Skinned (2 page)

They don’t want to hear how I lay trapped, skin gnashed by metal teeth; legs numb,
absent
, like the universe ended at my waist; arms torn from sockets, twisted, white hot with pain. They don’t want to hear how one eye was blinded behind a film of blood but the other saw clearly: black smoke, a slice of blue through a shattered window, freckled skin spattered with red, the white gleam of bone. An orange flicker.

They don’t want to hear what it felt like when I started to burn.

I wish I could say my life had flashed before my eyes while I was trapped in that bed. It might have made things more interesting. I tried to force it. I thought if I could remember everything that had ever happened to me, moment by moment, then maybe it would be almost like being alive again. I could at least kill some hours, maybe even days, reliving Lia Kahn’s greatest hits. But it was useless. I would start with the earliest moment I could remember—say, screaming at the pinprick pain of my first morning med-check, convinced by toddler rationality that the tiny silver point would suck out all my blood, while my mother smoothed back my hair and begged me to stop crying, promising me a cookie, a lollipop, a puppy, anything to shut me up before my father arrived. I would remember the tears wet on my face, my father’s disgust clear on his—and then I would think about how the daily med-checks and DNA-personalized medicine were supposed to make us all healthy and safe and live nearly forever, and how
nearly
wasn’t close enough when your car’s nav system crapped out and rammed you into a truck or a tree and flipped you over and chewed you up. I would remember my mother’s hand across my forehead, and wonder why I never heard her voice in my room.

Days passed.

I made lists. People I knew. People I hated. Words starting with the letter
Q
. I tried to make a list of all the ViMs I’d ever owned, from the pink My First Virtual Machine with its oversize buttons and baby-proofed screen to my current favorite, a neon blue nanoViM that you could adhere to your shirt, your wrist, even, if you felt like flashing vids as you sashayed down the hall, your ass. Not that I’d tried that…more than once. But things got hazy midway through the list—There’d been too many ViMs to remember them all, since if you had enough credit, which I did, you could wire almost anything to function as a virtual computer that would link into the network.

I sang songs to myself. I practiced the lines I’d been forced to memorize for English class, because, according to my clueless teacher, “the theater may be dead, but Shakespeare is immortal.”

“To die,—to sleep;—

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’t.”

Whatever that meant. Walker had done a passage from
Romeo and Juliet
with Bliss Tanzen playing Juliet, and I wondered if Bliss would be the one—or if you counted her D-cups, the three—to replace me.

I listened to the doctors, wishing they would betray some detail of their personal lives or at least say
something
other than “delta waves down,” “alpha frequency boosted,” “rhythm confirmed as normal variant,” or any of the other phrases that floated back and forth between them. I tried to move my arms and legs; I tried to
feel
them. I could tell, when they opened my eyes, that I was lying on my back. It meant there must be a bed beneath me, some kind of sheets. So I tried to imagine my fingers resting on scratchy cotton. But the more time passed, the harder it was to even imagine I had fingers. For all I knew, I didn’t.

I stopped trying.

I stopped thinking. I drifted through the days in a gray mist, awake but not awake, unmoving but uncaring.

So when it finally happened, it wasn’t because of me. I wasn’t trying. I didn’t even know what I was doing. It just…
happened
. Eyes closed, eyes closed, eyes closed—

Eyes open.

There was a shout, maybe a doctor, maybe my father, I couldn’t tell, because I was staring at a gray ceiling, but I’d done it, I’d opened my eyes, somehow, and they stayed open.

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.

T
here 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
?