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MACHINE MAN
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN: 9781448169832

First published in United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 2011, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Transworld Digital an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Max Barry 2011

This entire work was serialized in somewhat different form from March 2009 to December 2009 on www.maxbarry.com/machineman.

Max Barry has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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FINE, IT’S FOR MINTER.

1

AS A BOY, I WANTED TO BE A TRAIN. I DIDN’T REALIZE THIS WAS unusual—that other kids played with trains, not as them. They liked to build tracks and have trains not fall off them. Watch them go through tunnels. I didn’t understand that. What I liked was pretending my body was two hundred tons of unstoppable steel. Imagining I was pistons and valves and hydraulic compressors.

“You mean robots,” said my best friend, Jeremy. “You want to play robots.” I had never thought of it like that. Robots had square eyes and jerky limbs and usually wanted to destroy the Earth. Instead of doing one thing right, they did everything badly. They were general purpose. I was not a fan of robots. They were bad machines.

I WOKE AND REACHED FOR MY PHONE AND IT WAS NOT THERE. I GROPED around my bedside table, fingers sneaking between novels I didn’t read anymore because once you start e-reading you can’t go back. But no phone. I sat up and turned on my lamp. I crawled underneath the bed, in case my phone had somehow fallen in the night and bounced oddly. My eyes were blurry from sleep so I swept my arms across the carpet in hopeful arcs. This disturbed dust and I coughed. But I kept sweeping. I thought: Have I been burgled? I felt like I would have woken if someone had tried to swipe my phone. Some part of me would have realized.

I entered the kitchen. Kitchenette. It was not a big apartment. But it was clean, because I didn’t cook. I would have spotted my phone. But I did not. I peered into the living room. Sometimes I sat on the sofa and watched TV while playing with my phone. Possibly the phone had slipped down between cushions. It could be there now, just out of sight. I shivered. I was naked. The living room curtains were open and the window looked onto the street. The street looked into the window. Sometimes there were dog-walkers, and school-going children. I shivered again. I should put on some clothes. My bedroom was six feet away. But my phone could be closer. It could be right there. I cupped my hands over my genitals and ran across the living room and pulled up sofa cushions. I saw black plastic and my heart leaped but it was only a remote. I got down on my hands and knees and felt around beneath the sofa. My ass tingled with the first touch of morning sun. I hoped nobody was outside that window.

The coffee table was bare on top but laden beneath with reference books I hadn’t touched since Google. A phone book, for some reason. A phone book. Three million sheafs of dead tree stacked up as a monument to the inefficiency of paper as an information distribution platform. But no phone. I sat up. A dog barked. For the first time ever I wished I had a land line, so I could call my phone. I peered at the top of the TV and it was empty but maybe I had put my phone down there and it had been dislodged by minor seismic activity. As I crossed the room, my eyes met a jogger’s. Her face contorted. That might have been from exertion. Behind the TV was a cord-based civilization but no phone. It wasn’t on the kitchen bench. It still wasn’t on my bedside table or the carpet or any of the places I had already looked. My teeth chattered. I didn’t know how warm it would be today. It might rain, it might be humid, I had no idea. I had a desktop but it took forever to boot, more than a minute. I would have to choose clothes without information on the environmental conditions. It was insane.

I showered. Sometimes to solve a problem you need to stop trying solutions. You need to step back. I stood under water and mentally retreaded the previous night. I had worked late. I had arrived home around two. I don’t think I ate. I went to bed and fell asleep without even using my phone at all. I realized: It’s in my car. It made perfect sense. I turned off the water. I had not used soap or washed my hair but from water was probably 80 percent clean. That was a pass. I wrapped a towel around my waist, grabbed keys from the kitchen, and padded out of the apartment. The stairwell was ice. I almost lost my towel trying to open the door to the underground garage. My car was in the sixth bay and already I could see the empty dock. I bwip-bwipped it open anyway and crawled inside to search between seats. I could not believe I had driven all the way home without docking my phone. Or maybe I could. Sometimes I left it in my pocket and realized only when I stopped the car and reached for it. That had happened. And last night I had been tired. It wasn’t inconceivable. The phone could be anywhere. It could be anywhere.

I stared out the windshield at a concrete wall and became sure my phone was at work. I had taken it out of my pocket because you couldn’t take electromagnetic equipment into Lab 4. It was on my desk. Anyone could pick it up. No. There were cameras. No one would steal my phone. Especially if I arrived early. I groped for my phone, to check the time, and groaned. This was like being blind. I put the keys in the ignition and remembered I was wearing a towel. I hesitated. I took the keys out again but it felt like a tearing. I got out of the car and fixed my towel and took the steps two at a time.

DRIVING IN, I GRIPPED THE WHEEL. THE SUN BEAT THROUGH THE windshield, mocking my sweater. I had overdressed. I reached the point where I had to decide between the avenue or by the park and didn’t know which had less traffic. I hadn’t read a news headline for hours. War could have broken out. There could have been earthquakes. I turned on the radio for the first time in years and it jabbered about discount carpets and what an excellent medium for advertising radio was and would I like to win a thousand dollars, and I stared at it in disbelief and turned it off. I wished I had my phone. I didn’t even want to do something specific. I just wanted the possibility to do things. It could do so many things.

The avenue was choked with traffic, of course. I sat there and exchanged ignorance with time. Finally I turned the car into the science district and sped past research houses and machine fabricators. At the end, on the river, was Better Future: an eight-story complex of a half-dozen connected buildings, a wide lawn out front and razor wire everywhere else. There was more underground but you wouldn’t know. At the boom gate I fumbled my security pass and had to get out to pick it off the concrete. A security guard wandered out of his booth and I tried to wave him away because the last thing I needed now was conversation. But he kept coming. “Morning, sir.”

“I’ve got it.” I swiped the card. The boom rose.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes. Just dropped my card.” A hot wind blew by. I tried to pull off my sweater and my security tag snagged in the sleeve and slipped from my fingers again. By the time I freed myself, the guard was offering it to me.

“Hot one today.”

I looked at him. This sounded like a criticism of my information-impaired clothing choice. But I couldn’t be sure. I opened my mouth to request a clarifying restatement, then realized it didn’t matter and took the card. I got back in the car and drove into the bowels of Better Future.

I SWIPED FOR THE ELEVATOR AND AGAIN FOR ACCESS TO BUILDING A. We were big on swiping. You couldn’t go to a bathroom in Better Future without swiping first. There was once a woman whose card stopped working and she was trapped in a corridor for three hours. It was a busy corridor but nobody was permitted to let her out. Ushering somebody through a security door on your pass was just about the worst thing you could do at Better Future. They would fire you for that. All anyone could do was bring her snacks and fluids until security finished verifying her biometrics.

I passed the atrium, which was already filling with young people in white lab coats and older managers in suits and skirts. At the central elevator bank was a young woman with dark hair. Marketing, or possibly recruitment. The call button was lit but I moved to re-press it anyway, then stopped myself because that was completely illogical, then went ahead and did it because, seriously, what was the harm. It wasn’t like I was doing anything else. As I stepped back, I saw the young woman looking at me and glanced away, then realized she was starting to smile and looked back but then she was looking away and it was too late. We stood awhile. I reached into my pocket for my phone. I hissed. She said, “Take forever, don’t they?”

“No, I lost my phone.” She looked confused. “That’s why I was …” I trailed off. There was silence.

“They’re all on three,” she said. According to the display, three cars were at Sublevel 3 and the fourth was right behind them. “All these engineers, you’d think we could figure out how to decluster the elevators.” She smiled. “I’m Rebecca.”

“Hmm,” I said. I was familiar with the elevator algorithm. It sent cars in the same direction so long as they had a destination, then allowed them to reverse. It was supposed to be efficient. But there was an alternative that allowed people to enter their destination before getting in, which allowed the scheduler to make more intelligent decisions. The problem was the system could be gamed: people figured they got elevators faster by mashing buttons. I wondered if cars should move away from one another when idle. It might even be worth delaying one car to create a gap. You would slow one journey but benefit everyone who came after. I should run some numbers. I opened my mouth to say this and realized an elevator had arrived and the woman was entering it. I followed. She pulled her satchel close to her body. She seemed tense. I tried to think of something to say but all I could think was, Takes forever, doesn’t it, which was what she had said to me. She got out at Organizational Communications without looking at me.

I AM NOT A PEOPLE PERSON. WHENEVER I’M EVALUATED, I SCORE VERY low on social metrics. My ex-boss said she had never seen anyone score a zero on Interpersonal Empathy before. And she worked with engineers. If anyone is having a party, I am not invited. In meetings, during downtime, the people I’m seated between will both talk to the person on their other side. There’s something about me that is repellent. I don’t mean disgusting. I mean like magnets. The closer people get, the stronger their urge to move away.

I am a smart guy. I recycle. Once I found a lost cat and took it to a shelter. Sometimes I make jokes. If there’s something wrong with your car, I can tell what by listening to it. I like kids, except the ones who are rude to adults and the parents just stand there, smiling. I have a job. I own my apartment. I rarely lie. These are qualities I keep hearing people are looking for. I can only think there must be something else, something no one mentions, because I have no friends, am estranged from my family, and haven’t dated in this decade. There is a guy in Lab Control who killed a woman with his car, and he gets invited to parties. I don’t understand that.

I EXITED THE ELEVATOR AND SWIPED FOR ACCESS TO THE GLASS ROOM. We called it the Glass Room because it overlooked several adjoining labs, but actually the walls were green-tinged polycarbonate plastic. Apparently they were glass until an incident involving a spilled beaker, a weapons-grade pathogen, and panicked techs with office chairs. I heard two versions of this story: in one, the pathogen was harmless and served as a wake-up call to everyone concerned. In the other, two people died before the complex could be locked down, and another six afterward, when they flooded the labs with gas. It was before my time so I don’t know which was true. All I know is the walls are plastic.

The moment the door opened, I could see my phone was not on my desk. I pawed through papers, just in case. I checked the drawers. I kneeled on the plastic floor. I did a circuit of the room, checking other desks, then again, slower, encompassing all horizontal surfaces. Then I reeled into my chair and closed my eyes. I had grabbed at this idea of my phone being at work without properly considering the probabilities. Would it have killed me to do one more sweep at home? My phone was probably on my bedside table, stuck between novels. I had looked there pretty thoroughly but maybe I hadn’t. I opened my eyes and rotated my office chair to survey the room slice by slice. Nothing. Nothing. I had an idea and picked up my office phone to dial my cell, but froze with my finger above the buttons because I did not know the number. It was on my phone. Everything was. I sat there and did not know what to do.

MY LAB ASSISTANTS ARRIVED. I HAD THREE: JASON, ELAINE, AND Katherine. Katherine was the one who wasn’t Chinese. I was supposed to be teaching them something while they worked, but I had never been sure what. I knew I was a disappointment to them. They had made it into one of the most exciting research labs in the world and their mentor turned out to be me.

They donned white coats and stood there expectantly. Elaine glanced at Katherine and Katherine rolled her eyes and Elaine jiggled her eyebrows like: I know. This was right in front of me. I should have come down on them but it seemed stupid to say, Stop jiggling your eyebrows. They probably knew this. I had no such problems with Jason, who would say what he thought, if you asked him directly.

Elaine said, “Should we get started sometime today?”

“On what?”

Another glance with Katherine. She gestured to the glass. The plastic. The lab beyond. “On durables testing, of course.”

We were supposed to be bombarding a lightweight carbon polymer with radiation. The idea was to check that it wouldn’t melt. On our three previous attempts, it had melted. It was interesting to watch but frustrating on a professional level. It was probably going to melt again. This was not what I wanted to be doing, with my phone missing: watching a polymer melt. But I stood and went to get my coat because, after all, it was my job.

JASON RETRIEVED THE POLYMER WHILE I SWIPED INTO LAB 4 AND powered on the Clamp. The Clamp was a pair of hydraulic-powered steel plates, good at holding things and not melting. The rest of the room housed a spectrograph, a compact accelerator, and various support equipment, all connected by dangling cables as thick as arms. As I wiggled the joystick to maneuver the Clamp into place I saw Elaine and Katherine, green-tinged and blurred, moving about in the Glass Room. I wondered if they had seen my phone. I should have asked. But I had to concentrate on what I was doing because the Clamp was approaching and that thing was so heavy it could hurt you moving at a tenth of a meter per second. Once it had left a bruise on my hip that took three weeks to heal. My own fault. The equipment had safeties but your primary piece of protective equipment was your brain. There was a presumption that anyone entering this room was intelligent enough to keep away from hot things, sharp things, and things carrying large stores of momentum. We were not factory workers.

I set the Clamp in place and pressed a rubber button to bring its plates closer together. A klaxon sounded. An orange warning light spun. That always happened. It wasn’t something I noticed anymore. While I waited, I thought about that girl in the elevator. I should have told her about elevator algorithms. She might have been interested. She might have said, I had no idea, and when we arrived at her floor, put a hand on the door to stop it closing.

I saw my phone. I had spent so long imagining it that for a second I wasn’t sure it was really there. But it was. It was on top of the spectrograph. So obvious. I had worked late and when checking my pockets for a pen had realized I still had my phone, which wasn’t allowed, and none of that mattered because here it was. I went to get it. My outstretched fingers were about to close on it when my thighs brushed metal. I looked down. I had walked into the Clamp. The plates were touching me. They were actually closer than I had meant to bring them. I should have hit STOP a few seconds ago. I heard the klaxon and noticed the swirling orange light as if for the first time. I began to back out. I wasn’t in real danger. The plates moved too slowly. Although that was deceptive. The gap shrank linearly but in relative terms it accelerated. My thighs jammed. I turned sideways and shuffled. My left shoe caught. I freed that but then the right did. I hadn’t accounted for a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the plates increasingly obstructing movement. I had left insufficient margin for error. I lunged for freedom and fell face-first onto the floor. I pulled one leg free but my right shoe caught. I grabbed my thigh and pulled. Above the clamp, through the green glass, Elaine and Katherine gaped. Between them and me sat my phone, untouched.

I felt unbearable pressure. My intestines tried to squeeze out of my ears. I didn’t hear the noise. The klaxon covered that. But I saw the spray. In the orange light, it looked black.

During Clamp operation, the lab autolocked, for safety. I had to tear my shirt into strips to stem the bleeding. I had to flop across the floor until I could reach the controls. I’ll be honest. There was a lot of screaming. I got my hands on the STOP button. The klaxon died. The orange light faded. I closed my eyes. I was going to vomit, or pass out, or one then the other. The door opened and Jason said, “Oh fuck, fuck.” I felt very sad, because that seemed to confirm it.

2

A ROOM FORMED AROUND ME. IT DIDN’T HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE. IT WOVE itself out of nothing by degrees. Not really. It was just how it seemed, under medication. It was a while before I felt confident it wouldn’t blow away again—the bleached sheets, the beige walls, the furniture that was all on wheels—to reveal I was still in Lab 4, bleeding to death.

A surgeon visited, a tall woman with dark frizzy hair and impatient eyes. Usually I appreciate impatience in a person. It indicates an appreciation of efficiency. But my head was full of bees and she talked too fast to follow.

“The debridement went very well. Often in the case of traumatic injury there’s a great deal of bone fragment and destroyed tissue, but yours was remarkably clean. You’re lucky. I had to take your femur up about six inches but that’s really nothing. Very little smoothing of the bone was required. I did a closed amputation, stitching the skin closed during the operation, and that’s extremely rare in a trauma case. Normally we’d have to leave the skin flaps open, to make it easier to clean any infected tissue. But as I said, it was a remarkably clean site.”

“What was a site?” My voice was thick. I wasn’t sure what I was asking. I just needed her to slow down.

My surgeon raised a clipboard and scanned it. Her name tag said DR. ANGELICA AUSTIN. That sounded familiar. She might have visited me earlier, when I was less conscious. Dr. Angelica Austin flipped a page. “We might look at scaling back your pain meds.”

That sounded like a terrible idea. I tried to sit up. I caught sight of my leg. I had a thigh. A thigh in a stocking. Three or four tubes emerged from areas that were patched with dressing, looping to hanging plastic bags. Between these were glimpses of something pink and black and shiny that did not look like skin but was. I was short. That was the shocking part. It wasn’t the stump so much. The stump was bad. But what was terrible was the air. The space. I had half a thigh. My knee was gone. My calf. I had no foot. I was missing an entire foot. I had kicked things with that foot and now I didn’t have it. These were things that were wrong.

“You …” said Dr. Angelica Austin. “We went through the stump yesterday. I showed you.”

“I don’t remember.”

Dr. Angelica Austin wrote something on her clipboard. She was lowering my dosage. Before I could object, she put her hand on my shoulder. It felt awkward, for both of us. “I’ll come back when you’re rested. This is the darkest point, Mr. Neumann. It all gets better from here.”

MY ROOM HAD WINDOWS. I COULD SEE ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE GARDENS. At dusk, the skyscrapers flared orange. It was very quiet, this hospital. It was like I was the only person there.

I HAD FOUR NURSES: KATIE, CHELSEA, VERONICA, AND MIKE. MIKE WAS the one who bathed me. That struck me as unfair. All I’d gone through and a man sponged me. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just another disappointment. Nurse Mike was friendly. This is nothing against Nurse Mike. He taught me how to unwind the bandages without pulling out a draining tube, which was something I did once and never wanted to again. He showed me how to fasten them so they wouldn’t unwind in the night. My dressings needed changing every four hours. That’s how much I was leaking, even before you counted what came out of the tubes. It was an alarming idea. Presumably if I disconnected the saline drip, I would deflate to a husk. I was a junior high physics problem. If Charles Neumann is a human being with volume 80 liters, oozing bodily fluid at the rate of 0.5 liters per minute, how often must we replace his 400-milliliter saline bags? I felt I should have been more sophisticated than that.

The nurses were very familiar with my stump. They seized any opportunity to whip back the sheet and probe my flesh. “It’s looking fantastic,” they said. Especially Nurse Veronica. Nurse Veronica could not love my stump more. She smiled and opened my curtains and changed my bags and said it wouldn’t be long before I pulled on my dancing shoes. I knew what they were doing. They were teaching me not to be ashamed. It was a good hospital. But I was still ashamed.

THEN CAME THE PHYSICAL THERAPIST. THE SECOND HE BOUNCED IN I realized I was back in gym class. He was fit and tan and wore a hospital polo shirt small enough that his biceps strained the seams. Tucked beneath one was a clipboard. The only thing missing was a whistle. “Charles Neumann!” He stopped beside my bed and folded his arms. I had been watching TV, and felt guilty. “Is it Charles? Charlie? Chuck?”

“Charles.”

“I’m Dave.” He rolled aside a hat stand of fluid bags. “I’m here to get you out of that bed.”

I looked at my bed. It had warm sheets. A few magazines near my feet. Foot. My phone nearby. I didn’t see the problem with the bed.

Dave’s eyes shone. He drank a lot of fruit juice, I could tell. He made me feel listless. “We’re gonna work hard together, Charles. I have to warn you. Sometimes you may not like me very much.”

He dragged over a chair. He stood there and grinned. I looked at the chair. I looked at him. “What?”

“Get into it.”

It seemed a long way away. It was a meter lower than the bed. What if I fell? Dave waited. His grin was permanent. I placed my phone on my bedside table and folded up my magazines. I rolled back the sheet. I leaned forward to check my dressing, the tubes.

“Don’t worry about all that. Just get your butt into this chair.”

You just get your butt into this chair, I thought. But I edged forward. My stump scraped across the sheets. It wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t good. I felt itchy. I was thirsty. I looked around for a glass of water.

“Come on, Charles.”

I gripped the edge of the bed and swung my good leg over it. Then my stump. It made me want to cry, that little movement. It was so pathetic. Once entire limbs had jumped at my command. Now this.

“Almost there.”

I slid off the bed and fell into the chair. The shock of impact traveled up my stump and jangled the nerves there. My surgeon, Dr. Angelica Austin, had folded them up inside my body. I had learned this from a nurse. They were places they were never meant to be, wondering what was going on. Something dripped into my eyes.

“Yes! Great! Great!” Dave dropped to his haunches and slapped my arm. “You made it!” He laughed like we were friends. But we were not. We were not.

THE NEXT DAY DAVE TURNED UP IN A STEEL WHEELCHAIR. IT WAS pretty flash. I mean for what it was. The wheels gleamed. The seat, back, and armrests were green leather. Dave parked beside my bed and climbed out. “Hi-ho, Silver!”

“What?”

“Time to mount your steed, my lord.” He slapped the chair. “It’ll be great.”

It would not be great. We both knew that. It would be struggling and shaking and landing in the chair like a wet fish. And then what? Maybe Dave would push me around the hospital. Maybe he would make me wheel myself. Either would be difficult and humiliating. I chewed the inside of my mouth, because I am not good at getting mad with people.

“Let’s do this,” said Dave.

“I have to finish reading this.” I showed him my phone. He plucked it from my fingers and set it on the bedside table. I didn’t stop him, because I couldn’t believe what he was doing. Dave didn’t understand the intimacy of the phone. He couldn’t have.

“Mount up.”

He was trying to antagonize me so I would strive to prove him wrong. He saw I responded well to a challenge. He would needle me mercilessly and then, on the day I was released, tell me how he’d always known I could do it.

“Let’s go, big guy.” He drummed his hands on the chair. “Let’s tear this place up.”

That was how they justified it. Gym teachers. Personal trainers. Runners. Looking down on you, despising you, it was okay, because it was for your own good.

“Don’t make me come over there,” said Dave. “Ha, ha.”

I DREAMED I WAS BACK AT BETTER FUTURE AND COULDN’T FIND MY LEG. I hopped around the lab, searching. I spied it on top of the spectrograph. I filled with relief because now I could reattach it, then woke and realized no.

“TAKE IT IN,” SAID DAVE. “RI-I-I-IGHT IN. FEEL YOUR CHEST EXPANDING. Hold it. Hold it. Now out.”

I exhaled. The sun came out from behind a cloud. I squinted and shifted in my wheelchair. We were outside. I was not happy about that.

“Three more. I want you to let the relaxation in, Charles. Let it in.”

“I’m hot.”

“No you’re not.” Hospital people walked by, entered the lobby doors. Dave sucked in breath. “Three more.”

“This isn’t helping.”

“It’s not helping because you won’t let it help.”

“It’s because I’m missing a leg. Breathing doesn’t help with that. It doesn’t help at all.”

Dave’s eyes held no pity. “Feeling sorry for yourself?”

Dave was wearing shorts. I had been trying not to let that bother me, but he was wearing shorts, with two fit, tan legs bursting out and running down to socks and sneakers, and wasn’t that a little unfair to a guy in a wheelchair with a bloated, mutant, itching stump? I didn’t want to be that guy. That angry cripple guy. But I was a cripple and Dave’s legs were making me angry.

“Just another chapter, buddy,” said Dave. “A new chapter in your life waiting to be written.”

“It’s not a chapter. It’s a loss. It’s a regression.”

“All in how you see it.”

“It’s not. It’s objectively verifiable. I’m less.”

Dave squatted. He put a hand on my left wheel. “Let me tell you about a guy who came through here about five years ago. He’d had an industrial accident just like you. Lost both legs. Right up to the hip. Used to be a water skier. Professionally. But day one, when he came out of surgery, he decided, That was my old life. He said, Now I start my new life. I told him to write the next chapter, man, and he did. You know what he’s doing now?”

I pushed Dave’s hand off my wheel, got my hands on the grips, and shoved myself away. People stood aside to let me wheel by, one furious revolution at a time.

“He’s winning medals!” Dave shouted. “In the Para-lympics!”

I WOKE FROM AN AFTERNOON NAP TO FIND A WOMAN IN A CHAIR beside my bed. The chair hadn’t been there before. She had brought it. She had a large black case, like a portfolio. She was neat and corporate. Her facial bones were prominent and symmetrical. She was blond. “Hey, you.” Her lips twisted sympathetically. “How are you?”

“What?”

“I’m Cassandra Cautery. From the company.” Her head tilted. “We miss you, Charlie. I hope they’re taking good care of you. Are they? Your comfort is my priority.”

“Um,” I said.

“Good.” She smiled. She was very attractive to be giving me this much eye contact. I felt strange, as if I had been mistaken for someone else. She handed me a business card. It said, CASSANDRA CAUTERY. Crisis Manager.

I said, “It was my fault. The accident.”

“Would you mind signing a statement to that effect?” She flipped open her portfolio and handed me a paper. It was a letter, from me. “I’m sorry. This may feel abrupt. It’s just … well, as you say, it was your fault.” She popped a pen and offered it to me.

I wondered if I should get a lawyer. It felt like that kind of situation. But the letter was true. I raised the knee I still had, positioned the paper, and signed.

“Thank you.” She made it disappear into her portfolio. “I appreciate that. Now let’s talk about you. About what you need to get back on your feet.” Her smile wavered. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“That slipped out.”

“It’s …” I shrugged.

“Ramps. Leave. We’ll make it happen. We’re that kind of company.”

“Okay.”

“Are you sure everything here is perfect? There’s nothing at all?”

“No,” I said. “Well. I don’t like my physical therapist.”

I NEVER SAW DAVE AGAIN. THAT AFTERNOON I WAS VISITED BY NURSE Veronica, who fiddled with the flowers by my bed. “Would you … what would you like to do this afternoon, Charlie?”

“Stay here,” I said.

“In bed?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said.

I DIDN’T GET UP FOR TWO DAYS. I’M NOT COUNTING BATHROOM VISITS. I did have to leave the bed for those. I had to shuffle into my wheelchair, steer onto the tiles, and drag myself onto the toilet. Then there was nothing to do but look at my stump. The stocking was off and the draining tubes removed. I no longer leaked. I was nothing but pink skin and black stitches. I didn’t like the bathroom visits because I didn’t like the stump.

But in bed, things were okay. I had my phone. I had wi-fi. I logged on to my work account and wrote notes. I streamed movies. I got addicted to a game. I won’t say I was happy. Every now and again I reached to scratch my right leg and realized it wasn’t there. Or I shifted my weight and found it unexpectedly easy. But I could see this might not be the end of everything.

DR. ANGELICA AUSTIN RETURNED. IT HAD BEEN A WEEK. I LAY BACK AND closed my eyes while she prodded at the disaster site.

“Very good.” She flipped back the sheet. “I couldn’t ask for a better result.”

I said nothing. I didn’t want to disrespect Dr. Angelica Austin. But I found it hard to believe she could be proud of this. Maybe I was being unfair, because she worked with living tissue and I worked with machine-fabricated metals. But if I ever produced something that ugly, I would be embarrassed.

“Have you felt sensation in the missing limb?”

“What?”

“Following an amputation, many patients report phantom sensation.”

“Uh,” I said. “No.” I had heard of phantom pain. I just never thought I’d hear it from a doctor. I thought it belonged in the same category as ghosts and auras.

“Don’t be ashamed to mention it.”

“I haven’t felt anything.”

Dr. Angelica eyed me.

“I feel what’s there. What’s there is itchy.”

“Painful?”

“Yes. It aches.” I waited for Dr. Angelica to pick up the clipboard, the one for writing down pain medication doses. She didn’t. “A lot.”

“That’s because you’re not moving it. I heard you stopped physical therapy.”

“Yes.”

“Therapy is essential to your recovery. Why did you stop?”

“I didn’t like Dave.”

“You didn’t have to like him. You just had to do what he said.”

Dr. Angelica frowned. She wore glittery earrings. They were a little extravagance in an otherwise austere outfit. She would have to remove those for surgery. You couldn’t have tiny jewels dropping into someone’s chest cavity. They were counterfunctional, which implied Dr. Angelica cared more about looking good than doing her job. I was possibly being unfair again. Maybe she didn’t have surgery today.

“It’s time you saw the prosthetist.”

For a second I thought she said prostitute. “Prosthetics?”

“Yes.” Dr. Angelica eyeballed me, as if I should count myself lucky I was getting a prosthetist at all. I got the feeling she did not think I had really deserved her surgery. “She’s very good.”

“I don’t need a prosthesis.” I was thinking about what that would mean: more gym class. Gripping wooden rails, struggling to coordinate parts of my body. “I can use the chair. I sit down all day at work. I sit down at home. I don’t play sports.”

“Do you drive? Does your house have steps? Do you ever catch an escalator? How many times a day do you stand?”

I said nothing.

“You’re not useless,” said Dr. Angelica. “You haven’t broken. You have a minor disability and you can learn to overcome it.”

I WAS SICKLY AS A CHILD. I GUESS THAT COMES AS NO SURPRISE. I WAS that kid who spent a whole summer inside, curtains drawn against the hoots and laughter of kids in the street outside. Glandular fever. Then complications in the lungs. When I got back to school, in gym class I handed the teacher the note that allowed me to be excused to the library. He made me show him that note every time, even though it said for the duration of the year. He was waiting for me to decide I was ready for gym class, and forget what my note said. That day never came. In the library, I read about trains and DNA and how they built the Hoover Dam. Walking home, I watched a boom gate descend across a railroad crossing and knew it did so because the wheels of an approaching train had dipped the track’s inductance below its preprogrammed level.

As a result, I threw like a four-year-old. I couldn’t catch. When I ran, my arms and legs flailed like I was drowning. If I had to play baseball, I swung at balls with hope but no faith and was not surprised. In soccer, people wove through me like I wasn’t there.

When I got older things started to change. I don’t mean I improved. I mean it mattered less. By senior year, most of the kids who could run and jump and throw balls like missiles had dropped out. Being smart became valuable. No girl came up clutching textbooks to ask if I could help with her homework, but I could see it might happen. The likelihood of such an occurrence was on the rise. I attended MIT, and in mechanical engineering no one cared about sports. There was a girl in wave propagation, Jenny, and one time when I was presenting a paper on hydrodynamics she kept nodding and smiling. I spent a week thinking how to ask her out. Then I came to class and there was a guy kicking a little sack in the air, doing tricks, and Jenny was watching him in a whole other way, and I realized things were not so different after all.

THE PROSTHETIST WALKED IN WITH A BUNCH OF ARTIFICIAL LEGS under each arm, like a Hindu goddess. She dumped the legs onto my bed and ogled me through glasses. Her hair was brown and limp and dragged into a merciless ponytail. Her shirt was white and huge. “Hi! I hear you got a transfemoral.” Before I could respond, she lifted up my sheet. “Oh. They weren’t kidding. That is a clean stump.” She rolled the sheet up to my waist and put her elbows on the bed, so she could look at it from up close. “Some kind of machine accident, yes?”

“A clamp.”

“Well, you hit the jackpot. This is amazing.”

I stared at her. She wasn’t the first person to act like my amputation was just terrific. But she was the first I believed.

“If you’re planning to do the other leg, you should definitely use the same method. I’m serious.”

“What?”

“I’m joking.” She sat up but one of her hands was still right next to my stump. “It’s Charlie, right? I’ll be honest, Charlie. I love a transfemoral. I see a lot of transtibials—that’s below the knee—and, no offense to those people, but it’s like fitting shoes. There’s no art in it. This …” She patted my stump. I jumped. “This is a blank canvas. This gives us options. Want to see some legs?” She turned to rummage through her limbs. A section of hair drifted in front of her face and she jammed it behind her ear like she wanted to teach it a lesson. “Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got here.” She lifted something. A pole. The toe was rubber. Like the bottom half of a crutch. The top was a flesh-colored plastic bucket with cloth straps. “This is entry-level. I’m only showing you this so you know what’s out there. Hey. Hey.” My eyes jumped to her face. “I’m not putting you in this. This is horrible. This is the public option. Although, just FYI, if your employer wasn’t giving you basically the best medical care in the world, this is what you’d get.” She put the pole leg on the floor, where I couldn’t see it. “Let’s forget that. Wait. Did I introduce myself? I’m Lola Shanks.”

I knew that from the ID tag dangling from her billowing shirt. She was grimacing into the camera. If my ID looked like that, I would ask them to take another picture.

“Let me show you something else.” From the ankle down it resembled a real leg. A real leg that had died a few days earlier. The toes were flat and squared off. The calf was aluminum. The knee was a band of jointed metal. At the top was another bucket. “This you can put a shoe on. And I see from your face that you’re not in love with it, but imagine it under long pants. The fullness here? It gives you a more natural look. Once you get practiced, nobody will know the difference. Not until you take off your pants.” She grinned. She was pretty young. How much education did you need to become a prosthetist? Not much, apparently. “What do you think?”

“How does it work?”

“You’re looking at the socket. Ninety percent of your satisfaction with the prosthetic will come from how well you fit the socket.” I noticed her choice of words; not how well the socket fits you. “We wrap your limb in a stocking, pull it into the socket through this little hole at the bottom here, and tighten it with these straps. But that’s not ideal. What we’ll do once the swelling has subsided is take a mold of your leg and build a custom socket off that.”

“How does it walk?”

“Well, you swing it. It takes some practice.”

“You swing it?”

“Right. It’s hinged. Your foot will fly out in front of you for a while. Steep inclines will be a challenge. Everything will be a challenge. It’s going to be hard, Charlie, no matter what you wear.”

I looked at the pile of legs. “What else?” I could see something black and silver poking out from behind her. That looked interesting.

She smiled. “You’re spoiling it. I was trying to build up some suspense before we went to the top of the line. But before we go there, let me warn you: these don’t give you a natural look. We’re now trading off cosmetics for function.”

“I don’t care about a natural look.”

Lola’s breath caught. “Really. Well, that’s good. I feel the same way. Real beauty follows function. That’s why we find things attractive: because they work. Like teeth. We don’t just like them straight and white for no reason. It’s because they’re good at biting. This leg, it’s good at walking.” She reached behind her. What she produced was not like a leg. It was like a machine. The foot was two arched prongs, almost skis. From a hydraulic ankle rose twin black pylons, which disappeared into an aluminum knee. Judging from the battery casing, there was a microprocessor in there. “It’s an Exegesis Archion foot on a computer-controlled adaptive knee. Multiaxis rotation, polycentric swing. That heel, that’s carbon polymer. The Olympics banned it because it provided an unfair advantage over regular legs. Too much energy return. The knee is programmable. We teach it your precise gait. What it does is take the thinking out of walking. You get to stop worrying about how you’re going to swing your foot and just walk.”