She sent Caesar a diagram of the arm. Two weeks later he replied—on official letterhead, with the eagle on the seal—to congratulate her.
“You see what we’ve accomplished?” She framed it on the wall.
When I was fifteen, she created an artificial leg.
“You’re so intelligent,” she said. “And I’m so proud of you. There’s so much you could do, if you only cared a little more about yourself. If you were only willing to put in the time.”
I came to her that night and asked her to build me one. It was long and slim, turned up at the heel and impervious to pain.
It proved too long—the false foot dragged a few millimeters behind the real one—and so we amputated the other. I grew two inches overnight and found I was taller than she was.
My mother supervised my rehabilitation. She took me daily to the Forum, where now I could leap and somersault over the ruins, and challenged me to run faster, to climb to the top of Trajan’s Column, to jump from the three-story Triumphal Arch without wincing in pain.
My mother filmed it all and sent the footage to Caesar.
This time his answer was handwritten. He thanked my mother for her service and invited us both to a reception on the Capitoline the following Kalends.
My mother put her hands on the sides of my face; she tightened at my screws until I yelped; she checked the circuits at my shoulder and polished the metal eagle branded into my forearm.
“Don’t fidget.” She slapped my left wrist, which was the only one capable of feeling pain. She considered my neck, my breasts, my waist. “It’s only…” She passed her fingers over my eyelids. “They’re brown, like mine. You could fix them, you know. If you wanted to.”
I told her I didn’t want to. My eyes were her eyes; for her sake I loved them.
“But you can barely see!” She pulled them open with her fingertips. “You could see perfectly, more than that—we could put a camera in, another lens or two, so you could see things up close…”
There was nothing noble about my refusal. I was afraid of the pain.
“Whatever you want,” she said. “It’s none of my business. But when Caesar sees you, don’t blame me if he isn’t impressed with us. He doesn’t invite just anybody to these things, you know.”
It wasn’t easy to get an invitation. Caesar didn’t ask people twice. She’d worked so hard—she’d been so proud of me, of my strength, of my speed, of the swannish way I could dance, balancing my whole weight upon a single metallic toe. She only wanted Caesar to see, in his majesty, what she saw already, and what I refused to see.
She gave me two blue eyes to replace the ones she had taken out.
That night I danced with Caesar. He slid his hand up the side of my thigh; I did not feel it. I let him take me to one of the back chambers, and there I let him open the various panels on my legs, on my forearm, in my back. I showed him where my mother had fused wires together, and where they snaked into veins. He asked me to show him my strength.
The next day a member of the senatorial science council was found poisoned, and Caesar offered my mother his place. The following month she improved upon my spine.
There was only one part of me my mother refused to operate upon. She would not risk my ability to bear children. “It is the greatest thing I have ever done,” she said to me. “It is the only way I know I am truly alive, knowing that I will live on in you. It means that I will never die.”
In the end it didn’t matter. When I was sixteen, one of her refurbishments resulted in infection, and to save my life it became necessary to remove my womb.
“Never mind,” my mother said then. “I’ll build you a better one tomorrow.”
When I was seventeen Caesar’s chief scientist died; my mother replaced him. We moved to the official residence: a glass-fronted monolith just outside the city walls. From the top floor we could make out the old city in the distance—the Colosseum, the Triumphal Arch, Trajan’s Column—swarming with tramcars. With my new eyes I could even make out the stray cats.
“It’s happened at last,” my mother said. “This is what we’ve been working toward. They know now what we can do.” She considered me. “You’ve gotten so beautiful, you know.”
I was not beautiful; nevertheless, I commanded attention. Men stared at my legs in the street, marveling at their symmetry, sometimes suspecting. There were rumors among the political classes—whispers of senator’s wives with false hands or bionic ankles, minor modifications among the Praetorian Guard—but the totality of my replacements was unheard of, even here. My appearance in the marketplace prompted whispers, dark looks, greengrocers crossing themselves and lighting candles to the saints. By now my mother had replaced every part of me, with the exception of my left arm.
This, I had informed her, would remain precisely as it was.
My mother and I still took our walks around the Capitoline, where men bowed to us when we passed them by. My mother’s name was inscribed upon the ministry walls, now, for services rendered to Caesar; she liked to go there each morning at breakfast time, to make sure that it was still there.
“All fools,” she said. “The whole lot of them.”
“Except you.”
“I’ve done so much, now. I’ve been cleverer than they were. The others: they made toys, children’s games. I made things for men. And, you see? Now they know. It was the least they could do for me, given all that I do for him.”
She wrapped her arms around me and kissed my forehead, and in the warmth of her, nothing else existed. There was only that double strand of our being, our arms twining into one another. There was only her face in my face, her voice in my voice, and so she did not realize that I was lying to her.
It was a lie of omission. I had taken to wearing a shawl, as peasant women did, to cover the falsity of my face, and in that anonymity I had begun to wander the insalubrious alleyways of the city, like the palm readers and chicken sellers, uniformly made of flesh. There I walked for hours, in the fruitless hope of blistering my feet, of starting to smell. Alone I went across the river into Trastevere, and there I wandered anonymous in the back alleys of the marketplace.
One day I went, head covered, to the fishmonger on the riverbank; he pressed live squid into my hands and commanded me to feel their freshness; I squelched the tentacles between my fingers and marveled at how easily I crushed them.
I took my left hand out of its glove and carried it bare-handed to the bridge; there I tore at it with my teeth; there I swallowed it raw. I spit the ink out into the river and thrilled at my transgression.
I had even taken to going to church. I wasn’t sure if I believed, but my mother set no store by it, and so I took perverse pleasure in listening to the old rites, in the incense that clung to my clothes. I never took a cushion for my knees when I knelt to pray—I did not need one—but the old women of the congregation took this for penance, and thought me the most pious of them all.
I lit candles for my mother, and left them burning. I took communion, and sanctified whatever parts of me could still be sanctified—five of my fingers, the wrist of my left arm. In those moments, I used to imagine that I was transfigured and that my body was neither mechanical nor flesh, but something ethereal and else, some yet-undiscovered material that my mother had not learned the secret of creating. Those parts of myself, incense doused and made whole, were all that did not belong to her.
My mother sensed this. She caught me on the stairs, twenty paces ahead of my bodyguard, and knew where I had been; she sniffed the incense that had settled on my hair.
“What must people think of you?” She stood with her arms crossed and laughed. “What must Caesar think? The senators? They probably think you’re mad—or doing something political.”