A Perfect Machine(7)

Henry’d never had anyone die on him, and he’d only ever been to one other funeral in his life – his grandfather’s. Three quarters full of lead, but dead simply of old age. He hoped he’d be as lucky.

Henry turned and walked out the door.

Faye followed, trying to convince him to go back to bed, stay and talk for a while. Just until he calmed down. But he kept walking, would no longer look at her.

She gave up at the front door, where it was clear she wasn’t going to stop him, no matter what she said. She watched Henry from the hospital’s front-entrance window. Watched him stumble slowly out into the blowing snow. Trip. Fall. Collapse on his side.

She cursed under her breath, threw her coat on, ran through the double doors, across the parking lot. She knelt down, tried pulling him to his feet, but he was too heavy.

Faye stood up, left him lying in the snow, ran to the curb, flagged down a cab. The cabby pulled over; she approached the driver’s side and explained the situation. The cabby put on his hazard lights, jumped out of the car, moved to help Faye.

Together, they lifted Henry to his feet, shuffled him through the snow and ice to the back door of the cab. Faye ran quickly inside the hospital, fished around for some bills in her purse, came back out, paid the cabby, told him Henry’s address.

The car pulled away from the curb, soon lost in a white sheet of snow.





T H R E E





It snowed for another three days straight, then cleared up suddenly to usher in sunny, blue skies. But colder now. Much colder.

Henry shivered in his apartment. Not only had the temperature dropped, but his bedroom radiator had shut down. So much for getting warm.

He was too tired to move out into the marginally warmer living room, so he wound the blankets around him as tightly as he could to keep in the heat. But no matter how many blankets he curled around himself, or how snugly he wrapped them around his frame, the cold still got in.

The cold of ice on steel.

His teeth chattered. He swam in and out of consciousness. Several times he hallucinated Faye coming to see him, stroking his brow, telling him it would be alright, that he just needed to rest to get through this, just needed to sleep a while longer.

Sometimes during the three nights of the storm, he dreamed of Milo: Milo standing at the foot of his bed, floating a few inches off the ground, smiling. Just smiling. Snow in his hair. Then he’d drift out of the room, disappear, and Henry would wake up. Cold and alone. With pieces of the metal puzzle inside him still shifting around. Faster than at the hospital, steadily picking up speed.

In the chill of dawn, when the apartment seemed at its coldest, Henry felt he knew what the pieces of the puzzle were doing. They were moving within him to touch each other, form something. But what – and for what purpose – he had no idea. He believed in nothing. Expected nothing. The only thing Henry wanted now was to close his curtains. Since the storm had subsided, the sun streamed through his bedroom window too bright for Henry’s eyes, which now glinted in the light. He didn’t know it, couldn’t see it, but they’d turned from deep brown to metallic silver.

The day after the storm passed, Henry felt the puzzle inside him slowing, calming.

Milo came to visit him in his dreams one last time, late that fourth night: he hovered at the foot of the bed, as he’d been doing the last few days. Only this time, before he left – a look of intense concentration on his face – he floated over to Henry’s bedroom window. Tried, and failed, to close the curtains for his friend.



* * *



The night before Henry would wake up changed forever – five days after coming home from the hospital – he dreamed a memory of him and Milo as kids of about twelve years old:

“What do you think happens?” Milo asked Henry, a more innocent precursor to their discussion the week before Milo’s death.

They were in Henry’s backyard. Just sitting in the dirt, playing with plastic action figures from their favorite movies.

“Happens when?” Henry replied. He held one action figure in each hand.

“When ya get all filled up with bullets. Or whatever.”

“Dunno. Don’t care,” Henry said, and pummeled one of the action figures into the other.

Milo shifted his position in the dirt. Something about Henry not caring what happened when full lead content was reached bugged him. “How can you not care, dummy?”

Henry shrugged. “Just don’t. Maybe one day I’ll find out, but till then it’s stupid to waste time thinking about that crap.”

Milo dropped his own action figures in the dirt, glanced up at the sky. Blue, clear, the sun shining so fiercely, he couldn’t look anywhere near it. He dropped his eyes again, looked at Henry. He hesitated a moment, as if considering something, then spoke, hesitantly: “Well, I think … I think you become, like, this awesome monster robot machine! I think you become really big, and you go around saving people trapped under cars and in burning buildings and stuff. I think you become a lot happier, too. Like, way happier than in regular life. You know?”

When Henry didn’t immediately answer, Milo picked up one of his action figures – an army guy missing an arm – and tossed it across the yard.

Sensing his friend’s frustration, Henry said, “OK, here’s what I honestly think: I think whatever you become, it’s not good. It’s bad. I think you become something else. Not even yourself anymore. And maybe you do bad things to people, but you can’t control yourself. And yeah, maybe you’re all cool and robotic and metal and gigantic and everything, sure. But I think –” and here, Henry droppped his action figures on the ground, and stood up “– I think you hurt people. People you hate. People you love. Everybody.”