Machine Man

by Max Barry

  “I don’t think I am ready.”

  “Well,” said Katie, bending to retrieve a pajama top. “That is not the medical opinion.”

  I didn’t understand how this had happened. No one had warned me. I hadn’t been consulted. It felt like an eviction.

  “Your company has arranged a car. It’s out front. So let’s get moving! Did you want some help with your clothes?”

  I looked around the room. I didn’t want to leave. Here was everything I needed. “Shouldn’t I talk with my doctors first?”

  “Oh, I don’t think you need more doctors.” Nurse Katie flopped a hospital-issue bag onto the bed. “You need to get out there and start enjoying life again.”

  “But …”

  “It’s all taken care of,” she said. “Chop-chop.”

  NURSE KATIE wheeled me out to the curb. This was slightly ridiculous because I was wearing the leg, but there were rules. A van was waiting, a white one, with a Better Future logo. I didn’t know why they had chosen a van until Katie helped me into the passenger seat and rolled the wheelchair around to the rear. The chair was coming with me.

  “Good luck!” called Katie. She waved through the window.

  “Where to?” asked the driver.

  Back, I thought. But that was not an option. “Home, I guess,” I said.

  I DECIDED to jerk myself off. I wasn’t horny. I had nothing else to do. I had been home a week and was sick of Netflix. I sat at my workstation and browsed some porn. I looked at a girl with red hair and lips and wondered what it would be like to talk to her. I dug myself out of my pajama pants. I was overcooked pasta. I thought: Kind of like a stump, and that was a terrible idea, horrible. I began to shrink. I wondered if I should search for amputee porn, by which I meant porn for amputees, then realized that was not what I would find. I searched anyway. I found a beautiful woman with one arm and another with no legs below the knee and I thought they were pretty hot and kind of inspiring but I did not want to masturbate to them. I remembered a study on male chimpanzees and how those on the lowest social rungs exhibited severely depressed sexual desire. I shut down the computer. I felt lonely.

  I WOKE to a terrible cramp in my foot. Not the foot I had. The other one. I groped around in the dark, grimacing and clutching at empty sheets. I hauled myself upright and turned on the lamp and threw back the sheets. “See. Nothing there.” I was talking to my brain. “Nothing to hurt.” I leaned forward and pretended to massage the space where my toes would have been. As a scientist, I am not proud of this. But it seemed to help. I swallowed some pills and kept massaging. I was ahead of my prescriptions. But this was a temporary problem. Soon my brain would figure out it shouldn’t be feeling phantom pain, because I was a pretty smart guy.

  I WAS on my sofa playing with my phone when it rang. I didn’t know what the hell it was doing. I was scrolling through an article and suddenly the whole screen changed and it made a noise I’d never heard before. I thought: Pop-up advertising? I saw: BLOCKED, DECLINE, ANSWER. I moved my thumb to the ANSWER button. It felt strange, as if I were attempting to microwave something in the TV. “Hello?”

  “Dr. Neumann.” A woman. Not Lola. There was a lot of warmth in Dr. Neumann, like she enjoyed saying my name. It was a month for unfamiliar experiences. “It’s Cassandra Cautery. From the company. How are you?”

  “Hello,” I said again. I was not good on the phone, obviously.

  “I just wanted to reach out and see how things were.”

  There was a pause, during which I realized this was a question. “Good.”

  “Great!” Cassandra Cautery was quite hot, I remembered. I was talking to a hot woman right now. “I thought so. I’ve seen the reports from the hospital and they were glowing. I was extremely pleased. You know how much we’re concerned about you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I wanted to float an idea with you. The idea of coming back to work.” She paused. “This can happen completely on your timetable. We want to do it so it works for you. But—I’m not sure if you’re aware—there’s evidence that returning to work is extremely beneficial. For you, I mean. You get reengaged, get busy, you’re not just sitting around the house. Not that you’re doing that!” She laughed. My coffee table bore four half-empty boxes of cereal and half a dozen snack wrappers. On the bookshelf there was a carton of curdled milk I had been meaning to throw away for two days but always forgot about until I sat down. I had an e-mail from my internet provider telling me that although I was on a quote unlimited download plan end quote there were reasonable usage guidelines and they would appreciate it if I tried to stay within them. “I know how it is with engineers. Never happy unless you’re building something. So … do you have any thoughts about when you’d like to come back?”

  “Um,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? I mean … absolutely. Let’s do tomorrow.” I heard her shuffling papers. “That’s terrific. I’ll send a car. A van.”

  “A car is fine. I have a leg.”

  “A … of course you do. I’m thrilled you’re being proactive about this. I really am. It’s great if we can show you’re able to return to full duties relatively quickly. It just reduces any potential messiness on the legal side. You know?”

  “No.”

  She laughed. But I was not joking. “So let’s get you back on your … on the horse. How’s eight a.m. tomorrow?”

  “Okay.” I took the phone from my ear and tapped END CALL. The screen faded to the home page. I had an appointment. I entered it into my phone, then checked the call log. There it was. An incoming call. It had lasted three minutes, forty-two seconds. I looked at it a while, because it was kind of remarkable.

  I SHOWERED, but not for long because I didn’t have a chair like in the hospital, where I could sit and feel water drain past my butt. I had to get one of those. I gripped the shower screen and hopped to my towel. I could have worn the Exegesis—it was water-resistant—but then I wouldn’t have been able to wash the stump. If there was one place I needed to wash, it was the stump.

  I dried myself on the toilet, pulled on the stocking, and fitted the leg. I had not been wearing it much since I got home. Lola Shanks would be disappointed. When I stood, the plastic socket squeezed me and I thought: That’s right, that’s why I don’t like it. But I lumbered into the bedroom and opened the closet. When I was dressed I walked back to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I was leaning on my biological leg. I straightened. The Exegesis did not look so good poking out of the bottom of a pair of business pants. It looked like a forked tongue. Like I had stepped in something and become tangled. I felt nervous. At the hospital, lots of people had something wrong with them.

  I walked into the living room and sat on the sofa. My phone rang. The driver. I sat there and did not answer. It stopped. Then it rang again. This time I tapped ANSWER. “Hello,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  IT WAS a black town car. The driver was overweight and had a cap and a little beard. He opened the rear door and told me it was a beautiful morning. Once we were on the road, he said, “That’s a fancy-looking foot you have there.”

  I looked up from my phone. He was watching me in the mirror. “It’s an Exegesis.”

  “Oh yeah? What does that do?”

  “It converts kinetic energy into forward motion.” I was describing walking.

  The driver whistled. “Nice,” he said. “Nice.”

  WE PULLED into the driveway that arced past the main lobby doors. The driver sprang out to open my door. Before I got my phone into my pants he was offering me his hand. I took it; he levered me to my feet. It was bright and I squinted. Two people came toward me: Cassandra Cautery and a tall, smiling man I didn’t recognize. “There he is,” said the man. “Great to have you back.” His ID tag said: D. PETERS. I think he was my section head. I didn’t recognize him because he was a senior manager and they didn’t go into the labs. D. Peters extended a hand and I shook it. It felt strange, like I was meeting him for the first
time.

  “We’re so pleased,” added Cassandra Cautery. She was smiling, too.

  “Everything’s set up for you.” We began to walk toward the glass doors. I was a little awkward and my ski toes dragged. “That’s amazing,” said D. Peters. “What is that, ah, that called?”

  “It’s an Exegesis Archion.”

  “And what’s the idea there? With the design?”

  “It doesn’t waste so much kinetic energy.”

  He nodded. “Mmm. Clever.”

  The glass doors parted. We entered the air-regulated coolness of Better Future. The lobby had very high ceilings, even for us, and was connected via a glass wall to the atrium. There were birds in there. They lived their whole lives inside the company. A couple of white coats crossing the floor glanced at my foot with professional interest. It was hard to walk when you were self-conscious about it.

  “I’m going to let you get to work,” said D. Peters. “But if there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all, I’m a phone call away.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good man.” For a second I thought he was going to punch my arm. But he didn’t. He strode briskly away, to do whatever it was the managers did. Have meetings, I guess. Make phone calls. It was hard for us on the technical side to understand why the company required so many managers. Engineers built things. Salespeople sold things. Even Human Resources I could understand, kind of. But managers proliferated despite performing very few identifiable functions.

  Cassandra Cautery swiped into Building A. I followed. “You can really move on that,” she said. I nodded. We didn’t talk for a while. When we reached the elevators, a few people joined us, but no one spoke. I couldn’t tell if they were uncomfortable around my leg or didn’t care. Cassandra Cautery inspected something on her sleeve. The elevator dinged and we stepped inside. A man tried to join us but Cassandra Cautery said, “Would you mind very much taking the next one? Thank you.”

  The doors closed. The car hummed. Cassandra Cautery said, “I suffer from diastema.” Her face was faintly flushed. “It’s a gap between the teeth.” She dug a finger into her mouth and stretched back her lips. Between her canines and her molars was a space, almost a centimeter wide. She released her lips. “I saw five different specialists but they all said the same thing. It’s inoperable. There’s a bundle of nerves there and the way the teeth are sitting, they can’t be moved without risking permanent damage. Facial paralysis.” She blinked three times. “It was hard to deal with. Growing up. I dieted. I ran and swam and did Pilates. The girls in my social group in high school, well, you probably won’t understand, but they were fierce. About appearance. I told my parents I wanted the operation anyway. I didn’t care if I got facial paralysis. They said no. We fought for months.”

  The elevator doors opened. Cassandra Cautery glanced out. The corridor was empty. I shifted uncomfortably.

  “But you know what? I’m glad I have this. I’m proud of it. Not proud. Grateful. For the lesson. You can’t be perfect, no matter how hard you try. That’s the message. You don’t stop trying to improve yourself. You keep pushing yourself in the areas you can control. But when you come up against something like diastema, all you can do is accept it. You can only take a deep breath and say, ‘This is who I am.’ ”

  There was silence. “Okay,” I said.

  “I’ve never told anyone else about this. I’d appreciate it if you kept it to yourself.”

  “Okay.”

  She smiled. “I just want you to know you’re not alone.”

  CASSANDRA CAUTERY escorted me as far as the Glass Room. Inside, my lab assistants Jason and Elaine were at their desks. Katherine I could see down in Lab 2, doing something to rats. Katherine was always messing with those rats. She’d made them little houses and ramps out of sheet fiber. One had a kind of swing. I had been meaning to take her aside and tell her she would regret this kind of thing when it came time for destructive testing.

  Jason’s and Elaine’s eyes followed me across the floor. I landed in my office chair. Elaine said, “Welcome back, Dr. Neumann.”

  “Thank you.”

  Elaine looked at Jason. Jason said nothing. Elaine said, “We’re glad you’re okay.”

  I turned on my computer. This thing took forever to boot. I fingered my pants pocket, seeking my phone.

  “We had counseling.”

  I looked at her. “Why?”

  “To deal with it. The accident. It was pretty gruesome. Very gruesome. I have nightmares.” She hesitated. Across Elaine’s forehead marched a parade of acne. She had violent skin. She wore her hair in thick bangs but you could still see it. “It was good. The counseling. They encouraged us to talk. They said we should share our feelings with you, if you were comfortable with that.”

  I looked at Jason. He was very upright, his face stiff. His head moved left, right, left, very slightly. I felt grateful to Jason. If everybody were like him we could just move on and pretend nothing ever happened.

  Elaine said, “So I don’t know if … if you are comfortable. With talking about it. If not—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Oh. Okay. No problem.” She turned away. Her shoulders hunched. I had consigned her to nightmares, I guess. But I wasn’t responsible for her brain. I didn’t control what she thought. She was a human being. She should take ownership of what occurred between her ears.

  “Welcome back, Dr. Neumann,” said Jason. He had visibly relaxed. He swiveled back to his desk and we got to work.

  I LEFT the Glass Room for lunch. The corridors were busy and my ski foot attracted attention. People stared without shame. We were a company of engineers: they were interested in how things worked. I kept moving, but when I reached the Building A cafeteria there was a line. The man ahead of me turned and saw my leg. “Hey. Are you that guy?”

  “Which …” I said. “Yes.”

  “You chopped off your leg?” He bent down and peered at it. “In the lab?”

  “Crushed.”

  “Do you mind if I touch?”

  “Uh …” Two more people in the line turned. A bearded guy got up from his table and headed toward me, trailing lab assistants. “Okay.”

  “Interesting shape,” said a woman behind me.

  “Let me just roll up the pants here.” The man glanced up. “Is that okay? I can’t see.”

  “I’ll do it.” I pulled up the pant leg. There was a murmur of appreciation. I flushed.

  “Look at the knee,” said the beard.

  “It’s moving with the piston here,” said the man, now on his hands and knees, peering up. “That, what, makes it more comfortable to walk?”

  “And his leg fits into that plastic bit.”

  “The socket.”

  “What holds that on?”

  “Straps,” I said. “Just cloth straps.”

  There was silence. The blue-shirt guy peered around for another few moments, but didn’t see anything else that caught his attention. “Well, that’s really amazing.”

  “Incredible,” said the beard. “Just fantastic, what they’re doing.”

  “Very smart,” said the woman.

  These people’s ID tags said AERONAUTICAL DEVELOPMENT and MOLECULAR REENGINEERING and BIOMATERIALS. To the average scientist, stupid was failing to account for behavioral changes exhibited by magnetohydrodynamics when accelerated to supersonic speeds. It was being uncomfortable with Gödel numbering. A few months ago I had attended a presentation on living gels, and when a man in the audience said something was smart, he was referring to a process for tricking living cells into fusing with carbon molecules for the first time in human history. And he said it grudgingly. We did not use the word smart lightly. We did not use it about a hinge.

  “Very nice.” Someone patted me lightly on the shoulder. “Very nice.” I rolled down my pants, ashamed.

  I CARRIED my lunch to a bathroom and locked myself in a stall. As I picked my sandwich out of the plastic wrap, I remembered what Lo
la Shanks had said: that things would be tough, and that would make me a better person. She said it was about how you respond to the challenge. I was glad she wasn’t here to see this.

  I RECEIVED an e-mail from Cassandra Cautery informing me that a car would take me home whenever I wanted. I just had to call a number. I recorded this in my phone and kept working. After everybody left, I caught the elevator to the AV Center, where vending machines offered energy bars, fruit, and cola outside darkened presentation rooms. It was free, so that engineers wouldn’t wander around trying to find the most efficient sources of calories per dollar. I chose some snack bars and apples and returned to the Glass Room. I had nothing to do. Most of my work had been reassigned while I was away, the remainder had no deadline. I ate my snacks and played with some programs but was not inspired. I read a sensationalist article about the future of embedded operating systems. Around ten, I picked up my phone. The driver said he would be ten minutes. I waited five, pulled on my jacket, and left the Glass Room. When I stepped out on the ground floor, the corridor lights glowed a dim yellow and the lobby was empty. My footsteps echoed, a soft scuff from my shoe followed by a scrape of carbon polymer, like some kind of machine process.

  I DISCOVERED Building A had bunks. They were small, featureless rooms with barely enough space for a bed, but anyone could use them. If you had two hours before the catalytic cracker finished, you could get some downtime. There were also showers and a twenty-four-hour kitchen. I half-expected to find it populated by a loud, jokey community of scientists, like island shipwreck survivors, but it was empty. I called my driver and asked if he could collect some things from my house. That night I microwaved a shrink-wrapped meal and slept in a bunk. When I woke, I showered and dressed and caught the elevator back and this entire time I didn’t see a single other person. I wished I had thought of this earlier.

  IT BECAME annoying to sit. To transit, from standing. The Exegesis was good for movement but gave me nothing when I went to lower myself into a chair. It was all up to my biological leg, which was thin and weak and complained at the effort. At the hospital, when I’d been doing physical therapy, it had bulked up a little, but since then it had shrunk back to default size. So now I accelerated into chairs, making a whoof upon impact. It wasn’t a huge problem. But it was not ideal.