by Leah Thomas
Can you blame my heart for tripping over its own beats? Can you blame my lungs for limping?
It became worse when he released his hold on me. Then I felt I was caught in the blackest reaches of outer space, falling into pitch darkness. I cried out and could only just hear my own voice, only just feel the faint echo of the vibrations in my throat.
Merrill could see well enough. There were lights in the chamber, lights that have never meant a thing to me. He didn’t rely on his ears. It must have fascinated him, watching me flounder in that minuscule chamber. I fell to my knees. Tried to reach out to the foam walls to orient myself. To do something about the way my chest was heaving, my heart was skipping beats. To make noise enough to see by. To little avail. The walls were far enough that I could not reach them. I gasped. Clung to the platform we stood on, as insubstantial as the cold metal of it felt when I could not see it.
Merrill did not help me up. Of course he would not. He pressed fingers to my throat to take my pulse, probably taking notes on his clipboard. Then he cupped a hand against my right ear while I gasped on the floor.
“Come on, Moritz! What’s with that heart rate? Get a grip on yourself! This doesn’t look good for us, you know?” He was shouting, but it was coming out in whispers. It was everything in a vault of sensory deprivation. I clicked and clicked, and there was nothing. Nothing but his distorted voice. I could only listen. “You’re supposed to be our golden boy. Most fetuses we tweak aren’t lucky enough to land supersonic hearing. Some kids end up tiny and with no legs and no arms and half a brain. They’re going to cut funding if we can’t prove you kids useful. And even you’ve still got cardiomyopathy, don’t you? The initiative’s a failure if you’re not superhuman, Momo! Prove yourself! So click louder! Quit panicking!”
He jammed a finger against the monitor implant behind my ear; it beeped, illuminating my skull. Doubtless the device told him how my heart was failing, how my temperature was rising and my ears were straining. Could it tell him what I was trying to?
Could it tell him to stop?
Was he writing this down? What were the numbers telling him when all I was telling myself was that this wasn’t worth living through?
“This is so disappointing, Momo!”
I was gasping. Light-headed. Weeping just to feel the warmth of water on my cheeks. The spikes of pain in my chest were worsening, constant. But every word that went straight into my head was more painful. He was so indifferent, Oliver.
I was a fruit fly in a vial. He would squish me between his thumb and a hard surface, to see what color my blood was.
“Please,” I wanted to say, but I could not hear my voice. I clutched at his pants.
Somehow he made himself heard. Put his mouth so close to my ear that the warmth of his breath seemed to prick the inside of my skull. “Those women in the waiting room. They’re still hoping to avoid cystic fibrosis, you know? They don’t realize that we’re aiming for the future. But if even our muse can be defeated by foam blocks, what am I doing here? How are you inspiring?”
The pain was unbearable now. My lungs were lifeless sacks. Breathing seemed futile. I must have been in the throes of cardiac arrest.
“Look, it’s all because of you, Moritz. All those failures in the children’s ward, in the name of improving you. Because even you’re still diseased! So prove we haven’t wasted our time!”
“Please.” It was only a gasp in my constricting throat. Was I being crumpled by a mighty fist, ribs through lungs and bone shards through muscle? And underneath it all, what pained my heart more? My disease?
Or the knowledge that my existence diseased everyone else?
This was when I died, Oliver. If you were wondering.
I was unconscious during my liberation from the anechoic chamber.
Rostschnurrbart ran into Dr. Merrill in the elevator. Asked if Merrill had spoken to me that morning. Merrill shrugged. But on the ground floor, when Rostschnurrbart asked after me in the waiting room, the woman who smiled told him that an odd man had shown me away.
Rostschnurrbart did not hesitate. He told me while I was lying in recovery that he had long since found something unsettling about that grin. He had been careful not to leave us two alone together. Rostschnurrbart recalled the incident with the water tank. Recalled that Merrill made no effort to save me from drowning, but instead recorded data while I flailed behind the glass.
When Rostschnurrbart pulled me from the chamber, my lungs had collapsed. I had no pulse when he lifted me out.
Rostschnurrbart had to press the defibrillators into my chest to restart my heart. I did not repel them.
My mother installed my pacemaker that same day. I did not wake for almost a week. Merrill was long gone. My mother did not listen to his claims. He grabbed her lapels. Declared that his actions were for the sake of progress, couldn’t she see? The place was stagnating! Look!
Rostschnurrbart struck him in the face. He was not grinning then.
My mother never truly looked at me. She was logical; she knew that no matter which way she was facing, in a room of sufficient sound waves I could see her. She should not have to look at me.
It never bothered me until I was lying in rehabilitation after the anechoic incident.
When she was switching out one of my IVs, I found the courage to speak to her. I had considered, carefully, my course of action. Which questions to ask her.
“Mother,” I said while she pushed a needle into my arm. Her fingers were icy inside her gloves. We weakhearted fools have poor circulation. “Mother, did you make me this way?”
“I did.” She pulled the needle out again. “Somehow I did.”
“Not on purpose?”
“Not on purpose. I only meant to repair your heart, not take your eyes. Genetic manipulation is a mysterious field. We are still learning.”
“Were you trying to … repair the others, too?”
She pulled medical tape from her pocket. “No. Not only repair them. I was trying to improve them. As I unintentionally improved you.”
“But why not only repair them? If they could have been normal?”
The threads of the medical tape she laid on the needle already pulled at my skin.
“Normal people have done little for the dying world, mein Kind. The world needs abnormal vision. As it stands, there are flaws in humanity that no genetic manipulation can change.” Her impassive face flickered. “Normal people are monstrous.”
“My father was normal.”
“Without a doubt.” She sighed, for once like a person. “And he left us. Too late to change him.”
I asked a final question.
“Would … would you still love me if I were … normal?”
“Do you have to ask?” She left the room.
I did have to ask. In a soulless house, you must ask such things.
I have wondered what would have happened if my mother had not accidentally taken my eyes from me. If her meddling in my genes had simply fixed my cardiomyopathy and left me unremarkably normal. Utterly human. If the research in the lab had not been twisted to bizarre purposes.
Your ailment could be my fault, Oliver Paulot. I do not know how far my mother’s needles reached. How many children across the world are pale, twisted shadows of superhumans. How many parents with genetic conditions applied to her testing program hoping she’d spare their children disease, not realizing she’d only do so if she could give them “abnormal vision.”
I do not deserve normalcy, Oliver. Not if my existence deprived others of it. I am the prototype of your suffering. It may be because of me that you cannot visit the garage that houses your family’s grief. That you cannot go to a cinema. Or be irritated by cartoons.
If I had been born with eyes, would you be dancing to New Wave on Halloween?
Do you wonder why I could not tell you of this sooner?
You wanted me to cure your boredom. You did not want me to haunt you.
And I … I did not want to be the monste
r who sent you to the woods.
Moritz
P.S. You think I am leaping to conclusions. You think that your illness could be unrelated to the lab in Saxony. If only, Ollie.
I didn’t want to tell you. In the laboratory that injected young women with chemicals, the man who played peekaboo with me and raised me from the dead with defibrillators:
His name was not Rostschnurrbart. I misled you.
You should know that Rostschnurrbart translated into English is “Rust Mustache,” or perhaps “Auburn-Stache.” He wore paisley shirts and leather shoes. He moved in a stuttering, stop-motion fashion.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Needles
I’m sorry you were locked in a dark chamber. I know the feeling.
Screw hypocrisy: you should have told me all this sooner.
The thing about Auburn-Stache—how the hell am I supposed to trust him now? How could you let me, knowing what you know about him? How do I know he doesn’t spend all the time he isn’t here working in Germany, jabbing needles into people?
Right from the start we became friends because we needed someone to trust in, to confide in, right?
But you still can’t see me as a confidant. Even now. Even after what I told you about Joe, about Liz, you were holding back things that massively shape both our lives. I want to think it doesn’t matter.
Why did you lie to me? How could you?
How could you do what everyone else does?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Womble
Ollie,
Perhaps I should have told you all this sooner. But much of our friendship is founded on encouragement. You have been such a light. You had confidence in your autobiography. Why would I take that from you?
Why would I want to reveal the horrors of me to the only person who ever saw me as heroic?
I think, perhaps, you are asking the wrong question. It should not be “Why did you lie to me?” but rather “Why did you decide to tell me the truth?”
Knowing the stakes, why should I ever risk it?
I haven’t told you about the night before we confronted Lenz. The night we returned to Partygänger. Mel didn’t even sigh when he let us in. Another night of music and noise and illumination and the kind of company that was beginning to comfort me. Company that no longer made me look over my shoulder in trepidation.
We danced. We laughed. Owen mouthed along to words and I acted like a fool to the beat. The world wept to see my terrible dancing. I danced anyhow.
And at one point while a song crescendoed and broke like waves on the shore, Owen leaned forward and kissed me out there on the dance floor. Hyper-real in the vibrations of the bass and bodies and breath and motion. He pulled my head toward his and held me close so that you might have thought I could not breathe. For once my weak heart did nothing. Felt nothing.
For a moment I understood silence. I pulled away from him. I left him standing alone in a field of movement. Even as I turned around, of course I could still see him. Could see how his face crumpled as I retreated.
I pushed through nameless torsos to the bar. Fieke pounded me on the back. If only I could blink my thoughts from my head.
“Well? You’ve gotta be fluffin’ pleased.”
I shook my head. “Beg pardon?”
“What?” She scowled. “All that chasing after my brother and you ditched him? Are you shitting me?”
I allowed her to shove me that time. I could see Owen headed for the exit, pushing past people. Harried. Losing his innate rhythm.
“What the fluff were you thinking? Are you even human?” As angry as Fieke ever was with me, this was the angriest.
“I don’t love him,” I said.
“As if you know what the hell it is to love anybody, you android.”
She did not stomp away. She glared at me until I had to leave. Until the noise was showing me too much of Owen’s painful absence.
But I do know what it is to love anybody. I realized it the moment Owen pressed himself against me and the rest was only silence.
I can confess because I am already doomed.
Doomed, not only that I love a boy far away, but that I love a ghost. I love a boy who will forever be a stranger to me and my crippling heart. It is also that you have been, since the moment I first knew you existed, completely in love with someone else. And I loved you anyway. Despite or because of Liz’s impenetrability.
I love the way you fail to stay on topic. Your admittedly lame sense of humor. Those self-effacing comments you make that demonstrate the extraordinariness of your heart. I love the way you feign optimism for the sake of those around you.
It causes me no end of grief, loving you. Ollie, you cause me no end of grief with the way you counteract yourself. With the way you bring misery onto yourself and act like an idiot for the sake of a girl who does not appreciate you. Who cannot appreciate the loneliness and the silence.
Forgive my bluntness.
Now you cannot say I do not trust you. I have shown you my beating heart. Pacemaker and all, confidant.
Now that I have trusted you with the darkest depths of me, I have sent you this package. Inside you will find a womble, a rubber hazmat suit that my mother once wore in the laboratory. Perhaps your father wore one, too. I beg you to go out and stand up for yourself. Stand up for the girl you’re in lovesickness over.
Win the girl and take her away into the night after your masquerade ball.
I am going to the hospital. Nothing can hurt me now that I’ve faced the power line that is you.
Worry about your weakhearted fool of a pen pal no longer.
Yours,
Mo
Chapter Thirty
The Blackberries
I hope that one more thing you can forgive me for—or love me for or whatever—is my bad habit of being a complete ass.
I’m sorry. And now I’m terrified. What are you doing? What will happen to you if you turn yourself in? What will you do when you get to the hospital?
No, screw it. There’s more I need to say to you.
Mo, I can’t hate you for loving me. Although I can wonder whether you’re on drugs—not because I’m a boy, which, whatever, Oscar Wilde. But because I’ve been such an idiot all the time.
Maybe if I’d met you first, out by the power line with pockets full of berries—not Liz, but you—I mean, who knows? I don’t know anything about love except that it stings a bit and makes people act like cat-pissing doofuses.
Never mind.
What I’m saying is this:
I didn’t mean to blame you for one second about what your mother did. I was so scared, so angry, and I took it all out on you. Because Mom can’t walk anymore, and Auburn-Stache said nothing the last time I asked again if she was going to die.
If Vorgaggingdon’tmakemewriteitagaindamnit is all about moving past the actions of a previous generation, how can you just sit there all shaken with guilt about your mother’s bad choices? I mean it.
Let me put it more artistically, with greater sophistication:
They left us in the toilet. In the deepest pile of shit. And we’re coated in the crappy residue of their decisions. But that does not mean we are the one who pooped, Moritz. And neither are we the poop.
Never think that. We are not the poop.
I think that analogy puts it straight. And don’t argue with it. Don’t even try.
Moritz, you are not the poop.
(I can’t wait for you to cringe through this. I hope you can still laugh at my lame humor.)
But, god, I’m not laughing. I’m terrified. I’m scared that you’ve ended up like your mother somehow, buried under the weight of her bullshit. And then there’s me, powerless to do anything about it. Powerless yet again.
Moritz, don’t go anywhere.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Hands
Father will not look at me. I told him what happened. Told him the awfulness of what I did to Lenz under the bridge. He contacte
d Lenz’s father. A phone conversation that I left the room for. That I plugged my ears to make myself blind for.
Father told me to get in his car. He didn’t turn on the radio. He sighs in his throat, and I can hear the echoes of how he can’t bear what I’ve done. What I may have become. Am I so different from the girl who tried to drown me?
I gave him the address of the Abend residence. When we passed under the bridge, I could not see it.
The basement apartment seemed shabbier than I remembered. I walked right down the steps and took a deep breath. Knocked on the door.
After a moment, Owen eased the door open. His gaze shifted to his feet. I could hardly see him despite the way his pulse trilled. He soon withdrew. Of course he did, after my inhumanity on the dance floor. My violence under the Südbrücke.
Fieke appeared in the foreground, pulling out the chain latch.
“Look what crawled out of its cave.” All her piercings had been removed. Her face was actually soft-featured without those rings and studs. I saw the little girl in her again. She looked in dire need of sleep.
I coughed. Straightened myself up. Tried to project confident dolphin-waves. For whatever good it could do. “I am going to see Lenz. I am going to tell his father what happened.”
“What, did you grow a pair? He’s been lying there for ages. It’s a bit late.”
“I came to ask you to accompany me.”
“Fluff off,” said Fieke. “Why would I ever want to see him again?”
“Because you’re sorry for what happened. Because you can’t sleep, either.”
“You don’t know shit.”
“He never touched you,” I said. “He wasn’t the one who hurt you.”
Again I let her hit me. The smack of her palm on my cheek confirmed my words. It wasn’t Lenz. But it was someone, anyone else. It was the parents neither of them speak of. The reason they live alone in an apartment in disrepair without proper heating. Why Fieke is nineteen years old but still in Hauptschule. This is their inheritance.
The slap echoed in my head. I retreated up the steps. A bus passing on the street bombarded me with sound that I wished I could vanish into. No matter what, I will always hear my rushing blood and creaking bones. I slipped into the passenger seat beside Father.