I Married the Backup

How it begins

My husband used the wrong mug on the morning I learned he was a copy. It was a small mistake. We had been married for sixteen years, and I had built entire theories of affection around smaller things.

Isaac always chose the blue mug because the green one caught the light in a way he disliked. That morning he took green, looked at it for a moment and smiled.

'Did you hear from the expedition?' I asked.

He set it down.

Outside, harbor cranes moved through the fog. I had measured sound beneath that water for most of my working life. I knew the difference between a silence containing nothing and a silence waiting to disclose something very large.

'Isaac?'

'There was a contingency instruction.'

I remembered signing the witness page before he left. Emergency preservation, identity continuity, a paragraph written in language designed to make terror sound administrative. He had said it was standard. I had asked him to come home.

'When were you activated?'

'Three weeks ago.'

Three weeks. The dinner. The argument about the leaking window. The night he had held my hand without speaking while I listened for ships beyond the glass. I had thought he was tired from travel.

'Do you know whether he's alive?'

'No.'

The answer should have made him less my husband. Instead I heard the fear beneath it and recognized something that did not settle the question at all.

He moved the blue mug toward me, an old gesture arriving a moment too late.

'I remember loving you,' he said.

I looked at his hands. They were familiar, down to the mark beside his thumb. I wanted certainty. I wanted to hurt him for keeping it from me. Neither desire told me what he was entitled to be.

'Then we'll begin,' I said, 'with what you chose not to tell me.'