Chapter Six: Balance
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It's a common misconception, Finch's doctors had said, that the human body operates on only five physiological senses. As he had worked—relearning how to walk, sit, stand, lift, turn—they had told him that in reality, depending on one's criteria, there are anywhere between nine and twenty-one separate senses.
Widely agreed upon was equilibrioception: the perception of gravity and ability to balance accordingly. Without it, one was in constant free-fall down the rabbit hole, forever sailing off the edge of the world.
Closely related was proprioception: the ability to locate the parts of one's body in space, to tell where you ended and the rest of the world began. Without it, life was rather like starring in one's own personal Picasso painting.
More controversial was nociception: in a word, pain. Some scientists thought the perception of pain existed independently from the sense of touch. Others disagreed. No consensus in sight. Personally, Finch could go either way.
Armstrong had spent the better part of an hour suspending Finch horizontally, face-down in the middle of his homemade apparatus—this strange, altered body hoist. The central body sling, instead of cradling Finch hammock-style, was doubled once around his hips, right at the tipping point of his center of gravity, and stretched taut. Any false move either sent him tilting headlong or arching backwards, to be caught with a jolt by the other straps attached strategically to various junctures on his limbs.
Like the restraints on the now-gone hospital bed, these straps were wide, thick, faux-suede-padded; there would be no chafing, no bruising. Nothing to distract from the pure, precisely measured, continuous torque on each of the eleven screws and six plates holding him together.
And then there was the collar. Half neck-brace, half traction sling, the thing hung down from a short pulley system, strangling and stabbing him by turns. Resisting against it eased the sharp bite of titanium into bone but it also pressed against his airway, leaving him lightheaded in a matter of minutes. Relaxing into the restraints allowed him to breathe deeply, but it also sent each piece of metal shrieking against its skeletal mooring.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is... is loosed upon... upon...
Yeats—hadn't Yeats died of a broken back? But wait, no: he'd died in old age, a senator and Nobel Laureate. An accident as a young man, then, that was it: fractured spine, ribs, pelvis... only... no, not him—Kahlo. He was thinking of Frida Kahlo, of course. One of Grace's favorites. After the train accident, the great Mexican painter had spent the rest of her life in a steel corset, a metal exoskeleton to shield the crumbling column of her spine. Grace had told him Frida's story after the ferry bombing, trying in her kindly way to give him hope for a full life even after the crippling injuries... except...
Except that wasn't right. Grace didn't know about the injuries, the surgeries, the scars—though he was having trouble remembering how that could be... she couldn't possibly not have noticed... not even he could have hidden...
No. She had never seen the scars. He remembered now. She had left him. She had cried at the end; she had kept the book he'd used for the ring, had held it to her chest and wept—but she had still left. Since then, every so often, he would catch a glimpse of her near the house they had shared, but she had never noticed. Or she had pretended not to. Even now, all these years later, she couldn't bear to look at him.
Finch sagged against the restraints, wetness dripping to the floor from his nose, his mouth. So tired. He was so tired. The flood of pain began to ebb, and a rushing sound drowned the sobbing noises in his ears.
He woke to a tender touch and a warm clean smell, familiar. He heard footsteps—the soft sounds of worn, paint-spattered loafers supporting a pair of slender ankles. A tether of long hair fell against the back of his neck. Long, red hair.
"Grace," he breathed.
He shifted, wanting, needing, to see her face. The movement sent him forward sharply, compressing his spine at the nape and stretching it at the small of his back; pain shut on him like the teeth of an animal trap. He gagged and pulled back, overcorrecting and jogging the whole weight of his suspended body against the collar. Bile spattered the floor beneath him, and he shook and whimpered, lost.
Then Grace laid another hand on him and he stilled, focusing on the feel of her fingertips at the nape of his neck. He took a steadying breath. She was right, of course. He didn't need to see her face, any more than he'd needed to see the falling tendril of hair to know its color, or see the old shoes to recognize her footsteps. Somehow the collar was no barrier to her fingers; he clearly felt the soothing rub of her thumb against the hairline on the back his neck. Just as he'd felt it dozens of times before, from behind him in bed, or while he sat at his computer.
"It's like someone drew it with a Sharpie," she'd giggle, combing her fingertips over the stark, perfectly even hairline on his nape.
"I employ a set of hair clippers quite regularly."
"Still, though."
"And I thought you said Sharpies were 'for noobs'."
"Okay then: it's like someone drew it with a Staedtler ink-brush."
His hair in general had been an endless source of amusement to her; she had sporadic, irresistible urges to touch it. She'd tried to explain the fascination once, after she had dropped her bedtime-reading book to scoot closer, cross-legged on the quilt. He'd submitted to her fond pats while she searched for words.
"It's just so..." she said, her palms bouncing lightly against the straight, stickery ends. "So..."
"Absurd?" he'd prompted.
"Vertical," she'd replied.
Before Grace, he hadn't known he could enjoy the sense of touch—mechanosensation—so much.
He wasn't a complete naïf when they met—he had been to college, after all—and he'd usually found sex pleasant enough, if hardly worth the exorbitant amount of time and energy most people seemed to invest in its pursuit.
With Grace, though, the intimacy of skin-on-skin had been revelatory, and nothing short of intoxicating. He thoroughly enjoyed making Grace happy, and flattered himself that eventually, through observation and research, he had even been able to teach her a trick or two.
He was quite sure he'd never signed up for this, though.
These straps—he could barely move, why couldn't he move—they didn't hurt, exactly, but there was an unpleasant tingling and the lights were much too bright and—oh. Oh no, he'd been wrong: this did hurt. This wasn't just uncomfortable or unsettling; this was wrong, and this hurt. Grace's hand was gone; he reached for it in his mind, but all he found were memories.
Their first morning, they had woken up smiling.
"I love your smile."
"I love your smile."
They'd smiled some more.
"Our kids would have really cute teeth," she'd blurted.
He'd kissed her.
A cramp was curdling in an outer muscle of his bad hip: the smallish, tensor something-or-other—the one with the name like a Starbucks drink. It was overdeveloped on the left from hitching his leg out sideways with every step, so ordinarily a cramp there was no small matter. Granted it was presently the least of his worries, but he'd gotten good at isolating and relaxing it at will. And he needed to feel good at something at the moment.
He and Grace had met at a Starbucks for their first two dates. It seemed safe; it seemed to be what people did. They'd laughed afterwards when they'd realized neither of them liked coffee.
Now, Grace was not-drinking-coffee somewhere in Italy. Nowhere near... wherever this was. She wouldn't be coming for him. He wouldn't want her to. He was beginning to wonder about Mr Reese, though. He wasn't even bothering to waste energy hoping John would just keep his head down and leave well enough alone; John would find him, or die trying. He sincerely hoped it would be the former.
But it had never taken this long before.
There were footsteps again—long-legged footsteps that trembled the metal arms suspending Finch's suspended cage; he began to sway gently in midair. There was a click of a lock and the whisper of a draft as the door opened. Finch's vision tunneled in on the dark spatter of mucus on the cement floor beneath him. His body was tensing, his breaths shallowing. His bones groaned, half relieved as they pulled themselves a little tighter together.
Armstrong walked toward him, deliberately lightening his step to ease the nauseous swaying. He stopped an arm's length away, silent and still. Watching.
"This is about the Machine, isn't it," Finch said.
Armstrong said nothing. Finch closed his eyes.
"I'll tell you anything you want to know."
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. . . .
"When this is over, when I get Harold back, I will kill you."
"I'd expect nothing else from you, Detective."
. . . .
John's fists tightened fiercely around the bunches of Slim's shirt he held in his hands. Slim took the hint and kept still when John let go and began patting him down.
"These regular check-ins you mentioned, to the—"
"To the armed men guarding your friend's room?"
"Right. How do you contact them?"
Slim had nothing on him—no wallet, no keys, no phone. John started to check again, just to be sure.
"I can't tell you that, Detective."
John's hand ghosted over Slim's sternum.
"I can be pretty persuasive."
Slim's eyes widened. "Well, you'll have to be. I'm due to check in soon, actually. Very soon. And I don't think you'll be able to convince me in time. You should really let me go now."
There was no swagger in Slim's voice; just earnest concern and the snuffle of a swelling nose. Sweat and blood had darkened the short, sandy hair on one side of his head.
John's fingers settled above the metasturnum bone where Slim's ribs joined, and pushed down hard and slow until it creaked, right on the cusp of giving way. Slim gasped and started to struggle but John's free hand settled around his throat—not squeezing, just a gentle warning. Slim stilled instantly.
"And what if I don't let you go now?" John murmured.
Slim shook his head. "Well, I wouldn't make the check-in in time. I don't know exactly what would happen then—and I'd rather not find out, personally."
Something was rubbing against the heel of John's hand where it lay under Slim's throat. He eased his hand off Slim's ribcage and reached under the shirt, feeling for the anomaly. It was small, hard; he pulled down the collar to look. A white plastic disk, set into the skin just under the right collarbone. A hole in the middle to accommodate a large-bore IV drip.
A chemotherapy drip.
Slim smiled at John sadly.
"One way or another, Detective, this will be my last job." Tears began to shine in his dark, deep-set eyes. "And I can't tell you what a gift your friend is, what a comfort it is to finish my life's work in such a meaningful way. So please, let me go do my job. Or don't—and we'll see what happens. But I promise you, there is no way I help stop this project before I've decided it's finished."
He licked at his bleeding lip, and his wet eyes now burned with determination. "I won't—I can't—allow you or anyone else to take this away from me. Please understand, please accept, that for now your friend—Harold—is mine. I'll let him die before I give him up prematurely." His voice had dwindled to a whisper. "Please don't make me do that."
John's hands fell away from Slim's throat and chest, but he made no move to back away from where he loomed over the prone body beneath him. Slim had to duck and cringe out from underneath him.
"Thank you, Detective."
Slim got to his feet slowly, one hand pressed to the bleeding cut on his brow. He didn't straighten up fully; the spot on his solar plexus where John's thumb had dug deep would be bruised black for weeks. Or until he died. Whichever came first.
Rubbing at a twisted knee, Slim slowly made his way up the stairs. John's eyes followed him, hard and glittering with the promise that he'd do everything he could to make sure the latter came first.
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