The Synthetic

by Sadmac
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Taken purely as an object I'd measure somewhere around 6 feet, though in honesty there's not a lot of me from top to bottom. Stripped of the synthetic I would likely make a tidy pile of flesh rising just below the knee. "The synthetic." It feels strange to give such airy conceptual titles to such rigid polymer realities. I once read something by some twentieth century "futurist" or some such that qualified prosthesis as the beginning of a race of cyborgs. There's a quaint sort of ignorance in the way the past looks forward. One of my earliest memories was the piercing red gleam in the center of the steely circular stub in the eye socket of one of the bulky uniformed gentleman outside my father's office, and the cold thrill it gave me when he told me there was no eye underneath. There's no such thrill here. There's no foreboding glimpse of a writhing mechanical half-life lurking under this fabricated frame. It is no machine come to life. It is indisputably dead. It is not sinister, only crowding, like awaking to find all of the furniture in the room has been piled up on your bed. It is an armour violating my personal space. There is something entirely too close about it, and I want to push it away and walk out of the room just to rid myself thoroughly of its presence. But of course it would more likely do so by itself than I would without its assistance, and in reality it will be many months before we might even venture to do so together.

Immobility has at least granted me a kind of peace. When not being prodded I have only my thoughts and the ceiling to worry me. The ceiling. One can make such friends if one but suspends, for a moment, the dread of madness. Ah, with such affection did I count the tiles, enumerating each imperfection in their sixty-four holes; the subtly elliptical perforations in the slightly darker one over there, the little lip where the one in the corner is prying away. And oh, that lovely split! That craggy, brown-hemmed little scar that ran so neatly down the center of that one tile right in the middle of the room! The unabashed brazenness with which it was cleft, an ungrateful ugliness spat into the sterilized ward! It is the new punk of ventilated ceiling covering.

Apart from bedfellow of my plastic other half and socialite to the ceiling, I've also become a kind of connoisseur of palliative medicine. The "blue drug" has a pleasant color, a deep but translucent navy that shows sharp highlights under the lamp. The new conditioner of the nurse who brings it gives the experience a pleasant odor, and injection into the IV bag means it goes down smooth. Sadly the experience falls apart from there. It washes harshly over the nerves, inspiring sharp muscle spasms and an undertone of dull terror. Morphine on the other hand is more recommendable. It appears unremarkable in the needle; a clear, watery substance. The doctor smells of a harsh and synthetically fragranced anti-bacterial soap, reminiscent of the scented cakes placed in urinals. The needle is icy cold inside the flesh and seems far too big for its duty, but the onset saves it. A gentle warming complements the slow dissipation of reality. Sleep becomes easy as the universe backs further and further away. Even the bed, even my thoughts, even the so-called synthetic recedes into the dark.