You are motionless for so long that one crow flaps down to inspect you, eyeing his reflection in your metal side. He pecks. Once, twice. You have been working a loose wire out of your neck, which was wound up somewhere inside you but is now poking out, and you twist it off and hold out the gleaming piece.
He yanks it from your fingers and flees. Immediately, two more crows drop out of the trees to pummel him. You watch his oily back disappear into a squall of black bodies, reappear, disappear again. As they fight, black beak, jet claw, ragged bundles of greed, you remember what it meant to feel desire.
Over the course of a week, as a glittering shape flowers inside your head, you examine your budget, your savings, your expenses.
You order twelve carnival mirrors and set them up in your apartment. There is no more room for your bed, so you sell that to a new arrival. You also buy three old industrial robots, rusted and caked in machine oil. The boxes arrive thick and fast, and your apartment manager, who knows the square footage of your room, raises his single eyebrow at you when you come to collect them. Now, everywhere you turn, you confront an elastic vision of yourself, stretching as high as the ceiling and snapping to the shortness of a child. The eyes in the mirror gradually lose their fear.
You write about everything to your former lover as a matter of habit, not expecting a reply.
Biting your cheek, you call Joel to ask where you can buy faulty artificial organs. He listens to your flustered explanation and gives you contacts as well as three hearts, Mk. 1, 2, and 4, out of his own collection. You balance them in the robots’ pincers like apples in a bowl.
With a net and a handful of bread, you catch birds on the roof: house sparrows, rock pigeons, crows, an unhappy seagull. You release the birds in your glass coffin crammed with carnival mirrors. They batter themselves against the window and shit on the mirrors and on you. Your room is all trapped, frantic motion, exaggerated in swells and rolls of glass. People look sideways at you when you leave your room, your chrome and steel parts streaked with white. You look at your slumped, stretched, stained reflections and recognize nothing and no one.
Sometimes, when the room is dark, you can admit that you are making this for someone who will never see it, who will never come back, who will never write to you. Then you roll onto your good side and listen to the flurry of wings until you fall asleep.
You set out neatly lettered signs in your window and on your door. Musée de l’Âme Seule. Signage is probably against building regulations, but you used the shreds of your lease to line your room. You run a notice in the news that is two inches by two inches. Saturdays and Sundays. You keep your door unlocked. You feed the birds, you wipe down the hearts, and you wait.
Joel comes to see you, or perhaps to see what you’ve done with his hearts.
"Where do you sleep?" he says, looking around.
Anywhere, you say.
His expression says he thinks parts other than your lung need examining. But he is also curious. He touches the orange arms curled around artificial ventricles, the frozen rovers sprouting substitute livers at odd angles.
"I’m not very good at art," he says. A sparrow shits in his hair.
You offer to wipe up the mess, you are already wetting a towel in the sink, but he has to leave, he is meeting someone somewhere else, he has left his jacket at the clinic, he is late.
Two weeks later, on a Sunday morning, one more person walks into your museum. She swings open your door and is surprised into laughter by a burst of gray wings. She is even uglier than you are, most of her face gone, hard bright camera lenses for eyes. She has glued pages of books and playbills over her carapace.
"I was an actress," she says.
She has been in all the shows that she wears. The pages came from books she liked but couldn’t keep. Her name is Nim. She has been in the city ab urbe condita, she says, meaning four years ago, when it was fifteen residents and three doctors and one building. She walks around your room as she talks, studying the mirrors, the machines, the birds, the bounce of her own reflection.
Without asking permission, she shoves a window open and shoos out the birds. They leave in one long shout of white and gray and brown. Flecks of down spin and swirl in their wake.
You ask her how long it took to remember how to walk, how to function, how to smile.
"Two weeks. Three months. Two years." She shrugs. "Sooner or later."
Nim has no hair, only a complex web of filaments across her metal skull, flickering her thoughts in patterns too quick to follow. Her hands are small and dark and unscarred.
"Look," she says, touching the skin of your cheek, showing off her lean titanium legs. "Together we make one whole person."
More than that, you want to say, as you add up fingers and toes and organs and elbows. A sum that is greater than one. More than two. But you are tongue-tied and dazed. You realize that you stink of birds and bird shit.
She smiles at your confusion. "I’ll bring you some gloves and cleaning supplies."
What for, you say stupidly.
"To shine up this place."
But this is what I am, you say. This is what I look like. You stretch out your hands to indicate the mirrors, the stained, spattered floors, the streaked walls.
"You could use a spit and polish too, frankly." She demonstrates, using her sleeve, and you blush.
But why are you here, you ask. Why is she touching you with gentleness? You are afraid that this is all an accident, a colossal misunderstanding, that she will walk out of the door and vanish like your sparrows.
"I’m looking for a collaborator," she says. "I’ve got an idea. Performance art. Public service. If you can clean up and come for lunch tomorrow, I’ll tell you about it."
Inside you, a window opens.
That was when you stopped writing to me. Your long, careful emails came to an end. What is there to say? The stories of people we have loved and injured and deserted are incomplete to us.
If I could write an ending for you, it would be Nim holding your new hand in hers, Nim tickling your back until you wheeze with laughter, the two of you commandeering an office block for a new museum, a museum of broken and repaired people, where anyone for an hour or three can pose in a spotlight and glitter, glisten, gleam, haloed in light, light leaping off the white teeth of their laughter. But it is never that easy, and that is not my right.
You knew, I think, before I did. That no one can have a life that is without questions, without cracks. And now you are the deepest one in mine.
Here is what I have. A year and two months of emails. A restaurant check. A glossy fragment from a magazine, two inches by two inches. Terse. Opaque. Musée de l’Âme Réparée. Saturdays and Sundays. Revival, WA.
What could I say? What could I ever say?
(2014)
THE WINTER MARKET
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson was born in 1948 in the coastal city of Conway, South Carolina, and spent most of his childhood in Wytheville, a small town in the Appalachians. Gibson, an orphan at 18, left school without graduating, and in 1967 moved to Canada in order to avoid the Vietnam war draft. With his future wife Deborah Jean Thompson he traveled to Europe, though they "couldn’t afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency". The couple settled in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1972. Through the punk musician and author John Shirley, Gibson met Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner and they, along with Rudy Rucker, went on to form the core of the cyberpunk literary movement. Over the years, Gibson’s work has shifted steadily away from science fiction towards an exploration of the (admittedly skewed) present day.