Exoskeleton
A short story about love, loss, and death
2040
Leila’s marriage was a snail- the grotesque, invasive kind moving along purposeless. Some days, she felt like the slimy mollusk- vapid and languid, bogged down by the pretty shell on her back. The enigmatic shell bound to her inextricably, with a stranglehold on her life. Without it, she would remain an ordinary slug.
It added flair to her mediocrity.
Leila was a malacologist, fascinated by invertebrates and their eccentricities. She began working on a conservation project when her attempts to get into academia failed. She had once dreamt of living in a lab, prying creatures apart and stealing their secrets. Now she devoted time to save them from extinction. She superimposed new expectations over old ones, trimming the outlines to sync with her life.
Her macabre taste discomfited normal people. So she avoided social gatherings but maintained serviceable friendships at the office.
She preferred her bubble of solitude.
Then she met James.
She had been loitering in the background of a fundraising party - a convention of scientists from around the country - when he walked up to her. She had painted a polite smile and inclined her head in greeting. But he had hung around longer than most guests, who usually fled when she responded only with gestures and monosyllables.
He had stood before her, dressed in a black tuxedo and shiny shoes, a champagne flute in hand. The dark hair, gelled back to perfection, contrasted with his sallow skin. He was tall; taller than her in heels. Leila imagined him in a flowing cape with scarlet accents. Given some fangs, he could pass for a mediocre Dracula.
She chuckled at the mental picture.
“You are quite the talker, aren’t you?”
His smile of straight white teeth muted the sarcasm of the words.
“Only if the company is good,” she remarked, replying to his taunt in kind.
She had engaged in conversation that night to humor the stranger who had sought her out to kill time. One night of friendly banter, she had thought, wouldn’t be so bad.
But they had crossed paths again.
They met a few days later at a greenhouse when she was shopping for seeds for her garden beds. Then again at the supermarket. Another chance encounter in the library. When her stomach began fluttering in his presence, she grew worried. When the tension eased, and a tingling warmth suffused her on hearing his voice, she became anxious. When she began missing their ‘accidental’ run-ins, she panicked.
When their lips met in the middle of an inconsequential debate about tulips, she surrendered. The hard planes of his body, so foreign yet so comforting, aligned with her pliant form. The smell of his cologne, the minty taste of his lips, and the heat of his breath etched into her memory, slotting into a permanent spot, like the heady start of an addiction.
Now she stood in their study, perusing the shelves of DVDs divided into ‘His’ and ‘Hers’. ‘His’ housed a sizable collection of genres- mystery, horror, documentary, comedy, drama, and even world cinema- reflective of an eclectic taste. The overwhelming majority in ‘Hers’ though, was romance; most of them gifts from her husband during the early years of courtship.
These days, however, the clutter in ‘His’ relegated ‘Hers’ to a corner of the shelves. She never watched any of hers. They sat cloaked in cobwebs, relics of an age she had long forgotten.
Many such artifacts of irrelevance littered the house.
She stood motionless, absently counting the DVDs. She hated being in love. She longed for the days when it had all been a fairy tale; a mere dream, unrealized and fantastical. Over the years, she had misread her infatuation for boys on numerous occasions, quick to imagine a wedding, where she stood resplendent before her groom of the week. He would drool longingly, counting his blessings. None of her dream grooms, however, reciprocated her feelings. And the infatuation, as she tagged her desperation, faded as did their attractiveness.
Perhaps her marriage was the ultimate manifestation of her desperation all along.
There was movement upstairs, puttering footsteps, as her husband wandered around the bedroom. His morning routine entailed a circuit of the room, looking for pests, or new corners left undiscovered the previous day.
She found his eccentricities cute. His obsession with DVDs amused her once upon a time.
She remembered a picnic in the neighborhood park where he had gifted her ‘The Notebook’ as a token of his affection.
“You’ll like it, it’s heart-wrenching,” he had said, voice low, perhaps imagining parallels between the movie and the epic romance between them. She had smiled dutifully, thanking him for the thoughtful gift.
He had grand ideas about the love they shared. She assumed he was playacting the script of a movie trapped in his head.
He loved writing plays and enacting them before her, modulating his voice to suit the character. He called it his secret passion, reserved only for home. He would attend drama workshops in the city, bright-eyed in hopes of putting up a show for entertainment. He would go off to weekend retreats at the local theatre. He came up with monologues to inspire, terrify, and even amuse. She had long suspected his flair for drama when they began dating. His antics in later years reinforced her deduction.
“Once I retire from science, we can produce a musical,” he suggested randomly over dinner one day.
“We?” she asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
“Of course, we! There’s no you or me for us, it’s always we!”
He then attempted futilely to convince her to join forces for his pet project, while devouring meatballs she cooked for their anniversary.
“But I have no interest in theatre. In case you’ve forgotten, I am a zoologist,” she interrupted, “And I love my job.”
“Pfft,” he scoffed, waving a dismissive hand.
Her façade never worked with him. The white lie at the foundation of her career crumbled in the face of his contempt. He was lucky to have two passions to indulge, and open doors on the path of his career. She had had to change course, stumbling across roadblocks at every milestone. Her manufactured dreams felt trivial compared to his instinctive convictions. She resented his greed to achieve more, to establish himself in every way he chose.
The man who lived as her husband these days, however, had a finite set of responses for her. They maintained a well-rehearsed life. The charming memories, shadowed by bitterness confused her. Had they really ever been in love?
Or merely tolerated each other, coexisting in the same orbit?
Leila straightened up the DVDs in her section, opting to pull down a few from his pristine stack.
The doorbell rang.
She had made plans with her daughter. But eight o’clock was too early for a visit.
She left the study, deciding to clear the mess later. She opened the front door and found Sophie leaning against the wall.
“Hey!” Leila said, forcing a smile, “You’re early!”
Sophie did not reply, merely walked into the house and headed to the kitchen. She was in one of her moods. Leila hoped to get through breakfast and leave soon. Forgetting the DVDs and her marital woes, she began setting the table.
“I made pancakes,” she said, placing a stacked platter on the table.
“Tea is fine,” Sophie replied, making herself a cup.
They sat in awkward silence for a few minutes. Leila watched her daughter’s impassive face, plain as naked canvas. She was dressed in black, as she did customarily for their monthly outing.
Leila decided to initiate conversation, but before she could, they heard footsteps down the hall.
James entered the room, the smoky fragrance of cigars clinging to his robe. His stash of cigars though had run out years ago. He stood tall, hair coiffed in a bun, each strand neatly tucked.
“Good morning,” he greeted, “What’s for breakfast?”
Leila cringed at his cheerful tone. Their daughter sipped tea, barely acknowledging him.
“How have you been?” she asked, ignoring her father.
“Better,” Leila mumbled, as James sauntered to the table and sat down beside her.
“Hello, Sophie,” he said, piling pancakes on a plate, “You should visit more often. Your mother and I get lonely all by ourselves.”
“Hmm.”
More moments of painful silence followed the brief exchange. Leila missed the raucous family meals of the past. James and Sophie pitted against her, criticizing her expertise in the kitchen. The laughter of those morning memories withered into the silence of today.
“When are we leaving?” her daughter asked, breaking her reverie.
“Soon. Maybe after breakfast.”
“I can’t stay long,” she said, “We are testing new prototypes in the lab today. If successful, we could implement the upgrade to older models too.”
“You’re going somewhere?” James asked, then quite abruptly said, “You should visit more often. Your mother and I get lonely all by ourselves.”
His tone changed seamlessly from confused to cheerful.
“How long has he been like this?” Sophie put away her tea, “It’s gotten worse than I anticipated.”
“He’s quite well. These episodes are sporadic,” Leila replied, staring a hole at her plate, “Don’t bother me at all.”
James sliced his pancakes into squares, seemingly forgetting his intervention.
Sophie crossed her arms, abandoning all pretense of tea drinking.
“Yeah, why would they?” she snapped, “As long as he’s walking around, you don’t really care.”
“That is not what I meant. I care about him.”
“Do you care about yourself, though? Do you, really? Because your actions speak otherwise. He’s clearly not ‘well’, Mom!”
“I am quite well, dear,” James interrupted, assiduously fractioning his food.
Sophie ignored him.
“You have to get over it, Mom. Let him go,” she whispered, “Please.”
James had not yet eaten a single piece on his plate.
Leila swallowed her last slice, washing it down with some juice. She stood up from the table.
“I’ll get ready. Give me five minutes.”
She blinked to keep the tears at bay.
**********
The mother and daughter walked down the dirt path to the cemetery. Thick ivy coiled around the rusting gate. The smell, as they approached, reminded Leila of the tree in their backyard and its shade, pungent with the scent of moss and the fall wind’s soothing chill.
She remembered the treehouse James had built on it, with a doorway too narrow for Sophie to get through. She remembered his clumsy paintings of leaves on the panels, his rechristened plywood nest for birds rather than the birthday gift for their daughter. The birds never came to roost, and his shoddy masterpiece, with its tiny doorway, sat abandoned on the tree for years.
Sophie walked ahead; her stride purposeful. Leila followed at a leisurely pace, the sudden leaden weight in her stomach slowing her down. They passed graves with fresh flowers left by family and friends. Perhaps some of them had waited to have dinner together one night. A few might have impatiently cursed their spouses’ tardiness. They would have checked their watches every ten seconds willing their companions to show up soon. They might have left for home, irritated, only to find a cop waiting at the door with the news.
Their world might have ended that night, stuck in bitter replay inside their heads.
“Mom.”
She did not like visiting. The cool breeze choked her now, the acrid stench of memory too sharp to ignore. She had fallen off the stage of one of James’ many plays and landed in a vacuum. She stepped to her daughter’s side, staring at the headstone that haunted her every night.
James Walker
1983–2030
Beloved father, husband, and pioneer physicist
It was the day before Thanksgiving. He had wanted to talk about Sophie’s boyfriend, who she planned to bring home the next day. James had misgivings about the boy’s laidback attitude but held his tongue in front of their daughter. He had a rant prepared, and looked forward to letting off steam. She should have refused to meet him so far away and pleaded to eat at home. She should have tackled his arguments with cool logic, as he did with her so many times.
But she hadn’t.
And then he had died. They had recovered the body from the totaled car.
She had visited the morgue to identify his corpse; to confirm that the distorted form with the crushed skull was indeed her husband.
Later, she had wandered the empty house, cleaning up after a dead man; erased from life, but pervasive in memory. Leila, without overt displays of grief, scared her daughter, who chose to stay with her.
Months after James passed, Sophie brought home the prototype he had devoutly developed — a man-sized robotic replica of himself.
A computer in his skin, devoid of his imperfections.
The birthmark on his neck he had hidden under turtlenecks was gone, as was the scar from a tennis injury marring his face. Its palms were uncalloused, unbefitting a builder of useless treehouses, and it had the eyes of a doll, too blue and perfect to be human.
Sophie had left her with him and she began living with the new James.
In time, she had come to tolerate him. She enjoyed life with the doppelganger of the man she loved. It walked and talked like James; made snide remarks about her hair just as he would. It kissed and caressed her, the warmth of nascent polymer mimicking the feel of his fingers.
It never ate though; the weekly retreat to the charging room nourishment enough. But it sat beside her at every meal, with its own loaded plate.
Leila knelt by the grave, her face glistening with tears. Her new life was a borrowed fantasy. She still loved James. She longed for his imperfections, his rage, his stubbornness, lost to her forever.
The realization drove her dizzy. Before Sophie could stop her, she fled, stumbling on the way to the car.
**********
She entered the house to find him waiting with food. He wore a benign smile, an automated curl of the lips. Still dressed in his robe, he sat alone in the room. She wondered if he had been waiting for her to show up.
A genie awaiting his master’s next command.
“I am not hungry,” she said, walking to their room upstairs.
He followed, climbing the steps in her wake.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
She took the stairs two at a time
“How was your day, dear?”
Dear?
“It was fine,” she replied, hoping he would stop.
But he never did. Not even in his computer avatar.
“How was the visit to the cemetery? Leave flowers at my grave?”
She was almost at the landing when she stopped, stunned.
She turned and saw his empty face with the usual unwavering smile.
“I have access to your phone’s GPS, remember?”
They stared at each other, his cold gaze scorching her.
Leila stepped up and closed the door to their bedroom.
She lay in bed replaying James’ question, so unsettling and insidious. The machine had been programmed with encrypted files of her husband’s memories. It was designed to replicate his responses to a plethora of stimuli. But James had been careful to present a stellar image of himself- loving father, doting husband, fiery intellectual, etc.
She had never had a quarrel with the robot. It never disobeyed her. The cruelty of James’ actions at times, was absent in his invention.
How then had it responded the way it had today? An innocent question laced with just a hint of malice? Had James stashed a secret code of his unsavory traits to emerge over the course of time? Had he been biding his time, fooling her with the loving act, only to unleash his true self now? Who was he really? She had lived so long with his benign twin that she had forgotten the real James.
Perhaps the perfect husband in her head was the mirage he had helped shape with the robot. He had altered her perception in ten years, maybe.
She envisioned his slot in her mind corroded by the machine’s influence.
No, she loved James. That was the only truth anchoring her.
It had gone dark outside. Her stomach rumbled, and Leila mulled getting something to eat. Before she got up though, the door opened.
She was too exhausted to deal with him. Deal with it.
She feigned sleep, willing it to go away. She heard its footsteps close to the bed. The sheets ruffled as it got in.
She held her breath.
Cold fingers caressed her cheek, the pressure light and soothing. They lingered on her face, then moved down her shoulder, coming to rest at her waist, and gently pulled her into an embrace. It only had pants on. It smelled of James’ cologne, earthy and fresh, but she missed his sweat. She couldn’t remember the smell of his sweat. Something sharp and cloying, perhaps. It kissed her crown, but there was no rush of warm air, no lingering moisture from its lips. The vampire analogy from years ago seemed apt now.
She lay motionless against its chest.
“It’s okay,” it whispered, “I am here.”
Its nipples were dark for its pale skin. The right nipple had always been unnaturally protruded. She brushed a finger against it.
James chuckled, an expected reaction fine-tuned into its system.
She scraped a nail against it. It flinched but pulled her closer.
“I am sorry,” it mumbled, “I shouldn’t have talked to you that way.”
She scratched the nipple again.
“Stop doing that!” he said, louder, “I said I am sorry, Lee.”
She pressed down hard on the nub, twisting her finger around.
“Hey! Stop it,” it shouted, “Ow! I already apologized!”
She ignored its pleas and pushed hard one last time.
“I am sorry too,” she whispered, her lips close to its neck.
The nipple vibrated, and its chest trembled, the skin graft bubbling as it shifted. The upper layer cleaved, a precise movement to the side that revealed the inner cavity.
Its insides were blue-white, a mass of wires and switches, so unlike the searing red of her husband’s blood. She remembered the color of his innards, the stark crimson painted over his twisted corpse in the morgue years ago.
“What are you doing?” it asked, alarmed.
It had let go of her, arms lying helpless by its side. It made no attempts to stop her, didn’t even protect itself from her. It was molded to suit her desires- a marionette cursed to entertain forever.
Its ‘heart’ lay nestled under a snarl of wires. The organ was fragile, a pathetic facsimile of the real thing. She reached into the tangle and touched it.
“No,” James cried, “Please, Lee.”
But it wasn’t really him; just an entity of make-belief.
“I am sorry,” she said again, sobbing in earnest, “But I don’t need you, James. Not anymore.”
She ripped the control unit from the chest. Its limbs twitched, body convulsed, and sparks burst from the center of its chest. It heaved, almost toppling off the bed. But then everything ceased.
It had gone still.
“I am sorry,” she whispered once more.
The blue heart buzzed in her hand. She clutched it closer, pressing her lips to it. She lay down again, the unit flickering in her palm. The remains of the robot, its eyes unblinking, lay next to her.
She loved him. More than that, he had loved her.
He would want her to be free.
“I am so sorry,” she whimpered into the dark, turning away from the mess of plastic and steel.
