Machine Man Read Free

outstretched fingers were about to close on it when my thighs brushed metal. I looked down. I had walked into the Clamp. The plates were touching me. They were actually closer than I had meant to bring them. I should have hit STOP a few seconds ago. I heard the klaxon and noticed the swirling orange light as if for the first time. I began to back out. I wasn’t in real danger. The plates moved too slowly. Although that was deceptive. The gap shrank linearly but in relative terms it accelerated. My thighs jammed. I turned sideways and shuffled. My left shoe caught. I freed that but then the right did. I hadn’t accounted for a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the plates increasingly obstructing movement. I had left insufficient margin for error. I lunged for freedom and fell face-first onto the floor. I pulled one leg free but my right shoe caught. I grabbed my thigh and pulled. Above the clamp, through the green glass, Elaine and Katherine gaped. Between them and me sat my phone, untouched.
    I felt unbearable pressure. My intestines tried to squeeze out of my ears. I didn’t hear the noise. The klaxon covered that. But I saw the spray. In the orange light, it looked black.
    During Clamp operation, the lab autolocked, for safety. Ihad to tear my shirt into strips to stem the bleeding. I had to flop across the floor until I could reach the controls. I’ll be honest. There was a lot of screaming. I got my hands on the STOP button. The klaxon died. The orange light faded. I closed my eyes. I was going to vomit, or pass out, or one then the other. The door opened and Jason said, “Oh fuck, fuck.” I felt very sad, because that seemed to confirm it.

A ROOM formed around me. It didn’t happen all at once. It wove itself out of nothing by degrees. Not really. It was just how it seemed, under medication. It was a while before I felt confident it wouldn’t blow away again—the bleached sheets, the beige walls, the furniture that was all on wheels—to reveal I was still in Lab 4, bleeding to death.
    A surgeon visited, a tall woman with dark frizzy hair and impatient eyes. Usually I appreciate impatience in a person. It indicates an appreciation of efficiency. But my head was full of bees and she talked too fast to follow.
    “The debridement went very well. Often in the case of traumatic injury there’s a great deal of bone fragment and destroyed tissue, but yours was remarkably clean. You’re lucky. I had to take your femur up about six inches but that’s really nothing. Very little smoothing of the bone wasrequired. I did a closed amputation, stitching the skin closed during the operation, and that’s extremely rare in a trauma case. Normally we’d have to leave the skin flaps open, to make it easier to clean any infected tissue. But as I said, it was a remarkably clean site.”
    “What was a site?” My voice was thick. I wasn’t sure what I was asking. I just needed her to slow down.
    My surgeon raised a clipboard and scanned it. Her name tag said DR. ANGELICA AUSTIN . That sounded familiar. She might have visited me earlier, when I was less conscious. Dr. Angelica Austin flipped a page. “We might look at scaling back your pain meds.”
    That sounded like a terrible idea. I tried to sit up. I caught sight of my leg. I had a thigh. A thigh in a stocking. Three or four tubes emerged from areas that were patched with dressing, looping to hanging plastic bags. Between these were glimpses of something pink and black and shiny that did not look like skin but was. I was short. That was the shocking part. It wasn’t the stump so much. The stump was bad. But what was terrible was the air. The space. I had half a thigh. My knee was gone. My calf. I had no foot. I was missing an entire foot. I had kicked things with that foot and now I didn’t have it. These were things that were wrong.
    “You …” said Dr. Angelica Austin. “We went through the stump yesterday. I showed you.”
    “I don’t remember.”
    Dr. Angelica