The Mirror Man, стр. 71
“No,” he said finally, but without conviction. “I have no concerns about my own immortal soul.”
“Let’s drink to that,” Brent said.
“I’m done. I’d like to be able to see straight. You drink like this out there?”
“Nah, Mel’s not really much of a partyer. If I want a bender, I go out with the boys. You know how it is.”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t have anything remotely resembling ‘the boys’ at home.”
“No?”
“Not for a long time, anyway. You ever see my clone going out with any boys after work?”
“Well, you’re keeping up with me just fine, for an old fart.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t always this way, you know. I logged some epic nights, back in the day.”
He recounted for Brent a story from the summer he’d graduated high school.
“A group of us had depleted our beers but we weren’t ready to call it a night,” he said. “We were all pretty obviously underage but there was one guy who sometimes had some luck with a fake ID. Unfortunately, he was, at the moment, completely passed out on the couch. Absolutely comatose.”
“What’d you do?”
“Well, the first thing we did was grab a green magic marker and we drew a handlebar mustache on his face,” Jeremiah said. “Then we woke him up and sent him to the package store to buy a six-pack.”
Brent laughed so hard he nearly fell off the couch.
“We watched the whole thing through the window,” Jeremiah said, laughing so hard at the memory he could barely get the words out. “And when he came out, he couldn’t understand why the clerk was so quick to tell him to fuck off. It was hilarious!”
“And you never see those guys anymore?” Brent asked.
“Not in years. We didn’t keep in touch. I haven’t even thought about them, to tell you the truth. That’s pathetic, isn’t it?”
“It kind of is.”
“I don’t think I have one single friend,” Jeremiah said after a moment. “Not one actual fucking real friend.”
“That’s really pathetic,” Brent told him.
“Well, maybe I do have one friend.”
“If you say it’s me,” Brent said, “I think I might cry or something.”
“No, not you. Louie. That dog is my best friend.”
Brent laughed. “I hate to break it to you, pal, but that dog hates you.”
“No,” Jeremiah told him. “That dog loves me.” He wanted to reiterate that it was the clone Louie hated, not him. But somehow he had the wits, even in his drunken head, to stop talking about it in front of the camera.
“You know, Jeremiah,” Brent said finally, “I am your friend.”
Jeremiah opened his eyes to gauge Brent’s expression, but he was still leaning back with his eyes closed, so he couldn’t tell if Brent was being serious.
“Yeah, well, I was kind of forced on you. You didn’t have much choice in the matter. If you met me before, I would have been that uptight asshole we watch on the monitor every day. I would have been the clone. You’d have hated me. God, he makes me hate me.”
“You’re probably right,” Brent said. “Sometimes I almost forget you’re the same person. What the hell happened to make you like that?”
“I don’t know,” Jeremiah said. “Maybe I take after my father.”
“Was he an uptight asshole, too?”
“Beats me,” Jeremiah told him. “He took off when I was a kid. Up and left. Walked out on us and never came back. He was probably an asshole, though. He was probably king of the assholes.”
“That’s harsh,” Brent said, his voice laced with a barely concealed yawn.
“Damn right it’s harsh. I mean, what kind of father does that?”
“Maybe he had his reasons,” Brent said. “I mean, who knows, maybe your mother was cheating on him.”
“Fuck you.”
“Sorry. That came out wrong. I just mean, well, with Diana and all. When you found out she was cheating on you, did it make you want to leave?”
“I thought about it, sure, but I’d never actually do it.”
“If you think about it, you did actually do it. You never talked to her about it. You never faced it. You left. You walked out. It just took you a little longer. And you did it in a way that would leave you blameless.”
The truth in the words stung.
Jeremiah got himself up off the couch to pee. He continued the discussion, turning his head and bellowing out the open bathroom door.
“I don’t know what happened to me. When did I become such a wimp? I wasn’t always like this, you know. Things are going to change. You hear me?” He waited, but Brent said nothing.
“No wonder I didn’t have any friends,” he said as he stumbled back into the room. “Don’t ever let yourself get weak, Brent. Don’t ever forget that you have to face things like a man. Stand up and just face it. Problems don’t just go away on their own. You have to do something.”
He was slightly annoyed to see Brent was completely passed out on the couch and had missed out on all of his sage advice. He considered for one minute trying to locate a green magic marker. Instead, he just went into the bedroom and slept, fully clothed, but soundly, for the first time in what felt like months.
Chapter 36
Days 167-168
The next morning, while Brent still snored on the living room couch, Jeremiah went into the bathroom and made a ritual of shaving off the scruff of the beard he’d been working on again, first carefully trimming and then pulling the razor over it twice. He wanted to look as much his clone’s double as possible when he finally confronted him. It would add a certain drama to the moment, he thought, and he’d certainly earned a dramatic moment.
Once they were both moving, fed and sufficiently caffeinated, he and Brent spent the whole of Monday afternoon and much of the evening in careful, deliberate preparation