“If that’s true, then you need to tell me that when I ask those questions.” Brent looked suddenly deadly serious. “That’s important.”

“I don’t mean that he’s doing anything unexpected,” Jeremiah said. “I don’t mean I actually would have done anything differently. I guess I just mean that I wish I could. I wish I had the chance. He is doing everything exactly as I would have done it. But maybe I’ve changed. I think the clone is incapable of that. I think he can only work with what he got from me at that point, at that exact point in time. That’s all he’ll ever have. He can’t change. Maybe he’s stagnant. But I’m not. And I’m different now.”

Brent eyed him with measured attention, which made Jeremiah instantly uncomfortable. He wasn’t certain, after all, how much he could actually trust Brent. Charles Scott still signed his paychecks.

“I don’t know,” he told Brent. “I’m not thinking clearly. I think I’m just tired.”

He’d been living with these feelings for a while, wondering how it was possible to watch his own replica and not like him. Every day, as the viewing was set to begin, Jeremiah would feel his stomach tighten and his face harden into an expression of contempt, which he found more and more difficult to conceal. He watched with gritted teeth as his double wormed his way around his day, never fully engaging in anything, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his awkward insecurity came across as unwarranted conceit. In every conversation, he was only marginally there, only as much as he needed to be, never vested, and answering questions with abrupt predictability. He never pursued anything from anyone around him. Never initiated a discussion himself. He never asked a question or wondered out loud. At home, too, he seemed stuck on the edges, just halfway in. He wouldn’t attempt any honest connection with either Diana or Parker and he all but pushed them away if they ever tried it with him.

“Can we go to a movie tonight, Dad?” Parker asked once. “We haven’t been to a movie in ages.”

“Anything you could possibly want to see ends up on TV for free in two months, anyway,” the clone told him. “Nobody goes to the movies anymore.” Jeremiah had been livid at that. It was a missed opportunity and he wanted to jump inside the wall and throttle that clone. He was an idiot.

Was he expecting too much of his double? Despite fleeting moments of a kind of empathy for the clone, he knew the thing on the wall wasn’t really human. How, he reasoned, could something so unnatural even be expected to live and engage? He might walk and talk and breathe, but there had to be something missing from the clone, some elemental spark, some God particle, some essence. A soul?

Thoughts like that didn’t typically clutter Jeremiah’s mind and the fact that he thought about them now shocked him slightly. He had no unshakable faith in anything higher than the sky, but watching that clone haunt his own world, day in and day out, made him question things he’d never considered. It had begun to interfere with his sleep.