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Beth. They shake hands.
Beth spends the rest of her lunch walking the Black Pitch. It’s what the school unofficially calls the main playground: a patchwork of tarmacs, laid at different times to cover holes and cracks that could prove near-fatal, then covered with a thick coat of gravel from end to end. The noise of the children’s shoes on the gravel is ever present: a scraping, thin and frantic. The pitch needs to be watched at all times. It’s a rare lunch hour that one of the kids doesn’t fall and hurt themselves. Beth walks around it by herself, because when it rains like this, the pitch is empty: none of the kids want to brave it. They hang around the grassy fields or the slick tarmac at the back of the art block, under whatever cover and overhangs they can find. She can’t hear anything over the sound of the rain on her umbrella. It’s quite peaceful, she thinks, watching the water hit the gravel as it does, almost nudging it around to make immediate puddles. It’s relaxing. As the break comes to a close she stands in the central doorway to the Black Pitch and waves the children in. They’re all drenched, which is a hazard. The school used to trap them inside when it rained, to stop any chance of them getting sick. The kids used to be more trouble than that was worth. Now they get drenched, and they ride through the final two lessons of the day in damp clothes. They’re always too exhausted to cause any trouble at least, those afternoons.
When they’re all inside Beth still stands there, in the door frame. She loves the smell.
Petrichor, says Laura from behind her. That’s what you call the smell of rain on hot ground.
Thanks, Beth says. Good word.
No problem.
Did they go all right? Beth asks, catching her just as she’s off to her next class.
The bell rings over her reply, which she repeats. They went fine, yeah. Better bunch of kids than in many places.
Beth thinks that might be a compliment. Her class, a year-seven one, doesn’t listen to her telling them about some semi-tragic novel where an Inuit child befriends a husky that saves its life and, tragically, inevitably, dies.
7 (#u5e222e83-e52f-5a8c-b77f-86de843d54d9)
Beth can’t sleep because of the rain. It’s so heavy that it sounds unholy: the windows shaking, the beating of it against the ground outside. Looking down from her bedroom window to the Grasslands she can see that they’ve become a slop, as the run-off from the hard ground has caused the water to accumulate there. It’s puddled around the base of the building – she can lean down and see it, like a trench, and there are things floating in it but she can’t see what they are from here, bobbing like dark rotting buoys – because the ground is too hard to take it in. It’s easier to watch it than to sleep, so Beth slides open her window and leans out. It’s coming straight down, no wind pushing it in any direction. She can lean on the sill and not get even slightly wet, which she does: sitting on the edge of the bed and watching it fall. The cats are conspicuous by their absence. She wonders where they go when it rains like this. If they’re young enough to not remember when it rained with any real regularity, and if they don’t know what it is, it must terrify them. She remembers being a child and having a small dog, and the first winter it snowed since they got it. Taking the dog out into it and trudging through the foot of whiteness that covered their streets that first morning, and watching the dog licking at it, then jumping through it: trying to make it over the mounds but failing, and ending up leaving pits where its entire body landed over and over again. How it pissed into it, and the cave that the hot urine made, and how that cave made the overlying snow crumble. How she notices that cause and effect, dragging the dog to piles of snow against walls to get it to wee, to make the snow collapse.
When she’s done with the window she leaves it open and walks around the flat. She sits in the living room in front of the television, nervous. She checks her bank accounts, which have been all but cleared out by her purchasing the Machine. She’s got an email from the French seller. He’s ambiguous in the language he uses, but he wants to make sure that it got there in one piece, and that it works. She doesn’t know why he cares: probably because he’d likely get in more trouble for selling it than she would for buying it, and if it was broken she would be liable to kick up a fuss. She replies: Everything seems to be fine, and the equipment seems to function. I’m very grateful for all your help. She presses send, and she’s barely had time to think before a reply comes.
No problem, it says. It offers her help if she needs it, tells her to email that address. She doesn’t reply to this one. She assumes that that’s it, the last contact that she’ll have with him. She Googles Vic’s name, just to see if there’s anything new, but there’s nothing immediate. There’s a lot of articles that mention him as part of some group litigation, and a few people who have studied him, covered him as part of a thesis. Occasionally an article will mention Beth as well: it will say that he was only recently married when he went to war, and that the treatment robbed a wife of her husband, left her practically bereaved only a couple of years past their beautiful union. Purple prose to describe something that was far more simple and crude than it appeared. When it had actually been a lump of shrapnel from an improvised, home-made bomb that robbed her. When she heard that he had been injured – a telephone call from a man whose name she didn’t even remember, frantic and desperate where she had assumed that army calls came through measured and calm – she prayed for him to survive. She said, through her atheism, that she wanted nothing more than for him to survive.
Whatever happens, that’s all that I want, she said, out loud, to the darkness of her bedroom as she tried to sleep that night. Now, she remembers that night, because – quite deliberately – she never prays. This has been done by her, not some cruel deity. It was an unfair trade-off, to give him his life and then curse him with the dreams that it did, only to rob his life from him again, in all essence. Beth shuts the laptop and walks to the fridge. She takes milk out and drinks from the bottle, standing with the door open, letting the chill run over her body. She can’t stop thinking about Vic, so she goes to the spare bedroom. This, in here now, contains a part of him.
You’re still here then, she says. She turns the Machine on and presses her hand, all of it, palm fully spread, onto the screen. The whirr, the hum. The familiar warmth of the screen as she leaves her hand there, and the print that’s left when she peels it away. The start-up tones ring out and she sees the menu there. She chooses to play back a recording. There’s a list of them all, each with a date stamp and time count next to it. At the bottom of the list is a total of everything. Just shy of 270 hours of recordings. It’s implausible, she thinks, until she remembers that they took it out of him in hour-long chunks, broken down into only a few sessions a week. She can’t remember how long it took, not really. How long they lived with Vic having his episodes, and with Beth pretending that it was all right.
She picks one, at random. Vic’s voice is first.
I know how this goes, he says. He sounds sick, Beth thinks: like there’s a scratch in his throat. He says, What do you want me to talk about, Robert?
I’d like you to tell me your name, like always, the doctor says.
Victor McAdams.
Tell me some other things about yourself, Victor, the doctor says. There’s a pause, then he speaks again. Where do you live, for example?
London.
Oh, whereabouts?
Ealing.
Okay. Are you married?
Yeah, Beth. Elizabeth, Beth, he says. Beth presses pause on the screen. Him saying her name, so loud and so clear through the room. She presses the timeline to hear it again. Yeah, Beth. Elizabeth, Beth. Elizabeth, Beth.
Any kids?
No.
Why are you here? Do you know?
Because I have dreams, and because … of what I did to Beth.
Good. Do you mind if I start the process?
No, Vic says. On the recording, behind their voices, comes the sudden rumble of the Machine, like a turbine. Beth thinks of sitting on planes and hearing the engines kick in. That lurch of noise. I’m ready, Vic says.
What do you dream about? the doctor asks.
Vic sighs. Mostly about blackness, he says. Darkness. It’s like nothing, with noise over the top. It’s hard to explain.
What are the noises?
Bangs. Sounds like gunfire, he says. There’s a rustling on the recording which takes Beth a few minutes to place, and then she gets it: it’s his hair. They decided that he should grow it out, to establish less of a connection with his army persona. And to cover the scar from the bullet. It itched, the scar, and he always ran his hands through the freshly grown hair when he was stressed.
And can you tell why you’re hearing them? Why you’re hearing gunfire?
No, Vic says. He sounds trepidatious. I don’t know.
Beth stops the recording. She wonders if the Machine is like the ones that they used in the labs. Vic was so early on in the run of treatments that he must have had experience with the older Machines. She presses the screen, going to the place she found the firmware number. She writes it down again, on the palm of her hand, along with the Machine’s serial number. At her laptop she types them in, but there’s nothing. She doesn’t know what she expected. Maybe that it would have a list of recalled Machines, and where they originated. Then she remembers the documentary.
8 (#u5e222e83-e52f-5a8c-b77f-86de843d54d9)
It’s been at least a couple of years since she last watched it, because it was so painful for her to see Vic the way he appears in it. She finds the disc in the drawer, along with everything else she put aside about the Machine, just in case. It’s a shop-bought copy, her second. The first she lost after a fight with Vic, during the later days of his treatments, when she pulled it out to show him, to say, This is you.
Fuck you, Vic. This is you.
She puts it into the computer and lets it start up. She still remembers the exact minute and second when he appears, because there was a period that she watched this repeatedly, like a child fixated, so she skips to the first one. It’s an introduction of him, only ambiguous, no details offered. They’ve blurred his face and down-tuned his voice, like he’s a criminal or a snitch; only it was so that he himself would never see it by accident, post-treatment, and start to ask questions. They show a blurred-faced Beth walking him into the hospital, where a psychiatrist spoke to them. They made an assessment and offered Vic the Machine.
Beth doesn’t care what they’re saying in the documentary, because she knows, and she knows that most of it was lies, or ended up being lies. Instead she wants to see him for the first time, wearing the Crown, hooked up. A mock of his first session, staged for the cameras, but she still wasn’t allowed to be there.
They told her, It can make things confusing for the patient. So she never went, not until the later stages, during what they termed cleaning up. There was no danger, then, of her messing anything up for him, apparently. So in the mock he’s there, in a chair, his face a mess of pixels, with a doctor asking him questions. She knows that the Machine isn’t on before they even show it, because there’s no noise in the room apart from the murmur it makes when it’s merely plugged in. The doctor is asking Vic about the war, and he’s answering, and the doctor is fake-pressing buttons. They show the Machine. They have trouble getting it all into shot, but once they’ve adjusted their field of view and pulled back, there it is. It’s the same model, exactly the same as the one in the spare bedroom. Beth’s sure of it.
She picks up the laptop and walks it into the spare room. She places it on the bed and changes the angle of the screen. So that she can see both it and the Machine. It’s exactly the same model. The same size (she guesses, from the height of it in both rooms); the same width (again); the metal the same pitch black; the screen with the same slightly glossier shine. She knows that it’s not the same Machine, not exactly. There were hundreds of them built. But there’s something heartening about the fact that it’s the model that started this all. The one that took everything away from Vic will play a part in giving him back. It’s almost poetic.
She takes the Crown down from the dock and examines it. The pads. She wonders if they got cleaned between patients – she remembers the sweat on Vic’s head around where the welts would be, before they turned black over a period of months, permanent bruises that would be hidden by his ever-growing hair – and decides that she needs to take care of that now. From the bathroom she gets disinfectant wipes, and from the kitchen a duster and the handheld vacuum cleaner. She starts with the Crown, wiping the pads down, and the frame that holds them together, and then she lifts it to her face to examine it closely. She brushes apart her hair, taking it back from her face; and then slides the Crown onto her skull. The pads slide into place, like they’re meant to be. The perfect size for her. They sit on her temples, where she’s got thin hair, like wisps. Vic used to call it her fur. He would sing this song to her – For my flesh has turned to fur, the lyrics went – and she would hit him on the shoulder, telling him to stop it. She looks at the screen. The REPLENISH button is there, on the front page. This is what they took away from future iterations, when they locked it down. Before they withdrew the Machines altogether. She could press it … She wonders what it would be like, with Vic’s memories in her head. If that is something that she could carry around.
She puts the Crown back in the dock and rubs her scalp. It’s tighter than she imagined. She cleans the rest of the Machine’s bulk, using the duster to wipe down the metal, then taking the disinfectant wipes and running them all over the screen, into the corners. There’s black gunk where the metal meets the glass, which she tries to get with her nails but it won’t budge, so she brings a knife in from the kitchen and scrapes away at it, getting it into the vein between the surfaces and reaming the gunk out. Then she wipes it all down again, noticing as she rubs the screen that she’s inadvertently cycling through menus. She’s managed to end up on a page that’s inviting her to wipe the Machine’s internal memory. She presses the CANCEL button, suddenly relieved. She had been so close to losing it all. Everything she’s worked for, for so long. She turns the screen off, to stop it happening. Puts the thing on standby.
She drags a chair in from the kitchen and places it next to the Machine, and stands on top of it. There’s a gap just about big enough for her arm to fit between the Machine and the ceiling, so she runs the handheld vacuum into the gap, watching the dirt and grime that sat on top of it zoom into the transparent container.
She looks at the picture again, the frozen still on her laptop screen. She compares. They really do look incredibly similar. She wonders if it might not be the same Machine.
She unplugs it at the wall. It’s nearly light outside. She dresses for work and sits on the edge of the bed in her bedroom. Now, I could sleep, she thinks. Now, when I have to go to work.
9 (#u5e222e83-e52f-5a8c-b77f-86de843d54d9)
At the weekend, one week closer to the end of term, she visits Vic. She packs a bag before she leaves the house, taking biscuits with her, and some of his clothes, pulled out of the vacuum-packed plastic bags where they’ve been lingering. The walk to the ferry terminal takes her along the coastline, because she goes out of her way to stick to it. It’s infuriatingly hot, even this early in the morning. She peels off her sweater and stuffs it into her bag. From the sea, there’s a wind, but it barely registers against the heat. She remembers when this was a rarity: when weather like this would have brought the tourists flooding here, and the beaches below where she was walking now would have been crammed. The promenade leading to the terminal is almost deserted. People walking their dogs on the beaches, letting them leap into the waves; some elderly couples sitting in chairs outside the coffee shop. Everybody else is still in bed.
The ferry ride itself is amazing. She calls it a ferry: it’s a catamaran, and she stands on the deck and, for a few minutes, it’s almost cold. The wind up there, caused by the speed, is biting. She doesn’t put her sweater back on, because she wants to feel it. She knows how fleeting it will be. Even as the boat starts to slow she goes inside and rubs a thin layer of suntan lotion onto the back of her neck. They say, on the news, that everybody will get used to the sun eventually. Children born now won’t burn nearly as easily. We’ll be like they used to be in the south of Europe: naturally tanned. Beth isn’t there yet. She rubs the lotion on and then pockets the bottle, in case she needs it later. The ferry docks into what’s left of Portsmouth harbour, and they all leave.
She remembers how Portsmouth used to be, back when the Navy was still here, before the collapse of the cliffs and before the flooding of Old Portsmouth. They dredged it, of course, once the waters rolled back a bit, but the damage was done. It’s something that people rarely appreciate until it happens: the sense of safety, of not needing to blockade. She thinks about how easily people now put up walls here, after they’ve been through it. The shops she passes have small steps to enter them and trenches dug along the roadside gutters. Everything seems to have been elevated a few feet. This part of the city, when it was constructed, floated on the water, and there are still the remnants of the parts that were lost when the flood came: the offices that were wrenched away from their moorings, somehow, and collapsed into the sea, toppling onto boats, the masts tearing through the windows and spilling out the guts of the desks and computers and people inside. Even now, that part of the city is bypassed and cordoned off, despite it being years since it happened. Still, in the water, you can see the computers and ruined chairs from the offices under the water, sitting far below the docks.
From here Beth enters the station, where her train is waiting, and she finds a seat and stares out of the window. She’s become accustomed to not doing anything on these journeys, because she finds herself too distracted. On the occasions she tried to read a book, she had forgotten about whole characters by the time she boarded her return train. It wasn’t worth it in the end.
After the train she fights through Victoria station, and to the underground. The tube is filled with stale air, recycled a seemingly infinite amount of times, pumped out in what is claimed to be cold air, but only tastes cold, somehow, and is still warm at its core. She can tell as she walks through the stations: how out of breath she gets just fighting her way to the escalators. Everybody around Beth sweats. By the time she reaches Richmond it’s a relief, even just to step out onto the high street. It’s busy already, but she turns away from the shops and towards where it looks more residential. Three turnings away and over the bridge and past the little shops and she’s there.
The sign in the front garden proclaims it to be a CENTRE, though Beth knows different. It’s a hospice, really. She would argue that the patients are all terminal, because they’re like this until they die. Any chance of them being treated by this new technique is slim to none; if they’re the right patient, and if the company decides that the technology is up to it, then maybe. Probably not, though. Saturdays are visiting days, and she has to sign in. She has to show ID and be scanned, so she places her bag on the table and stands where she’s meant to and lets them check she’s not dangerous. She has no idea why anybody would want to bring a weapon into this place. The school, that’s a risk. Once a year the news rings out with another story about somebody murdering their classmates. Nobody ever murders the handicapped and dying.
In the hospice itself, Beth knows the way to Vic’s room. There are coloured lines on the floor to lead visitors. Green to the gardens; black to the storeroom in the eaves, where they keep old Machines, in case they should ever need them; sandy yellow to the private rooms. Beth follows this last line up the stairs and to the left. She pays for a room of his own, where so many of them are in larger wards, four or six to a room, divided only by thin cotton curtains. There’s an argument among the families of those in here that private rooms are unfair, because not everybody can afford the subsidies. They’re all in the same boat, goes the argument; and besides, they don’t know any different. She pays the subsidy, despite the rising prices, because it gives them privacy.
When he’s back to being himself, Beth thinks, he’ll appreciate that I did it. What it gave him. That space to be alone, and to be himself.
Vic’s room is the same colour as the rest of the hospice. A thin grey paint, a white dado rail, a white skirting. The furniture is hospital standard, with a white wire-frame bed locked to the wall and a table that’s high enough to be wheeled over the bed – and over Vic – and a chair in the corner of the room, a soft thing that’s low to the ground, impractical to sit in. There’s a television (an old-style set, with the bulbous behind and curved screen) on a stand on the wall opposite the bed as well. It made Beth laugh, the first time she saw it. When they brought her into the room, to tell her that this would be where he was staying, and they pointed it out. She asked them if it would be part of his rehabilitation, watching EastEnders. They ignored her. She found out later that the building used to be an old people’s home, and they simply moved them out and moved the new patients in. In the corner are Vic’s personal accoutrements: his monitor, his spare colostomy bag, a collection of kidney-shaped metal trays stacked up like saucepans. There’s a bowl of fruit, but it’s token, and often the fruit is gone, well past its date. On the wall above the bed, looking directly down at Vic is a security camera, a tiny ball that affords somebody a 360-degree view of the room. A direct line to see and hear whatever Vic is doing at any given point in the day.
Here, Vic is on the bed, shitting himself.
Here, Vic is writhing, managing to push himself onto the floor, his tongue lolling from his mouth.
Here, Vic is in the corner, because he walked of his own accord, which should be a near-miracle, and celebrated, but now he’s just standing there and gasping as he faces the walls, heaving his body up and down, his shoulders halfway to a convulsion. Over and over and over again.
Beth always worries what state she’ll find him in. She’s sometimes been here when there’s been an accident, and she’s seen it before the carers have had a chance to deal with it, but that’s a hazard of their jobs, she thinks. The carers and hers. Even with those paying guests, the clinic is understaffed and underserviced. She could complain, but they’ve got heading on for a hundred other patients here, and they’re all in similar boats. Some are better, admittedly: many of them have kept their day-to-day routine, and they can take themselves to the toilet and feed themselves. Some of them might as well be in a coma for all they’re worth. Lying there, calm as anything, barely cognitive when visitors come. Vic is special to the clinic. He’s a worst case: not just far less able than the man he once was, but totally out of control of the man he’s become. Beth’s never seen anybody worse, not in the flesh.
(On the internet she’s seen videos of patients who reacted to the initial Machine treatments in other ways entirely. She tells herself that it could have been worse: those patients who, in the early stages of treatment, killed themselves and their families: holding them at gunpoint until they ended it, casually, one by one; or slashing their throats while they slept, disbelieving of the stories told to them to fill in their gaps. Or, when they’re vacant – such a cruel word, so suggestive that somebody else will be along in a minute to take their place – they’ve managed to somehow end it all afterwards. Reduced to something so primal and vague that they’re barely even quantifiable as human any more, let alone the men and women that they once were. And they end it, by either just giving up and stopping being any more; or, in worse cases, finding ways to put themselves out of what must be an indefinable misery.)
Today Vic has his back to Beth. She can see the line of his spine, the weight of his skin on it. How it looks almost curved where it follows the too thin mattress, the weak bed frame. His back has spots on it that it never used to have. They never get past red smears, but still. She knows that he’s not being bathed enough. The only times she’s complained they’ve told her to be here more, to do it herself. They are understaffed. They aren’t, they tell her, paid enough.
They say, Why don’t you move closer? They just say it to her, as if they’ve known her all her life, and who are they to pass judgement?
Because of my job, Beth replies, weakly. She doesn’t tell them that it’s shame-based: that she doesn’t want her colleagues’ pity. She tells everybody that Vic’s away at war, and she has a photo of him in her classroom. To her classes and workmates, Beth wants Vic to be a hero. Still away and fighting the good fight, even after all this time, even after any war he could be fighting has long ended.
He doesn’t stir as she approaches. She has to say his name four times before he even flinches, and then it’s not recognition. It’s awareness. When this happened they didn’t know why, any more than they had when Beth had rushed him to the hospital, telling them that something had gone terribly wrong, Vic’s body on the back seat in constant convulsion. He was one of the first to fall apart, because he’d been one of the first to start the treatments, and erase what needed to be erased. He was to be a test case, proudly paraded in front of crowds. But when they let her see him finally without any sedation he was a void. Nothing inside him.
They said, We don’t know why this has happened. This is an anomaly, it can’t be right. They apologized to her straight away, so she knew. You don’t apologize if you haven’t done anything wrong, and they said sorry so many times.
Vic? Beth says again. He moans: low and timorous, from somewhere other than his throat. From below. It’s me, she says.
She puts her hand onto his back and rubs it. Sometimes she’s done this and he’s reacted to her touch as if she was fire. Throwing her off, writhing around, lashing out with his arms and legs. Today he’s more placid. Her hand placed against his shoulder blades, she listens to and feels him breathe.
Some of the other users of the Machine, the doctors said to her when they delivered their final diagnosis, forget the basics, even. They forget the stuff that’s innately written into us, deep within us. Breathing, eating. They forget how their bodies work. They told this to Beth as if this should have made her feel better: your husband isn’t on a respirator, and we don’t have to tell his heart how to work for him. You don’t have to make that hardest of decisions yet. He’s still alive. And Beth, through her guilt, was even grateful.
Will he ever get better? she asked them. They didn’t know. What they did know was that he was ruined.
Sit up, she says to Vic. She moves around to his front, where she can see his face. It’s hardly changed over the past few years. He’s still handsome, she thinks. He’s still an army man, even where he’s lost the definition in his muscles. Jowls more than muscle, there, around his face. His hair has grown out, but she can still see the bruises, burned into his skin. They remind her of being a schoolgirl: of Ash Wednesday. All the children lining up to have a cross drawn on their foreheads, big fingers leaving smears that they were all too scared to immediately rub off, even with the slight smell and the stigma of having to wear it. That’s what the pad-marks look like to her: ash.
Vic moans again, so she moves her arm underneath him and tries to heave him into a sitting position. Come on, she says.
He says something that sounds like No, but she knows it’s not that. He hasn’t said a word in years. It’s like when parents think that their child says its first word, something random, off the curve. Really, it’s just a collection of noises that approximates speech. It’s fantasy and hope. She links her arms together, under his armpits and around his back, and she strains to drag him up the bed. He doesn’t help her at all. He doesn’t fight against it, but there’s no compliance.
Come on, she says. When he’s nearly sitting – a slight angle to his whole body, like he’s on a boat, slanted against the waves – she stands back. Better, she says. She wipes his mouth and then the rest of his face, and she brushes his hair with her hands because his comb seems to be missing. It’s usually kept on the shelf at the side of the bed but there’s nothing on it today, which makes her think that the cleaners have had off with it. It wasn’t a cheap one: part of a set that she gave him for Christmas once. That set went through the war with him, and it was part of the stuff that they shipped back with him after his emergency surgery, that she had to sort through, that she had to choose to keep. The scar – the real scar, not the Machine’s burn scars – sits to the left of his forehead. When she stares at it she traces a line to the bullet’s exit point, and she wonders how close it really came to ending everything. A fraction of a millimetre, the doctors at the time said. Beth has always wondered if that was an exaggeration.
I don’t suppose you’ve managed to remember who I am, Beth says. She stands back and looks at his face, and tries to make eye contact. You’re Vic, she says. Do you remember that? She’s not expecting anything. This isn’t the point where she gives up: that happened a long time ago.
(She remembers the exact day, because it still sits there as a dream that she has when she’s drunk or lonely: Vic bucking as she held on to him, as she tried to console him, and she realized that he didn’t know who she was, and he didn’t care. She was the only one who cared, and she had the guilt on top of that, and she carried that with her every single day, every single time that she thought about him.)
She changes him. She can’t remember what it’s like to undress him normally, not like they used to. This is different, a shift in their relationship. The act of pulling down his underwear and replacing it. Wiping him if he’s had an accident. The nurses here change him every few hours to prevent them, now. Rubber-lined underwear; rubber sheets on the bed. She pulls the underwear down his legs and past his ankles, and then she takes a bath-wipe and rubs it over him. She doesn’t know how often the nurses actually do it.
I hope you’re all right in here, she says to him. She sits on the edge of the bed after putting his new pants on, and she turns on the television. It doesn’t hold his attention – she isn’t sure that he’s even capable of paying attention any more – but she watches a daytime cookery show for a few minutes. Sitting next to him is reassuring. She thinks that it won’t be that long until she’ll have him back with her, back as he was. Sitting with him now makes that prospect feel somehow more real. She can feel his warmth, which hasn’t changed at all. His blood still pumps the same way. His skin still smells the same, after she’s cleaned him.
He can walk still, sometimes: when she catches him on the right day, when the muscle memory does more than his active brain. Today isn’t one of those days. She asks an orderly who passes the room to help her put Vic into a wheelchair. It goes quite smoothly until he’s actually in it. He makes himself stiff as a board, back arched, and the orderly straps him in. They forcibly bend him, making him sit.
Safer for you both, the orderly says. He calls Vic Mr McAdams, which makes Beth feel sad. She wheels him down the ramps, pulling him behind her as she walks backwards, because he’s so much heavier than she is. At the end of the corridor is a wall of glass that’s so reflective and so dark inside as to be almost a mirror. She sees herself with him, her hands on the handles of the chair. She looks older, and his hair has become mussed in the move to the chair. She straightens it again with her hands. He doesn’t look at the reflection. She remembers something that she read this one time: how the only animals to recognize themselves are chimpanzees and elephants. You can put a mark on their heads and they will see the reflection and reach for themselves, to rub the mark off. Every other animal tries to find the thing by looking behind the mirror, unable to understand what it’s seeing. Vic doesn’t even look at the reflection. He sees nothing there; if he thinks it’s another person, he doesn’t care.
This is how it is, Beth says. She wheels him down the entrance ramps and into the garden, and then across the tarmac path. It’s even hotter than she anticipated, and within seconds she can see the beads of sweat on Vic’s forehead. She mops them with her sleeve. Jesus, she says.
Around her, other families are attempting to relax. All of this is too demanding. Being with people who are so far gone that they aren’t the people that they once were. And some argue that it’s like coma patients, and how you would stand by them, but Beth has heard the other side of the argument. That they’re more like the dead. There’s nothing inside them. They might look the same, and they might smell the same, but they’re different. The person that they were is gone. Inside them, the part that made them who they were, that’s gone. So what’s left? Beth’s heard the argument that there’s nothing. She’s seen the divorce figures for the vacant. Two years ago, a judge in America had annulled a marriage, but that was still an exception.
This is mortality, he said. Life and death. We’d never force somebody to stay married to a corpse. When a person loses this much of themselves, they have lost their soul. And what is left when you have no soul?
Most of the people here with her are parents, looking at their children, all grown-ups. Grey-haired men and women trying to act as if this is normal, because there’s a bond there that’s indelible. There’s no annulment between parents and their children. At their worst the patients are back to the way they were before they walked and talked, when they lay and were inattentive and cried for no reason. She sees the parents trying the same tactics they might have tried then. The snapping of fingers to try and draw their eyes. Calling their name, over and over, in the hope that it will stick. Nobody knows why the brain doesn’t work like it should after the Machine’s had its way with it. This would be much easier for all involved if it was just a wipe. One doctor who worked on the project wondered if the brain hadn’t had its ability to record memories wiped. As in, it had forgotten how to remember. Beth doesn’t like to think about it. So she and the parents lie on the lawns with their charges and they treat them like pre-toddlers. She knows that they wonder why she’s still with him, because they can’t see what she can be getting out of this. Nobody dreams of a vacant shell for a husband.
She wheels the chair out towards the gates, and the road. She wants to see how far she can push it without being noticed, if anybody’s going to question anything. There are no security cameras in the grounds because there’s no danger of the patients escaping, not when most of them can’t even walk. And those who can, can’t work door handles, or dress themselves, and certainly couldn’t get past the manned security desk. She pushes the chair further down the path, to the gates themselves, and then onto the street. She turns the corner and she stands with him and waits. She can see the people across the road staring at her. Or staring at Vic. It’s quite shocking, the first time you see him, because it’s not like seeing a disabled man. There’s no life in him. When you look at the vacant, there’s something wrong, and you can tell. It’s immediate. It’s what the overly religious factions who oppose the Machine use as evidence: they present the intangibility of the soul as proof of the existence of something less tangible still. The people across the road all turn their heads and stop talking. Beth ignores them. She puts her head down and looks at Vic, and she gently rubs the sides of his head. Apparently they itch, the burn marks; and she used to do this before, to the bullet scar.
After a minute nobody’s followed her, and there’s no sign of a security guard when she pushes Vic back into the grounds. None of the other visitors notice, even. Too preoccupied with snapping their fingers and whistling as if their offspring are dogs. Beth pushes Vic back the way that they came. She wipes his brow again. Through security with no hassle, and then to his room. She thinks about doing this herself, which is something that she’ll have to learn. She sidles the chair right next to the bed and locks the wheels in place, and then stands behind him.
I need to get my arms under here, she says. She pulls his arms up and puts hers underneath them. He’s so heavy. She struggles, pushing him forward, and he turns himself out of the chair and onto the bed. She puts a hand on his back to support him. Pushes him with it, and then she uses her other hand to try and get his legs up. His body turns too much, so she pulls him up the bed. He still gives her nothing.
She tries to manoeuvre him onto his back. She does this by pushing one shoulder and pulling the other, trying to make him do it himself. Now one hand on his shoulder, pulling, and the other on his knee, then his thigh. Incremental stages to get him flipped over. Next, her hand on his shoulder and her other hand looped around his thigh. She heaves and pulls, but doesn’t know if she can do it. Heave and pull, and finally his legs start to move, and, almost independently, his torso. He’s not flat on his back now, but as near as, and he starts to make a noise from deep inside him. She tries to yank him up the bed again, because he’s a foot clear of his pillows, and his legs dangle off the end of the metal frame. Small movements, but movement all the same: an inch at a time. Maybe less. Over and over, tiny repeated movements.
She remembers meeting him for the first time. They’re at school, their last year. Everybody says it’s perfect. That they’re perfect.
Pull and release, over and over, until the pillow is underneath his head, the first pillow at least. The pillows are so thin and unsupportive. No pillowcase. Instead gauze, designed to be easily washed, so that the whole pillow can be put straight in the washer. She tries to squeeze it into a shape that’s more comfortable.
Lift your head, she says, knowing that it won’t do anything. She bunches the pillows up but she can’t make him look comfortable. This would be easier with normal pillows, she says. She tries to shift him up the bed more, but he won’t budge. This is as much as she can do. She stands back to look at him, and he rolls his eyes and opens and closes his jaw, and his hands twitch and his legs are totally, unbearably still.
I’m sorry, she says. She’s not apologizing for her inability to make him comfortable, she knows, but if anybody heard her, that’s what it would sound like. All the way home on the train Beth tells herself that this will be easy. That this is the right thing to do.
When she gets home she sits in the spare bedroom and puts the Machine on and listens to audio of Vic talking about her: not the good stuff, the stuff that he wanted to keep, but the bad. The bits that they wanted jettisoned.
10 (#u5e222e83-e52f-5a8c-b77f-86de843d54d9)
On Monday, after school, Laura is waiting for Beth by the gates. She’s smiling.
I was hoping to catch you, she says. Good day?
