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.