A Perfect Machine by Brett Alexander Savory
For Sandra Kasturi – best of all possible monkeys
O N E
The bullet tore a thin strip of flesh from his cheekbone, drove into the brick wall behind him.
He turned a corner, cut swaths through the steam rising from sewer grates – smoky ghosts wrapping around his skinny legs. Dissipating.
Gone.
More bullets flew past his ears as he ducked around another corner, legs pumping hard, breath coming in thick rasps. He didn’t know this section of the city very well, so it was just a matter of time.
Always just a matter of time.
Voices. Loud, harsh. Guttural bursts exploding from thin lips, wide mouths: find him, fuck him up. The words didn’t matter, but their speakers did. The people who spoke these words could run hard and for a very long time.
Gas lamps swam by on his left, shining, flickering, watching the man run. Chasing away the shadows in which he wanted to hide.
The man heard more shots behind him, wished for a dumpster, a garbage can, another brick wall, anything to hide behind. Then one of the bullets slammed into the back of his right knee. He gritted his teeth, continued running.
Another bullet caught him in the left shoulder. He plunged ahead, driven forward by the momentum, listing to one side, nearly losing his balance. But his left knee held him, and he kept running.
More shouting. Now coming from two directions.
He turned another corner, saw four men standing there, weapons raised, aimed in his direction. He stopped, stumbled backward, teeth clenched tight against the pain in his leg and shoulder. Two more men and one woman stood the way he had just come, grinning, their mouths black holes in their faces.
The shouting stopped.
Nowhere to go.
Seven distinct cocking sounds, as bullets entered chambers.
The man took a deep breath, held it. Closed his eyes.
The night burst open with muzzled fire. The man crumpled. Red seeped out from under him, glistening in dim gaslight.
* * *
Hospital green.
Walls rippled when he opened his eyes. Fluorescent ceiling lights rotated blurrily. He looked to his right. The woman in the bed beside him wavered, floated on crisp white sheets.
The man rubbed his eyes, heard a door open, whisper closed. Heard a voice, looked up, saw a young woman at the foot of the bed. A nurse. Her mouth moved, but the man heard no words. She held a clipboard, her eyes sweeping it, her mouth moving again. Her brow crinkled, maybe frustrated she was getting no answers to her questions.
The man thought the nurse was beautiful, and he would have answered her questions had he heard them, had he been capable of hearing anything but his own pumping blood.
Faraway sounds filtered into the man’s ears. Mumblings in a tin can. He shook his head, cleared the cobwebs. The sounds swirled, formed words to match the nurse’s red, red lips. She was asking how he was feeling.
The man put a hand to his head, glanced at the woman in the bed next to him. She had almost stopped floating on her sheets, was now staring at him hard, frowning. The man looked up at the nurse, smiled as best he could, and said, his voice a jumble of cracked rocks, “Not particularly great. Uh, how about you?” He tried to smile, but he wasn’t sure if his mouth moved at all.
The nurse – very familiar to him for some reason, what was her name? – returned the smile, then mouthed more words to him, lost again to the pounding in his ears. He shook his head to let her know he couldn’t hear her. She reached down and patted his hand. She was warm. He wanted to move his other hand on top of hers, to feel the smooth skin there. He tried, but nothing happened. He looked down and saw the sling in which they’d put his arm. His leg, too, was bandaged.
He wanted to tell the nurse – Farah? Frieda? – they’d made a mistake. He didn’t need to be here. The sling and bandages were unnecessary. Some kind pedestrian had probably brought him in, or at least called an ambulance to take him away. But they were wasting good hospital supplies on him when they could be used for people who really needed them – perhaps like the woman next to him.
He looked again at this woman, and saw her frown had softened. The lines in her forehead smoothed out to show that she approved of the nurse’s job, approved of compassion shown to another human being.
But she didn’t know him. Didn’t know what he was. If she did, the frown lines would most certainly reappear.
In past hospital experiences, the doctors usually discharged him very quickly once they identified him. But the doctor who’d scribbled the man’s name on his chart might have been in too big a rush to figure it out, or maybe too new to his job to notice the signs.
The way the hospital staff looked at him – and others like him – was always with a touch of faint disgust, but mostly indifference. Once they realized he was one of them, they’d ask two security guards to walk him down the hall, the automatic doors would slide open, and they’d stand there silent, waiting for him to leave. Just staring. Afraid to touch him. Pushing him out into the cold with their eyes, their fear. Sands in their minds shifting already to cover the experience. They would gradually forget they’d even met him. The memory erased entirely.
He did not know why this happened, but it had always been so, for as long as he could remember.
The nurse patted his hand again, released it, smiled once more, and walked out the door.