“Why?”
“Nobody goes to church.”
At last she forbade me to go. It wasn’t right for me to be seen there, she said—anyone who knew anything at all knew the story of her parthenogenesis; my existence routed all faith. Hadn’t she done herself—simply and without any trouble—what was prophesied? In any case, Caesar would think us no better than peasants.
She asked me why I wanted to go out into the dirt, into the soot, why I wanted to smell of sweat and fruit and onions, of the filth of the world.
“It’ll get into the wiring,” she said, and began to scrub at my ankles with steel wool. “I’ll have to spend hours fixing it for you, and then where will we be?” Her laugh was long and high-pitched and hollow. “I don’t know why you insist on going out among them,” she said. “It’s only the unloved that need to go to those places, and you’re the best-loved girl in Rome.” She began tinkering with the panels on my back. “Don’t you think?”
I had grown used to nodding. The panels at the nape of my neck often triggered it a half step ahead of my own thoughts.
I went anyway, sneaking out at strange, orange-lit hours, lingering in the marketplace. Sometimes I bought prayer cards from the women who sold reliquaries on the church steps and took them home, just to annoy her.
“You just don’t try,” my mother said when I returned.
My mother returned to her experiments. In my absence she filled her laboratory once more with objects both slithering and mechanical. She engineered griffins to guard the compound; she made pills that obviated the need for water, for grain, for meat.
She stopped sleeping. She locked herself in the laboratory, and at night I could hear the whirring of machinery: computer fans and bone saws. She did not speak to me, but her eyes were bloodshot, and even in repose her fingers scratched and picked at one another because she could not bear to sit still.
She built a robot with my face and tasked it with the domestic chores. She said nothing to me, but one day I came home to find my bed made and the dishes washed, and a girl with my old brown eyes staring at me across the kitchen table.
I pretended not to notice.
For Caesar she worked harder than ever. She worked on weapons, on bombs and spores. She no longer admired him. He too had failed her. He was weak in private—easily ruffled. She was too clever for him. She explained her formulas to him and he did not understand them; he only nodded—like an owl, she said—and sent her on her way.
Rome was not enough for her. She had come to hate it. She hated the obsequious waiters and the motorcycle oil that pooled up between the cobblestones. She hated the marketplace sounds: the squawking of chickens, the hawking of squid.
“They don’t realize how much better I could do,” she said. She had stopped speaking to me; instead, she had taken up the habit of addressing the robot to whom she had given my eyes, inevitably in my overhearing. “You understand that, don’t you? I could give them something worthwhile.”
Nothing was worthwhile. She stood at our window and pressed her palms against the glass; at times she muttered curses at the passersby below. They did not understand her; nobody could understand her. Did they not know that the medicine in their drinking water, the fortifications in their joints, the serenity of their sleep—all this they owed to her?
I watched her from the doorway, tapping my feet upon the threshold, and relished her unhappiness. I was one of them, after all, with my still-beating heart, my left arm still fashioned of flesh. Like them I had the power to disappoint her.
One night she came into my room, woke me two hours before dawn to tell me she had discovered it—that through which all things would be purified. She had molted, melted, melded; she had alchemized and vaporized and at last she held in a ball no bigger than a thimble the secret to the beginning and the end, the proof of her greatness, the seal of her wisdom, the stamp of herself.
She would not let me sleep. She flung open the curtains; she stomped dust from the carpets; she dragged me into her laboratory and there, humming with joy, she revealed to me a small and spinning black sphere, the size of my rosary beads.
“You see?” she said. “I’ve done it. I’ll show them, now.”
“What does it do?”
Her laughter echoed from machine to machine. “Everything.” It realigned asymmetries; it gathered viscera into geometrical shapes. It took cells and rearranged them in her image. It could cure congenital deformities, she said, from the inside out.
“Is it safe?”
“What do you take me for?”
She told Caesar she wanted to test it. She asked for five hundred men. The response came swiftly, on printed letterhead. It was too dangerous, he said. Perhaps she would be content with rats?
All night long she raged, throwing beakers and jars against the wall. The maid with my face scuttled behind her, sweeping up the mess.
“You see how they’ve treated me?” she said. “They’ve made me a laughingstock—and it’s because of you! You think they don’t see you walking out alone, by yourself? You think they don’t wonder what kind of influence I am, letting you go out among the plebs? You think it’s not your fault?”
I had no answer for her.
She grabbed me by the shoulders, fixed her gaze on mine.
My eyes were made of electric sparks, and they gave nothing away.
The next morning my mother took me on our customary walk to the Capitoline, to see where her name had been inscribed upon the wall.
“It’s a wonder they’ve got the balls to leave it up,” she said, “if this is how they’re going to treat us.” She took my hand. “Come. We’ll go to the Forum. We’ll have a picnic.”
We sat once more on the pillars; she spread cheese on bread—a rarity, now; she almost never ate food. Together we turned our faces to the sun. She pressed my cheek against her breast and ran her fingers through my hair. The crimson light of the dusk had settled upon her cheeks, and in that light she was beautiful. I leaned against her; her body was warm on mine, and I do not know if I have ever loved her more.
“It’s only that I wanted to give you the world,” she whispered to me. “It’s only that I love you, and that nobody else really can.”
She began to hum—quietly at first, and then loudly enough for passersby to stop and stare—hum until every panel and every wire and every metal bolt within me began to vibrate with the beauty of it.
It was only when she stopped singing that I realized what she was about to do.
There was a flash, and then there was no more world.
We can never go back. From time to time I don the necessary helmet and walk alone along the ramparts of the old city.
The men at the border press their foreheads to the floor. They retreat into their elevators and then I walk alone past the Colosseum, past the legless statues, the bones of stray cats. Now all seven hills are dust and shadows, and so alone I go to Pompey’s Theatre, to the stultifying emptiness of the Hippodrome where even the eagles are dead, and alone I venture into hollowed-out tramcars; the upturned Pantheon; the parks on the Janiculum, where the vines reach all the way to the river, which has not flowed for twenty years.
I walk until nightfall, and there is no sound but my footsteps, which is like no natural sound and which sickens me still. I go alone to what’s left of the basilica, to pray, and when my knees fall to the earth the clang echoes in my ears and it is the only sound left in the world.