The Mirror Man

by Jane Gilmartin

  “Just as a precaution, it’s nothing serious. They checked me out. I’m okay.”

  “Did you total the car, Dad?”

  “Not sure yet, but I think so. Probably. Shouldn’t your mother be home by now?”

  “Nah,” Parker said, opening the refrigerator and turning his attention to the pressing matter of what he would eat. “She’s working late.”

  That was news to Jeremiah.

  “I thought you had something at school tonight,” the clone said, echoing Jeremiah’s own thoughts right down to the word.

  “It got canceled. I texted her and she said she might as well stay late tonight.”

  “Did she say when she’d be home?”

  Parker shrugged and poured himself a glass of milk to wash down the eight or nine cookies he had snagged from a cabinet. “I don’t know,” he said. “Hey, if we get a new car can we get a convertible?”

  There wasn’t a hint of suspicion in Parker’s face. In fact, Jeremiah was stunned at how readily Parker had taken the clone for him. His every reaction and expression, every gesture, was exactly what Jeremiah would have expected. His son interacted with it in exactly the same way he would have done with Jeremiah. As impressive as it was, it hurt. Dr. Young’s words echoed in his mind: “You are literally being replaced, Jeremiah.” That thought hit home watching the clone talking to Parker.

  “We’ll see,” the clone said. “Where have you been? Did you miss the bus or something?”

  “Nah. I stayed after school with some friends.”

  “What friends?”

  “You don’t know them. Kids from school.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Nothing much, just hanging out.”

  Parker turned to head upstairs, eager, no doubt, to begin his usual hour of gaming before dinner. But the clone stopped him.

  “Hey, do me a favor and take Louie out for a walk. He’s acting strange. I hope he’s not sick or something.”

  At that moment, the cameras stopped and the monitor on the wall blinked off just as abruptly as it had switched on four hours before.

  Brent stood up from his place on the couch with a slow stretch. Jeremiah was still staring at the blank wall in front of him.

  “That was,” he began, shaking his head to find the right word, “absolutely bizarre.”

  “I bet,” Brent said. “It certainly looks like an exact copy. So, down to my questions and then we can kick back for a while, have some dinner.” He didn’t seem genuinely fazed by what they’d just seen.

  “Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”

  Brent sat back down and pulled his laptop closer. When he spoke, his voice had assumed a more solemn, businesslike manner.

  “During the viewing did you note any actions of the clone to be unexpected, atypical or otherwise out of the ordinary?”

  “The whole thing was a bit out of the ordinary from where I’m standing,” he said. “But no. I suppose he acted just the way I would have under the same circumstances.”

  Brent typed and then looked up at Jeremiah.

  “At any point during the viewing did you note an instance where you would have acted in a manner different from the clone?”

  Jeremiah honestly tried to settle on something he might have done differently. But the clone had done everything exactly as he would have done—from the things he’d said to Parker to the way he’d fluffed the pillows behind himself, stacking them at an angle to support his shoulders and upper back. It was almost spooky.

  “No,” he said at last.

  “Finally, did the people interacting with the clone display any indication that they recognized the clone as an imposter?”

  “No,” he said. The question had referred to people, after all, so technically, Jeremiah reasoned, he wasn’t lying when he failed to mention Louie’s reaction. He felt justified in his answer. And in terms of Parker’s interaction with the clone, it was definitely the truth.

  He’d been struck, in fact, by the way Parker hardly seemed to look at the clone when he talked to him. Parker acknowledged his father only as much as he needed to and nothing more. It hadn’t always been like that.

  Jeremiah’s mind turned to a camping trip they’d taken together when Parker was about ten years old. Jeremiah had never been camping in his life and never had any desire to try, but at the first mention of the idea from his son, he’d rushed out and spent a small fortune on anything he thought they might need: a top-of-the-line tent, subzero sleeping bags, a book of campfire stories, several cans of bug spray and a portable stove. They ended up at a campground in central Maine, slightly off-season, with a persistent light rain that stayed with them the entire weekend. He wasn’t surprised they’d had the place almost exclusively to themselves.

  The trip wasn’t the idyllic adventure Jeremiah had imagined it would be. It took him three tries to get the tent up and even then it ended up lopsided when one of the poles wouldn’t stay put. They couldn’t get a fire started until the owner of the place felt sorry for them and finally helped to put up tarps in the trees above their campsite. But Jeremiah had never felt closer to Parker than he did during those damp, chilly two days in the middle of the woods.

  “It’s a good thing it’s just me and you, Dad,” Parker had said while they listened to the rhythm of the rain on the tent. “I don’t think Mom would be able to handle this like we can.”

  “Yeah. She’s not much for roughing it,” he agreed. “She’d need her pillows and a place to plug in her coffeepot.”

  “And her makeup,” Parker added, “and her TV.”

  “And her shower,” Jeremiah said.

  “And her clothes dryer!”

  “And about six pairs of shoes!”

  “And basically the whole house!”

  They’d fallen asleep that night laughing, and as Jeremiah pulled the sleeping bag up under his chin against the cold, he couldn’t remember ever feeling more completely content and comfortable.

  The tent and all that expensive gear never made its way out of the attic a second time.

  After watching the strained exchange between his clone and his son, Jeremiah felt the full force of regret like a weight around his neck.

  “No,” he said again to Brent. “Parker treated the clone just the way he should have.”

  Chapter 5

  Day 2

  The next morning, Brent came to the lab early, only a few minutes before the day’s viewing was scheduled to begin. Groggy and still half-asleep, Jeremiah dragged himself to the living room couch and looked at the wall just as the clone was pouring himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen. The typical commotion and rush of his family’s weekday morning routine played out in front of Jeremiah and had an almost immediate effect. He could feel his own adrenaline kick in as he watched them hurrying to beat traffic and make the school bus. Diana, a blue sweater slung over one arm, was digging in her purse for Parker’s lunch money and Louie was leaning up against her knees in a futile attempt to get her attention.

  “Have you checked on the car?” Diana asked the clone without looking at him. She handed Parker three crumpled dollar bills.

  “I’ll call today,” he said. “It’s at the shop near my office.”

  “I have to stay after school for a makeup quiz in English,” Parker said, slinging his backpack over one shoulder. “Can I get a ride?”

  “I won’t be home until after four today,” Diana said. “Can you get a ride from someone else?”

  “Yeah, probably. I guess so.”

  Parker heaved his shoulders to settle his mammoth backpack behind him and stuck the buds of his headphones in his ears before bolting out the door and down the street to catch the bus. Diana downed the last of her coffee and struggled her sweater on.

  “You’ve been taking on a lot of extra hours lately,” the clone said to her. “You worked late
yesterday, too.”

  “Well, there’s a big case and they need me,” she told him. “It’s mainly just a lot of research. It won’t be for too much longer. How’s your head?”

  “Fine,” the clone said. “Doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  “That’s good.” She rinsed her coffee mug and left it in the sink. “I’ve got to go. I’m late.”

  The clone poured the last of his coffee into the sink and followed her to the door leading to the garage. Louie took a tentative step after him, but then seemed to think better of it and walked back to his dog bed in the corner of the kitchen and lay down.

  “I think Louie might be sick,” the clone said. In the lab, Jeremiah cringed, hoping Brent wouldn’t pick up on all the talk about the dog.

  Diana stopped and turned toward Louie with a hint of confusion on her face.

  “Really?” she asked. “He seems fine to me. He ate his breakfast. Was he okay on his walk this morning?”

  “He wouldn’t come on the walk with me,” the clone told her. “That’s what I mean. He just didn’t want to go. Dug his heels in. I just let him out in the yard on his own. He was acting strange last night, too.”

  Diana’s brow wrinkled. “I’ll make an appointment for him later this week,” she said, and walked into the garage.

  The clone followed and closed the door behind him. Another camera, situated somewhere above the garage bay doors, immediately picked him up from another angle in an almost seamless cut.

  Diana got into her red Subaru and waved at the clone as she closed the door. Jeremiah saw with some unease that she hardly looked at him as she did so. He’d never noticed while he was actually there with her, but she hardly looked at him at all anymore. There’s guilt in her, he thought. The clone waved back, and Jeremiah noticed that his gaze lingered for just a moment longer than it should have. The realization that he knew exactly what was going through its mind in that moment was slightly disturbing to him. It was definitely someone at her office she was having an affair with. He had never met anyone from the law firm, knew them only from her sporadic mentions of them: four lawyers, three of them men, two other legal secretaries, one of them a much younger man, and two receptionists, both female. He should have done something. He should have confronted her. He didn’t know why he never had. It wasn’t as though he needed any more proof. He had been sure of it for a while, several months at least. And, he realized now, the clone shared that certainty. He found himself wondering if his double would somehow muster the resolve to do something other than wait and pretend. He wondered if he even could.

  “I’m going to make coffee,” Brent said, startling Jeremiah out of his contemplations.

  On the monitor, Jeremiah watched as the clone got into the rental car, started the engine and backed into the driveway. He drove to work listening to news radio and sighing occasionally at the traffic on the highway. How the hell had they gotten a camera into the rental car?

  Brenda, the bubbly, flame-haired receptionist for ViMed’s Communications department, greeted him at the office in typical exuberance. She wore an equally brash outfit, featuring a pair of oversize kelly-green hoop earrings that were specifically distracting.

  “Good morning, Mr. Adams,” she said, handing him a single slip of pink paper. “Walt Thompson from the New York Times.”

  “Thanks,” he said, looking her directly in the ears. “Anything else?”

  “You have that editorial meeting at 11:15 and the printer will be here at noon to go over the proofs of the newsletter. Other than that, pretty quiet so far.”

  The clone nodded and headed into his office. He closed the door and the camera angle shifted. This one, if Jeremiah had to guess, was located in one of the paintings on the wall directly in front of him and afforded a clear view of the desk and a head-on view of the clone.

  Walt Thompson was a science editor for the Times and Jeremiah’s former classmate and one-time colleague on a Boston paper. There was a chance the call could have been a social one, but Jeremiah suspected it more likely had to do with Meld. Even without a current storm over the drug, Walt had been keenly preoccupied with it, writing no fewer than four stories on the drug in the past two months. He was probably still chasing it. The clone sighed and picked up the phone to dial.

  Jeremiah could hear only the clone’s side of the conversation, but it was relatively easy to figure out that his suspicions had been correct.

  “Give it a rest, would you, Walt?” he said. “If you want another angle, why don’t you talk to that doctor in Delaware again? I hear he’s using Meld more and more. There’s your story...

  “What am I hedging about? I don’t have anything new. There’ve been no more suicides, no incidents at all since New Jersey. Maybe the kinks have been worked out. Maybe the cops are doing their jobs...”

  Maybe, Jeremiah thought in the lab, it was just a stroke of dumb luck.

  “You’re being ridiculous. You’re starting to sound like one of those conspiracy theorists. I think you need a vacation...

  “Look, I can put you in touch with someone else from the science end, but I think you’re barking up a dead tree here, Walt. There’s nothing new to report...

  “I’m not defending anyone. This is my job...

  “Yeah, yeah, the award thing. No, I haven’t forgotten,” the clone said, his tone shifting from the defensive for the moment. Walt had been after him to attend an award dinner in New York City at the end of the month. Jeremiah had no inclination of going.

  “Diana is checking her schedule. I’ll get back to you on it.” He hadn’t even mentioned it to Diana.

  The last thing Jeremiah wanted was to drive four hours and schmooze with a roomful of journalists, most of whom he could have reported circles around in his day. He had no desire to banter about who got which promotion and listen to all the righteous First Amendment‒Fourth Estate pontificating. And he certainly wasn’t itching to see Walt get a second Hearst Award for Excellence in as many years. Jeremiah had been nominated himself three times but missed out on each one. If he had to hear one more person say to him what an honor it was “just to be nominated” he’d likely start throwing punches. Besides, with the Meld scandal, he’d be a goldfish in a piranha pool, and that wasn’t something he was about to walk into casually.

  “Yeah, I will,” the clone said into the phone. “I’ll call you later this week.”

  For the remainder of the viewing, Jeremiah and Brent watched the clone work silently in his office, lead an uneventful editorial meeting and decline an offer for lunch with two of his younger coworkers, saying he had a lot of busywork to catch up on. When the monitor switched off, he was eating a soggy tuna sandwich alone at his desk and staring, unknowingly, directly into the camera.

  Chapter 6

  Day 30

  It was a novelty to live in the lap of high-tech luxury without the responsibilities of work and family. Jeremiah wasn’t used to so much free time, and in those first weeks he wallowed in it. He stayed up late, well after midnight, watching old movies and reruns of TV shows he hadn’t seen since he was a kid. He ate unconventional meals at odd hours and burned them off on the treadmill in virtual locales as exotic as he could think of. He read newspapers—the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, even his hometown weekly—from cover to cover. They delivered the actual hard copies, like he’d asked. He started reading the books they’d supplied him with and toyed again with the idea of writing his own novel. A year of this could go far, he figured, toward finally setting that idea in motion. But what would he write about? Titles took shape in his mind: Clone Alone; Cloney Island; The Year of the Clone. He doubted Charles Scott would approve. Still, he thought, it could make for a good read.

  After a while, though, too much free time begins to feel more like empty, wasted hours, and Jeremiah got antsy, the way one does when a vacation has gone on too long. He craved his o
ld routine. More than anything, he wanted a walk. Not the augmented reality kind he could get on the treadmill, an actual walk in the woods where he could feel the breeze on his face and the crunch of the leaves underneath his feet. It didn’t help matters that he was made to watch his clone doing all the ordinary activities he was beginning to miss. He started to fixate on things that shouldn’t have bothered him. He hated that the clone was left to choose a new car to replace the one that was wrecked. A dark blue Lincoln town car? Really? It looked like something a G-man would drive. Although he knew he would have ended up with the same car—sedate, appropriate, not too flashy—he had to wonder why he’d suddenly started eyeing a lemon-yellow European sports car while he watched the clone haggle at the car dealership. He found himself wishing the clone might at least have taken it for a test drive.

  The days went by, in what felt like four-hour stretches to him, and Jeremiah was repeatedly astonished by how exact this replica was. In those first days, they watched it in a variety of activities: leading editorial meetings at ViMed, walking the trash to the curb on a Monday morning, stammering and fidgeting through casual office conversations in the hallways of his office. Each time, Jeremiah had the feeling he was watching a television show he somehow had forgotten he’d written. It got to the point where he could mouth the words of every other thing the clone said, both at home and at work. No, I don’t want any pie... Let’s put some polish on this write-up... Have you finished your homework yet?... Yes, dear... No, sir... I suppose you might be right, dear... No wonder Diana and Parker had been so totally and utterly fooled by the thing. He was almost fooled himself. It was a marvel, to be sure, but increasingly unsettling to him.

  “This is stupendous, Mr. Adams,” Charles Scott exclaimed during a random check-in.

  This is pathetic, Jeremiah thought.

  “And what’s truly remarkable,” Scott added, “is that the clone seems to be perfectly convinced himself. He actually believes he is you.” Scott shook his head in a show of unexpected amazement. “He doesn’t know the difference at all. Everything is working exactly as we hoped. He has no idea he’s a copy.”