James Smythe - The Machine

I can’t let anybody else have this; have you, I mean, she says to Vic. You understand? The fans start. They start, as if she was powering it up for a treatment, but she’s not; and they keep accelerating, as if she’s been running it for an hour, which she hasn’t; and they keep going, until the noise is louder than a shout, and the vibrations through the floor make Beth almost lose her footing. She doesn’t know if this is real any more, or something else. She wishes that she could ask somebody else if they can feel this, but there’s only Vic, and he’s as much a part of this as the trembling casing of the Machine itself.

She presses the screen first, then flicks through the menus to the hard drive, and she goes through the sequence to erase everything. The screen’s vibration is so violent that it nearly hurts her finger as she presses it: running up it from the tip, making the joints shake. When she pulls her finger away it’s like she’s got pins and needles, but she’s pressed the button, and she’s confirmed that this is what she wants to do. The Machine may protest, but this is her choice. It’s not enough, she thinks. Hard drives can be recovered. Data – zeroes and ones – lives on past anything we do to it. Vic stands in the doorway and watches her.

Can I help you? he says, but he seems sad to be saying it.

You don’t want any part of this, Beth says.

Maybe not.

What happens after this?

I don’t know, he says. Are you taking it all away?

Just the memories, she says. Just what it’s got of you. She touches him: the vibrations inside her travel to him, and his skin seems to shake, sending him out of focus for a second. There, and yet not. You keep watching, she tells him.

She kneels on the floor and then moves onto her back, and she peers upwards into the opened insides of the Machine. She can see the wire cluster in the middle but can’t reach it, not from where she is; so she starts to stretch her arm, pushing her body up into an arch and pressing her shoulder against the edge of the opening. She reaches with her fingertips, flailing them as if that might make the ball come closer, but it doesn’t work. So she moves herself more, and then suddenly she’s closer; her head underneath the hole, and it’s large enough to squeeze inside, she thinks. So she does.

She starts with one shoulder and her head, and once they’re inside, the other shoulder, and she moves herself around, stretching and finding space inside the Machine’s enormity. It’s bigger inside than out, she thinks, and then she manages to bring the top half of her body up and into the Machine, and she reaches up until the ball of wires is in her hands, and she can start to unwind it. It’s tightly packed but there are no knots, no seals, and she manages to wind everything out until she sees the central nugget: the hard drive, a solid lump of silver metal, attached through a normal plug socket, almost: nothing complicated.

She touches it; it shivers. When she pulls the plug out, the shivering stops.

In the bedroom, Vic sits on the end of the bed and holds his head in his hands. He looks up when Beth reappears.

Is that me? he asks.

Yes, she says. She holds him out, and his metal glints in the darkness of the room.

What are you going to do with it?

I have to destroy it.

Okay, he says.

So. She puts the hard drive into her pocket. Outside the front door, more hammering: the forceful fists of the police again.

She’s in there, Beth hears Laura say, and then they hammer more. Laura shouts: She’s a murderer! She killed little Oliver! (Beth smiles when she hears his name. That was it. Oliver.) The police don’t try and quieten her. They keep hammering.

Mrs McAdams, they say, we know you’re in there. Please open the door, or we will enact forceful entry. Beth listens as other people’s voices appear: the fat neighbour and her daughters, asking what’s going on, their voices carrying through the walls and doors. She sees people massing outside, and hears Laura again.

She killed that boy, you know that? She’s a murderer, and she tried to kill me! She tried to erase me! Beth can see her through the crack in the curtain, even from here: standing by the railing, towel held to her head, preaching. When I confronted her, she tried to kill me! She blames it on her husband, but he’s been disabled by her. She thinks he’s in there with her, but he’s not! He’s not a murderer; she is! He’s in a home, a vegetable: a victim of what she has done!

I’m not, Vic says. What she says. I’m not.

No, Beth says. Of course you’re not.

The police hammer, and the door starts to move slightly in the frame. One of them shouts about going to get the ram, and Beth knows what happens then: this all comes apart around her in seconds. Everything needs to be forgotten about and abandoned. She can’t let them get this, all of this.

She stands, suddenly alone, with the Machine.

I started this, she says. Didn’t I.

Beth tries to force the bedroom window open more, but it strains at the hinges. Beneath them, not far below, is the Grasslands, and she knows she could make that drop. It’s not too bad. It would hurt, but she’d walk away.

Smash it, Vic says. So Beth takes the light from the bedside table and turns it around, and she rams the base at the window. It doesn’t smash – the glass is far too thick for that – but the thin struts of the window buckle slightly, widening the gap. Harder, Vic says. Really give it some welly. She stands aside and lets Vic take the lamp, and he rams it over and over again, until the window is wide enough for Beth to squeeze through. Outside there are railings along the edge of the window, and she puts her hands on them. If you lower yourself down first, the drop will be less, Vic says. So warm: the railings burn to touch, and her hands sweat as they touch them. She doesn’t have any other choice. She can hear the banging from the other side of the flat, and Laura’s voice carrying through.

She is messing with forces that she doesn’t comprehend, Laura says. Beth wonders what sort of audience she now has. How much the islanders are humouring her. They will break down the door and enter the flat, and they’ll charge through the rooms looking for them, or for signs of who they are – No, Beth thinks, who she is, that’s all – and they will tear her belongings apart. And will they stand in awe of the Machine? Will they stand in front of it, as hollowed and gutless as it now is, and will they know to search through it? Or will they look at its opened front and know that it’s dead: that it’s like Vic’s body, lying in that bed, with all that makes it what it is taken from it, stolen from the inside by Beth, and left ruined, alone and blinking and reaching for purpose? She gave it up so quickly.

She thinks back to the day that Vic all but died. She stood outside his room as they told her their diagnosis: how the Machine had taken him. She had spent hours holding his hand until that point, knowing – so sure, so absolutely utterly bloody-mindedly sure – that he would pull out of it, do some sort of right turn and there he’d be, complaining of a headache and sleeping all day and rubbing at those bruises on his head, but still her husband. He would go back to talking incessantly about things that they both remembered, key events, holidays and hotels and birthday parties and other things that mattered; and those things that the Machine made up for him the first time around, people and places that didn’t exist. They would come from nowhere, and he would say, I love you, and he would take her hand, and he would say, Do you remember that holiday in Hawaii? On Big Island? And Beth would smile and ask him to tell her about it. That’s how she’d phrase it: Tell me about it, she would say, and she would close her eyes and lie back and put her head in his lap, and sometimes he would stroke her face and her hair, but sometimes he would simply let it be, getting so carried away with the story and the words that were somewhere inside his head that he almost forgot that she was there. It didn’t matter, because this was him, and he was happy. Better fake memories, than memories that tore him apart and kept him awake at night. So when he lay there, frothing and howling, she told the doctors that she couldn’t see him. She asked them again if they really meant that it would be permanent and they put their hands on her shoulder.