He called it experimentation

I live in a mechanized body. A teenage protégé, I built it to thwart my enemies. The words they flung at me glanced off the flesh-like tarpaulin exterior and I laughed as my creation’s face remained static.

It does have limitations. Years have passed and I did not consider growth. My form has cracked as I fit into the machine like a geisha’s foot into her shoe. I sometimes must talk to others and for that I spin rusted wheels and tap dials that stick.

Now I look at various people from behind the transition house’s desk: hairy, bruised, clean, athletic, stump-legged and in wheelchairs. I rotate the head ninety degrees east and there sits Nicole on the seat beside me. She has eyes pale blue like Neptune against caramel angular skin that concurrently shock and crystallize my squirming heart.

She asks me why I read Joyce and the wry curve of her thin purple lips lifts a tone of irony that slips through the ear’s transistor radio and titters about my body. I know how this will end. I languidly tap on this and that key and pull a string to open its mouth. It outpours the drainage waste of my true intentions and sounds:

                “He’s complex and I can’t understand anything really”—a pause as I abandon the keys to adjust the eyes that through inattentiveness fell on her chest—“but the words are nice and it has good imagery.”

“Ah. That does sound complex.” She smiles but averts her gaze to the residents.

A pink fedora glides to the desk.

                “Mail?” The wheezy hat asks.

                I arch the machine upright and bend it over the cardboard mail folder. A return rotation and then I say “None today. I’ll mark your wake-up for four next morning. Sleep well.”

                Before I sit I watch the gray curly hairs wave on his waving liver-spotted arm as the pink hat atop the frail man on his wheelchair glides to the door.

“Thank you, but I won’t be staying tonight.”

                Away from the shelter I find safety in my room. It is a white room with an olive air mattress in one corner and a plywood desk and notebooks in the other. One pad documents questions to use during conversation and the other details my experiments. Both are unreliable. The pre-thought questions only add to my robotic tone. The other lists chemicals, drugs, and alcohols that all have proved as useless as the phrases.  

Here at least I can move without ensuring its movements won’t make others suspicious. When free I stumble and arch around this cubicle, but it grows claustrophobic. The space feels too close now. I’ll drop off my bags and leave.

                Alcohol was crossed off and deemed unhelpful long ago but I nevertheless now find myself on a wooden chair at a dim corner table with a few shots of amber scotch. As I sit and decant the liquid through fabricated throat and into my gaping mouth, I forget myself and fuse into the skin-embracing gears.

                Those eyes again. At the bar and talking to a pair of shiny teeth with smooth skin and a button-down folded neatly on tan arms. She glances at me and waves. I lackadaisically lift my palm and the half-full glass beside it slides across the table but stops at the edge.

                “I wouldn’t have expected to see you here” says she, now standing at the table and pulling me into the orbit of billowing blue Neptune.

                Does she know what she’s putting me through? I tap the cloudy shape-shifting keys and try to make it speak. “I sometimes”—and then—“come here.”

                “Oh, ok. My friends and I are at the counter if you want to join in.”

                There were faces at the counter that either smiled at her or laughed at me when she walked away. I finished my drink.

                I like the night. Especially hazy nights like tonight. Above is a full moon or a street lamp. The sidewalk is hard but my feet seem to bounce along. Despite the coat on the gears the cold still seems to turn my skin into gelatin. My organs are wobbling. A sip from the bottle eases things but the night grows dimmer. Black now. Did I miss something?

                Sensation. Sickly sensation, but I feel. It is bright outside. There is a giggling trickle of water nearby and I am laying on dirt and rocks. I turn to my left and see a wheelchair and plastic legs and then that gray face and pink fedora.

                He wheezes. “Last night as I was feeding the minnows you fell from the sky. Or rather, that ledge.” He nods upwards to the steep muddy edge held in place by trees and roots. “You swan-dived onto a rock—sprock! Ha! I thought you were dead, but instead your head smashed and chest ruptured in a metallic din and one body fell out of another.” He clears his throat. “The flashiest molting I’ve seen in my days and I’ve seen quite a few things.”

                I see myself. Crooked arms and toothpick legs and a few feet shy of that body I built. I can move, though. I arch my back and sit beside his plastic legs. “Thank you,” I say, and don’t use buttons.

                “No, thank you. I only watched you fall. If you look ahead there’s a path that takes you from the ravine.”

                I exit and sit naked on the warm sidewalk beside the trees that line the precipice. My keys and wallet were on the other body, but that’s fine. I think I’ll sit here for a while and bask in the sun.