Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

  Something else moved. An arm.

  My arm. And, for a moment, I forgot everything in the pure blast of relief: my arm. Intact. I couldn’t feel it, wasn’t trying to move it, but I saw it. Saw it jerk upward, across my field of vision, then back down to the bed again, hard, with a thump. Then the other arm. Up. Down. Thump. And my legs—They must have been my legs. I couldn’t feel them, couldn’t see them, but I could hear them against the mattress, a drumbeat of thump, thump, thump. My neck arched backward and the ceiling spun away, and I was flying and then a thud, loud, like a body crashing against a floor. Crack, crack, crack as my head slapped the tile, slapped it again, again, all noise and no pain, and then feet pounded toward me and all I wanted was the motionlessness of the dark again, but now I couldn’t close my eyes, and two hands, pudgy and white and uncalloused, grabbed my face and held it still, and then for the first time since I’d woken up, everything stopped.

  To sleep: perchance to dream.

  EYES WIDE OPEN

  “Some kind of total freak?”

  There were no dreams.

  I opened my eyes.

  I opened my eyes. It was a triumph. If I could have smiled, I would have.

  But I couldn’t.

  I closed my eyes, just because I could. Then opened them again. Close. Open. Close. Open. It wasn’t much.

  But it was something.

  “Lia, can you hear me?” It was a new voice, one I didn’t recognize. The face appeared. Small mouth, big nose, squinty brown eyes with a deep crease between them. His parents must not have cared enough to spend the credit on good looks, I decided. Either that or his gene pool was so crowded with ugly, this was the best he could get. “Lia, I want you to listen to what I’m saying and try to respond if you understand me.”

  Respond how? I wondered. For a doctor, he didn’t seem to have much grasp of the situation.

  “Our instruments are indicating that you’ve gained control of some key facial muscles, Lia. You should be able to blink. Can you blink now, if you understand me? Just once, nice and slow?”

  I closed my eyes. Counted to three. Opened them again.

  All I’d done was blink, but the doctor beamed like I’d won a championship race. Which should have seemed completely lame. Except I felt like I had.

  And that felt pretty good, right up until the point when I started wondering why I could blink, but still couldn’t speak or move. I wondered how long that would last.

  I wondered if I could figure out the blink code for “Kill me.”

  “You were in an accident,” he said with a little hesitation in his voice, like he was telling me something I didn’t know. Like he was worried I would freak out. How much freaking out did he expect from a living corpse?

  “I’m sure you have questions. I think we’ve got a way to help you with that. But first we need to establish a cognitive baseline. Is that okay? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

  No. Not okay. Okay would have been him telling me exactly what was wrong with me and how he was planning to fix it. And when. But that answer wasn’t an option. I was stuck in a binary world: Yes or no. I blinked once.

  It was something.

  “Are you in pain right now?”

  Two blinks. No.

  “Have you been conscious at any point before now?”

  One blink.

  “Have you been in pain?”

  One blink. I kept my eyes closed for a long time, hoping he’d get the point. His expression didn’t change.

  “Are you able to move any part of your body?”

  Two blinks.

  I suddenly wondered if I was crying. I probably should have been crying.

  “I’m going to apply some pressure now, and I want you to blink when you feel something, okay? This might hurt a little.”

  I stared at the ceiling. I waited.

  No blink.

  No blink.

  This can’t be happening to me.

  The doctor frowned. “Interesting.”

  Interesting? Forget asking him to kill me. I wanted him to die.

  His face disappeared from view, replaced by a large white paper, filled with row after row of block letters in alphabetical order.

  “We’re going to try this the old-fashioned way, Lia. I’m going to point at the letters one by one, and you blink when I get to the one you want. Make sense?”

  One blink.

  “Do you know your name?” This from the idiot who’d been calling me Lia from the moment he walked in the room.

  His stubby finger skimmed along the letters. I blinked when it got to L. He started again at the beginning, and I blinked at I. Again, A.

  “Good, very good. And your last name?”

  Letter by letter we finally got there. It was just so freaking slow.

  There was more pointless trivia: my parents’ names, the year, my birthday, the president’s name, and all of it painfully spelled out, letter by letter, blink by blink. I’d waited so long to make contact, but pretty soon I just wanted him to go away. It was too hard. I didn’t let myself think about what would happen if this was it, all I would ever have. A white sheet, black letters, his stubby finger. Blink, blink.

  “Now that you’ve reached this level, we should be able to move on to the next stage. It’s just going to take a little longer to implement. Is there anything you want to ask in the meantime?”

  One blink.

  The letters reappeared and his finger crawled along.

  W. Blink.

  H. Blink.

  A. Blink.

  T. Blink.

  WRONG WITH ME.

  Blink.

  I could tell from his expression it was the wrong question.

  “As I said, Lia, you’ve been in an accident. Your body sustained quite a bit of damage. But I assure you that we’ve been able to repair it. The lack of motive ability and sensation is quite normal under the circumstances, as your neural network adjusts to its new…circumstances. The pain and other sensations you may have experienced while you’ve been with us are a positive sign, an indication that your brain is exploring its new pathways, relearning how to process sensory information. It’s going to take some time and some hard work, Lia, and there may be some…complications to work through, but we will get you walking and talking again.”

  He said more after that, but I wasn’t listening. I didn’t hear anything after “walking and talking again.” They were going to fix me. Whatever complications there were, however long it took, I would get my life back.

  “Is there anything else you want to ask?”

  Two blinks. After the second one, I kept my eyes closed until he went away.

  The bed was mechanical. It whirred quietly, and slowly the ceiling tipped away until I was sitting up. For the first time, I could see the room. It wasn’t much, but it was at least a different view, a better one than the ceiling, whose flat, unblemished gray plaster was even less interesting than the black behind my eyes. It didn’t look like any hospital room I’d ever seen. There was no machinery, no medical equipment, no sink, and no bathroom. I couldn’t smell that telltale hospital mélange of disinfectant and puke. But then, I realized, I couldn’t smell much of anything. There was a dresser that looked like my dresser, although I could tell it wasn’t. A desk that looked like my desk. Speakers and a vidscreen, lit up with randomly flickering images of friends and family. No mirror.

  Someone had gone to a fair amount of effort to make the place feel like home.

  Someone was expecting me to stay for a while.

  A horde crowded around me. Doctors, I assumed, although none of them wore white coats. At the foot of the bed, clutching each other, my mother and father. Although, to be accurate, only my mother was doing much clutching, along with plenty of weeping and trembling. My father stood ramrod straight, arms at his sides, eyes aimed at my forehead; an old trick he’d taught me. Most people would assume he was looking me in the eye. Most people didn’t pay much attention.

  My mother
pressed her head to his shoulder, squeezed him tight around the waist, and used her other hand to pat my foot, gingerly, like she was afraid of hurting me. Apparently no one had told her that I couldn’t feel her touch, or anything else. More likely she was in selective memory mode, tossing out any piece of information that didn’t suit her.

  “We’ve hooked up a neural output line from the language center of your brain, Lia,” the squinty-eyed doctor said. Now that I had a better view, I could see that he was also short. For his sake—and mine—I hoped his parents had spent all their credit on IQ points. Because clearly, they’d spared little for anything else. “If you speak the words clearly in your mind, the computer will speak for you.” Then it was like the whole room paused, waiting.

  Hello.

  Silence.

  “It might take a little practice to get the words out,” he said. “I wish I could tell you exactly how to do it, but it’s like moving an arm or raising an eyebrow. You just have to find a way to turn thought into action.”

  If I could speak, I might have pointed out that I couldn’t move my arm or raise my eyebrow. And then thanked him for rubbing it in.

  Hello.

  Hello.

  Can anyone hear me?

  Is this piece of shit equipment ever going to work or are you all just going to keep standing there and staring at me like I’m

  “some kind of total freak?”

  My mother let loose a whimpery squeal and buried her face in my father’s chest. He didn’t push her away.

  “Very good, Lia.” The doctor nodded. “Excellent.”

  The voice was female, an electronic alto, with that artificially soothing tone you hear in broken elevators, assuring you that “assistance is on the way.” It trickled out of a speaker somewhere behind my head.

  Hello, I thought, testing it. The word popped out instantly.

  “Hello,” my father said, like I’d been talking to him. Which maybe I had. His eyes stayed on my forehead.

  “You’re going to be okay, honey,” my mother whispered. She squeezed the foot-shaped lump at the end of the bed. “I promise. We’ll fix this.”

  “Can someone tell me what’s happening?” the speaker said.

  I said.

  “How bad was I hurt? How long have I been here? What happens next? Why can’t I—” I stopped. “I’ll be able to move again, right? Walk and everything? You said I could. When?”

  I didn’t ask why Zo wasn’t there.

  “It’s been several weeks since the accident,” my father said. “Almost four.” His voice was nearly as steady as the computer’s.

  One month trapped in a bed, in the dark. I’d missed three tests, a track meet, who knew how many parties, nights with Walker, hours and hours of my favorite vidlifes. A month of my life.

  “Of course, you’ve only been conscious for the last week or so,” the doctor said. “And as I explained before, your brain needed this recuperation period to adjust to its new circumstances. Involuntary motion indicated the first stage had been achieved. We actually expected you to reach this point a bit sooner, but, of course, these things vary, and nothing can be rushed, not in cases like this. Given the severity of your injuries, you’ve really been quite lucky, you know.”

  Right. Lucky. I felt like I’d won the lottery.

  Or been struck by lightning.

  “Voluntary control over the eyelids, that’s stage two. You’ll gradually achieve control over the rest of your body. In fact, you may already be started down that path. We’ve immobilized the rest of you for the moment, after your…episode. For your own safety. But when you’re ready, your rehabilitation therapists will work with you, isolating individual areas. Sensation should return as well, if all goes smoothly.”

  He didn’t say what would happen if things didn’t go smoothly, or how big the if was. I didn’t ask.

  “How bad?”

  The doctor frowned. “I’m sorry?”

  “You said severe. How severe?” I hated that this man, a stranger, knew my body better than I did.

  “When we brought you in after the accident…Incidentally, although you didn’t ask, I assume you’ll want to know what happened? A chip malfunction on a shipping truck, I believe. It slipped through the sat-nav system, and coincidentally, your car’s backup-detection system malfunctioned, reading the road as clear. It was a colossally unlikely confluence of events.” He said this clinically, casually, as if noting a statistical aberrance he hoped to study in his spare time. “When we brought you in after the accident, your injuries were severe. Burns covering—”

  “Please, stop!” That was my mother. Of course. “She doesn’t need to hear this. Not now. She’s not strong enough.” Meaning “I’m not strong enough.”

  “She asked,” my father said. “She should know.”

  The doctor hesitated, as if waiting for them to reach a unanimous decision. He’d spent the last month with my parents and still thought the Kahn family was a democracy?

  My father nodded. “Continue.”

  The doctor, smarter than he looked, obeyed. “Third-degree burns covering seventy percent of your body. That was the most immediate threat. Skin grafts are simple, of course, but in many cases infection proves fatal before we have the chance to do anything. Crush injuries to the legs and pelvis. Spinal cord abrasion. Collapsed lung. Damage to the aortic valve necessitated immediate bypass and may have required an eventual transplant. Internal bleeding. And, as far as secondary injuries, we were forced to amputate—”

  “Please,” the computer voice cut in. It was so calm.

  My father raised his eyes, waiting. Believing I was strong enough.

  Keep going, I forced myself to think. The words were in the air before I could take them back.

  “Amputate the left leg, just below the thigh. Several hours were spent trying to salvage the left arm, but it wasn’t possible.”

  There were two feet beneath the blanket. Two legs. I could see them. Maybe I couldn’t feel them or move them, but I knew they were there.

  Prosthetics, I realized, retreating to a part of my brain the computer couldn’t hear. They can do a lot with prosthetics. They made fake limbs that moved, that even, in some way, felt. That looked almost normal. Almost.

  The doctor had said I would walk. He just didn’t say how. He didn’t say on what.

  This can’t be happening to me.

  How could it be happening—how could it keep happening—and still seem so unreal?

  But then how could it be real? How could I, Lia Kahn, be a one-armed, one-legged, burned, scarred, punctured lump?

  “I need to see.”

  “See what, Lia?” my mother whispered. What did she think?

  “See. I need to see what I look like. I need a mirror.” In my head I was shouting. The voice was not.

  “That’s not advisable at this point,” the doctor said. “I only told you about your injuries so you would realize how lucky you are to be making a full recovery. So you would understand that certain decisions were made for your own good. Some sacrifices were needed to save your life.”

  Some “sacrifices,” like an arm and a leg?

  “I need to see.”

  The doctor frowned. “We really should wait until the final, cosmetic procedures have been completed. It’s ill-advised at this stage to—”

  “Let her see,” said a man who hadn’t spoken yet. He stood closest to my parents, his gray suit flashing, very subtly, in time with his heartbeat. The style had been in and then very definitely out a couple years ago, but it worked for him. Although with his face—chiseled cheekbones, long-lashed brown eyes, dimpled chin, nearly-but-not-quite feminine lips—anything would have worked. “She’ll have to find out eventually. Why not now?”

  I was sorry I couldn’t smile at him.

  Then I reminded myself that the smile would have been bound by blistered lips, pulled back to reveal cracked teeth, or dark empty gaps, along bloody gums. As for the blond hair I would have liked to flick
over my shoulder, just quickly enough that the scent of lavender wafted out to greet him? It was probably gone. I’d smelled it burning. My eyes were both still there, that was obvious. At least one of my ears. But my mouth didn’t work, my nose didn’t work—Who knew whether they were intact or just sunken caverns of flesh? The pretty doctor didn’t see pretty Lia Kahn, I reminded myself. He saw the lump.

  He found a mirror.

  It was small, about the size of a hand stretched flat, with the fingers pressed together. Framed with black plastic that maybe was supposed to be shiny but wasn’t, not anymore. He paused, tipped his head toward my father. “Do you want to…?”

  My father shook his head.

  So it was the pretty doctor, the kind of guy Walker would be someday if he remembered to shave and stopped flunking gen-tech, who approached, mirror in hand. He kept it angled safely away. “You ready?”

  As if it mattered. I closed my eyes.

  The computer said yes.

  They’ll fix it, I promised myself. No matter how much it costs, no matter how long it takes. If my mother could keep her skin looking like she was twenty-two, if Bliss Tanzen could show up with a new nose to match every new season’s shopping spoils, a few scars were nothing. Maybe I’d even keep a couple. Becca Mai had a delicate white fault line running down her cheekbone that she claimed came from a close encounter with jagged glass on some illicit venture into the city. Everyone knew Becca Mai was too prep to sneak out of the house and too petrified to sneak into the city, and Bliss had spotted one of those home tattoo kits on Becca’s shop-log, just before it mysteriously got edited out. But guys still loved her sexy little shiver as they traced their fingers down the scar. Becca gave good shiver.

  I could do better.

  “Lia, if you want to see, you’re going to have to open your eyes.” The doctor’s voice didn’t quite match up to his pretty face. I liked voices lower, a little husky. Of course, Walker was nearly a tenor. Carved cheekbones, a tight six-pack, and a girl can get used to just about anything.

  Anything, I told myself. And then, deep breath.

  Eyes wide open.

  I didn’t know computers could scream.