by Beth Revis
copyright
THE BODY ELECTRIC. Copyright © 2014 by Beth Revis
Cover and Interior Design by Hafsah Faizal
www.bethrevis.com
www.iceydesigns.com
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Scripturient Books.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9906626-0-0 (signed, limited edition)
ISBN-13: 978-0-9906626-1-7 (special edition)
ISBN-13: 978-0-9906626-2-4 (paperback)
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ISBN-13: 978-0-9906626-4-8 (ebook)
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dedication
For the ones I can never forget.
Dei gratia.
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good
amid these, O me, O life?
—Excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “O Me! O Life!”
one
”Don’t ever forget how much I love you,” Dad says.
I dig my toes into the warm Mediterranean sand. The water is a perfect blue, speckled with the white foam of cresting waves. When I tilt my head back, I can feel the warmth of the sun, a gentle sea breeze lifting strands of my short, brown hair and blowing them into my face.
But none of this is real.
“It is real!” I shout.
Dad turns around, a look of surprise on his face. “What was that, Ella?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I mumble.
“Are you ready to come in, you two?” My mother stands at the top of the beach, near the road, her cupped hands amplifying her voice.
“Not just yet,” Dad says, winking at me. He takes off at a run, kicking sand on me as I jump up, chasing after him. I can hear my mother laughing behind us. The sandy beach gives way to pebbles and bigger rock formations, and soon neither of us is running as we pick our paths through wave-worn rocks. Mom and the road and the beach are far behind us. It’s just me and Dad and the sea.
It’s fake.
“No!” I say, just as my bare feet slip on the wet rock. I crash down, pain shooting up my scraped shin. Dad turns back and helps me up.
“Are you okay, Ella?” he asks.
No. NO.
“Yeah,” I say.
“We shouldn’t run,” Dad says. “We should take the time to appreciate this area. You know where we are, right?”
I hadn’t recognized it before, but now that Dad says it, I do know where I am. From the cliff above us extends a giant arm of rock, arcing over the sea and then reaching back down into the water. The rock formation has created a perfect arch—large enough to fit a house under—through which the sea flows. Waves crash against the sides of the rock, sending up salty sea foam.
“It’s the Azure Window,” I breathe, staring at this natural wonder.
It’s not. Not really.
“Eyes are the window to the soul, Ella, don’t forget that,” Dad says. He’s not looking at me; he’s watching a girl swimming out in the ocean, so far away from us that I cannot recognize who she is.
“I… I thought the Azure Window was destroyed,” I say slowly. “In the Secessionary War. The bombs broke the arch, the rock crumbled into the sea.”
As I say the words, the natural bridge of rock cracks with an earsplitting snap. First pebbles, then boulders fall from the arch. The water churns with the destruction. Giant clouds of dirt and debris mar my vision of the crumbling rock formation. When the dust finally clears, there is nothing there but a pile of rocks and swirling, dirty water.
I turn to my father.
He’s dead.
He’s dead.
As I watch, the skin of his face cracks, like the rock did, exposing red blood. His flesh falls away from his skull like pebbles crashing to the sea. A waterfall of cascading blood and gore falls from his head, down his neck. His shoulder chips away, and, with a giant crash, the flesh from his chest falls from his body, an avalanche splattering into the sea at our feet, now stained red. I can see, for just a moment, his beating heart in his ribcage, and then that, too, withers and dies, the useless, blackened lump tapping against his ribs before plopping out of his body. He’s nothing but bones, and then the gentle warm Mediterranean wind blows against him, and his bones break, clattering down into the pile of muck and flesh swirling in the salty sea.
“This isn’t real,” I say.
Because it isn’t.
two
I wake up with a violent jerk, running a shaky hand over my sleep-crusted eyes.
Ever since last year, the nightmares have been getting worse. More vivid. The line between what’s real and what’s not is so blurry.
Ever since I started working at the Reverie Mental Spa.
I sigh, throwing my blankets back and getting out of bed. By the time I make it to the kitchen, my mother’s already slicing tomatoes for breakfast.
“Sleep well?” she asks cheerily.
“Yeah, no,” I say, slumping into the chair. But when she turns back to look at me, a curious smile on her lips, I just grin at her as if I’d woken up from the best dream ever.
Mom hands me the plate of tomatoes. “Forgot the basil,” she mutters, turning away before the plate’s fully in my hands.
They’re real tomatoes, grown on our roof, not the perfect spheres from the market. Of course, they taste pretty much exactly like the genetically modified food the government stamps approval of sale on, but I like the weirdly discordant shapes of the tomatoes we grow ourselves. They’re lumpier, as if they have only a vague idea of the round shape they’re supposed to be. The rich, red insides glisten with the sprinkle of salt Mom threw over them before she handed them to me.
Then I notice the blood.
“Mom,” I say evenly, trying not to make it sound like a big deal.
“Mmm?” she asks, not turning.
It’s rather a lot of blood, mixed in with the slices. It’s darker than the tomatoes’ juice, smeared across the plate.
“Mom,” I say again.
Mom turns, still holding the knife. I see the cut pulsing blood down her hand, cutting a dark path through the chopped green basil clinging to her skin. She’s shorn off the tip of her second finger.
“Mom!” I say, dropping the plate on the counter and rushing to her. She looks down at her hand and curses, tossing the knife into the sink.
“Damn, damn, damn,” she says. “It’s ruined, isn’t it?” She looks past me at the plate of tomatoes. “All ruined. Damn!”
“I don’t care about the tomatoes,” I say, wrapping a tea towel around her finger as Mom reaches past me, grabbing the plate and sliding the tomato slices into the rubbish bin. “Be still,” I order, but she doesn’t listen. She tries to shake me off.
“Forget about the damn tomatoes!” I shout, snatching her hand again and pressing the towel into the cut. Mom stares down at it dispassionately, watching the red blood soak through the white cloth.
I slowly raise my eyes from Mom’s hand to her face. There’s no emotion on her face. No pain.
“You didn’t feel it, did you?” I whisper.
“Of course I did,” Mom says.
I squeeze the cut finger, just a little, just enough pressure that she should feel a spike of pain. But Mom doesn’t notice.
I drop her hand, and Mom peels away the tea towel. It’s ruined—but Mom’s finger isn’t. As we watch, the raw, bleeding flesh slowly knits back up, and the skin starts to regrow.
Mom snorts. “At least the bots are good for something.”
“You’re getting worse,” I say. It’s not a question.
“Ella—” Mom starts to reach for me, but I wrap my arms around myself. The back of my tongue aches as burning tears fill my eyes. “Ella, it’s not that bad.”
“It is!” I shout, staring at her. Mom’s eyes plead with me to forget what I saw, to pretend that everything is okay. But it’s not. It’s not.
It’s the beginning of the end.
This is the way things are:
Almost two years ago, Mom was diagnosed with Hebb’s Disease. It’s rare, and it’s fatal. Some people think it comes from the universal cancer vaccination since it was developed a short time before the first case of the disease, but no one’s sure. All we know is that, for some reason, the space between neurons starts to grow wider. Your brain is yelling at you to move, but your nervous system can’t hear it.
Most people don’t last more than half a year with Hebb’s, but Mom’s survived two whole years thanks to the research on nanobots Dad did. He was close to finding a cure, I know he was. He used nanobots to help alleviate the symptoms, using the tiny, microscopic robots to communicate the messages between Mom’s brain and nervous system. The bots have the additional advantage to heal other areas where Mom’s been hurt, like the cut on her finger. Medical nanobots are no new thing—everyone has vaccination bots when they’re born—but the way Dad used them on Mom’s illness… it seemed like a miracle.
But then Dad died.
And now Mom’s…
Not being able to feel anything is the first warning sign. If a knife nearly sliced off her finger, and she didn’t even freaking notice, that means Dad’s temporary fix for Mom is failing. The bots aren’t working. The disease is taking over. The disease that eventually kills every single one of its victims is winning.
“Mom,” I say, my voice eerily calm. “How long have you had trouble feeling things?”
“It’s not been long, Ella, please, don’t worry about—”
“How long.” It doesn’t even sound like a question any more, just a demand.
Mom sighs. “A few months. It’s… been getting steadily worse.”
My hands are shaking so violently that I curl them into fists and hold them behind my back so Mom doesn’t see. I can’t be weak, not in front of her, not when she needs my strength.
When Mom was first diagnosed, I practiced saying “My mother is dead,” until I could say it without crying.
And then Mom didn’t die. Dad found a way to stave off the disease, and she lived.
But he didn’t.
Dad’s death was sudden, and violent, and it gutted me like knife guts a fish. An explosion in the lab where he worked, about a year ago, killing him and several other scientists. No one expected it—no one except the terrorists who planned it. I was so angry. He left me with a sick mother and no hope. And when I woke up the next morning, and every morning after, there would be a moment, a brief moment, where I’d forgotten Dad was dead. And every morning, I relived every ounce of pain when I remembered again that he wasn’t here with us. With me.
“Ella.” My mother speaks loudly, drawing me back to the here and now. “I don’t want you to worry about it, really. Jadis is taking me to a new doctor, one of the ones in the lab that gave us the grant money, and well—don’t give up hope on me, okay?”
I jerk my head up, staring at her fiercely. “Never,” I say, and I mean it more than anything else I’ve ever sworn.
I’m not ready to be an orphan.
three
I watch Mom like a hawk, every nerve in my body strung out. How could I not have noticed her condition worsening before? She moves slower than normal. When I stare at her face, I notice that the skin just under her jaw is a little looser, as if she’s shriveling from the inside.
When the buzzer at the door sounds, I nearly fall out of my chair. I tap my fingers across the cuff at my wrist quickly. My cuffLINK is connected to our apartment, and my commands for the door are received immediately. It slides open noiselessly and Ms. White steps inside.
“How is everyone?” she asks cheerfully. Then, seeing my grim look, she asks again in a lower voice, “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Mom says, crossing the room. She picks up her brown purse from the bench by the door, but weighs it in her hand, as if the small bag was too heavy. She drops it back down; all her information is contained in her cuff, and she doesn’t really need anything in her purse, but I can’t help but think this is another sign that she’s growing weaker.
Ms. White’s eyes shoot to me for a more truthful answer about Mom’s condition. Ms. White is Mom’s best friend and my godmother, as well as manager of the Reverie Mental Spa—the business Mom developed before she got sick and where I intern. When I was younger, I tried calling her Aunt Jadis, even though we’re not related, but it was weird, like calling a teacher by her first name. She’s just always been Ms. White to me, even now, when she’s one of the few still standing beside me after Mom got so sick.
As I fill Ms. White in on this morning’s tomato episode, her mouth narrows to a thin line and her skin pales even more. Ms. White is originally from Germany, and her pale skin and platinum blond hair has always stood in contrast to Mom’s and my Mediterranean darkness. As Ms. White listens to me, I can’t help but compare her to Mom. In many ways, Ms. White looks like everything a responsible adult should be: she dresses in immaculate, designer linen suits, her hair is always razor-edge straight, and she just has the appearance of someone who gets things done. She looks exactly like what she is: a business manager. Beside her, Mom looks like an adult dressing up as a disheveled teenager, but it’s Mom who’s a literal genius and scientist.
“I’ll take her to Dr. Simpa, and let him know,” Ms. White tells me as we all head to the lift across from the apartment.
“I can do it,” I say immediately.
Ms. White smiles at me kindly. “Let me. It’s no trouble. And you look like you could use a break.”
The lift doors open to the lobby of the building. Mom bought this building specifically for the development of the Reverie Mental Spa—we only moved into the apartment upstairs after Dad died.
“Don’t you need me to work today?” I ask Ms. White as we move across the lobby floor.
Ms. White pauses. “I cancelled our appointments,” she says.
I stare at her, surprised. She didn’t know Mom was ill; how could she have known to clear the schedule?
“Something’s come up,” Ms. White says, lowering her voice. She drops back, letting Mom walk to the door on her own as she draws me to the side. “I’ll tell you more about it later, but we have a very special… er… c
lient coming in tonight. You don’t have plans?”
I snort. I never have plans. All I do is work.
“We’ll meet back here, then. But for now—you should go out. Try not to worry.”
Ha. The only thing I do more than work is worry.
Ms. White leads Mom to the door, where she has a private transport waiting to whisk them to her doctor. I stand in the empty lobby, considering my options. With no clients, the spa is empty, and there’s really no point in my staying here.
The lobby is all glass and chrome, and immaculately appointed. The front wall is made entirely of glass, and is illuminated with our logo: a giant neon sheep. The sheep bounces over the letters of REVERIE, making them melt into our slogan: RELIVE your fondest memories with Reverie Mental Spa.
People from all over the world come here for Mom’s invention—a process that allows people to lucidly dream in a state of utter relaxation. It’s expensive, but worth it: Having a reverie is like reliving the best day of your life in perfect clarity.
I briefly consider ignoring Ms. White’s advice about going out. I could go to the basement level of the building, where Mom’s reverie chairs are set up. I could give myself a reverie and get lost in the past, forget about this morning, and Mom’s blood, and Mom’s disease, and everything else.
I could relive a day when Dad was still alive, and Mom wasn’t sick.
But then I remember the image of Dad’s flesh melting from his skin in my nightmare.
Maybe I should go out.
four
When I step outside, the glass doors of the Reverie Mental Spa closing behind me, I allow myself a moment to get lost in the chaos of the city. Our building is on one of the busiest streets in the city. The autotaxis and magnatram zip by the road in front of the spa, with dozens of e-scooters weaving in and around the traffic. A crowd of people gather in front of the Reverie Mental spa—tourists, snapping pics with their cuffs of the elaborate iron gates that lead into Central Gardens, just across the street from us.