Machine Man (24 page)

Then bargaining. Quieter.
Just let the battery be all right. Please let the battery be functional
. Fourth, depression.
They’re dead. I’m dead
. This is a kind of wallowing. A shutdown. The final stage is acceptance. I include no example because I was a long, long way from acceptance.

ON THE
fourth day Lola entered my room. Until then she had been leaving trays of food outside. I learned to wait until her footsteps receded, pull myself to the door, and drag in the food before the dogs descended.

But this day she opened the door. She wore a green blouse and an air of quiet misery. I was on the carpet, surrounded by my parts. Parts of my parts. I had disassembled them and arranged the pieces in concentric circles. It looked as if I had suffered the world’s neatest explosion. Which I had. What had come out of Lola had killed no one, disturbed nothing, hurt no body but mine.

“I think …” she said.

These disassembled components, they didn’t mean I was fixing them. I had taken the Contours apart because I couldn’t think of anything else. I was trying to break my problem down until I reached something fixable. That was how you solved anything: you divided it.

Lola said, “I think it’s unfair to act like this is my fault.”

“It’s not your fault.” I did not look at her as I said this because I did not really believe it.

“They put it in me.” She took a step forward and her foot landed beside a three-foot-long section of titanium that had once controlled plane stabilization. My issue was so many sections were machine-welded. I couldn’t open them with domestic tools. “They put that thing in my chest and didn’t even
tell
me.”

I almost didn’t say it. “You could have calmed down.”

“I could have calmed down.”

“Yes.”

“Charlie. I
tried.
”

I picked up a radial bolt. I wasn’t sure where this had
come from. I had made notes, in the beginning. I should have kept that up.

“My heart wouldn’t slow down. It—”

“People are very selective about their bodies,” I told the bolt. “Anytime their bodies do something good, they claim it. They say
I
did this. But something goes wrong, it’s not
I
anymore. It’s a problem with their foot. Their skin. Suddenly it’s not them anymore. It’s the body they’re stuck in.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing.” I rolled the bolt around in my hand. “I’m just making an observation.”

Silence. The door closed with a
click
.

I FOUND
a skateboard beneath the bed and heaved myself onto it. With one functional hand and one half-useless one I could wobble along at extremely low speed. It was difficult and degrading but I could do it. When I was sure nobody was around I opened the door and edged into the corridor. Halfway to the bathroom a dog trotted up and sat on the tiles. I knew it couldn’t have helped me if it wanted to but it still felt rude. I dragged myself into the bathroom and shut the door. My breathing was harsh and ragged. I had become incredibly unfit. I put my half-hand on the toilet seat and my full hand (my
good
hand, now) on the nearby bench and strained. The muscles in my arm trembled like frightened girls. I flopped over the toilet seat and my lips kissed porcelain and I didn’t care because at least it was progress. I wrestled myself upright. As I began to urinate I felt proud.

When I emerged, three dogs were sitting on the floor outside. They didn’t look scared or curious. They were just there. “Shoo.” I pretended to lunge at them. One stood, looked at the other two, and sat down again, as if faintly embarrassed.
They were communicating telepathically. As individuals they were stupid but together they formed a single intelligence. A pack mind. And it was planning something. It was gathering observational data for later use. As I rolled toward my bedroom, I felt Dog’s many eyes burning into my back.

I TALKED
to my parts as I worked. For example, I would pick up a mirror plate and say, “And what’s your problem?” Or, when contemplating a radiation shield: “You need an arc welder. That’s what you need.” They didn’t answer. I wasn’t crazy. It was just a way to focus. But sometimes I heard footsteps outside the door and realized this might not be obvious to anyone else.

I regretted what I’d said to Lola. I told the Contours that. “She tried to calm down.” This was late one night, after a frustrating few hours prying apart transistors. “She didn’t want you to die.” Then I wrapped my arms around my chest and cried, because I was really tired.

The next day, I decided to apologize. I would make things right. I didn’t want to wallow here, a filthy, stinking, grieving thing, dragging itself around. I didn’t want to make Lola sad. Then I sat up and parts of the Contours fell everywhere. I had slept with them to stave off phantom pain. Don’t ask me why that worked. It just did. I thought,
I’ll just fix one thing
. If I could do that, take one step toward restoring functionality, the Contours wouldn’t be dead. They would only be temporarily disabled.

So I crawled off the bed and began hunting for one fixable thing. But I couldn’t find it. Weeks passed.

I HAD
an epiphany. I was on my stomach, straining to reach some titanium pieces that had somehow wound up under
the bed, and thought,
These are just metal
. I guess that doesn’t sound very revelatory. But it was. I stared at these pieces, which had once been the core of my fingers, and they didn’t look like part of me.

I sat up. I would never put the Contours back together: I knew that now. Previously, this had been a paralyzing fear, but I mostly felt relief. Part of me still wanted to fix them, to try one more time, but it was a small, receding part. I looked down and thought,
I’m a mess
.

I had damaged Lola. Maybe she had left. Someone was bringing me food and listening outside the door, but that could have been Dr. Angelica. I pulled open the door. Fresh air hit me like a slap. A piece of paper lay in the corridor: a clipping from a trade supplies catalog. It was an advertisement for an arc welder. On it was Lola’s handwriting:
For you, in the garage
.

I was still there when she appeared at the top of the corridor. “Oh,” she said. “You … well, I heard you needed one. It took me a while to get.” She shifted from one foot to the other. “I hope it’s the right kind.”

I croaked: a low, pathetic sound. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Lola said. “It’s okay, Charlie.”

AS I
entered the bath, a film of grease peeled away from my skin, forming a swirling Mandelbrot slick. I was the center of a galaxy of sweat and dissolving dirt. I hadn’t realized how badly I stank. You could get used to anything. Your brain complained only about change.

Lola began to wash me. I could not really believe the lack of vindictiveness. I hadn’t known this about love: that you did not need to deserve it. I thought there was a set of criteria, like a good sense of humor and looks and wealth. You could compensate deficiencies in one area with excellence
in another, hence rich, ugly men with beautiful wives. But there was an algorithm involved. That was why I thought I was unloved: I didn’t score highly enough. I had made some attempts to improve my score and also told myself I didn’t care because if that was what women wanted, something fake and temporary, I would rather be alone. And sometimes I was just lazy and would rather code things. But here I was soaking in a bath of my own filth with Lola scrubbing my shoulders, and what algorithm could explain that? That problem was nonhalting.

Lola left and came back with a set of prosthetic legs, like the day we’d first met. She rested them against the wall. “Now, these are nothing special …” They had crutchlike poles and plastic buckets. They were prosthetics for war veterans abandoned by their government. “They were all Angelica could get without arousing suspicion.”

“Oh,” I said.

“They’re basic, I know. They’re not like … they’re really basic. But they’re something.”

“Thanks.”

She smiled. “Want to try them on?”

The straps were frayed and worn, dark in patches. A lot of amputated thighs had sweated into these. The sockets were loose in some places and strangling tight in others. When I slid the plastic around my thighs, my tissue wailed. I was used to nanoneedles, not gross pressure. It felt like fitting a glove onto my eyeball. I belted the strap around my hips. I slung an arm over Lola’s shoulder and she helped lever me upright. I couldn’t sit in the sockets, like the Contours: I had to move them, as if they were stilts. They were stilts. I took a step, hanging off Lola, and sideswiped the wall with a rubber toe, leaving a black mark. “That’s okay,” she said. “Keep trying.” The sockets were filling with blood, I was sure.

By the fourth step I noticed my body liked it. My thighs
didn’t like it. My thighs hated me. But my brain was feeding me endorphins, pleased to be moving.
This is what you’re supposed to do
. My brain was not an intellectual. It took pleasure in simple things like long walks and hard work. Maybe it had a point. It was probably just the endorphins, but suddenly it seemed possible to live like this. Perhaps Lola and I could build anonymous lives in some tiny Canadian snow town. Lola could bake pies. I could grow vegetables. I would be the man with no legs and the half-hand who was a scientist once. The townspeople would find me aloof but grow to respect me. They would call me Doc.

Lola lowered me to the toilet seat. “That was awesome, Charlie. That was an insanely good first effort.” She reached for a buckle.

“Again.”

Her eyebrows jumped. “Are you sure?” She clapped her hands. “That’s the spirit, Charlie! That’s the spirit!”

NIGHT FELL
. I won’t recount the whole sweating, groaning ordeal. I’ll just say it was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. I speak as someone who crushed his legs in an industrial clamp. The problem was I went to bed with no parts. It was just me and Lola curled inside my arm and this seemed doable with the lights on, but as soon as silence fell, I knew it was a mistake. I lay there staring at the ceiling. I felt a crawling. Not painful. But there.

I tried to ride it out. I thought about other things, like whether Carl would find me, and what he might do if he did. The crawling escalated to pangs. I twitched and Lola’s head came up. Her eyes glittered in the darkness. “It’s okay,” I said, but I wanted her to know I was lying.

“Do you want to put your legs on?”

I shook my head. I chewed my teeth. At midnight we switched on the light and strapped me into the war veteran legs. The relief was immediate. I massaged their stark poles with shaking fingers and felt invisible muscles loosening. Lola snuggled into me. I closed my eyes.

I woke screaming. My legs were inflating, stretching. My thighs were on fire. It was unlike anything I had ever felt. Lola scrambled for the light. I grabbed at the poles, willing my brain to realize they were there. But that wasn’t the problem. I knew it immediately. It wasn’t that I didn’t have legs. It was that I didn’t have Contours. My baseline had changed. I needed my
real
artificial legs.

“I’ll get the nerve interface mat,” said Lola.

“No,” I whimpered. “Not yet.”

MORNING WAS
better. Lola padded off to the shower, clad in a borrowed T-shirt that said
DINO-ROAR!
I tried walking in the war veteran legs by myself. I staggered into the corridor, taking huge, toddlerlike steps, bouncing off the walls. There were no dogs around. I should have noticed that.

“He
has.
” It was Lola. She had detoured to the living room for some reason. “You’ll see.”

“You bought him a frickin’ welder. You’re enabling him!” Dr. Angelica, of course. “I swear to God, Lola! This ends with you in pieces.”

“He’s trying. You’ll see.”

“Trying to get to the garage, I bet.”

“He’s using those, those
stupid
legs. He’s changed.”

“He hasn’t. They never do.”

I formed a smug little plan. I would totter out there on my pole legs. Dr. Angelica would be surprised. Lola would glance at her like
See?
And I would be all
What?

I got one pole in front of the other. As I reached the end
of the corridor, I attained balance and entered the living room walking, actually walking, albeit stiff-backed and goggle-eyed, like a zombie. Lola and Dr. Angelica turned. It was perfect. Then I stepped on a dog.

“Biggles!”

I had never heard a more piercing sound, and I’ve worked in metals fabrication. Dr. Angelica rushed at me, her fingers hooked into claws. I looked down and saw a dog, Biggles, I guess, trapped under the rubber toe of the pole. Mostly it seemed to be Biggles’s blue vest, but he was making a hell of a noise, so maybe some of Biggles was there, too. I tried to raise my leg but snagged on his coat. Then I was off balance and could do nothing but pivot. Dr. Angelica’s shriek reached a new pitch of outrage. It possibly looked like I was grinding on the dog. She banged into me with her shoulder and I hit the floor in a tangle of poles. When I levered myself up, Dr. Angelica was cradling Biggles in her arms. Biggles licked her face, whimpering.

I realized they had planned this. Dog, the pack mind, had sent Biggles to throw himself under my poles. He was a suicide bomber. I looked around for the furry faces I knew would be watching from a dark doorway somewhere. “It’s a setup.” In retrospect, I should have kept this theory to myself. “Biggles did it on purpose.”

Dr. Angelica hit me. You would think a surgeon would be careful about using her hands as blunt instruments. But she let me have it. Her nails raked my cheek. On all sides came yapping and shrieking. Dogs streamed out of the walls. Biggles bit my finger.
“Get out!”
Dr. Angelica screamed.
“Get out you asshole you asshole get out!”

“Stop hitting him!” said Lola. The dogs’ yowling melded with Dr. Angelica’s enraged screams and Lola’s shrieks until I couldn’t tell one from another. At Better Future I once attended a demonstration of sonics-based nonlethal
weaponry and what came out of that gun did not sound as bad as this. I wrapped my arms around my head. Pain exploded in my kidney. I looked up. Dr. Angelica had kicked me. She stared down and in this moment I was glad she did not have a scalpel. Lola grabbed a fistful of hair. Dr. Angelica shrieked. She swung a looping punch at Lola and Lola ducked and they stood a few feet apart, shocked at each other, or themselves. Dr. Angelica clutched Biggles tight and ran out of the room. A train of little dogs trotted after her. One looked back at me before he disappeared and I sensed him gloating. The bedroom door slammed.