LIMBs

 

Julia E. Elliott

On a gauzy day in early autumn, senior citizens stroll around the pear orchard on robot legs. Developed by the Japanese, manufactured by Boeing, one of the latest installments in the mechanization of geriatric care, Leg Intuitive Motion Bionics (LIMBs) have made it all the way to Gable, South Carolina, to this little patch of green behind Eden Village Nursing Home. And Elise Mood is getting the hang of them. Every time her brain sends a signal to her actual legs, the exoskeletal LIMBs respond, marching her along in the gold light. A beautiful day—even though Elise can smell chickens from the poultry complex down the road and exhaust from the interstate, even though the pear trees in this so-called orchard bear no fruit. The mums are in bloom. Bees glitter above the beds. And a skinny man comes toward her, showing off his mastery of the strap-on LIMBs.

 “Elise.” He squints at her. “You still got it. Prettiest girl at Eden Village.”

 She flashes her dentures but says nothing.

 “You remember me. Ulysses Stukes, aka Pip. We went to the   BBQ place that time.”

 Elise nods, but she doesn’t remember. And she’s relieved to see a tech nurse headed her way, the one with the platinum hair.

 “Come on, Miss Elise,” the nurse says. “You got Memories at three.”

 Elise points at the plastic Power Units strapped to her lower limbs.

 “You’re gonna walk it today,” says the nurse. “I think you got it down.”

 Elise grins. Three people from the Dementia Ward were chosen for the test group, and so far, she’s the only one with nerve signals strong enough to stimulate the sensors. As she strides along among flowers and bees, she rolls the name around on her tongue—Pip Stukes—recalling something familiar in the wry twist of his mouth.

*

 For the past few months, nanobots have been rebuilding Elise’s degenerated neural structures, refortifying the cell production of her microglia in an experimental medical procedure. Now she sits in the Memory Lane Neurotherapy Lounge, strapped into a magnetoencephalographic (MEG) scanner that looks like a 1950s beauty parlor hair-drying unit. As a young female therapist monitors a glowing map of Elise’s brain, a male spits streams of nonsense at her.

 “Corn bread,” he says. “Corn-fed coon. Corny old colonel with corns on his feet.”

 Elise snorts. Who was that colonel she knew? Not a colonel, but a corporal. She once kissed him during a thunderstorm. But she was all of sixteen and he was fresh from Korea, drenched in mystique and skinny from starving in a bamboo cage. Elise vaguely recollects his inflation into a three-hundred-pounder who worked the register at Stukes Feed and Seed. Pip Stukes.

 In a flash, she remembers the night they ate barbecue together, back when the world was still green, back when Hog Heaven hung paper lanterns over the picnic tables and Black River Road was dirt. After wiping his lips with a paper napkin, he’d said, You ought to be my wife in his half-joking way—and she’d dropped her fork.

 “Look,” says the female therapist. “We’ve got action between the inferior temporal and the frontal.”

 “Let’s try another round,” says the male, the one with the ponytail so little and scraggly that Elise wants to snip it off with a pair of scissors.

  “One unit of BDNF,” says the female. “And self-integration image therapy with random auditory sequencing and a jolt of EphB2.”

 The boy clamps Elise’s head into a padded dome, and the room gets darker. She hears birdsong and distant traffic as a screen lights up to display a photo of a couple, the girl decked out in a wiggle dress and heels, the man slouching beside her in baggy tweed, his face obscured by a straw hat. At first Elise thinks they’re walking on water, but then she realizes they’re standing at the edge of a pier, a lake glinting all around them.

 Something about the lake makes her gasp, and Elise wonders if the young woman in the photograph is her daughter—though she’s pretty sure she never had a daughter, so maybe it’s her mother’s daughter, which means she and the girl are the same person.

 “We’ve got action all over,” says the female therapist, “mostly in the temporal and right parietal lobes.”

 “Emotional memory and spatial identity,” says the male, tapping a rhythm on the desk with his fingertips.

 Elise glares at him for breaking her stream of thought, then looks back up at the image, noting a streak of silver in the upper-right corner.

 “Boat,” she whispers.

 And then she sees him clear as day: Pip Stukes at the wheel of the boat, his hair swept into a ducktail by the wind.

*

 In the pear orchard, Elise takes long strides, easy as thought, around the bed of mums. Scanning the lawn for Pip Stukes, she notes a cluster of wheelchair-bound patients idling at the edge of the flower bed, two women and a sleeping man, his shoulders slumped forward, his chin resting on his chest.

 “Hey, good-lookin’, what you got cookin’?” Pip Stukes struts toward her on cyborg legs. The skin around his eye sockets looks delicate, parchment shrunk down to the bone. While one of his eyes shines as blue as a tropical sea, the other is frosted with glaucoma. But Pip still flirts like a demon, sadness nestled under the happy talk.

 Elise blushes and Pip laughs, stands with his hip cocked.

 “Pretty day for a walk.” He holds out his arm and she takes it.

 He leads her into a stand of planted pine. Interstate 95 drones, but Elise thinks she hears a river. Looking for a thread of blue, she gazes through the trees, but all she sees is the blurry outline of a brick building. A crow flutters down in a shaft of green light. And Pip turns to her with an aching look from long ago.

 “Elise.”

 She studies him, mentally peeling back layers of wrinkled skin to glimpse the shining young man inside. She thinks he may have been the one, the dark shape in the bed beside her when she came up gasping from the depths of a bad dream.

 She practices the phrase in her head first—Are you my husband?—but her lips twitch when she tries to say it.

 “What?” says Pip.

 And then a male tech nurse, alerted by their RFID alarms, rushes into the patch of woods to retrieve them.

*

 Elise sits by the lake on a towel in early spring, delighted to see that she’s young again. As the sun sinks behind the tree line, she shivers, waiting for someone. She spots a wet glimmer of motion out past the end of the pier, a lithe young man doing tricks in the water. He crawls dripping from the lake, a merman with seal-black hair and familiar green eyes. As he inches toward her, his tail, a long fishy appendage glistening with aqua scales, swishes behind him in the sand.

 Elise wakes, panting, in her semielectric bed. She reaches into the dark, claws at the aluminum railing. She’s cold, her blanket wadded beneath her feet. And her roommate moans, a steady animal keening. The night nurse drifts in with pills in tiny cups. Though Elise can’t see her, she knows her voice, low and soothing like a sheep’s. The night nurse fixes her blanket, checks her diaper, gives her a drink of water, and then slips out of the room. Now her roommate’s snoring. The air conditioner hums. And Elise lies awake, thinking about the beautiful swimmer from her dream.

*

 Elise can smell the stuffiness of Eden Village Nursing Home only when she returns from being outside for a while. It’s as if they’ve shellacked the floors with urine and Lysol. And in the cafeteria, some gravy is always boiling, spiked with the sweat and waste and blood of the dying, all the juices that leak from withering people—huge cauldrons of gravy that emit a meaty, medicinal steam.

 Now that Elise can walk, now that she’s thinking a little faster, she feels up to exploring. She wants to find the room where Pip Stukes lives, ask him point-blank if he’s the man she married.

 Someone’s approaching down the endless hallway, a speck swelling bigger and bigger until it transforms into a nurse, a boy with a golden dab of beard.

 “Looking for the Dogwood Library?” he says. “Elvis and the Chipmunks?” He points toward a small corridor, then shuffles off into nonexistence.

 Peering down the passageway, Elise sees a parlor: wingback chairs, sofas, a crowd of patients in wheelchairs. She wills her strap-on LIMBs to move and, after a heartbeat pause, lurches down the hall. Over by a makeshift stage, the wheelchair-bound patients watch some middle-aged men set up equipment. A few people with LIMBs weave among the furnishings. Elise recognizes a tall woman with bald spots and a stubby old man with big ears. She creeps behind a potted palm to watch Elvis and the Chipmunks take the stage. Three large plush rodents sporting high pompadours, they jump into a brisk, twittering version of “Jailhouse Rock.” Elise is about to leave in disgust when she spots a man slumped in a wheelchair, dozing, his face so familiar that the shock of it interrupts the signals pulsing from her brain to her legs and into the sensors of her Power Units. She collapses onto a brocade couch. Sits there wheezing in the blotchy light. Then she calms herself and looks the man over. She remembers the hawk nose, the big, creased forehead.

 The Chipmunks croon “Love Me Tender” in their earsplitting rodent way, and Elise snorts. The man in the wheelchair had a great voice, could play guitar by ear. All those summer evenings they spent on the porch have been streamlined into archetypes and filed away in different sections of her cerebral cortex. And now the memories come trickling out. She remembers the sound of the porch fan and the smell of the lake and the feel of his hand on the back of her neck. She recalls swimming under stars and singing folk songs and drinking wine until their heads floated off their necks.

 Elise steps around a coffee table heaped with Reader’s Digests. She studies the pink bulges of the man’s closed eyes, the blanket draped over his legs, the big, fleshy head, humming with mysterious thoughts. The mouth is what strikes her hardest, the lips full, just a quirk feminine. When he opens his eyes and she sees the strange green, she knows it’s him, the man who once kissed her in a birch canoe, moonlight twitching on the water.

 “Who are you?” she says, the words pouring miraculously from her tongue.

 He studies her, and she fears he’s been drained dry, all of his memories siphoned by therapists into that electric box, where they bump around like trapped moths.

 He makes a gurgling sound, small and goatish. His left eye is blighted with red veins. His hands rest on his knees, and she wonders if he can move them at all.

 “Are you my husband?” she says.

 The man’s tongue pokes out and then retreats back into the cave of his mouth. He grunts. His left hand closes into a fist.

 “I thought you were dead,” she says.

 “Bwa,” he says, but then a nurse seizes his wheelchair, jerks him around, and trundles him off toward the corridor. Elise staggers in a panic and her LIMBs malfunction, leaving her crumpled on the carpet as the chipmunks mock her with “Heartbreak Hotel.”

 She pulls herself up, squats, then stands, wills her legs to move fast, and they do, speeding her along like a power walker, but then a CNA with dyed black hair stops her. Scans her tag, beeps the Dementia Ward, and shuffles her back to the place she’s supposed to be.

*

 Hands folded in her lap, Elise slumps in the MEG scanner. Groggy from an antipsychotic called Vivaquel, she’s having a hard time concentrating on what the therapists are saying.

 “Barbecue bubba,” says the boy. “Magnolia, moonshine, Maw and Paw.”

 “Very original,” says the girl. “How about some limbic work? Aural olfactory?”

 “Whatever,” says the boy.

 “Doo-wop and gardenias.” The girl giggles. “Who the hell makes this shit up?”

 Elise wishes they’d quit flirting and get on with it. She has half a mind to tell the boy that he’d be attractive with a decent haircut, but she doesn’t. She sits with her arms crossed until the boy slips in her ear buds and clamps a plastic cup over her nose. In minutes Elise smells sickly sweet aerosol air freshener. She coughs, and they lower her olfactory levels. As the Everly Brothers croon “All I Have to Do Is Dream” in their wistful Appalachian twang, she can’t help but sway to the music, breathing in a whiff of synthetic cherry, the exact scent of a Lysol spray that was marketed in the 1980s.

 “She doesn’t like it,” says the boy.

 “She’s responding,” says the girl. “Look at her amygdala. It’s glowing.”

 Elise recalls a cramped hospital room that smelled of cherry Lysol, the green-eyed man hunched in a bed, looking at the wall. He dove into the lake one summer night and bashed his head against a rock. Now his legs wouldn’t work right and he refused to look her in the eye. She held his balled fist in both hands and squeezed. The doctor said his motor neurons were damaged, compromising his leg muscles. The doctor went on and on about partial recovery and physical therapy, but the man didn’t seem to be listening.

 Elise remembers the smell of the man and the way he cleared his throat when he got nervous. She remembers how his silence filled the room every time he heard a motorboat fly by on the water. Stiffly, they’d wait for the sound to fade, and then pretend they hadn’t heard it.

*

 She wakes up with his name on her tongue: Robert Graham Mood, otherwise known as Bob. In the depths of her Vivaquel nap, she saw him, swimming in the lake’s brown murk, down near the silty bottom. Enormous primordial catfish flickered through the hydrilla, and Bob fed them night crawlers with his hands. Right where his sick legs used to be, Bob was growing flippers, two stunted incipient fins sprouting from his knees.

 This merman was her husband, Elise realized, and he was swimming away from her, toward the deepest part of the lake, where the Morrisons’ pontoon had sunk during a severe thunderstorm. The whole family had drowned: mother, father, three sons. And scuba divers swore they’d seen ghosts slithering near the wreck, glowing like electric eels.

 Elise rolls onto her side. Her room has a window, but an air-conditioning unit blocks the view. And now a tech nurse is here to attach her LIMBs to her scrawny legs. As he hooks up her sensors, he doesn’t say one word, doesn’t make eye contact: he might as well be tinkering with an old lawn mower.

 

First published in Tin House 51: Science Fair, Volume 13,
Number 3, Spring 2012
Included in the short story collection, The Wilds, Tin House Books, 2014