The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  Our meeting was over.

  I was nine years old.

  I didn’t miss him, precisely, once he was gone. I thought about his disappearance often—the circumstances that surrounded it, the things that were not to be discussed—but that was hardly the same as missing him. The place in our lives where my father had been was raw and strange. It was like the crater left behind by a pulled tooth, one that had been abscessed and throbbing for years. That emptiness was something to notice, something to run my tongue across constantly, bothering the wound until the gap in my gum closed. It was the taste of blood, clean and sharp and somehow comforting.

  But the hole where my father had been healed over with surprising speed, and my mother and I fell into an uneasy routine. There were things we didn’t talk about, not ever, and there was part of the garden I didn’t help her with anymore. We never bothered to clean out his study—just closed the door and pretended that the house was one room smaller than it had always been. After a few years, I went away to boarding school, and the silence around his absence became even easier to maintain. It was all simple enough.

  I didn’t miss my father until I found myself at his alma mater, attending classes that he had taken decades before. Even then, walking halls that he’d walked, I suppose that it wasn’t him that I missed. Whenever I found myself struggling with a professor’s lecturing style, or with a tricky bit of theory, or with a complex lab, I longed for my weekly hour in his study. I would sit in my dormitory with some seemingly unsolvable problem before me, and I would think wistfully of those easy answers. I would remember my feet kicking at the legs of the armchair that was mine to sit in, the big carriage clock behind his desk ticking away, the low rumble of his voice explaining things until I understood them.

  And whenever I finished untangling my problems on my own—whenever I sorted out the professor’s shorthand, or found the root of the theory, or completed a titration successfully—I missed that handshake. I missed the grown-up feeling of having successfully completed a maneuver that existed solely to prove that both parties knew what they were doing.

  I missed knowing without a doubt that I had done the thing right.

  * * *

  Seyed wasn’t at the lab when we arrived the next morning. I was relieved that he wasn’t there for me to deal with. It was time to wake the subject.

  I rummaged through a drawer, pulled out an old stack of résumés, and flipped through it. After a moment, I dropped it into the recycling bin. The résumés I had were too old to be of any value. I would need to ask Human Resources to siphon me some fresh ones.

  Martine and I got set up, prepared ourselves to talk to Zed. Not Zed, rather—he was Nathan, now. Martine and I had agreed to start calling him that to each other as well as to his face, so we wouldn’t slip up and confuse him.

  Nathan.

  He was laid out in his recovery bed with an IV in one arm, the long snake of a catheter winding out from under his bedsheets. His vitals beeped along merrily on a monitor at his bedside, their steady rhythm a constant reminder that things were going just fine. His wounds were nearly healed already, a benefit of how new he was. His tissues were childlike, pliant, malleable. That healing factor wouldn’t last, of course, but it was useful in these early stages, when he needed to mend quickly enough to scar.

  He looked almost exactly like the man I remembered. His thick brown hair was already growing out of the short cut that Seyed had given him on his first day out of the tank. His eyelashes fell across his cheeks, light but startlingly long. His mouth hung the slightest bit open. His lips—thin, wide, perpetually curled up at the corners—still shone with the layer of lanolin that Seyed would have smeared across them the night before, to keep them from drying and chapping and cracking.

  Martine and I stared at him for a long time. There was nothing to be said, no reason to say it. I knew what she was thinking, and I’m sure she knew what I was thinking too.

  This was Nathan.

  I would be lying if I pretended that I was never tempted to change him. I had complete control over the person he was going to become. And I could have built this Nathan differently, could have tried to turn him into someone I could spend a life with. Someone who had a little more courage, who paid more attention to detail. Someone who could keep up with me, who wasn’t threatened when he couldn’t.

  I could have made him into someone who still loved me, who loved me again. And then, when he was finished, I could have made a public display of taking him back, repairing our marriage, reconciling. I could have given myself a brilliant, docile, grateful man who no one would question my relationship to.

  But that person I would have made—he wouldn’t have been Nathan. Anyone who met him would have known that something was wrong. It was always in his essential nature to fall just short of what I needed him to be. I could finally see that. He was never going to be good enough; the original Nathan was born to be a disappointment to me at every turn, all the way down to his marrow.

  I couldn’t extract that from him. Not without making him someone entirely new. Someone I could never have fallen in love with in the first place.

  So I didn’t.

  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 the mountains. 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 a bit 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.

  “It’s fine,” Martine said. “I can handle it.”

  I shook my head hard, hit the cycle button again. “No,” I said, “there has to be another way.”

  “He knows that he has a wife,” she said.

  “He could have meant either of us,” I said. “He might still think of me as his wife. I could—” But I cut myself off midsentence, because I couldn’t.

  I knew my husband well enough, I thought. I knew that he hated all three of his suits. I knew that he had a good relationship with his father, and that he was smart enough to know never to ask about mine. I knew that he was stubborn when he was sick. I knew that he was gentle with children and animals, awkward around teenagers. I knew that the phrase “go big or go home” made him irrationally angry, and that any mention of his inability to grow facial hair would send him into a spiral of insecurity.

  On our wedding day, I knew that he loved me, and I knew that I loved him, and I thought that no matter what else happened, we would be the one certain thing in each other’s lives.

  “It’s fine,” Martine said again, her eyes sliding away from mine. “Send him home with me. We’ll just…” She hesitated. “We’ll pick back up where we left off.”

  A tidal wave of horror rose up in me, overwhelming, too much all at once, flooding into all the places where it’s fine wanted to live.

  It was sudden, the way I knew how I felt about Martine.

  With most people, I knew how I felt about them within minutes of meeting them; I categorized them as useful, annoying, charming, friendly. With most people, I found a place where they fit and I put them there, and that was how I felt about them until they gave me a good reason to change my mind. They rarely did. But Martine—I had spent so much time trying to sort out the answer to the question of Martine. I’d spent months being irritated at her, resenting her limitations, admiring her growth, fearing her, learning to like her, struggling not to hate her. I had spent so much time unsettled by her, by the way I couldn’t figure out where she fit in my life and in my world.

  But there in that airlock, all at once, I knew how I felt about her. It was, all of it, the exact same way I felt about myself.

  All the same frustrations, all the same moments of affection.

  Everything I felt toward Martine, I felt toward myself, too.

  Of course, then, I wanted to find some way to protect her. And of course I resented her for it.

  I couldn’t send her back to the life she’d been living. I couldn’t put her back into that house where she was constantly waiting for permission, where she was quiet and careful and uncurious. I couldn’t do that to her.

  But I couldn’t take Nathan home, either. I couldn’t undo the last year. The way we had programmed him, he didn’t love me anymore. I’d gotten a little drunk with Seyed the night we implanted those emotional memories into Nathan’s brain. It had been surprisingly awful. I had refused to talk about it, had doubled down the next day on making sure that the new Nathan would know that he didn’t love me.

  Not anymore.

  His betrayal, our broken marriage—it was part of the geography of who he was. It was part of him. He didn’t recognize me in the context of the lab, not so fresh out of sedation, but he would recognize me soon enough, and he would see me as a woman he had stopped loving years ago.

  I couldn’t make Martine take him. I couldn’t take him. But one of us had to take him.

  I hit the button again, and the airlock cycle clicked back to life.

  “He’ll hurt you,” I said.

  “He won’t,” Martine replied. Her shoulders were set in a brave square. She looked me in the eye, right directly in the eye because we were the exact same height and her eyes could immediately find mine without searching. “We programmed him to be difficult, but not to be violent. He was never violent.”

  I crossed my arms. “You know what I mean. He’ll hurt you the way he hurt you before.”

  “I can handle it,” she said, and I was taken aback by the stubborn note in her voice. It was as strange as listening to a recording of myself for the first time. Is that how I sound? “I handled it before you came along, and I can handle it now.”
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  “No,” I said, “no, you don’t have to—”

  “I do, actually,” she interrupted. “I do have to. Because Nathan made me for this. It’s what I’m for, remember?”

  I flinched at the echo of my own cruel words from the tea shop, from that fight that felt like it had taken place in another reality. Martine rested her hands on her belly, which was enormous already, bigger than anyone could possibly overlook.

  “I have to do this, Evelyn. I have an imperative. It’s who I was made to be.”

  We argued for what seemed like ages, me hitting the airlock button once every couple of minutes, Martine digging her heels in with astonishing dedication. I tried a dozen different tactics, but in the end, it was an empty, hopeless argument, and she called me on it.

  “You don’t have a solution.” She said it with flat finality. “You don’t have a solution because there isn’t one. You keep trying to convince me that I’m wrong, but you know we don’t have anywhere to go from there if I am, so why are we doing this? So you can make yourself feel better about it?”

  “No,” I said, and I meant it. “I want to figure out something—there has to be a better way, a way to protect you.”

  Martine shook her head, her eyes smiling, her mouth flat. “I always knew it would be like this,” she said. “I assumed you’d thought it through.”

  It hit me hard, just the way it had hit me hard every other time I’d let her down, failed in my unexpected role of caregiver to this person I’d never wanted. Even as I felt myself collapsing around the pit of guilt at the core of me, part of me raced to justify the way things were going to be. Really, that part whispered, she’s right. She’s made for this. It will be just like it was going to be before. You don’t have to solve it.

  “He’s going to wake up soon,” she continued. “We have to go back in there. I’ll change into a dress, tell him I’m visiting. I can act like you called me.”

  “But you can’t lie,” I said. “I mean, you sort of can, but you’re terrible at it.” I felt slow and stupid, like I was a step behind somehow and I didn’t know how I’d gotten there.