An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘So, did you cure me?’

  She doesn’t look at me. She looks at her shoes: heavy black boots. There are scuff marks on the toe of the right one. I stare at that place. I’ve seen that before but I am not sure where or what caused it. Kicking something? Does she play some kind of sport in those shoes?

  She shrugs. ‘You don’t seem to display the same kind of attraction to prepubescents.’

  ‘No.’ And the truth of the experiment is hanging like a grey cloud between us. ‘I want to go back.’

  She nods.

  ‘I’m not sure what data you’re getting or whatever. I’m not sure how well your experiment is going, but I’d like to go back.’

  She nods once more. ‘We weren’t intending on hooking you up again. We have some more testing to do but I think we’ll find you will not reoffend. I don’t think you’ll be going back to prison, if that’s what you are afraid of.’

  Her knee is so close to mine I can feel the warmth of it. I put my hand down between our legs and the back of it touches her.

  She looks up, frowns, but there’s a sweetness in her eyes that makes it more a frown of sympathy than of anger.

  We will never make love.

  ‘So you won’t send me back?’

  ‘To prison?’

  ‘To the ocean.’

  She shifts her hips and her leg falls away from my hand and my hand feels cold. I fold it into my lap, wrap my fingers around it.

  ‘I’m sure we can. I’ll check. I imagine it will be useful for us. But what if it upsets the balance? We took you back. We bypassed whatever it was that went wrong. I don’t think you will be reoffending ever again. I really think we might have fixed that now.’

  The cold travels up my arm. It fills me. I shiver.

  ‘If you can arrange for it, I would like to be hooked up one more time.’

  She looks into my eyes for the first time. She holds my gaze. I wonder what she sees there. I wonder if she sees the empty space inside me where another person is missing. I wonder if she realises that the other person is me. I’m not here anymore. I have disappeared.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘I’ll find out.’

  She reaches over and she hugs me. I can feel the catch in my throat as her hands close around my shoulders. It’s a quick hug, and it takes me by surprise. I don’t have time to hug her back. I put my arm up and tap her back awkwardly, and she’s gone. There is a lingering smell of petrol. Then I remember. My sister rode a motorcycle and there was always that worn place on the toe of her boot where she changed gears.

  Liv rides a motorcycle.

  It’s a surprise to me. I don’t know anything about her. She’s a person separate from me and what we have shared has everything to do with my head and nothing to do with her at all. She stands and smiles and I smile back and it’s just the surface of ourselves, a thin communication.

  When she leaves I am still alone. Always alone. I lie on my bed and try to understand the passing of time. It isn’t urgent. I have the rest of my life to figure it all out, or I have forever. Each minute that passes is just a tiny piece of now. I wonder how so much absence can fit into such an insignificant parcel of time.

  *

  Liv is swimming. Liv is one stroke ahead of me and I can see her back tensing against a wave, her feet kicking. She looks younger in the water. More lithe. But she doesn’t swim like my sister used to swim. Water is not her element. She stops and treads water and I can see the top of her swimming costume on her shoulder is twisted. I almost reach out and straighten it but I stop myself just in time.

  ‘You’re sure?’ She pushes wet hair back behind her ear, panting. A swell comes and she rises up and drops down again and then I’m caught in it and it pushes me away from her so I have to stroke a couple of times to reach her.

  ‘One more time. Just this one time.’

  It’s difficult for me to stay up here at the surface with her. How easy would it be to duck-dive, to push down through the water, to find the sandy bottom of the ocean.

  I turn and there is the beach such a long way away. I squint to look at the bright stretch of sand. It is like looking at the sun. There is a child on the beach, an adult squatting close. The child runs into a wave and then runs back into the waiting arms of a parent. I try to remember my sister, but all that seems like another lifetime.

  I take a breath and duck my head down under the water then bob up again.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, spitting sea water.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For setting me free.’

  She looks back towards the beach and her forehead knits up as the child squeals. I can hear it, even here beyond the breakers. ‘We’ll need time to see if that’s true. More tests. But you’ll live in the facility while they do them.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘They’ll be moving me. Into robotics,’ she says, ‘for my sins.’ And then she laughs.

  ‘What is it you do again?’

  ‘Stories,’ she says. ‘I tell stories. Other people’s stories.’

  ‘My story. Does it have a happy ending?’

  The swell lifts her and carries her away from me. She strokes back against the wave but it is strong and she’s already caught in it.

  All endings are arbitrary. Her voice sounds loud in my head. Even if a character dies, that’s just the ending we choose. There is more to the story, the body goes on, changes, becomes other, but we’ve grown tired of the story, or we’ve taken what we need from it and are ready to move on. I always remember something I read when I was younger. A poet wrote it, but it wasn’t really a poem. It was about a badger or something that was shot in an empty swimming pool by the poet’s houseguest. The poet starts cleaning up the blood and the spilled guts. He starts to think about the blood cells which are still essentially alive. The creature is dead but if he gathered up the blood he could keep it living in a test tube or whatever. So what is the moment of death? What of our organs that get donated and put into other people? What about the nutrients of a body that go to feeding a predator or a plant? Is there a location for consciousness? Or what about the body. Are we our bodies?

  I listen to her voice, which has become suddenly passionate. I watch her body flailing against the waves as she is driven towards the shore. Is she in her body? Or is she in my head? Is she a part of my own consciousness, now that I have had this intimacy?

  Are we of the body? She asks in my body. In my head. And even that isn’t where I am now. My actual head is on a hospital pillow, hooked up to a machine. She is by my side. Perhaps she is holding my hand.

  She’s almost out of sight and below me there is the cool dark of the ocean. I take a breath. I hold it. I twist and dive and my legs propel me downwards.

  No. Ronnie. Come back.

  She is in my head and now she knows the end of the story. I imagine it’s like when you are at the cinema and you suddenly know exactly how the thriller will end. It takes the wind out of the last few moments of the story. A less clever viewer would be waiting on the edge of their seat to see how the story’s going to end. It would be a surprise, and they’d feel the rush of satisfaction as all the pieces locked into place.

  Liv is in my head. And I know what is going to happen next, and so she knows. I look up and she’s there on the surface, her legs kicking, then she floats, staring down, one hand outstretched. In the real world somewhere a long way away, I hold it. I squeeze her fingers to let her know she’s important to me. In the world we are both in now, I dive further. I settle into the feeling of multiplicity. I am with them. I am one with them. I am the colony. I’m the medusa billowing her beautiful jellyfish skirts through the water, searching for any last thing to eat in an ocean that is bereft of almost everything else. I am the tiny polyp, new birthed. I am the soft crust of the colony, dividing, dividing, dividing, becoming more and more, all of them me. I am locked in a beautiful dance as the one female is surrounded by so many males. I am aroused by her. I am spontaneously ejaculating and all the other
males are too and she is gliding though the event, collecting the identical DNA. I am dividing, spawning, swimming, clinging. I am jellyfish and I am no longer alone. I will never be alone.

  Count back from ten, she says but I’m drifting on a current, listening to the voices that are not voices. I’m listening to the delicate ribbons of electrical activity. I am listening to the subtle changes of chemicals in the water. This is the way I speak now, will speak from now on.

  Ronnie. Listen to me. Count back from ten. But I can barely understand her voice. It is static. It is a meaningless wash of interference.

  Ronnie, she says, and then static. Words. Static.

  ‘I love you,’ I tell her. But I’m not sure she can interpret my electrical impulses. I’m not sure she’s tuned into the changes in the water, so subtle and yet so clear to me now.

  ‘I love you,’ I say to her anyway, even though she may not be able to hear. ‘Now. I am capable of feeling love and I give it to you. We give it to you. We thank you.’

  The connection is broken. I am back in my tank alone. The receptor has been removed. I will die in this tank. It doesn’t matter because I am not I alone. I am many. I am clinging to the grille at the filter of a nuclear power plant. I am stuck to the wreck of a ship rusting away on the ocean floor. I am floating gently on a warm current. I am birthing more of me, even now. I am plentiful. I have been and will always be. I will die in this tank and Liv will die in her bed and I will still be one and many.

  I taste her fingers. They are in the tank that this one of me exists in. I am not sure what will happen to the body that was mine. They will keep it alive, I suppose. It was nothing but a blink in the long intense stare that is and will be my life. I taste her fingers for the briefest moment. Somewhere I am ejaculating and somewhere else I am birthing and being birthed. All of these things are interrelated. That one taste of her a part of me now. Ronnie is a part of me now.

  All things, and the one thing that is central and certain.

  Me.

  If you were an animal what would you be?

  Me.

  Jellyfish.

  Me.

  PART 3

  CAMERON

  THERE IS A sweet warmth, it’s like the faintest dust of icing sugar on my face. That is how the light from the screen touches me. And although I know this sensation is only for me, and the few who are like me, it seems impossible to imagine turning a computer on without noticing this delicate caress of light. Humans can’t feel it. The angelic chord from the computer that accompanies the breath of light is my celebratory sound. Ahhhhh. High and bright, a ripple of gratitude that I’m one of the lucky few who have such an abundance of sensors in their skin.

  The room is spare, temperature controlled, and the light is kept at a low, even frequency. Everything in my room is designed to understimulate. There used to be a photograph. Three boys. Maybe they are girls, it’s hard to tell from a photograph. The boys, or girls, were glancing up towards a sky puffed by clouds, that’s what I imagined, although most of the sky was cropped out. They were dressed in white robes and they were wearing wings of soft downy feathers. They were my Representative Age—eleven to fifteen.

  Hamish took the photo away because he said I had begun to obsess about it. I would sit too long on the bed in front of it and weep. I imagined myself to be first one, then another of the children, then I pressed myself into the little girl or boy in the background and imagined I was her, almost hidden from view, waiting, winged. Waiting in the wings. Haha.

  When Hamish asked me why I was crying I told him the truth. It was too beautiful. How could you not cry at the sight of such a thing? Hamish didn’t, though. He sent some people to take the picture off the wall and replace it with a dull abstract painted in colours that matched the furniture. Greys, cream and a touch of vermillion. Why are you still crying? he asked me and I had to admit it was because the new picture was so ugly. It looked like it was painted by a dozen factory workers and bought at a furniture store.

  So then they took the cheap abstract away and I was left with nothing to break up the monochrome and after that they made some adjustments to my functionality and the racket of the world was turned down a notch. I felt a bit less. I still feel less, but I am used to it now and I can still feel the light on my skin when I turn my computer on and that is enough.

  I came across the picture again after the adjustments and I didn’t cry at all, despite the swell of emotion that ballooned in my chest. I’d searched for it. Adolescent angels were my key words. Photograph, black and white.

  An Uncertain Grace by Sebastião Salgado. It was a perfect name for the picture.

  There is a safe search on my computer. It is to stop me seeing information that a child of my Representative Age would not usually see. But there it was in an advertisement for a book about art. The elements and principles of design, and it said this image was a perfect example of balance, repetition and hue. I didn’t really care what it was, what artistic alchemy made this photograph great. I just liked it. I came back to it between chats sometimes, careful to hold back any surge towards tears in case Hamish turned me down another notch. If I lost the feel of screen-light against my cheeks, or the way a whiff of cologne fills up my mouth like ice-cream, I would be bereft.

  The flash of movement on the screen comes at me like a speeding car. I flinch at the sight of it—overstimulated, Hamish would say. There is a man settling down in front of the webcam at his end of things and he doesn’t waste time. He is just a blur of shapes and a clash of colour at first, then I manage to still the thudding of my heart enough to see: he is just a middle-aged man, unshaven, hollow cheeked. I hear his voice shaking as he tells me to unbutton my shirt. His eyes are wide, almost unblinking. There are patches on his temples, which is how they monitor his responses. There will be patches on his chest, too, and in his groin and on his cock. I have seen them close up. I have touched the soft pale squares of plastic. I have licked them, and tasted the salt and sweat and chemicals.

  They are collecting information, that is the point of it all. They are testing them. This man, here, now, is being monitored. He knows it, but he is getting something he wants, and he takes it all in as quickly as he can. He stares so that the whites of his eyes are visible all around his irises. Bug-eyed.

  Hah! I let a little puff of laughter out and his eyes bug wider still. He thinks it’s part of my hebephilic programming, a nervous little laugh at his lewd requests. I suppose it might be. I can feel the blood rushing to my cheeks and I think of the angel in the photograph, the one on the left with his slightly startled expression. That’s probably how I look to him now. I wish someone would make me some wings out of feathers…No, I would never be able to concentrate on the requests of the Hebes if I had a pair of wings like that. I would be rolling around naked on the bed, abusing myself all day—spent by the time they brought me a visitor. Even the thought of all those feathers against the soft skin of my shoulders is enough to make me start to get hard.

  I stand up so the man can see my shorts bulging and I sway my hips from side to side and I’m spluttering with laughter and red cheeked and giddy when I sit down again. It is like pulling your pants down to moon the traffic. I saw it on a movie once and laughed so hard I started coughing.

  He is a Hebephile. He is attracted to teenagers, boys my age. I am his ultimate sexual fantasy and I have flashed him my stiffy when he only asked me to unbutton my shirt. On a whim I unzip my shorts completely and pull them down and stand up again and my penis wiggles for a second at the camera. I laugh and he groans.

  He is masturbating, which I am supposed to encourage so they can monitor his responses. This is a part of their research and I am programmed to facilitate it. I know about that but I know nothing about the man at all. Did he get caught with pornography—videos of real boys? Did he touch one? Have sex with one? Whatever it was it got him arrested. It brought us together here.

  ‘Take your shirt off,’ he says and I won’t. I just won’t
. Sometimes I do what they ask me to, and I do like the feel of the computer light on my chest, but they have made me unruly by nature. I resist direction. It is because I represent thirteen, full of Hormonal Anarchy. I know, logically, that this is what is making me dart away from the screen and throw myself full-bodied on the bed, but I have no control over it.

  I kick my sneakers off and pull my pants down, struggle out of my shorts, catch my heel on my underwear. All of this feeling on my skin. The smell of myself, the human components of me all fragrant with sweat and blood and boyish heat. I bounce my stiff dick back and forth, making it slap at my hips. He is watching from his screen in the Shooting Gallery. He is in his tiny booth and beside him other men, they are almost always men, in their tiny booths watching child-machines like me with half our clothes off.

  The drawer under the bed snaps open. I slip across the sheets and pull it clear. There is lube in there and I grab for it and pour too much onto the palm of my hand. I like them to watch, I suppose this really is a part of my programming. If I didn’t like them watching it wouldn’t be possible for me to do the job they’ve made me for. Their eyes on me are exciting, but at a certain part of the performance they always disappear and it is just me and the rub of my own hand and the slip of the lube.

  Sometimes in the afternoons Hamish brings me new things to try out, little latex toys, or sheets of textured fabric, velvet or satin or lycra. One day he surprised me with a whole roll of bubble wrap but that was too much. Most of the session was off camera because it was so fun to roll and bump around with the shroud of the bubbles popping all over me and he has never brought me anything like that again.