Page 18 of Death of the Author
18 Aerographene
It looked like any other physical therapy room, albeit a nice one. Gym equipment, large windows that let in plenty of natural
light, medicine balls, mats, three sets of mounted parallel bars. Except the huge space was completely empty, aside from herself
and Hugo. Today, he was wearing rolled-up sweatpants and his prosthetic limbs were on display. She’d been staring at them
since he’d opened the front door of the gym to let her in. The way he walked with them was so natural. The feet even adjusted
when he stepped up on the curb.
“You ready?”
She thought about her family yelling, right up until the moment she slammed the door of the autonomous vehicle that took her
to the airport. Her mother weeping. Her father trying to negotiate. The texts from her siblings, in all caps, full of curses
and warnings. Chinyere pulling up to the house at the last minute and trying to grab the handles of her chair. Zelu had looked
into her sister’s eyes and spoke a vicious “Don’t you dare. ” She’d hoped that her expression conveyed how dead serious she was. It had. Chinyere had stumbled, shocked, and then backed
off.
In her mind, she’d begun to think of that horrible morning as “the Crunch,” because she’d felt as if she were being physically crushed by her family.
“I’m ready,” she said. Last week, she’d closely read and signed the paperwork to participate in this trial. She had confronted
and left her family. Msizi. She was here now, at MIT. Could she do this? Without them? But this was her life. She clenched her fists. If she fucked herself up, it would be 100 percent her own fault. She tugged at her blue sweatpants
and wished she’d worn jeans instead. Hugo had said the exos would fit over anything she wore, but it just seemed right to
wear workout clothes in a gym.
“This way,” Hugo said, motioning toward a door on the right side of the room.
Zelu didn’t pay much mind to the details of the room—it was bright and there was a table. All her focus went straight to what
was on the table: the exos. Her exos. She recognized them immediately, yet they looked nothing like the ones in the video she’d watched. They were only thin
slivers of metal mesh, elegantly curved to mimic the undulation of a human’s hips, knees, ankles, and feet. Sitting there,
they looked like beautiful pieces of alien tech that had been found by humanity.
“Now I know why you asked me what my favorite color was,” she said.
The pieces were painted a rich and bright cyan. Mine , she thought, and felt surprised by how quickly that feeling sprang upon her.
“So,” she started, wheeling closer. “How do... how do I put them on?”
Hugo smiled mysteriously. She frowned back at him. Back when she’d been in the hospital after the accident, she’d watched
so many movies that she’d quickly run through the recent options and moved on to the old ones she’d never thought to watch
before. One of those films had been Willy Wonka first, she needed to get used
to simply having them on. He helped her into her wheelchair again, and she wheeled around campus with him for an hour while
the disembodied voice of the exos asked an array of questions about her lifestyle and leisure activities. When she told it
she swam, it even asked her where she liked to swim and what her strongest style of swimming was.
“Your legs are disconnected from your brain, so the machines need to construct a brain of their own,” Hugo said. “The more
specifics they learn about you, the better a job they can do. And they’ll keep learning.”
He sounded so confident that they would work for her, but she knew better than to take it for granted. She’d read thoroughly about this process online. Some patients just couldn’t take to the exos. They found them impossible to adjust to, or they changed their minds for whatever reason. There were more than a few instances of this, and it bothered her that Hugo hadn’t mentioned it even once. Maybe he didn’t want to scare or discourage her. Regardless, the internet existed, she’d used it, and now she was fighting off all that fear and discouragement. The moment of truth would be tomorrow, when Hugo said she could try standing for the first time. According to all she’d read, that was the moment when people always either said, “I love these!” or “Fuck this shit, my chair is perfectly fine.”
She was glad to get back to her hotel room that night. The prepping with the exos had been tiring, and afterward, Hugo had
invited her to dinner with several MIT professors and grad students. There had been no easy way to say no. After the dinner,
a mechanical engineering grad student named David had quietly stepped toward her while she was waiting for her ride back to
the hotel and asked her if she’d go out to dinner with just him at some point. She’d looked at the confident smirk on his
thick, luscious lips and said she might give him a call if he gave her his phone number. Smart and hot was her favorite combination.
She showered, laid out her clothes for tomorrow, and lay down on the bed. She checked her phone. More messages from her family
had queued up. Chinyere’s texts were cold and short, passive-aggressive and shaming. Amarachi’s were also full of guilt trips.
How dare Zelu be so selfish to make her mother cry and her father unable to sleep? Tolu was less aggressive, begging her to
just call him, claiming that he’d listen to whatever she wanted to say. Msizi hadn’t called at all. He also hadn’t posted
a thing on any of his moderately active social media accounts since she’d left. Or maybe he’d just blocked her.
She’d only posted to her social media once today, a photo she’d taken from her point of view going into the physical therapy
gym with the caption:
The next level. #RustedRobots.
It had been Liked nearly 200,000 times, and the comments were mainly questions and theories about what the heck the photo
meant. Several thought she was on the set of the Rusted Robots film. These made her chuckle. Authors rarely had anything to do with a film adaptation... well, nothing more than having
written the novel the film was based on.
She considered opening her laptop but picked up her journal and pen instead. After the day she’d had, writing by hand, the old-school way, felt rebellious.
Tomorrow’s the big day. I’m ready for it. Do I have expectations? Yes. No. When Hugo first approached me, I was intrigued,
but it’s not like I’ve been sitting here hoping for a fucking miracle. I don’t believe in all that. I fell out of a tree that
had already been hollowed out by ravenous insects. It was a shell and I didn’t even know it. From the outside, it looked like
something that would outlive me by centuries. That dead thing dropped me like something offended and now I’m paralyzed. I
don’t believe in miracles. I’m okay with it. I’m alive. I have a strange present and a strange future. And I’m curious. I’m
ready to spin the wheel. I want to see. I’d have been a fool if I didn’t go to see. But my family has expectations and their
blood runs through me, too. They expect a lot. They expect me to live. To not embarrass them too much. To stay in my place
in the family. Sometimes they expect me to stay invisible. I know my parents do. Invisible enough that no one will start asking
questions and look at me so closely that they remember that an Onyenezi-Onyedele is “crippled.” My coming here, my using exos
will draw attention to ALL this.
Maybe I want to bring attention to it, though. And I think that if I could do everything on my own, including walk—well, “walk”
(I’ll never be able to walk walk)—they couldn’t keep me in the sad place they’ve unintentionally made for me. I’ve already started to move out of it;
I will continue. I’m afraid. I don’t have their support. But I will continue. Even if tomorrow is a fail. Tomorrow might be
a fail. Maybe I’ll break all the bones in my legs. It will be my fault. But I will continue. I’ve allowed myself to dream.
Not of reality. I will never be able to walk. I know. But I want to see. I don’t expect, but maybe I am hoping.
Tomorrow is where my hope lives.
I can’t be normal, so I’ll be something else.