Katie Williams: Tell the Machine Goodnight

“It’s fine if you keep it in your room,” she said. “I mean, I’d like you to.”

“But you need to finish it? You said that.”

On impulse, she reached out and grabbed his wrist. It was so thin! You didn’t really know until you’d touched it. She could have circled it with her thumb and finger easily. There was still a bit of the fur on his skin, the silky translucent hair that his body had grown to keep him warm when he’d been at his skinniest. Lanugo , the doctors had called it. They both stared down at her hand on Rhett’s wrist. She knew he was probably horrified; he hated being touched, especially by her. But she couldn’t make herself release it. She stroked the fur with her finger.

“It’s soft,” she murmured.

He didn’t speak, but he also didn’t pull away.

“I wish I could replicate it on one of my models.” She’d spoken without thinking, a bizarre and horrible thing to say.

But Rhett stayed and let her stroke his wrist for a moment longer. Then, something more, he touched it—improbably—to her cheek before extricating himself.

“Goodnight,” he said, and she thought she heard him add, “Moff.” Then he was gone; again, the sound of his bedroom door. Pearl stared at the unfinished trilobite, imagined it swimming through the dark oceans without the benefit of its antennae to guide it, a compact little shell, deadened and blind. Surely he hadn’t said “Moff.”

Pearl stayed up late again, pretending to work on the wasp, but really making unguided twists in the wire, ending up with an improbable creature, one that had never existed, could never exist; evolution would never allow it. She imagined that the creature existed anyway, imagined it covered with fur, with feathers, with scales, with cilia that reacted to the slightest sensation. When the light to Rhett’s room finally shut off, she went down the hall and got a cotton swab from her bag.

Rhett slept on his back with his lips slightly parted, the effect of the sleeping pill she’d crushed into his shake when fixing his dinner. It was easy to slip the swab into his mouth, to run it against his cheek without causing a murmur or stir. Easier than perhaps it should have been, this act that Rhett and the company, both, would consider a violation. The Apricity 480 sat on the kitchen table, small and knowing. Pearl approached it, the cotton swab in her grip. She unwrapped a new chip, the little slip of plastic that would deliver her son’s DNA to the machine.

You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.

She loaded the chip, fit it into the port, and tapped the command. The Apricity made a slight whirring as it gathered and tabulated its data. Pearl leaned forward. She unfolded her screen and peered into its blank surface, looking to find her answer there, now, in this last moment before it began to glow.

CASE NOTES 3/25/35

Saff says it’s funny to think of someone hating her enough to do what they did. She says it’s funnier to think that she herself was there while they were doing it, that she already knows the solution to this mystery; she just can’t remember what it is. She says that her body must remember—that the person’s fingers are printed on her skin, their voice in her eardrums, their reflection on the backs of her eyes—and maybe her body could tell her, if only she could get her brain to shut up and let it. She lifts her bracelets to her elbow and lets them drop back down to her wrist, where they fall against each other, chiming. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you, Rhett?” she says, adding, “Tell me the truth.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I say. “But then most people wouldn’t consider my sense of what’s crazy to be particularly reliable.”

Saff crinkles her nose. Does she think we’re flirting? If she does, I let her go on thinking it because it’s less trouble that way.

And I don’t tell Saff the truth: that my body knows more than my brain does, too, that that’s why I starve it. Instead, I tell her a lie. I tell her that I can help her.

CASE NOTES 3/26/35

On the night of 2/14/35, Saffron Jones (age 17) was dosed with “zom,” short for “zombie,” so named for the drug’s effects of short-term memory loss paired with extreme suggestibility. Basically, if you’re on zom, you’ll do whatever anyone tells you to and you won’t remember any of it afterward, won’t remember much of what came before it either, which is the nastiest part because you won’t remember who dosed you. While on zom, Saff was told to strip naked and recite conjugations of the French verbs dormir, manger, and baiser (respectively, “to sleep,” “to eat,” and “to fuck”). She was told to shave off her left eyebrow and to ingest half a bar of lemon soap. These events occurred in the basement of Ellie Bergstrom (age 18) during a party at Ellie’s house and were recorded on Saff’s screen. No one besides Saff is visible or audible in the video. As is typical with zom, Saff woke up the next morning with no memory of the previous night. She remembered leaving her house for Ellie’s party, that’s it. She thought she’d gotten drunk. She didn’t realize anything more had happened until she accessed Facebook and discovered the video posted to her account. It had 114 dislikes, 585 likes.

“IT COULD HAVE BEEN A LOT WORSE,” Saff tells me.

We’re sitting in her car in Golden Gate Park, pulled over on one of the access roads behind the flower conservatory. I can almost see the white spires of the conservatory through the treetops, but my clearest view is of the dumpster in the back where they throw out the flowers that have wilted and gone to rot.

“Saff. They made you eat soap.”

Saff showed me the video. (I don’t go on Facebook anymore.) In it, she took bite after bite of the thick bar of soap like it was a tea cake. Her pupils were huge and lavender in the dim basement light. (So were her nipples.) Her eyes weren’t dead, though, not zombified like you’d think. She has big, dark eyes, Saff does. And in the video, they glittered. Also, she smiled as she chewed. We think she must have been told not just to eat the soap, but to like eating it. I stared at her mouth so I wouldn’t look at her breasts, all too aware that the clothed Saff was sitting across from me, watching me as I watched her. In the video, the tip of her tongue darted out to collect a stray flake of soap from her bottom lip. Her lips parted, and a bubble formed between them, quivering like a word you can’t speak. Then she threw it all up, a foamy yellow torrent. After that, the video cut out.

Saff shrugs. “At least my eyebrow is growing back. Can you tell?” She’s penciled in the missing brow with care, but I can tell because it’s a slightly different shade of brown from the real one. “It could have been worse.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t? Are you sure you weren’t …?” Raped is what I’m not going to say.

“I think I could tell. It would have been … new.” I’m a virgin is what she’s not going to say.

Saff is sneaking looks at me, but this time it’s not because she’s trying to flirt. She’s embarrassed, either to tell me she’s a virgin or maybe just to be one. I want to tell her not to bother being embarrassed, not around me. When I left school last year, all the kids in our class had started declaring themselves straight, gay, bi, whatever. Me, I had nothing to declare. Because I was nothing. I am nothing. I’m not interested in any of it. The doctors say I would be if only I ate more, but they think every true part of me is just another symptom of my condition. What they don’t understand is that my condition is a symptom of me. That I am a stone buried deep in the ground, something that will never grow, no matter how good the dirt.