Chapter Text
The first thing I am aware of is the cold.
It settles into my sternum like a second skeleton, like something inserted between my ribs while I slept — methodical, thorough, the kind of cold that does not apologise. I have been cold before. I have catalogued cold: the specific temperature at which synovial fluid thickens, the precise moment a nerve ceases to conduct, the way hypothermia softens the boundary between sleeping and not. I know cold the way a cartographer knows coastlines — by its edges, by where it ends.
This cold has no edges.
I open my eyes.
The candle on the writing desk has burned to a stub, maybe two hours of light left in it, maybe less. The room is amber and shadow. Outside the window, Geneva is still dark, that particular pre-dawn dark that belongs to no one, that exists in the space between yesterday and whatever comes next. I catalogue this too, automatically, the way I catalogue everything: approximate time, three or four in the morning. Weather, cold. Condition of subject —
I stop.
There is something behind the curtain of my bed.
Not something. Someone.
The bed curtain, heavy burgundy velvet, the kind that smells faintly of cedar and old winters, is moving. Slowly. With a deliberateness that could not be wind, could not be the settling of the house.
Something is holding it. Something on the other side is gripping the fabric with enough force to pull it slightly inward, and I can see, if I look carefully, if I do not look away, the outline of fingers. Very large fingers. Fingers that do not, in their proportions, belong to any man I have ever treated.
I had forgotten.
No, that is not accurate. One does not forget a thing like this. I had filed it away, which is a different kind of forgetting, the deliberate kind, the kind that requires architecture. I had come upstairs. I had sat at my desk until my eyes stopped focusing. I had told myself: in the morning. I had told myself: it will be different in the morning, everything is different in the morning, morning is when things make sense.
It is not morning.
And the curtain is moving.
I do not breathe. I am aware of this, the sudden, animal suspension of breath, and I observe it with the detached portion of my mind that never entirely stops observing, that annotates even my own terror with clinical footnotes. Sympathetic nervous system response. Elevated cortisol. Pupils dilating to gather light. Useful, this habit. Useful to have a part of myself that watches the rest of myself the way one watches a specimen under glass. It creates a kind of distance. It creates the illusion that I am not afraid.
I am terrified.
The curtain moves again. The fingers tighten, release, tighten again, and I understand, with a lurch of something I cannot immediately name, that this is not aggression. This is not the movement of something that intends harm. This is the movement of something that is exploring. Testing the texture of the fabric. Learning what velvet is.
I sit up.
This is, I will reflect later, either the bravest or the most foolish thing I have ever done. I sit up, and the curtain shifts, and for one suspended moment nothing happens. The candle gutters, the shadow on the velvet grows and shrinks and grows again, and I am sitting in my own bed at four in the morning waiting to see the face of the thing I made.
It pulls the curtain aside.
I had thought, I realise now that I had thought something. Some image, assembled in the back of my mind during the long months of work, some composite sketch of what it would look like. I find, in this moment, that I cannot remember what that image was. Whatever I had imagined, it was not this.
It is enormous. I knew this, I had chosen the dimensions myself, had reasoned that larger nerves would conduct more efficiently, that greater muscle mass would compensate for the imprecision of my sutures; but knowing a measurement and seeing it are two entirely different categories of knowledge. It fills the gap in the curtain the way a door fills a doorframe. Its head nearly grazes the canopy. And it is looking at me with eyes that are —
I have dissected eyes. I know their anatomy with the intimacy of long acquaintance: the sclera, the iris, the precise mechanism by which the pupil responds to light. I know eyes as structures. I have never, until this moment, looked into a pair of eyes and felt looked back at in quite this way. There is something behind them. Not thought, not yet, not language, not reason, but something. Attention. Presence. The particular quality of a mind that is there.
It blinks.
And then slowly, with the careful deliberateness of something learning the rules of its own body, it turns its head to follow the movement of my hand as I push my hair from my face. I stop. It stops. I exhale. Its chest rises.
It is mirroring me.
The clinical footnote arrives before I can stop it: imitative behaviour, observed in human infants from approximately two months of age, also documented in certain primates; and then I silence it, because this is not a specimen and this is not a laboratory and I am sitting in my dead mother's bed looking at something I pulled out of the dark with my own hands and it is breathing in time with me.
Something cracks open in my chest. I do not have a name for it yet.
I move my hand, slowly, the way one moves around an animal one does not wish to startle, and I reach toward the curtain on my side of the bed. Its eyes track the movement. I pull the curtain back, and it pulls its own curtain back, mirroring the gesture with an exactness that is almost painful to watch. It wants to understand. It is trying, with the only tools available to it, to understand.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. It watches.
It looks at my hands.
I look at its hands.
My hands are still gloved. I sleep in my gloves, have slept in them for months, cannot entirely explain why except that the laboratory is cold and the work required them and at some point they became part of me in the way that habits become part of a person without their noticing. Red leather, butter-soft, fitted to each knuckle. I had them made in Paris. They are, I am aware, a small absurdity.
It is looking at my gloves the way it looked at the curtain. With attention. With the particular hunger of a mind that has no categories yet and is trying to build them from scratch, from whatever it can observe.
I look at its hands.
They are large. The sutures along the knuckles have healed cleanly, cleaner than I had hoped, the skin knitting together with a neatness that still surprises me when I let myself think about it. The hands of a large man, or something very like a large man. The hands of something that is trying to figure out what hands are for.
The thought arrives quietly, without drama: I should show it.
I should show it that these — the things at the ends of our arms, the things we use to grip and to build and to reach — are the same. That we share this, at least. That there is, between us, this one legible fact: we both have hands.
It is such a small thing. It is the smallest possible beginning.
My fingers find the button at my wrist.
The room is very quiet. The candle has burned lower. Outside, Geneva is beginning, almost imperceptibly, to lighten, the dark shifting from black to the deep blue that precedes dawn, that colour that has no proper name. My fingers are at the button of my right glove. The creature watches. It has gone very still, the way it went still when I sat up, the way it seems to go still whenever I do something new — storing it, I think. Filing it away. Learning.
I begin to pull the glove off.
The leather slides from my knuckles. From my palm. My bare hand emerges into the cold air of the room, and I hold it out. Between us. In the amber light of the nearly-spent candle.
I look at it. Then I look at the creature.
“Look,” I am saying. “Look. Here. This is what I am underneath. This is what you are too.”
The creature looks at my hand.
Then, very slowly, it raises its own.
I do not breathe.
Its palm meets mine.
I had not known what to expect. I had not let myself expect anything, had trained myself out of expectation the way one trains oneself out of any dangerous habit, by cataloguing its consequences. But I had imagined, in some unexamined recess of myself, that the skin would be cold. It seemed logical. It seemed, given everything, the most probable outcome. I had worked with cold things for so long. My hands knew cold. My hands knew the temperature of what does not live.
Its palm is warm.
Not feverish, not the warmth of inflammation or infection, not the warmth I have learned to associate with the body in revolt against itself. Simply warm. The warmth of something alive. The warmth of something whose blood is moving through its vessels right now, in this moment, because I asked it to, because I built the vessels and I started the heart and somewhere in the machinery of what I made there is a furnace that has been burning all this time without my knowing.
I turn our hands over, slowly. Its fingers are longer than mine. The suture lines along the knuckles are silver in the candlelight, very fine, the kind of scarring that happens when healing goes well. I had not been there to see it heal. The thought sits in my chest like a stone I have not yet decided what to do with.
It watches our joined hands with tremendous concentration.
I am looking at its face and thinking, with the part of my mind that thinks in spite of everything: you are pale. It is a peculiar observation given the circumstances. It is a peculiar observation given that paleness is the least extraordinary thing about this moment. But it strikes me with the force of genuine surprise, the intellectual kind, the kind I have not felt in months, that something so pale can be so warm. There is colour in nothing, in the skin, in the lips, in the hollows beneath the eyes. It is the colour of old wax, of winter light, of things that have been kept from the sun. And yet underneath my fingers its hand is alive with heat, contradicting itself completely, a dead colour over a living core, and I find I cannot stop thinking about it.
How, I think. How are you so warm?
As if warmth were something I had not planned for. As if warmth were a surprise my own design had sprung on me.
I become aware, gradually, of something else. The rhythm of its breathing. It is close to me now, closer than it was, and its chest is moving with a slowness and depth that I associate with calm, with an animal that has decided, for reasons of its own, that it is safe. Something about this undoes me slightly. I had not considered what it would feel like to be trusted by it. I had not put that in any equation.
I do not make the decision consciously. I am not certain, afterwards, that it is a decision at all. I simply lean forward, and I press my cheek to its chest.
The sound of its heart fills my ear.
It is steady. It is very steady, a deep and unhurried percussion, nothing like the arrhythmic terror I had feared in the final hours of my work, nothing like the stuttering uncertain rhythm I had monitored through the long night of the experiment. It beats as if it has always beaten. As if it has never done anything else. As if it does not know it was not beating three months ago, as if it has no memory of the silence that preceded it, as if the silence was simply not part of its experience and so does not exist.
I close my eyes.
Behind them: months of work. Behind them: the smell of the laboratory, which will probably never fully leave my memory, which has become as familiar as the smell of my own rooms. Behind them: the specific weight of failure, carried so long it had started to feel like a feature of my own body, like a bone I had grown that was not on any of my anatomical charts.
Its hand settles on my back.
It is, I think, the gentlest thing anyone has ever done. This is probably not true. My mother was gentle. But in this moment, in this room, at this hour that belongs to no one, with the candle burning its last inch and the city beginning to wake outside a window I cannot see from here, the weight of that hand on my back is the most careful thing I have ever felt. It does not know what it is doing. It is doing what I did, what I have watched it do: mirroring, learning, returning a gesture with a gesture. I leaned into it and so it is leaning back in the only way available to it, with the only vocabulary it has.
But the heart under my cheek is warm and it is steady and the hand on my back is real.
This is, I understand, an embrace.
My first thought is taxonomical: an embrace is defined as the act of holding another person closely in one's arms, typically as a sign of affection or comfort. My second thought is that I have not been held by anything since before my mother died. My third thought is not a thought at all. It is something that moves through me without language and exits without leaving a name for itself, and I let it go, and I keep my cheek pressed to the chest of the thing I made.
We stay like that for a long moment.
Then I lift my head.
It looks down at me. Its expression is not easy to read, not yet. I do not yet have the vocabulary for its face, have not learned which configurations of its features mean what, have not had time to build the interpretive grammar that living with someone requires. But its eyes are open very wide and it has not moved its hand from my back and there is something in the quality of its attention that I can only describe as intent. It is paying attention to me the way one pays attention to something that matters.
I reach up.
It is a slow movement, the kind of movement one makes in the vicinity of something that startles easily, though I am not certain anymore that it startles easily, not certain anymore of much I had assumed about it in the abstract. My fingers find the edge of the bandaging at its jaw, the linen I had wound there in the final hours of the work for reasons I can no longer fully reconstruct, some instinct about protection, about keeping the new tissue clean and undisturbed while it settled into itself. The creature goes very still under my touch. Not the stillness of fear, I think. The stillness of attention. My fingers move slowly along the edge of the linen, finding where it is tucked, beginning to unwind it, and it lets me, it simply lets me, holding its face with a patience that is almost formal while I work, while the bandaging comes loose in my hands in a long pale strip, while the last of it falls away and I see, for the first time, the whole unobstructed line of its mouth, the jaw beneath, the throat, all of it healed, all of it complete, and I look at what I have uncovered the way one looks at something one has been afraid to look at for a long time and finds, to one's great surprise, that it is not terrible at all.
I pull back enough to put a small distance between us. Its hand falls from my back slowly, reluctantly, the fingers trailing as if uncertain whether to let go. I look at it. It looks at me. The candle gutters and the light shifts and for a moment we are both just two things in a dark room at the edge of dawn, and I am thinking about warm hands and steady heartbeats and the strange grace with which this enormous creature has been conducting itself all night, so carefully, so earnestly, as if being alive were a thing it wanted to do correctly.
I raise my hand and I point at my own chest.
It watches.
"Victor," I say.
My voice comes out smaller than I intend. Quieter. There is something about saying one's own name in the dark that makes it feel provisional, like a hypothesis rather than a fact. Victor. A name my mother gave me. A name that means, in the Latin my tutors insisted on, conqueror. I have never felt less like a conqueror in my life. I am standing in the pre-dawn cold pointing at myself like a man who has forgotten what he is called, saying my own name to a creature that has never heard human speech and may not hear it now as anything more than sound.
It is looking at my hands.
Then at my face.
Then, with the careful deliberateness that I am beginning to recognise as its particular quality, the way some people are hasty and some are methodical and this one is neither but is something else entirely, something more like thorough, it opens its mouth.
"Vi— tor."
The sound of it moves through me like a current.
It is not perfect. The vowels are slightly strange, shaped by a mouth that has never made vowels before, working with a tongue and teeth and the architecture of a throat that knows, mechanically, how sound is produced but has not yet learned what to do with that knowledge. But it is unmistakably my name. It is unmistakably an attempt. And underneath the imperfection, underneath the newness of it, there is something that is not imitation, or not only imitation, there is something that reaches and finds and lands, and I hear it, I hear the reaching in it, and something in my chest that has been very tight for a very long time loosens by one degree.
I laugh.
It is not the laughter of relief, exactly, though there is relief in it. It is not the laughter of hysteria, though I would perhaps be entitled to that. It is the laughter of someone who has just witnessed something genuinely extraordinary and has no larger response available to them, whose body has decided that laughter is the only container big enough for what is happening. It comes out of me bright and sudden and a little helpless, and I press my bare hand over my mouth, and I look at the creature over the tops of my fingers, and I feel something I have not felt in so long that I have to search myself for the word.
Delight.
Pure and uncomplicated and almost unbearable, the way it always is when something surpasses what you had let yourself hope for. My eyes are very bright. My heart is doing something irregular. The creature is watching me laugh with an expression of profound interest, tilting its enormous head very slightly to one side like a question mark made flesh, and it says it again, softly, as if tasting it a second time to see if it still works:
"Vic— tor."
It works.
It works completely.