She sleeps the last night she’ll sleep before she starts working on him properly: the last night when the flat is quiet, when she’s not worried about the implications, or whether he’ll make noise or choke on his tongue. She’s read, on her forums, that this can be harrowing. She’s read reports from husbands, mainly, desperate to get their wives back. How demeaning this is to everybody, how degrading.
The things I’ve seen, one person wrote. I never thought I’d see them like this.
But it was worth it? another nameless forum-user asked.
Oh g yes. Absolutely. Smiley face.
Beth lies in bed and stares upwards. She can see the flaws in the ceiling, where the upstairs neighbours walk heavily. They have an achingly heavy old pram and they keep their baby in it all the time, pushing her around the flat. The creak of their wheels as they do it is maddening, but it keeps the baby quiet. She barely cries. Beth assumes it’s a she. The paint in the ceiling easily cracks, and Beth’s sure it’s got worse. She would repaint it, if it weren’t for Vic, and for the fact that she’ll soon be leaving the flat. When they’re gone she’ll sell the place. Then there’ll be no rush, and it won’t matter how long it actually takes.
She sits on the lip of the bed. It’s just past five, and it’s starting to get light outside. Beth remembers when you used to have to change the clocks, and when some mornings it would be dark. Dressing for school in the pitch black, and walking to the bus as the sky turned pink. Now it goes from blue to yellow in gradient shades. Her bedroom door is already open, so that she can hear Vic if he stirs, and to allow a breeze – the thought makes her laugh – to pass through the flat. She pulls on clothes. She stretches in the doorway. No point in dragging this out.
She makes herself a cup of coffee in the percolator, one of the stronger blends, and the noise wakes Vic’s body up. Its eyes peel apart.
We’re going to get on with this, Beth says. She doesn’t care if the body understands: people talk to pets and babies to stop themselves going mad. To reassure themselves that, in some little way or other, a level of understanding will be reached one day. Whether that’s returning a thrown ball, or a complex understanding of language. Something.
She has a terrifying thought as she pulls tracksuit bottoms from the pile to dress him in: what if she misses a step? What if there’s something intrinsic missing from the Machine? Say, language, or the ability to move. Those parts of the brain. What if she makes Vic again and he’s left without anything, trapped inside that shell. She stands and worries about it. The urge to prevaricate passes.
She pulls Vic’s hospital-issue trousers to his ankles. The smell hits her. She didn’t take him to the loo, her first rule. The one she wasn’t going to break. He’s been sitting here … The nappy he’s wearing is soiled yellow and brown, and his thighs – thick, dark hair, coiled up like springs – are slathered. She starts to cry, and she catches herself, raises her hand to her mouth. She goes to the kitchen for the wipes and the nappies, and then decides against them. It’s too big a job. Instead she stands at his head and puts both her arms under his, trying to heave him to his feet. He’s remarkably compliant today, his muscles helping her slightly on the way. He steps, it seems, or maybe just supports his weight a little, and together they stagger towards the bathroom. Beth doesn’t have the strength to help him in, so she coaxes him to sit on the edge of the bath, and then swings his legs over. From there she pushes him to kneeling. She gets a plastic bag and pulls the nappy away, and all the shit tumbles out and into the pink bathtub. She folds the nappy – the mess all over her hands, and the smell rank and stale in the small windowless room – and puts it in the bag, which then sits in the corner of the room. Beth pulls the showerhead down, covering it in the shit from her hands, and puts the taps on, and then she sprays the showerhead at the end of the bath where Vic isn’t, washing her own hands off, and the taps, and then cupping the water around the showerhead to clean it down. She imagines herself under it, trying to get herself clean.
She doesn’t know what temperature to use, so she finds a level where it’s hot but not scalding. She sprays it onto the nape of Vic’s back and his body doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t know if it even can. If there’s any sort of self-preservation instinct. She read once that we are human because we can’t drown ourselves in shallow bodies of water: because something kicks in. If our faces meet water, adrenaline courses through our bodies, making our bodies thrash out, trying to wake us up if we’re asleep or passed out. Beth pulls the showerhead around Vic’s body and sprays it once, just quickly, onto his face. There’s no movement there, and he doesn’t flinch. She brings it back to the face, and holds it there. She can’t even see him breathing through it. She imagines the water eking its way into his mouth and nose, flooding his lungs. And he wouldn’t even try to stop it.
Back to the mess, and she washes it as best she can. She doesn’t touch it, and she moves the showerhead underneath him as much as she can. She doesn’t want to touch the dirty water that’s flowing out, the bigger parts of debris getting worn down in the thick hot mire of the plughole, the smaller particles flushing upwards, creating a ring around the tub. She holds the showerhead right underneath him, pointing upwards. No movement from him still, even like this, even with the water splashing around him. Fighting against him, almost. Beth wants to stop this, but he’s not even close to clean. She moves the shower around to his thighs and sprays them down, but it’s in the hair, so she has to use her hand. The flat of her palm, the fingers lifted away from the leg. She rubs. And his penis: this shrivelled beetle of a thing, years of being used for nothing but pissing rending it sad and weak. She rubs it with her palm. There was time when that would have been enough, and this would have gone differently. There was a time, she reminds herself, when she wouldn’t be cleaning shit off it.
She moves the showerhead to his arse again, and between the fleshy cheeks, trying to get it all. She keeps having to shower down the bath. Clean then rinse. Repeat. Clean then rinse, and he’s finally done. She washes down the bath with him in it, to make sure she gets it all – all the dirty water that’s somehow found its way between his toes, and into the hair of his shins, and on his fingers. She cleans both the bath and Vic’s body, scrubbing away with a sponge that she knows she’s throwing away as soon as this is done. She looks at him as she puts the sponge into the same bag as the filthy nappy: he’s slumped, penitential on his knees.
From here she knows that she’s moving him to the spare bedroom, to the bed next to the Machine. She knows that the treatments will hurt at first. It’s a pain that he’ll get used to, like having a tooth drilled, once he’s got over the shock. She wonders how long it’ll take to see the first parts of Vic back inside him. How long before he’s recognizable again. She wonders if it will be harder or easier to cause pain to her husband when he’s nothing but a void. A shell, like the Machine itself.
She pulls back the duvet cover and smoothes the sheet down, and she moves anything from the bedside table that could cause a problem. That he could lash out at and accidentally connect with. She leans over and presses the Machine’s power button, but it’s still unplugged: the noise is just the low-level one, the power-saving noise. So she plugs it into the wall and presses the screen again. That initial snarl. The internal fans begin. She can almost see them. Flickering, spinning, covered in dust. The dust flying around inside the Machine. She wonders why so much of it is hollow: when they were designing it, what the space was for. Why they needed so much that had nothing in it.
She remembers something about the brain that she read once, or that she was told: that we only use 20 per cent, something like that. A fraction. So much is untapped. Maybe that’s a myth, she thinks. It seems obtuse to have so much waste, when evolution has pushed us to our limits everywhere else. Maybe, she thinks, it’s just that we don’t understand exactly how it is used. It’s vital, that 80 per cent. It has to be.
In the bathroom she tries to work out how to get Vic’s body out. He’s too slippery so she tries to dry him there and then, rubbing the towel over his back and chest. Then down to his thighs, to get them dry, and his feet, as much as she can. She pictures him slipping in the bath and hitting his head, and then blood everywhere. Imagine cleaning that up, she thinks. She tries to get him to his feet but she can’t get traction, so she ends up in the bath behind him, pulling him to his feet again, and then easing him over the edge to the floor, one leg at a time. Something in him wants to preserve himself: he tries to balance when he can. He hasn’t completely abandoned that. She gets both his feet to the bath mat and then sets about drying the rest of him. Soon she’s on her knees, in front of him, drying his shins. She hasn’t been this close to him in years.
She sits him on the toilet.
Go on, she says. Go now. Nothing comes out so she runs the tap. She knows that’s enough to set most people off. Go on, she says. Then it happens, a slim trickle of piss out of the end of the penis, just enough to say that he’s been. Nothing from the other end. She sets an alarm to go off every four hours, reminding her to take him. She doesn’t want any more accidents. The clock lets her know that the whole process took the best part of an hour. She can’t do that several times a day.
She dresses him, making him step into the pants and the tracksuit bottoms one leg at a time, then pulling them up for him. And a t-shirt, which is a hassle, getting him to hold his arms up as she slips it on. She thinks that a shirt would have been easier to get him into. Stupid, really, never even crossed her mind. A short-sleeved shirt, easy to get on and off, and to regulate heat. Just open it. She kicks herself. Next time, she thinks, and that makes her laugh. As if.
She walks him to the bedroom. The Machine is whirring, and the sound drowns anything else that might be there. It’s like a force field, when you walk through the door. Outside the door there’s nothing, the ambient noise of the cats on the Grasslands and the birds that they’re desperately hunting, and the crying of the fat woman’s daughters and the squeak of the pram wheels from above. In the spare bedroom, with the Machine running, none of that registers. Just that fan, or that power supply, or whatever it is. A buzz, a whirr, a hum. A grinding, almost, if you listen to it for too long; or like anything at all. You can make it into anything. She leads Vic’s body in, moving him foot by foot, and he stops in the doorway. He isn’t looking at the Machine, but his feet plant themselves. Beth has to bend down and shuffle them forward one by one. She’s sure that he’s resisting.
Come on, she says. It’s not that hard. He seems to be leaning backwards, not enough to fall, but enough to change the balance of his body. And there’s a noise, Beth’s sure, coming from his throat. She leans in close: a whine. It might have been there all along, she can’t be sure, but she can hear it now, now that he’s this close to the Machine. He’s reacting to it. Please, she says to Vic. She keeps moving him forward. Onto the bed, sitting first, then she gets behind him and pulls him up the bed. The easiest way to move him. Soon he’s lying down and in the right place. His body seems tense at first, and then she turns his head, so that he can’t see the Machine.
She looks at the clock. She angles it to face them. She’s broken this down into sessions in her mind, an hour at a time to start with. Pick a file, work through it chronologically to keep track of it all – they’re all about thirty minutes long, and the chronology is a structure she’ll need to remember what she’s done. Put it back in the order in which it was taken. She’ll let it talk him through whatever it says, and she’ll let it fill in the gaps. She doesn’t have a choice about that part.
It was always unnerving, wondering where the memories came from when they hadn’t existed before. She thinks about the first time that he remembered something that she didn’t: when he spoke about what he had done for his twenty-first birthday. In reality he had been training, at some camp or other. He had called her up, drunk, and told her how much he liked her. He was so drunk, he said, that he wouldn’t remember it. He slurred it to her down the phone, and she knew that he was lying. He wasn’t as drunk as he claimed. And then, that one day, deep into his treatments, he remembered something completely different. An invented scenario in which they had been on a weekend away together. He asked her if she remembered what they had for breakfast, because he did. Something complicated. So much detail, more than you would normally recall. And none of the connections. And she had to smile and agree, and play along, because those were the rules.
Do we have any photos of that weekend? he asked her, and she said no. She reported it to the company, and they sent her a doctored picture, computer generated.
To help establish the fiction, they said in the attached email. She showed the photograph to Vic and he smiled.
That’s the place, he had said. Yeah, wow.
Beth wondered if there was a bank of such material inside the Machine, to help establish these memories. Pictures of places that the creators had visited; or yanked from brochures, pages torn out to feed into the thing. And maybe whole stories, created by a team of writers. In some ways, she thought, this is the newest form of drama: the creation of something from nothing, a play that’s made to be performed by couples, where one of them is oblivious to the fact that the other is acting. She wonders how that stuff gets inside the patient’s head. If it’s just zeros and ones, binary burned in.
She tries not to think about it too much.
Beth pulls the Crown down from the dock. This won’t hurt, she says to Vic’s body, and she pulls the umbilicus towards him, making it uncoil from where it’s withdrawn inside the Machine. She manoeuvres herself to the other side of the Crown – nearer to the Machine’s control panel, because this is where she’ll need to be – and she leans down to put the Crown onto the head. The panels slide on; a perfect fit. She wonders what the chances are that she and Vic have the same size head. She wonders if she has a large head, or he has a small one. Must be her hair, makes her head seem bigger.
The pads sit exactly on the burned-in scars on his temples, like they’d never left. She’s got some lubricant at the side of the bed, because she’s read that it can make it easier, so she puts some onto her finger and lifts the pads one by one, smoothing the jelly down onto his skin.
Right, she says. I think we’re ready.
Beth presses the Machine’s screen and it lights up. She can see the options. REPLENISH had always been intended to help those with dementia. To prompt them back into life: a secondary effect of the Machine’s powers, and one that the company behind it saw as a lucrative revenue source. There was a huge untapped market there, and the tech was already available at every hospital around the country. Soon it would be in every home that needed it, that was the plan. Fool-proof tech, software, hardware, and those who had loved ones afflicted by too few memories, or too many, could take care of the situation themselves. That was the pitch they gave to shareholders. Beth watched the conference on the internet, back when she was helping Vic herself. She remembers the applause that the announcement got.
REPLENISH. The Machine’s fans kick in at double, maybe triple time, and the thing sounds like it’s growling. The whole screen vibrates beneath her fingers, and she’s barely able to keep her hand there. Each touch is like pins and needles. The file menu appears and she picks the first.
We’re ready? Can you say your name for us? The doctor’s voice fills the room. She wonders how the Machine knows to not take that information, to not turn Vic into the doctor. There’s a lot she doesn’t know. She knows that it works, that’s enough.
Victor McAdams.
And could you state your rank and ID number, for the record?
Captain. Two-five-two-three-two-three-oh-two.
Great. Don’t be nervous, the voice says to him. He laughs. You know why you’re here?
Yes sir.
Don’t call me sir. My name’s Robert. First name terms here, Victor.
Vic.
Vic.
She’s putting him back exactly as he once was. She reasons that this is going to be easier if there are no more lies: if he’s back to being Captain Vic McAdams, scarred in the war, leaving the army by choice. No manufactured photographs. She wants him to be exactly the man he was, and they can go through the process – the healing, the therapists, the PTSD counselling – together, as they should have done in the first place. Can’t pretend that something didn’t happen. Can’t just brush it under the carpet.
On the bed, Vic’s body moves ever so slightly, twitches left and right. His face spasms slightly, and his eyes – Beth didn’t see them close – dart around underneath his eyelids, as if he’s dreaming. There’s no sound from him, only the rustling of his arms on the sheet.
So, tell me why we’re here, Vic.
Because I’ve been having trouble sleeping. There was an explosion, an IED, when we were on a mission. Went off when we were doing a sweep on a hospital which looked abandoned, and we were sloppy. I took the brunt, here and here. Beth can picture Vic pointing. He always pointed the same way: to his skull and then to his arm, as if the hole in his head and the tear through his bicep were the same thing, the same level of damage. I returned home, Vic continues, and was sent to recuperate, and then given leave. I was rewarded for saving my squad, they said.
You’re a hero.
So they say.
And now you’re here?
Because I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I, ah, replay the event. Dreams and such, and lucid dreaming, you called it.
Don’t worry about what I called it.
Fine. Sometimes I’ll be sitting with Beth and—
Beth?
My wife. We’ll be sitting together watching TV or whatever and I’ll zone out, and I’ll be somewhere else. And I could swear it. If she tries to wake me up … She tried to wake me up a few weeks ago and I hit her. And I knew it was her, but still, I hit her. Not because it was her, but I couldn’t stop it. I was somewhere else.
By the end of the hour, Beth’s worse than Vic. She had pictured him convulsing, worst-case scenario, and yet Vic’s body is relatively still. She’s the one who’s been affected. Hearing him talk about her like this, and knowing that this is what she’s putting back into him. That, when he wakes up, he might be back as he was. Her memories of what happened are different from his, though: because she remembers being there, and how he screamed at night, and sweated, and would cling to her when he woke up; and how he worked out all the time, until his skin was glossy and the lines of his scars throbbed; and how he stood in the bathroom for hours, no exaggeration, and used his finger to trace the lines of the scars, up and down, not even realizing that he was doing it, rubbing the already puckered and tender flesh sore; and how she would serve dinner, putting it onto the table at the same time every day, one square meal a day, and he would pick at it, pushing it away, growing ever thinner, while the lines on his face deepened. It never went so far as to be something you could call a disorder, but it was serious enough that she knew there was something really wrong. And she remembered how they could never watch the television shows that they used to, the series about the anti-terrorist group sidelined in favour of cooking shows and renovation shows and soaps, which he used to hate, but which posed no danger of sparking an episode, as he called them. And how, that first year he came home, fireworks night made him like a scared cat, the first bangs prompting him to turn up the volume of the television, and the second round making him put in headphones, and then the way that he shook slightly on the sofa. And how, at his worst, he drank a lot, becoming a cliché, but he hid it from Beth because, he said – when she finally caught him – he was ashamed, and that he thought he had a problem, and when Beth said that it was because of the war, he shrugged and thought about the next drink. And how he said to Beth that they should try again for a child, and she said no, because this was no environment to bring a child into. And how he saw things and remembered things that never happened, long before the Machine got involved, when they argued or reminisced (which was all they ever seemed to do), and Beth would at first contradict him and tell him that he was insane, but then soon, because it was easier, began to placidly agree, and let him have his way. And how he didn’t hit her just once, lashing out in confusion about who she was, but how he hit her a few times. He didn’t do it like an abuser, though: no trying to avoid visible bruises. He got angry and he struck whatever was closest. Four times, before he hit her, it had been the walls of their house. His fists left indents and cracked thick paint. She had been next, the first time because she was close, and she was asking him to get help because of how little he’d been sleeping. The marks underneath his eyes were like bruises on his cheekbones, or warpaint in some action movie. The second and third times were when they were in bed, and he woke up, and then he swung his fists. The fourth time was when Beth gave him the leaflet that the doctor had left them about the Machine, and begged him to consider it seriously. After that, she told him that there wouldn’t be a fifth time.
You hurt me again and this is over, so you have to think about that. What’s most important to you? Pride, or whatever’s left of this?
Beth takes the Crown off his head and puts it back in the dock, and presses stop on the Machine. It winds down: the sound of an oven cooling, the clicks of an engine in the cold. New noises that she’s never heard before and can’t explain. Looking at Vic’s body, Beth sees that it needs water. She hadn’t seen the sweat during the process, but it’s suddenly there, seeping out underneath him, sinking into the mattress.
You need a towel as well, she says. She goes to the kitchen and gets a little bottle from the fridge and a towel from the pile she’s got there, all cheap, bought from the pound shop and designed to be thrown away if need be. Not made for washing; she suspects that they wouldn’t last a proper spin cycle. She uses the towel first, wiping down his chest and then pulling him up, her arm behind his shoulders, rubbing his back down. She props her body behind him and unfolds the towel, laying it flat on top of the sheet. Then she pushes him back down. Relax, she says. She catches herself, talking to it like it’s a sentient being. Like it’s a him, and can understand her. It can’t, not yet.
She stands in the kitchen and opens one bottle of water and drinks it straight down, gulping it. She gasps in between gulps. She wonders at what point he’ll be recognizable again: when Vic will start to seep back into his body. The Machine contains all that is left of who he once was. Already it’s processed his story, the speech-to-text system inside it turning his spoken, quivering memories into data and patching them. Filling in the cracks in his story. Somewhere, inside the Machine, are the exact constituents of what – who – Vic will be. Like a version of him, somewhere, only maybe not arranged in the proper order, and therefore not conscious, and not alive. The God-botherers argue that the soul is a solid thing, a distinct entity, and that when you tamper with it, you destroy it entirely. A soul that’s broken is no soul at all. By that logic, Vic’s soul is simply waiting to be reassembled. What is it, before it becomes whole? Before it works again?
With one bottle done and crushed in her hand, and thrown into the recycling bag, she opens another. She hadn’t noticed how hot she was. And listening to him, being in that room, has given her the start of a headache – are there fumes, from the Machine? Or is it just the heat of the fans, the hard drives, the memory inside the thing burning its way out? Not serious enough to pop the ibuprofen open – she worries that she won’t have enough. They weren’t even meant for her, but for Vic. For when it starts to hurt him. She eyes the diazepam and hopes that she won’t have to use them. Maybe this will go easier than she’s been fearing.
He still hasn’t moved when she gets back into the bedroom. She goes to the Crown, and feels that the pads are still wet with the lubricant, so she puts it straight back onto his head. She knows that listening to the playback of the voices aloud is an indulgence, totally unnecessary. It’s something to make it easier for her. What’s important is the code that’s being buzzed into him by the Machine. But it makes her happier, to hear his voice. To picture that this is how he’s being rebuilt, piece by piece, slotting together like Lego.
We’re ready, Beth says. She presses play.
Captain Victor McAdams.
Okay, Vic. Want to tell me about your last exercise? As many details as you can remember.
No. Not especially, Vic says. Beth can hear the smirk in his voice. He could be such a shit when he wanted to be. Fine, he says, breathing out. A huff, almost. We were somewhere I’m not allowed to say—
You’re allowed to say here.
I’m not.
This is between us.
So it can be between us and I won’t say the name of the place.
Do you think that this is all a trick?
You’re not army. Whatever you’re cleared for, I don’t know. So. You want the rest?
The doctor acquiesces. Please.
We were there, checking out a hospital, and there were only three days left before we moved to the next area. So it’s routine, place has been cleared out. Should be easy. And there’s a school that we checked, right next to this hospital. Hospital used to be a block of flats, but they converted it into whatever. School was empty, and we did it, routine. So we got slack. Beth hears him grit his jaw. His voice tightened when he did it: a level of audible stress. The recording continues: When we got to the hospital – and you have to remember, these things take like half a day to do a sweep, so it’s not something we breeze in and out – we were sloppy. No contact in a week. No shots fired in even longer, maybe three or four weeks. So that meant we were sloppy.
Okay.
On the bed, Vic’s body quivers and shakes. His hands pull themselves closed, making balled fists. His fingernails, which need cutting, dig into his palms. His toes curl over, the way they used to when he came during sex, his feet forming exaggerated arches, his legs twitching.
We went through and I was taking point, and I didn’t see it until too late. Something I triggered that was going to go off, and we were piling through the doorways because we were complacent. I suppose. So when I saw the flash – they do this little flash first, like the ignition on a boiler, the pilot light, you know – and I saw it and I thought, Well, fuck, this is my fault. I take this one.
That’s it?
Made sense. I was sloppy. I triggered it, so it was mine to take. And that means I got like this. There’s the noise of him moving, in the room. I got like this, and it blew shrapnel here and here.
Beth can see him, slightly re-enacting his movements in twitches and gestures. Remembering it exactly. He was so exact, such a creature of habit. Of repetition.
And that’s all I remember, until they dragged me off. I woke up in the helicopter but I don’t remember that part. Apparently I was awake, I don’t know. And then I was home. I remember seeing Beth when I got back, because she was waiting for me to wake up. That was about two weeks later, when I woke up properly. They’d operated already and everything. Taken the shrapnel out. And there was Beth, waiting for me.
Beth remembers it as well, but she can also remember those two weeks in the hospital, weeks that he has no recollection of, when she stood by this enormous incubator-like device that was keeping him alive, as they pulled the shrapnel from him over the course of two operations. They told her that he was lucky to be alive. She prayed that he would make it awake intact.
Vic’s voice tells the rest of the story to the doctor, and to Beth, and they both listen. Here, Beth finds herself sitting on the end of the bed, near to Vic’s feet. They twitch and curl up seemingly with every punctuation point of Vic’s speech. After a while, Beth puts her hand onto his right shin. She does it to steady them – to let him know that there’s somebody there, as if that might help – but she finds that she sort of likes it.
She imagines her husband trickling back into this body. She fantasizes that he is filling up, from the bottom of his body first, like water into a jug, and she’s touching the only part that might now be him.