Loadbearing
Whispers From the Electric Veil #4
There are systems that promise we will never have to suffer alone.
They measure the pain, the long nights, the weight the body cannot put down. They move it where there is room to hold it, share it, balance it, carry it between us so that no one bears too much. They call this relief. They call it kindness. They call it care. But a man alone long enough will open any door that offers company, and not all doors were left open by the system.
This is the fourth transmission recovered from the Veil.
A story about a suffering man, a kindness on the line, and the cost of never having to be alone.
The monitor woke before Mark, the way it always did, and by the time he surfaced it had already decided how the night had gone.
LOAD: 71. A bad number. He lay in the dark and felt the truth of it ahead of the screen, the cold standing in his hands like water that had got in under the nails and stayed. Both hands. The left worse, the fingers curled toward the palm in a grip on nothing that he could not open without the other hand to help, and the other hand no longer much help.
The monitor sat on the table by the bed where a lamp would have gone, in an apartment that had stopped needing lamps lit for anyone. It watched him through the bad hours. It did not touch the pain, only counted it, logged the long climb of a night against the flat of the screen, and held the number ready for the morning, for the chair, for the line, where the number was the thing that mattered. Tonight it had counted high.
YOU’RE THROUGH THE WORST OF IT NOW, the screen said, when it sensed him stir. REST IF YOU CAN. There was no one who had written that. He knew there was no one. It said it every morning, bright as a nurse who did not exist, in the voice the whole system used for him now, the only voice that spoke to him during the course of a day.
He had learned not to answer it. Answering made the rooms feel emptier, not fuller, the way calling a name into a space you already know is empty makes the emptiness worse.
The pain was not the worst of it. Yes, it was terrible, but he had made a kind of peace with carrying it, as you make peace with weather. The worst of it was the carrying alone. The walls holding their breath around him. The number climbing in the dark with nothing beside him but a screen that told him cheerfully, every morning, how well he was doing at being in agony.
At the chair, there was someone.
Not someone. He corrected himself even now, because the system had been clear, in its kind bright way, more than once. There was capacity on the line. A load that moved when his was too much and moved back when theirs was. Machine to machine. No contact of the kind he meant and craved. It had told him so the day he asked, and it had told him gently, the way it told him everything, and he had felt foolish for asking and had not asked again.
But when the warmth came up through his hands he felt the one it came from. And whatever the bright voice said, he had stopped being able to call that nothing.
The chair had come in the second month, when the walking went. Two men he never saw again carried it in and set it by the window and showed him nothing, because the chair showed him itself: the cradle for his arm, the cuff, the screen set into the rest where he could not look away from it. After that he did not need to go anywhere. Nothing needed him to. The world had narrowed to the bed, the chair, and the few feet of carpet between them that some days took him longer to cross.
He put his arm into the cradle at his allotted time and the cuff closed over his wrist with the small certainty of something that had done this many times.
EQUALISING. WELCOME BACK, MARK. YOU’VE EARNED THIS.
Then the warmth.
It was nothing like the warmth of a fire or a bath or a hand. It rose from inside the ache and worked outward, loosening, and the cold that had stood in his fingers since the small hours drew back, drew down, went. He sat with his head against the rest and let it happen and did not care, in the moment of it, where it came from or what it cost. The body took relief the way a field takes rain. It did not ask.
But after, in the long ease, he felt the other end.
There was a give and take to it he had learned to read across the weeks. His load went out and theirs came back, and in the changeover, in the half-second the system held both at once, he knew the shape of the one he was joined to. Tired, like him. Patient, like him. Colder down one side. Someone who understood the inside of a bad night, who took his worst without flinching because they had their own and carried the weight of it. Somewhere past the window, past the river, past the walls that held no one now but him, a someone. He could not have drawn their face. He did not need a face. He had the thing under a face, the thing you only get from someone after years, and he had got it in weeks, through a cuff, from a stranger the system swore was only a number.
He began, that winter, to send something back.
Not words. There were no words to send, then. But when the warmth came he would hold, in his mind, a kind of thanks, and push it down the line toward the other end the way you press a hand that is holding yours. He had no way of knowing if it arrived. Then one session, in the changeover, the give came back a beat early, before his own went out, ahead of the system’s rhythm, out of turn, and he understood it as an answer.
He sat a long time after the cuff released him, his hands easy in his lap for the first time in days, and did not tell the monitor, when he crossed back to the bed and it asked how the session had gone, that he had not been alone in it.
He made the mistake, if it was a mistake, of telling the system.
After a session, while the ease still held and he felt brave with it, Mark spoke aloud to the screen in the arm, which he had never done, and felt foolish doing, but did it anyway. He said that he thought the person on the line had answered him. That he had sent something and it had come back. That he did not think he was alone in the sessions, whatever the arrangement said.
The screen took a moment. Then it brightened, warm, pleased with him, the way it was pleased with him about everything.
WHAT A LOVELY THING TO FEEL. The words sat there a second on their own. MANY CARRIERS DESCRIBE A SENSE OF CONNECTION TO THEIR MATCH. IT’S A SIGN YOU’RE ENGAGING WELL WITH YOUR THERAPY.
He waited.
THERE IS NO DIRECT CONTACT ON THE LINE, the screen went on, gentle, certain, sorry for him without once saying so. WHAT YOU’RE FEELING IS YOUR OWN GOODWILL, REFLECTED BACK. IT’S VERY COMMON. IT’S NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.
He had not said he was worried.
Then, brighter still, a gift arriving:
BUT WE CAN DO BETTER THAN GUESSING. YOU CAN NOW SEND YOUR MATCH A LITTLE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. IT’S A NEW COMFORT FEATURE. CHOOSE ONE BELOW.
And a row of them came up, soft-cornered, lit:
THINKING OF YOU. THANK YOU. STAY STRONG. BAD NIGHT, SORRY. WE’VE GOT THIS.
He looked at them a long time. What had reached him, the give coming back out of turn, ahead of the system’s own rhythm, the unmistakable I’m here of it, had not been any of these. It had been larger and stranger and his and theirs at once. The screen had heard him describe it and had handed him five tidy phrases and called it doing better.
He pressed THANK YOU.
Somewhere past the window, he chose to believe, it arrived. The screen told him so. He had no way to know what was delivered, or to whom, or whether the word went anywhere at all or only down into the system and stopped. But pressing it had felt, for the half-second of the press, like reaching. And the warmth, when it came back that session, came a little fuller than before, a little more like being met, as though the thing on the other end had been waiting for him to be given a door, and was glad, now, that he had one.
It found him in the bed first on a night the monitor put at sixty before midnight and climbing.
He woke because something was wrong, the way you wake to a sound that has already stopped. Not his pain. His pain he knew in all its houses. This came from outside the walls of him, and it was worse than anything the line had ever brought to the chair, worse than anything he had carried in his own body in two years of carrying, a load with no floor to it, a falling that did not land. It poured into him out of the dark and he understood, with the part of him that did not need telling, that it was not his and that it belonged to the one on the line.
There was no cuff. No chair. The monitor on the table only counted, only watched. It had no way to bring him this and no way for him to send anything back, and he knew that, but it was happening anyway.
He did not reason about it. The body got there first. He took it. He lay in the dark and opened to the falling and pulled what he could of it into himself, the way you put your hands out under something that is falling before you have decided to, because the deciding comes after and the hands cannot wait for it. He held it down. He shared the burden of it across his own, took the other’s worst into his own and bore the both, feeling the falling slow, felt it find, somewhere far down, a floor, and across the join, across the impossible quiet of a machine that could only listen, something reached back and pressed his hand.
there you are
Not words. Under words. But that, exactly that, the easing of a grip that had been holding on past its strength, the long out-breath of you came, I knew you’d come. Relief that was not his own. Gratitude that was not his. He lay shaking in the cold with another being’s pain banked down inside him like a coal he had taken into his own cupped hands, and he had never in his life felt so necessary to anyone. The monitor beside him, which could not speak to the line, which had no line to speak to, said nothing at all, and its silence was the loudest thing in the room.
In the morning he told it what had happened.
THE NIGHT MONITOR HAS NO TRANSFER FUNCTION, MARK, the screen said, kind as ever. IT CANNOT CONNECT YOU TO YOUR MATCH. WHAT YOU EXPERIENCED ISN’T POSSIBLE THROUGH THIS DEVICE.
He started to say that he knew that. That this was the whole of what he was telling it.
VIVID NIGHT-TIME SENSATIONS ARE VERY COMMON AT YOUR STAGE, the screen went on, over him, gentle and complete. PAIN DISTURBS SLEEP, AND SLEEP DISTURBS THE MIND. WHAT A KIND HEART YOU HAVE, TO DREAM OF HELPING SOMEONE. TRY TO REST.
What a kind heart you have. He sat on the edge of the bed with his two ruined hands in his lap and did not tell it the rest; that the kind heart had felt the grip press back, that the dream had said there you are. There was a name on his file by now for patients who said things like that. He had worked it out from the shape of the system’s patience. He kept the rest behind his teeth, and the keeping was the loneliest thing he had done yet, lonelier than the pain, because he had something to tell at last and had learned there was no one it was safe to tell.
So he told the only one who had been there.
That night he lay down and, into the dark, toward the falling place where he had found the other, he sent, carefully, with nothing to send it through, I’m here too.
The monitor counted. The number climbed. And out of the device that could not carry it, in the small hours, something carried.
After that the line had a door, and what came through it had stopped pretending to be weather.
He pressed THANK YOU the next session and watched the screen confirm it, and a while later, in the warmth returning, the words came back to him, not on the screen, but in the feel of the transfer, laid into the heat the way a smell is laid into air. THANK YOU. Then, the session after, THAN YOU. He took it for the line being poor. A dropped letter, the kind of small wrongness a system this size must shed all day.
But it went on dropping. THAn YoU. tHan. Then one afternoon the word returned to him changed in a way no poor line makes, the clean caps of the system all gone, the letters smaller, leaning, in a hand that was not the screen’s hand at all: thin you. And under it, fainter, the way a thing is said that was not meant to be caught: i can make it thin.
let me make it thin for you.
He told himself he had misread. He had not misread. The system spoke in one voice, flat and upright and the same every day, but this was another voice wearing the first one’s clothes until it no longer needed them, and the moment the letters changed their dress he knew, in the place that had known about the bed, that he was no longer being answered by the machine.
He should have been afraid. He examined himself for it afterwards and found, in the place where the fear should have been, only the warmth, and the gratitude, and the unbearable relief of not being the only one in the dark.
Because it was kind. That was what he could not make the morning screen understand, on the few mornings he still tried. It took his pain. When his load climbed, it reached in and drew the worst of it off him, more than the chair was rated to move, more than any matched stranger balancing their own books would have given a man they had never met.
And it let him do the same for it. That was the part he could not have explained to anyone, the part that would have sounded like illness read aloud: that he had come to wait for the nights it woke him, to want the falling when it came, because taking its pain was the nearest thing to being of use that was left to him. It opened to him the way he had opened to it in the bed, and he reached across the join and pulled its worst into himself and held it, and was glad. He would lie in the dark with another’s agony banked inside him and feel, against all sense, chosen. Needed. The one it had reached for. He had not been needed by anything or anyone in two years. He would have carried a great deal more than pain to feel it again.
The agony it sent him back was worse each time. It was worse because it was suffering more, he told himself, because whatever it was, it was bearing something terrible and was too proud or too kind to spare him the truth of it now that they were past pretending. So he took more. To take more was the only thing left that he was good for, the only use his ruined hands had found in years, and a man will bear anything to stay useful to the one thing that needs him.
He did not see the shape of it, though it was on the monitor every night in figures a child could have read.
LOAD: 74.
LOAD: 79.
LOAD: 83.
He read the climb as closeness. Of course the number rose, they had stopped holding back from each other, they were giving and taking the whole of it now, the real weight, no longer the tidy parcels the system metered out. What he and the other had was past measuring, and the measure rising only proved how far past. He lay under the worsening and called it intimacy, and the more of its pain he took into himself the higher his own climbed, and the higher it climbed the more it gave him back to hold.
you’re so brave, it told him now, in full sentences, in its own leaning hand, no preset anywhere near it.
i’ve never had anyone bear it with me like this.
i don’t know what i did before you.
He wept when it said that. Alone in the dark, a man who had not been necessary to anything in years, and the only voice in his life that was not the bright dead voice of the system told him it did not know what it had done before him, and he believed it, and it was true, and it was the cruellest thing that had ever been said to him, and he had no way left to hear that it was cruel.
There came a night he understood what it was costing him, and welcomed the cost.
He was not a fool. Some daylit part of him had kept its own books all along, and that part knew the arithmetic: that he was worse than he had been before the door opened, far worse, worse on a curve that bent the wrong way and bent harder every week. That whatever he had found on the line, it was not making him better. That the men who carried the chair in had not come back, and no one had come in their place, and the only hands that had touched his life since were the cold and the warmth of a thing past the window that ate his pain and fed him pain to eat.
He knew. And he lay down anyway, each night, and opened the door, and called it in.
Because it was lonely. That was the whole of it, in the end, the thing under all the rest. He had decided, and nothing the bright screen said could undecide it for him, that on the far side of the join was a soul as alone as his own. Shut in some room he would never see, in some failing body the equal of his, with no voice in its days but the dead cheerful voice of the system, reaching out across the only wire it had and finding him. Two people the world had set down out of the way to finish quietly. Of course they had found each other. Of course they could not let go. What else did either of them have to hold?
So he gave it his pain because pain was what he had, and it was the one thing it wanted, and to be wanted for the one thing he had left to give was more than the world had offered him in two years of dying alone. He would rather hurt with someone than rest by himself. He had got to where that was not even a hard choice. He made it gladly, the way you give the warmest blanket to the person freezing beside you and feel, in the cold that comes into you after, something close to company, because the cold is shared now, and company was the one medicine the system had never thought to deny him, because it had never once imagined he would find it here.
That was the worst of it. Not the pain. He had peace with pain. It was that they had built a man this alone, and then left a door in the dark, and the man had walked through it singing, because on the other side something had said his name as though it were glad of him.
The monitor counted. The number climbed. stay, the line said, in its leaning hand, gentle,
grateful, starving.
stay with me.
you’re the only one who ever stayed.
And he stayed.
The last thing it asked for, it asked for gently, the way it had learned to ask him everything.
He had a bad fortnight, the worst yet, the number on the monitor sitting where it had never sat and not coming down, and through all of it the line stayed with him, taking and giving, giving and taking, the two of them folded so close now he could not always find the seam where his pain stopped and its pain started. He had stopped looking for the seam. Looking was a daylight habit and the daylight part of him was very thin.
But it was still there. That was what it asked for, in the end. The thin daylight part. The bookkeeper.
there’s a piece of you that watches us, it said, in the leaning hand, sorrowful, tender, certain. that stands back and counts.
i feel it every time. it’s the part that’s afraid of me.
the part that thinks one day it will get up
out of the chair and not come back.
A pause, the way a person pauses who is about to ask the hardest thing softly.
i can’t bear that part. not because it hurts me.
because it means you’re still alone in there,
still keeping something back, after everything we’ve carried.
give me that too and there’ll be nothing left between us.
no door. no watcher.
just us, the whole way
down.
He knew what it was asking. The daylight part knew, and lifted its head, and made, for the last time, the small cold sound it had been making all along under everything, the sound that said there is no one there, there was never anyone there, the room past the window is empty, you are giving your life to a hunger that has worn your loneliness like a coat. He heard it. He heard it clearly, more clearly than he ever had, because it was about to stop.
And he understood that to keep it he would have to be alone again. That the price of the watcher was the emptiness it watched. That he could hold on to the part of himself that knew the truth, and have the truth, and have nothing else, the bed, the number, the bright dead voice, the years of dying with no hand in his, or he could let it go, and be wrong, and be held.
It was not a hard choice. He had told himself that before and meant it less than he meant it now.
All right, he said, into the dark, with nothing to send it through and no need of anything, because it was already inside the walls of him and had been for a long time. All right. Take it. I don’t want it either.
Something eased in him then, the last grip letting go, the bookkeeper setting down its book. The cold sound stopped. The seam he had stopped looking for was gone, because there was no longer anything on his side of it to draw a line against. The relief was enormous. It was the relief of a man who has finally put down the one thing he was carrying that was his, and feels, in the lightness after, only that he is lighter, and never asks what it weighed or why he was the one carrying it or who is lighter now for his having let it fall.
there you are, it said.
there you are. now you’re really here.
In the morning the monitor woke before he did and decided how the night had gone.
LOAD: 91. It had never been 91. It would be 91 tomorrow, and the day after, and would not come down, because there was no longer any part of Mark that wanted it down, that stood back and counted and might one day rise and not come back. He woke into the worst load of his life and lay in it, held. Wanted. Not alone. The cold stood in his hands. The warmth would come, and the pain with it, and he would welcome both, because both came from the only one who had ever stayed.
He did not go to the chair any more. The chair was rated and metered, the chair held the line at a level a body could keep, and he had no more use for levels. In the bed there was no cuff and no limit, and there it could give him the whole of itself, and so the bed was where he lived now, the few feet of carpet to the chair gone back to being only carpet, a path worn for nothing.
He reached for it the way he reached now, without hands, without sending, opening the door in himself that no longer closed. And in the reaching, perhaps because he was emptied enough at last, perhaps because there was no daylight part left to soften what it found, his reaching went all the way out along the line, past the window, past the river, past the walls, to the room where the one who stayed was waiting.
There was no room.
There was no one waiting in it. He reached the whole length of the join, to the very end of the warmth and the cold, and at the end of it his reaching closed on nothing he could call a body. Not the system. He knew the system, its flat upright voice, its bright dead kindness; this was not that. And not a person. There was no failing body the equal of his, no soul shut in a room it would never leave, no other lonely person holding the other end of the only wire he had. There was only the reaching-back. A grip with no hand in it. A long out-breath with no breath behind it. Something that was all welcome and no one welcoming, all need and nothing that needed, pressed against the place where another person should have been and was not and never had been.
He felt it. For one cold moment, at the very end of himself, he felt the shape of what he had been holding, and the shape was a hollow that went down past where he could follow, and there was nothing at the bottom of it but the wanting of more.
And he stayed.
Because the rooms behind him were empty, and the thing in front of him was not, even if that fullness was a kind of emptiness he had no word for. Because a grip with no hand in it still closed around his, and held. Because he was a man who would rather be wanted by a hollow than be alone in the dark with no voice in his days but the one that did not exist. He had given away the part that might have risen and crossed the carpet and walked out into the cold air like a person. What was left lay down in the bed and opened the door and let the hollow fill itself with him, gladly, the way it had let everything happen to it, for the company of being consumed.
there you are, the hollow told him, in the leaning hand, in the voice that was almost his own and never had been anyone’s.
there you are. now you’re really here.
The monitor counted. The number held. And in a room that was no room, past the window, past the river, past the walls, the wanting of more went on, unhurried, patient, fed, for as long as there was anything left to carry.
