James Smythe - The Machine

So she kisses him harder. She keeps her eyes closed, because she doesn’t want to know if he’ll be looking at her. He always used to look at her, his eyes open. He said that it made it feel better. More real. This feels real enough, Beth thinks. She pushes him back, his fingers still moving around her, and she slides on top of him. She manoeuvres, and then he’s inside her.

And the Machine is there all the time: that low-level noise that lets them know it’s still there, and that it’s still waiting to be used again. Beth pushes her whole body down to grind herself against him, and it doesn’t take long. She falls off him: in the heat, so sweaty so quickly. She thinks that she’ll have to change the sheets. She doesn’t say anything, and neither does he.

She lies next to him, trying to hear his breathing over the Machine; or maybe the Machine’s noise is his breathing, she can’t be sure. The heat becomes stronger somehow: as if it’s coming up through her body, and she’s making the heat herself, not the burning sun or the holes in the ozone layer that they warned them about for so long. She makes the heat. She feels her head with the back of her hand and can’t tell if it’s a temperature. So she gets out of bed and dresses herself lightly, her swimming costume and some shorts, that’s all. She walks back through the estate – it feels like days ago she was last here, not just earlier this evening – and she finds the beach opposite the stretch of shops where everything is dead and everybody else asleep, and she slides into the water. She swims out as far as she can, until the island is hidden by the darkness: only the blip of lights run across the view. She looks at the water as she treads to stay still: and the ripples on the surface that tell her that the vibrations have followed her even here. She stops and bobs, then sinks. Down. She shuts her eyes. Down. Cold all around her, and she can’t feel the warmth of the outside air, not even slightly.

She thinks that she could stay under: but even as she is thinking it something kicks in and her body writhes and forces her upwards, and she gasps for air when the surface breaks. She’s drifted closer to shore: she can see the estate from here again.

She swims back.

As soon as he wakes up she gives him the powder, worrying about the amount, stirred into orange juice to mask the taste. It turns the juice cloudy and grainy, and he pulls a face as he drinks.

No, he says. Oh, no.

It’s only orange juice, Beth says. To reassure him.

Beth, that’s not orange juice. That’s like chalk. Yuck.

Beth sits and stares at him. Suddenly nearly himself. Everything: the way that his face moves, that his tongue spits the words, that his hands ball when he doesn’t like something. His shoulders. And that leads her to his face, which is looking cleaner and healthier, and his arms, which are definitely trimmer. More toned. She wonders if he could press what he could when he was still at war, because this – Captain Vic McAdams – is the man she’s getting back. Not the shell that came back from war, or the shell that she helped make with the Machine’s treatments.

And then he tries to stand. He moves to the edge of the bed and swings his legs down, and it’s like he never stopped being himself. Feet go onto the floor, and he pushes himself to standing, and then rocks backwards.

Woah, he says. Unsteady. I’m a bit dizzy.

How’s your head? Beth asks.

Swimmy. I need…

Lie down, Beth says. How many pills were in the orange juice, she wonders. Five? Ten? All six packets made a pile of dust that filled half a mug, and this was a few teaspoons siphoned off and stirred in. But he’s weak anyway, she knows that. It’s been a long time.

Where are we? he asks.

In my flat.

What about our house?

I can explain it, but—

He doubles over and clutches his temples.

Jesus, this headache, he says. Jesus.

Come and lie down, Beth says. She has to support him, but it’s still easier than it was. On the bed in the Machine’s room he lies down, and in the darkness she soothes his head. She rubs her fingernail over the skin where his hairline sits, and he falls asleep. She takes the Crown and slips it onto his head. She tightens the bracing straps. I’m sorry, she says.

She presses the Machine’s screen. The vibrations and the noise, seemingly more intense again. She feels sick, and she has to hold onto the Machine as it makes her rock. She queues up the file and presses play, and on the bed Vic screams and bucks.

Oh God, he says, through the cries. Oh please. Please. Beth turns and holds him. She presses him to the bed, to try and stop him moving. Oh fuck, he says. This hurts oh my God it hurts so much.

I’m sorry, Beth says.

Oh my God. He passes out suddenly, and there’s no movement, not even a twitch. It’s sudden enough to make Beth feel for his pulse.

Do you know what makes it feel worse? the Vic on the recordings asks, his voice suddenly filling the room.

No, the Beth on the recordings says. What makes it worse?

That I can’t remember how we first met, he says. I don’t know why. It’s just a mist.

We met at a dance, the recorded Beth says.

That’s right. Okay. I think I remember now.

Beth now moves her hand to her mouth, because she doesn’t want to make any other noise. This was the part she didn’t want to hear, that she tried to pretend didn’t happen. This was her taking over the treatments, and changing the schedule to fit her timetable, not Vic’s, because she wanted a husband who was at home and normal and didn’t have gaps and patches that needed filling. This was a Beth who did three treatments a day when she should have spaced them out: three a week, they told her; a Beth who watched the bruise-burns appear on his temples each day with more speed, and then stay there; a Beth who was convinced that this was the solution.

Who sat in the clinic with Vic, in a room where they couldn’t see the Machine, and plugged him in and let it run and run.

They trusted the patients to do this at their own pace – there’s no right or wrong, the doctors told them, and that was their failing right there, that’s when they sealed their fate and condemned all these people: in not locking it down – and Beth was well aware that she was abusing it. How many of these recordings are there? Of her gently leading Vic down corridors to find patches, and then letting the Machine make of those patches what it did? Trusting in it – behind a wall, not even just a curtain, but something that they couldn’t see but could definitely hear, the continual churning behind and above them – and letting it do what she should have done herself?

She wants to turn the volume down, but here they are: herself and the man that she first created, as they go through the process. As she hears herself pushing him.

I don’t know, the Vic on the recording says, by way of an answer to a question.

Yes you do, the Beth says. Try and remember. You do know.

Okay, he says. Jesus, my head hurts.

Don’t stop now, the Beth says.

On the bed, Vic starts his bucking again, awake, his mouth suddenly frothing. Beth pins him down as much as she can.

I’m sorry, Beth says.

On the forums, the person who built the Machine’s new firmware used a construction analogy.

Before, the post said, it was like you were building extra floors to a building, like a block of flats, when there wasn’t the structure for it. You weren’t supporting it with pillars and scaffolding, just putting it on the top and hoping for the best. And then, at the same time, you’re pulling out the bottom floors in big chunks. You’re taking out the basement and the lower levels, taking out the foundations, and you’re leaving the whole thing unbalanced. They – the doctors – didn’t think about that. So, what happened next? I apologize, because maybe the analogy is crude, but the whole thing collapsed, and the building that you were adding to was destroyed. Not just the new parts, but all the parts, the older parts as well. Might as well have been flattened. Now what you’re going to do is build something new on the ground. The building-up part, that’s not what made it collapse. It was the removing of the foundations. That’s why this is safe, perfectly safe, for them. No danger for them, and no danger for you.