The Machine (14 page)

The sky crackles.

It wakes Beth up because it’s so noisy, like firecrackers snapping away. The television is halfway through a Japanese cartoon, but that doesn’t give her a time to use as reference. The clock says that it’s just gone midnight, which means she’s barely been asleep any time at all. It’s so dark in the flat, only the TV is giving off any light at all.

Snap, snap, snap.

She stands up and stretches, and her head feels clear enough, but the air in the flat is horrible. Hot, not just warm, and nearly wet. On the rare occasions that they have storms, they’re perfect for clearing out everything. Like a reset button, and they leave the ground smelling – what was it that Laura called it? Petrichor? Petrichlor? – and the sky clear. And everything’s cooler for a few days. Not long enough to get used to it, but in the same way that people used to celebrate the British summer. They get out and enjoy it while it lasts. It’s no longer something that everybody has to fight against.

Beth walks to the window and pulls back the curtain. The rain hasn’t started yet, and she knows what she expects to see, but it’s different. The sky isn’t just black: intermittently a filthy grey shade, lit by the lightning. There are other people outside, and in the distance she can see the sun buried underneath the clouds. It’s 11 a.m. The sky crackles again, and the lightning rushes across it, smacking into itself. It’s bad special effects from a science-fiction movie. It’s one of those gadgets where the electricity is attracted to somebody’s palm resting on the glass. It rolls through the clouds – like horses through waves, Beth thinks, which she remembers from somewhere, but she’s not sure where – and it seems to leap before it dissipates. She forgets about everything else: Vic, the Machine, her own life. She opens the front door and breathes it in, the damp, the sense that it’s about to happen. Everybody senses it.

And then it rains. It thuds in single drops first, thwap, down onto the concrete, and they’re almost big enough to make their own puddles. They’re as warm as everything else. Thwap, thwap. More of them. Each of the residents of the estate stays under cover, even her next-door neighbour, who hides indoors as her daughters run out, well past when they should be asleep. After the drops comes the flood, a gush of water coming down on them. Heavier than Beth’s ever seen before, she thinks. Nobody talks: down in the courtyard people stand huddled. It seems almost reverential. The rain pours and then the lightning comes, and all across the sky it can be seen, ripping down from the sky, smacking onto buildings. The lights are on in all the flats one minute, and the next they’re gone. The power tears out through the entire estate, and as far into the distance as Beth can see from the balcony: no lights down at the shops, no lights on the estate past that, or the houses that run around the edge of the island further down. Total blackness, apart from the lightning.

Snap.

Beth rushes back inside to Vic and the Machine, and she doesn’t know what she expected, but it’s still making that low-level hum, and it’s still going. It’s still plugged in and she doesn’t know what she expected, because that battery keeps on going, and now she wonders why everybody else doesn’t hear it: when the rest of the ambient noise is gone and all that’s left is the Machine and the light from it and that noise, which comes from somewhere at its back, in the dark, somewhere that she knows doesn’t have a speaker and shouldn’t be able to make noise. And what if Laura is right? With her protesting and her crying and her berating and praying to God? What if this is as unnatural as she’s suggesting? She reaches out slowly, tentatively, and she presses the screen – Vic doesn’t stir, completely knocked out by the day – and it lights up, and the light fills the room.

How are you still working? she asks it. That rumble, like the thunder itself. Roll of noise; pause; flash of light. She’s terrified, but this is what she wanted. She wanted Vic back. Somehow she’s getting him.

There’s time to do another, she thinks. She’s awake, and she’s got power. One more couldn’t hurt. She pulls the Crown down and rests it on Vic’s head. She wonders if it works when he’s asleep; if anybody’s ever tried it. She could be the first, a pioneer.

She presses play. Outside, the lightning fizzes.

He’s totally compliant when she takes him to the bathroom and he uses the toilet and then she puts him into the shower. Again, Beth thinks that he’s making this easier on her, although she can’t tell whether it’s an effect of the Machine and he’s becoming more himself, this quickly, this efficiently; or whether it’s just that the body is helping more, as if it’s getting to know her. But he works with her, and he lifts his feet more, and in the shower he isn’t as curled up. When she lifts his arms to wash underneath them, to soap up his armpits – the sweat has settled into his skin – he holds them aloft briefly. She finds the process much more appealing: this is nearly her husband again, and it’s nearly her husband’s body that she’s touching.

The flat is cooler than it was, because it’s happened: the sky has cleared. It’s instantly less muggy. Beth looks outside and it’s bright but clean. Something fresh in the air: that smell.

She puts a new sheet on the bed as Vic sits crouched in the bath. The breeze – there’s a breeze! – that comes through the flat is wonderful, even though it’s still warm. Beth leaves Vic almost naked as she lays him down on the bed, only underwear protecting his modesty. She pulls the Crown down and presses the screen, and it’s ready and waiting, exactly where she left off. The Machine’s start is like a yawn, a stretch, preparing itself for what it has to do. She lubes the pads and presses them onto his head, and she pushes the button. He flings himself upwards suddenly, arching his back. He swipes with his arms at his head.

No, Beth says. Don’t. Vic stops swiping at her and knocks the Crown off his head instead. He opens his mouth and noise comes out, a blast of something atonal, barely recognizable. It’s not something she’s heard before, and it doesn’t stop, even as his body bucks and his jaw moves between open and closed with a jarring sharpness, and his tongue pokes out, the muscle seeming to push itself to breaking point in an attempt to get out of his mouth. Please stop the noise, she says, and she rubs his head – the lubricant smearing under her touch on his temples – and that seems to calm him a little. Even then the convulsions (because that’s what Beth thinks that they are) continue, and she rubs more and makes a ‘Shush’ noise, over and over. He’s shaking, so she moves closer and puts her arms around him. She leans in. Please, she says. He resists but she gets close enough to properly hold him, hooking her arms behind him and closing her hands together to keep purchase.

She notices that the Crown is dangling down from the Machine, is tilting onto the floor. And then she notices that his voice, Vic’s voice, is playing.

You want to know what I wore at our wedding? he asks. Why does that matter?

Just tell me, the doctor says. You know how this works.

Fine. I wore full regimental dress. Everybody did, all the wedding party. My ushers all did, because they were all from my unit.

What are their names?

The ushers?

He reels them off. That part had to be taken. It devastated Beth at the time. The photographs that got doctored: of Vic in a normal suit, like any other wedding. Who is he, and what did he do? Nothing to indicate that, because he’s in a suit. No ushers, because they were all in uniform. People taken away from him, just like that. A click of a mouse. Beth wonders, as she clings to him, why they ever thought that it was a good idea, or that it was even fair.

That’s what this is like, the forum-user wrote. It’s like, we made a decision and it was a bad one, so now we’re putting things back the way that they were, through magic or whatever.

Beth thinks about that: about how she’s only undoing five years of hell, and innumerable hours of pain. She holds Vic and wonders if he’ll thank her for this: and if she’ll tell him the absolute truth about how he ended up here. That it was her decisions, not his, not theirs, and her eagerness to push him. Because she thought that he was so strong.

After a while the noise ends, and Vic’s body’s mouth closes.

Okay, Beth says. She stands and lets him lie down. When she lifts the Crown from the floor she’s sure that his body flinches, even though he’s not looking towards her and the Machine. I won’t, she says. We can have a break.

She goes to the living room and turns the television on, and puts the volume up. She finds it hard to hear what’s being said, people arguing, getting up from their chairs and threatening violence, waving their fists. She realizes that she’s left the Machine on. Vic is still speaking. How did she not notice? It’s so loud, and the noise of the Machine itself. She goes back to the Machine and is about to press stop when the recording ends. It’s been an hour since it started, and the time’s passed so quickly. All spent cradling him.

Beth runs the taps and wets her face, and then moves a kitchen chair into the widest path of the breeze. She leans back and lets it brush over her wet cheeks and lips. In the corner of her eye she sees the tablets stacked on the work surface: the ibuprofen first, but then the diazepam.

Not yet, she says. She’s shocked at how weary she sounds. How much this is taking out of her, as well as him. She doesn’t move. She sleeps.

When she wakes up she finds him waiting for her, where he was. The Crown slides straight on again. She tightens the straps, and fastens the jaw-strap, because she doesn’t want it being knocked off. The Machine leaps at her palm’s touch, and that vibration starts up again. She remembers the way that the ground shook during the flooding, and this is like that, after it finished: feeling uneasy on your feet, the trembling that runs through your legs and for a second you don’t know if it’s nerves or actually something physically happening to the ground, or if the two are even any different. She chooses the same passage as the morning’s attempt, and she doesn’t look at Vic’s body as she presses play. She gets close to the Machine, hands on either side of the screen. And she leans in, so that her head is almost resting on the black metal above the screen, propping her up, because the tremors run right through her. Everything in her body shakes, and she can, for a second, feel all of her bones: big and little, teetering against their connections, rattling in their sockets. She can’t hear anything past the noise of the Machine, and past the clatter that’s now inside her own head. As if this pain – because that’s what it’s heading towards, clinging to this thing – might be some sort of penance for pretending that, behind her, there isn’t her husband’s body, writhing and bucking on the bed, making a noise that sounds like something almost digital, unnatural and blunt. And this is just the tip of it: if it hurts now, it will only hurt her more as he becomes more himself. And especially as he becomes more able to vocalize. Will she have the strength to continue when he’s able to ask her to stop? When it’s his voice, his personality, half-formed?

She shuts her eyes, and that’s nearly enough to make this bearable: when all that she can hear is the Machine and that’s all that she can feel, even as her eyes vibrate behind her eyelids, this seems less real.

The first audio cycle ends, and the Machine quietens. Vic’s body doesn’t, so Beth presses play on the next file. No break; no time to reconsider.

She thinks that it could be a dream, but it’s so vague that she can’t tell. Vic says her name, over and over again. Muted and not quite right. The sounds are there but the mouth isn’t forming them quite properly. It wakes her and she rushes through, and there’s Vic, sitting on the edge of the bed.

Beth, Beth, Beth, he says. He rubs his face with his hands.

Oh my God, Beth says, and she puts her arms around him. She doesn’t know how much of him this will be, and she could pull away and that noise might start again. He says her name seven times and then stops, and starts crying. She tries to soothe him, and in a second he’s asleep. She lies him down and watches him. She lies next to him, in the nook made by the curve of his sleeping body, and she sleeps herself.

This could all be a dream, she thinks as she drifts off.

When she wakes up she’s in the room with him, but the Machine is on, and it’s playing; Vic’s speaking from another time entirely. Something from much later on in his treatments. She keeps her eyes shut, because she’s asleep, she tells herself. She doesn’t need to wake up yet. She doesn’t need to know what’s happening.

Word association, the doctor says.

Okay. Then they do it, a series of words that are connected and trite when Beth hears them back. All so obvious.

Morning, the doctor says.

Sun. The sun, Vic replies.

Bullet.

Pain.

Beth opens her eyes and sees the Machine’s screen lit up, playing back. It’s been activated: REPLENISH is illuminated. She’s on the bed. The Crown is on the pillow above her head; she looks up, peers up, and there it is, blinking. She sits up – Vic doesn’t seem to notice – and she pushes the pillow away.

I didn’t do this, she says. I didn’t take this down. She looks at Vic and grabs his arm and shakes him. Was this you? she asks. Did you get up? Did you do this? He doesn’t make a noise, but the Machine does.

It changes pitch. It shifts upwards, less industrial turbine, more washing machine or dishwasher, something normal and practical and household. Only louder. So much louder. Beth picks up the Crown, holding it between two fingers. The Crown itself shakes. She hadn’t realized that. Maybe that’s what hurts Vic: maybe it’s too tight on his head.

She slides it back onto the dock, and the voice persists.

Stop it, she says. She presses the screen but it keeps playing, so she doesn’t even fight it. She pulls the plug. It keeps playing. Fuck off, she says. She hits the screen.

Death.

Parents.

She shouts at the Machine, which wakes Vic up – his eyes peeling open, that’s it – and then hits the screen again.

I’ll fucking break you, she says. Stop playing that.

It stops. The screen goes black. Vic shuts his eyes.

Beth paces the flat in the darkness and then goes to her room. She shuts the door almost all the way, and then she lies on her bed. In the darkness she counts to fifty. Something that she learned from Vic, an army trick.

When stress descends, count back down, he had told her.

From ten? she had asked.

God no. If counting from ten solves it, it wasn’t proper stress in the first place. Fifty. A hundred. A thousand.

That’s what you do?

Yeah.

How long does it take?

If I make it to zero it means I’m going to sleep, he had said.

She counts. Somehow she sleeps.