I want to be a little boy again

Seems a Little Seam to Me

By

Timothy Stillman

It was different now. She had been chasing it, unknowingly, out of the corner of her eyes for some time. Always at night. Watching the Vid Screen. Or doing cross-sticks under the too bright lamplight. It was three month after the surgery on her left eye, the patch having been removed only recently. Delicate procedure. Extensive procedure. And it seemed as though it had gone well this time. She was still a bit shaken by everything. The explosion of fireworks in her suddenly carnival eye that terrifying night when she woke with the scent of singed hair for some reason no one could explain in her mouth and nose. She had called Service. Which had rushed her to Medivac where had begun what she referred to as the eye odyssey.

She preferred not to think of any of this, and now a corner of darkness, a small wedge of it was in the left upper corner of her fragile delicate hurt eye. It did hurt some, as she got her cane, stood up from the sound chair, then leaned over turning off the sound of the movie that was encapsulated in her chair and filled her entire body with the soundtrack until her very bones felt bruised and unalone. The bruising of her bones by the sound that had become her when she listened to music or watched movies was small price to pay for being awash with sound that said she could hear, and that infirmity when she had the players on was happily washed away, even if the movie or music was grim.

She pretended she did not see the little corner of darkness, like a tiny edge of a roof in the upper left corner of her eye—it was little price to pay for what had been wrong with it—all the nerves and the broken jelly and the lens replacements and the odd images in her eye all this time. Now there was simply seaweed black floaters in the other eye, of which nothing at all was ironically wrong. The new eye, the eye of tomorrow, that one was the bad eye now obversely the good one. She held to her cane tip, and went slowly to the kitchen area. Tildy, her cat, walked with her and purred against the old woman’s anklets on this cold first wintry night of December.

She cooed to the cat, a lovely gray Minx, and Tildy meowed back at her mistress, looking way up at the woman, hugely tall from the cat’s perspective, though the woman was barely five ft. tall and refused to use the metric system even America had finally switched to some generations ago, bull headed country indeed. The old woman whose name was Sadie, or as the children used to refer to when she was one of them, Sad-y, for she was, though not really, but seemed to be sad much of the time. And finally she was indeed quite sad. She fixed a cup of Earl Gray—not that they still made that—it cost so much to buy good tea, but what allowances were given her were eaten up by her eye, which made her smile—her eye, a voracious living creature.

She fixed the plain old cheap tea she pretended was Earl Gray tea, and sipped it, leaning by the dusty counter in this small aged little house where she had lived most of her lifetime. And she thought the light from the living room seemed—odd. Seemed coming for a different-slant. It had something to do, she thought, burning the tip of her tongue on the hot tea in the flowered teacup preserved from her grandmother’s grandmother. The doctors had told her to think of the first new eye as it would eat up the previous real one, cell by cell, DNA strand by strand, melting it in effect, so the body would accept it as its own. The second artificial eye would do the same to the previous almost-real one.

She was frail and was toddly sometimes and sometimes tiddly, she half giggled between her pale drawn little lips, and true the light would have to be adjusted to—the new eye was almost her very own, her doctors said, and she remembered vids of the ancient past in which a heavy set gray haired woman in a very baggy what they used to call print dress, pale white flowers on it, and the dress very dark and a little shiny from being worn a long number of years. The doctors had told her that was her eye vids memory, since her original eyes, the one she had been born with, was saying good bye to her as it was eaten, grotesque image, away. Because even poor people such as she in this country, since memories were getting shorter and shorter, school history classes getting slimmer and slimmer text books, for governments made sure that persons did not remember some certain things, of which she and no one else, even and especially the government, did not know, therefore there was a computer chip placed in the brain where memory used to be.

The chip was concerned with domestic memories of the baby born, so they would remember their mothers and grand mothers and great grand mothers etc., only women of course, doing house hold chores and baking, when back long ago these things were actually done, and this was the price in addition to the georgies she could never afford enough of, the true price of having had her eye gone, then its replacement, and now its replacement. She was old, not of use to the State, and being a poor girl from a poor family, of no use at any but in the most unimportant of ways, therefore the luxury of memory was not needed. Never had been needed really. For the simple good heart of the State allowed her as it did everyone, no one really needed, since computers ran the entire world, so with her memory going, simple as it was and tedious sometimes watching some woman in her dim past running a hot triangle over a dress on a gray board while watching a tiny box on which dim images moved-oh you have to be kidding, she thought first on seeing that, thinking her chip was out of whack—and she could even feel the heat of summer there in that hot little green room of then, but all of it was going, saying goodbye, which she tried not to think of.

For soon she could not think at all, and with no memory and no thoughts at all, whatever they might have been, she would become a thing, an object, she would still live but she would be less alive than she had ever been. For try as the scientists might, they had to incorporate memories of some sort into humans before the androids were totally perfected, because of the simple fact they were what most made us human. She finished the cuppa and started back to the living room, taking it slowly, in this model house that was in a huge steel barrel that covered half the country and prevented any citizen from seeing what the world outside had really turned to. Then Tildy jumped high. Higher than she had ever jumped before. And Tildy then vanished in the upper little roof ledge of the eye and the strangely swayed light from the lamp in the living room with its sterile though homey to the people here at least comfort. Soft cushions everywhere. For her breakable bones. Honey colored walls. Constant heat or coolness. Servers when she wanted the metallic things. So far she had refused. Lovely vid screens round the walls in soft glow. The sound chair.

Now minus though one irreplaceable thing. Her beloved cat Tildy. As the cat vanished into something in the air, against the light that was like some of the sea turning round and swimming back on itself. The old woman who was losing even memory of her own face and being and name, screamed unintelligibly, her feet slipping and she tumbling and she remembered that heavy set woman, the tired woman, sitting in front of one of those—she could not think the word, but vaguely saw it, when there were such things, an even then old Singer sewing machine. The word Singer scripted in old yellow on the black thing the woman with ancient arthritic hands worked in the barely lit cold bedroom of her own aging small house and that was the last conscious thought she had because she was now finally at long last doubting everything she had been told and viewed her whole life, which caused the machine her to totally shut down, for that was the ultimate prime directive of her makers, and everyone’s makers, never to doubt, especially never to doubt everything.

She fell to the warm soft cushions and her eyes closed, and she was shut off.

While, Tildy, real cat, had found with her own complex eyes never for a human or android of whatever caliber to duplicate, which was why they kept cats alive, to continue to observe them, what the dead woman thing had almost seen, metaphorically and a bit literally too. The little ledge in the edge of the eye that would be salvaged and used again was a seam a seamstress would have noticed immediately, against the light flowing a bit against itself, for the seam was between tonight and tomorrow, as a moment an instant the wise heads who had worked out absolutely everything had not noticed.

And in this seam, this sewing machine pleat that made the cohesive tiny miniscule things that such giant brains had no need of, this little seam work, was a warm comfortable place and roomy and filled with happiness and contentment, as though a weary arthritic god chased down the gleaming halls of man’s so smug inventiveness and perceptions, having withered the world landscape and billions of creature on it with their insane nuke battles, from little peanut minds, here was god’s last hiding place, god at his singer machine singing still as Tildy purred when she felt a familiar anklet next to her cheek, so she rubbed her cheek on it and looked up at the now real, little young woman who looked very tall to the cat, thought the woman was barely five ft. tall.

It all depends on your perspective.