Spare and Found Parts (20 page)

Y
ou aren't sure why you trust this moment. The air is soapy, and the shock of the music is still changing the texture of the world around you, deepening it with new ridges and valleys of emotion. You are suddenly aware of your mouth, as if you'd never had a mouth before now.

He is a grand thing before you, moving easily. Your eyes connect with his again, and you are grateful for him. He's brought you so much in such a short time: a hundred thousand anthems! Each song a bauble, a star. He's brought you these gifts, these passwords to the world before. People must have danced like this all the time. How did they ever
stop
dancing?

You glide around him, barely touching at the fingertips, lightly connecting every beat or two. He's confident in his movement. He's a good dancer. That must
come in his code. You, though, you are teaching yourself as each key change arrives, as each line rises and tips into the next, as the woman singing from long ago wills you to. You learn her words easily, almost start to sing along.

Just beneath the skin of you there is a warmth, a possibility, and something like the opposite of fear: courage.

You built him to be handsome and strong. He hasn't a face yet, not like how you drew him on the page, but if you soften your eyes, you can see it. Here he is, far from line and paper; you feel a pull toward him. This is not a coincidence. He is good at this, and you are not; but you don't care. He's not going to sneer or laugh or roll his eyes; he can't, and he wouldn't. He thinks you are amazing: you
made
him.

You trust him, and what a golden climb that truth is building through your ankles and knees and gut and your chest, and before you are quite sure of it, you crescendo into him, high on your toes. You built this kiss. This belongs to you.

His head leans forward to meet yours, and he places his hands around your waist. His mouth is not a mouth. He is cold.

All the gold drains out of your body, and you are in the arms of a machine; you are between pincers of steel.

The kiss feels like nothing. This is not a kiss at all.

You stay with it, and you think of Oliver Kelly: of the feel of his skin against your selfish hands in the hospital, of his obvious desire for you, the smell of formaldehyde and cologne and his body in the back of your throat. He did not want you then, but at least he knew what he wanted; at least he wanted; at least he chose.

You built Io with your own hands. Was he capable of choosing? Were you choosing this for him?

Is this why they took the machines away? Is this what they punished a whole nation for? They came too close to the uncanny, lost themselves to the unreal, and paid, and here you are, tangled up in a steel tower with electric lights for eyes. How is it Oliver is in your throat now? How is it that he would feel more real than this, this that you have drawn up from nothing, this that you made? It is not Oliver that you find yourself wishing for; it is just—just a human, not a machine.

This floods you as you break contact and Io turns his head, says, “You kissed me.”

“I'm sorry, I can't—” Your stupid mouth won't work now and you back away from him and he says your name and you are afraid. He is so full; he is so real: how much does he know? Before you realize it, you have turned on your heel and you are moving away, fast; you are leaving. You need the air. You need out of this house.

W
hen Nell passed Ruby at the garden gate, she barely noticed the girl, let alone expected Ruby to cycle after her, eye lit up like a bright bulb of concern. But Ruby turned and followed. Even after Nell had ridden out of the parklands and swerved west, bypassing the way into the estates, the town.

As Nell moved, she listened to her body, her thrumming pulse, her chest; her ticking shifted tone, started to clang. Something was happening. She didn't stop.

The two girls flew on their bicycles against the warm rain. Nell led them out past the rush of Heuston Falls and down the increasingly barren road westward. The road became less even, as the ruins began to loom against the humid gray of the falling afternoon.

The ancient flats and high-rise blocks like rotten teeth lined the blackened old tongue of the road that
led out to the mystery of the rest of the island. This was where the scars of the epidemic were the most gnarled, between the Pale and the Pasture, the places that the sparse population hadn't even tried to mend yet. Hadn't they enough to do in their small communities, rather than waste time on the ragged edges, the rotten hemline of their tiny civilization?

Nell slowed a little. Putting miles between her and the house, Io's arms. It was supposed to be helping, but she was feeling sicker now than she was in the kitchen.

Ruby caught up and pedaled beside her.

They didn't say anything to each other, not for some time. They just cycled on, past small gray shells of houses and wide, scorched fields. Night suggested itself over the horizon; the sky began to move neon.

This far out the air began to reek. Yellowed and tangled meadows stretched out on either side of the decrepit motorway west. They soaked up the warm rain greedily, drunk after so long dry. Close up Nell could smell how foul and how sick it was, but the girls stayed in the center of the tar road as though the slight distance from the wild pasture would grant them more safety.

“My chest hurts,” Nell said suddenly, breaking the silence so sharply that Ruby almost lost control of her bike.

“Do you need to stop?” offered Ruby, her voice hopeful. “Are you ready to go back?”

Nell did not answer; she only kept pedaling.

Ruby moved closer to Nell on the road, barely an arm's length from her. This was the farthest west the girls had ever been. Nell's breaths were great gulps of panic. “Ruby, my chest hurts.” She still looked straight ahead into the electric sunset. “It sounds—”

“It sounds bad, Nell; it sounds different,” ventured Ruby.

Tears rolled down Nell's face, her lips were chapped; but she was still somehow cycling. Still moving forward, still moving away.

“Nell, maybe you should stop?”

Nell said nothing, her face crumpled in something that married physical pain and immense sorrow. She slowed down a little. Ruby reached out, but Nell swerved, lost her grip on the wet filthy road, and toppled gracelessly over on her side. Her chest whirred, clanked. The hull of a sinking ship, long after the iceberg. The creaks of a burning house coming down around itself: a terrible, terrible noise. Her palms were scraped from the road, and her throbbing, exhausted legs still tangled in her bicycle. She heaved, but there was nothing in her.

Ruby leaped down to Nell's side, her bicycle
clattering to the road. Rain slid down the tip of her nose, her clothing plastered to her form. Nell shuddered and gasped.

“Can you move? We need to get back!” Ruby was crying now, totally powerless in the rain, on the road. “I'm not going to be able to carry you!”

“Will you,” Nell managed weakly, “you please get my—my da?”

The sheer effort of this breathy request pulled Nell's precarious consciousness out from under her. Her eyes flickered shut, her breathing labored, but her chest kept grinding, metallic and heaving and strange. Ruby shook her once or twice, but Nell couldn't feel it; she was lost to the blackness of the asphalt.

Ruby picked herself up, sobbing, and pulled away from her friend. She clumsily mounted her bicycle, the streamers from the handlebars pathetic, childish in the storm. Ruby began to speed back the way they had come. Night had fallen hard, and she left Nell alone in the dark.

I
am walking toward you, but I cannot see you yet. The rain is heavy. Your father came out of his laboratory; he heard the door slam. He asked me why you left, and I told him that you got a fright. He looked at me long and hard, and I almost told him that you kissed me; but I did not think that was the right thing. Your father is very secretive. He placed long black gloves over my hands and arms and boots on my feet and a long rubber coat over my body. The hat, he said, would keep the water from connecting with my eyes and damaging them. He told me that between these garments and the umbrella, I would be hard pressed to get wet at all. He said not to move too quickly. He said not to burn you, not to burn his girl. He said he was not worried about you because he trusts me.

Nell. I am not sure what that means; but I did not
have time to ask. I am not sure he should trust me. I have not yet seen another person. This world outside the house, I am sure, in daylight is very beautiful.

The city is very large and very gray, and the stone woman on the horizon is very tall. I like her and hope you will bring me close to her. Can we explore this city together? It does not look like the map that I have stored in my code. The network is silent, and there are no updates. I know this waterfall from somewhere, but I would still very much like you to tell me about it when I find you, if you are not still frightened, or angry.

I wish you had location tracking. I wish you were a blue dot on a white map that I could go to.

Your chest was making different noises in the kitchen, but I am not sure you could hear them. I did not tell you when I heard the frequency change, but I should have. Dancing with you was very easy. I want to find you, but perhaps you do not want to be found. I am sorry. I should not keep walking in case I walk in the wrong direction.

When Ruby barrels toward me on her bright bicycle, for a moment I think she is going to attack me. I brace myself for collision, but she skids to a halt and is shrill; her voice is not her voice. If you were frightened in the kitchen, then Ruby is terrified now. But not of me. Of something else.

Her words spill out of her. She tells me she left you by the side of the road. “Nell is broken, go west, go to the motorway, you'll find her after the city ends, she's far out, run, run, run.” She inhales and exhales in great gulps of night air. Maybe if I were a human, I would embrace her, but I do not think she would like that.

I do what she tells me and begin to run, holding my umbrella over my head. I am fast in the rain. I am learning about time, because time changes pace depending on what happens. I experience time differently from how you experience it, Nell. I do not feel it slow because I am bored or fly because I am happy, but tonight I run for a hundred years.

Each footfall is an hour, a day. I have learned this feeling from you; surely it was you showing me how to feel these things. Each second is another winter, Nell. When I find you, this terrible slowness, this human dread will stop. Things like me should not feel time like this.

I am coming for you. Please keep ticking. I will find you; I am listening for you. The night is truly down upon me now as the city gives way under neglect and dissolves into desolate countryside. The rain sounds like a million tiny stones thrown down all at once against my umbrella, a clatter, destruction. Like a broken television. Like a radio that does not work. Like
the moment eggs begin to really sizzle on a frying pan.

I will tell you all about televisions, Nell. I will tell you about radios. I will play you every song in my library with rainfall sampled in the music. I hope you will let me dance with you again.

I am a hundred years older. I am rust under my long coat and gloves. I am afraid. How is it I learned so much from you, Nell, in so little time? How is it that my code can pulse this way? Why did your people make things like me, Nell, if only to teach them this agony?

Then, over the rough drone of the weather, a sound. It is not your ticking. It is a gnarled, crunching wheeze. It is something broken, but it is at least in your rhythm, with your frequency. I'd know your heartbeat anywhere. Ten thousand songs, and it is still the most marvelous thing I have heard.

Nell, I want to show you the words these songs have taught me. I want to say
heartbreak, ecstasy, tragedy, forgiveness. Waterfall
. I want to tell you I have heard all about Fridays. I can hear your body in the dark, and the sound will have to be the blue spot on the white map that I move toward. I know you are alive nearby.

In the moonlight (I know a lot about moonlight, too), I see your body and bicycle against the silver and black and water. I am standing over you. You are so small, Nell, and your sound is a factory on fire.

Your oak skin is gray, and I am glad of my gloves and that I cannot hurt you. I could hold twenty of you with my strong arms. I am sorry, I am leaving your bicycle. I can carry you and this umbrella, and that is all. I begin to walk east, back to the city.

Your eyes flicker open, and you are frightened, then relieved; then your body tenses with pain. You cough, and there is blood on your lips. I run.

You are gone again, asleep or worse, but still breathing, your chest still churning out that sound, that awful symphony, but at least it means life. At least you are here.

I drop the umbrella once I am under the porch and hammer on the door with all I can, still holding your body, all limbs and sound and, I am sure, cold, but I cannot feel that through these gloves.

Dr. Crane answers, Kodak sitting around his shoulders. “What took you so—” Then he sees you and swears. I tell him you are broken, and his voice darkens. “Bring her to the laboratory immediately, stupid child going so far out . . .”

I don't ask any questions. I bring you through the white room where you brought me to life, and he closes the door behind us.

I am not a monster now. I can help.

Y
ou are standing out at the edge of the lake, the water is lapping your feet, starving. Your hands are full of small stones, shining and black. You place them in the pockets of your nightshirt, then lean down to the shoreline and gather up some more. Your pockets are heavy. This is the only thing you can feel: the weight. Your chest is quiet, and the world is quiet. You are sure you can smell the rain, but it is just beyond your senses.

Fistfuls of stones.

The shirt pulls at your shoulders. Maybe it will rip. If it does, you will tie its white flannel arms around your naked waist, and it will be just as good for dragging you down when you walk into the water. You will walk into the water, and you will find her.

She'll be lying among the weeds and loaches, hair a vortex of curls, peaceful and safe from the hand
of your father, the cold water soothing her electrical burns, the weight of the water a loving pressure. You step forward. You can't feel the water, but it must be cold. When you find her, you will lie beside her, place your head in the crook of her arm, and place your ear to her chest. It will be silent. Everything will be silent and safe.

When you decide you weigh enough, or the rocks run out, you begin to walk forward. One step, two steps, but you are barely up to your ankles when the lake begins to move, the tide shrinking away from you, repelled.

You step forward, and the slow repulsion of the water becomes a rush away from the land, from the living bad world. You cannot move now; your legs will not listen. The water swirls and grows tall, the atmosphere charged with something bigger than you, far bigger. The lake grows tall, a whirlwind, a tower, a body, a fountain. The water splits, becomes legs and a belly and breasts and arms and hands. There are drops on your cheeks, your eyelashes. You can't wipe them away, and even if you could, you wouldn't. The lake is your mother. Her mane is black, inky weeds, the slope of her nose, her full sad mouth, all water. She is a fountain, and you are a girl, a child with her pockets full of stones.

She ascends taller and taller, a green glow from her chest like a beam, like a beacon, until she all but disappears into the night sky and the lake is empty, a crater. She has taken all the life of it with her. You try to say, “Mother,” but your tongue doesn't work. Far above you, her laughter is a trill of starlight; she raises her river arms up high, stretching. She is whole.

You are fearful suddenly that she can't see you, that she doesn't know you are there, her line of vision too far above. You want her to see you, see you completely: your quiet chest and your heavy nightshirt, your bare feet.

Then she begins to walk. The earth shudders with each footfall. She passes right over you and the tiny stone path. Her toes glance off the roof of your house just exactly enough that the roof is dislodged like a kicked cobble. The tiles shatter to the ground, and the walls crack from the disturbance. But she keeps walking. As the giantess walks away, you hear her singing. Her voice is volcanic; words descend like ash, like rain: “Don't follow me, Penelope, don't follow me.”

Stone Kate is a child at your mother's side for a moment as she passes. You can hardly see her now as the swaths of distance and darkness swallow her up, but you know she is walking to the ocean. Your
house has fallen down; your mother is in the water once more.

You can move your arms, your legs. You say, “Mother, Mother.” One by one you take the stones out of your pockets. There are so many.

You will wake up when they are empty.