A body, a rock, a towel, a plastic starfish, wet sand on her calves: she catalogues these things slowly.
God, I’m old she thinks to herself as she looks at her hands, pale as the pith of a satsuma. Eighty-seven this year. Still married, by all accounts.
She is waiting. She waits so long that the sun sets, a grey mottling the skies, the sea. Soon, a young man appears by the edge of the beach, his fringe dark and wet.
“Found you,” he says, smiling, as friendly as can be.
◆
She had been prepared, by all accounts, for the first death. He was sick for so long that over time his accumulated items had long lost their function, and their meaning. The mountain bike he used to oil every six months, his collection of photography books, the dozens of shirts with their complicated cuffs and buttons and personalities of starch: all replaced by the dripdripdripdripdrip of morphine. Daily smells had a taint plastic odor. She made far too many morbid jokes in those last days.
A harsh adjustment period followed. Where there had been rigor and schedule, there was now empty space, choice. She began to paint again. She tried meditation. But after a while, she just let that empty space live with her, like a shadow.
Then, one day, when she is cleaning her brushes with sour turpentine, a new shadow arrives. The first Herb clone.
◆
She has tried moving so the Herbs would not find her, but it is futile. They function like AI scent hounds, algorithmized to find her no matter where she is. They show up at midnight; when she’s eating at a restaurant; when she’s visiting a friend; in the bathrooms of doctor’s clinics.
“Do you know what you are?” She had asked one of them, a long time ago.
“Of course,” he replied, “Also, I know I’m supposed to be with you.”
Even in Manila, New Jersey, Shanghai, or just down the street, they find her. She can’t trick the system, so she stops trying.
◆
She thinks she has seen the worst of them, but it is 21-year-old Herb, the first of who arrives after her seventieth birthday, that causes her the most grief. He has no sensitivity, lacks emotional wayfinding, thinks it is okay to leave the house and not return for days without sending word. His seafoam eyes are always open, and he asks her cruel things, like if he she considers him the most physically attractive at this age. He suggests that one day they can go to India, because he has never been, and he wants to see the elephants.
“You’re my wife,” he says, incredulous, lying awake in bed one night. “I can’t believe it.”
“We’ve been married seventy years,” she replies in a whisper, half-asleep. He takes this as a romantic gesture, and clasps her hand to his fine-haired, sunken chest.
She does not say that they have been to India three times. The first time, they go to Jaipur. He was so excited over the elephants that he immediately booked a tour from someone he found on the street, and when they arrived they saw the dirty little hut, the rods and the chains, the elephant lying on the ground, and the rest of the trip they could not erase the image of the mammal’s large, sad eyes. The second time they go, it is a short work trip, and she is left alone in the hotel room for hours on end. The concierge tells her how unsafe it is for a woman to walk alone on the streets. She does not pull the bedcovers over her husband when he returns home and collapses, drunk on too many beers.
The third time, there are no more elephants, no more beers, and they stay in the house of an old friend. The tea, she remembers, is a mourning tea—dark, the temperature of their emotion—and the house itself is so large that it hides their sorrow, their resentment.
◆
21-year-old Herb tugs at her shirt, kisses her on the neck. So sudden is this unexpected eroticism she finds herself glazed with sweat, both anxious and excited. But she is also tired and her bones ache. She pulls away.
“Sorry, am I doing something wrong?” He asks.
She goes to brush her teeth, her gaze lingering on the bright liver spots on her hands. In the bathroom mirror, she sees the reflection of Herb’s body draped over the bed. His muscles expand generously as he breathes.
When you get older, your limbs harden into themselves, she remembers him saying in the hospital bed, just before he died for the first time. You double down on yourself; your bones and everything shrinks.
At least we’re both old, she had laughed then. We get to look at each other’s ugly old faces all day.
In the morning, when 21-year-old Herb showers and then comes out onto the porch, she tries not to notice how he moves like a clone, how each fibre of his hair touches the sun, how his teeth are so soft and straight. The light dries the water on his skin all at once, not in patches. He looks at her curiously.
“Do we have kids?”
◆
There was a period in their lives when he had had issues: a mid-life crisis, depression.
She knew he was going to therapy often, and had difficulty expressing himself. He was always either tense or sleeping. What she didn’t know was that he had also signed up for the Program around the same time and had made duplicates of himself at different ages. Now, she can never predict which one she will get, but it has been emotionally-abusive-45-year-old-Herb one out of three times. Only once did she see 75-year-old Herb again, and he only lasted two weeks.
They spent most of that time sitting on the porch, drinking hot toddies and wrapping themselves in the quilt they had bought somewhere upstate, when they were both in their early twenties and thought 80 dollars was a lot of money. “I thought you wouldn’t want me like this again,” he said. She told him not to talk so much, and he smiled and rested his head on her shoulder. The next day, she woke up and found nothing but mist beside her, the air two degrees cooler where he had been.
◆
Not long after Herb died and the clones started showing up, she had driven all the way to the middle of the country, back when she still had her license, and barged into a Program clinic.
“I’m sorry, it’s out of our hands,” the receptionist said firmly as she threw papers around, sobbed, threatened to sue. “Everything that your husband did with us is legal and we have all the authorized paperwork.”
“But I didn’t see any of it,” she cried. “He didn’t tell me. What is your ethical policy here? Do these people know what they’re doing?” She gestured to the walls of Program posters, the people sitting in the waiting area, the tiny paper water cups. The receptionist did not call security right then, but the blank look in her eyes made it clear she would.
When she got home, emotionally-abusive-45-year-old-Herb was sitting on the couch, waiting.
“Are you making dinner? Or do we have to order in again?”
“I just drove for three hours,” she muttered, wincing as she bent to unlace her shoes. “And I’m 69 years old. Make your own fucking dinner.”
◆
She asked the 75-year-old Herb clone: why?
“I know you don’t like being alone,” he said. “And I love you.”
He told her the 75-year-old one was meant to be a safety, recommended by the clinic, in case the others all died too quickly. He had misread a lot of the fine print. He did not know the clones came randomly, out of order. He could not remember how many he had made.
“I’m sorry honey, this must be so confusing for you,” he said. He had become so compassionate, so kind, in his later years. Especially after her chemo, after the surgeries, after Caroline died. All things 21-year-old Herb had no idea about, and 45-year-old Herb didn’t have the courage to face yet.
◆
Once, Herb asked her after their 30th anniversary if people could change. It’s a clichéd question, I know, he laughed. But what do you think?
I think the fact you’re asking that question means that you can change, she answered.
How did you know I was talking about myself? He said, kissing her on the face. That week, he took five days off work and they stayed in eating leftovers from their party, watching reruns of their favorite shows, and responding to belated congratulatory messages. “Can’t believe it’s been 30 years!” An old friend messaged. “Sorry John and I couldn’t make it. We had to drive Elise up to campus early for pre-orientation. They grow up so fast!”
When she had stared too long at that message on her phone, Herb suggested they take a walk outside. She remembered then how nice that felt: to be guided instead of the one always guiding.
“Come on,” he had said. “It’ll be good to get some fresh air.”
◆
He must have left a note, she had thought at one point when it started happening. She looked everywhere. In all the boxes, in friends’ houses, in the walls of the house.
But there was nothing. Not a brief explanation, not a statement. She would have even settled for a factual “I made ten clones each at age 21, 45, 55, and 60.” At least she could prepare herself. Nobody told her she would have to grieve multiple times, in multiple ways.
The clones are more biologically complex, delicate, and prone to organ failure—especially when under duress. Some die after a few days. Winter is hard for them to adapt to. At first, she had tried to make them comfortable, tried to be the same person she had been before: willing, able, accommodating. When the first 21-year-old clone died, she thought it had been her fault after giving him a cup of water that was too hot. But then she noticed they inevitably ended up in deadly situations. 45-year-old Herb, in particular, was prone to physically imploding when facing any kind of emotional discomfort. Yet he keeps finding everything wrong, keeps fixating on problems when there are none. His guilt starts to eat away at him earlier and earlier. One time, she arrives home from the doctors to find twenty cases of beer blocking the driveway.
◆
Keeping them alive is exhausting. She does it because she feels it is her duty. But if he could change, why can’t she? She thinks about this as she watches the Herbs die, their bodies dissolving into vapor as if there had been nothing there at all.
◆
Emotionally-abusive-45-year-old Herb clone is yelling at her. He is yelling at her in their old house, where she has moved to after trying to escape from him three times. Eventually, she gives in and meticulously replaces all the furniture with their own and arranges all their photographs and books to look almost exactly like it did when they still lived there. She hates herself for this.
She walks to the beach, and he follows and walks behind her, still yelling, now crying too, asking her to forgive him. What happened to Caroline, he keeps saying. That was my fault, wasn’t it?
I already forgave you, she thinks to herself. I’m tired of always being the one giving. When do I get peace?
Someone has left a bucket and a plastic starfish on the beach. She starts to build a sandcastle by herself, while Herb works himself into a heart attack.
She feels guilty that she does not feel guilty at all. He will return, eventually.
In a few hours, the body has disappeared, and 21-year-old Herb arrives and takes her home.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says. “I was washing my hair.”
◆
She swears they are becoming less and less human. Or is it her that is feeling her mortality challenged, after so many years of living with the Herbs?
◆
Why is it that we never see when we are our best selves?
◆
She sees the Program advertised on the bus, on billboards, on her television screen. “Be your best self—for your loved ones!” The wording irks her. She wonders if the tagline has changed recently. She cannot imagine 45-year-old Herb being lured in by this language. But then again, she knew so little of him in those years. This she also blames herself for. If she had listened, had seen how truly lost he was, she could have perhaps predicted how he, after nine pints of beer, thought it reasonable to get behind the wheel of a car at the exact same time their daughter was walking home, alone, in the dark, after having waited a full hour for her father to come and pick her up. How when he woke up in the hospital, he refused for days to believe it had happened, that their daughter had died, and threatened to sue the staff for misinformation. It was always someone else’s fault, until it was his.
◆
Caroline, Caroline, Caroline. The clones say it in their sleep, repeat it with such force that she cannot help but cry alongside them, again. It is one thing that still she has no control over. At least Herb was right, here: no one else could understand this special type of grief. And so, in this, she is not truly alone.
◆
To her surprise, the 21-year-old Herb clone is still alive. Perhaps it is because she has been careless from the beginning; she has grown tired of accommodating their needs, protecting them. When he asks her about children, she tells him they had a daughter, but she died after his car collided with her on the street. She tells him he was terrible in the aftermath and several times she tried to end the marriage. If the clone is curious about how much therapy and time it took to recover, she tells him the exact cost, the number of sessions, the AA meetings, and lifelong follow-ups. She does not hide her mastectomy scars. She does not cook for him or clean his clothes. She puts up the old photographs of their trips to Hawaii, France, India, and when he asks if they can go, she looks at him and laughs.
Only then does she feel slightly cruel as his face crumples. 21-year-old Herb did not ask for this; did not sign up for any of the resentment, the bitterness, the life already lived. He deserves more. But then she looks at him again and remembers he is still just a clone.
◆
It is strange to celebrate their wedding anniversary, but they do so anyway. For 21-year-old Herb, they are celebrating their first anniversary. For her, it is their 71st. She tells him where to buy flowers, shows him how to make ravioli the way he learned after that one summer in Italy. She takes out a bottle of red wine from storage and makes a crass joke that Herb is finally of legal drinking age before immediately remembering his later problem with alcohol. He laughs alongside her, but she ends up feeling awkward—maternal, almost, which only makes her pain more isolating.
After dinner, they look over their wedding photos. “Remember the man at the flower stall? The day we got married?” He asks her. Out of all the things, this she does not recall. “You told him you wanted some expensive roses, and he looked at us like we wouldn’t know what to do with them.”
“Well,” she says. “Maybe he was right. I was sixteen, after all.”
Her high school friend Marcia had been the witness, and they had borrowed—without permission—her father’s Kodak camera to document the signing at city hall. None of them really knew how to use it, and the photographs are blurry. When they look at the decades-old photo album, she can tell that the clone is trying not to reveal how disturbed he is by the yellowed edges, the fact that he is only a year older while the images have aged significantly.
“So beautiful,” he says, his fingers resting on a picture of her in a pinned blue dress, the roses in her hand. She looks at him then, and notices that he is staring very hard at the photo, as if he wants to enter it. In that moment, she sees that he carries his own grief. He has missed her entire life—their entire life—together. Just as she can never have her 75-year-old Herb back, he can never have her 16-year-old self back, will never know this feeling of growing old together, will never make his own mistakes or learn from them.
She touches his shoulder, and he wilts at the contact. As mortal as anyone.
◆
In the middle of the night, she wakes with an idea. She writes it down in a note, then when the sun rises, she goes out for a long, slow walk on the beach. When she gets back, he is waiting at the kitchen counter, coffee already brewed, soft-boiled eggs under a basket of foil. She does not recall any of the other clones being able to make breakfast for her. Herb himself did not do this until he was in his fifties.
“I read your note,” he says. They look at each other, her hand still on the doorknob. She does not realize how tight she has been gripping it until he says yes, okay, and she finally releases, the blood streaming back into her fingers.
◆
He drives her the three hours to the clinic and insists on waiting in the carpark, although his nearby presence makes her nervous. She notices that there is a new receptionist. It has been years since she was last here.
When the Program doctor asks who the clone should attach itself to, she hesitates before giving a name. There is typing on a computer. She waits, skin palpitating. But the doctor does not disagree, does not tell her that this is not possible, does not look at her with the scorn and pity she had imagined in the car ride over.
“What age? And how many?” He asks. “You can only clone a version of yourself in the past, not in the future.”
She gives him the age, signs all the papers, gives them her DNA, and walks back to the car where Herb is waiting anxiously. “Did it work?”
“They don’t know about our plan, if that’s what you mean,” she says. “They think I’m just an old lady looking out for her husband.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m doing this for me,” she replies, looking at the paperwork before stuffing it into her bag. When she glances at him, however, she notices he is smiling a little.
◆
At home, they wait. She has not told him when, and he is scared to ask. She takes her time preparing everything; her will, her money, the house. She asks the clone to clean as if they are expecting a special guest. He takes pleasure, she can tell, in vacuuming the grout lines, fixing table legs, planting new rose bushes. Herb always liked to feel useful.
“You’ll have to find a job,” she says. “We used most of the money joining the Program. And please try to stay alive.”
“You and me both,” he responds, a familiar teasing gleam in his eye. She looks at him, suddenly seeing 75-year-old Herb again, and wonders when she had moved from the desperate, blood-out-of-body kind of grieving into the quieter, heavier kind.
He helps her categorize all of their things, and they donate the clothing and smaller furniture to charity stores. The logical side of her knows they must also remove all traces of Caroline from the house—it would be unfair—but she cannot bear to throw away the Mother’s Day cards, the music certificates, the photo albums. She decides to take them with her, along with the last photograph she has of her and Herb, when he was already in the hospital.
“Okay,” she tells him, finally. It has been a month since she signed the papers. “I’m ready.”
◆
When she had woken up that night, the plan had not been transparent. She had simply realized that she no longer felt the desire to stay, to do more. Herb, the original Herb, had been dead for almost 20 years now; they had no grandchildren, no longer relatives. All her friends were gone.
But she also could not leave 21-year-old Herb alone, prematurely widowed. She had wondered, briefly, if it would be moral to kill him, and how she, an 87-year-old woman, could do it. They had been living together for over a year now, and it seemed that every day he was gaining in strength, in resilience. When she happened upon the alternative option, she had brushed it aside at first, but then she kept returning to it in the dark. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. What if they could start over? What if her and Herb could do it all again, in a different timeline? In mist-formed bodies that longed to be visible, that longed to live?
◆
Alone now, at the beach, she worries about 21-year-old Herb, wonders how he will cope while he waits. The doctor had told her the 17-year-old clone could take up to five days to arrive after her death. It’s strange, she thinks, how in the end he did give her something. When they had looked together at that photograph of her in the blue dress, he had shown her what loneliness was. What she had was not that. What she had was a bag of photographs, of memories, on her back, and her unending grief, her love, was testament that she had not been, and would never be, alone.
“I only wish you could have been here,” she says now to long-gone Herb, to Caroline.
The water is cold, the waves slippery and full, but she does not mind. As she melts into the sea with her bag of memories, she thinks of her daughter, she thinks of Herb, and how it feels so pleasant, so painful, this sharpness, the fullness and emptiness, the tide and the sand.