Katie Williams: Tell the Machine Goodnight

Pearl said it now, out loud, in her empty apartment.

“Ouch.”

Speaking the word brought no pain.

To pass the hour until dinner, Pearl got out her latest modeling kit. The kits had been on Apricity’s contentment plan for Pearl. She was nearly done with her latest, a trilobite from the Devonian period. She fitted together the last plates of the skeleton, using a tiny screwdriver to turn the tinier screws hidden beneath each synthetic bone. This completed, she brushed a pebbled leathery material with a thin coat of glue and fitted the fabric snugly over the exoskeleton. She paused and assessed. Yes. The trilobite was shaping up nicely.

When it came to her models, Pearl didn’t skimp or rush. She ordered high-end kits, the hard parts produced with exactitude by a 3-D printer, the soft parts grown in a brew of artfully spliced DNA. Once again, Apricity had been correct in its assessment. Pearl felt near enough to happiness in that moment when she sliced open the cellophane of a new kit and inhaled the sharp smell of its artifice.

Before the trilobite, she’d made a Protea cynaroides , common name king protea, the model of a plant that, as Rhett was quick to point out, wasn’t actually extinct. She could have grown a real king protea in the kitchen window box, the one that got weak light from the alley. But Pearl didn’t want a real king protea. Rather, she didn’t want to grow a king protea. She wanted to build the plant piece by piece. She wanted to shape it with her own hands. She wanted to feel something grand and biblical: See what I wrought? The king protea had bloomed among the dinosaurs. Think of that! This blossom crushed under their ancient feet.

The Home Management System interrupted Pearl’s focus, its soft librarian tones alerting her that Rhett had just entered the lobby. Pearl gathered her modeling materials—the miniature brushes, the tweezers with ends as fine as the hairs they placed, and the amber bottles of shellac and glue—so that all would be put away before Rhett reached the apartment door. She didn’t want Rhett to catch her at her hobby because she knew he’d smirk and needle her. Dr. Frankenstein? he’d announce in his flat tone, curiously like a PA system even when he wasn’t imitating one. Paging Dr. Frankenstein. Monster in critical condition. Monster code blue! Code blue! Stat! And while Rhett’s jibes didn’t bother Pearl, she also didn’t think it was especially good for him to be given opportunities to act unpleasant. He didn’t need opportunities anyway. Her son was a self-starter when it came to unpleasantness. No, she hadn’t thought that.

The sound of the front door, and a moment later, there Rhett was, each of the precious ninety-four pounds of his sixteen-year-old self. It had been cold outside, and she could smell the spring air coming off him, metallic, galvanized. Pearl looked for a flush in his cheeks like the one she’d seen in Mr. Waxler’s, but Rhett’s skin remained sallow; his visible cheekbones were a hard truth. Had he been losing weight again? She wouldn’t ask. After all, Rhett had arrived in the kitchen without prompting, presumably to say hello. She wouldn’t annoy him by asking him where he’d been or, to Rhett’s mind the worst question of them all, the one word: Hungry?

Instead, Pearl pulled out a chair and was rewarded for her restraint when Rhett sat in it with a truculent dip of the head, as if acknowledging she’d scored a point on him. He pulled off his knit cap, his hair a fluff in its wake. Pearl resisted the impulse to brush it down with her hand, not because she needed him to be tidy but because she longed to touch him. Oh how he’d flinch if she reached anywhere near his head!

She got up to search the cupboards, announcing, “I had a horrible day.”

She hadn’t. It’d been, at worst, mildly taxing, but Rhett seemed relieved when Pearl complained about work, eager to hear about the secret strangeness of the people Apricity assessed. The company had a strict client confidentiality policy, authored by Bradley Skrull himself. So technically, contractually, Pearl wasn’t supposed to talk about her Apricity sessions outside of the office, and certainly many of them weren’t appropriate conversation for a teenage boy and his mother. However, Pearl had dismissed all such objections the moment she’d realized that other people’s sadness was a balm for her son’s own powerful and inexplicable misery. So she told Rhett about the man, earlier that day, who’d been unruffled by the suggestion that he exchange his wife for prostitutes, and she told him about the woman who’d shouted at her over the simple suggestion of exploring a religion. She didn’t, however, tell him about Mr. Waxler’s amputated finger, worried that Rhett would take to the idea of cutting off bits of himself. A finger weighed, what, at least a few ounces?

Rhett grinned as Pearl laid the office workers bare, a mean grin, his only grin. When he was little, he’d beamed generously and frequently, light shining through the gaps between his baby teeth. No. That was overstating it. It had simply seemed that way to Pearl, the brilliance of his little-boy smile. “Moff,” he used to call her, and when she’d pointed at her chest and corrected, “Mom?” he’d repeated, “Moff.” He’d called Elliot the typical “Dad” readily enough, but “Moff” Pearl had remained. And she’d thought joyously, foolishly, that her son’s love for her was so powerful that he’d felt the need to create an entirely new word with which to express it.

Pearl went about preparing Rhett’s dinner, measuring out the chalky protein powder and mixing it into the viscous nutritional shake. Sludge , Rhett called the shakes. Even so, he drank them as promised, three times a day, an agreement made with the doctors at the clinic, his release dependent upon this and other agreements— no excessive exercise, no diuretics, no induced vomiting.

“I guess I have to accept that people won’t always do what’s best for them,” Pearl said, meaning the woman who’d shouted at her, realizing only as she was setting the shake in front of her son that this comment could be construed as applying to him.

If Rhett felt a pinprick, he didn’t react, just leaned forward and took a small sip of his sludge. Pearl had tried the nutritional shake herself once; it tasted grainy and falsely sweet, a saccharine paste. How could he choose to subsist on this? Pearl had tried to tempt Rhett with beautiful foods bought from the downtown farmers’ markets and local corner bakeries, piling the bounty in a display on the kitchen counter—grapes fat as jewels, organic milk thick from the cow, croissants crackling with butter. This Rhett had looked at like it was the true sludge.

Many times, Pearl fought the impulse to tell her son that when she was his age, this “disease” was the affliction of teenage girls who’d read too many fashion magazines. Why? she wanted to shout. Why did he insist on doing this? It was a mystery, unsolvable, because even after enduring hours of traditional therapy, Rhett refused to sit for Apricity. She’d asked him to do it only once, and it had resulted in a terrible fight, their worst ever.

“You want to jam something inside me again?” he’d shouted.

He was referring to the feeding tube, the one that—as he liked to remind her in their worst moments—she’d allowed the hospital to use on him. And it had been truly horrible when they’d done it, Rhett’s thin arms batting wildly, weakly, at the nurses. They’d finally had to sedate him in order to get it in. Pearl had stood in the corner of the room, helpless, and followed the black discs of her son’s pupils as they’d rolled up under his eyelids. After, Pearl had called her own mother and sobbed into the phone like a child.