by Rich Horton
Bad news didn’t come all at once. It came in successions. Cancer is present. Metastasis has occurred. The tumors are unresponsive. The patient’s vitals have taken a turn for the worse. We’re sorry to say, we’re sorry to say, we’re sorry to say.
Grace wheeled Mara toward the back, maintaining a stream of banal, cheerful chatter, remarks about the weather and questions about the holidays and jokes about boys. Mara deflected. She wasn’t ever going to have a boyfriend, not the way Grace was teasing her about. Adolescence was like spring, one more thing buried in endless snow.
Mara felt exhausted as they pulled into the driveway. She didn’t have the energy to push abba away when he came around the truck to help her down. Mara leaned heavily on her father’s arm as they crunched their way to the front door.
She vomited in the entryway. Abel came to investigate. She pushed his nose away while abba went to get the mop. The smell made her even more nauseated and so when abba returned, she left him to clean up. It made her feel guilty, but she was too tired to care.
She went to the bathroom to wash out her mouth. She tried not to catch her eye in the mirror, but she saw her reflection anyway. She felt a shock of alienation from the thin, sallow face. It couldn’t be hers.
She could hear abba in the hallway, grumbling at Abel in Yiddish. Wan, late afternoon light filtered through the windows, foreshadowing sunset. A few months ago, she and abba would have been rushing to cook and clean before Shabbat. Now no one cleaned and Mara left abba to cook alone as she went into ima’s studio.
She paused by the barre before sitting, already worried about how difficult it would be to get up again. “I want to watch Coppélia,” she said. The AI whirred.
Coppélia began with a young woman reading on a balcony—except she wasn’t really a young woman, she was actually an automaton constructed by the mad scientist, Dr. Coppélius. The dancer playing Coppélia pretended to read from a red leather book. Mara told the AI to fast-forward to ima’s entrance.
Mara’s mother was dancing the part of the peasant girl, Swanhilde. She looked nothing like the dancer playing Coppélia. Ima was strong, but also short and compact, where Coppélia was tall with visible muscle definition in her arms and legs.
Yet later in the ballet, none of the other characters would be able to tell them apart. Mara wanted to shake them into sense. Why couldn’t they tell the difference between a person and a doll?
Abba lit the candles and began the prayer, waving his hands through the smoke. They didn’t have an adult woman to read the prayers and abba wouldn’t let Mara do it while she was still a child. Soon, he used to say,after your bat mitzvah. Now he said nothing.
They didn’t celebrate Shabbat properly. They followed some traditions—tonight they’d leave the lights on, and tomorrow they’d eat cold food instead of cooking—but they did not attend services. If they needed to work then they worked. As a family, they had always been observant in some ways, and relaxed in others; they were not the kind who took well to following rules. Abba sometimes seemed to believe in Hashem and at other times not, though he believed in rituals and tradition. Still, before Mara had become ill, they’d taken more care with halakha.
As abba often reminded her, Judaism taught that survival was more important than dogma. Pikuach nefesh meant that a hospital could run electricity that powered a machine that kept a man alive. A family could work to keep a woman who had just given birth comfortable and healthy.
Perhaps other people wouldn’t recognize the exceptions that Mara and her father made from Shabbat as being matters of survival, but they were. They were using all they had just by living. Not much remained for G-d.
The long window over the kitchen counters let through the dimming light as violet and ultramarine seeped across the horizon. The tangerine sun lingered above the trees, preparing to descend into scratching, black branches. Mara’s attention drifted as abba said kiddush over the wine.
They washed their hands. Abba tore the challah. He gave a portion to Mara. She let it sit.
“The fish is made with ginger,” abba said. “Would you like some string beans?”
“My mouth hurts,” Mara said.
Abba paused, the serving plate still in his hands.
She knew that he wouldn’t eat unless she did. “I’ll have a little,” she added softly.
She let him set the food on her plate. She speared a single green bean and stared at it for a moment before biting. Everything tasted like metal after the drugs.
“I used turmeric,” he said.
“It’s good.”
Mara’s stomach roiled. She set the fork on her plate.
Her father ate a few bites of fish and then set his fork down, too. A maudlin expression crossed his face. “Family is Hashem’s best gift,” he said.
Mara nodded. There was little to say.
Abba picked up his wine glass. He twisted the stem as he stared into red. “Family is what the goyim tried to take from us with pogroms and ghettoes and the shoah. On Shabbat, we find our families, wherever we are.”
Abba paused again, sloshing wine gently from side to side.
“Perhaps I should have gone to Israel before you were born.”
Mara looked up with surprise. “You think Israel is a corrupt theocracy.”
“There are politics, like opposing a government, and then there is needing to be with your people.” He shrugged. “I thought about going. I had money then, but no roots. I could have gone wherever I wanted. But I thought, I will go to America instead. There are more Jews in America than Israel. I did not want to live in the shadow of the shoah. I wanted to make a family in a place where we could rebuild everything they stole. Der mensch trakht un Gatt lahkt.”
He had been speaking rapidly, his accent deepening with every word. Now he stopped.
His voice was hoarse when it returned.
“Your mother . . . you . . . I would not trade it, but . . . ” His gaze became diffuse as if the red of the wine were a telescope showing him another world. “It’s all so fragile. Your mother is taken and you . . . tsuris, tsuris . . . and then there is nothing.”
It was dark when they left the table. Abba piled dishes by the sink so that they could be washed after Shabbat and then retired to his bedroom. Abel came to Mara, tail thumping, begging for scraps. She was too tired to make him beg or shake hands. She rescued her plate from the pile of dishes and laid it on the floor for him to lick clean.
She started toward her bed and then changed her mind. She headed downstairs instead, Abel following after. She paused with her hand on the knob of the red-painted door before entering abba’s workshop.
Mara hadn’t seen abba go downstairs since their argument that morning but he must have managed to do it without her noticing. The doll sat primly on her stool, dignity restored, her head tilted down as if she were reading a book that Mara couldn’t see.
Mara wove between worktables until she reached the doll’s side. She lifted its hand and pressed their palms together as abba had done. It was strange to see the shape of her fingers so perfectly copied, down to the fine lines across her knuckles.
She pulled the thing forward. It lolled. Abel ducked its flailing right hand and ran a few steps away, watching warily.
Mara took hold of the thing’s head. She pressed the tip of her nose against the tip of its nose, trying to match their faces as she had their palms. With their faces so close together, it looked like a Cyclops, staring back at her with one enormous, blank eye.
“I hate you,” Mara said, lips pressed against its mute mouth.
It was true, but not the same way that it had been that morning. She had been furious then. Betrayed. Now the blaze of anger had burned down and she saw what lay in the ashes that remained.
It was jealousy. That this doll would be the one to take abba’s hand at Shabbat five years from then, ten years, twenty. That it would take and give the comfort she could not. That it would balm the wounds that she had no choice but to inflict.
Would Mara have taken a clockwork doll if it had restored ima to her for these past years?
She imagined lying down for the scans. She imagined a machine studying her brain, replicating her dreams neuron by neuron, rendering her as mathematical patterns. She’d read enough biology and psychology to know that, whatever else she was, she was also an epiphenomenon that arose from chemicals and meat and electricity.
It was sideways immortality. She would be gone, and she would remain. There and not there. A quantum mechanical soul.
Love could hurt, she knew. Love was what made you hurt when your ima died. Love was what made it hurt when abba came to you gentle and solicitous, every kindness a reminder of how much pain you’d leave behind.
She would do this painful thing because she loved him, as he had made this doll because he loved her. She thought, with a sudden clenching of her stomach, that it was a good thing most people never lived to see what people planned to make of them when they were gone.
What Gerry had said was as true as it was cutting. Abba was not the one who would die.
Abba slept among twisted blankets, clutching his pillow as if afraid to let it go.
Mara watched from the doorway. “Abba.”
He grumbled in his sleep as he shifted position.
“Abba,” she repeated. “Please wake up, abba.”
She waited while he put on his robe. Then, she led him down.
She made her way swiftly through the workshop, passing the newly painted marionette and the lonely mechanical hand. She halted near the doll, avoiding its empty gaze.
“I’m ready now,” she said.
Abba’s face shifted from confusion to wariness. With guarded hope, he asked, “Are you certain?”
“I’m sure,” she said.
“Please, Mara. You do not have to.”
“I know,” she answered. She pressed herself against his chest, as if she were a much smaller child looking for comfort. She felt the tension in his body seep into relief as he wept with silent gratitude. She was filled with tears, too, from a dozen emotions blended into one. They were tears of relief, and regret, and pain, and love, and mourning, and more.
He wrapped his arms around her. She closed her eyes and savored the comfort of his woody scent, his warmth, the stubble scratching her arm. She could feel how thin he’d become, but he was still strong enough to hold her so tightly that his embrace was simultaneously joyful and almost too much to bear.
Act II: Jakub
Tour en l’air
(Turn in the Air)
Jakub was careful to make the scans as unobtrusive as possible. If he could have, he’d have recorded a dozen sessions, twenty-five, fifty, more. He’d have examined every obscure angle; he’d have recorded a hundred redundancies.
Mara was so fragile, though; not just physically, but mentally. He did not want to tax her. He found a way to consolidate what he needed into six nighttime sessions, monitoring her with portable equipment that he could bring into her bedroom which broadcast its data to the larger machinery in the basement.
When the scans were complete, Jakub spent his nights in the workshop, laboring over the new child while Mara slept. It had been a long time since he’d worked with technology like this, streamlined for its potential as a weapon. He had to gentle it, soothe it, coax it into being as careful about preserving memories of rainy mornings as it was about retaining reflexes and fighting skills.
He spent long hours poring over images of Mara’s brain. He navigated three-dimensional renderings with the AI’s help, puzzling over the strangeness of becoming so intimate with his daughter’s mind in such an unexpected way. After he had finished converting the images into a neural map, he looked at Mara’s mind with yet new astonishment. The visual representation showed associational clusters as if they were stars: elliptical galaxies of thought.
It was a truism that there were many ways to describe a river—from the action of its molecules to the map of its progress from tributaries to ocean. A mind was such a thing as well. On one end there was thought, personality, individual . . . and on the other . . . It was impossible to recognize Mara in the points of light, but he was in the midst of her most basic elements, and there was as much awe in that as there was in puzzling out the origin of the universe. He was the first person ever to see another human being in this way. He knew Mara now as no one else had ever known anyone.
His daughter, his beloved, his sheineh maideleh. There were so many others that he’d failed to protect. But Mara would always be safe; he would hold her forever.
Once Jakub had created the foundational schematics for manufacturing analogues to Mara’s brain structures, the remainder of the process was automated. Jakub needed only to oversee it, occasionally inputting his approval to the machine.
Jakub found it unbearable to leave the machinery unsupervised, but nevertheless, he could not spend all of his time in the basement. During the mornings when Mara was awake, he paced the house, grumbling at the dog who followed him up and down the hallways as if expecting him to throw a stick. What if the process stalled? What if a catastrophic failure destroyed the images of Mara’s mind now when her health was even more fragile and there might be no way to replace them?
He forced himself to disguise his obsession while Mara was awake. It was important to maintain the illusion that their life was the same as it had been before. He knew that Mara remained uneasy with the automaton. Its very presence said so many things that they had been trying to keep silent.
Mara’s days were growing even harder. He’d thought the end of chemotherapy would give her some relief, but cancer pain worsened every day. Constant suffering and exhaustion made her alternately sullen and sharp. She snapped at him when he brought her meals, when he tried to help her across the house, when she woke to find him lingering in the doorway while she slept. Part of it was the simple result of pain displacing patience, but it was more, too. Once, when he had touched her shoulder, she’d flinched; then, upon seeing him withdraw, her expression had turned from annoyance to guilt. She’d said, softly, “You won’t always be able to do that.” A pause, a swallow, and then even more quietly, “It reminds me.”
That was what love and comfort had become now. Promises that couldn’t be kept.
Most nights, she did not sleep at all, only lay awake, staring out of her window at the snow.
Jakub searched for activities that might console her. He asked her if she’d like him to read to her. He offered to buy her immersive games. He suggested that she log into a spare room with other sick children where they could discuss their troubles. She told him that she wanted to be alone.
She had always been an unusual child, precocious and content to be her own companion. Meryem had said it was natural for a daughter of theirs, who had been raised among adults, and was descended from people who were also talented and solitary. Jakub and Meryem had been similar as children, remote from others their own age as they pursued their obsessions. Now Jakub wished she had not inherited these traits so completely, that she was more easily able to seek solace.
When Mara didn’t think he was watching, she gathered her crutches and went into Meryem’s studio to watch ballets. She did not like it when he came too close, and so he watched from the hallway. He could see her profile reflected in the mirrors on the opposite wall. She cried as she watched, soundless tears beading her cheeks.
One morning when she put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jakub ventured into the studio. For so long, he had stayed away, but that had not made things better. He had to try what he could.
He found Mara sitting on the floor, her crutches leaning against the ballet barre. Abel lay a few feet away with his head on his paws. Without speaking, Jakub sat beside them.
Mara wiped her cheeks, streaking her tears. She looked resentfully at Jakub, but he ignored her, hoping he could reach the part of her that still wanted his company even if she had buried it.
They sat stoically for the remainder of a
ct one, holding themselves with care so that they did not accidentally shift closer to one another. Mara pretended to ignore him, though her darting glances told another story. Jakub let her maintain the pretense, trying to allow her some personal space within the studio since he had already intruded so far. He hoped she would be like a scared rabbit, slowly adjusting to his presence and coming to him when she saw that he was safe.
Jakub had expected to spend the time watching Mara and not the video, but he was surprised to find himself drawn into the dancing. The pain of seeing Meryem leap and spin had become almost a dull note, unnoticeable in the concert of his other sorrows. Meryem made a luminous Titania, a ginger wig cascading in curls down her back, her limbs wrapped in flowers, leaves and gossamer. He’d forgotten the way she moved onstage, as careful and precise as a doe, each agile maneuver employing precisely as much strength as she needed and no more.
As Act II began, Mara asked the AI to stop. Exhaustion, she said. Jakub tried to help her back to her room, but she protested, and he let her go.
She was in her own world now, closing down. She had no room left for him.
What can I do for you, Marale? he wanted to ask. I will do anything. You will not let me hold you so I must find another way. I will change the laws of life and death. I will give you as much forever as I can, sheineh maideleh. See? I am doing it now.
He knew that she hated it when he stood outside her door, watching, but when he heard her breath find the steady rhythm of sleep, he went to the threshold anyway. While she slept, Mara looked peaceful for a while, her chest gently rising and falling underneath her snow-colored quilt.