James Smythe - The Machine

You hurt me again and this is over, so you have to think about that. What’s most important to you? Pride, or whatever’s left of this?

Beth takes the Crown off his head and puts it back in the dock, and presses stop on the Machine. It winds down: the sound of an oven cooling, the clicks of an engine in the cold. New noises that she’s never heard before and can’t explain. Looking at Vic’s body, Beth sees that it needs water. She hadn’t seen the sweat during the process, but it’s suddenly there, seeping out underneath him, sinking into the mattress.

You need a towel as well, she says. She goes to the kitchen and gets a little bottle from the fridge and a towel from the pile she’s got there, all cheap, bought from the pound shop and designed to be thrown away if need be. Not made for washing; she suspects that they wouldn’t last a proper spin cycle. She uses the towel first, wiping down his chest and then pulling him up, her arm behind his shoulders, rubbing his back down. She props her body behind him and unfolds the towel, laying it flat on top of the sheet. Then she pushes him back down. Relax, she says. She catches herself, talking to it like it’s a sentient being. Like it’s a him, and can understand her. It can’t, not yet.

She stands in the kitchen and opens one bottle of water and drinks it straight down, gulping it. She gasps in between gulps. She wonders at what point he’ll be recognizable again: when Vic will start to seep back into his body. The Machine contains all that is left of who he once was. Already it’s processed his story, the speech-to-text system inside it turning his spoken, quivering memories into data and patching them. Filling in the cracks in his story. Somewhere, inside the Machine, are the exact constituents of what – who – Vic will be. Like a version of him, somewhere, only maybe not arranged in the proper order, and therefore not conscious, and not alive. The God-botherers argue that the soul is a solid thing, a distinct entity, and that when you tamper with it, you destroy it entirely. A soul that’s broken is no soul at all. By that logic, Vic’s soul is simply waiting to be reassembled. What is it, before it becomes whole? Before it works again?

With one bottle done and crushed in her hand, and thrown into the recycling bag, she opens another. She hadn’t noticed how hot she was. And listening to him, being in that room, has given her the start of a headache – are there fumes, from the Machine? Or is it just the heat of the fans, the hard drives, the memory inside the thing burning its way out? Not serious enough to pop the ibuprofen open – she worries that she won’t have enough. They weren’t even meant for her, but for Vic. For when it starts to hurt him. She eyes the diazepam and hopes that she won’t have to use them. Maybe this will go easier than she’s been fearing.

He still hasn’t moved when she gets back into the bedroom. She goes to the Crown, and feels that the pads are still wet with the lubricant, so she puts it straight back onto his head. She knows that listening to the playback of the voices aloud is an indulgence, totally unnecessary. It’s something to make it easier for her. What’s important is the code that’s being buzzed into him by the Machine. But it makes her happier, to hear his voice. To picture that this is how he’s being rebuilt, piece by piece, slotting together like Lego.

We’re ready, Beth says. She presses play.

Captain Victor McAdams.

Okay, Vic. Want to tell me about your last exercise? As many details as you can remember.

No. Not especially, Vic says. Beth can hear the smirk in his voice. He could be such a shit when he wanted to be. Fine, he says, breathing out. A huff, almost. We were somewhere I’m not allowed to say—

You’re allowed to say here.

I’m not.

This is between us.

So it can be between us and I won’t say the name of the place.

Do you think that this is all a trick?

You’re not army. Whatever you’re cleared for, I don’t know. So. You want the rest?

The doctor acquiesces. Please.

We were there, checking out a hospital, and there were only three days left before we moved to the next area. So it’s routine, place has been cleared out. Should be easy. And there’s a school that we checked, right next to this hospital. Hospital used to be a block of flats, but they converted it into whatever. School was empty, and we did it, routine. So we got slack. Beth hears him grit his jaw. His voice tightened when he did it: a level of audible stress. The recording continues: When we got to the hospital – and you have to remember, these things take like half a day to do a sweep, so it’s not something we breeze in and out – we were sloppy. No contact in a week. No shots fired in even longer, maybe three or four weeks. So that meant we were sloppy.

Okay.

On the bed, Vic’s body quivers and shakes. His hands pull themselves closed, making balled fists. His fingernails, which need cutting, dig into his palms. His toes curl over, the way they used to when he came during sex, his feet forming exaggerated arches, his legs twitching.

We went through and I was taking point, and I didn’t see it until too late. Something I triggered that was going to go off, and we were piling through the doorways because we were complacent. I suppose. So when I saw the flash – they do this little flash first, like the ignition on a boiler, the pilot light, you know – and I saw it and I thought, Well, fuck, this is my fault. I take this one.

That’s it?

Made sense. I was sloppy. I triggered it, so it was mine to take. And that means I got like this. There’s the noise of him moving, in the room. I got like this, and it blew shrapnel here and here.

Beth can see him, slightly re-enacting his movements in twitches and gestures. Remembering it exactly. He was so exact, such a creature of habit. Of repetition.

And that’s all I remember, until they dragged me off. I woke up in the helicopter but I don’t remember that part. Apparently I was awake, I don’t know. And then I was home. I remember seeing Beth when I got back, because she was waiting for me to wake up. That was about two weeks later, when I woke up properly. They’d operated already and everything. Taken the shrapnel out. And there was Beth, waiting for me.

Beth remembers it as well, but she can also remember those two weeks in the hospital, weeks that he has no recollection of, when she stood by this enormous incubator-like device that was keeping him alive, as they pulled the shrapnel from him over the course of two operations. They told her that he was lucky to be alive. She prayed that he would make it awake intact.

Vic’s voice tells the rest of the story to the doctor, and to Beth, and they both listen. Here, Beth finds herself sitting on the end of the bed, near to Vic’s feet. They twitch and curl up seemingly with every punctuation point of Vic’s speech. After a while, Beth puts her hand onto his right shin. She does it to steady them – to let him know that there’s somebody there, as if that might help – but she finds that she sort of likes it.

She imagines her husband trickling back into this body. She fantasizes that he is filling up, from the bottom of his body first, like water into a jug, and she’s touching the only part that might now be him.

Vic’s cough is what wakes her. She’s asleep in her bedroom, amongst the chaos of the vacuum-packed clothing bags that she’s pulled out of the Machine’s room to make it hospitable, and she’s dreaming of something that she can no longer remember when she wakes up, but it’s there, insistent, almost itching for her to find it. Then the cough, and it hacks through the mugginess of the flat. It’s the first noise that she’s heard Vic make since she brought him back, beyond the mild whimpers and whines that she thinks were involuntary; but here his body is responding to something. She gets out of bed. Half past four. She gets a bottle of water, even as the cough continues, and she swigs from it first. It isn’t until she gets into the Machine’s room that she notices the cough properly. She doesn’t know how much these things are or can be personal, but she recognizes it. It’s Vic’s cough: not just the hacking reaction of a dry throat in a random body.