Robin Wasserman - Frozen

And I did not think about that, either.

Instead of turning out the lights and climbing into bed, I mechanically—always mechanically—entered the purple-and-blue tiled bathroom for the first time. The stranger’s face watched me from the mirror, impassive. Blank.

I pulled up the network query I’d made earlier, the one I hadn’t had the nerve to read. The words scrolled across my left eye, glowing letters superimposed on my reflected face.

I froze the parade of definitions and expanded the one that seemed to matter. The guy’s name was William James, and he was way too old to be right. Two hundred years ago, no one knew anything; it’s why they all died young and wrinkled with bad hair. Two hundred years ago, they thought light could go as fast as it wanted, they thought the atom was indivisible and possibly imaginary, they thought “computers” were servant girls who added numbers for their bosses when they weren’t busy doing the laundry. They knew nothing. But I read it anyway.

If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.

The face didn’t move; the eyes didn’t blink. Cold and neutral , I thought. It wasn’t true. I had felt anger; I had felt fear. But fear of what? The man couldn’t have hurt me, not really. At least, he couldn’t hurt me forever. Whatever he did to the body, I would remain. I couldn’t die. What was to fear in the face of that?

What kind of emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heartbeats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of shallow weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present…?

Even now, in my pajamas, in my bathroom, I felt. The tile beneath my feet. The sink against my palms. I felt absence: the silence that should have been punctuated by steady breathing, in and out. Fingers against my chest, I felt the stillness beneath them. I felt loss.

In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast bone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more.

Nothing more.

Their whispers slithered through the crack beneath my bedroom door, and I fought the temptation to press myself against it, to find out what Zo and Walker, who had for years shared a mutual, if mostly unspoken, oath of eternal dislike, could possibly need to discuss. Not that the topic was in doubt.

The topic was me.

The whispers stopped. I struck my best casual pose, legs dangling off the side of the bed, elbows digging into the mattress, ankles crossed, head tipped back to the ceiling as if the track of solar panels had proven so engrossing as to make me forget what was about to happen. The door opened, and I held my position, letting Walker see me before I saw him.

Giving him time to erase his reaction before I could see it on his face.

Not enough time. When I sat up, he was still in the doorway, one hand in his pocket, the other gripping the frame, holding himself steady.

“Hey,” I said.

He didn’t move. “Your voice…”

“Weird, right? I hear myself talk and I’m like, wait, who said that?” I forced a laugh, but stopped as soon as I saw him wince. I’d forgotten that I wasn’t very good at the laughing thing yet. Especially when I was faking it.

“It’s nice,” he said, like he was trying to convince himself. “I like it.”

I hated it. Someone else’s voice, husky and atonal, coming out of the mouth.

My mouth, I reminded myself. My voice. But I could only believe that when I was alone. With Walker finally standing there, watching me, I was forced to admit it: The voice belonged to the thing , to the body, not to me.

“It’s been a while,” I said, even though I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to bring it up. He hadn’t voiced me back on Thursday night or on Friday. And then Saturday came, and he was here. That should have been enough.

Walker shrugged. He rubbed his chin, which was shadowed with brown scruff. Without me around to remind him to shave, he’d grown a beard. “I was going to text you, but…”

“Yeah. But.” I stood up. He was still in the doorway. If he wouldn’t come to me, I would go to him. It can be difficult at the beginning, Sascha had said. But the people who know you, the people who love you, they’ll see beneath the surface. They’ll get that it’s really you under there. You just have to give them some time.

No one knew me better than Walker. But when I curled the hand around his wrist, he jerked away. “Sorry, I—”

I stepped back. “No, it’s fine.” It wasn’t. “I shouldn’t have.” He shouldn’t have.

“No, really. I just…” Walker finally stepped into the room, edging around me as he passed, careful not to touch the body. He sat in my desk chair, back straight, feet flat on the floor. Arms crossed, hugging his chest.

I dropped back down on the bed and waited.

“I’m very glad you’re all right,” he said finally, like he was passing along a message from his mother to some old lady who’d broken her hip. Like he’d been rehearsing.

I risked a smile. I’d been rehearsing too. “I missed you.”

“You, too.” He stared down at the floor. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, almost to his shoulders, like one of Zo’s retros. I wanted to smooth it back. I wanted to stand behind him and bury my face in it, resting my cheek against the back of his head, wrapping my arms around his shoulders, letting him grip my hands in his. But I stayed where I was. “It’s, uh, it’s pretty,” he said. “I mean— you’re pretty. Now. Like this.”

“You don’t have to lie.”

He shifted in the seat. “No—It’s just, I guess, I just thought you’d look a little more like… I mean, on the vids, and you looked… But now… I thought you’d look more…”

“Like me?” But as soon as I said it, I knew that wasn’t what he’d meant. I didn’t look like me, not anymore, not with the hair that was the wrong color and texture and wasn’t even hair, just a synthetic weave that was grafted on and would never grow. The nose was too small, the eyes too wide, the fingers the wrong thickness, the wrong length, the teeth too straight and too bright, the mouth bigger, the ears smaller, the body taller and too symmetrical, too well proportioned, too perfect. But it wasn’t that. I knew what he’d wanted to say; I knew him too well.

I thought you’d look more… human.

And I saw the body again like I’d seen it for the first time, like he was seeing it. The skin, smooth and waxy, an even peachy tone stretched out over the frame without sag or blemish. The way it moved, with awkward jerks, always too slow or too fast. The stranger’s face with dead eyes, pale blue irises encircling the false pupils, and in the center of the black, pin-pricks of light, flashing and dimming as the lens sucked up images. The eyes that didn’t blink unless I remembered to blink them. The chest that neither rose nor fell unless I pretended to breathe. The body that wasn’t a body.

His girlfriend, the machine.

“It’s just weird,” he admitted. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t—”

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “It is weird. It’s weird for me too.”