The Mirror Man

by Jane Gilmartin

  “I’ll save you the trouble,” Jeremiah said. “No, no and no. The clone didn’t do anything surprising, I wouldn’t have done anything differently and Diana certainly didn’t show any signs she wasn’t talking to me. Done. Get us a beer.”

  Chapter 14

  Days 85-87

  “How long have you been married, Jeremiah?” Brent asked a few days later over bland braised chicken.

  “Sixteen years,” he said. “In two weeks actually.”

  “Whoa, will clone boy remember?”

  “I always do, so I assume he will.”

  “Sometimes I forget you’re the same person.”

  “I wish I could forget,” Jeremiah said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I can’t stand to watch him. He’s weak. He’s got no backbone. No guts.”

  “I think he has your backbone and your guts actually. Right down to the molecule, as I understand it.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I guess he does seem a little wimpy.”

  “Could you imagine sitting back like this with him, having dinner, just talking?”

  “I don’t know him the way I know you. Or rather, I suppose, he doesn’t know me.”

  “You’d never be friends with him, not like we are.”

  “Well, we were sort of thrown together, you know? It’s different,” Brent said. “But he is you, Jeremiah. He’s an exact replica. And you answer those questions every single day to prove that. He’s just the same as you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to make some changes when I get out of here. I can tell you that. I’m not going to be the same as him anymore. I’m not going to be such a goddamn doormat, always afraid of stirring up the pot. I’m going to say what’s on my mind.”

  “I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re lucky, in a way,” Brent said.

  “Lucky, how?”

  “Most people don’t ever get to see themselves the way you have. You get to see yourself from the outside. It’s actually pretty cool.”

  As soon as Brent said it, Jeremiah was startled by the idea that this whole thing was very much like taking Meld. In an instant, he could begin to understand how taking that drug the wrong way might entice someone to suicide. Maybe it’s better to never know how the world sees you. Maybe no one should see themselves like that. It surprises you. You don’t recognize yourself, or maybe you do, and that’s worse. The thought disturbed Jeremiah in a profound way. What was watching his clone for hours every day actually doing to him? All he knew was that, as the days went on, he liked what he saw less and less and tried to distance himself from the clone at every opportunity.

  “I don’t think it’s cool at all,” Jeremiah said. “I don’t feel very lucky.”

  “Maybe you’re overthinking this,” Brent told him. “Yeah, I’ll agree, the clone does seem like an asshole at times—way more of an asshole than you actually—and he’s sort of boring, one-dimensional, but that is still you up there. That is the Jeremiah Adams I first met. Maybe you’ve loosened up a bit in here, but that could just be because of me, you know? Maybe I’m the element of change in this equation. You’re still the same person. You’re just better now. Maybe I made you cooler.”

  “Sometimes I look at him, and even though I know everything he’s going to do, every single word he’s going to say, if I could just switch places with him, sometimes I think I would do things differently.”

  “If that’s true, then you need to tell me that when I ask those questions.” Brent looked suddenly deadly serious. “That’s important.”

  “I don’t mean that he’s doing anything unexpected,” Jeremiah said. “I don’t mean I actually would have done anything differently. I guess I just mean that I wish I could. I wish I had the chance. He is doing everything exactly as I would have done it. But maybe I’ve changed. I think the clone is incapable of that. I think he can only work with what he got from me at that point, at that exact point in time. That’s all he’ll ever have. He can’t change. Maybe he’s stagnant. But I’m not. And I’m different now.”

  Brent eyed him with measured attention, which made Jeremiah instantly uncomfortable. He wasn’t certain, after all, how much he could actually trust Brent. Charles Scott still signed his paychecks.

  “I don’t know,” he told Brent. “I’m not thinking clearly. I think I’m just tired.”

  He’d been living with these feelings for a while, wondering how it was possible to watch his own replica and not like him. Every day, as the viewing was set to begin, Jeremiah would feel his stomach tighten and his face harden into an expression of contempt, which he found more and more difficult to conceal. He watched with gritted teeth as his double wormed his way around his day, never fully engaging in anything, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his awkward insecurity came across as unwarranted conceit. In every conversation, he was only marginally there, only as much as he needed to be, never vested, and answering questions with abrupt predictability. He never pursued anything from anyone around him. Never initiated a discussion himself. He never asked a question or wondered out loud. At home, too, he seemed stuck on the edges, just halfway in. He wouldn’t attempt any honest connection with either Diana or Parker and he all but pushed them away if they ever tried it with him.

  “Can we go to a movie tonight, Dad?” Parker asked once. “We haven’t been to a movie in ages.”

  “Anything you could possibly want to see ends up on TV for free in two months, anyway,” the clone told him. “Nobody goes to the movies anymore.” Jeremiah had been livid at that. It was a missed opportunity and he wanted to jump inside the wall and throttle that clone. He was an idiot.

  Was he expecting too much of his double? Despite fleeting moments of a kind of empathy for the clone, he knew the thing on the wall wasn’t really human. How, he reasoned, could something so unnatural even be expected to live and engage? He might walk and talk and breathe, but there had to be something missing from the clone, some elemental spark, some God particle, some essence. A soul?

  Thoughts like that didn’t typically clutter Jeremiah’s mind and the fact that he thought about them now shocked him slightly. He had no unshakable faith in anything higher than the sky, but watching that clone haunt his own world, day in and day out, made him question things he’d never considered. It had begun to interfere with his sleep.

  One morning, just after four, he gave up, threw back the covers and got out of bed. Better to just find something to do, he decided, rather than lie in bed wide awake. He didn’t have a book he was reading at the moment and didn’t feel like watching TV. He was antsy. He tried the treadmill for a few minutes and then gave up on that, too.

  Finally, and without any conscious decision on his part, he found himself sitting on the living room couch, headset on and controller in hand, playing his first solo round of Infinite Frontiers or, as Brent had started referring to it, IF. Trying to recall the correct sequence of buttons it took to fire his machine gun and rummaging the 3-D war-torn landscape for med kits and discarded rations made for a good distraction. One needed to concentrate, after all, to avoid stepping on a land mine or getting shot in the head by some mindless AI sniper. It took effort, too, Jeremiah discovered, not to shoot his foot off with his own gun, a maneuver he seemed to have mastered without even trying.

  After dying several unceremonious deaths and respawning in roughly the same spot he’d started at, he decided to work on his avatar instead. How many times had Brent chided him, after all, for continuing to play as the default image of a nondescript American soldier named Player 2?

  The choices were many and intricate, starting with species and ending somewhere around eyebrow shape and shoelace color. If he wanted to, Jeremiah could literally have played the game as a bipedal alligator in an evening gown. But he went with something slightly more menacing.

  Slowly, attribute by
attribute, his avatar, whom he called Clyde, came into being. He was a stocky, stern-faced ex-marine (or so Jeremiah imagined) dressed in camouflage pants and a tattered Ramones T-shirt, which was bursting from the force of his muscular chest. He wore a military surplus helmet over messy, dirty blond hair, and goggles that looked like they were salvaged from an industrial waste site. He had a cache of weapons on his person that included an assault rifle, two handguns, a machete and a blade he concealed in one of his hobnail boots. Once he leveled up a few times, Jeremiah had his eye on a sweet Uzi and a grenade launcher, but he didn’t have the points for either yet. Standard-issue grenades were clipped in a ready row on his belt, and his pack contained ammo, med kits and rations enough to last a virtual month or more.

  He sat and tweaked Clyde’s appearance for over an hour, playing with the skin tone and trying out different placements for battle scars and tattoos. In the end, though, he opted to hold off on the ink altogether, deciding that tattoos would be used to mark his eventual kills. And Jeremiah planned on many victories, even if he hadn’t come close to one yet.

  When he finally positioned the nose just right and had firmly decided against a bandanna, the living room door opened without warning and Brent came whistling into the apartment. Jeremiah looked at the clock and was shocked to realize he’d been at it for four hours. It was nearly nine o’clock in the morning.

  Brent smiled—almost laughed—when he turned and saw Jeremiah, still in his underwear, with the headgear on and controller at the ready.

  “Practicing?” he asked.

  “Yeah, well, I’m sick and tired of you whipping my ass every single time we play this stupid thing.” He switched the system off, discarded his gear and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He’d wait until they were actually in battle before introducing Brent to Clyde. He wanted more practice, too. It wouldn’t matter how fierce his avatar looked if he kept shooting himself in the foot.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been practicing, too,” Brent said. “Still gonna whip your ass. Every single time.”

  Chapter 15

  Day 89

  “Why do you get so bent out of shape when your wife works late?” Brent was attempting egg-white omelets for a late lunch. “I mean, Mel’s out three or four nights a week, either working or out somewhere with her girlfriends. Doesn’t faze me. She was out last night until all hours.”

  “It’s different when you’re married,” Jeremiah told him. “Especially when you have a kid. And it doesn’t help that I can’t even ask her about it.”

  Jeremiah got up from the table and grabbed the orange juice from the fridge. They had a viewing scheduled for four o’clock and they still had almost an hour to kill. He was glad for the chance to get out of his own head for a while, so he didn’t mind that Brent had decided to tread on what he considered personal territory.

  “I don’t know,” Brent told him. “I just can’t imagine me and Mel ever being that way, not even when we’re married. I guess I just think two people don’t necessarily need to be together every minute to be together.”

  “Like I said, it’s all different when you’re married. You’ll see. We have an arrangement—I work, and she takes care of the family side. When she starts missing that, it’s like she’s not holding up her end of the deal.”

  “But she’s working, too, right?”

  “It was supposed to be a part-time job,” he said. “You know, just something to keep her head in the game. And I make enough money. She doesn’t have to work.”

  “Still,” Brent said, shaking his head, “seems you’re mad over nothing. I’m not going to be like that with Mel. I don’t care what you say.”

  “You have any pictures of Mel?” Brent talked about her so often, working her into every other conversation, that Jeremiah felt he needed some point of reference.

  Brent took out his phone, fingered the screen deftly and handed it to Jeremiah with a grin.

  She was every bit as beautiful as Brent had built her up to be. Long waves of caramel-colored hair fell around light brown eyes and bright pink lipstick. She had four earrings in her left ear and the photo caught her in midlaugh so that even her personality seemed perfectly captured in still life—vibrant and confident and totally sure of her place in the world. She looked like the sort of person everyone else gravitated to in a crowded room. He could practically hear her laugh.

  “How the hell did you land her?” he asked, handing the phone back. “You got some secret trust fund or something?”

  “Nope,” he said, waving his hands down the length of his body, “just all this awesomeness.”

  “Yeah, right. How did you meet? And don’t say the strip club she worked at, because that would just be sad.”

  “No, we met through a mutual friend,” he said. “And she wasn’t a stripper, she was an exotic dancer, and she only did it to put herself through school. That isn’t sleazy, it’s a good work ethic.”

  “And where did she go to school?”

  “She studied art history at Suffolk,” he said. “She’s an artist in her own right, though, and damn good.” He nodded toward the abstract painting on the wall. “She painted that, you know.”

  “You’re kidding.” Jeremiah was glad he’d never thought to mention to Brent that he didn’t like the painting.

  “No, Charles Scott commissioned it himself when the place was being decorated. She’s incredibly talented.”

  Jeremiah had trouble imagining that Charles Scott would concern himself with something as trivial as the lab’s decor.

  “Is all of her stuff abstract like that? You think you might be able to get her to paint something else for me? Like maybe a portrait of my dog or something?”

  “Well, I can’t do it now,” Brent told him. “I’m not allowed to talk about you. It’s in my contract. But afterward, I guess, when this is all over, I could ask her. Why the dog, though? I thought you didn’t like that dog.”

  “N-no,” Jeremiah stammered. “No, of course I like him. Why would you say that?”

  “He doesn’t seem to like you much.”

  Jeremiah swallowed hard. He hadn’t meant to say so much.

  “Well, he’s really Parker’s dog,” he said. “I thought a painting might make a great gift for Parker when I get back.”

  “Sure, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “So, does Mel just sit and paint all day? She makes enough money with that?”

  “At the moment, she’s working as an assistant in the press department of the MFA,” he said. “But she does okay with her painting. She’s had a few shows.”

  “In my day, nerds like you didn’t get girls like her.”

  “I think we just sort of complement each other,” Brent said. “Left brain, right brain sort of thing, science and art.”

  “Seems like the two things are mutually exclusive,” Jeremiah said, more to himself than to Brent.

  “Nah, it’s like a balance. You need a little of everything in you, you know? And if you don’t have it, you gravitate to someone else who does. Opposites attract, right?”

  On some level, Jeremiah could understand that. When he’d met Diana all those years ago at college, it was her eccentricity and her absolute dread of the mundane that had drawn him in. In those first few succulent weeks, they’d lie awake in his twin bed talking by candlelight, and he’d listen with eager ears while she ranted about the hypocrisy of the American Dream.

  “I don’t ever want to be the kind of person who thinks it’s important to keep up or get ahead,” she told him. “We have to always be true to our real selves, to our own true destiny and desires. We can’t ever give in to mediocrity. It’s all so meaningless. It takes away so much.”

  She was so beautiful when she spoke that way, her eyes sparkling with some private fire and her whole body rigid with the strength of her conviction. He’d been mesmerized by her in those first
weeks.

  And he’d nod and agree and happily spit it all right back at her, all the while knowing that his own truest desires were laced with the trappings of everything she despised: family, stability, security, roots—all the things he never had growing up with his mother’s whimsy. His mother didn’t know the meaning of settling down. The very concept of laying down roots somewhere seemed as abhorrent to her as it did to Diana. She bounced from job to job only for the sake of “something new.” She filled his head with stories and strung their yard with Christmas lights all year long “to lure the fairies.” Quite unintentionally, it seemed, his mother had made him a serious man. It was no wonder he settled on studying journalism: he was pulled in by the allure of facts, the simple, plain language and the truth in it.

  But there must have been something of his mother still inside him, and Diana, once, had fed that need in him. It was a sort of balance, like Brent said. But somewhere along the line, that balance had become skewed. Neither one of them had seemed to notice. Neither of them seemed to care.

  “I suppose that’s true,” he told him now.

  Inwardly, he marveled at how it had all changed. When Diana became pregnant with Parker, Jeremiah had insisted they settle down. He convinced her it wasn’t giving in, that they’d still be their own real selves. He found them a decent apartment in a good neighborhood, and he helped her decorate it with Bohemian tapestries, curtains fashioned of Indian silk scraps and a secondhand red velvet couch. He landed his first real job on a newspaper. They got married with a small, civil ceremony. Then, before Parker was three, the rent was replaced with a mortgage and the velvet couch went to Goodwill. Eventually, it was Diana who convinced him that he’d make more money in marketing than he ever could in journalism and, reluctantly, he’d given in. After he started with ViMed, they moved to a better neighborhood and bought a bigger house with an extra bedroom. And though Jeremiah brought it up on a regular basis for a while, they never had another child. It was something he was sorry about from time to time.