Unwelcome Bodies (13 page)

“What about Selene?”

The blur shimmies, making Alice’s head swim. “She’s got a long road to recovery ahead of her. We need a team in place within the month. I’ve spoken to your doctors, and they feel that’s a highly aggressive schedule, but they say you could meet that deadline if you really work at it.”

“Will…will Marika be on the project?”

Another shimmy. “No. Her specialty was the brain/sensor uplink, and of course, caretaking. She had nothing to do with interpreting the data you three collected.” Alice hears a small sigh. “What we did to you girls was inexcusable.”

“No, we volunteered.”

“I don’t think little girls can really give that kind of consent.”

“But the ships—”

“Almost destroyed the entire colony. I know. They killed my family, too.” The white splotches vanish from the brown blur, then reappear. “Look, I know how important this project is to you. I want you back on the team. I owe you that, at the very least. No one has more experience interpreting surveillance data than you. No one.”

Alice closes her eyes. It’s too hard to think when she’s trying to puzzle out what her eyes are sending to her brain.

The project needs her. She needs Marika. The project will not help her get Marika back, but it will help keep the colony safe.

Ten years ago, lying in another hospital bed, she was offered that same job. She sacrificed so much for it then.

This time, no sacrifice is required.

When she looks at it that way, the answer is clear.

She reopens her eyes, looks at the twinkling blur, and says, “I’m in.”

* * * *

From that point on, she makes good progress, adjusting about as well as the doctors expect. Her vision is jumpy and often confusing, and many of her muscles are severely atrophied, but soon she’s able to use a motorized wheelchair, and go to the bathroom on her own, and use her new eye controls to filter out confusing input so she can focus on a task.

The day they finally let her go out for the first time, she heads straight for the park. There is warmth on her too-pale skin, a riot of color in all directions, the cries of children playing, and scents that threaten to overwhelm her senses after a decade of smelling only metal.

She steers her wheelchair off the path and onto the grass.

“Hey!” her nurse calls, but Alice ignores her and keeps going until she reaches a shady patch under one of the few trees that looks old enough to date from before the bombardment. She eases herself onto the ground, ignoring the protests of her feeble muscles, and lies on the cool, tickly grass, staring up into beautiful, beautiful green.

And laughs.

She hears a motorized whine, and looks up to see Jayna peering down at her. “There’s a bug in your hair.”

She pats the grass next to her. “Come on down. I’m sure there’s plenty to go around.”

Soon, they are released from the hospital and are given their own apartment, where Alice thrills over being able to do little things like prepare her own food, sleep in a bed, bathe herself, walk. And every day, she and Jayna analyze unusual data from the surveillance computers, doing their part to keep the colony safe. It is so much more than she’s ever had. It should be enough.

But she is lonely.

No one touches her anymore. No one whispers endearments in her ear speakers. No one makes her tremble, makes her head heavy with desire, makes her feel flush and warm all the way down and fluttery in the middle.

No one calls her beautiful.

In fact, from the sidelong glances she gets whenever she goes out, she knows she’s lucky that no one bothers to comment on her looks at all.

“Well, that was new,” Jayna says as they wheel into their shared apartment. “I don’t think we’ve made a little kid cry before.”

“Maybe the chairs scared him.”

Jayna shoots her a glare. “Face it, we’re hideous. Freaks of science. It’s a life of spinsterhood for us. At least for a while you had…well, whatever it was you had.”

“She won’t talk to me,” Alice murmurs.

“You don’t fit her fetish anymore.”

“It wasn’t a fetish.”

“I’m not saying that fetishes are bad things. Hell, I’d love to find someone whose kink I fit. There’s got to be someone out there into scar tissue and wheelchairs.” She wrinkles her mashed nose. “Then again, maybe I should just put in for plastic surgery. Maybe they’ll give me dating lessons too. ‘Hi, I just learned to pee all by myself again. Wanna go out?’”

“I don’t think that’ll work,” Alice says. She levers herself out of her wheelchair and grabs her crutches. She is determined to be walking unaided as soon as possible.

“You’re probably right. I could try, though. I mean, what would it hurt?”

With a smile, Alice says, “You never know. You could get lucky.”

Jayna laughs. “Yeah. I guess I need to find just the right fetishist of my own—”

Alice whirls around, nearly losing her delicate balance. “Will you stop calling her that?”

“What do you care what I call her? It’s not like she stuck by you or anything.”

Alice looks down at her feet. “I know. But I still miss her.”

“So do something about it already.”

“But she won’t see me.”

“She’s fine with seeing you. She just doesn’t want you to see her back.”

Alice’s head snaps up, her eyes focusing beyond the room. That’s it. Why didn’t she see it sooner?

“Thanks,” she whispers, and clops down the hall on her crutches.

“For what?” Jayna asks.

But Alice doesn’t answer. She hobbles into her room, sits down heavily at the computer, and types out a message.

“Marika. I have a proposal. I think we can make this work. Please come visit me. Bring a mask.”

She gets an answer within moments. “I’ll be there.”

* * * *

Marika arrives the next day. Alice has asked Jayna to answer the door for her and bring Alice the mask. It is a white full-faced hood, and the eyes, ears, and mouth are taped over. Sitting in her mechanized wheelchair, Alice pulls a keypad onto her lap, tugs the mask over her head, lining up the nostril holes so she can breathe, and freezes in sudden panic.

She is crippled again.

This won’t work. It can’t work. She can’t go back to this. At least last time, it was for selfless reasons, but now—

The muffled sound of approaching footsteps snaps her mind out of its panicked spiral. Through the plastic and the tape, she hears the bedroom door close, a body sink into a chair.

She lets out a long breath. No. She has to try. Besides, she can stop it at any time. She has that power now.

Alice carefully positions her hands over the keypad and types, “Can you look at me this way?”

There is a long pause, then through the tape, she faintly hears Marika answer, “Yes…I…I think so.”

The panic screams at her from the animal parts of her brain, but after ten years strapped helplessly into a chair, she’s gotten good at ignoring her flight response. “Do you think you can love me this way?” she asks.

She feels a shaking hand touch the plastic over her face, then jerk away. “I don’t know. It’s not…it doesn’t look like you.”

“We can have a new mask built. It can look just like the old one.”

“But you…” The hand flutters to her chest. “The tubes are gone.”

“I know.”

“And…the walker…”

“I can stay in the wheelchair for you.”

“It’s not the same. You’re… I know you’re whole under there. I know you can get out of that chair, pull off that hood. You’re not my captive girl any longer.”

“I know. But I’m willing to pretend. Isn’t that enough?”

She hears a sigh. “I don’t know.”

“Well let’s find out.”

“Alice, I…I’ve never felt this way about anyone else. Never.”

“I haven’t either.”

“What if it’s because of the mask? What if I can’t love you out of the chair? I’m terrified that we’ll try and…”

Alice nods. “I know.”

“At least if I walk away, I can’t be disappointed.”

“But it’ll still hurt.”

There’s silence, and she hopes she’s struck a nerve.

Finally, Marika says, “This isn’t normal. You deserve normal.”

Alice laughs behind the plastic. “Honestly, I wouldn’t know what to do with normal. Not after…” Not after her senses were hijacked. Not after she spent over half her life crippled and strapped to a walker. Not after she sacrificed her childhood so that other children wouldn’t have to. She lifts her fingers from the keypad and clenches them into fists.

Gentle hands clasp her fists and massage them until they relax.

“You deserve someone who loves you for what you are,” Marika says. “Not for what we made you.”

Alice lays her hands back on the keypad and types, “It’s too late for that. I am what you made me. And now I need you to love me again. You can put me in the old mask, and the old chair. I’ll be the old me for you, and the new me when you’re not around.”

Marika clasps the mask and rests her forehead on Alice’s. “God, I missed you.”

“We’ll make this work,” Alice types. “We have to.”

* * * *

Marika’s doorbell rings four times. That’s the signal.

Alice logs off of the work database and closes her eyes, letting a deep breath out through her nose.

This is never easy. But these are the rules.

She grabs her canes and limps over to the walker. It’s a terrifying contraption—one that she’d never seen with her own eyes for all the years she spent in it. Dull metal, faded padding, straps and buckles, and that rail circling the entire thing, trapping the occupant inside.

Trapping her inside.

But she doesn’t need to look at it for long.

She pulls off her clothes, straddles the chair, and carefully connects the seat/body interface until it is just right. Then she pulls on the thin cotton gown, tying only the very top tie, letting the rest hang loosely off of her still-thin frame.

And then there’s the mask.

This is the hardest part.

It takes several deep breaths for her to work up the courage. But she finally closes her eyes and pulls it over her face, making sure the breathing tubes and earplugs are perfectly aligned before tightening the straps around her shaved scalp, sealing her inside the sound- and light-proof prison.

It’s always heavier on her face than in her hands, and she sags forward, shuddering under the weight.

She slides her hands into the thumbless mittens that are now permanently strapped to the rail. Marika won’t walk in until she uses their controls to type the all clear.

And she hesitates, just like she does every day.

No. This is love. And love requires sacrifice. Hers is just more tangible than most.

She steels herself, then types, “I’m ready.”

She feels the air change as the door opens, and there are hands strapping her into the mittens, trapping her in the chair until morning.

And as always, panic grips her with that realization.

But then hands and lips roam all over her, and she’s lost.

Notes on “Captive Girl”

The inspiration for this story came to me one Boskone. There was a painting in the art show of a woman with the top half of her head completely covered in a metal helmet. Wires trailed from it, and there was a wire-covered glove on her outstretched hand. The image lodged itself solidly in my mind. Later that weekend, I went to a writing panel, and one of the panelists mentioned that you should write about things that fascinate you to the point of scaring you. So I started musing in my notebook about how terrified I was of the thought of total captivity, which lead me back to the painting, which eventually turned into a girl strapped into a chair with all her senses (but touch) hijacked for a greater cause. And because I’m a sicko, I turned it into a love story.

My initial impetus for making it a lesbian love story was that I thought it would seem less exploitative to have an older woman as Alice’s lover than an older man. But as I started writing, I came to realize that another benefit of having them both be women was that I got to explore the peculiarly female aspects of a relationship from both sides. It would have been a very different story if one or both of them had been men.

Last Bus

SHE STANDS IN FRONT OF the tidy brick house and gazes up the sloped, neatly-mown lawn at it. This is the place. The last stop. She walks up the front sidewalk, takes the narrow flagstone path around to the side of the house, heads into the little roofed-in area between the house and the garage, and starts searching. There it is, right under the mailbox in the nook leading to the side door. The little faded yellow egg sticker.

She sits down and waits. The bus should be by soon.

She wonders how the bus is going to make it into this little space—a small walkway between the side door and the garage, the washer and dryer taking up half the available room. She wonders how the driver will see her, tucked away under the mailbox like she is. But those thoughts immediately slide back out of her head. The bus will come soon. This is the stop. The egg sticker is there. The driver will see her. This is the last bus. Soon, she’ll be home.

A gray-haired woman in an old housedress walks by, a full laundry basket tucked under her arm. “The bus doesn’t stop here anymore,” she says.

She just smiles at her and says, “I’ll wait.”

The woman shakes her head and walks into the house.

She settles back against the wall, knees drawn up, waiting. It might be a long wait. She thinks she might have just missed the earlier bus. But it’s a beautiful day, and the nook is a sunny peach color, so the wait doesn’t seem so bad. She wonders if she should have brought something to read, or maybe a notebook to write in, but it’s too late now. She can’t go back. She wouldn’t want to even if she could. She’s moving forward; almost at the end. All she has to do is be patient and wait.

Then he walks into view, smiling pleasantly down at her, a faint twinkle in his eyes. She feels a slight stirring inside of her. The attention is nice. It’s been a while. She tries to think how long, but that also slides away as soon as she calls the thought up.