Her room was bare. She had expected a dorm room or a hotel room of some kind, with a kitchenette and a living suite, but it was gray and quiet and, but for a twin bed attached to the wall and a sink and a closet for her clothes, empty. The mirror over the sink was small, square, and only just large enough for her to see her face, her hair, her shoulders, the very tops of her breasts if she were naked, and nothing else, but she found herself staring at the mirror every morning and every night for hours on end.
She stared at her shoulders and the tops of her arms, at her biceps, or what she could see of them if she let her arms hang at her sides, or what she could make of them — or the one, at first, her real bicep, which was the only one she could lift and squeeze into shape. A tiny white line of a scar wrapped itself around her shoulder where they’d attached the mechanical arm, and another identical scar wrapped around her other shoulder, and the two arms looked so much alike that there were days when she could convince herself that she couldn’t tell, either, which was which.
That first week and most of the second week, she couldn’t move it at all, not by thinking, not by trying. What had happened in the operating room, the way she had torn it apart, must have been a fluke, Mr. Niles told her. “Muscle memory, or a knee-jerk reaction,” he told her. “Like a chicken running around with its head cut off,” he told her. Which didn’t make her feel better, nor did it make any sense to her.
“It’s a process,” the doctor, crutched and timid in her presence, told her. “The internal operating system is still working out the best way to communicate with your own neurological system. And then your muscles and your synapses all have to be retrained. But it will work itself out. Leave it to its business and it will work itself out.”
But she couldn’t just leave it to its business. It was her arm, damn it. She couldn’t not try. She tried the first moment Mr. Niles left her alone, even though he’d told her not to, not for a couple of days at least. She walked into her room and closed the door with her normal arm and then turned around and stared at the closed door in front of her and willed her mechanical arm to lift. She tensed muscles. She closed her eyes and imagined a reality. A reality that involved her mechanical arm lifting full of grace and fluidity to open the door. She pretended the arm wasn’t even there, or was nothing special, that the last thing she wanted or needed was for the arm to make some movement, operate some simple machine. She tried to trick herself into using it. She let herself fall forward, tried to sneak up on the arm, jolt it into the action of catching her as she fell. She tried this sort of thing for what must have been hours, but none of it worked, and she was tired and sore and ready for bed. She struggled one-handed with her clothes and her shoes. Everything about her hurt and wanted to sleep. She sat down at the edge of the bed, winded and unhappy, only to remember she hadn’t turned off the light. She debated lying back on the bed and covering her eyes with her normal arm and sleeping with the light on but she hated sleeping with the light on. She sighed and leaned forward to give herself the momentum to stand back up, but leaning forward, something else happened: Her mechanical arm swung down of its own volition and grabbed her shoe, and before she knew it, her arm had thrown the shoe, hard, so very hard, at the light fixture over her head, hard enough to smash the fixture and the bulb and to stick her shoe firmly into the ceiling.
And after that, all she could do was stare at it, even in the dark, stare at that arm and wonder what, if anything, it might do next.
25
Their faces were masked. She could tell by the way they moved, by the way they walked and swung their arms and held their chests forward, she could tell by the look of them, they’d been trained by someone who had once worked for the Regional Office.
They stopped when they saw her, saw how close she was to the gurney, to her arm, and they looked at each other and then one of the men shrugged and the other shrugged back and then he glanced briefly down at the arm on the table, as if to make sure it was still there, that it hadn’t left, hadn’t sprouted legs and walked away on its own.
She didn’t say, Where am I?
She didn’t say, Who are you?
Didn’t say, What have you done with Mr. Niles?
She didn’t say anything except for with her eyes, which said, quite clearly and pointedly, I am going to kill you, to the man who’d looked down at her mechanical arm, but he didn’t flinch or take on a concerned look or falter in his step or step backward in fear as she had hoped he might. Instead, he smiled at her and then looked at the other man and nodded at him and they laughed as if they’d just shared a joke, and she wondered if they were talking to each other, if they’d been talking all along but in a secret way, in a way that she couldn’t hear. Telepathically, maybe.
The two men untied her and moved to lift her out of the chair. They weren’t rough with her, and the one trying to pick her up by the armpit that wasn’t an armpit anymore because it was a stump shied away a little bit at first, uncertain where to lift from. The other one had forgotten his gloves and was barehanded. He had soft, gentle hands. They concerted their efforts and lifted her up, and she saw the gash on her other arm, and thought, They didn’t know! and she ignored the burning, ignored the sight of her own bone, and she thought of Mr. Niles, and she did not panic.
She didn’t panic at all.
She made a silent vow to Mr. Niles that she would not panic, that she would find some way out of this mess, a mess she imagined was of her own devising, and that she would find him, find him at least to apologize to him, and in her mind, she clenched her fist. She imagined herself standing in front of everyone who might stand in her way, and in her mind, she clenched her mechanical fist, ready to wreak havoc on all of the enemies of Mr. Niles and the Regional Office. As the two men walked her past the table where her mechanical arm lay useless and lifeless, and just before they yanked her out of the room, she looked at it and imagined her mechanical fist tightly clenched and full of its unimaginable power.
And that’s when she saw the fingers twitch and jerk and then swiftly close, her mechanical hand, swiftly close into a powerful fist, and she felt a gasp rising in her throat, but then they hit her in the back of the head with something heavy and blocky, and everything went blurry, and they hit her again, and things went black.
26
Once in a while, Sarah would get a call from Mr. Niles. He would bring her into his office. He would sit her down in the chair across from his desk. He would sigh. He would lean forward and smile and ask about her, ask about her arm, about the apartment he’d found for her, ask about her aunt, who he knew lived in Queens now and was very important to Sarah.
He did this every time, and every time, this ritual made her feel anxious. Or not anxious, but antsy.
She appreciated his attention but because she was barely twenty and had a mechanical arm and was desperately seeking vengeance, she really just wanted him to get to the point, which she knew would come only after she’d answered his questions, refused his offer for water and then for coffee, assured him that she was doing fine, thank you, and that she was ready, she was ready to see whatever he’d called her in to show her.
Namely, she was ready for the file on his desk, the name inside that file, the photograph, the last known whereabouts.