There was nothing I couldn't do, once I was like you. You, poor thing, trying so hard to understand the laws of physics, to leave the laws of metaphysics behind, played by the rules. But I, having grown up in a world of cells and atoms, I knew which rules I could bend, which tethers I could cut.
Once you'd left my hospital room, my new body's family was ushered in by a nurse who demanded quiet and calm. They were anything but. Their daughter, dead for days, was now alive and smiling. There were screams, tears, repeated hugs and caresses, and it took all my focus to avoid hurting them accidentally. Ada, my new name; I heard it repeated endlessly. Ada, Ada, my darling Ada, my baby Ada, my lovely Ada, Ada, Ada. . .
The nurse finally hustled them out: the father, tall and thin, with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes; mother, with unwashed, unruly hair, dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep, sallow and weeping; brother, slack-jawed and shell-shocked; sister, constantly teary-eyed, hardly able to look away from me. Once they'd left, the quiet rang in my ears like a bell singing, Ada, Ada.
I didn't know where my edges were. Lying in the hospital bed, I could feel my sense of self expand to include the bed, the air around me, the linoleum floor below and the plastic-shielded wall behind.
Sometimes I wanted to be back in that tiny space in your—my—head, I wanted to be nothing, to simply observe. But those times were relatively few and fleeting.
The nurse came back to check on me. She took my temperature and blood pressure, then checked my wounds. There weren't any. I'd unwrapped the splint around my fingers and pulled out the stitches from my healed skin. The nurse was surprised to find smooth, unmarked flesh. She backed out of the room, stuttering her intent to find a doctor.
I stretched while I waited. I'd tried to be kind, to avoid frightening people, but it was becoming tiresome. I didn't want to have to explain anything to a doctor; I wanted to be out, to be free, to whirlwind around the city like a leaf or a bird or the wind itself, pushing the leaves and birds along the corridors of the streets and alleys. The wind is only the wind, the leopard is only the leopard, and nothing less.
You had gone along with all the tests and controls imposed upon you simply because you didn't know anything, every experience helped you learn. You learned to love my parents, loved what had been my life, and was willing to submit in order to keep those things. There was no need for me to go through the same learning period, and I knew nothing of my new family—Ada's family—to make the doctor's poking and prodding and difficult questions worth my time.
I resolved to unfetter myself. I untaped and removed the saline drip and needle from the back of my hand. I stood, naked, and strode across the room to open the door. Material from the stainless steel doorknob flooded over my hand to settle on my forearm. I left the doorknob with an impression of my fingers, as if they had sunk into a ball of butter.
The hospital hallway was bright and clean, reflective surfaces making my eyes water. It was quiet. I trailed my fingers across the upper half of the wall, above the resin wainscot, and the latex from the paint flowed up and over me, forming a cream-colored, skin-tight bustier. I closed it up with a stainless-steel zipper in the front. I turned back for a brief moment to see the remains of the paint—a chalky white dust—barely coating the wall board. I liked the bustier. I liked the way it moved with me. I made something similar for pants but didn't bother with a zipper this time; I realized there wasn't a need to have a mechanical method for clothing removal.
"Ada!"
I was at the intersection of two hallways, where nurses and aides worked inside a round island of countertops and computers. I walked left to find my—Ada's—family huddled in a corner of a waiting area.
"I'm very sorry," I said, "Ada is dead."
There was silence, from both the staff and the family.
A hand grabbed my arm.
"Ms Garcia, I can't imagine you feel well enough to be up and about. Why don't you allow me to escort you back to your room."
I turned to find a doctor. I resisted the urge to make his hand melt. Instead, I extended myself into him, along his nerves, to his brain and there I was the queen of all I surveyed through both pairs of eyes.
"I'm quite well, actually," I said.
"Yes, I can see that now." I spoke with his mouth.
"But I'm not Ada Garcia. You should double-check your records."
"Of course. I'll discharge you. You're free to go." I realized I rather liked having a puppet.
"Thank you, doctor."
"My pleasure, Ms—" I hesitated. I did like the name Ada.
"Ada Lopez," we said.
The family erupted in a chorus of objections and obscenities. Their daughter had come back from the dead only to reject them.
"Call security," the doctor called. To everyone there, it looked like he was escorting me away from Ada's family. Ada's brother broke apart from everyone else and came after us.
"You cannot break mama's heart again," he said, "you need a psychiatrist and drugs and whatever else can help you, Ada. You're my sister. You think I don't recognize my own sister?"
"Look closer, and you won't see your sister," I said, "your sister is gone." The doctor and I stopped. I held out my hand to Ada's brother and he moved closer to grip it. Through his nerves I brought him down to the scale of his own atoms, electrons circling like dizzy planets around the sun of the nucleus, then back up to his brain. Together we explored the memories in his synapses, the sight of Ada's body, very dead, very stiff. Then I let him go.
Tears streamed down his cheeks. "Who are you." His voice cracked, not with fear, but wonder and grief.
"Tell them," I said, "Tell them I'm not theirs."
No comments:
Post a Comment