James Smythe - The Machine

He rolls slightly, from side to side, as if he’s lying on waves. Somehow suddenly tidal. He makes a noise, like before, but much quieter. A digital murmur, nothing more, really. The Crown blinks. Over the now-quiet speakers, Beth can make out words.

I always wanted to be a soldier, he says. I always wanted…

As the voice on the recording drops, she stops listening. Instead, she watches him: the muscles on his arms. Where they had dropped and sagged as he stayed in the clinic, and the flesh had taken back his army physique to nature’s settling point, all of a sudden it looks as if it’s becoming stronger. She touches his bicep and it’s firm. She squeezes it and it’s not what it once was – she pictures him as he was, taut, pinched flesh, a body destined to cause envy in his friends and hers, built from training rather than pride or conceit – but somehow it’s getting back to how he was. She tells herself to read about muscle memory: about whether this is something others have experienced, as a by-product. His body resetting itself to the way that it once was. She peels up the t-shirt he’s wearing, and there: the fainting trace lines of his stomach muscles. The iliac crest she used to stroke.

So they told me that if it was what I wanted…

She stands and looks at herself in the mirror on the dresser: at how she’s faded away over the past five years. Living by herself, and the toll. And the time. She’s sure that, as she looks at Vic, he hasn’t aged. What she thought was salt-and-pepper hair starting to creep in looks different in this light. She thinks about giving him a haircut, back to how it used to be, so short that it was barely there at all.

Like this never happened, she says.

She wonders what he’ll see when he’s awake and himself again: when he looks into the mirror; what he’ll expect. Will he want himself as he was, or will he know? She’s not getting rid of the last five years, because the lies are something that she needs to extinguish completely. So will he want them? Will he want to see himself and know what he’s been through? Will he want to see the time he’s lost in his eyes and on his face, and running through every vein in his body? And when he looks at Beth, what will he see? The woman who destroyed him, or the one who recreated him, returned him to what he was?

She opens the door to the bedroom as soon as the playback ends, before the next one starts. Laura’s still there: the shadow of her head, leaning back against the window. Beth goes to the fridge for water, and she drinks it herself though it is meant for Vic. With the window shut, the heat in the flat is nearly intolerable. She takes another bottle into the room and shuts the door behind her, and presses play.

Another day. She gives him the diazepam in his drink, without food inside him. It sets in faster and heavier without the food, and she’s wasting time. DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY. He drinks it without saying a word, the whole drink down in one, and then lies back.

Thank you, he says. I was so thirsty.

She sees herself as if in a film: where the actor has been told to stumble backwards, shocked. Display an extreme reaction to this. Emotionally push yourself. Imagine that it’s real.

What did you say? she asks. Her voice is so shaky, so barely there. She sounds as if she might be sick, as she listens to her words: the filter of it in her throat, the words catching on rising bile.

Thank you. He turns and looks at her, only not quite at her, his eyes off somewhere else. It’s so hot. He smacks his lips together. Can I have more? Still no real eye contact. Beth steps forward and lifts the bottle to his lips, and he sucks on it, almost, like a baby at a teat, and she tilts it more.

Go on, she says. Her voice: her head. The pain in it, because she’s so tired, and she’s been doing this for so long, and now this, so suddenly? He can’t be back, not yet. What do you remember? she asks him.

I, uh, he says. He searches. His eyes flit around the room. They look for reference points. They look for something to latch onto.

Do you remember my name? she asks.

He looks at her, but not at her eyes. The rest of her face, her body. Up and down.

Beth?

Beth. Do you remember your name?

I’m Victor McAdams, he says.

What else? Where are we? She sits on the edge of the bed. She’s not touching him. She worries that, if she touches him, he might disappear; like he might not be entirely real, not yet.

I don’t know, he says.

How did you get here?

No, he says.

What’s the last thing you remember?

No, he says. No, I can’t get this, I can’t. Oh my God, I don’t, ah, ah. He panics, and he moves more. He tries to push himself up to sitting, but the drugs that he’s been given are settling in, and it’s tough. He’s pushing against them. You have to let me up, he says.

I can’t, Beth tells him, not yet. Lie down. Shush. She rubs at his temples as he gives in, because the drugs are so much stronger than he is, and he lies back. This will hurt, she says. But I’ve never been so convinced that I’m doing the right thing. She pulls the Crown down and puts it on. No lubricant, because he doesn’t seem to need it any more, as if the Crown has grown, somehow, to fit around him more comfortably. He murmurs and rocks again, but she starts the Machine nonetheless. She knows her way around the screens without looking: she can sit with him and stroke his brow, fingers running all the way to the pads of the Crown as she presses play, and then his voice amidst the sound of the engine as it roars at both of them, and amidst the tingle from the pads and the screen. With one hand on his head, and the vibrations there, and the other on the screen, taking in the vibrations from the Machine, she feels like the central part of a circuit, the part that completes it. Vic is incomplete, and she will help.

No, he says now, as the Vic on the recording describes who he used to be.

Are you Vic now? she asks him as he lies there, the sweat dripping from his body. Like a fever.

At the end of the session she walks out of the room and makes breakfast for herself, and downs bottles of water at the sink. She pops ibuprofen from the packet and swallows them, three, then adds a fourth minutes later, even though she knows that they’re not an instant relief, that they take time to work. She stands in front of the fridge and lets the air from inside it steam up around her, and soon the flat is full of something like smoke but it’s only condensation. She loses track of how long she’s been standing there. She drinks another bottle. In the reflection of the oven door she looks at herself: her hair, her face. One of the first things that she’ll do when she’s fixed Vic and brought him back to her is sort this out. A haircut, a trip to a department store, if there’s one wherever it is that they end up. She makes a note on a Post-it stuck to the fridge to do more house research when Vic’s sleeping tonight, so that she’s prepared. Somehow this is all going faster than she dreamed. She gave herself six weeks, and yet now, after only one – not even one, not really – he’s showing signs.

She peers at the window. Laura’s gone. Beth wonders when she left. If she stayed until the night, or gave up long before. She knows that she’ll be back, because Laura has that sort of insistence. The sort that doesn’t just slip away.

She wakes him for lunch, the session complete, and an extra hour and a half of sleep for both of them, to get over it. He opens his eyes at her. She’s put her face close to his, so that he can’t avoid looking. Her eyes at his.

Come on, she says. It’s time for lunch. Are you hungry?

I think so. She smoothes his hair where the warmth of the Crown has made tufts, like horns.