“My father used to tell this story about six blind men and an elephant. One man felt the elephant’s leg and said an elephant must look like a pillar. Another felt the trunk and said an elephant must look like a tree branch. Blind guy number three felt the tail and said an elephant is like a rope. Fourth guy feels the belly: The elephant is like a wall. Fifth guy, ear: The elephant is shaped like a fan. Sixth guy, a tusk, so an elephant must be like a pipe.”
Razor stares at me stone-faced for a long moment, then smiles. It’s a good smile; I like it, too.
“That’s a beautiful story. You should tell it at parties.”
“The point is,” I tell him, “from the moment their ship appeared, we’ve all been blind men patting an elephant.”
60
IN THE CONSTANT sterile glow, I measure the days by the uneaten meals he brings. Three meals, one day. Six, two days. On the tenth day, after he sets the tray in front of me, I ask him, “Why do you bother?” My voice like his now, a throaty croak. I’m soaked in sweat, fever spiking, head pounding, heart racing. He doesn’t answer. Razor hasn’t spoken to me in seventeen meals. He seems jittery, distracted, even angry. Claire’s gone silent, too. She comes twice a day to change my IV bag, look into my eyes with an otoscope, test my reflexes, change out the catheter bag, and empty the bedpan. Every sixth meal, I get a sponge bath. One day, she brings a tape measure and wraps it around my biceps, I guess to see how much muscle I’ve lost. I don’t see anyone else. No Mr. White Coat. No Vosch or dead fathers pumped into my head by Vosch. I’m not so out of it that I don’t know what they’re doing: holding vigil, waiting to see if the “enhancement” kills me.
She’s rinsing out the bedpan one morning when Razor comes in with my breakfast, and he waits silently until she’s finished, and then I hear him whisper, “Is she dying?”
Claire shakes her head. Ambivalent: could be no, could be your guess is as good as mine. I wait till she’s gone to say, “You’re wasting your time.”
He glances at the camera mounted in the ceiling. “I just do what they tell me.”
I pick up the tray and hurl it onto the floor. His lips tighten, but he doesn’t say anything. Silently, he cleans up the mess while I lie panting, exhausted from the effort, sweat pouring off me.
“Yeah, pick that up. Make yourself useful.”
When my fever shoots up, something in my mind loosens, and I imagine I can feel the forty-four thousand microbots swarming in my bloodstream and the hub with its delicate lace of tendrils burrowed into every lobe, and I understand what my father felt in his dying hours as he clawed at himself to subdue the imaginary insects crawling beneath his skin.
“Bitch,” I gasp. From the floor, Razor looks up at me, startled. “Leave me, bitch.”
“No problem,” he mutters. On his hands and knees, using a wet rag to mop up the mess, and the tart smell of disinfectant. “Fast as I can.”
He stands up. His ivory cheeks are flushed. Deliriously, I think the color brings out the auburn highlights in his blond hair. “It won’t work,” he tells me. “Starving yourself. So you better think of something else.”
I’ve tried. But there’s no alternative. I can barely lift my head. You belong to them now. Vosch the sculptor, my body the clay, but not my spirit, never my soul. Unconquered. Uncrushed. Uncontained.
I am not bound; they are. Languish, die, or recover, the game’s over, the grand master Vosch mated.
“My father had a favorite saying,” I tell Razor. “We call chess the game of kings because, through chess, we learn how to rule kings.”
“Again with the chess.”
He drops the dirty rag into the sink and slams out the door. When he returns with the next meal, there’s a familiar wooden box beside the tray. Without a word, Razor picks up the food and dumps it into the trash, tosses the metal tray into the sink, where it lands with a loud clang. The bed hums, maneuvering my body into a sitting position, and he slides the box in front of me.
“You said you didn’t play,” I whisper.
“So teach me.”
I shake my head and say to the camera behind him, “Nice try. But stuff it up your ass.”
Razor laughs. “Not their idea. But speaking of asses, you can bet yours I got permission first.”
He opens the box, pulls out the board, fumbles with the pieces. “You got your queens and kings and the prawns and these guard-tower-looking things. How come every piece is like a person except those?”
“Pawns, not prawns. A prawn is a big shrimp.”
He nods. “That’s the name of a guy in my unit.”
“Shrimp?”
“Prawn. Never knew what the hell it meant.”
“You’re setting it up wrong.”
“That could be because I don’t know how to freaking play. You do it.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“Then you’re conceding defeat?”
“Resigning. It’s called resigning.”
“That’s good to know. I have a feeling that’ll come in handy.” Smiling. Not the Zombie high-voltage type. Smaller, subtler, more ironic. He sits beside the bed and I catch a whiff of bubble gum. “White or black?”
“Razor, I’m too weak to even lift—”
“Then you point where you want to go and I’ll move you.”
He’s not giving up. I didn’t really expect him to. By this point, wafflers and wusses have been winnowed out. There are no pussies left. I tell him where to place the pieces and how each one moves. Describe the basic rules. Lots of nodding and uh-huhs, but I get the feeling there’s a lot of agreeing and not much grasping. Then we play and I slaughter him in four moves. The next game, he falls into arguing and denying: You can’t do that! Tell me that isn’t the stupidest damn rule ever. Game three and I’m sure he’s regretting the whole idea. My spirits aren’t being lifted and his are being totally crushed.