Before he could get himself out of bed and into the living room, Dr. Natalie Young had already let herself in. She’d have to, he figured, since he was incapable of even opening his door from the inside.
“I wasn’t expecting you, Dr. Young.” He looked down at his shoeless feet with some apprehension.
“You have just seen the clone for the first time. I thought it might be a good idea to have a talk, Mr. Adams,” she said, and motioned for him to take a seat on one of the couches. She sat on the other, directly across from him. She crossed her legs at the ankles, adjusted her computer pad on her lap and smiled at him in a way that was at once demure and expectant.
Just like the first time he’d seen her, Jeremiah was struck by the idea that she looked more like a model playing a scientist in some rock video than she did an actual scientist. She was a beautiful woman for her age, which Jeremiah guessed was near either side of forty. The fact that she sported black-rimmed men’s eyeglasses and wore her silvery-colored hair pulled back in a tense knot behind her head was an obvious attempt to work around her looks. It almost had the opposite effect.
But Natalie Young was all business and a woman of few words, as he supposed most psychiatric doctors needed to be. She seemed to be waiting for Jeremiah to say something.
“Have you seen it?” he asked.
“I have, briefly.”
“What did you think?”
“I’m more interested in your thoughts,” she said.
“Well, they got the nose just right.”
“And everything else, I’d say.”
“Yeah, everything else. It’s strange to think that thing will be going home tonight, having dinner with my family, walking my dog.”
“How does that make you feel, Jeremiah?”
“I don’t know, nervous, I guess. But this is what I signed up for, right?” He tried to smile but he had the sense it didn’t come across right.
“Why don’t you tell me how you spent the last night with your family. What was that like?” she asked.
“It was just normal, I guess. A normal night. You know, dinner, some TV.”
“I can’t imagine it felt very normal for you,” she said. “You are literally being replaced, Jeremiah. You must have been feeling something on your last night with your wife and son. Did you do anything special? What was going through your mind?”
In fact, there had been a great deal going through his mind the night before. On his drive home, he had thought of soldiers. How many times had he seen on the evening news the syrupy stories of young men or women returning home from war to welcoming crowds and weepy families? How many times had he cringed as the cameras invaded the intensely private moment when a father or mother sought to surprise a young child with a visit to a kindergarten class? He was always struck by how silent a child’s joy could be. Most of them just ran into the arms of a parent and burrowed in with hardly a word, lost in some transcendent relief. And despite the fact that he always felt like he was intruding, watching something that no one else should be witness to, he typically choked up at the sight and couldn’t look away. It was brilliant media manipulation, something he could admire.
But what the cameras never captured—what they never seemed to care about—was what came beforehand. How did these people say goodbye? He doubted that was as silent a thing. More likely there were moments of tension and fiery exchanges. Fear and uncertainty coming out as unintended anger, the way it had for him in the weeks leading up to the cloning. He imagined frustrating, terrible things that no one would want to watch. But at least, he thought now, those were shared fears. Jeremiah hadn’t even had that comfort. He couldn’t even tell his family he was leaving. He couldn’t say goodbye to them.
He would have liked his last night at home to be special somehow, even if he was the only one who knew why. He had come home with a decent bottle of wine and stopped short of buying flowers for Diana. If anything were going to make her suspicious, he realized, it would have been flowers. He hadn’t done anything like that for a very long time. Neither had she.
“I suppose I would have liked to explain a few things to them,” he told Natalie Young. “I sort of feel like I was cheated out of that.”
“What would you have explained?”
“Well, it hasn’t been easy these past few weeks, you know. I’ve been a little on edge with all of this. I haven’t been easy to live with.”
“Go on.”
He recounted for her an evening about a week before when he had gone upstairs to Parker’s bedroom door fully intending to maneuver his way into playing a computer game with him.
Parker hadn’t even looked up from the screen when Jeremiah spoke to him from the doorway. It was like he wasn’t even there, or like he was a figment that couldn’t penetrate the laser fire and bomb blasts of the game. So, without even meaning to, Jeremiah had let everything inside him come out in a burst of anger that—to Parker—must have looked like it came out of nowhere. And once it began, Jeremiah hadn’t known how to reel it back in.
“You’re on that thing twenty-four hours a day! You’re wasting your life with this crap!”
Parker had said nothing, but Jeremiah saw his face redden with a tormented mix of anger and the frustration that comes from not being able to do anything with it. Jeremiah could see that his son was fighting to keep himself quiet.
“From now on there are going to be rules. You hear me? You’re not going to be on that computer whenever you want. You can play for one hour after school and then one hour after your homework is done. Do you understand?”
“My homework is done,” Parker said without looking up. “I already finished it.”
“Good. So, turn that goddamn thing off and clean your room or something. Read a book. I don’t care what you do, but just turn it off.”
He turned on his heels and almost ran into Diana, who was standing in the hallway with an empty laundry basket, her eyes wide in quiet surprise. Jeremiah just shook his head and skirted past her down the stairs where he sat heavily on the couch and turned on the TV. She followed him.
“What on earth prompted that?” she asked icily. “What’s gotten into you lately?”
“Nothing’s gotten into me,” he snapped. “The kid needs to grow up. Someone around here has to be the bad guy. It might as well be me.”
“Oh, come on. That’s ridiculous. He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s a kid. He’s playing his games. What’s so bad about that? You think he’s the only kid his age who does this?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t care about other kids. We need to have some limits.”