did it, I broke it, and it will never be unbroken again.

  * * *

  Nathan didn’t have an appendix. One of his molars was missing, knocked out in a middle school brawl. He had a scar on his bottom lip from where he’d bitten through it as a toddler. His collarbones were uneven. His arms were freckled.

  When he died, Nathan had a road-rash scar on his right knee from a cycling accident. He had calluses on his index fingers, and a scar on his arm from a dog bite I’d never heard about. He had a mole on the back of his neck, a new one. He had a burn on his left hand that Martine had, at the time, suspected would leave a scar.

  When we pulled specimen 4896-Zed from his tank, he did not look like Nathan. He was smooth and white and soft and strange, as though he had just been removed from a full-body cast. If he went out into the world unfinished, he would move wrong.

  I never sent a subject into the world unfinished. Damaging a fresh specimen, weathering it just the right way to make it mirror the person it was supposed to emulate—that was the final layer of polish.

  4896-Zed would not be awake for that polishing process. After that first week, as the conditioning tapered down, we would begin to ease him into consciousness, encouraging him to use his limbs and experience the pain of healing that would inform his mannerisms. 4896-Zed would need to slightly favor his right knee, to fidget with the scar on his lip. He would need to be awake for a fortnight, so that he could practice being Nathan.

  All of it came with a risk of discovery. But I didn’t have any visits from the lab director or from potential investors on the schedule, and they didn’t make unscheduled visits. Those were too unpredictable for them; there was no way to anticipate what might be on display.

  There’s a lot in the process that investors don’t like to see. There’s a lot that lab directors don’t like to see either. The night before we began to condition 4896-Zed—Zed, as we had begun calling him—Seyed argued with me vehemently about whether to let Martine participate in the work. “She shouldn’t see this,” he said. “She shouldn’t know what we do here.”

  “She already knows,” I replied, pushing Seyed’s water glass toward him to remind him to hydrate.

  He had been showing up at the lab hungover with increasing frequency since the night we’d seeded Nathan’s clone. I hadn’t called him out on it, but I couldn’t afford for him to be slow on the first day of conditioning. He took my hint, drained his water glass, and continued his argument.

  “She might know intellectually, but seeing it is something different.” He shook his head. “Martine is too sapient for this. She’ll know that this is how she was made. It’s fucked up, Evelyn.”

  “This isn’t how she was made,” I said. “Nathan didn’t condition her. He left her … fresh. Look—if she asks, I’ll be honest with her about it. Okay?” I waited for Seyed to stop frowning at me. “I promise,” I added, trying not to roll my eyes at him.

  “If she’s not okay, you’ll let her stop?”

  “If she’s not okay, I’ll let her stop,” I said.

  I was, of course, lying. He wasn’t my friend. I didn’t owe him any guarantees, and I was well within my rights to make him an empty promise in order to shut him up about Martine and her experience. The thought of excusing Martine from any part of the conditioning process stirred a cold, cruel rage deep in my marrow. If I’m honest, I should admit: I was fully prepared to hold her by the back of the neck and make her watch as specimen 4896-Zed bled into the gutters of the autopsy table.

  I let that bitter fury carry me through the next morning’s preparations. I watched Martine’s face closely as we drained Zed’s tank, as Seyed helped me shift him onto the autopsy table. I watched her for any sign of hesitation or weakness. I didn’t realize that I was doing it at the time, of course—but I was doing it, all the same. I was looking for a flaw, for something that would prove how different we really were.

  I couldn’t admit to myself yet that my antipathy toward Martine was ever-so-slightly waning. She had been studying hard, tearing through my old textbooks, asking me if I had more. Over the prior weeks, we had spent the morning drives to the lab discussing new things she’d read about. She had cornered Seyed over lunches, peppering him with questions about tissue structure and human development and synaptic decay. She had begun to speak more directly, more honestly. She hadn’t entirely stopped waiting for permission, but she was less hesitant, less passive. It was abrasive at times, made her less easy to direct—but I was starting to respect her a little.

  Perhaps that’s why I watched her so closely. Perhaps I was cautious of that respect.

  When I handed Martine a sanding block and told her to debride Zed’s knee, my dwindling contempt raised its nose to the wind, scenting for blood. She asked me what “debride” meant.

  “Technically,” I answered, “it means the removal of dead tissue. Infected skin, scabs, that sort of thing.” I gestured to the perfect, unblemished knurl of Zed’s knee. “In this case, it means you’re going to re-create the injury that led to Nathan’s scar. Sand his skin away, like the asphalt did when he fell.” I outlined the area with a ballpoint pen, in case she couldn’t remember the exact location. “Take everything within that oval down to dermis, then a little beyond. It should bleed.”

  Martine studied the rough oval I’d drawn on Zed’s kneecap, then looked at his face. I waited for her to falter.

  “How deep is he under?” she asked, her voice muffled by her surgical mask. The mean cruel core of me crowed in triumph: she was scared to hurt him, I was right, she was weak, weak, weak. But then she turned to me and continued before I c
ould answer: “Should we strap him down, in case he fights?”

  I hadn’t expected that from her. I hadn’t expected that at all.

  “He’s out,” I said. “He’s deep enough under that we’ll be able to yank his tooth this afternoon without trouble. I wouldn’t worry.”

  “Good,” she replied, and then she descended on his knee. She held the skin taut with one gloved hand, and she swung the sanding block in great circles, scraping away healthy skin with every downstroke. “I figure,” she said, her eyes intent on her work, “the road only scraped him in one direction, so I shouldn’t go back and forth. Unless you disagree?”

  I shook my head, then realized—she wasn’t looking at me.

  She had asked my opinion, but she wasn’t watching me with fearful eyes to make sure that I approved of her choice. She hadn’t stopped her work to see if I was going to object. She wasn’t thinking of me at all.

  “Yes, that sounds good,” I said. I watched her for a few more seconds, but it was obvious that my supervision wasn’t required. I turned away from her, walked to the autoclave to check that the dental instruments were ready for the afternoon’s work. When I looked over my shoulder, she was still bent over Zed’s knee, humming to herself as she swept away layer after layer of his skin.

  After I had performed Zed’s tooth extraction, I asked Seyed to deal with the cleanup. I told him that I wanted to make sure Martine was feeling all right about the work she’d done that day. He would need to rinse Zed’s body of blood and saliva, would need to dry him and transfer him to a recovery bed for the night. He would need to wash down the autopsy table and dispose of the biowaste and autoclave the instruments. It was a two-person job, but Seyed didn’t so much as hesitate before agreeing to handle it.