by James Smythe
It was always unnerving, wondering where the memories came from when they hadn’t existed before. She thinks about the first time that he remembered something that she didn’t: when he spoke about what he had done for his twenty-first birthday. In reality he had been training, at some camp or other. He had called her up, drunk, and told her how much he liked her. He was so drunk, he said, that he wouldn’t remember it. He slurred it to her down the phone, and she knew that he was lying. He wasn’t as drunk as he claimed. And then, that one day, deep into his treatments, he remembered something completely different. An invented scenario in which they had been on a weekend away together. He asked her if she remembered what they had for breakfast, because he did. Something complicated. So much detail, more than you would normally recall. And none of the connections. And she had to smile and agree, and play along, because those were the rules.
Do we have any photos of that weekend? he asked her, and she said no. She reported it to the company, and they sent her a doctored picture, computer generated.
To help establish the fiction, they said in the attached email. She showed the photograph to Vic and he smiled.
That’s the place, he had said. Yeah, wow.
Beth wondered if there was a bank of such material inside the Machine, to help establish these memories. Pictures of places that the creators had visited; or yanked from brochures, pages torn out to feed into the thing. And maybe whole stories, created by a team of writers. In some ways, she thought, this is the newest form of drama: the creation of something from nothing, a play that’s made to be performed by couples, where one of them is oblivious to the fact that the other is acting. She wonders how that stuff gets inside the patient’s head. If it’s just zeros and ones, binary burned in.
She tries not to think about it too much.
Beth pulls the Crown down from the dock. This won’t hurt, she says to Vic’s body, and she pulls the umbilicus towards him, making it uncoil from where it’s withdrawn inside the Machine. She manoeuvres herself to the other side of the Crown – nearer to the Machine’s control panel, because this is where she’ll need to be – and she leans down to put the Crown onto the head. The panels slide on; a perfect fit. She wonders what the chances are that she and Vic have the same size head. She wonders if she has a large head, or he has a small one. Must be her hair, makes her head seem bigger.
The pads sit exactly on the burned-in scars on his temples, like they’d never left. She’s got some lubricant at the side of the bed, because she’s read that it can make it easier, so she puts some onto her finger and lifts the pads one by one, smoothing the jelly down onto his skin.
Right, she says. I think we’re ready.
Beth presses the Machine’s screen and it lights up. She can see the options. REPLENISH had always been intended to help those with dementia. To prompt them back into life: a secondary effect of the Machine’s powers, and one that the company behind it saw as a lucrative revenue source. There was a huge untapped market there, and the tech was already available at every hospital around the country. Soon it would be in every home that needed it, that was the plan. Fool-proof tech, software, hardware, and those who had loved ones afflicted by too few memories, or too many, could take care of the situation themselves. That was the pitch they gave to shareholders. Beth watched the conference on the internet, back when she was helping Vic herself. She remembers the applause that the announcement got.
REPLENISH. The Machine’s fans kick in at double, maybe triple time, and the thing sounds like it’s growling. The whole screen vibrates beneath her fingers, and she’s barely able to keep her hand there. Each touch is like pins and needles. The file menu appears and she picks the first.
We’re ready? Can you say your name for us? The doctor’s voice fills the room. She wonders how the Machine knows to not take that information, to not turn Vic into the doctor. There’s a lot she doesn’t know. She knows that it works, that’s enough.
Victor McAdams.
And could you state your rank and ID number, for the record?
Captain. Two-five-two-three-two-three-oh-two.
Great. Don’t be nervous, the voice says to him. He laughs. You know why you’re here?
Yes sir.
Don’t call me sir. My name’s Robert. First name terms here, Victor.
Vic.
Vic.
She’s putting him back exactly as he once was. She reasons that this is going to be easier if there are no more lies: if he’s back to being Captain Vic McAdams, scarred in the war, leaving the army by choice. No manufactured photographs. She wants him to be exactly the man he was, and they can go through the process – the healing, the therapists, the PTSD counselling – together, as they should have done in the first place. Can’t pretend that something didn’t happen. Can’t just brush it under the carpet.
On the bed, Vic’s body moves ever so slightly, twitches left and right. His face spasms slightly, and his eyes – Beth didn’t see them close – dart around underneath his eyelids, as if he’s dreaming. There’s no sound from him, only the rustling of his arms on the sheet.
So, tell me why we’re here, Vic.
Because I’ve been having trouble sleeping. There was an explosion, an IED, when we were on a mission. Went off when we were doing a sweep on a hospital which looked abandoned, and we were sloppy. I took the brunt, here and here. Beth can picture Vic pointing. He always pointed the same way: to his skull and then to his arm, as if the hole in his head and the tear through his bicep were the same thing, the same level of damage. I returned home, Vic continues, and was sent to recuperate, and then given leave. I was rewarded for saving my squad, they said.
You’re a hero.
So they say.
And now you’re here?
Because I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I, ah, replay the event. Dreams and such, and lucid dreaming, you called it.
Don’t worry about what I called it.
Fine. Sometimes I’ll be sitting with Beth and—
Beth?
My wife. We’ll be sitting together watching TV or whatever and I’ll zone out, and I’ll be somewhere else. And I could swear it. If she tries to wake me up … She tried to wake me up a few weeks ago and I hit her. And I knew it was her, but still, I hit her. Not because it was her, but I couldn’t stop it. I was somewhere else.
By the end of the hour, Beth’s worse than Vic. She had pictured him convulsing, worst-case scenario, and yet Vic’s body is relatively still. She’s the one who’s been affected. Hearing him talk about her like this, and knowing that this is what she’s putting back into him. That, when he wakes up, he might be back as he was. Her memories of what happened are different from his, though: because she remembers being there, and how he screamed at night, and sweated, and would cling to her when he woke up; and how he worked out all the time, until his skin was glossy and the lines of his scars throbbed; and how he stood in the bathroom for hours, no exaggeration, and used his finger to trace the lines of the scars, up and down, not even realizing that he was doing it, rubbing the already puckered and tender flesh sore; and how she would serve dinner, putting it onto the table at the same time every day, one square meal a day, and he would pick at it, pushing it away, growing ever thinner, while the lines on his face deepened. It never went so far as to be something you could call a disorder, but it was serious enough that she knew there was something really wrong. And she remembered how they could never watch the television shows that they used to, the series about the anti-terrorist group sidelined in favour of cooking shows and renovation shows and soaps, which he used to hate, but which posed no danger of sparking an episode, as he called them. And how, that first year he came home, fireworks night made him like a scared cat, the first bangs prompting him to turn up the volume of the television, and the second round making him put in headphones, and then the way that he shook slightly on the sofa. And how, at his worst, he drank a lot, becoming a cliché, but he hid it from Beth because, he said – when she fi
nally caught him – he was ashamed, and that he thought he had a problem, and when Beth said that it was because of the war, he shrugged and thought about the next drink. And how he said to Beth that they should try again for a child, and she said no, because this was no environment to bring a child into. And how he saw things and remembered things that never happened, long before the Machine got involved, when they argued or reminisced (which was all they ever seemed to do), and Beth would at first contradict him and tell him that he was insane, but then soon, because it was easier, began to placidly agree, and let him have his way. And how he didn’t hit her just once, lashing out in confusion about who she was, but how he hit her a few times. He didn’t do it like an abuser, though: no trying to avoid visible bruises. He got angry and he struck whatever was closest. Four times, before he hit her, it had been the walls of their house. His fists left indents and cracked thick paint. She had been next, the first time because she was close, and she was asking him to get help because of how little he’d been sleeping. The marks underneath his eyes were like bruises on his cheekbones, or warpaint in some action movie. The second and third times were when they were in bed, and he woke up, and then he swung his fists. The fourth time was when Beth gave him the leaflet that the doctor had left them about the Machine, and begged him to consider it seriously. After that, she told him that there wouldn’t be a fifth time.
You hurt me again and this is over, so you have to think about that. What’s most important to you? Pride, or whatever’s left of this?
Beth takes the Crown off his head and puts it back in the dock, and presses stop on the Machine. It winds down: the sound of an oven cooling, the clicks of an engine in the cold. New noises that she’s never heard before and can’t explain. Looking at Vic’s body, Beth sees that it needs water. She hadn’t seen the sweat during the process, but it’s suddenly there, seeping out underneath him, sinking into the mattress.
You need a towel as well, she says. She goes to the kitchen and gets a little bottle from the fridge and a towel from the pile she’s got there, all cheap, bought from the pound shop and designed to be thrown away if need be. Not made for washing; she suspects that they wouldn’t last a proper spin cycle. She uses the towel first, wiping down his chest and then pulling him up, her arm behind his shoulders, rubbing his back down. She props her body behind him and unfolds the towel, laying it flat on top of the sheet. Then she pushes him back down. Relax, she says. She catches herself, talking to it like it’s a sentient being. Like it’s a him, and can understand her. It can’t, not yet.
She stands in the kitchen and opens one bottle of water and drinks it straight down, gulping it. She gasps in between gulps. She wonders at what point he’ll be recognizable again: when Vic will start to seep back into his body. The Machine contains all that is left of who he once was. Already it’s processed his story, the speech-to-text system inside it turning his spoken, quivering memories into data and patching them. Filling in the cracks in his story. Somewhere, inside the Machine, are the exact constituents of what – who – Vic will be. Like a version of him, somewhere, only maybe not arranged in the proper order, and therefore not conscious, and not alive. The God-botherers argue that the soul is a solid thing, a distinct entity, and that when you tamper with it, you destroy it entirely. A soul that’s broken is no soul at all. By that logic, Vic’s soul is simply waiting to be reassembled. What is it, before it becomes whole? Before it works again?
With one bottle done and crushed in her hand, and thrown into the recycling bag, she opens another. She hadn’t noticed how hot she was. And listening to him, being in that room, has given her the start of a headache – are there fumes, from the Machine? Or is it just the heat of the fans, the hard drives, the memory inside the thing burning its way out? Not serious enough to pop the ibuprofen open – she worries that she won’t have enough. They weren’t even meant for her, but for Vic. For when it starts to hurt him. She eyes the diazepam and hopes that she won’t have to use them. Maybe this will go easier than she’s been fearing.
He still hasn’t moved when she gets back into the bedroom. She goes to the Crown, and feels that the pads are still wet with the lubricant, so she puts it straight back onto his head. She knows that listening to the playback of the voices aloud is an indulgence, totally unnecessary. It’s something to make it easier for her. What’s important is the code that’s being buzzed into him by the Machine. But it makes her happier, to hear his voice. To picture that this is how he’s being rebuilt, piece by piece, slotting together like Lego.
We’re ready, Beth says. She presses play.
Captain Victor McAdams.
Okay, Vic. Want to tell me about your last exercise? As many details as you can remember.
No. Not especially, Vic says. Beth can hear the smirk in his voice. He could be such a shit when he wanted to be. Fine, he says, breathing out. A huff, almost. We were somewhere I’m not allowed to say—
You’re allowed to say here.
I’m not.
This is between us.
So it can be between us and I won’t say the name of the place.
Do you think that this is all a trick?
You’re not army. Whatever you’re cleared for, I don’t know. So. You want the rest?
The doctor acquiesces. Please.
We were there, checking out a hospital, and there were only three days left before we moved to the next area. So it’s routine, place has been cleared out. Should be easy. And there’s a school that we checked, right next to this hospital. Hospital used to be a block of flats, but they converted it into whatever. School was empty, and we did it, routine. So we got slack. Beth hears him grit his jaw. His voice tightened when he did it: a level of audible stress. The recording continues: When we got to the hospital – and you have to remember, these things take like half a day to do a sweep, so it’s not something we breeze in and out – we were sloppy. No contact in a week. No shots fired in even longer, maybe three or four weeks. So that meant we were sloppy.
Okay.
On the bed, Vic’s body quivers and shakes. His hands pull themselves closed, making balled fists. His fingernails, which need cutting, dig into his palms. His toes curl over, the way they used to when he came during sex, his feet forming exaggerated arches, his legs twitching.
We went through and I was taking point, and I didn’t see it until too late. Something I triggered that was going to go off, and we were piling through the doorways because we were complacent. I suppose. So when I saw the flash – they do this little flash first, like the ignition on a boiler, the pilot light, you know – and I saw it and I thought, Well, fuck, this is my fault. I take this one.
That’s it?
Made sense. I was sloppy. I triggered it, so it was mine to take. And that means I got like this. There’s the noise of him moving, in the room. I got like this, and it blew shrapnel here and here.
Beth can see him, slightly re-enacting his movements in twitches and gestures. Remembering it exactly. He was so exact, such a creature of habit. Of repetition.
And that’s all I remember, until they dragged me off. I woke up in the helicopter but I don’t remember that part. Apparently I was awake, I don’t know. And then I was home. I remember seeing Beth when I got back, because she was waiting for me to wake up. That was about two weeks later, when I woke up properly. They’d operated already and everything. Taken the shrapnel out. And there was Beth, waiting for me.
Beth remembers it as well, but she can also remember those two weeks in the hospital, weeks that he has no recollection of, when she stood by this enormous incubator-like device that was keeping him alive, as they pulled the shrapnel from him over the course of two operations. They told her that he was lucky to be alive. She prayed that he would make it awake intact.
Vic’s voice tells the rest of the story to the doctor, and to Beth, and they both listen. Here, Beth finds herself sitting on the end of the bed, near to Vic’s feet. They twitch and curl up seemingly with every punctua
tion point of Vic’s speech. After a while, Beth puts her hand onto his right shin. She does it to steady them – to let him know that there’s somebody there, as if that might help – but she finds that she sort of likes it.
She imagines her husband trickling back into this body. She fantasizes that he is filling up, from the bottom of his body first, like water into a jug, and she’s touching the only part that might now be him.
24
Vic’s cough is what wakes her. She’s asleep in her bedroom, amongst the chaos of the vacuum-packed clothing bags that she’s pulled out of the Machine’s room to make it hospitable, and she’s dreaming of something that she can no longer remember when she wakes up, but it’s there, insistent, almost itching for her to find it. Then the cough, and it hacks through the mugginess of the flat. It’s the first noise that she’s heard Vic make since she brought him back, beyond the mild whimpers and whines that she thinks were involuntary; but here his body is responding to something. She gets out of bed. Half past four. She gets a bottle of water, even as the cough continues, and she swigs from it first. It isn’t until she gets into the Machine’s room that she notices the cough properly. She doesn’t know how much these things are or can be personal, but she recognizes it. It’s Vic’s cough: not just the hacking reaction of a dry throat in a random body.
She helps him sit up slightly more, and lifts the bottle to his mouth. He reaches for it, tongue out, desperate, and she pours it faster than she should, drizzling the water down his chest and into the sweat of his chest hair.
Come on, she says. That’s it. He drinks most of the bottle, gulping it down.
Thank you, he says.
What? Beth stands up. She stands back. What did you say? He doesn’t move, doesn’t look at her. His eyes are open, focused on the ceiling, on the veins in the paint. Say that again. Vic? Vic. She says his name repeatedly, as if one of the versions of it might make sense to him: one with a particular tone in her voice, or a particular lilt. She draws closer again, kneels on the bed and looks into his eyes. They don’t search around or try to avoid hers, but they’re not with her either. Somehow vague. She looks at his lips. Thank you, she says. Say thank you. But he doesn’t say anything.