The Echo Wife Read online

  •  Dogs. Sometime in the five years since the scan, Nathan had become slightly afraid of them. Not a phobia, but an aversion, a tension. Martine said he was bitten by a dog shortly before I first knocked on her door. I couldn’t remember a dog bite. I couldn’t even remember an injury.

  •  The sapphire. I never suspected that he would notice the fact that I didn’t wear it. It lived in a fire safe in the bottom of my closet, when we were married and after, and I always thought it had evaporated from his awareness the same way it had mine. But that wasn’t the case—apparently, it hurt his feelings. He was disappointed that I didn’t like it more, embarrassed by my disregard. The word Martine used was “crestfallen.” Even after all that time, he had been upset enough about it to tell Martine how he felt.

  •  Me. Of course. How he felt about me. How much he respected me. How much he wanted me. How much he loved me.

  Martine was wrong about nothing.

  Nathan, it seemed, told her everything. Even things that hadn’t been his to tell.

  Things about my childhood. Things about our sex life. Martine knew it all.

  I told myself that it didn’t make sense for me to be angry about it—what possible reason would he have had to lie to her about any of it, to conceal any of it from her? It’s not as though he needed to worry about breaking my confidence, not when he was already breaching my trust in such an irrevocable way. It’s not as though he needed to worry about Martine telling me what she knew—or, for that matter, telling anyone what she knew. She was isolated, and I was ignorant.

  I’m sure Nathan didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.

  Normally, I wouldn’t have done such a thorough assessment. The duplicative clones I developed were never intended to function as completely convincing stand-ins for the people they resembled—that was a cornerstone of the ethical justification for the research. Every time I applied for more funding, every time I appeared in front of a review board, every time anyone asked how my work was in any way prudent, I had to be able to prove that I wasn’t making people; I was making tools.

  It’s why Martine was so underdeveloped, so dependent. Nathan had clearly gotten access to one of my own early neural frames, but he couldn’t replicate my entire mind, my every thought process. He couldn’t make her a whole person, with self-direction and a fully developed sense of agency.

  No one could.

  That is the part I decided not to reveal to Martine. I discussed it with the only person I could: Seyed.

  I didn’t trust him again, not yet—but I could feel the trust returning, seeping into me like meltwater into a basement, and every day I leaned on him again just a little more. It felt good, having another person to share this enormous secret with.

  It was nice, is all. Confiding in Seyed about the risks we were taking. It was a comfort. Seyed and I sat up at my kitchen table most nights over increasing volumes of whiskey and wine after Martine had gone to sleep, talking about the risks we were taking and the impossibility of the work we had taken on. We drank too much and didn’t eat enough, because our bellies were too full of the magnitude of our project to digest anything else.

  In a way, I suppose we were trying to heal the thing that had become broken between us, because we needed to be whole in order to carry our shared burden.

  This is the thing we had to carry: Even if we succeeded at the impossible thing, we would never be able to tell anyone. We couldn’t publish. We couldn’t even whisper. We would just have to sit on our achievement, letting the world remain ignorant of the possibilities we’d uncovered.

  The possibilities we’d created.

  “This is going to be groundbreaking,” I often said, a phrase that was becoming a trigger for the whole familiar litany. “We’re making a man. Not a subject, not a tool—a person. We’re making a whole person, and we never even get to brag about it.”

  Seyed’s answer shifted depending on how much he’d had to drink. On the nights when he was most sober, he disagreed with me. We weren’t making a person, he would insist. We were making a clone. A more complex clone, but still.

  But during the course of our project, few of Seyed’s nights were sober. He was under a great deal of strain, I could understand that. There were several days when he had to manage the lab almost entirely on his own while I worked with Martine, and he was taking on a larger portion of specimen conditioning than usual. On those nights, when he drank enough to make his eyes glassy and his hands clumsy, his arguments vanished.

  “We’ve always been making people,” he would slur, staring into his glass as though it could look back at him. “This whole time, that’s what we’ve been doing. It’s just different for you this time, because it’s a person you knew. But it’s not different for me, not really. It’s always been like this.”

  But as Martine and I worked through the five-year-old catalogue of Nathan’s neural processes, I began to believe more and more that Seyed was wrong. I began to understand that I wasn’t going to be making a person I knew.

  I began to see that I hadn’t known Nathan at all.

  * * *

  The morning I had my scrambled-egg epiphany, Nathan was already running late. He was anxious to get to work. He had spent the months prior embroiled in a pitched battle with another faculty member over … something. If I’d been a more attentive wife—if I’d been Martine—I would have known what the conflict was about, would have remembered why he was so upset. But Nathan’s problem was some heated, petty conflict in which I had never been able to feign interest, even when pretending to listen would have prevented an argument.

  The problem was that if I’d cared—if I’d paid attention—Nathan would have wanted me to fix the problem for him. Oh, sure, he would have framed it as a discussion, as a back-and-forth about what I would do in his shoes, as brainstorming solutions together.

  But in the end, I would inevitably find myself in charge of solving his problem, holding his hand as he figured out how to deal with problems he had almost always caused himself. Over the years of our marriage, I learned that it was better to ignore him when he started dropping heavy hints about his worries at work.

  It was the only way he would ever learn how to handle things on his own.

  I was doing it for the sake of his growth, really.

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was that on the morning I had my breakthrough, Nathan was looking for a fight. He was too much of a coward to have the fight he needed to have with whoever was causing his problems at work, so he decided to take it out on me. He was looking to be angry about something.

  When he walked into that smoky kitchen, he found his outlet.

  The eggs and the pan went into the trash, which I suppose was fair; both were ruined. He made an incisive comment about my cooking—something about wondering how someone who claimed to value competence could be so inept at a basic skill. That was less fair.

  I tried to explain that I’d spaced out because I’d had a huge breakthrough. I didn’t apologize, but I offered to make him something new to eat, if he would just wait a few minutes. But of course, he wasn’t interested in what I had to say. He was interested in being angry at me. He was interested in causing a scene.

  He had stormed out of the house, slamming the door so hard behind him that the coffee mugs rattled against each other in the cupboard.

  But when Nathan got home that evening, he apologized for his temper. He kissed me and handed over a bag of takeout. He made a joke about not wanting to make me cook. He apologized for not listening to me, the kind of apology that made me think he really understood what he’d done. Nathan said he should have been more invested in my work and my process.

  He asked me to explain my breakthrough.

  I was still brittle from the way he’d acted that morning. I wanted to make him apologize more, wanted to make him feel guilty. He’d hurt me, and I wanted to hurt him back, so I struck at the vulnerable underbelly of his apology. I asked him if he was even slightly inter
ested in me. I asked if he actually wanted to know about my work at all.

  “Of course I want to know,” he said, his voice tender. “I’m sorry if I made it seem like I don’t care. I do. I care so much about your work. Will you tell me? This is about the clone project, right?”

  It was a stupid question, and I remember chewing on it. I could have bitten into it hard; all of my projects were “the clone project,” and his question was so vague that I could have accused him of having no idea what I was working on. But I decided that he was doing his best, even if his best wasn’t very good. I decided to let it pass.

  I sat down at the kitchen table with him, and we ate Chinese food out of boxes, passing a carton of rice back and forth between us. I told him about my breakthrough. I was recalcitrant at first, petty, making him beg me for information, making him apologize again and again—but he asked questions, smart ones that proved he was listening, and I started to get excited.

  I told him about the work I’d been doing, the ideas I had, the direction I knew I could take my research if I could just get the funding and supplies I needed.

  We talked for hours. When we finished eating he pulled me up from the dining-room table by both hands. He tugged me into the bedroom, leaving the half-eaten boxes of food on the table, and he pressed me down into the mattress in our little bed and he kissed my temples and told me that I was brilliant.

  The next morning when I woke up, I was alone in our bed. I remember smiling into my pillow, thinking that we’d done right by each other. Thinking that we’d fought and made up and now things were better than they’d been before. I felt like we’d cracked the code, we’d figured out the secret to being married. I felt like we were going to make it.

  I wrapped myself up in my bathrobe and padded out of our bedroom feeling victorious. Maybe that’s why I didn’t think too much about it when I found him standing over my desk in our shared home office. He was examining a few pages of notes I’d left on my blotter, his brow furrowed. I stood in the doorway for a moment, watching him look at my papers. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, “Nothing,” and then he kissed me and went to get dressed for work, and I didn’t ask any other questions.

  I didn’t think about it again until years later, when I finally found out what he’d been doing. What he’d done.

  I didn’t consider why Nathan might be so interested in my work, in my research, in my notes. I thought that was how love worked. People who love each other, I thought, would naturally be interested in each other, interested in what they were doing.

  I assumed that I could trust his intentions.

  It didn’t occur to me that he was trying to mine information out of me. It didn’t occur to me that he was trying to use my own research to replace me. I felt grateful for his interest, for the way we were talking again.

  I thought we were coming out of a little rough patch, one caused by work stress and weariness, so I told him everything about my work. It became a thing we bonded over, me sharing with him over dinner and coffee and drinks and pillow talk.

  Every advance I made.

  Every roadblock I overcame.

  Every victory, all the way up until I harvested my first viable adult specimen a year later. Right up until I discovered Martine, two years after that.

  Of course I had told him everything.

  I didn’t think I had any reason not to.

  * * *

  While Martine and I combed through Nathan’s scans, Seyed primed the suspension every day, laying groundwork for the mapping we’d do later. Lorna had been right to laugh at the idea of turning an existing brain into a fresh start. It was far more realistic to simply make one from scratch.

  The specimen was still a loose slush, a slowly thickening slurry of dividing cells that wouldn’t consolidate without direct stimulus. The tank contained a thing that looked like a jellyfish with four thick tentacles that would eventually become limbs, and dark patches where smooth muscle and neurological tissues were starting to gel. Gradually, patiently, with the right balance of neurons exposed and developing, Seyed gave it shape.

  I kept catching Martine staring at the translucent mass that we were going to turn into a man. I walked into the lab one morning after a coffee run to find her standing in front of the tank, her fingers pressed to the glass, watching it as though she could urge it to grow.

  “Don’t touch that,” I said, setting her tea down on the FOOD USE ONLY table.

  “Why?” she asked, turning to look at me without taking her hand away from the tank.

  A thousand answers occurred to me, none of them true. I could have fed her a lie about her body temperature disrupting the interior climate of the tank, or I could have told her that the glass was fragile, or that her skin oils were corrosive. The lies were too obvious, though—she would have seen right through me.

  Getting caught in a lie is so much worse than saying nothing.

  But I couldn’t give her the real answer, either. The real answer was so true as to be cruel, and I was trying so hard not to be cruel to Martine. Don’t touch that, because you don’t belong here.

  I deflected instead. “We have work to do. Come on.”

  She pursed her lips at me and stood there for several seconds before turning her back on the tank and joining me at our table. It was something she’d begun doing—taking time before following instructions. Putting space between my request and her response.

  It was uniquely infuriating to me.

  She wasn’t supposed to be able to fight her programming like that. She wasn’t supposed to change. Neurocognitive programming was intended to be static, immovable, and the fact that Martine was starting to shift hers felt like a direct insult to the integrity of my work.

  So I did my best to ignore her moods—moods she shouldn’t have been able to have, although I could chalk that up to Nathan’s incompetent, lazy execution of my early protocols. I did my best to treat her as I would have treated any research assistant, to speak to her the same way I spoke to Seyed. The same way I spoke to anyone who was in my laboratory, participating in my research, using materials acquired with my funding.

  But even then, she visibly chafed. She made faces at things I said, rolled her eyes when I was snappish, and even when she wasn’t being petulant, she hesitated for several seconds before obeying my directives. Every single time, Martine hesitated.

  I suppose it would have been virtuous of me to celebrate her developing independence. But the truth is, she was more useful to me when she was obedient. As much contempt as I felt for the way Nathan had programmed her, it was so much simpler not having to worry about her feelings.

  I could understand why he would want her pliant, even if I couldn’t respect his cowardice in needing her that way.

  I didn’t need her to be perfectly obedient. I could handle her as she was. But I liked her better when she did as she was told.

  That didn’t mean that I was the same as Nathan had been. He’d created Martine to be this way; I was merely taking advantage of a thing that was already there. I didn’t forge the tool. I just wanted to use it effectively. That didn’t make me a monster. It wasn’t wrong of me, wishing she would behave as she’d been designed to.

  Besides, even if it did make me a monster, there wasn’t time to think of it that way. I was far too busy for navel-gazing.

  There were more important things at hand.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Martine and I were not, strictly speaking, living together during this time. She had her place. I had mine.

  But neither of us had a home.

  Martine had spent her short life trying hard to make her house into a home, but she had been trying to make it into a home for Nathan, not one for herself. She spent a few nights there, but more often than not, I drove her directly from the lab to my town house.

  We didn’t discuss it. We just slept back-to-back in my bed, curled away from each other. As the nights got colder, I began to sleep under the c
overs, but Martine never did—she stayed on top of them, perfectly still. She woke before me each morning, and by the time I got downstairs each day, she was already dressed.

  I didn’t unpack a single box after she arrived. I did tell her that she didn’t have to unpack for me, but I didn’t tell her very many times. I didn’t fight her on it.

  She did that work for me, and I let her.

  A month into Nathan’s neurocognitive programming—six weeks after we filled a sterilized tank with the treatment that would become specimen 4896-Zed—I came downstairs in the morning and found Martine in the kitchen, washing her underwear in the sink.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “I have a washing machine.”

  “I don’t want them to stain,” she muttered, scrubbing the fabric against itself with strong, sure fingers.

  “Did something happen?” I asked, and she shook her head.

  “Just a little blood.”

  “How much?”

  She turned the underwear inside out to show me. They were made of lace, the same color as the skin of her arms, and the fabric of the cloth crotch insert was stained the deep rust of saturation.

  “I think that’s more than you’re supposed to bleed when you’re pregnant, Martine,” I said, trying to sound calm. I looked at her belly, which became more obvious every day. I didn’t know anything about obstetrics, not beyond the basics, which were functionally useless to me. I didn’t know if she was supposed to look the way she did then, or if something was wrong. Her belly was locked up tight, and there was something in it that I didn’t understand on every possible level.

  I hadn’t been able to let go of that—the shouldn’t-be-possible of her pregnancy. It was another subject of my late-night conversations with Seyed, trying to figure out the unthinkable how of her baby. It was like a blister, and every time she rested her hand on her abdomen, something in my brain stung, because I still didn’t have answers.