by James Smythe
Okay, she says. She stands again. She runs her hands over her head, and she looks at the Machine. It’s plugged in and switched on already, but she could swear that she unplugged it. It’s possible that she got it wrong, just as it’s possible that she didn’t hear Vic thanking her, in his voice, with his polite tone. Nothing casual there. She presses the screen. It’s as it was yesterday, as she left it. Five recordings down, one after the other, and then repeated. Blocks of five, at an hour each. Five-minute break between each, for toilet and drink, then an hour’s break for lunch, then the whole thing repeated. She doesn’t know if the information presented to Vic through the Crown is the same, though. She doesn’t understand the technology at all, even though she’s read everything she can about the Machine.
They started with slugs, she knows: removing the part of a slug’s memory that told it where food was. Slugs rely on experience to drive them towards whatever it is that they’re looking for. They remember. Scientists took that out and made them forget, and the slugs were lost. It wasn’t lobotomizing them: it was a targeted jolt. Proper science. An injection, and electricity, like a lightning bolt that only damaged the part you wanted it to. And after that they moved on to other animal trials, nothing cruel about it, because you’re making something forget the inane. Nothing important. Brain memory is different from muscle memory: even down to the actual filing system of how we remember. And then on to humans, and the introduction of the Machine, because the power needed to process it all was tremendous. In the earliest trials, the Machine occupied an aircraft hangar. There are pictures of it on the internet, this hulking thing that went back and back, filling the space like the first computers, a room full of wires and chipsets. They took memories away from people, and they discovered that they could also jolt those memories back: that the Machine burned bridges, but could also repair them, in a way. That’s what Beth understands: where it came from. They made the technology useable, put it out there before it should have been – when there were no limits to the havoc it could wreak – then tried to backtrack by imposing guidelines, dressing the Machines up as handy household appliances. But it was already over.
Beth worries that she’s pushing him too hard. That was how she got into this: rushing. She was in charge of his treatments in the latter days, because they wanted to remove the doctor from the equation. It was important that Vic ultimately forgot that he’d even had treatments in the first place. The last day of any patient’s experience was to have that part erased, wiping down the surfaces and locking the door on your way out. So Beth was in charge, and she was meant to take her time with the last few stages; ten stages, that was all. But she rushed it, and then … That’s been hanging over her for years: not knowing if Vic would have been left broken without her help, or if she was the catalyst. One treatment a week, she was told: and she condensed them into a fortnight.
Now, the instructions on the internet forums tell her that it doesn’t matter. That the pace at which memories are put back in is at the user’s discretion. She wonders who these people are, on the forums. What they actually know. The creators of the Machine are taking so long to work this through themselves, to reach an actual solution and make it public, only promising things in press conferences with their performing test cases. And the guerrilla underground has taken control instead. She laughs, to think of herself as that: part of a movement defying logic, and science, and time. At the forefront of something. She laughs because of how she got here.
It’s nearly morning, she says. You need to use the toilet. He’s made it through the second night dry, apart from the sweat. Tomorrow night she’ll give him a sheet instead of the duvet. She didn’t even think, because the duvet was what they had in their old house, and the decoration, the furniture. All of it imported to make this bedroom feel as much like their old room as possible, with the exception of the Machine, filling that wall, in case that helps to nudge his memory even slightly. She helps him up and leads him through. His walking seems better. More focused, somehow. She sits him on the toilet and stands outside the room.
The day I watch you take a shit is the day I know this marriage is over, Vic joked once. But it wasn’t really a joke, she didn’t think.
Back to the bedroom, she says, and she would swear that he leads slightly: that he’s the one who instigates that first assisted step, and that he knows the direction, that she doesn’t have to twist his body to meet it. He kneels onto the bed as well, she thinks, and when she goes to turn his body to lie down he doesn’t feel as heavy as he did the day before. Maybe just a night’s sleep, and Beth is less tired herself. She takes the Crown down and puts it on him, and the black marks are back, she notices. Not that they ever left, but they faded, like the way that bruises fade, only they never completely abandoned his scalp; and now they seem brighter. Which makes sense, because they’re always going to be tender, Beth supposes. She notices that the Crown has pushed up some of his hair into a tuft; she smoothes it down.
She presses the button and gets the next recording playing. REPLENISH, like a shampoo, like an energy drink. Vic’s voice is all she hears. She almost entirely blocks the doctor out now, as if he’s not important. She thinks that that must be what makes him good at his job: his ability to fade into the background. Vic talks about what made him want to get into the army, and how his father pushed him. Background experiences that made him who he was. Who he will be.
With the first shift over, Beth gives him food. This morning it’s soggy cereal, corn flakes left to melt in milk. Beth has to lift the spoon and open his mouth with her finger and slide the food off and onto his tongue, and then close his mouth, and he swallows of his own accord, an exaggerated motion in which he seems to tense every muscle in his jaw and neck in order to make it all go down. Then they repeat the process, so eating the bowl of cereal takes nearly half an hour. It’s the longest break he’ll get before lunch.
The second session begins, and the playback follows on from the last. Beth sits and listens and looks around the room, and suddenly the hour is gone. She finds herself staring at the photographs that she’s put in cheap frames on top of the chest of drawers; or at Vic’s body; or at the bowl of potpourri. She can’t remember how long ago she put it in the room, but it still smells. The sort of thing her mother would have done. She’s looking at the Crown on his head, listening to nothing, it seems, thinking about her own headache – how these sessions take it out of her as well, and that’s important, that the partner understands and feels it – when the doorbell interrupts.
Who’s that? Beth asks, a jerk reflex. Asking Vic that question. Something she hasn’t had the chance to do in years; he always used to be the one who opened the door to people. She would always tell him to go and do it, and assume he would know who it was before he even looked. As if he was always expecting somebody.
The bell rings again, and it’s followed by a knock. Three knocks, rapid and harsh. Beth stays where she is, staying quiet. Nobody ever comes to see her. Might be that it’s the neighbour with the girls. Another series of raps on the door, and Beth moves to the doorway of the bedroom to get a better look – to hopefully see a shape through the pebbled glass at the top, and somehow recognize the person from that vagueness.
The letterbox flaps. Beth? It’s me. Laura’s voice. I know you’re in there, Beth. Please answer the door, she says. You don’t have to do this alone.
Beth stands and holds her breath, and she completely forgets that Vic is behind her with the Crown still resting there on his head.
Beth, Laura says again, but she lets the letterbox snap back into place, and her shadow – just a shape – moves away, and down towards the window that looks into the living room. The curtains are closed so she can’t see anything, but her shape lingers as she tries to peer in.
Beth’s phone rings: the house line, because that’s the only one that Laura’s got.
Come on, she hears Laura saying through the window, which is cracked slightly open at the top to let the air in
. Answer, answer. She paces and lets it ring, and Beth stands completely still and there’s no noise apart from the roar of the Machine, but that must be too quiet for Laura to hear, even though inside the bedroom it sounds like a gale, when you really focus on it.
The phone rings for a minute and then stops, and there’s a few seconds where Beth wonders if she’s gone – Laura’s silhouette is nowhere to be seen – before a note is pushed through the letterbox, and then she walks past the window.
Beth goes and picks up the note, which is a single folded piece of paper, but pre-written, prepared, as if this – her not answering or being out, one or the other – was an eventuality Laura had anticipated.
Beth, I came to offer you my shoulder and my advice. I can help you through this. You shouldn’t make these decisions on your own. Call me. Laura.
I’m not on my own, Beth says aloud.
25
Beth carries the note around with her as if it has a special meaning, but keeps it either in her hand (where it scrunches in on itself) or in the back pocket of her shorts (where it attempts to smooth itself out again). She thinks about it as she feeds Vic his lunch of apples and pineapple and tinned peaches, mixed down in the processor, like this is some fad diet, and when they resume their sessions in the afternoon she sits and reads it over as Vic listens to himself talking about his training. These sessions are the worst: the ones that have only to do with his army background, that she listens to because they’re there.
Am I being selfish? she asks him in their fourth session of the afternoon, pausing the playback for a second. Would you even want this, if it was offered to you?
The Machine’s noise is something that should be ruinous. It should destroy her, to hear it, because it’s so pervasive and so intense. There’s no escaping it when the Machine is working, or even when it’s idle. And she’s felt it shaking a few times before, but now, as she sits at the foot of the bed, she could swear that the vibrations from it are coming through the carpet. She climbs off as Vic talks about the speed with which he can strip and clean and rebuild a rifle, and she lies on the floor with her head on its side to see if the carpet is actually trembling, as she suspects. She feels it in her face: that slight tickle, like pins and needles.
When the fifth session is over she takes the Crown off and puts it back in the dock. She doesn’t unplug the Machine, because the hum when it’s on standby is almost comforting, she thinks. She wonders if Vic likes it. If it’s reassuring. She hauls him to the bathroom again, and makes him a dinner of spaghetti hoops on two slices of mushed-up bread, and puts him to bed, making sure that the bed is dry (which it is, as the heat pretty much ensures that anything left for half an hour bakes itself dry). She gives him water, but not too much.
Shower in the morning, she says. He shuts his eyes without her having to tell him to, but that might just always be the way he’s done it. When he’s tired, he knows.
She sits on the sofa with Laura’s note in her hand and pulls the laptop out and starts to flick through her usual forums. She searches to see if there’s anything about Machines vibrating, and if that’s a side effect of the custom firmware. She’s become an expert on these things, she thinks. Ten years ago, firmware wouldn’t have even been a word to her. When that search throws up nothing she searches for threads on The Positives, the name they use for those carers who’ve successfully brought people back from vacancy. There are six on her main forum, the one where she actually has a username and a login, and they were the only six people people she knew of who had managed to get hold of Machines. She was lucky number seven. The firmware was all programmed by the first one, and he shared the wealth. Swedish, lost his wife in the same war as Vic fought in, and he was desperate, because he didn’t have money. And their government banned the Machines; his chance of anything happening of its own accord was slim to none. She sends him a question.
How long did it take for your wife to become herself again? (Recognizably.)
Beth presses SEND and waits for a reply.
The users of the forum are dedicated and passionate, and they’re all willing to help. The users say that you don’t know what families of the vacant are going through until you go through it yourself; the only people who can help are those who feel your pain. It’s a motto of the forum-goers. Beth sits and rubs the sides of her head, where the headache has set in – like spending too much time near a photocopier, and so intense, concentrating on this, putting all the tension into her head and her jaw, making her bite down on nothing, making her tense her entire face over and over, every muscle in it – and she’s thinking about the ibuprofen when the reply comes.
Hi there! It was exactly two weeks after we started. We took it easy because I was sacred.
Beth thinks that he means scared, but she could be wrong.
I did not want to hurt her. So it was two weeks before she said something that was exactly her. But she made noise that she was getting better before that, and so I persevered. Are you going to be hopefully joining the club of the rest of us? Because we can give you any more help, if you need it. Just say the ask. Smiley face.
Beth doesn’t reply. She thinks about it – she types a reply, which she deletes twice – and then shuts the laptop. She still has the note, and she reads it again: Laura’s handwriting, which now looks over-rehearsed to her, as if she wrote this once on another sheet and copied it out, like writing letters to relatives when she was a child. And the words: suggesting that she needed help or advice. That she wasn’t entirely sure of what she was doing. It’s an intrusion by somebody on the outside, someone who was barging in where she wasn’t wanted. She hasn’t been through this pain, and she can’t understand it, so she can’t expect to help.
Beth puts the TV on and then mutes the sound and leans back. She shuts her eyes. That’s all it takes.
26
The sky crackles.
It wakes Beth up because it’s so noisy, like firecrackers snapping away. The television is halfway through a Japanese cartoon, but that doesn’t give her a time to use as reference. The clock says that it’s just gone midnight, which means she’s barely been asleep any time at all. It’s so dark in the flat, only the TV is giving off any light at all.
Snap, snap, snap.
She stands up and stretches, and her head feels clear enough, but the air in the flat is horrible. Hot, not just warm, and nearly wet. On the rare occasions that they have storms, they’re perfect for clearing out everything. Like a reset button, and they leave the ground smelling – what was it that Laura called it? Petrichor? Petrichlor? – and the sky clear. And everything’s cooler for a few days. Not long enough to get used to it, but in the same way that people used to celebrate the British summer. They get out and enjoy it while it lasts. It’s no longer something that everybody has to fight against.
Beth walks to the window and pulls back the curtain. The rain hasn’t started yet, and she knows what she expects to see, but it’s different. The sky isn’t just black: intermittently a filthy grey shade, lit by the lightning. There are other people outside, and in the distance she can see the sun buried underneath the clouds. It’s 11 a.m. The sky crackles again, and the lightning rushes across it, smacking into itself. It’s bad special effects from a science-fiction movie. It’s one of those gadgets where the electricity is attracted to somebody’s palm resting on the glass. It rolls through the clouds – like horses through waves, Beth thinks, which she remembers from somewhere, but she’s not sure where – and it seems to leap before it dissipates. She forgets about everything else: Vic, the Machine, her own life. She opens the front door and breathes it in, the damp, the sense that it’s about to happen. Everybody senses it.
And then it rains. It thuds in single drops first, thwap, down onto the concrete, and they’re almost big enough to make their own puddles. They’re as warm as everything else. Thwap, thwap. More of them. Each of the residents of the estate stays under cover, even her next-door neighbour, who hides indoors as her daughters run ou
t, well past when they should be asleep. After the drops comes the flood, a gush of water coming down on them. Heavier than Beth’s ever seen before, she thinks. Nobody talks: down in the courtyard people stand huddled. It seems almost reverential. The rain pours and then the lightning comes, and all across the sky it can be seen, ripping down from the sky, smacking onto buildings. The lights are on in all the flats one minute, and the next they’re gone. The power tears out through the entire estate, and as far into the distance as Beth can see from the balcony: no lights down at the shops, no lights on the estate past that, or the houses that run around the edge of the island further down. Total blackness, apart from the lightning.
Snap.
Beth rushes back inside to Vic and the Machine, and she doesn’t know what she expected, but it’s still making that low-level hum, and it’s still going. It’s still plugged in and she doesn’t know what she expected, because that battery keeps on going, and now she wonders why everybody else doesn’t hear it: when the rest of the ambient noise is gone and all that’s left is the Machine and the light from it and that noise, which comes from somewhere at its back, in the dark, somewhere that she knows doesn’t have a speaker and shouldn’t be able to make noise. And what if Laura is right? With her protesting and her crying and her berating and praying to God? What if this is as unnatural as she’s suggesting? She reaches out slowly, tentatively, and she presses the screen – Vic doesn’t stir, completely knocked out by the day – and it lights up, and the light fills the room.