Greg moves away from Joe, stands in the kitchen, the bare tiles cold on his feet. He tries his best to plug one ear, to close his friend out, because someone on the phone is saying that Sandra’s just been rushed to the hospital. A car accident—no, a bike accident, which also involved a car. At first he can’t absorb the information. His mind makes old TV static.
“Sir, are you there?” the voice on the phone breaks through the static.
“She’s where? Which hospital?” Greg asks.
Slowly, he begins to realize that someone hit Sandra with a car while she was on her bike. Joe hasn’t stopped speaking. Now he’s rhapsodizing about how he thinks the lady who runs the bar/video arcade looks like Wonder Woman.
“Shut up,” Greg says.
Joe obediently shuts up, staring at his friend, who he’s never heard angry before. Greg nods his head and says “Okay” a lot into the phone. His hands shake. He turns to Joe and asks for a ride to the hospital. He knows he can’t drive himself, and that if he did, he’d probably crash his car, too—and then the only ride he’d be getting would be in an ambulance. He tries not to picture Sandra’s body on the pavement, blood across her face, and her intestines like a wet bag of yarn. In the car, images from every violent movie Greg has ever seen torture him. He vows only to watch nice movies—in which genteel British people drink tea while petting cats—from now on. He prays that her heart keeps ticking.
• • •
At the hospital, they won’t let him see her. The nurse says Sandra had to be rushed into emergency surgery. They couldn’t wait for him; they are so sorry. Sandra’s father is there too. He’s on a cell phone, making calls, gesturing violently. Greg overhears something about prototypes, something about expensive.
“I don’t care what you have to do,” her father says.
He hangs up the phone and collapses into the chair next to Greg. The orange vinyl of the chairs squeak as they both shift their weight.
“Do you ever wonder why the chairs in hospitals still look this way? Why hospitals look like a movie from 1990?” Greg asks.
He immediately hates himself for the inanity, but he has to hear the sound of his voice or his ears will fill with other, worse sounds. The sounds of tires. The wet splat of flesh on pavement. His brain insists on creating sound bubbles. Splat! Boom! Crash!
“It makes people feel safe,” her father says.
“What?”
“Nostalgia. People like it. Would you want this place to be full of hover chairs and holo-displays with the vital signs of our loved ones? Why do you think no one has shit like that in their house? We like old.”
Greg doesn’t know what to say to that because it feels too simple, although he supposes it has to be right. He lives in a world where people can have mechanical hearts, and last year they started a colony on Mars; yet everyone still drives cars with rubber tires (although the cars do run on animal waste) and wears denim, except for the occasional weirdo who thinks everyone has to wear onesies in the future. Most things people do or don’t do ultimately have to do with comfort. He knows this; he learned it in college. Psychology 101.
• • •
Twelve hours later, a nurse says, “You can see her now.”
She smiles a red lipstick covered smile. She looks like a nurse from an old movie. Greg can’t help but think she might be a clone or an android. He hears they are everywhere now. She looks overly tidy to be quite human. Greg stands up too quickly and weaves on his feet, vaguely nauseated and dizzy, high on caffeine and vending machine sugar snacks. He follows the nurse, Sandra’s father right behind him. Greg braces himself for Sandra to be unconscious or covered in stitches, wrapped in a cast. She might be burned, scraped, mummified in bandages, threaded with cords, but she will be there, and that’s what matters. He promises himself not to show shock—no matter what. The nurse stops in front of a room and motions them in.
Machines beep and whir, and Sandra rests on the bed, flipping the pages of a book. She turns and looks at them. As her head turns, Greg can hear the sound of gears; it reminds him of the sound of the remote control car he used to have as a kid. She smiles, and her face looks surprisingly whole—just some bandages on her chin. But then he sees one of her eyes. It’s blue like the other, but the iris spins and focuses, and he feels like he’s in line at the bank, and the camera of the digital teller is zooming in on him. Her father rushes over and hugs her, and she wraps her arms around him. One is silver and metal, and he can see her pseudo-knuckles clicking together. He makes himself walk forward one step at a time. Her father steps away and lets Greg lean in close. He kisses her cheek and feels her cheek bone, hard and unyielding. He wonders how much under there is metal. She whispers in his ear, tells him she was so afraid, she thought she was going to die, or live with one arm, one leg, one eye, some sort of horrible half-person, doomed to stay in bed.
“I’m whole,” she says. She grins. Half of her teeth are too shiny, too white, and too perfect.
“Thank God,” he says.
He’s not religious, but he tells himself he’s thankful to whatever deity there might be. He really is. He just has to get used to the way her head turns now, the way her left eye looks like it’s recording him. He feels ashamed. He feels even more ashamed when she tears up and looks at him, suddenly, only one eye weeping.
“What about the wedding?” she asks.
“We’ll have it here,” he says.
III
And then comes baby in a baby carriage
Two years after the makeshift hospital wedding, Greg weeps with Sandra, because she’s just miscarried a baby for the fourth time. She’s holding the little body, most of the way formed, on her lap. The hospital cleaned the baby girl, wrapped her in a blanket, and made her look almost alive. Greg thinks that hospitals are cruel.
“She could have made it,” Sandra says.
“She didn’t have lungs,” Greg says.
Perhaps he’s a little cruel, too, but he can’t let her have delusions, can’t let her have false hope. With the first baby, he went along with it. He said it was just bad luck and that the little one would have been okay, if only Sandra had carried her to term. But he’d seen the X-rays. He knew that the baby’s heart was under-developed, too small to ever support her. He knew that the same way he knew that this baby didn’t have lungs and that it was only the umbilical cord that was keeping her alive. All of the babies were missing some part: heart, lungs, brain, liver, stomach . . . something vital every time. Sandra’s father comes into the hospital room, pats her shoulder, murmurs something about unintended side effects, the dangers of experimental medicine. Greg tries to get him to leave, but Sandra grabs her father’s arm with a too-strong grip.
“You could have saved her,” she says.
“Too young,” he says.
He doesn’t repeat what he’s said every time—that Sandra’s body part replacements were prototypes, and that infant-sized ones haven’t even been attempted yet. He also doesn’t repeat what he said once, to Greg, sitting drunk on their sofa. With a glass of brandy in his hands and a bottle between his feet, her father stared at the glass and confessed that he thought the body part replacements—and the genetic manipulation required to make Sandra’s body accept them—might be why she kept losing babies, why every infant was lacking. He said he was sorry. Greg poured him more booze and said he forgave him. Which Greg is pretty sure is the truth. He suddenly remembers a long-ago conversation with Sandra’s father—one which might have saved them all this suffering. He tries to forget again.
Sandra releases her father’s arm. She wipes tears away from her right eye.
“We’ll try again,” she says.
Greg wants to say no, but he can’t bring himself to say that all she’s really giving birth to is pain.
• • •
The hospital makes Greg wheel Sandra out in a wheelchair. There’s nothing wrong with her legs, but they seem to think that by taking extra care of her, they are being helpful. The d
octor hovers nearby, watching as the nurse helps her into the chair. His hair is dark and dyed red at the tips. Greg thinks it makes him look like an anime character and less serious, but he doesn’t say so because he knows he wants to lash out at somebody, anybody.
“Perhaps you should stop trying to have children,” the doctor says.
Sandra turns her head and stares at the doctor. Her neck looks bony and frail.
“Piss off,” she says.
Greg opens his mouth, but he can’t decide if he wants to cheer on her feistiness or say he agrees with the doctor. The two impulses fight within him, and he can’t make any words come out, can’t bring himself to tell his wife that he’d be okay with adoption or that they could get a cat—twelve cats for all he cares.
The doctor presses his lips together and doesn’t say anything. He lets Greg wheel Sandra past him, but Greg can feel the doctor’s eyes as they leave.
• • •
Back at home, it takes Sandra weeks to decide to get up, move around, go back to work.
She lolls on the couch, staring at the television screen projected onto the wall; instead of going outside, she turns on the 3D function of the set and sits, surrounded by a variety of scrolling landscapes equipped with sound. To bring her tea, Greg has to pass through projections of heather-covered Scottish hills, or Antarctic wastelands filled with penguins. He feels awkward stepping through the penguins.
She catches his hand as he hands her a cup of green tea.
“I’ll get better,” she says.
Greg looks at her matted hair, at her collar bone poking out of the top of her sweater, and wants to believe her.
She grips him tighter, with her mechanical arm, and he cringes. She doesn’t apologize.
“I really will,” she says.
He leans forward and kisses her forehead. He tells her okay, and she lets him go, grasping the teacup carefully with both hands.
• • •
Eventually, she does get better, and she goes back to work, but Greg can see she’s changed somehow. His wife has grown more serious. She jokes less. She lets him keep watches and clocks. She doesn’t talk about being a cyborg anymore. Perhaps after the accident her strangeness surpassed her desire to be special. Greg tries not to make her think about it. Most of the time now he can hold her without flinching. They put skin over the metal arm. He’s okay, except when she grabs him during sex and holds too tight. Or sometimes, in the night, he rolls over in his sleep and startles awake when he first touches her strangely unyielding flesh.
Sometimes he dreams she’s dead, and then he wakes up feeling empty inside. He’s still drawing The Mistress of Time. He won an award recently, and he and Sandra were in the paper, holding a gigantic poster of the cover of his comic between them. The woman on the cover has a bionic eye and one metal arm. The line underneath the picture says, “Greg Jones and his wife Sandra, his muse.”
Her hair is rarely a mess like it used to be when she read at the bookstore counter. Now, when she works at the counter, she sits straight in her chair and never disturbs her coif. Only when she first clambers out of bed in the morning does her hair fall into disarray. The sight of her curls in a riot fills Greg with tenderness.
• • •
The fifth time Sandra gets pregnant, everything seems normal. Greg watches the ultrasounds closely, searching for any sign of missing vital organs. But a little heart beats right before his eyes. He begins to hope. Sandra gleams and glows. She makes him think of a nineteenth century painting, her hair long and luxurious, her body draped in flowing clothes. She’s taken up gardening. She sings while she works at the bookstore. She tells everyone to buy poetry.
She starts bringing poetry home, too. She recites it while she cooks. She’s trying to memorize all of Yeats. Greg thinks her plans ambitious, but he doesn’t say anything. It’s Saturday, and she’s reaching up to the top of a bookcase to grab a copy of the collected works of William Butler Yeats when her water breaks. She drops the book on the floor and stares down at the fluid pooling by her feet.
She says, “Sorry for the water damage.”
She paces around the floor of their home. He draws her, distended stomach, arms braced against her hips, hair loose around her shoulders. He thinks she’s beautiful. Hours later, she goes into labor—real labor—on time for once, and she looks positively triumphant. At the hospital, she sweats and she wails and she bleeds, but she also grins in exultation, gritting her teeth.
When the doctor takes the baby from between her legs and cuts the umbilical cord and wipes away the blood and mucus, and the infant starts up a healthy wail, Greg smiles. Until he sees two blank spots where there should be eyes. Smooth skin, no lids. He stares at this healthy but eyeless baby.
The doctor sees his face. “Don’t worry, when she gets older and her skull gets larger we can give her mechanical eyes,” he says.
Her father nods along with the doctor, says reassuring things, talks about how this one will be okay, nothing vital is missing. By the time she’s large enough for new eyes, maybe the technology will be even better. Eyes are easy to replace. Sandra clearly doesn’t hear him, her eyes are closed, her head tilted to the side on her pillow, and her lips curved in a smile.
A nurse—who looks identical to the one who talked to Greg after Sandra’s accident—comes in and hands him a glass of water. Sandra still hasn’t noticed the baby’s lack of eyes. She’s too high on victory and pain. The nurse smiles her perfect red smile at him. She is most certainly a clone.
“A girl!” she says.
Greg keeps his mouth closed around his words.
“What are you thinking?” asks the nurse, too perkily.
“Tick-tock,” Greg says.
Jennifer Pullen received her doctorate from Ohio University and her MFA from Eastern Washington University. She originally hails from Washington State. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are upcoming in journals including: Going Down Swinging (AU), Cleaver, Off the Coast, Phantom Drift Limited, and Clockhouse.
Inheritance
Michael Milne
Oliver’s classmates locked him with gaping, lidless gazes for a few seconds before the first one screamed. The impulse traveled, then all of them were wailing, and Mrs. Turner quickly led the class out. Alone, Oliver moved to the hole in the wall, a popped blister surrounded by loose plaster. The desk he had thrown lay shattered in the field two stories below, its legs pointed upwards like half of a dead spider.
The principal arrived and silently ushered Oliver off to a stiff blue bench opposite his office, placing his hand close, but never on, Oliver’s shoulder. Marooned in the home of kids who smuggled lighters and butterfly knives to school, Oliver’s face burned red and hot. Teachers and other sixth graders passed by, keeping a safe distance, whispering as they went.
When his parents finally filed past an hour later, Oliver thought they looked strangely shrunken, that they were his size. Mr. Clark wore his only black suit, still wrinkled from the wedding the family attended two weeks before. Mrs. Clark didn’t make eye contact with Oliver, but squeezed her son’s shoulder as she passed.
They both spoke in hushed voices, rarely to each other. Oliver could hear his mother shifting in her seat, defeated, each of her sentences trailing off at the end.
“We don’t know how much Oliver knows of what’s going on . . .” Angie muttered. They were talking about the divorce. Edward asked the principal to recommend a child therapist, someone Oliver could talk to in order to help him manage his anger, and Oliver tried desperately to make himself relax.
“And would either of you mind explaining,” Principal Isaacs asked at last, “how he launched a desk through the drywall and across Maple Crest Avenue?” Oliver wanted to burst in and say that the desk had barely cleared the bleachers, that there was no way it could have gotten across the street.
Neither of his parents could or would explain, nor did they explain to Oliver why he could overhear them from three rooms away.
&nbs
p; • • •
“Can Dad come to my birthday?” Oliver asked a week before the party.
“You’d like him to come?” Angie asked. Oliver knew he had some degree of leverage—there was a new boyfriend, his name was Craig and he wore loafers and already took the liberty of telling dad jokes. Angie spent the last week seeming deeply apologetic. “It’s your birthday. We’ll see if he can make it.”
In what Oliver hoped to be a carefully negotiated peace, Edward appeared at noon that Saturday. He was out of breath, overdressed. And though this was the first time Edward had entered the new house on Roxborough Street, it seemed totally natural, like he could be walking in, covered in the scent of cut grass or holding a greasy bag of take-out. Oliver moved to meet his father away from the few other press-ganged partygoers, and Edward handed him a gift.
“Open it,” Edward said. Under the poorly bound newspaper was a blue monster truck toy, years too young for Oliver. A half-peeled price sticker stained the side, and Oliver pretended not to notice.
“I love it, Dad.”
Oliver watched his parents perform a careful dance of evasion, two planets on opposite ends of an orbital path. One in the kitchen, the other awkwardly holding court outside; one leaning over the cake, the other repelled to the outer reaches of the meager crowd. Oliver eyed the assembled middle schoolers, here mostly out of parental decree and the promise of snacks, and was certain they were logging this for gossip purposes.
“Can you stay for dinner?” Oliver asked. He knew the answer, deliberately asking by the fence and far away from prying eyes and ears. He knew that even if it had been yes, it would have been awful. And yet he still wanted it, like the dogged need to rip off a hangnail.
“I don’t think I can, Oliver.” Edward Clark glanced up to the sky, listening to something far away. “I need to go. Now. I’m sorry. I’ll see you soon.”
Soon turned out to be nearly two months later, and each subsequent excuse began to feel worn and ragged. Edward rarely told Oliver the truth about where he was—Oliver knew this—but he grew to wish his father had a deeper reservoir of alibis, that he didn’t simply cycle through the same two or three. Emergency at work, left the stove on, looking after the neighbor’s dog.
Behind the Mask Page 9
