ODD?

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I wasn’t comfortable before. My throat was hoarse and sore because I yelled at them. They deserved it. I screamed at them and swore and cursed when I felt the smooth weight of the sedative leaning down on me, pressing into my lungs. They had no right. I’d been entitled to that meal and sedative wasn’t supposed to be part of it. I’d have kept eating. The rest of the lamb, potatoes roasted golden and crisp so that they shattered when I bit into them, all hot and brittle and salt. There was soft cheese and plums and pears and peaches. I’d have kept eating, eaten beyond the sanity of balance, eaten until my gut split and I died in the pain and wonder of too much of everything.

  They hid it in the brandy. So dense and sweet, gravity and lightness and fire in my mouth and throat, the captured bitterness of it, all love and hate and regret, thick and wonderful, and they’d drugged it.

  I am comfortable. Pain is a scream, trapped inside this terrible comfort. Pain is wanting to move, to run and hurt and love and feel and freedom and no one and nothing. Pain is life and so I am comfortable.

  They placed me on a bed and brought me in here. It’s white and blue, this room; it’s silver and grey. All so pale, except for their faces. The doctor’s eyebrows are dark arches above blue that is either his eyes or just the walls of this place reflecting against his soul and a wisp of brown hair shows, just beside his left eye, at the edge of his cap. The light in here is bright, but it doesn’t shine into my face. All along the far wall are trays and bowls and troughs, stainless steel. Cold.

  There are assistants, I’m not sure how many. Like the doctor, they are dressed in blue. Unlike him, their faces are covered. They shuffle about, turning towards me and then away. I see the darkness of their eyes. I can hear them, the rustle of their clothes, the slip of feet on floor, the sibilance of voices in this. They speak, but not to me.

  This room is a theatre, that’s what they told me. A theatre. A place where performances are staged. It’s full of old machines, grey and shiny, all steel and holo displays. There are plastic tubes, laid out, ready for use. Ready. They’re ready for me to star in their show, silent in their anticipation, waiting to open their mouths inside my flesh. On the other wall there's a mirror that’s really a window. Witnesses are on the other side, watching me as if I’m television. But I’m not. I’m not television. I’m real.

  The doctor smiles and nods. I want to believe that somewhere in his face I will find compassion. I want him to say that I have been pardoned. I want him to say that I have been given an extension. I want him to whisper I have a plan. He holds up a syringe so that I can see it. Taps the side of it in order to raise a bubble of air which he expels.

  “You may have this in your arm or your leg,” he says. “Which would you prefer?”

  I prefer to not have this happen.

  They didn’t believe me when I told them about the beach. Day after day they pointed to the schematics and told me that there was no beach and no sky. I thought the psychiatrist might have understood how there can be a beach, even when it doesn’t show on their plans, because he started talking about race memory and collective unconscious. Then one day I went to see him and it was a different psychiatrist.

  I cannot speak. My throat’s stopped up with fear. I’m shaking. I don’t know if the doctor can see this, but it’s because my heart is beating so hard, so fast. It’s as if I’ve run and run and run. As if I was allotted a certain number of beats, back at the beginning of my life, and my heart knows that it’s never going to use them all up now, but it wants as much of its allocation as it can get. I’ve tried to make it stop. I wanted to take that away from them.

  The needle is small and very sharp. It will be the last thing I ever feel and I want to feel it. What if he stuck it in my eye or the palm of my hand or the tips of my fingers? What if he stuck it in my cock? Wouldn’t that be punishment enough?

  “Arm is easiest,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. My voice is small and dry. Catches between the muscle spasms in my neck.

  The pain is not enough. A fleeting scratch and then warmth. Silent warmth sliding up my arm and down my fingers. Into my shoulder and into my chest and then suddenly it’s everywhere. A weight and a lightness all at once. I am awake in a vivid acuity. The light in the room seems lighter, but it might just be the drug’s affect on my eyes.

  “You won’t feel this one.” He holds a second syringe where I can see it.

  Blurry, up close, the needle goes into my face. Dipping, up and down into me. A moment later my vision returns to normal and the feeling has come back into to my tongue and lips. I could eat if I wanted to. I could drink, I could kiss and shout and laugh and bite and blink and frown and smile. They have only done this so that I can speak.

  “I want to live,” I say.

  “Life is balance,” he says.

  The assistants’ feet scrape and hiss across the floor. They lift me. I can’t feel their hands. I’m on a table now, the unfelt cold bench that’s part of the props of this theatre. Head up, arms by my sides, legs out in front. There are gutters running down the sides. One assistant wheels away my bed, one strips the cotton blanket from me.

  I am naked, just wearing this body one last time. Assistants bring basins of water. In silence they wash me, arm by arm, leg by leg, careful to sponge clean the wounds and bruises. I can hear the small trickle of water as they dip the cloths and then wring them out. I can smell the tang of soap. I wish that the cloth would press against my mouth, that I would taste the water or the soap, but they hold it so carefully with their blue gloves. They place my hands on the table, palms up and away from my body. No part of me even touches me.

  There’s a sudden hiss of sound and I’m confused for a moment and then I hear the magistrate’s voice coming from a speaker somewhere in the room. She says: “Commence.”

  The doctor stands at the foot of my table. An assistant wheels in a cart. There are knives and scissors and blades laid out on the tray of the cart on a cloth that’s blue as the sky I’ll never see again. Blue as the sky that they deny even exists. Blue as it was that day.

  The doctor steps to the right side of the table and lays his hand on my dick. This part of me, such a paradox. So soft, so hard. Anger and ecstasy. Piss and come. I want to feel it one more time but I can only see it. “Don’t do this.” The words seep out of me but in the time it takes to say them he has the blade in his hand and already blunted me with a tourniquet and I can see a line of red. It blurs and blurs. How can they do this? How can they do it to me? I can't breathe, I've forgotten how, the blade buries itself inside me and I expect pain but there’s nothing. The assistant holds up scissors, the ends of them are flattened, and buries them in the wound. The bleeding slows. Bleeding. My dick and balls all small and pale and limp in his hand and then in a bowl and I’m bleeding. Like a woman. I can smell it: smoke and meat; and then the thick protein smells of blood and piss. I can’t even tell that I’m pissing, except for the smell.

  It’s gone. The assistant carries the bowl to the window and holds it up for the witnesses, though there are cameras everywhere; they watched the cutting in close-up. The magistrate’s voice hisses over the speaker and I don’t hear her at first. There’s something white dabbing and poking at my face. One of the assistants is wiping my eyes and nose.

  “. . .and the delivery system has now been excised. In accordance with Paragraph (a) of Section II. Order of the line will be considered on sexual maturity if the get is male. Until such time, a core-sample of generative material will be cryogenically maintained.”

  They could stop this now. They could even reverse it if they really wanted to, but they could stop. Just stop. Sew my wound. Let me sit to piss. I could live like this. No harm to anyone. Neutralised. No more ferals. It would be so easy. “Please,” I say. “Please. . .”

  The doctor looks down at the wound he’s created. At the stump where I end now. His gloves are red and purple and blue. He tucks a thread of flesh back inside me. I’m too messy for this world. His finge
rs run up my right leg, blue on my skin, at the broken flesh and the black, purple bruises. “That must have hurt.”

  “I was running.” Running so fast. I thought I could get away from them. I tripped in the thick sand and fell. Snap of bone and the pain. I screamed when they rolled me onto my back and my eyes were watering from the sand in them and the sun.

  Worse than the pain is their continued denial.

  The doctor’s fingers tap against my leg. The bruises fade under the press of his finger and then turn dark again.

  “I wanted to get into the water. I wanted to swim. I could have swum a long way. There are islands.”

  The doctor does not look at me.

  One assistant brings a big rubber sleeve that reminds me of a toy I had when I was a kid. A möbius sleeve forever turning itself inside out, slipping through my fingers, almost impossible to hold onto. Assistants tuck my foot into it and push it up the length of my leg; their thin, blue fingers burrow into the wound of my groin as they push and push. The sleeve has squeezed the blood out of my right leg and it looks pale and diseased, the bruises all green and purple. Another assistant ties a wire around the very top of my leg. I can see the flesh bulging up against it. That should hurt. They roll the sleeve off. My toes are turning blue.

  The doctor’s blade burrows into my hip, thigh, groin. The assistants wipe away small amounts of blood and click and snip with their little, flat scissors. Blue smoke hazes their blue hands and I can smell meat cooking.

  “Fixing a break like that is a huge resource drain.”

  The doctor is right, of course, but I never asked to have it fixed. I offered it to them. I said they could take it away. I said they could use it.

  Smoke haze drifts and swirls around the assistants, their voices low murmurs. Tools whine and screech, shuddering through my foundations so that I can’t see properly.

  This is all a process, like the processes in factory rooms where clothes and chairs and phones are put together. Only this is the reverse. They rock me from side to side and wrap their arms around me to hold me steady against the cutting and hammering. The smell of blood is so thick. I am immersed into the salt of it, into the ocean of it.

  “I loved running. I was so fast. She ran with me. You know that.” They can hear me. The doctor and the assistants, the magistrate and all the witnesses. “She ran with me. She saw it all too.” It was only a game. It was only everything. That speed and strength and lightness and power. That race and rush and fall and fuck. Sand and old seaweed sticking to my arse and her on top of me, laughing and smooth and hot and her tits and my hands and her face and mouth. We were beating like the surf, her laughter shrill as a gull and all the soft and hard of us coming together.

  Blue assistants move like waves at the beach. I can see the red and white and yellow of meat. Those flat scissors hang from where my leg was. One assistant wheels that trolley to the window for the witnesses and this time I hear what the magistrate says.

  “Right lower extremity. This material will now be recycled as skin matrix, protein and mineral resource.”

  When I shut my eyes, they are gone. I wish I could shut my ears; it's hard to ignore the small sounds of them, the whispers and the plotting. I can feel my face from the cleft of my chin to the top of my eyebrows. A narrow band of sensation: mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows. Right leg.

  It startles me. I might have said something, I’m not sure. Several of the assistants turn and look at me. The doctor frowns. It isn’t there, but I can feel it. Not cold and broken, lying in a trough but strong now. My right leg! I flex my toes and aim a kick at the doctor’s head. Nothing happens, of course.

  The assistants take the sleeve to my left leg. To my perfect and beautiful left leg.

  I breathe slow. Air slips over my top lip. I can’t feel my lungs filling or my chest expanding, I only know that they are.

  “You could stop. You could stop now.”

  The doctor begins the cutting of my left leg.

  “You could stop after that.” The pulling and the little noises. The small, water sound of my blood caught in the table's gutters. “I’d be balanced then.” I could learn to move about on just my hands. “I wouldn’t be a drain on the resources. I wouldn’t need as many calories and the feral will only be small, it will take years before he or she needs to consume very much. Equal to two legs for a long time, all that mass of muscle going into the protein vats. I’ve given back. I’m giving back. Isn’t it enough?”

  An assistant beside me, holding me. An embrace that I can’t feel. Now I end halfway up the table. They’ll be a good mineral resource because I took care of them. All that calcium. All that protein. All that sand.

  “Stop!” For a moment, they hesitate, the trough and my beautiful leg almost there, almost at the mirror-window. “There's sand. Check under my toenails. Just look. There's sand under my toenails from where I was running on the beach. Can you look? You can look. You can just—you can look. You should.” But they move on and they don't reach for my toes. They won't even look. They won't look for the sand. She ran with me and I can feel it. My legs are pumping, jarring against the sand, slipping and twisting in it. I open my eyes and see smears of blood where my legs were, I close them and feel the stretch and thrust of each stride, the prickle of salt air against my thighs.

  “She saw the ocean.” She saw it. She laughed and pulled strands of her hair covered in sand away from her mouth. She kicked sprays of water at me and she dove in, her hair and clothes streaming and foamy. It was real and she knew it, so why did she deny it when we stood in that courtroom?

  “Why won't you even look?”

  “We’re going to lay you back a little now,” the doctor says. “Just so you don’t slip down the table.”

  One of the assistants is holding my hand. I look to him for some hope of sympathy, of compassion, a sign that I’ve atoned for something that shouldn’t even be a crime. He has another, smaller sleeve and he pushes my hand into it.

  “Now there’s nothing left to balance me. Did you think of that? Did you think about how I am no longer in balance?”

  “We will bring you to balance. That’s what we’re here for.”

  Nothing is wasted. Not a single drop of blood, not even a thought, so listen to me. Listen to my thoughts: It. Was. All. Real. Can you hear me? Do you understand? I wish the machines would answer. This is maintenance of integrity and serenity. This is the law. Gravity and lightness are all inside me. My invisible legs stick straight up and pedal the air. There’s blood all around me and it smells like the ocean. The room is filled with my thoughts like grains of sand on the beach. Perhaps this is balance.

  I cut my arm, tried so hard to bleed myself out. I dug and dug at the soft flesh, searching for an artery. It hurt so much but I didn’t mind because it was me and it was mine and it was what I wanted. Dark flesh wept red on the floor of my cell but it wasn’t enough.

  One of the assistants lifts my left arm away. To show the witnesses. To please the magistrate. To bring me into balance.

  The doctor moves to my right arm.

  I grab him with fingers that aren’t there anymore. I can feel how hot the lights are on him. “It’s all I have left.

  “You could have stopped this. You could have made it so this never happened. There’s a procedure. You could do it for any male.” Sever the little tubes that carry sperm. I asked them, again and again why they couldn’t have done that. I never understood the sense of their reply. The germ cells could have been cryogenically preserved; I didn’t have to carry them with me all the time. There would have been no risk of creating a feral. But they talk about the importance of the mix of genes in every individual. Need for balance and conservation of energy. Random choice generated in the natural act of procreating, and, more importantly, the emotional cost and the energy cost of artificial fertilisation.

  “You won’t have my mix now.”

  “What mix is that?” The doctor is close by my right ear as he speaks.

&nb
sp; “My unique genetic mix. The part of me so important to balance within the gene pool.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I’ll be gone.”

  An assistant wheels the trolley towards the window.

  They could build a trolley for me. A little cart powered by my bioelectricity, a neural implant so that I could drive it.

  “Your gene map is still in the library with everyone else’s. And we’ll have samples of your cells and generative tissues. If the feral is male, he might be able to restore the balance himself. It’s happened before. Who can tell what the future will bring?”

  I can. I can tell. The blade goes—I can’t quite see it—into my chest, and draws a red line right down to where I finish. I can smell shit. I can smell it all honest and frightened and raw. The doctor’s arm sweeps past my face and I imagine the letter Y with its tail where my dick used to be and its arms raised, finishing where mine once started.

  Assistants, now smeared with golden shit and red blood, stand along each side of the table and grasp the open edges of the cut with metallic things.

  “Don’t do this. Stop. You could stitch the skin back together and you could let me go. You could.”

  I push him away with my hands that aren’t there, hit him and punch him. His blade is so fast. I am yellow inside under my skin and red in the middle and fog and thick smells come out of me. Ocean and smoke and meat and bitter and fear. I can see steam and red and bone and the pulsing energy of me.

  “Oh please don’t oh please don’t oh please don’t please don’t please don’t please don’t.”

  I am peeled and exposed. I am a child’s toy, an instruction manual. I want the assistants to look inside. I want them to at least care. They have silver-shiny clamps that their blue hands put inside me. I’m leaking into myself and draining away down the table’s gutters.

  The doctor’s blade is fast and sure, but not reckless. The assistants whisper, their feet shuffle.

  He takes and takes. I am a riverbed. I am a canyon.

  “Are you feeling any pain?”