-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
/
page0023.mm
49 lines (49 loc) · 2.32 KB
/
page0023.mm
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
<p>Page 23.</p>
<p>Days passed and no-one visited. In this
respect it was just like my first time in the hospital. The
difference was now I wanted them to. Well, not <em>them</em>.
Her. I wanted to see Lola Banks barge through the door, her arms full
of legs.</p>
<p>I couldn’t
ask the nurses to send her. Since they had turned hostile, letting
them know I wanted something was a strategic mistake. My meals were
proof enough of that. But I couldn’t wait, either. On the fifth
day, just as I was formulating a plan involving dragging myself
across the floor to the phone in the hall, Lola appeared. She was not
carrying any prosthetic limbs. It was just her, in a too-big shirt
and crooked glasses. She hung in the doorway like she was afraid to
enter.</p>
<p>“Hi,” I
said.</p>
<p>She chewed her lip.
Then she marched toward me, but stopped two feet short of my bed.
“You crushed your own leg.”</p>
<p>“Yeah.”</p>
<p>She said, “Why.”
The word came out of her mouth like it was heavy. It slid bonelessly
to the floor and lay there.</p>
<p>I shrugged. It
seemed obvious. Lola had seen my prototype.</p>
<p>“They think
you’re suicidal,” she said. “They think you like
hurting yourself.”</p>
<p>“<em>What?</em>”</p>
<p>“Well?”
she demanded. “What else are people meant to think?”</p>
<p>“Do
people get their vision laser-corrected because they like hurting
themselves? Is that why they pierce their ears? People who work out
at the gym, are they mentally ill because they’re prepared to
endure a little short-term suffering in order to make their bodies
work better? The only difference between them and me is I have access
to better technology.” Lola sucked in breath, but I was too
riled up to stop. “And I don’t have pain because it’s
my <em>goal</em>. I have pain
because it’s an unavoidable side-effect of the human body’s
design being so conceptually flawed that the only way to implement
significant improvements is to scrap what’s there and start
over.”</p>
<p>From Lola’s
expression, I realized I had gone too far. She began to move. “Wait,”
I said. “Let me rephrase.” But she was leaning closer.
Before I realized what was happening, she kissed me.</p>