“Well, if they’re throwing me out, then why wait?”
“No one is throwing you out, Mom. Will you just stop for a minute and listen to me?”
“You’re working with them,” she said, a small, sardonic laugh escaping her lips. “You’re not fooling me. You think I don’t know. But I see everything.”
An exasperated sigh escaped the clone’s lips just as Jeremiah sighed in exactly the same manner in the lab. Brent typed something into his laptop.
“I think you’re imagining things. No one is working against you, Mom. We’re all just trying to help.”
“Do you take me for a fool?” she asked. “They’ve been stealing my things. Putting drugs in my food. And now you tell me I have to leave. I say good riddance! I’ll leave right now. The sooner, the better. It’s not safe here.”
“Just slow down, Mom,” the clone said, moving toward her and taking a balled-up blouse from her hands. “No one is trying to hurt you. No one is putting anything in your food. This is foolishness.”
The clone led her by the shoulder and eased her to the edge of the bed. She looked away from him and shook her head.
“Foolishness,” she said. “That’s what you’d like me to believe. But I know what’s going on.” As if to illustrate that point, she poked a bony finger at her temple and repeated it. “I know what’s going on.”
“This is what I’m talking about,” the clone said carefully, and he sat down beside her on the bed. “You aren’t thinking clearly. This is why you have to move. You need to be in a place where they can handle these things. Somewhere they can take care of you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“No, Mom,” he said. “You can’t.”
“I need to talk to my son,” she said. The clone stopped and stiffened slightly. Jeremiah could see the muscles of his back tense up and the sight mirrored what he felt in his own body. “He’ll know what to do about this. Just go and call my son.”
“I am your son, Mom,” the clone said. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Jeremiah. It’s me.”
She looked at the clone for a long moment, as though trying to decipher something in the face.
“You can’t fool me,” she said at last. “You think I’m crazy? You’re not my son. I don’t know you. I think I’d know my own son.” She got up off the bed then and went back to stuffing articles of clothing, one at a time, into the suitcase.
“Mom,” the clone said, and left it at that.
In the lab, Jeremiah closed his eyes and said nothing. Brent was typing again.
“What the hell are you writing? Knock it off, Brent.”
“Did you hear what she just said?”
“She’s got dementia, for Christ’s sake! She doesn’t mean that!”
“I have to put it in there,” he said. “It kind of jumps out.”
Jeremiah turned back to the screen and watched as his double sat like stone while his mother moved back and forth again between the closet and the bed.
Jeremiah could barely move, either. In all the time since her memory had first begun to falter, there had never been a moment when his mother hadn’t known him. It was brutally upsetting. And in that moment, Jeremiah knew his clone was grappling with the same substantial shock. In a strange way, he had never felt more connected to the man on the screen.
“I’ll be back, Mom,” the clone said. “I need to speak to someone in the office and then we can talk about this more.”
A few minutes later, the clone was seated in Dr. Waterson’s office, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, holding his chin in his hands.
“I think we’d better go ahead and use the Meld on my mother,” he said. “She’s getting worse. Do you know, just now, she didn’t even recognize me? She had absolutely no idea who I was.”
Dr. Waterson blinked and stared at the clone for a brief moment.
“Mr. Adams,” he said, “your mother and I already took the Meld. Last night, in fact.”
“So, you know that the dementia has progressed,” the clone said.
“Actually, Mr. Adams, I’m not certain now that we’re dealing with dementia at all.”
“What do you mean?” the clone asked.
“What the hell is he talking about?” Jeremiah asked no one in particular.
“No,” Waterson said. “There are memory issues, certainly, that much we knew. But they are not consistent with what we typically see in dementia. They aren’t impacting the same areas of the brain. In fact, some of those areas actually seem somewhat improved, I think. Her short-term memory, for example, is fine. We may be looking at something altogether different.”
“What do you mean? Different, how?”
“You must remember, I am not a psychiatric doctor, Mr. Adams. I am not the right person to diagnose anything, but I have been trained in the use of Meld. I know what to look for. I saw clear evidence of mild depression, some definite paranoia and perhaps even schizophrenic disorder. We’ll need a brain scan to be absolutely certain, but the synaptic activity I sensed seemed well above what we’d expect in dementia. I actually feel her memory is fairly sound, under the circumstances.”
“How can this be possible?” the clone asked. “You’ve been talking about the onset of her dementia for a year now.”
“This guy is cracked,” Jeremiah said. Brent started typing again.
“If I’m not mistaken,” Waterson said, “there is a family history of schizophrenia, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” the clone told him. “My uncle. Her brother. But she’s never shown any signs of that.”
“It’s not completely out of the question, though. These episodes of hers, the things I saw with the Meld, it may point to a latent tendency toward schizophrenia. Earlier signs of the disorder might have been missed for all we know.”
“I just never thought it would touch her,” the clone said. “I thought that, after all this
