Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh Read online

  Anna was beginning to understand why the staff had wanted to vomit at the mention of her brother’s name. “So why are you taking me in now?”

  “Because he’s dying,” said Dr. Thompson, a strange expression on his face. “Because the last few times he’s said anything, he’s shouted about love. Because no one should have to die alone if there’s a choice.”

  He took out a key, unlocked the ward, and they stepped into a dim purgatory lit with the pale green and blinking red of far too many machines.

  It was overly easy to say her brother looked like hell. One eye was folded, sort of, the lid almost collapsed. His cheeks were odd, squared. The rest of him was under a sheet, but the arms were . . . wrong.

  And so many machines, Anna thought, so many machines.

  “You can touch his right hand,” Dr. Thompson said. “His left . . . well . . . ”

  She reached down, sheet between her skin and his, and stroked the side of his palm. Summer nights in the old Mercury, her and him and Tildy rolling around naked together. Not quite sex, not exactly, but close enough to ruin her if anyone had ever found out. Tildy was gone, pole-dancing in Oregon or Washington. Sail was dead now. Markus dying.

  No one left but her to remember the days of their childhood innocence.

  She began to giggle at that thought.

  Dr. Thompson looked at her strangely as the machines beeped and squealed. One of Markus’ eyes flickered open.

  “She’s with me,” her brother said, and smiled fit to be an angel.

  “Of course,” said Anna, who had no idea what or who her brother was talking about.

  The machines shrieked and flared, and there were nurses everywhere for a while, but Dr. Thompson never made her leave.

  The next day Dr. Thompson called her. “Can you meet me at the Ground State? It’s a coffee shop down on Irving.”

  “Sure.” She’d made her plane reservations for the day after. There wasn’t going to be a funeral. “Why?”

  “Just be there in an hour.”

  She went, wondering what, if anything, she would learn about her brother’s death. It was a grubby place, floors looking like they’d hosted a mud wrestling tournament, but Dr. Thompson was there without his lab coat, a ceramic cup steaming in front of him as some kind of industrial punk music blared through the speakers.

  Anna felt very out of place. She was a long way from Central Texas. But there was too much blood. She wanted an answer.

  “I need to show you something,” Dr. Thompson said abruptly. “I’ll be fired if anyone knows I did, but you . . . you deserve to know. And maybe you can tell me what it signifies.”

  “Uh huh.” In that moment, she did not want to know what had become of her brother, what his death might mean.

  “Be warned. This will be hard. Very hard.” He pushed a Polaroid photograph across the little table at her, face down. Anna picked it up, turned the picture over.

  It took her a minute to understand what she was seeing. A bloody mess, red and yellow and pink and blue and black, like the scrap bucket from a butcher shop.

  Then she saw the nose. Lips.

  A woman’s face. It was a woman’s face, sewn into a larger panel of . . . skin?

  “It was inside the skin of his abdomen,” said Dr. Thompson gently. “Facing in and up. Toward his heart. We don’t know who she is . . . was.”

  Anna began to cry, shaking her head, sobbing for the waste of years and lives. She collapsed onto the table, shrieking, then weeping, until finally Dr. Thompson stood, brushed his fingers across her shoulders, and left.

  When she finally looked up again, a bald man was standing at the counter, the map of a city tattooed on his head.

  Only in San fucking Francisco, she thought, taking the Polaroid and preparing to leave.

  The Death of Markus Selvage

  The women of his life loved him, all of them, without reservation, with open hearts and open arms and open mouths, as he found his way to them through a forest of rusting blades and glittering chains and clattering gears where the sweet birds sang forgiveness in his name.