Machine Man

by Max Barry

  As a result, I threw like a four-year-old. I couldn’t catch. When I ran, my arms and legs flailed like I was drowning. If I had to play baseball, I swung at balls with hope but no faith and was not surprised. In soccer, people wove through me like I wasn’t there.

  When I got older things started to change. I don’t mean I improved. I mean it mattered less. By senior year, most of the kids who could run and jump and throw balls like missiles had dropped out. Being smart became valuable. No girl came up clutching textbooks to ask if I could help with her homework, but I could see it might happen. The likelihood of such an occurrence was on the rise. I attended MIT, and in mechanical engineering no one cared about sports. There was a girl in wave propagation, Jenny, and one time when I was presenting a paper on hydrodynamics she kept nodding and smiling. I spent a week thinking how to ask her out. Then I came to class and there was a guy kicking a little sack in the air, doing tricks, and Jenny was watching him in a whole other way, and I realized things were not so different after all.

  THE PROSTHETIST walked in with a bunch of artificial legs under each arm, like a Hindu goddess. She dumped the legs onto my bed and ogled me through glasses. Her hair was brown and limp and dragged into a merciless ponytail. Her shirt was white and huge. “Hi! I hear you got a transfemoral.” Before I could respond, she lifted up my sheet. “Oh. They weren’t kidding. That is a clean stump.” She rolled the sheet up to my waist and put her elbows on the bed, so she could look at it from up close. “Some kind of machine accident, yes?”

  “A clamp.”

  “Well, you hit the jackpot. This is amazing.”

  I stared at her. She wasn’t the first person to act like my amputation was just terrific. But she was the first I believed.

  “If you’re planning to do the other leg, you should definitely use the same method. I’m serious.”

  “What?”

  “I’m joking.” She sat up but one of her hands was still right next to my stump. “It’s Charlie, right? I’ll be honest, Charlie. I love a transfemoral. I see a lot of transtibials—that’s below the knee—and, no offense to those people, but it’s like fitting shoes. There’s no art in it. This …” She patted my stump. I jumped. “This is a blank canvas. This gives us options. Want to see some legs?” She turned to rummage through her limbs. A section of hair drifted in front of her face and she jammed it behind her ear like she wanted to teach it a lesson. “Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got here.” She lifted something. A pole. The toe was rubber. Like the bottom half of a crutch. The top was a flesh-colored plastic bucket with cloth straps. “This is entry-level. I’m only showing you this so you know what’s out there. Hey. Hey.” My eyes jumped to her face. “I’m not putting you in this. This is horrible. This is the public option. Although, just FYI, if your employer wasn’t giving you basically the best medical care in the world, this is what you’d get.” She put the pole leg on the floor, where I couldn’t see it. “Let’s forget that. Wait. Did I introduce myself? I’m Lola Shanks.”

  I knew that from the ID tag dangling from her billowing shirt. She was grimacing into the camera. If my ID looked like that, I would ask them to take another picture.

  “Let me show you something else.” From the ankle down it resembled a real leg. A real leg that had died a few days earlier. The toes were flat and squared off. The calf was aluminum. The knee was a band of jointed metal. At the top was another bucket. “This you can put a shoe on. And I see from your face that you’re not in love with it, but imagine it under long pants. The fullness here? It gives you a more natural look. Once you get practiced, nobody will know the difference. Not until you take off your pants.” She grinned. She was pretty young. How much education did you need to become a prosthetist? Not much, apparently. “What do you think?”

  “How does it work?”

  “You’re looking at the socket. Ninety percent of your satisfaction with the prosthetic will come from how well you fit the socket.” I noticed her choice of words; not how well the socket fits you. “We wrap your limb in a stocking, pull it into the socket through this little hole at the bottom here, and tighten it with these straps. But that’s not ideal. What we’ll do once the swelling has subsided is take a mold of your leg and build a custom socket off that.”

  “How does it walk?”

  “Well, you swing it. It takes some practice.”

  “You swing it?”

  “Right. It’s hinged. Your foot will fly out in front of you for a while. Steep inclines will be a challenge. Everything will be a challenge. It’s going to be hard, Charlie, no matter what you wear.”

  I looked at the pile of legs. “What else?” I could see something black and silver poking out from behind her. That looked interesting.

  She smiled. “You’re spoiling it. I was trying to build up some suspense before we went to the top of the line. But before we go there, let me warn you: these don’t give you a natural look. We’re now trading off cosmetics for function.”

  “I don’t care about a natural look.”

  Lola’s breath caught. “Really. Well, that’s good. I feel the same way. Real beauty follows function. That’s why we find things attractive: because they work. Like teeth. We don’t just like them straight and white for no reason. It’s because they’re good at biting. This leg, it’s good at walking.” She reached behind her. What she produced was not like a leg. It was like a machine. The foot was two arched prongs, almost skis. From a hydraulic ankle rose twin black pylons, which disappeared into an aluminum knee. Judging from the battery casing, there was a microprocessor in there. “It’s an Exegesis Archion foot on a computer-controlled adaptive knee. Multiaxis rotation, polycentric swing. That heel, that’s carbon polymer. The Olympics banned it because it provided an unfair advantage over regular legs. Too much energy return. The knee is programmable. We teach it your precise gait. What it does is take the thinking out of walking. You get to stop worrying about how you’re going to swing your foot and just walk.”

  I took the leg and turned it over. It was light. Interesting design. Nothing groundbreaking. At the top was a bucket, another one of those translucent plastic sockets. I looked inside, in case there was anything innovative in there, but there wasn’t.

  “You don’t seem very excited,” said Lola.

  “Is this the best?”

  “It’s … well … honestly, Charlie, it’s pretty great.”

  “This is state-of-the-art?”

  “Cutting-edge,” said Lola, and grinned. I realized this was a joke. People in medicine have dark senses of humor. To them, no joke is complete until there’s a defiled corpse or spray of blood. “No. Seriously. This is the best.”

  I gave her back the leg. “Okay.”

  “It’s not a meat leg. I can’t give you that. But once you get familiar with this, it’ll be almost as good as the real thing.”

  “Okay.”

  She gathered up her legs. I shuffled down in the bed. It was nothing against Lola Shanks. She just didn’t have anything I wanted.

  THAT NIGHT I woke to discover I was pulling at the stitches, digging in my fingernails. I scrambled upright and flicked on the light, expecting the worst. But I seemed intact. A little clear fluid oozed out. I mopped it with a wet wipe from the drawer, switched off the light, and lay down. But it took a long time to get back to sleep, because that was really disturbing.

  THERE WAS a room with two wooden rails. The rails were for holding on to. They were three meters long and one meter apart, waist high. Aside from a few chairs, a desk, and a potted plant, they were the only objects in the room. It was not a place for things. It was a place for movement.

  Lola Shanks parked me beside a plastic chair, set down the Exegesis legs, and rolled up my pajama pants. I wasn’t happy about this, about these rails.

  “I notice you’re not much of a talker.” She clipped my pants, so they looked like shorts. I had not worn shorts for eleven years. It was another example of how I was being turned into someone I did not
want to be. “That’s a problem.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you need to be social.” She rolled a stocking over my stump. “Some people will be reluctant to talk to you. Afraid of saying the wrong thing. You need to break the ice.” She tucked the foot under one arm and fed the end of the stocking through a hole in its socket. She pulled. I felt a terrible pressure, like my stitches were about to burst. My stump was sucked into the socket. “How’s that?”

  “Tight. Tight.”

  “Tight is good.” She reached around my hips, feeding the strap. “You’re not seeing the problem, are you?”

  “What?”

  “The social thing. You’re not afraid of isolation.”

  “No.”

  She sat back on her haunches. “You can’t make this an excuse to disappear. I’ve seen how that turns out. How you get through this depends on you, Charlie. On how you respond to the challenge.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t mean this. It wasn’t that I wanted to cut myself off from the world. I just knew it would happen.

  She backed away. “Stand up.”

  I gripped the side of the wheelchair and levered myself into the air. The leg hung from my stump. It looked even less impressive from this angle. The ski-like prongs wobbled. They seemed flimsy. They looked like they might fall off.

  “Put your weight on it.”

  I leaned forward. The socket squeezed me in a way that felt very wrong.

  “Trust the leg, Charlie.”

  “The stitches—”

  “I haven’t popped a stitch yet.”

  I dragged my sleeve across my forehead. I put more weight on the leg and the toe prongs bent. I knew logically they must be rated to carry a running adult male but it seemed hard to believe. I wondered how thoroughly it had been checked.

  Lola Shanks held out her arms. I took a breath and let the leg absorb my weight. The pressure was bad but not unbearable. I shuffled forward and did it again. By the time I reached Lola I was losing rivers of sweat. I had traveled four paces. “Good!” She grinned, as if this was genuinely exciting for her, and I was shaky and tired but also proud and I smiled, too.

  I SAT in bed and inspected the Exegesis. I really needed tools. To take it apart. But I could figure out some things from observation. It wasn’t that complicated. It was essentially a bucket on a stick. I still found it surprising that this was as good as it got. It made me suspect that there were not a lot of amputees working in mechanical engineering. They seemed to have started from the premise that you should be grateful to be walking at all.

  But Lola Shanks was right: I had grown to like it. Not because it let me walk. That I could take or leave. But I did like staggering toward Lola, her eyes growing with each step, and how when I reached her she squeezed my hands.

  I WAS still shocked sometimes to see I was missing a leg. I had moments of paralyzing fear while my mind screamed, Where is it? Sometimes I dreamed I was missing something but couldn’t figure out what. It became annoying. I knew my brain had thirty-five years of conditioning to get over, but seriously, when was it going to realize this was real?

  AT 10:45 a.m. I grew impatient and fidgety. I couldn’t concentrate on my phone. I felt thirsty. It was because of Lola Shanks. She visited at eleven. I slid to the edge of the bed and strapped on the leg. When she arrived I was up and hobbling. She stopped in the doorway, looking outraged, in a good way. “Charlie,” she said. She stuck out her elbow. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  THE HOSPITAL was encircled by a wide concrete path, from the emergency bay to the rear garden. There patients stood attached to IV drips, sucking cigarettes. I was getting the hang of the Exegesis. But if I walked too confidently Lola Shanks took back her arm, so the temptation was there to feign incompetence.

  “Tell me about your work,” said Lola. “What do you do?”

  “I test things.” My ski-prong toes dragged: skrrrrch.

  “What kind of things?”

  “Things. Materials.”

  “Is it interesting?”

  I considered. It was interesting sometimes, like when you thought the copper valence was going to fall apart under particle bombardment but then it didn’t. This wasn’t what people meant by interesting, though. “No.”

  “Oh,” said Lola.

  “Sometimes I make things. If I have an idea, I can propose it as a project, and if they approve it I can build it.”

  “What do you build?”

  We descended a ramp. The ski toes tried to sail away from me and I let them. Lola’s arm tightened around mine. “Last year I built an oscillator. It moved a five-gram copper rod back and forth over a distance of twenty millimeters six hundred thousand times a second.”

  Lola was silent. “How is that useful?”

  “I’m not sure. I just proposed it and they said yes. They probably used it in some other project.”

  “Oh.”

  “Six hundred thousand oscillations per second is a lot.”

  “It sounds like a lot.”

  “I had to put it in a vacuum. To stop it setting the air on fire.”

  “It set the air on fire?”

  “Only once. In a controlled environment.”

  “Who do you work for again?”

  “Better Future.” She looked blank. “We developed depleted-uranium ordnance in the seventies. In the eighties we made amphibious tanks. They didn’t really work out. I don’t think we do them anymore. About ten years ago we got into medicine. We have a lot of pharmacological products. Lately we’re into proprietary metals fabrication, nonlethal weaponry, and bioengineering. We also sponsor the local softball team.”

  An older man in a hospital gown blocked our path, gazing out over the gardens, a cigarette to his lips. He seemed irritated about something. Maybe everything. He looked like that kind of guy. “Excuse us,” said Lola. His gaze dropped to the Exegesis and his lips pressed together. “Hey,” said Lola. “What was that?” He pretended not to hear. “Hey. Smokey. What’s your problem? You think you’re a better human being because you’ve got two legs?” He pushed his IV hat stand back toward the building. “Yeah, congratulations on those. Good job. I’m sure you put a lot of work into them.” Lola turned to me. “Can you believe that?” She shook her head. “Outrageous.”

  We walked.

  “People with legs have no character, Charlie. Honest to God. They never once have to figure out how to get from one room to another. And if they ever realize that, they feel clever.” She threaded her arm through mine. “You’re going to struggle. You’re going to have it tough. And that will make you a better person.”

  We walked in silence. A breeze touched my skin. I had never, ever, been this happy.

  THE NEXT day Lola took me to the cafeteria. It was full of doctors and conversation and families being positive. Some patients had no hair and some were thin as wire frames and reminded me things could be worse. Lola and I took a table near the window overlooking the gardens. I had decided to ask her out. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I couldn’t take her anywhere. But it was what you did when you liked a girl. And if she said yes, you had a girlfriend. That was all I knew. I was very nervous because I hadn’t been in a position to ask a girl out since Jenny in wave propagation.

  “How many people do you think you could poison before anyone noticed?” She was watching a woman serving coleslaw. “I think a lot.”

  “Can we go out?”

  She bit into her burger. “Not today. I have a plan for you involving a soccer ball.”

  I had been unclear. I shifted my weight from one buttock to the other. My ski toes clanged against the table leg. “Bong,” said Lola.

  “I like your hair.”

  Lola’s eyes widened. They lit on a few strands drifting past her face. She made a noise like fffbrr, grabbed them, and twisted them around her ear. “Shut up.” I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know if I should explain that I wasn’t joking or let her think I was. “When are you plucking those eyebrows?”


  I took a bite of my egg sandwich. I was out of my depth. Should I pluck my eyebrows? I didn’t know men did that.

  Lola’s hip beeped. She unclipped her pager. “Bah. That can wait.”

  Lola had other patients. Of course she did. Other men. She helped them walk and squeezed their hands when they took steps. I bet every one of them fell in love with her. Maybe not every one. She was kind of odd. But enough. I recalled a paper on how test subjects experiencing highly stressful events were disproportionately attracted to the first person they met afterward. The body confused arousal with attraction. I must be the latest in a long line of freshly dismembered men to fall under the spell of Lola Shanks. She was probably sick of it. If I told her I loved her she would look pained and explain that she really liked me and I was terrific but what we had was a working relationship. Then our sessions would be awkward. I should have realized this earlier.

  “What?” said Lola.

  I was staring. “Nothing.” I picked up my sandwich.

  “I can’t believe you eat eggs,” she said. “They’re basically fetuses.”

  NURSE KATIE bustled into my room. She seemed very happy. “Good news. You’re going home.”

  I put down my phone. “What?”

  “You’ve been cleared for discharge.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, you,” said Katie. “Would you like me to help you dress? Or do you want to do that yourself?”

  “I don’t … why am I being discharged?”

  “I guess because you’re ready.” Nurse Katie was happy. She had cheeks like apples.