Robin Wasserman - Frozen

“Brain scans.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t—What?”

“They took brains scans,” he said, haltingly. “And there was an anomaly.”

I still didn’t understand.

“I’m disqualified,” he said. “Structural abnormalities. Predisposition for mental disorder and/or decay. Unlikely but possible. So just in case—automatic disqualification. They don’t want me living forever if I’m going to go crazy, right?” He laughed. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

I pressed my lips together.

“Yeah, no one else seems to think so either,” he said. “Maybe I’m crazy already.”

“They can’t fix it?” I asked softly. “Whatever it is?”

“They could have. Before I was born. If they’d known about it, if my mother had let them screen for that kind of thing. But she thought it was superfluous. She only wanted the basics.” He laughed again. It was a weirdly tinny, mechanical sound, since his body was immobilized and his lungs were barely pumping any air. “Thanks, Mom.”

“There’s got to be something you can do, if you paid enough, some way to change their minds?”

“Nothing. No brand-new body for me. I’m stuck with this one. For life.” He paused. “As long as that lasts.”

I squeezed his hand again. Not that he felt it.

“Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “They can make a fake body from scratch, but they can’t fix a real one. Guess there’s only so much you can do when you’re stuck with damaged goods.” He didn’t laugh. “No, I guess that’s not very funny either.”

“I can help,” I told him. “I know how it feels, lying there, thinking your life is over. I understand.”

“You understand nothing ,” he spat out. “That’s what you always used to tell me, right? ‘You can’t understand, not unless you’ve been there.’ You’ve never been here.”

“You’re alive,” I said, aware that I was sounding like call-me-Ben, like Sascha, like every medical cheerleader I’d ever wanted to strangle. And now I finally got why they’d said all that. They needed to believe it. You couldn’t look at someone so broken and not believe they could, somehow, be fixed. “That’s something.”

“Something I don’t want. Not like this.”

So I said what all those cheerleaders never had. The truth. “Neither would I. And… it’s never going to be like it was before. Never . That will never be okay. But you will.”

He snorted.

“I know you don’t believe it,” I said desperately. “I know it all sounds like greeting-card bullshit that doesn’t apply to you, but it does. Maybe I can’t understand everything, but I understand that. The way you feel? I honestly don’t know if that goes away. But people— you —can get used to things, even if it seems impossible now. You can make it work.”

“Oh really?” he said, bitterness chewing the edges of the false cheer. “Thanks so much for the insight. So I can get used to a machine telling me when it’s time to pee, and when it’s time to shit, and then helping me do it—and that’s after all the regeneration surgery’s done. Until then, I just get a diaper. You think you could get used to changing it for me? I can get used to internal electrodes that spark my muscles into action and let me walk around and pretend I’m normal until it hurts so much that I fall down and have to get someone to cart me away? They tell me that part’s the medical miracle. Twenty years ago I might have been a lump in this fucking bed for the rest of my life, with people feeding me and turning me and wiping my ass. So you think I can get used to people telling me how fucking grateful I should be? And I can get used to my lungs working at half capacity, if I’m lucky , and feeling like I’ve got an elephant stomping on my chest—at least until the fluid builds up, and while I wait around for them to come suck it out, it just feels like I’m drowning? Not that you would know anything about that.”

“It sucks,” I said. “I know that. But you’re not alone. You don’t have to do this alone. I’m here, just like you were there for me.” I remembered the day I froze in the quad, the way he knew exactly what to say and what to do, even though he didn’t know me at all. And now no one knew me except for him. “We’ll do this together.”

“Together.” He snorted. “Right. And maybe you’ll finally fall deeply in love with me and make all my dreams come true. We’ll live happily ever after. As long as they can rig me up with some kind of hydraulic system. Not like I ever got to do it the normal way, so I guess I won’t even notice the difference.”

“Auden, don’t—”

“Don’t what? Tell you all about how my penis may get ‘moderate sensation’ back, and if I respond well to the electrical-impulse therapy—which, let me tell you, my penis and I are really looking forward to—I might, might be able to get the fucking thing up, up for some fucking, I mean, but—”

“Please don’t.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I grossing you out with all the medical details? Or is it the thought of having sex with me that disgusts you?”

He wanted me to fight with him. I wasn’t going to do it. Not now. Not here. “I thought my life was over when I woke up like this,” I said. “But you’re the one who told me that I could handle it. That I could start fresh.”

“This is different.”

“I know, but—”

“No!” The beeping started again. “You don’t know. This isn’t what you went through. This isn’t what you understand. This is me , my life. This is the way it’s going to be forever: shit.” He closed his eyes, sucking in heavy gulps of air.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, silently pleading with him to stay calm. “Just tell me what you want from me. What can I do?”

“You can get out.”

I stood up. “You’re right. You should try to sleep. I’ll come back later.”

“No. You should get out and not come back. Ever.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is your fault,” he said in a low voice. “What happened… It’s your fault.”

“It was an accident. You were just trying to… save me.” When I didn’t need saving.

“Seems like I’ve been doing that a lot,” he said. “You do something stupid, you do something reckless, and I fix it. You treat me like crap, and I save you again. Because I’m stupid. Was stupid.”

I closed my eyes. “You’re my best friend.”

He went on like he hadn’t heard. Or didn’t want to. “You’re probably happy, aren’t you? Why should anyone else get to be healthy and normal if you’ve got to walk around like some kind of mechanical freak, right?”

He’s just trying to hurt me, I told myself. And I had to let him do it if that’s what he needed. I had to do whatever he needed.

This is not my fault.

“Maybe this was the plan all along. Is that it? Is that why you kept dragging me along with you, making me take all those stupid risks? You were trying to get me killed—Excuse me, I mean, get me broken ?”

“Of course not! This was an accident .”

“This was inevitable. And if you didn’t see that, you’re as stupid as I was.”

“Auden, come on. I… I love you.”

“But not in that way, right?”

I would have happily lied if I’d thought there was even a chance he would believe me. “No. But—”

“But I’m supposed to grovel at your feet, thankful for whatever I can get from you, right? Sorry, not in the mood today. I’m not feeling too well.”

“Tell me how to make this better. Please.”

“I already did: Get out. The only reason I’m talking to you now is that I wanted you to hear it from me. What you did. Now you know. So we’re done.”