The Machine

by James Smythe

  Look, I shouldn’t have told you this, Beth says. She tries to wheel the conversation backwards. Laura used to be logical and easy. Not any more, now that this is out. This is a burden. It’s mine, not yours.

  No, Laura says. Almost shouts. I think this has happened for a reason. It’s good that you told me. You shouldn’t go through something like this alone.

  I should go, Beth says. She stands up. She necks the wine left in the glass. It’s already gone to her head: she can feel it, swimming around.

  Beth, I could pray for you both. I’ll show you how, Laura says. Beth sees the cross front and centre, suddenly brought forward to the front of the shirt, hanging down. Not a simple cross: a crucifix, a miniature figure hanging from his nails. A miniature crown of thorns on his head. That’s the best way to deal with this, you know.

  Beth forces her way through the crowd of students, ignoring their comments, and out into the air. She expected it to be cool, for some reason, where the pub had been so hot: she’d forgotten. Instead it’s dense and cloying. She rushes off. Laura doesn’t follow her.

  She passes the point where the children leap off into the sea, and they’re still there, or a different group of children are. Leaping from the outcrop of grass-tufted rock into the pitch blackness, only knowing that they’re jumping out far enough when they smack the water. And when their friends hear that smack they all laugh, as if each plunge is a belly-flop, and each dive a bomb. She stands back by the railing – set twenty feet away for safety, because the authorities didn’t know if or when more of the cliff might slump down further – and listens to them, trying to pick out anything other than shouts and giggles. They’re only teenagers, somewhere between thirteen and sixteen, she reckons, boys and girls, and she thinks she can see that they’re all naked. But there’s nothing really sexual about this: just the leap and the darkness.

  Down the path, only thirty metres away, she ignores the sign that implores her to call the telephone number on it and discuss her situation with the friendly-looking man on the other end, the sign that tells her that it’s never as bad as she thinks it is. She stands on the lip of the cliff and she can feel the alcohol inside her, making her sway. A bottle of wine, that’s all it takes these days. She thinks about when she and Vic got together, and how they were. How they would go out and drink with their friends, and how that led to their wedding, where they flooded the guests with booze. A good party, that’s all they wanted.

  She looks out at the darkness, and she thinks about the nothingness that replaced all of who Vic was, like a virus. Deleting cells, replicating itself. The Machine, filling in the gaps with things that didn’t stick, stories of its own creation to cover up the cracks. And what makes her think that it will be so different this time? Because the stories are Vic? From his own mouth, 100 per cent pure and unfiltered, every part of his life spilled onto digital tape? She doubts herself. She doubts the Machine.

  This isn’t me, she says aloud, to reassure herself. The kids down the way somehow hear her – and she wonders if she shouted it, even a little, or if it was just the wind – and they stop being children and become animals all of a sudden.

  Go on! one of them yells. His friends laugh. She’s sure that she recognizes the voice: the same cracked broken deepness of the bike boy who lives on her estate, who calls out to her, sexually threatening even for somebody so young. Go on, you cunt! Give the world a fucking break! He doesn’t know who she is. He can’t see her from here, and he wouldn’t recognize her voice – although, she recognized his, didn’t she? – and this is all for show. If she did it, he would never forgive himself, she thinks. That’s what she hopes. To teach him a lesson would be the worst reason.

  She backs away from the edge. She can’t see the boy in the darkness, and they’ve all fallen silent. There are no lights here, only the moon. She waits, suddenly scared; and then the laughs start again, and she hears the boy jump. She hears his laugh arc through the air, and the splash, and a second – maybe two – where there’s no noise. She wonders if he made it.

  His laugh cuts through the air from the water below. Beth turns and heads up the path. The estate is quiet. She unlocks the door to her flat. She can hear it, already.

  20

  Beth sits in the living room on the sofa. Her last night alone. She thinks about the night before her wedding, and the forced trip to the pub.

  This is your last chance, her maid of honour told her. You should relish this. Your last night alone!

  Last night alone! they all chanted at her in the pink minibus that passed for a limousine.

  I hope you make a few decent mistakes, her maid of honour said. She barely drank what wasn’t forced into her hand, and when she got home – not quite blind-drunk, but blurred and slurring – she telephoned Vic. He answered her, asking how she was. She told him.

  No mistakes, she said.

  Okay, he told her. She knew that he could never sleep once he’d woken up, and there he was the next day, at the altar with aubergine eyes. He hadn’t slept, and she had.

  She opens the bottle of whisky that she’s kept underneath the sink with the cleaning products, out of sight. Vic’s favourite, a Scottish one that he got a taste for. Not the best stuff, but certainly not the cheapest. She was saving it.

  I need this more than you, she says. She pours a glass and it splashes as it hits, but she doesn’t care. The smell on the carpet means nothing. The vibrations through the flat, through the sofa and into her: they’re all that she can feel. She swallows it all in one go. This can’t be real, she says. You’re trying to scare me. She puts the television on, doesn’t matter what channel, and she turns on the fans and pours another glass. She can feel it going straight to her. And Laura betrayed her, she thinks: she suggested she was something, but she was something else. How dare she judge me? Beth asks.

  She lies back on the sofa, to block out the noise of the turbine in the Machine’s room, and the vibrations, and the sudden pain in her head.

  What would I like to forget? Vic asks. His voice fills the flat, loud and clear. Like he’s actually there, played back by the Machine on the highest volume it can muster. This is from later on in his treatments. When it started, it took forever: like it was massaging his memories to find the knot. One by one, they came. I’d like to forget what I did after I got back. How I treated Beth.

  Didn’t they medicate you? the doctor asks.

  They gave me opioids. Do you know what they do to a person? How much they rob of you? I couldn’t take them after the first few.

  Maybe they could have helped.

  No. No. I was responsible for what I did. His voice degrades into tears, and that’s the sound that comes over the Machine’s thrum: her husband sobbing. I want to tell her that I’m sorry, he says through the tears.

  Beth stands up and walks to the doorway of the Machine’s room. She doesn’t go in: she stands against the connecting wall instead. She leans against it. She cradles a full glass of whisky, raising to her lips every so often and sipping. Letting it sting her lips where the heat of the days has made them crack very slightly.

  So what would you like to forget? the doctor asks.

  That. I’d forget that I hurt her. I’d forget that I did this, and that I was – that I am – the man I am now. I don’t recognize myself when I’m like that. I’d get rid of that.

  Don’t, Beth says.

  I would get rid of everything that made me that man.

  Don’t.

  Do you know what we’re doing here, Victor?

  You’re helping to make me better. That’s what I know.

  Why you’re wearing that Crown? Why we’re talking like this?

  Something. He pauses, unsure of himself. Beth can hear it in his voice. She knows every nuance. You’re taking away memories, is that right?

  That’s right, the doctor says. Beth can see him now, pressing the PURGE button on the Machine’s hulking screen: flushing everything that had been said before away. She rounds the corner
and goes into the room, and there’s the Machine. She doesn’t know how it’s playing this for itself. (There was a part of her that expected to see Vic and the doctor, sitting here, playing this out for real: that’s how fake this all feels to her, like an accident or a lie, or a dream.)

  How dare you? she asks. She puts her hands on the metal, which is so cold, and the shaking, which roars along her bones. Into every part of her. Come on, she says. The screen isn’t showing anything. That same painted blackness. Come on. She hits it, a punch with the flat of her fist. Play me more of him. Tell me more about what he felt.

  It obliges.

  What are we doing? Vic asks, another file starting. Must be the next one, chronologically. I’m so sorry, what are we doing?

  Not the doctor’s voice, next. Beth’s. We’re trying something, she says.

  It’s not time for a treatment, he tells her. I didn’t mean it, please don’t punish me.

  I won’t. This isn’t punishment.

  There are rules, Vic’s voice says. I remember that they told us.

  No, Beth now says, listening to it. Not this one.

  The Beth in the recording is persuasive. She sounds so strong and confident. The rules are for your safety, she says, and we won’t break them. But they told me to help you with your treatments, didn’t they?

  Yes. He’s so docile.

  Don’t play this, now-Beth pleads. She presses the Machine’s screen but she can’t get it to wake from its sleep. Please, she begs.

  What happened earlier today? then-Beth asks. She’s wiping something. Erasing something beyond his normal treatments. Do you remember?

  I didn’t mean to, Vic says.

  I didn’t ask that. I asked what happened.

  We had a fight, he says. Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.

  That’s okay. You’re not yourself. I have to press this, then-Beth says. Now-Beth sees it happening: COMMIT depressed. Ready. Primed. What did we fight about? then-Beth asks.

  I had a dream.

  What about?

  I was fighting. Some sort of fight. I had a gun. I was, uh. Something exploded. I was there, and then … I don’t know, I don’t know.

  Shh. Tell me everything you can remember.

  There was an explosion and my head was on fire, like burning, with the pain. And I had to shoot somebody or I would have been dead. I remember that.

  Where were you?

  Somewhere hot. Not here, though. Hot like the desert, somewhere like that. It was so hot. Went right through my helmet. I had a helmet on. Then I woke up, and you were there, and I didn’t mean it, but I was so confused.

  What did you do then?

  Now-Beth can hear it in then-Beth’s voice: the slight tweak of her jaw, which would soon start to swell, although she wasn’t even aware that it had been fractured. I don’t need to hear this again, now-Beth says. Turn it off. Vic’s voice speaks through her, above her. She hits the screen again, so hard that it should break, she thinks, but it doesn’t, and then she scrabbles to the floor and to the plug. She pulls it from the wall but the Machine continues to whirr. The turbines keep spinning. The voices are gone, but the screen is still on. Backup batteries, in case of power cut. The only way to shut it down now would be to destroy it, to open it up and cut its cords. She doesn’t.

  She takes the Crown down from the dock and puts it onto her head. Perfect fit, always is.

  Is this what you want? she asks it. Do you want more of me?

  She doesn’t press the buttons. She lies down with the Crown on, and she thinks, as the room spins and she feels herself sleeping, so quickly, so exhausted and shocked and terrified, that it will do what it will to her. And it can’t do anything that will change her mind about this.

  Tomorrow, she will get Vic from the clinic. Tomorrow she’ll bring Vic home.

  PART TWO

  The problem with memory was that it told us whatever we wanted to hear. It had no shape of its own.

  David Vann, Dirt

  21

  In through the front door he falls, because Beth can’t prop him up and work the key and keep herself steady, and when she feels herself going she drops him. Better that he take the soft landing than she fall with him, and she bear the brunt, break something. That would ruin everything. He’s taken worse in his time. And, she reminds herself, this him is just a form. A shell.

  He lands softly, his skin making the only noise on the flooring. Nothing from his mouth. The lift was broken – the lift is always broken – so his wheelchair is still down at the bollards, waiting to be folded and lugged upstairs. She won’t need it. Vic’s not so gone that he can’t be coerced into walking when he needs to, or into supporting some weight on feet which almost seem to drag their toes along the floor with each step. Still, in case. Maybe, she thinks, the muscles will have atrophied a little, and maybe he couldn’t sustain this over any great distance. You read about that; it would drive him mad. She would hate to have him back and then have to do years of physiotherapy. Still, she reasons, that would be better than nothing. She pulls him inside the flat, manoeuvring him onto his back. She leaves him there while she runs to the stairs, down, to where she left the chair. It’s already gone. Some of the residents are like magpies. Finders keepers, if anything is left for more than a minute. She stands there and looks around, to see if any curtains twitch. She would go to the door and hammer on it and demand her property back, if she could work out where it had gone – but she’s completely alone. Not a peep.

  Back in the flat Vic is exactly where she had left him. He’s gone limp now, all the use of his muscles seemingly gone. She can tell as soon as she looks at him, and it almost makes the getting him up here – how easily he responded to her – like a dream.

  Come on, she says. She puts her hands under his armpits and she tries to heave him along the floor towards the section of the open-plan room designated as a living room. It’s easy on the laminate floorboards, but the sofas sit across a large rug. It’s no longer its original colour. She can’t remember what the colour was, or even if it’s hers. Maybe it was always here, a part of the flat. She leaves Vic where he lies and pulls the sofas away from the rug, and then moves the things from the coffee table and carries that to the edge of the room.

  Only a second, she says to Vic. As if he cares. She rolls the rug up, not doing the best job of it. When it’s in a flabby cone she pushes it against the far wall, towards the kitchen door. She pushes the sofas and table back, and then resumes her dragging of Vic. She thinks, he’s heavier than he used to be, and then she laughs at this: because when did she ever drag him?

  She thinks about the man in his regiment who saved him, who dragged him away from the IED. He was a hero, taking the brunt. Trying to save the rest of them. Managing to save most of them. He dragged Vic away, to get him to medical help. Beth thinks about contacting him: they could compare notes. She keeps laughing at the idea as she pulls Vic’s body along. At the sofa she tries to heave him up, but she can barely do it. She climbs up onto the sofa and pulls. It’s a strain, and the sofa threatens to tip onto its back, but she manages it: his shoulders first, then his back – his head lolling the whole time, as if it were unable to support itself – and then his hips. From the floor she picks up his legs and swings them around, and it takes effort, but then he’s lying prone on the length of the sofa.

  That fucking wheelchair, she says. She stands over him and looks down at his face, which has nothing to it. No expression, not even enough to call it expressionless. It’s like he’s dead, but the blood still pumps. In coma patients it’s said that the eyes can still be seen moving under the lids, proof that they’re dreaming. Vic’s got nothing. What do I do with you now? she asks.

  22

  Beth lays out everything she’ll need for him on the floor nearest the sofas. She’s decided that she needs to impose some order. She’s going to try scheduled and strictly adhered-to toilet trips, to prevent accidents. Apparently his bowel and bladder have kept their muscle me
mory: they’re relatively stable.

  (He can hold it a few hours, was how the people in the home sold it to her. A few hours, and most of the time he’ll make it through the night.)

  Still, she’s got adult diapers in case she needs them – better that, than clean the sofas and the floors, and she intends to make him sleep in them – and baby wipes. She’s got a changing mat, which has blue ducks printed along it. Again, the ignominy will be better than the alternative. She’s got rubber gloves and bleach and cleaning products, and she’s got the materials for a bed bath, in case she can’t get him in and out of the real thing: sponges, bucket-deep troughs for water, flannels and a scrubbing brush that’s marked SKINKIND but looks more like something she would use on the floors. She’s got pamphlets and leaflets that they gave her at the clinic, containing advice that seems like common sense – preventing bed sores, fungal infections – and telephone numbers to call if she needs help. One of the pamphlets is called YOU, YOUR PARTNER AND THE MACHINE. She flicks through it, and it’s full of pictures of loving couples where she cannot tell which one of them is vacant and which one is just doting. She’s got most of the food out as well, cans of spaghetti and beans and keep-fresh bread, and bundles of snacks, crisps and nuts and dried fruit. When Vic has a bad day, she doesn’t want to starve herself, or him. She doesn’t even know what he’ll eat, so she’s got Ready Brek as well. It’s too hot for porridge, she knows – it’s winter food, traditionally – but she’s seen them feed it to people who otherwise have trouble with eating solids in the movies. Food and bottles of water – lots of small ones, that she can keep close. The fridge is full of them. She’s got changes of clothes for him, already out and sorted: underwear in one pile, tracksuit bottoms in another, t-shirts in a third. She assumes that she won’t need anything else: there’s no chance of it getting cold in here. It takes her the rest of the day to make sure everything is in its own pile and accessible, and that she’s got enough of everything. She doesn’t know how Vic will react when she starts the process, so now, while he’s not a danger to anybody, she’s taking the chance to prepare herself.