The Mirror Man

by Jane Gilmartin

  Jeremiah half sat and half wilted onto the couch.

  “What happened?”

  “They’re still looking into it,” Scott told him, “but it appears that she may have been given another patient’s medication.”

  “What? I don’t understand. How could something like this happen? Why wasn’t anyone watching her? How the hell do they mix up her medication in a nursing home?”

  “There is also the possibility that it might have been intentional on her part,” Scott said.

  “No. Impossible. My mother would never do that.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Scott said, “but didn’t the doctor mention he’d seen signs of depression under the Meld?”

  The Meld. Suicide. A shiver ran up Jeremiah’s spine. Could his own mother be the latest victim of Meld?

  Scott stared at him quietly as if waiting for him to speak, but Jeremiah said nothing. He just sat with the knowledge for a moment more, letting it sink in. He was his mother’s only surviving family. There would be arrangements to make, he knew, and it would be up to him to see to that. Financially, there was little left to do. He had taken care of all that years ago, but there would be a funeral and other loose ends. He didn’t know where to start.

  She had often tried to initiate a conversation with him about this very topic, from the time he was in high school, and he had always refused to discuss it. It had seemed morbid to him, and premature. He hadn’t wanted to think about it and was always put off by the casual way she’d just start talking about it, as though her own death really wasn’t that big of a deal.

  “Oh, Jeremiah, everybody dies,” she told him. “If we thought we’d be around forever no one would ever do anything. Life is short. Knowing that is what keeps you going. But I want to make sure you know what to do with me when the time comes. I don’t want to end up somewhere in the middle of nowhere, buried next to people I don’t even know.”

  He had told her to write it all down. She very likely had and, hopefully, it was somewhere in her personal belongings. Someone at the home would know.

  “I’ll need to speak to the nursing home,” Jeremiah told Scott, “as soon as possible.”

  “I am afraid that will not be permissible, Mr. Adams.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We cannot allow any contact whatsoever with the outside world,” Scott said. “You know the rules. We’ve been through this.”

  “But under the circumstances, you have to allow me to leave.”

  “Leave? I’m afraid we simply cannot permit it. No. We are on a very strict timeline here, as you know.”

  “A strict timeline? This is my mother, for God’s sake!” He was astonished. Anger rose up in his throat and nearly choked him. “I need to be at the funeral! You can’t keep me from that!”

  “I am sorry,” Scott said, rising. “I understand you are upset, Mr. Adams, but the contract clearly states that you are to remain in the lab for the period of one full year. Under no circumstances are you allowed to leave this facility. I’m afraid that includes the death of your mother.”

  “Dr. Scott, I am her only family. I’ve got to make the arrangements. I need to be there.”

  “The clone will take care of everything as well as you would do yourself. I am certain that the whole affair will be handled precisely to your satisfaction.” Scott got up and walked to the door, opened it and then turned again, as though a thought had just occurred to him. “This might actually be a unique exercise for the project,” he said. “I wonder if you might write down the details of how you would make the arrangements for your mother’s funeral. You know, the readings, the music, that sort of thing. Maybe the photo you’d choose for the obituary. It would make an excellent test, to see the comparison. I think it could be quite fascinating. I’m certain our investors would be interested.”

  With a great deal of difficulty, Jeremiah managed to be silent, but wanted nothing so much at that moment as to punch Charles Scott in the teeth. Once Scott was safely out the door, he settled for punching the living room wall instead. He didn’t even make a dent in it, but felt the sting in the knuckles of his hand, which he ignored.

  He picked up a lamp and threw it hard against the far wall and watched shards of blue ceramic scatter onto the floor and couch. Seething, he surveyed the room for something else to break, but there was nothing in the immediate vicinity except a computer monitor, which was bolted to the table, so he started on a stack of books, hurling them one by one against the locked door. And then, spent for the moment, he fell back down onto the couch, and put his face in his hands.

  No one was supposed to die while he was in here. That wasn’t part of the deal. Why had the damned clone agreed to let her take the Meld? If this was suicide, it had to be connected to that, he thought. His mother would never have done it. There was no way. It may have been in her genes, but suicide wasn’t in her character. No matter how upset she might have been about the move, her memory, all of it, there was simply no way he could reconcile that she’d killed herself. She’d always been one of the most contented people he’d ever known, almost to a fault. There was no way.

  Jeremiah ruminated on the clone’s visit with his mother when she hadn’t even recognized him. He had no way of knowing for sure whether the clone had seen her again since then, but he found himself hoping their final moments together weren’t clouded by her failing mind. The Meld had shown she didn’t have dementia, but there was surely something wrong.

  What occurred to him next was so shocking it made him bolt upright again. Charles Scott had heard the conversation about what the doctor had seen when she took the Meld. He must have been monitoring these viewings, either in real time or taped playbacks. And so he knew Patricia Adams hadn’t recognized the clone. She had looked right at the thing and declared that it wasn’t her son. Scott must have seen it. If not, all of it, every word of it, was in Brent’s report.

  And now she was dead.

  If it wasn’t suicide—and he couldn’t accept that it was—then what was it?

  Standing frozen in the middle of the room, still in his underwear, surrounded by the mess he’d made, a kind of dread washed over Jeremiah. He wanted to vomit. He retched and heaved, but it was no use. There was nothing inside him.

  Charles Scott was desperate that this experiment continue without interruption. But was he desperate enough to kill? By getting involved with all of this, had Jeremiah sacrificed his own mother?

  Chapter 21

  Days 106-109

  When he was a child, Jeremiah had loved his mother ferociously. Without a father, she had, by necessity, filled many roles for him—hero, teacher, best friend. She’d done a good job at all of it. They had been close, and she made sure to teach him things a father might have taught a son. Most of which she likely had to learn first for herself. By the time he was fifteen, he could fix a toilet, drive a stick shift and sweet-talk girls, and all with guidance from her. He could talk to her about anything, and she was always honest with him—except for the one thing that came to matter more and more as he grew up.

  “It doesn’t matter why your father left,” she’d told him once. “The only thing that matters is that he isn’t here, and that’s his loss, not yours.”

  How she managed to stay so optimistic, so full of life, even with the hand she’d been dealt, Jeremiah would never fully understand. But his mother had a real knack for making even the most commonplace things seem extraordinary and full of possibility.

  They used to play a game she called “Imagine,” which involved her scavenging the house for three random objects and hiding them in a shoebox. She’d run past him, in and out of rooms, giggling and marveling at the treasures she’d collected, and Jeremiah could hardly contain his excitement. When she was finished, she’d present the box to him with a flourish, and he would close his eyes and take the objects out, one by one, and had to make up a st
ory about whatever he found there. Ordinary things, items they’d looked at and tripped over ten times a day, were suddenly magical and full of mystery. The stories he told began as nonsensical little things: The pencil and the fish food finally found the car keys and went for a long ride, and he’d look up at her, disappointed that all the anticipation and excitement—all her treasure hunting—had resulted in something so dull. But she would get excited and spur him on with ridiculous, wonderful questions: Which one was driving? Where did they go? Did they stop to eat along the way? It would turn into a long, involved tale, replete with dinosaurs or aerial acrobatics, and he’d add details to it sporadically, right up until bedtime, until he knew he’d never look at a pencil the same way again. It was a wonderful game. He used to try to play it with Parker when he was little, but it never came out the same way, and he’d finally given up. He realized now that he’d never actually told his mother, later in life, how much that game had meant to him. It hadn’t even crossed his mind in years. But he remembered it.

  Stuck in the lab, he was struck by the notion that his clone might be remembering the exact same thing, and that possibility infuriated him. It felt like a violation. That was his memory. She was his mother.

  It must have been just before seven in the morning when Brent came into the apartment without a knock. He found Jeremiah still sitting on the couch, still in his underwear, cradling his bruised hand in his lap.

  “I’m sorry,” Brent told him.

  Jeremiah said nothing but looked at Brent with a sort of contempt he hadn’t felt toward him before. As far as he was concerned, anyone involved in this experiment, including Brent, was just another of his captors. Just someone else who wouldn’t give him the keys. And Brent was certainly complicit with that report he’d written for Scott. Sorry, he thought. Yeah, right.

  “I just wanted to see if you were all right,” Brent said. “Besides, we have a morning viewing. Basically, I’m just here early.”

  Jeremiah turned away from him and stared at the wall.

  “Have you eaten? I’ll make something, or I could pick something up if you want. I could probably smuggle in some more doughnuts.”

  “No.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Look, I want to help.”

  “You want to help? Then open the fucking door and let me out. Get me to my mother’s funeral. That’s how you can help.”

  “You know I can’t do that. I wish I could. Believe me.”

  “Then shut the fuck up and leave me alone. And I am not watching that fucking monitor today, either. I won’t do it.”

  Brent sighed heavily and sat down on the edge of the coffee table, taking in the broken lamp and the books scattered across the floor.

  “I know you’re upset,” he said. “You have every reason to be.”

  “Fuck you,” Jeremiah told him quietly.

  “Look, maybe we can arrange for you to at least view the funeral. That would be better than nothing, wouldn’t it? Maybe give you some closure.”

  “I don’t want to watch my mother’s funeral on TV! I want to be there. It’s my mother!”

  “I know, I know, but they aren’t going to let you go, Jeremiah. If it were up to me, I’d find a way. But at least this way you’d be able to see it.” It didn’t go unnoticed that Brent had attempted to distance himself from Scott and the rest of them, but Jeremiah wasn’t buying it. Not anymore.

  “There’s so much I wish I’d said to her,” he admitted after a moment. He rubbed at his eyes vigorously with his hands. He stood up and walked into the kitchen. Infuriatingly, Brent followed him.

  “I think it’s important that you watch the funeral,” Brent said. “I think you need to.”

  “How would they do that?” he asked. “I don’t even know where it’s being held.”

  “Yeah, but they certainly will. Believe me, Charles Scott keeps very close tabs on that clone. He knows where he is every minute of the day. Nothing escapes him.”

  “Brent,” Jeremiah said, and then paused. He grabbed the blender and a handful of ice cubes and turned it on full blast. He couldn’t afford any other ears on what he was about to say. “What exactly did you write in your report to Scott that day we saw my mother with the clone?”

  “The usual.” Brent’s voice rose over the din. “An overview of what we saw, your reactions.”

  “But you wrote something about my mother not recognizing the clone, right?”

  “Well, yeah. I had to.”

  “And Scott saw that report?” Jeremiah hit the pulse button.

  “Yeah. He sees them every day after the viewing, or the next morning.”

  “And he must see the same things we see, right? I assume these viewings are recorded for him.”

  “Maybe,” Brent said. “Probably. So what?”

  “So, presumably, he also saw what that doctor said, that my mother didn’t have dementia, after all. The Meld showed no sign of it.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Brent looked at him sideways. Jeremiah got more ice for the blender.

  “It must have looked to Scott like my mother knew something,” he said. “He must have thought she suspected something about the clone. Something that could threaten this whole thing.”

  Brent stared at him blankly.

  Jeremiah said nothing but looked at Brent in a way that he hoped completed his train of thought.

  “What? No. Jeremiah, come on! I mean, he loves the experiment and all, but come on. This is science. That’s crazy.”

  “But all of this is so goddamn important to him. I mean, if he thought there was a chance that someone knew, that someone suspected, who’s to say how far he’d go to save the thing?” He stopped short of revealing to Brent what he knew about Scott’s illness. He couldn’t risk that. Not yet. “He needs that funding from those shadowy investors he keeps talking about. If that money dries up, it’s finished.”

  “No way in hell.” Brent was adamant. “The people involved in this, those investors, I mean, Jesus, it goes up a pretty big ladder behind the scenes. They’d never stand for it. Scott wouldn’t risk it. No way. Put it out of your mind. This is crazy. You’re just emotional. You need some rest.”

  Jeremiah looked Brent hard in the eye for a moment. It was obvious he believed what he was saying. He sighed and turned the blender off. Brent was right about one thing: he was exhausted. His head was pounding. He wanted this whole thing to be over. He wanted to go home. If he were at home right now, he’d have made some excuse to walk with Louie, which he knew would have calmed him down some. A long, quiet walk in the woods with a dog can do more good than most people know. Here, he had no such option. He wondered if that’s what the clone was doing at the moment. But no, Louie wouldn’t walk with him. Louie was no traitor. While that thought should have made him feel better, it didn’t.

  “Why don’t you just try to get some sleep,” Brent said. “I’ll get you up in time for the viewing.”

  Jeremiah nodded. In the bedroom, he fell heavily onto the bed, but thoughts of his mother—the way she’d get excited over seeing a blue jay, the glint in her eye when she smiled at him—kept swimming through his mind, keeping him awake. His growing conviction that Charles Scott was a monster finally drove him out of bed and into the shower. He stood under the water for a full fifteen minutes, hoping it might clear his head, but he emerged as groggy and distressed as before.

  When he walked into the living room, Brent was gone. So was the considerable mess from the night before. Jeremiah went to the kitchen, deciding to go with strong coffee if he couldn’t get any sleep. Before he’d poured a cup, Dr. Young arrived at the apartment, coming in, as usual, without so much as knocking.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss, Jeremiah,” she said, motioning him immediately toward the couch. “Let’s talk for a while.” Her demeanor and tone were
such that Jeremiah was instantly skeptical of her sentiments. She was, in typical fashion, all business, and he had the sense that her desire to talk was more for the benefit of the experiment than for him. He didn’t trust her. He didn’t trust any of them anymore.

  Jeremiah didn’t feel like talking. There was nothing to say. And if there were, he didn’t want to say it to her.

  “It might help you to remember that your clone is grieving every bit as much as you are,” she said. Jeremiah wanted to swear at her but refrained and was silent.

  “Tell me what you’re feeling, Jeremiah.”

  “You know what?” he asked harshly, “Why don’t you tell me how I’m feeling. My mother is dead and I can’t even bury her. So, how do you think I’m feeling? How would you feel, Natalie, if it were your mother? She doesn’t have anyone else, you know. I’m the only one.”

  “I understand you’re angry. It may help to talk about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Mr. Higgins came to see me. He seems to feel that you might benefit from viewing the funeral,” she said. “I agree. I will suggest to Dr. Scott that he arrange it. And then maybe you can take a day or two off from the viewings after that. But soon, Jeremiah, I’d like to take the Meld with you again. It’s almost time for it, anyway, but I think it’s even more important now, under the circumstances. I can’t have you holding back your feelings from me. This is all part of the experiment, you know. I have a job to do.”

  He looked away from her and clenched his fists to keep from speaking. He didn’t trust the Meld. He didn’t trust what would come out of his mind. He couldn’t risk her seeing what he knew.

  * * *

  Two days later he watched on the wall monitor in the laboratory apartment as his mother was laid to rest.

  He recognized instantly the Church of Saint Paul in the small New Hampshire town he’d lived in for a brief time as a child, the only Catholic church in which he’d ever attended an actual service. He remembered staring up at the stained-glass windows, trying to decipher their images, making up little stories about them in his head while the priest talked in a way he couldn’t follow. Neither he nor his mother were members of this church, but she’d taken him here a few times. Although she had been raised a Catholic and had raised him with a quirky sort of spiritual foundation, they were not formal members of any particular church—or of any faith, for that matter. He’d never been baptized. She took him to churches of different denominations sporadically, for what she termed “soul visits.” Every now and then they’d just show up at a different church “to hear what they have to say.” It had made him uncomfortable as a child. He always felt conspicuous sitting in a place he didn’t belong, surrounded by people for whom the service was a sacred weekly ritual. The thought of it now, though, made him smile. She had always felt right at home, no matter where they were, so confident and comfortable. They’d been to Lutheran, Methodist, Unitarian and Latter-Day Saints. She even took him to a synagogue once, but they couldn’t understand half of what was said in the orthodox service. Afterward they tried to imitate the words and burst into fits of laughter at how badly they managed. But his mother said the sound was beautiful, even if they didn’t know what the words meant.