“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.
When the monitor switched on, the clone was at his desk with his office door closed, his head bent over a short stack of pages. The muffled voices of his coworkers could be heard in the hallway, just outside. Brenda’s voice rose above the din for a moment as she counted down the group to an uncomfortable delivery of “Happy Birthday” to someone called Tom. No one’s birthday escaped Brenda’s calendar. Nor their employment anniversary, promotion, new baby or impending retirement. She oversaw a collection schedule for the coffer and was on a first-name basis with a local bakery. Jeremiah had suffered through the ritual seven times himself. He’d smile and nod through the serenade and eat cake with a plastic spoon until, one by one, everyone figured out how to make a graceful escape back to their desks. When he could manage it, he tried to skip out on the gatherings for everyone else. It wasn’t always an easy feat. On more than one occasion, he’d actually hidden in the bathroom.
Jeremiah watched the clone with a certain empathy and cringed when he heard Brenda’s cheery rapping on his closed door. He almost laughed when he saw his double snatch the telephone receiver and hold it up to his ear. When Brenda poked her head in, he covered the mouthpiece with one hand and offered her a shrug of his shoulders and an apologetic expression. “Sorry,” he mouthed. She nodded and ducked back out, closing the door behind her, and the clone slipped the phone back onto its cradle with a quick sigh of relief.
“You don’t like cake or something?” Brent asked Jeremiah.
“It’s the middle of the workday. Those things are a nuisance. One week there were three cakes in two days. He’s got work to do. Can’t blame him.”
“Yeah, right, fake phone calls are so important. God, what a hard-ass.” Brent chuckled. “It’s cake. Loosen up a little, man.”
A half hour later, when the coast was clear, they watched the clone slink out into the hallway and over to Brenda’s desk. She smiled at him and handed over a paper plate with a lopsided slice of chocolate cake on it.
“I saved you some,” she said.
“Thanks. I couldn’t get away. Sorry about that. I’ll be sure to stop by his desk when I get a chance. Tom, right?”
“Tom. Not the editing Tom, the one in Accounting.”
“Got it.”
“Oh, Mr. Adams,” she said as the clone turned away, “while I have you here, I need to leave a little early on Friday, if that’s all right.”
“Sure,” the clone told her, and attempted to walk away. She came out from behind her desk and moved in next to him, brandishing her cell phone in one hand.
“My niece is coming in for the weekend,” she told him, scrolling through her phone and then showing him a photo of a skinny, smiling teenage blonde. “She’s visiting colleges. Can you believe it? They grow up quick, don’t they?”
Jeremiah watched the clone smile lamely and
