by Delaney, JP
You can tell from the way he says all this how incredibly proud he is. You breakthrough, you.
A part of you wants to bask in his approval. But you can’t. All you hear is, You freak.
“How can you possibly love me like this?” you say desperately.
For a moment there’s a flash of something fierce, almost angry, in his expression. Then it softens. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,” he quotes. “Sonnet one sixteen, remember? We read it at our wedding. Four lines each, in turn. Then the final couplet together.”
You shake your head. You don’t remember that, no.
“It’ll come back to you.” You wonder if he means the memory, or the sentiment. “My point is, those weren’t just empty words to us. You were always unique, Abbie. Irreplaceable. A perfect wife. A perfect mother. The love of my life. Everyone says that, don’t they? But I really meant it. After I lost you, plenty of people told me I should move on, find someone else to spend my life with. But I knew that was never going to happen. So I did this instead. Was I right to? I don’t know. But I had to try. And even just talking to you now, for these few minutes—seeing you here, in our house, hearing you speak—makes all the years I put into this worthwhile. I love you, Abs. I will always love you. Forever, just like we promised each other on our wedding day.”
He stops, waiting.
You know you should say I love you back. Because you do love him, of course you do. But it’s still too raw, too shocking. And right in this moment, telling Tim you love him would feel tantamount to saying, Yes, this is fine. You did the right thing, my husband. I’m glad you turned me into this freakish, disgusting lump of plastic. It’s worth it, to be here with you.
I, too, love and worship thee more than life itself….
“Shall we continue?” he says after a moment, when you don’t say anything.
5
He leads the way upstairs. You have to hold on to the rail, your legs stamping cautiously on each step.
“Those were all yours,” he says as you pass a huge floor-to-ceiling bookcase. “You loved books, remember? And that’s Danny’s room.”
The bedroom he indicates, the first one off the landing, doesn’t look much like a child’s room. There are no curtains, no carpet, no comics or pictures or toys of any kind. Apart from the bed, the only furniture is a small TV and a shelf of DVDs. To anyone else it might seem Spartan, but to a child like Danny, you know, it’s relaxing. Or at least, less stressful.
“How’s he doing?” you ask.
“Making progress. It’s slow, of course, but…” Tim leaves the sentence unfinished.
“Will he recognize me?”
Tim shakes his head. “I doubt it. I’m sorry.”
You feel a stab of sadness. But then, even a normal child might forget their mother after five years. Let alone a child like Danny.
Danny has childhood disintegrative disorder, also known as Heller’s syndrome. It’s so rare, most pediatricians have never seen a case. Instead they’d tell you patronizingly that children simply don’t reach the age of four and then get struck down by profound autism over the course of a few terrifying weeks. That they don’t suddenly regress from whole sentences to talking in squeaks and groans and little snippets of dialogue from TV shows. That they don’t start urinating on carpets and drinking from toilet bowls. That they don’t pull out their own hair for no reason, or bite their arms until they bleed.
When a child dies, the world recognizes it as a tragedy. The parents grieve, but there’s also the possibility of grief lessening, one day. But CDD takes your child away and swaps him for a stranger—a drooling, broken zombie who inhabits your child’s body. In some ways it’s worse than a death. Because you go on loving this beautiful stranger even while you’re grieving the sweet little person you lost.
“Where is he now?” you ask.
“He goes to a great special-ed school across town. Sian—she was one of the teaching assistants there, until I hired her as a live-in nanny—takes him every morning, then comes back to work with him on his therapy program afterward. It’s not close, but it’s the best place for kids like him in the whole state.”
You’ve missed so much, you think. Danny’s at school. A school you didn’t even know existed.
Tim opens another door. “And this is the master bedroom.”
You step inside. It’s a large room, dominated by the painting, a self-portrait, on one wall. The woman in the painting is red-haired, her mid-length braids—dreadlocks, almost—casually piled on top of her head. Her left ear, the one turned to the viewer, has three large studs in it. She’s wearing a striped shirt, the lower part of which is covered in colored smears, as if she’s simply wiped her paintbrush on it as she worked. She looks cheerful: an optimistic, sunny-natured person. On her neck a tattoo, an elaborate Celtic pattern, disappears under the shirt collar and emerges from one sleeve.
You look down at the flesh-toned rubber of your own arm.
“We can’t do tattoos,” Tim explains. “It would compromise the skin material.” He gestures at the picture. “Other than that, it’s pretty accurate, wouldn’t you say?”
He means, you’re an accurate copy of the painting, you realize, not the other way around. They must have used a scan of it to construct you.
Is the woman in the painting really you? She seems too self-possessed, somehow, too cool. And too confident. You look at the signature, a dramatic squiggle in the lower left corner. Abbie Cullen.
“You didn’t usually work in oils,” he adds. “It was your wedding gift to me. It took you months.”
“Wow…What did you give me?”
“The beach house,” he says matter-of-factly. “I had it built for you as a surprise. There’s a big garage there you used as your main studio—you needed space for your projects.” As he speaks he’s opening another door, directly opposite the master bedroom. “But you worked in here when we were in the city. This is where you painted that self-portrait.”
The floorboards in this little room are flecked with paint. On a trestle table are jars of dried-out paintbrushes and tubes of solidified acrylics. And a silver pen in a stand. You go and pick it up. The barrel is inscribed ABBIE. ALWAYS AND ALWAYS. TIM.
“The ink will have dried by now, I expect,” he says. “I’ll get some more. I’d better start a list.”
Numbly, you pull at the hospital gown you’re still wearing. “I’d like to get dressed.”
“Of course. Your clothes are in the closet.”
He shows you the closet, a walk-in off the main bedroom. The dresses hanging there are lovely—boho-chic, casual, but made from beautiful materials in bold, bright colors. You glance at the labels. Stella McCartney, Marc Jacobs, Céline. You had good taste, you think. And a good budget, thanks to Tim.
You pick out a loose Indian-styled dress, something easy to wear. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says tactfully, stepping out.
Remembering that hideous plastic skull, you avert your eyes from the mirror as you pull the gown off, but then you can’t help looking. Your body hasn’t been this toned for years, you catch yourself thinking: not since you gave birth to Danny—
But this isn’t a body. Those limbs were put together in an engineering bay, your skin color sprayed on in a paint booth. And below the waist you simply fade into smoothness, as blank and sexless as a doll. With a shudder, you pull the dress over your head.
There’s a sudden crash from downstairs, the front door slamming open. Feet pound the stairs.
“Danny, don’t run,” a female voice says.
“Don’t wrun!” a small voice mumbles. “Wrunning!” The running feet don’t slow down.
Danny. Spinning around, you catch a glimpse of dark hair, deep-set eyes, a taut elfin face, as he hurtles down the landing. Maternal love sluices through you. You can’t believe how
big he is! But of course, he must be almost ten. You’ve missed half his life.
You follow him to his room. He’s already pulled an armful of toy trains from under his bed. “Line them up. Line them uuuuup,” he mutters feverishly as he sorts them, biggest to smallest, placing them precisely against the baseboard.
“Danny?” you say. He doesn’t respond.
“Danny, looking,” the woman’s voice prompts firmly behind you. Danny does look up then, his gaze passing blankly over yours. There’s nothing in it, no hint of recognition that you’re even a person, let alone his mother.
“Great looking. Good job.” The woman steps past you and crouches next to Danny. She’s in her twenties, blond and cheerful, her hair tied back in a ponytail. “High five, Danny!”
“Sian, this is—” Tim begins.
“I know what it is,” Sian says, giving you a look even blanker than the one Danny just did. “High five, Danny!” she repeats.
Without lifting his eyes from his trains, Danny flaps his hand in her direction. She moves her own hand so he makes contact with it. “Good looking, good high-fiving,” she says encouragingly, “but now we’re going to go back and walk upstairs properly. Then you’ll get extra time with Thomas.” She holds out her hand. When he doesn’t respond, she says clearly, “Stand up and hold my hand, Danny.”
Reluctantly, he gets up and takes it. “Well done! Good standing,” she says as she leads him away.
“She’s a very good therapist,” Tim says when they’re out of earshot. “When she joined us, Danny wasn’t engaging with anything except food and his trains. Now we’re getting about a dozen exchanges a day.”
“That’s great,” you say, although that it still stings. “I’m so proud of you both.”
You say it, but you remember your excitement when the two of you first discovered applied behavior analysis, this way of teaching children with autism that, according to some studies, was even capable of curing them, or at least making them indistinguishable from other kids. If you’d known then that five years later, Danny would still be working on eye contact, would you have had the energy to keep going?
You push the thought aside. Of course you would. Any gains, however hard-won, are better than none.
Danny stamps up the stairs again, more slowly this time, with Sian at his heels. When he reaches his bedroom she produces a blue train. “Good walking, Danny. Here’s Thomas.”
“Here’s Thomas,” Danny echoes as he flops down and aligns the train with the others. Then, without warning, his troubled eyes flick up to yours.
“Moh,” he says. “Moh-moh.” He laughs.
“Did he just call me Mommy?” you say, amazed.
Tim’s already weeping with joy. You would be, too, if you could cry.
TWO
It was a couple of weeks after Tim’s announcement before Abbie Cullen actually showed up. Finishing a commission, we speculated, or maybe having second thoughts about working with us at all. We didn’t get many visitors—our backers were paranoid about security, and our location had been chosen for its low cost per foot rather than its potential for social activities. So to say that Abbie made quite an entrance probably says less about her than it does about the smallness and focus of our lives.
Even before Tim’s cry of “Listen up, people!” most of us had spotted her in reception—and if we hadn’t, we’d certainly seen the way Tim himself hurried over to greet her. She was tall, for one thing, almost six feet, with ripped skinny jeans and knee-high Cuban-heel boots that, along with the coil of reddish-brown braids piled atop her head, made her seem even taller. A black, inky tattoo—a Hawaiian design, someone said later, or maybe Maori or Celtic—sprawled from her neck all the way down her left arm. But the thing that struck us most was how young she seemed. In an industry like ours, where you could be a veteran in your twenties, she had a freshness about her, an innocence, that marked her out as not one of us.
“Abbie Cullen, everyone. Our first artist-in-residence,” Tim said, escorting her into the open-plan area. “Her work’s amazing, so look it up online. She’ll be here for six months, working on some projects.”
“What kind of projects?” someone asked.
It was Abbie who answered. “I haven’t decided yet. I hope it’ll be informed by what you guys are doing.” Her voice had a twang of the South in it, and her smile lit up the room.
Whether someone deliberately activated it we couldn’t say, but one of the shopbots chose that moment to approach her. “Hi, how’re you doing today?” it said brightly. “This jacket I’m modeling would look really great on you.” Needless to say, it wasn’t actually wearing a jacket—that was just a sample pitch we’d coded into the prototype. “Shall we go around the store together, and I’ll pick out some things for you to try? You’re about a size eight, right?”
“You got me,” Abbie said, laughing, and for some reason, even though it wasn’t particularly funny, we all laughed along with her. It was like our child had said something inappropriate but cute to a visiting VIP.
Tim laughed, too, the high-pitched boyish giggle that was one of the few geeky things about him.
“Abbie will be based in K-three,” he said, naming one of our meeting rooms, but she stopped him.
“I’d rather have a desk out here, where I can get a feel for what’s going on. If that’s okay by you.”
“Whatever you like,” he said, shrugging. “People, give her every cooperation. And learn from her. Asset-strip her brain. Reverse-engineer her creativity. Remember, she’s here for your benefit, not hers.”
Which, when we thought about it later, was not the friendliest way he could have welcomed her. But that was Tim for you.
6
It’ll take three weeks, Tim predicts. Three weeks for you to adjust to this new reality.
Like most things he says, this isn’t plucked out of the air but based on hard data. In the 1950s a plastic surgeon called Maxwell Maltz recorded how long it took facial reconstruction patients to get used to the results of their surgery. He published his findings in a book called Psycho-Cybernetics that became one of the bibles of Tim’s industry.
For three weeks, therefore, Tim plans to stay home, helping you adjust. He starts with the simplest things, bringing you objects from the yard—a curiously shaped stone, a leaf, a bird’s wing—or reading you articles from newspapers. His pleasure when he finds something your brain has missed, like the oranges—something he can teach you—is infectious.
As if you’re a child, he limits your time online, and vets the sites you visit. Too much information at once, he believes, may be more than your new brain can handle. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality. You know you once knew who wrote that, but it’s gone. Your memories are piecemeal, dependent on what happens to have been included in the uploads Tim made before you woke up. Or booted up, as he sometimes refers to it.
Then—clunk—it comes to you, plucked from the cloud. T. S. Eliot.
For the same reason, he still won’t talk about the circumstances of your death. The closest he comes is a brief reference to the accident before clamming up. No human being has ever been in a position to recall their own annihilation before, he explains. It might be unbearably painful. Mind blowing, even.
But you suspect it’s not only for your benefit that he avoids the subject. Revisiting that period would clearly be painful for him, as well. And Tim was never one to dwell on past defeats. Now he’s got you back, he’d rather behave as if the intervening years never happened.
You try to imagine what he’s been through, what those last five years must have been like. In some ways, you realize, you had it easy. You simply died. He’s the one who suffered. You see it in the deep lines on his face, the thinning hair, the small junk-food belly that juts from his once marathon-running frame: remnants of the terrible grief and loneliness that
drove him on, night after night, in the obsessive quest to create you. Already he’s hinted at near-breakdowns brought on by overwork, arguments with his investors, employees walking out. The first cobots were abject failures, apparently: million-dollar experiments that went nowhere. But he refused to give up, and around about the fifth or sixth attempt it started to come together. “But I didn’t want to make you until I’d gotten the technology right. I couldn’t bear to have you come back as some half-assed beta.”
“So what am I? A prototype?”
He shakes his head. “Much more than that. A quantum leap. A paradigm shift. And, most important, my wife.”
Sometimes he just sits and stares at you, drinking you in. As if he can’t quite believe he’s actually done it. As if he’s succeeded more than he ever thought possible. Then you smile at him, and he seems to come out of a trance. “Hey. Sorry, babe. It’s just so good to have you back.”
“It’s good to be back,” you tell him.
And gradually, slowly, you almost come to believe it.
7
He’s tried to minimize the differences between this body and your old one, you discover. Your chest rises and falls, just as if you breathe. You shiver when it’s cold, and if it’s warm have to take off a layer of clothing. You blink, sigh, and frown in ways you can’t always control. And at night you go to a guest bedroom, so as not to disturb him, and sleep; or rather, enter a low-power mode, during which you recharge your batteries and upload more memories. Those are the best times. Somehow your dreams seem infinitely richer than the waking world.
During one of those sessions, you find yourself remembering the day after he proposed to you. You’d traveled east to the Taj Mahal, where he’d paid a fortune for a private tour without the crowds. You were in a daze of fuzzy euphoria the whole way, leaning against him in the back of the air-conditioned Mercedes, occasionally stealing glances at the enormous red diamond on your finger.