Anja drew the woolen shawl across her thin shoulders tightly, sinking her chin to breathe in the fading scent of her mother. French lavender and the sea, all mixed up in one sharp whiff.
Time was measured in the beating of her mother’s mechanical heart. Thud, thud, thud. Space, in the number of steps taken to cross the room to retrieve the dried meals that arrived at regular intervals.
Her mother’s heart, rupture-proof, was now visible through a transparent film that had once been her skin, wrapped around a cage of bones. Anja could predict with split-second accuracy the rising and falling of each atrium, each ventricle. Each beat was exactly the same as the last. She watched it fill and squeeze, valves open and close, the ink-colored SmartBloodTM flowing thick and steady.
Thud, thud, thud. Like the footsteps of someone pacing back and forth along the corridor of a big, empty house. The heart would be the last thing to fail. It had the longest working life and had been the newest, most cutting-edge technology. The skin had been the first. Anja had watched as it mottled and shrank away from the bones, great stains of tea brown spreading.
DiamondSkinTM, they called it, self-repairing and extra tough. To a point, until her mother reached the end of her predicted enhanced lifespan, and the clinic doors of spotless glass slammed shut forever. So Anja waited, alone with her in this dark room that smelled of stale water, with nowhere to go.
* * *
When her mother first took to bed it was not so bad, because at least they could still talk. Back then, she could pretend things were normal, even as her mother’s muscles atrophied under the embroidered quilt and her lungs slowly collapsed into themselves. They passed their time in idle conversation, talking about anything and everything—music, Sweden, Anja’s father.
Sometimes Anja would play the violin for her, the strings pressing cold and cruel into her stiff fingers. She was out of practice, and it showed badly, but her mother no longer pointed out her mistakes. She didn’t seem to hear the flat notes or stray beats, only smiled quietly, eyes on the ceiling, hands clasped on her hollow stomach.
Anja longed for harsh words, for her mother to point out where she was going wrong and to call her lazy, complacent. To suck the air in through her teeth sharply and stamp her feet, to rap Anja hard on her knuckles the way she used to. So Anja started playing badly on purpose, notes slipping and sliding, rhythm askew, watching in quiet desperation for the slightest twitch of displeasure on her mother’s face. But it never came. All that remained was that blankness. Anja packed her violin away in its dark-velvet case, the shiny metal clasps making gunshot clicks as they snapped shut.
* * *
When Anja was a girl, a proper girl with ropey limbs and scattered acne, her mother used to take her swimming in the Baltic Sea. They would rise at dawn, when the clouds were still asleep and the air was damp with fog. Wrapped in thick bathrobes, they’d cycle the shrub-lined path in the dim light, anticipating each bump and turn before it came. The cloistered morning seemed to go on forever, as if in a dream. But then suddenly, just as their sandaled feet started to go numb in the wind, the path would open up and there it would be: lapping, metallic; the open sea. They stripped quickly, leaving their bathrobes in a pile, tripping lightly over rough sand and spiky little plants until they reached the edge of the surf. It was better to do it quickly, so they always plunged straight in, pushing through the suffocating chill that pressed from all sides until the sandy bottom dropped away and there was nothing left to do but swim. Her mother’s limbs shone like ivory in the pink morning light, fearlessly sluicing through cold. They did this every morning of her life; but then they came to New York, and there was nowhere to swim.
The day her mother said her last words, they had been talking about their beach. How the sand would rub their feet raw, the steely water blending into the sky. How the sharp cold, more heat than cold, never failed to take their bodies by surprise. Her mother wondering if their neighbor, Mr. Andersson, was still watering their plants as he had promised, waiting for the day when they would return to their little white house by the sea. Anja reminding her that Mr. Andersson was long gone, fifty years ago at least, before they even introduced life extension in Sweden. They had embraced it by now, of course, but were still a long way behind America.
It was in the middle of this reminiscing that her mother’s voice box quit, the muscles clenching around shapeless sounds until they gave up forever. At first, Anja kept talking, filling in with what she imagined her mother would say. It helped that her mother’s eyes were still alert, still met her own with a burning life. But eventually they dimmed. Then her skin started to fade, losing its color and opacity. It grew harder and harder to keep up the one-sided conversation.
Now Anja sat silently in the hard wooden chair next to her mother’s bed, listening to the pumping of her mechanical heart.
She told herself that her mother was long gone, her spirit extinguished like a flame in an airless room. She told herself that her mother was no longer there, that the body that remained was an imposter, a shell. A prison.
But sometimes she saw her mother’s translucent eyelids twitch, and she wondered. And always, always there was the relentless thud, thud, thud of the alien heart, a sound that haunted Anja in her sleep, in her dreams. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t shake the idea that her mother was still in there. Trapped in the dark, unable to speak or see.
How long had it been now? She couldn’t tell. The days smeared into one another.
* * *
Before they turned milky and white, her mother’s eyes had been the color of the sea. A clear, cold gray, the color of ice on a freshly frozen lake. When Anja looked in the mirror now, all she could see was her mother’s eyes staring back at her. Her mother’s eyes, her mother’s sharp nose, her mother’s pale salmon mouth.
* * *
Just to see, what’s the harm? That was what her mother had said when they first arrived in New York and walked past the clinic. So they got tested. It turned out they both had good genes, excellent genes, so good that they were eligible for all kinds of subsidized treatments. They laughed it off. That was not what they were here for; no, they were here for the music. Her mother to sing, Anja to play the violin.
But the thought of living forever was a slow-burning disease she’d caught from the moment they took those tests. Her mother started living like the Americans, no longer eating meat or even fish, her hefty bulk dwindling into an efficient, gym-honed leanness. She stopped running because of what it did to her knees. Eventually she sang less and less, because they’d told her about her heart, how it was the weakest link in an otherwise immaculate genetic makeup. There was also all that excess cortisol production involved in being a musician. Occupational hazard, as they called it.
Her mother became obsessed with enhancements, and then repairs. First it was the skin, regrafted every fifteen months; then the blood, souped up with microscopic smart particles, nanobots that cleansed and repaired and regenerated. The day they replaced her heart with a high-powered synthetic pump, Anja practiced the violin till her fingers turned purple and raw. At the clinic, she searched her mother’s face for clues as to where this would end.
Now she knew, of course. This was where. The two of them in this empty, damp room with nothing but a few instruments to their name. The treatments were subsidized only up to a point, growing more and more expensive as her mother reached the end of her predicted lifespan, until they had nothing left. All there was left to do now was wait.
* * *
Her tablet began to ring, but Anja ignored it, instead standing up and walking over to the window. She placed her hands on the smooth painted wood and pushed up. At first it wouldn’t budge, so she pushed again, this time harder, and the shawl around her neck fell to the floor. The window’s dusty seams creaked as it opened.
The smell of the city was crisp and sour. It hit her nose like salt water, making her eyes well up. The streets outside were empty, and most windows were dark. How many others were there, dying and unable to die? At least her mother had her.
The shrill cry of the tab bled out onto the empty streets.
Anja stepped back from the window, slipping a hand into her pocket. Her fingers closed around a card she had been carrying with her for a long time, ever since her mother had taken to bed. With her thumb she traced the curves of embossed numbers that she knew by heart now, a phone number printed under two words in bold red type: SUICIDE CLUB.