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Tender

Rachel Swirsky

The first time my love realized I might kill myself, he remade my arteries in steel.

He waited until I was asleep and then stole me down into the secret laboratory he’d built beneath our house. I pretended to be sleeping as he shifted lights and lenses until the room lit with eerie blue. Using tools of his own invention, he anaesthetized me, incised my skin, and injected me with miniature robots that were programmed to convert my arterial walls into materials both compatible with human life and impossible to sever.

It was not really steel, but I imagine it as steel. I imagine that, inside, I am polished and industrial.

Over the course of the night, he remade the tributaries in my wrists, my throat, my thighs. He made them strong enough to repel any razor. He forbade them from crying red rivers. He banished the vision of a bathtub with water spreading pink. He made my life impossible to spill.

I have recurring dreams of tender things dying in the snow. They are pink and curled and fetal, the kind of things that would be at home in my husband’s laboratory, floating in jars of formaldehyde, or suspended among bubbles in gestational tanks of nutritional gel.

Their skin has no toughness. It is wet and slick, almost amphibian, but so delicate that it bruises from exposure to the air. Their unformed bodies shudder helplessly in the cold, vestigial tails tucked next to ink-blot eyes. On their proto-arms, finger-like protrusions grasp for warmth.

They are possibilities, yearning, unfurling from nothingness into unrealized potential.

In my dreams, I am separated from them by a window too thick to break. I don’t know who has abandoned them, helpless, in the snow. Frost begins to scale their skins. Their mouths shape inaudible whimpers. I can’t get outside. I can’t get to them. I can’t get outside before they die.

My love replaced the bones of my skull with interlocking adamantine scales. I cannot point a gun at my ear and shoot.

So that I cannot swallow a barrel, he placed sensors in my mouth, designed to detect the presence of firearms. Upon sensing one, they engage emergency measures, including alarms, force fields, and a portcullis that creaks down to block my throat.

The sensor’s light blinks ceaselessly, a green wash that penetrates my closed lips. It haunts me in the night, bathing every other second in spectral glow.

One psychiatrist’s theory:

To commit suicide, you must feel hopeless.

To commit suicide, you must believe you are a burden on those you love.

To commit suicide, you must be accustomed to physical risk.

One, two, three factors accounted for. But a fourth forgotten: to commit suicide, you must be penetrable.

My love says he needs me, but he knows that I believe he’s deluded.

He would be better off with another wife. Perhaps a mad lady scientist with tangled red hair frizzing out of her bun and animé-huge eyes behind magnifying glasses. Perhaps a robot, deftly crafted, possessing the wisdom of the subtle alloys embedded in her artificial consciousness. Perhaps a super-human mutant, discovered injured and amnesiac in an alley, and then carried back to his lab where he could cradle her back to health. He could be the professor who enables her heroic adventures, outfitting her with his inventions, and sewing flame-retardant spandex uniforms for her in his spare time.

No poison: my vital organs are no longer flesh.

No car crash: my spinal cord is enhanced by a network of nanobots, intelligent and constantly reconfiguring, ensuring that every sensation flashes, every muscle twitches.

No suffocation: my skin possesses its own breath now. It inhales; it exhales; it maintains itself flush and pink.

“Please,” he says, “Please,” and does not have to say more.

He is crying very quietly. A few tears. A few gulping breaths.

Apart from the intermittent flash of the sensors in my mouth, our room is black and silent. I have been lying in bed for six days now. In the morning, he brings me broth and I eat enough to quiet him. In the afternoons, he carries up the robotic dog, and it energetically coils and uncoils its metal tail-spring until I muster the strength to move my hand and pat its head.

In the night, we lie beside each other, our skin rough against the sheets. He reaches for my hand where it lies on my pillow. His touch is so much. I can’t explain how
much
it is. Sensation fills my whole world, and I have so little world left to fill. My body has been strengthened by nanobots and steel, but my mind continues to narrow, becoming less and less. Something as consuming as his touch is so overwhelming that it is excruciating. It’s like all the warmth of the sun hitting my skin at once.

“Please,” he repeats in a murmur.

Next morning, when I wake, he has programmed the nanobots to construct a transparent wall behind my eyes. No bullet, no pencil, no sword can penetrate them to find my brain.

There are so many ways to die.

The accidental: A slick of water, a slip, and the head cracks on the bathtub, shower, kitchen sink. Hands pull the wrong pair of medicines from the cabinet. Feet rest on the arm of the couch, near the blanket thrown over the radiator. The throat contracts around a piece of orange peel, inhaled instead of swallowed, on a day when one is home alone.

The unusual: exploding fireworks, attacking dogs, plummeting asteroids, crashing tsunamis, flashing lightning, striking snakes, whirling tornados, splintering earthquakes, engulfing floods, dazzling electrocution, grinning arson.

The science fictional: robots, and aliens, and zombies, and Frankenstein’s monster, and experiments gone wrong, and spontaneous nuclear reactions, and miniature black holes, and tenth dimensional beings of malevolent light.

The routine: One car smashing into another. One damaged cell rapaciously dividing. One blockage of blood in the brain. One heart, seizing.

Self-immolation: no longer an option. After his last adjustments, my breathing skin can adapt to any temperature. It resists ice; it resists fire. I could walk into lava. I could dive into space.

“Please,” he still murmurs at night, “Please.”

His hand withdraws, but the heat-memory of it remains. It sparks under my skin like a new-forming sunburn, radiation caught and kept in the flesh.

Instead of hardening the shell of my body again, he appeals to my mind. Since I won’t believe that he needs me, he brings me a pair of genetically enhanced, baby white mice with brains so huge their skulls bulge. They scurry around, solving mazes by means of derived algorithms that they’ve scratched into their bedding, using mathematical notation of their own invention.

I feed them carrots, celery, lettuce, and pellets of radioactive, brain-enhancing super-food. They sit on my hand as they eat, grasping the morsels in their paws and nibbling at them with their prominent front teeth. They stare at me with ink-black eyes and make pleased, musical squealing sounds. They proffer their bellies for me to tickle, and they giggle in a register too high-pitched for me to hear. They bring me gifts of hoarded lettuce leaves inscribed with formulae I can’t decipher.

They are all energy and curiosity and brilliance. I watch them discover new ways to balance with their tails at the same time as they deduce the flaws in general relativity. I savor their love of life, their delight in discovering themselves as creatures who possess worlds and wisdom and bodies to explore. I feel their happiness heartbeat-hot in my stomach. It fills my remaining being with painful, wistful joy. Life is filling them. Life is diminishing me. I am tapering out of existence.

When I dream that night of the fetal creatures in the snow, I see that they have subtly shifted. Or perhaps I am only recognizing traits they have possessed all along. I see the features of my baby mice haunting their undeveloped bodies. Their ink-blot eyes are wondering. Their vestigial tails twitch querulously.

I pound my flattened palm against the dream-glass that separates us. I scream and scream for it to smash.

I can’t. I can’t. I can’t get to them. The unformed things, the helpless things, the ones that still want to survive. They shiver and turn blue. Ice crusts their eyes closed. I pound the glass. I can’t break it. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t break through.

While I dreamt, he encased me in armor as sensitive as skin. Invisible to the eye. Intangible to the fingers. Impervious as immortality.

I will close you in,
he didn’t whisper as he stood over me, his breath hot and helpless on my scalp.
You are an eggshell and I will wrap you in cotton and rubber bands until no fall can shatter you. I won’t wait until afterward to call all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. I’ll bring them here before anything goes wrong. I’ll set them to patrol the wall while they can still do some good. I’ll protect you from everything, including yourself.

My brain: wrinkled, pink, four-lobed, textured like soft tofu.

Steel arteries, adamantine scales, sensors, portcullises, nanobots, armor. So much fuss to protect three pounds of meat.

My mice have learned to write in English.

They crawl up and down the walls of their cage, pleading, until I give them scraps of paper and a miniature pen.

WE’RE WORRIED ABOUT YOU, they write.

On a white board, I write back,
It’s not your job to worry about me.
I pause before adding,
You’re mice.

WHAT IS IT THAT YOU WANT? they write.

I hesitate before responding.

Nothing.

They consult silently, evaluating each other’s perplexed expressions. They brux their teeth, chit-chitter-scrape.

Finally, they write, EVERYONE WANTS SOMETHING.

I do want something,
I reply.
I already told you.

But it’s not really fair to expect them to be clever therapists. They may be geniuses, but they’re still only baby mice.

In another science fiction story, my love would replace more and more of my body with armature until there was no human part of me remaining. With all my body gone, he would identify the fault as being in my mind.
That’s where the broken fuses spit their dreadful sparks,
he’d conclude, and then he’d change that part of me, too. He would smooth every complicated, ambiguous wrinkle from the meat and electricity of my brain: the inconsistent neutransmitters; the knotted traumas; the ice-thin sense of self-preservation. By the time he was done, I would no longer bear any resemblance to myself. I’d become a wretched Stepford revenant lurching in a mechanical shell. And still, he would love me.

In another science fiction story, as he and I struggled with the push-pull of our desires, an unprecedented case would crack the courts, establishing an inalienable right to die. Bureaucracies would instantly rise to regulate the processes of filing Intent to Die forms, attending mandatory therapy sessions, and requesting financial aid for euthanasia ceremonies. I would file, attend, and request. He would beg me not to do so until, finally, driven mad, he would build a doomsday machine in our basement and use it to take over the world. As the all-powerful ruler of mankind, he would crush rebellion in an iron fist. In his palace, he would imprison me, living but immobile, in a glass tank shaped like a coffin.

In the same science fiction story, written on a different day, he would build the doomsday machine, but at the last minute, he would realize the folly of deploying it. Instead, he would continue to plead as I turned away, until finally the doctors would pull his outstretched hand away from mine as they slid the needle into my skin.

In yet a third science fiction story, a meteor would crash to the earth, and upon it, there would be a sentient alien symbiont, and for it to survive, it would require a human host. Testing would determine that I was the only viable candidate. They would cut me open and stitch the alien into my side, and it would tell me stories about the depths of space, and the strange whales that fly between stars, and the sun-and-dust thoughts of nebulae. It would tell me of its adventures on the surfaces of alien monuments so large that they have their own atmospheres and have evolved sentient populations who think it’s natural for the world to be shaped like the face of a giant. The alien would help my wounded soul rediscover how to accept my love’s touch, and the three of us would live together, different from what we were, but unbreakably unified.

In this science fiction story, I am a fetus; I am a mouse; I am an eggshell; I am a held breath; I am a snowdrift; I am a cyborg; I am a woman whose skin cannot bear the sensation of love.

“Please,” he whispers in his sleep, “Please.”

Lying awake, I see the fetal creatures in the snow, not in a dream this time, but as a waking vision. My palm pushes futilely on the window between us. The fetal things are fragility I cannot rescue. They are love I cannot reach. They are myself, slowly freezing.

I, too, am fragmented. I am the creatures dying, and I am the woman pounding at the window. I am the glass between us. I am the inability to shatter.

I watch him lying next to me, his breath even with sleep. In an hour or so, while it is still deep dark, he will wake. He will take me down to the laboratory. In the morning, I will wake inhabited by an army of genetically engineered viruses, instructed to wrap each of my cells in a protective coat, a cloud-like embrace of softness and safety.

Do you know why I wear your armor?
I don’t ask him.

When you take me to the lab, I’m not always asleep. Sometimes, I’m aware. Sometimes, I feel the numbness of your anesthetic spreading across my skin. Sometimes, I watch your face.

The flash of my sensors makes him seem alien.

In the laboratory,
I don’t continue,
your hands, laboring over me, are like the hands of an unknown creator god, working his clay.

He stirs. The mice rustle in their cage. They draw schematics for spaceships that can escape this earth.

I don’t say,
I wear your armor because I love you.