James Smythe - The Machine

Back to the mess, and she washes it as best she can. She doesn’t touch it, and she moves the showerhead underneath him as much as she can. She doesn’t want to touch the dirty water that’s flowing out, the bigger parts of debris getting worn down in the thick hot mire of the plughole, the smaller particles flushing upwards, creating a ring around the tub. She holds the showerhead right underneath him, pointing upwards. No movement from him still, even like this, even with the water splashing around him. Fighting against him, almost. Beth wants to stop this, but he’s not even close to clean. She moves the shower around to his thighs and sprays them down, but it’s in the hair, so she has to use her hand. The flat of her palm, the fingers lifted away from the leg. She rubs. And his penis: this shrivelled beetle of a thing, years of being used for nothing but pissing rending it sad and weak. She rubs it with her palm. There was time when that would have been enough, and this would have gone differently. There was a time, she reminds herself, when she wouldn’t be cleaning shit off it.

She moves the showerhead to his arse again, and between the fleshy cheeks, trying to get it all. She keeps having to shower down the bath. Clean then rinse. Repeat. Clean then rinse, and he’s finally done. She washes down the bath with him in it, to make sure she gets it all – all the dirty water that’s somehow found its way between his toes, and into the hair of his shins, and on his fingers. She cleans both the bath and Vic’s body, scrubbing away with a sponge that she knows she’s throwing away as soon as this is done. She looks at him as she puts the sponge into the same bag as the filthy nappy: he’s slumped, penitential on his knees.

From here she knows that she’s moving him to the spare bedroom, to the bed next to the Machine. She knows that the treatments will hurt at first. It’s a pain that he’ll get used to, like having a tooth drilled, once he’s got over the shock. She wonders how long it’ll take to see the first parts of Vic back inside him. How long before he’s recognizable again. She wonders if it will be harder or easier to cause pain to her husband when he’s nothing but a void. A shell, like the Machine itself.

She pulls back the duvet cover and smoothes the sheet down, and she moves anything from the bedside table that could cause a problem. That he could lash out at and accidentally connect with. She leans over and presses the Machine’s power button, but it’s still unplugged: the noise is just the low-level one, the power-saving noise. So she plugs it into the wall and presses the screen again. That initial snarl. The internal fans begin. She can almost see them. Flickering, spinning, covered in dust. The dust flying around inside the Machine. She wonders why so much of it is hollow: when they were designing it, what the space was for. Why they needed so much that had nothing in it.

She remembers something about the brain that she read once, or that she was told: that we only use 20 per cent, something like that. A fraction. So much is untapped. Maybe that’s a myth, she thinks. It seems obtuse to have so much waste, when evolution has pushed us to our limits everywhere else. Maybe, she thinks, it’s just that we don’t understand exactly how it is used. It’s vital, that 80 per cent. It has to be.

In the bathroom she tries to work out how to get Vic’s body out. He’s too slippery so she tries to dry him there and then, rubbing the towel over his back and chest. Then down to his thighs, to get them dry, and his feet, as much as she can. She pictures him slipping in the bath and hitting his head, and then blood everywhere. Imagine cleaning that up, she thinks. She tries to get him to his feet but she can’t get traction, so she ends up in the bath behind him, pulling him to his feet again, and then easing him over the edge to the floor, one leg at a time. Something in him wants to preserve himself: he tries to balance when he can. He hasn’t completely abandoned that. She gets both his feet to the bath mat and then sets about drying the rest of him. Soon she’s on her knees, in front of him, drying his shins. She hasn’t been this close to him in years.

She sits him on the toilet.

Go on, she says. Go now. Nothing comes out so she runs the tap. She knows that’s enough to set most people off. Go on, she says. Then it happens, a slim trickle of piss out of the end of the penis, just enough to say that he’s been. Nothing from the other end. She sets an alarm to go off every four hours, reminding her to take him. She doesn’t want any more accidents. The clock lets her know that the whole process took the best part of an hour. She can’t do that several times a day.

She dresses him, making him step into the pants and the tracksuit bottoms one leg at a time, then pulling them up for him. And a t-shirt, which is a hassle, getting him to hold his arms up as she slips it on. She thinks that a shirt would have been easier to get him into. Stupid, really, never even crossed her mind. A short-sleeved shirt, easy to get on and off, and to regulate heat. Just open it. She kicks herself. Next time, she thinks, and that makes her laugh. As if.

She walks him to the bedroom. The Machine is whirring, and the sound drowns anything else that might be there. It’s like a force field, when you walk through the door. Outside the door there’s nothing, the ambient noise of the cats on the Grasslands and the birds that they’re desperately hunting, and the crying of the fat woman’s daughters and the squeak of the pram wheels from above. In the spare bedroom, with the Machine running, none of that registers. Just that fan, or that power supply, or whatever it is. A buzz, a whirr, a hum. A grinding, almost, if you listen to it for too long; or like anything at all. You can make it into anything. She leads Vic’s body in, moving him foot by foot, and he stops in the doorway. He isn’t looking at the Machine, but his feet plant themselves. Beth has to bend down and shuffle them forward one by one. She’s sure that he’s resisting.

Come on, she says. It’s not that hard. He seems to be leaning backwards, not enough to fall, but enough to change the balance of his body. And there’s a noise, Beth’s sure, coming from his throat. She leans in close: a whine. It might have been there all along, she can’t be sure, but she can hear it now, now that he’s this close to the Machine. He’s reacting to it. Please, she says to Vic. She keeps moving him forward. Onto the bed, sitting first, then she gets behind him and pulls him up the bed. The easiest way to move him. Soon he’s lying down and in the right place. His body seems tense at first, and then she turns his head, so that he can’t see the Machine.

She looks at the clock. She angles it to face them. She’s broken this down into sessions in her mind, an hour at a time to start with. Pick a file, work through it chronologically to keep track of it all – they’re all about thirty minutes long, and the chronology is a structure she’ll need to remember what she’s done. Put it back in the order in which it was taken. She’ll let it talk him through whatever it says, and she’ll let it fill in the gaps. She doesn’t have a choice about that part.

It was always unnerving, wondering where the memories came from when they hadn’t existed before. She thinks about the first time that he remembered something that she didn’t: when he spoke about what he had done for his twenty-first birthday. In reality he had been training, at some camp or other. He had called her up, drunk, and told her how much he liked her. He was so drunk, he said, that he wouldn’t remember it. He slurred it to her down the phone, and she knew that he was lying. He wasn’t as drunk as he claimed. And then, that one day, deep into his treatments, he remembered something completely different. An invented scenario in which they had been on a weekend away together. He asked her if she remembered what they had for breakfast, because he did. Something complicated. So much detail, more than you would normally recall. And none of the connections. And she had to smile and agree, and play along, because those were the rules.