Human Sister Read Free

Nuremberg, I thought.
    Smith sat down on his chair, then extended his hands, palms up. “Sara, take my hands. Please. I promise I won’t hurt you.”
    I saw no harm in this and laid my palms on top of his. In my mind I saw a white butterfly, its wings aquiver, light on a pink rose petal.
    “Look at me, please.”
    I looked up at him. When our eyes met, he smiled. Had I met him under normal circumstances, I would have felt that he was a kind man. Perhaps he was.
    “Sara, please listen to me carefully. There’s an ongoing investigation into the whereabouts and activities of androids. The law is that you must cooperate with this investigation. There are ways, painful ways, to make you talk. And you will talk. Everyone does. It’s just a question of how much you’ll put yourself through before you beg to talk. Please don’t make me leave this room without your statement. If you do, your unimaginable pain will be a torture not only to yourself but also to me and to Elio and your grandparents. Please, don’t do that to yourself. Don’t do that to us. Talk to me. Please.”
    I began pulling my hands away from his. He quickly turned his hands over and caught mine. “Ask for me when you want to talk. Just say my name, Randy Smith, and I’ll come back quickly and take away the pain.”
    I pulled my hands back and didn’t look up or answer. After a few seconds, he sighed, then slowly got up and left the room.
    I brought to my mind’s eye the grape leaf I used for self-hypnosis, seeing the intricate venation of its underside, and above it, a sky, calm and blue and streaked with cirrus, like wisps of hair from Grandma’s comb. But I didn’t proceed to the hypnotic countdown; I didn’t need to, not yet. I just wanted to be sure the leaf was there, and after seeing it, I returned to a meditative calm.
    The door opened. Casey walked briskly to the chair in which Smith had sat. I focused on his legs in their dark gray trousers. Suddenly, the chair swung around, its back cracking hard against one of my kneecaps. I tried not to wince. Casey sat, straddling the straight-backed chair.
    “Didn’t that hurt?” he asked. “You on something?”
    Interesting how different are the many sensations of pain, I thought. They’re all my friends, trying in their way to help me.
    “Doc, get in here!”
    A man wearing black shoes, black socks, charcoal trousers, and a long white coat entered the room and stood beside me.
    “Take a sample,” Casey ordered. “We need to know if she’s on something.”
    The doctor pricked my finger and drew a spot of blood. As he was leaving he said, “I’ll let you know in five, ten minutes, max.”
    “Okay, let’s start at the beginning,” Casey said to me. “What’s your name?”
    “Sara Jensen,” I answered, without looking up at him.
    I was surprised and upset at how my answering this question, a question Grandpa had told me I could answer, seemed to pull me out of the quiet place I’d been in.
    “So, you can talk. Good. We’re moving right along. You went to Calgary before Christmas with Elio, right?”
    Breathe slowly, deeply, I thought. Feel yourself moving away from him.
    “Okay. We know you can hear. We know you can talk. Now, we’re going to hear you answer my questions without all this fucking around. You went to Calgary with Elio. Right?”
    He rapped his thick, hairy fingers on the back of his chair, then reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a packet of photographs. “Looky what we got here. It’s you and your love sitting together on a flight to Calgary. Oh, and here. You and him at Calgary Zoo with your father and your lovely, sweet mother. Now, look at this one—it’s my absolute favorite. Warms my heart. The two of you hugging at Calgary International just before he boards a plane to Amsterdam to go see his mother. And he’s crying. How sweet.”
    They’ve decided to play good-guy, bad-guy with me, I thought. Ridiculous!
    He shuffled through the