Chapter #8Duplicate your family by: Seuzz   "Hey Johnson, can I get your help moving something?" you say over the back fence. He gives you a curt but friendly nod and follows you around the fence and into the garage. "If you could just lift that end up," you say, pointing to a heavy box. "I need to slide something under it." As he bends over, you pick up the tire iron you've positioned nearby, and give him a hard blow to the back of the head.
* * * * *
"Dad needs us over at Mark's for a moment," you say, sticking your head into Joanna's room. She looks up from texting on her cell phone, which she has been concentrating on.
"In a minute," she mutters. You wait patiently until she's done, then lead her outside and over to Mark's house. Your father-duplicate, wet from a cleansing shower and clad only in a pair of Mark's shorts, is standing in the kitchen, sucking down some beer and shoving pretzels in his mouth.
"Where's your clothes," Joanna asks bluntly.
"We're doing manual labor down in the basement," he replies. "I need you girls to hold something while Mark and I move something else." You follow as he leads you and your sister down the steps. Joanna recoils at the sight of the mother pod, but you've already shifted into your father, and you seize and drag her, yelling, toward it. There's another roar as she disappears into its depths. "Better fetch some clothes from her closet," you tell Mary, but she's already on her way.
* * * * *
"Honestly, why your father needs beer just to help Mark move something ..." you mother growls plaintively. "Joanna, can you run these over there for me?" She's got a couple of bottles out of the fridge.
"Sorry, I told Belinda I'd call her right back," you shout over your shoulder as you scamper through and up the stairs.
"Joanna!" Your mother calls. But she doesn't follow.
* * * * *
It's a silent family conclave as your father and mother and two sisters stand in the basement and regard the thing that was once your body. Under cover of darkness, Mark Taylor and John Johnson had bundled it into a wheelbarrow and carried it over. Mark is standing beside them.
"I'm sorry for your loss," you say through him, then you shift into your father.
"You did your best to make it right," you reply. "At least we're all together under a common roof again."
Your mother pretends to sniffle. Then five bodies kneel around the mother pod, and vomit nourishing sludge into its heaving mass.
* * * * *
And yet for the all the strangeness, life continues for the Johnson family much the way as it has. Oh, there are eerie silences at the breakfast and dinner tables, and it's not unusual to come around a corner and find one of your duplicates standing very still and staring into nothingness, as though deeply preoccupied. (But they don't really have thoughts, and in those moments they are as empty on the inside as they are on the outside; they've just gotten stuck in a spot where there are no habits or stimulations to carry into a new pretense.) These odd moments don't really matter, but as you become more comfortable with having this fake family around, you start goosing them and keeping them active and in character. On Sunday afternoon—the second full day after replacing your family with its new members—you concentrate on playing the part of father. Mary, on her own intiative, has gone to the college to study and see friends, but you goad and prod an otherwise lazy Joanna into doing chores, until, like the teenage girl she has replaced, she is irritable, sarcastic, and eager to escape. After giving her a stern lecture about her attitude problem (which she rolls her eyes at) you let her go off to visit Sarah Pak. That done, you lead your wife by the hand up into the bedroom, where you strip and give her a long, hard, and mutually satisfying fuck.
* * * * *
"Your sister's really lucky to have a guy like Shawn," you say casually.
Sarah makes a face. "You want him? I'd give him to you if I could."
You look at her in surprise. "Don't you like Shawn?"
She shrugs. "He's okay, for what he is."
"What's that?"
"A jock."
"I guess I kind of figured that's what made her lucky. There aren't that many of them. I mean, like star players on the basketball team."
"He could be worse than he is," Sarah admits. She pauses. "I liked your brother better. I mean, his type."
You let your gaze drift over to the window. In the distance, you can sense your mother and father duplicates getting horny again, but you already had your fun there. There's school tomorrow, and though you haven't any "plans," you've given some thought to what the future holds.
Or, rather, you've given some thought to giving some thought to what the future holds. It would be easy enough to just let your duplicates carry on as before, carried along by inertia and habit. And yet, in just the past two days, you've seen how far you can't really trust that. There's the danger of entropy taking hold. This morning, for instance, you caught your mother duplicate standing in the dirty kitchen and regarding it with a kind of bemused indifference where, normally, she would have been conscientiously scrubbing and cleaning and putting food away. And so you'd had to jump into her and put her to work; it was the same kind of need for focus that made you put Joanna and your father to work as well. It's true that, really, you only need your "family" to protect and feed your mother pod, but the need for that extends to keeping them acting like they are normal. If you let them drift and follow the path of least resistance, they might just start sitting around and doing nothing.
So, you've decided you need to give them some stimulation. Mark and your dad have jobs; Mary's got a boyfriend and college. Your mother—a housewife—will probably the most difficult to keep busy, and you'll likely have to spend a lot of time steering her and keeping her busy. Joanna? Well, she's got school too, which should keep her occupied. And yet ...
"Do you like his brother?"
"Robert?" Sarah blanches a little. "Talk about sibling issues."
"What do you mean?"
"Isn't it obvious? He's jealous of Shawn, so he has to try being the bigger jock and jerk."
"I guess." Yeah, Robert is obnoxious. But mixing Joanna up with him would be a way of keeping her off-balance and active.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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