Machine Man (5 page)

I took a bite of my egg sandwich. I was out of my depth. Should I pluck my eyebrows? I didn’t know men did that.

Lola’s hip beeped. She unclipped her pager. “Bah. That can wait.”

Lola had other patients. Of course she did. Other men. She helped them walk and squeezed their hands when they took steps. I bet every one of them fell in love with her. Maybe not every one. She was kind of odd. But enough. I recalled a paper on how test subjects experiencing highly stressful events were disproportionately attracted to the first person they met afterward. The body confused arousal with attraction. I must be the latest in a long line of freshly dismembered men to fall under the spell of Lola Shanks. She was probably sick of it. If I told her I loved her she would look pained and explain that she really liked me and I was terrific but what we had was a working relationship. Then our sessions would be awkward. I should have realized this earlier.

“What?” said Lola.

I was staring. “Nothing.” I picked up my sandwich.

“I can’t believe you eat eggs,” she said. “They’re basically fetuses.”

NURSE KATIE
bustled into my room. She seemed very happy. “Good news. You’re going home.”

I put down my phone. “What?”

“You’ve been cleared for discharge.”

“What?”

“Oh, you,” said Katie. “Would you like me to help you dress? Or do you want to do that yourself?”

“I don’t … why am I being discharged?”

“I guess because you’re ready.” Nurse Katie was happy. She had cheeks like apples.

“I don’t think I am ready.”

“Well,” said Katie, bending to retrieve a pajama top. “That is not the medical opinion.”

I didn’t understand how this had happened. No one had warned me. I hadn’t been consulted. It felt like an eviction.

“Your company has arranged a car. It’s out front. So let’s get moving! Did you want some help with your clothes?”

I looked around the room. I didn’t want to leave. Here was everything I needed. “Shouldn’t I talk with my doctors first?”

“Oh, I don’t think you need more doctors.” Nurse Katie flopped a hospital-issue bag onto the bed. “You need to get out there and start enjoying life again.”

“But …”

“It’s all taken care of,” she said. “Chop-chop.”

NURSE KATIE
wheeled me out to the curb. This was slightly ridiculous because I was wearing the leg, but there were
rules. A van was waiting, a white one, with a Better Future logo. I didn’t know why they had chosen a van until Katie helped me into the passenger seat and rolled the wheelchair around to the rear. The chair was coming with me.

“Good luck!” called Katie. She waved through the window.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

Back
, I thought. But that was not an option. “Home, I guess,” I said.

I DECIDED
to jerk myself off. I wasn’t horny. I had nothing else to do. I had been home a week and was sick of Netflix. I sat at my workstation and browsed some porn. I looked at a girl with red hair and lips and wondered what it would be like to talk to her. I dug myself out of my pajama pants. I was overcooked pasta. I thought:
Kind of like a stump
, and that was a terrible idea, horrible. I began to shrink. I wondered if I should search for amputee porn, by which I meant porn for amputees, then realized that was not what I would find. I searched anyway. I found a beautiful woman with one arm and another with no legs below the knee and I thought they were pretty hot and kind of inspiring but I did not want to masturbate to them. I remembered a study on male chimpanzees and how those on the lowest social
rungs exhibited severely depressed sexual desire. I shut down the computer. I felt lonely.

I WOKE
to a terrible cramp in my foot. Not the foot I had. The other one. I groped around in the dark, grimacing and clutching at empty sheets. I hauled myself upright and turned on the lamp and threw back the sheets. “See. Nothing there.” I was talking to my brain. “Nothing to hurt.” I leaned forward and pretended to massage the space where my toes would have been. As a scientist, I am not proud of this. But it seemed to help. I swallowed some pills and kept massaging. I was ahead of my prescriptions. But this was a temporary problem. Soon my brain would figure out it shouldn’t be feeling phantom pain, because I was a pretty smart guy.

I WAS
on my sofa playing with my phone when it rang. I didn’t know what the hell it was doing. I was scrolling through an article and suddenly the whole screen changed and it made a noise I’d never heard before. I thought:
Pop-up advertising?
I saw:
BLOCKED, DECLINE, ANSWER
. I moved my thumb to the
ANSWER
button. It felt strange, as if I were attempting to microwave something in the TV. “Hello?”

“Dr. Neumann.” A woman. Not Lola. There was a lot of warmth in
Dr. Neumann
, like she enjoyed saying my name. It was a month for unfamiliar experiences. “It’s Cassandra Cautery. From the company. How are you?”

“Hello,” I said again. I was not good on the phone, obviously.

“I just wanted to reach out and see how things were.”

There was a pause, during which I realized this was a question. “Good.”

“Great!” Cassandra Cautery was quite hot, I remembered. I was talking to a hot woman right now. “I thought so. I’ve seen the reports from the hospital and they were glowing. I was extremely pleased. You know how much we’re concerned about you.”

“Okay.”

“I wanted to float an idea with you. The idea of coming back to work.” She paused. “This can happen completely on your timetable. We want to do it so it works for you. But—I’m not sure if you’re aware—there’s evidence that returning to work is extremely beneficial. For you, I mean. You get reengaged, get busy, you’re not just sitting around the house. Not that you’re doing that!” She laughed. My coffee table bore four half-empty boxes of cereal and half a dozen snack wrappers. On the bookshelf there was a carton of curdled milk I had been meaning to throw away for two days but always forgot about until I sat down. I had an e-mail from my internet provider telling me that although I was on a quote unlimited download plan end quote there were reasonable usage guidelines and they would appreciate it if I tried to stay within them. “I know how it is with engineers. Never happy unless you’re building something. So … do you have any thoughts about when you’d like to come back?”

“Um,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I mean … absolutely. Let’s do tomorrow.” I heard her shuffling papers. “That’s terrific. I’ll send a car. A van.”

“A car is fine. I have a leg.”

“A … of course you do. I’m thrilled you’re being proactive about this. I really am. It’s great if we can show you’re able to return to full duties relatively quickly. It just reduces any potential messiness on the legal side. You know?”

“No.”

She laughed. But I was not joking. “So let’s get you back on your … on the horse. How’s eight a.m. tomorrow?”

“Okay.” I took the phone from my ear and tapped
END CALL
. The screen faded to the home page. I had an appointment. I entered it into my phone, then checked the call log. There it was. An incoming call. It had lasted three minutes, forty-two seconds. I looked at it a while, because it was kind of remarkable.

I SHOWERED
, but not for long because I didn’t have a chair like in the hospital, where I could sit and feel water drain past my butt. I had to get one of those. I gripped the shower screen and hopped to my towel. I could have worn the Exegesis—it was water-resistant—but then I wouldn’t have been able to wash the stump. If there was one place I needed to wash, it was the stump.

I dried myself on the toilet, pulled on the stocking, and fitted the leg. I had not been wearing it much since I got home. Lola Shanks would be disappointed. When I stood, the plastic socket squeezed me and I thought:
That’s right, that’s why I don’t like it
. But I lumbered into the bedroom and opened the closet. When I was dressed I walked back to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I was leaning on my biological leg. I straightened. The Exegesis did not look so good poking out of the bottom of a pair of business pants. It looked like a forked tongue. Like I had stepped in something and become tangled. I felt nervous. At the hospital, lots of people had something wrong with them.

I walked into the living room and sat on the sofa. My phone rang. The driver. I sat there and did not answer. It stopped. Then it rang again. This time I tapped
ANSWER
. “Hello,” I said. “I’m ready.”

IT WAS
a black town car. The driver was overweight and had a cap and a little beard. He opened the rear door and told me it was a beautiful morning. Once we were on the road, he said, “That’s a fancy-looking foot you have there.”

I looked up from my phone. He was watching me in the mirror. “It’s an Exegesis.”

“Oh yeah? What does that do?”

“It converts kinetic energy into forward motion.” I was describing walking.

The driver whistled. “Nice,” he said. “Nice.”

WE PULLED
into the driveway that arced past the main lobby doors. The driver sprang out to open my door. Before I got my phone into my pants he was offering me his hand. I took it; he levered me to my feet. It was bright and I squinted. Two people came toward me: Cassandra Cautery and a tall, smiling man I didn’t recognize. “There he is,” said the man. “Great to have you back.” His ID tag said:
D. PETERS
. I think he was my section head. I didn’t recognize him because he was a senior manager and they didn’t go into the labs. D. Peters extended a hand and I shook it. It felt strange, like I was meeting him for the first time.

“We’re so pleased,” added Cassandra Cautery. She was smiling, too.

“Everything’s set up for you.” We began to walk toward the glass doors. I was a little awkward and my ski toes dragged. “That’s amazing,” said D. Peters. “What is that, ah, that called?”

“It’s an Exegesis Archion.”

“And what’s the idea there? With the design?”

“It doesn’t waste so much kinetic energy.”

He nodded. “Mmm. Clever.”

The glass doors parted. We entered the air-regulated coolness of Better Future. The lobby had very high ceilings, even for us, and was connected via a glass wall to the atrium. There were birds in there. They lived their whole lives inside the company. A couple of white coats crossing the floor glanced at my foot with professional interest. It was hard to walk when you were self-conscious about it.

“I’m going to let you get to work,” said D. Peters. “But if there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all, I’m a phone call away.”

“Okay.”

“Good man.” For a second I thought he was going to punch my arm. But he didn’t. He strode briskly away, to do whatever it was the managers did. Have meetings, I guess. Make phone calls. It was hard for us on the technical side to understand why the company required so many managers. Engineers built things. Salespeople sold things. Even Human Resources I could understand, kind of. But managers proliferated despite performing very few identifiable functions.

Cassandra Cautery swiped into Building A. I followed. “You can really move on that,” she said. I nodded. We didn’t talk for a while. When we reached the elevators, a few people joined us, but no one spoke. I couldn’t tell if they were uncomfortable around my leg or didn’t care. Cassandra Cautery inspected something on her sleeve. The elevator dinged and we stepped inside. A man tried to join us but Cassandra Cautery said, “Would you mind very much taking the next one? Thank you.”

The doors closed. The car hummed. Cassandra Cautery said, “I suffer from diastema.” Her face was faintly flushed. “It’s a gap between the teeth.” She dug a finger into her mouth and stretched back her lips. Between her canines
and her molars was a space, almost a centimeter wide. She released her lips. “I saw five different specialists but they all said the same thing. It’s inoperable. There’s a bundle of nerves there and the way the teeth are sitting, they can’t be moved without risking permanent damage. Facial paralysis.” She blinked three times. “It was hard to deal with. Growing up. I dieted. I ran and swam and did Pilates. The girls in my social group in high school, well, you probably won’t understand, but they were fierce. About appearance. I told my parents I wanted the operation anyway. I didn’t care if I got facial paralysis. They said no. We fought for months.”

The elevator doors opened. Cassandra Cautery glanced out. The corridor was empty. I shifted uncomfortably.

“But you know what? I’m glad I have this. I’m proud of it. Not proud. Grateful. For the lesson. You can’t be perfect, no matter how hard you try. That’s the message. You don’t stop trying to improve yourself. You keep pushing yourself in the areas you can control. But when you come up against something like diastema, all you can do is accept it. You can only take a deep breath and say, ‘This is who I am.’ ”

There was silence. “Okay,” I said.

“I’ve never told anyone else about this. I’d appreciate it if you kept it to yourself.”