It is not an easy choice we are asking you to make, we understand how hard this choice must be, the choice between a story you have told yourself again and again, that you have done right by your mother, by her spirit, have taken righteous vengeance against the men and women who stole her from you, and the story that you have done very little at all, have done less than very little in fact, have worked to advance the goals and livelihoods of the two people who deserved your vengeance most.
We navigate through this life with the good-faith hope that we are doing our best, that we are aimed in the right directions, that we are helping the helpless. Maybe we slip, maybe we mess up, maybe from time to time we do things that are less the right thing. Or we cut corners, or we make choices that serve our interests over the interests of those who depend on us, or we hide the consequences of the decisions we have made with the hope that those consequences will never be seen despite how often we make those same decisions. We go back to the ones we love when clearly they do not love us, or do not know how to love us, or show us their love in a way easily mistaken for hate. We are weak in the face of the hard work it sometimes takes to be strong. We convince ourselves (incorrectly) that silence is not a form of consent. We let good people die and sometimes we kill them ourselves and we hide and we hide and we hide and soon hiding becomes the thing we are best at doing, but it is time, Sarah.
It is time to stop hiding, Sarah O’Hara.
It is time to stop peeking out from behind the coattails of Mr. Niles, the flaring nostrils of Oyemi, the long reach of the Regional Office, to stop peeking out from behind your mechanical arm, to stop hiding behind your aunt and the tragedy of your childhood, time to stop hiding from what is real and painful and frustrating and all of the other emotions we find it so easy to hide from, and time to admit that you know, have known, have always known since the first time you saw her, bald and trembling and half-submerged in the milky-blue water of Oyemi’s Oracle Pool with her “sisters,” time to see your mother, time to stop pretending it’s not her.
78
The relief she felt when she came out of the surgery, when she came out of the haze-inducing anesthetics, was an ecstasy kind of relief.
The relief in having this part of her removed was almost as strong, in fact, as the relief she felt when she’d had that other part of her reattached.
It lasted for a day, for almost two days, and she wondered how strong the anesthetic had been. She didn’t take any of the painkillers the doctor had given her. She didn’t need them, she felt so fucking good all of the time now. She should have cut the other foot off, too, for good measure.
The lab was working on a new foot for her. The doctor had asked her to wait two weeks, three weeks, and then the foot would’ve been finished and they could’ve removed the bad foot and replaced it all in one operation, but she couldn’t wait. She wouldn’t wait. She would have cut it off herself if he hadn’t done it for her.
For now, it was disguised. They didn’t have the prosthetic on hand, and so it was disguised with wrapping and a boot, the kind people wore when they broke their foot. She had a story to tell in which she was a klutz. People liked to hear about when you were a klutz, she decided.
But in all honesty, she didn’t care what people liked to hear about or what people thought about when they saw her with her boot and her wrap because all she could think about was how good she felt now that the foot was gone.
This feeling was a fleeting feeling, however. This feeling lasted not even two full days before it was gone and was replaced first by an itch at the base of her leg, around the place where her foot would have started if her foot had still been there, and was followed, not long after, by a sharp, but not as sharp as before, kind of pain.
At first, it was like she was being touched by a sharp piece of ice. And then it was like she was being jabbed by that piece of ice, or as if the sharp piece of ice were being worked into her skin, were working to gouge out some essential part of her there in that new and raw stump.
Or, and this was what she decided, it was like the sharp piece of ice was not on the outside working its way in, but was instead on the inside trying to dig itself out.
She unclipped the boot and unraveled the wrap and looked at the place where there had been a foot, but she couldn’t see what might have been going on.
She placed her fingers gently on the part of her that was still wrapped in gauze but couldn’t feel anything through the gauze and so she unwrapped the gauze, too, and tested the skin, the nerves, with the soft pad of her index finger and then with the rest of her fingers, and there she felt them.
She couldn’t see what they were, not yet, but she could feel them. With her fingertips, she could feel them pushing their way out of her stump, and they were sharp and cold and not ice but not unlike ice, either.
Not ice, no. Metal.
79
Everyone was scared of her now. The interns, the jerks in accounting, the office staff, the travel agency staff. Even the Operatives. Oh, boy, were they scared of her now.
They were more scared of her now than she could have ever hoped or wished for. They were the kind of scared of her that surpassed even the kind of scared they had been of Oyemi.
It helped, if helped was the right word, that the skin they’d grafted onto her mechanical arm to redisguise it had sloughed off, simply died and peeled off, leaving the shiny interior exposed.
The doctor, who was maybe the most scared of her, had no explanation for this, didn’t even correct her when she said it had just died and fallen away. The skin was synthetic. There had been nothing in it to die.
If they’d known about the other part of this, if they’d known about the way in which her own body seemed to be systematically targeted by the nanotechnologies in her arm, targeted for replacement and improvement, if they’d known about her foot, which she’d covered up with a shoe, if they’d known about any of this, they would have been the kind of scared of her that would have bled into a dangerous kind of scared.
The kind of scared that would have led them to draw up plans, perhaps. Execution and elimination plans, maybe. Dissection and examination and for-the-betterment-of-science plans, perhaps.
And she didn’t know that such plans hadn’t already been drawn up, did she?
No. She did not.
It had taken less than forty-eight hours for her body to grow a new foot, except that wasn’t right, considering the foot was mechanical, and her body couldn’t “grow” mechanical things, but there it was, a new foot for her. It had been painful, but only in the beginning. Less than forty-eight hours, but already other pieces of her were beginning to wither and die and would need to be replaced by machine. She could tell.
The decay wasn’t visible, but the post-decay replacements were. More of her than just her foot and her arm was beginning to feel inorganic. Her ankle, the lower edge of her calf. The toes on her other foot, four of them, including her big toe, were skinless and had a metallic shine to them. They smelled like pennies or nickels or maybe they just smelled like mechanical toes. When she touched them — and she couldn’t stop worrying at them as if they were loose teeth — they were cold and smooth and hard.
Her shoulder.
She’d felt none of this, though. There’d been no pain since the foot. This was a thing she was grateful for but also she couldn’t be sure how grateful she was or should have been. She didn’t like pain. She wasn’t the kind of person who sought out pain and suffering. But without the pain, what then?