Vic wakes her. She thinks, first thing, that she seems to do nothing but sleep: that this has taken so much out of her that she can hardly stand it. She’s on the sofa, curled up, her whole length pressed tightly between the sofa arms, and her body aches and moans as it unfolds itself.
You’re asleep, he says.
I know. I slept here.
You need to clean your head still, he says. She reaches up and touches the scab, hard and thick, and her hair is caught in it, knotted. She can feel the skin underneath the scab healing, slightly tender. She needs a shower, and she needs to clean the wound, and the hair. We’ll have a scar in the same place, he says. He touches it. He knows exactly how to touch her still. I’m worried about you, he says.
Don’t, Beth says.
I am. I do. He sits on the end of the sofa newly vacated by her feet. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know. There’s something about him that doesn’t look sad, Beth thinks. As if he’d eaten something that he shouldn’t have, or fucked another woman: a crime that had a payoff. A result. Something done to appease a hunger. I think maybe the Machine could wipe that I did it, he says. Is that a good idea?
No, Beth says. Don’t even think that.
But it won’t do any good, knowing it. And you could wipe it as well. Get it taken away, like it never happened.
It did happen.
Yes. But.
We have to leave, Beth says. Laura knows.
Your friend.
She’s not my friend.
She knows?
Yes. She knows that you’re back. She’s … Beth’s about to say something about the Machine, about what Laura thinks of it, but she catches herself. She doesn’t want to make Vic angry. Or the Machine. But she thinks about that boy, and how Vic saw him as a threat. She doesn’t want the same for Laura. She’s just nosy, Beth says, and she’s insistent, and she won’t leave anything alone.
He smiles. You used to hate that in people.
I still do, Beth tells him. She smiles at him, but it takes effort. He dresses himself, and she watches his body putting itself into his clothes, and she wonders if she could remove his memories of the murder. She couldn’t do it again, no, no chance of her putting him back into the hands of the Machine, because she couldn’t bear to see his face contorted that way again; and that noise from his mouth; and she couldn’t stand the wrenching away, piece by piece – like a finished jigsaw being picked apart, fingernails pushed under the pieces to remove them, watching the picture fall apart.
So we leave, he says to her from the bedroom. Right?
As soon as we can.
How soon is that?
Today. Tomorrow at the latest. We pack what we need, that’s it. Landlord can throw the rest.
What about that, in the other room? He looks at the bedroom wall, as if he can see through it to the Machine. She knows he can hear it, even though she’s never asked him. She just knows.
We disassemble it.
Okay. Vic nods, but Beth’s sure there’s something else there: a twitch. A tic.
She fetches bags from the bedroom, from underneath the bed: two large holdalls, one that used to be his, in their previous life, and one that used to be hers, and she puts them onto the bed and peels them open. She starts with her casual clothes: the stuff she can wear day to day, regardless of where they end up. She had planned for the UK, but there’s a lot to be said for abroad. Heading to France, maybe, where their money might go a bit further; or Spain, if they can cope with the heat there. She thinks about how much she’s been sleeping, and laughs at how easily she could adjust to the siesta lifestyle. Maybe Spain, she tells herself. Get the ferry to France, buy a car, drive down. Get the ferry to Spain itself, if Vic’s up to it. He used to get seasick. She wonders if that – his seasickness – will have made the transition, because it wasn’t mentioned in any of the recordings. Is seasickness part of a person? Or something embedded in a memory?
Vic stands by the front door.
I want to go for a run, he says.
It’s best if you don’t.
Why?
Because of the police.
They won’t ask me who I am.
Just stay here, please, Beth says. She realizes that she sounds desperate: but she doesn’t know why he’s being so casual about this. He sits on the sofa and stares at the wall, as if that is all that he is: he runs, he argues, he occasionally comforts her and apologizes. Why don’t you watch TV? Beth says.
No, he tells her. There’s no petulance in the voice, just a declaration that he doesn’t want to.
Then help me pack this stuff.
None of it is even mine, he says, which is untrue, because all the male clothes are his, every single item, but how would he remember that? So Beth does it for him: folding his t-shirts and shorts and trousers, which all seem to be white or shades of white, and which take up twice the space of Beth’s own clothes. She puts in toiletries, but they’re all hers, and then she decides against it: he needs ownership, she thinks. So she puts them back in the bathroom and decides that he should buy his own when they get to wherever they’re going, buy real male-scented toiletries that he wants to use. But then she wonders if he’ll even know what he wants, or if he’ll stare at these things on their shelves in the shop, and she’ll ask him what scents he wants, what sort of products, and he’ll be blank and clueless because it doesn’t matter to him. Because he never cried to a doctor, or to Beth, about the shampoo he preferred, and so it was never logged, and so it was never put back in. She wonders if maybe the gaps that the Machine filled in, if maybe one of them will have taken care of that. She wonders what Vic can smell at this moment. She sits on the bed and wonders these things as time rockets past, and all she can think, as she reaches every empty conclusion, is that she’s made a terrible mistake.
She takes one of the painkillers she bought, that she didn’t crush up for Vic, and another straight afterwards, deciding that one isn’t enough. Two isn’t even enough. Vic is asleep again – both of them are constantly exhausted, but after what they’ve been through maybe that’s okay – so she opens her laptop, standing with it at the kitchen worktop. On her forum, she looks at the topic that she created, and the replies. There are a few standard responses, from users who assume that she’s having problems – We’re so sorry, they say, or It’ll get there, give it time – and then there’s one from somebody whose username she doesn’t recognize. This is their first and only post.
They write that they’ve been a long-time lurker on the boards, but that they never had the urge to write anything before. They write that their partner – their choice of word, keeping everything ambiguous – had treatments in the earliest days, to get over a terrible event in their life. When they came out the other side, their faculties were hanging by a thread, and one day that thread snapped. It was, the post says, the worst day of their lives. (Beth thinks about what the writer wouldn’t have given to have had the Vic she was presented with: rough and unfinished and crudely drawn, but stable; and how she had destroyed him because she wanted so much more than that.) The writer’s partner spent four years, nearly, in a home, and then they were pulled out – not by the writer, but by the company who made the Machines. They needed people to trial their cure on: the writer didn’t see how it could make things worse.
There were five trial cases, the post says, and nothing has been said of them in public. They signed non-disclosure agreements and waivers of responsibility, but it was a way to get their loved ones back, in some shape or form. A year, they spent being worked on. (Beth thinks about her time rebuilding Vic, such a condensed period.) And then they were handed back to their loved ones: complete, or so they were told. Beth reads all this with her hands gripping the laptop sides, and biting into the inside of her cheek, worrying the flesh there with her back teeth. But they weren’t complete: the author of the piece doesn’t go into specifics, but says that there was something wrong.
They had it all back, says the writer, but there was something missing, and it made me think that there was something wrong with the way the Machine glossed over the gaps. But what if that wasn’t the problem? What if the problems – my partner had a temper, and said things that they would never have said before, looked at me like I was nothing, dead, filth – what if the problems are something that’s part of us already?
What if they’re part of humans, and we paste over them; and the gaps that are left after this, what if they’re just holes that let the darkness out?
Beth stands back from the work surface. She doesn’t write her own reply to the post; not because she doesn’t have anything to say, or doesn’t think that she can contribute, but because she can’t stop shaking, and she clings to the fridge, which is behind her, and she can feel that shaking with her, and she thinks, How did the Machine do this to us?