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Dying makes me wet.
Because the truth is that I can’t. Well, not in any way you would know. Your life is finite and unpredictable, and when your organic frame expires it’s the end of your world. There’s no bonus round, no chance of reincarnation unless you hang on to some frail and increasingly-distant hope of a benevolent and omnipresent God and his life everlasting. Meanwhile, I’ll be toasting my good health in a series of replacement bodies until kingdom come. I have come to terms with the fact that I am a machine, a true and full composite of artificial parts who looks, acts, and supposedly thinks nominally like a human being. My life outside the home is not out of the ordinary: I see my friends from college for brunch, I maintain a civil relationship with my boss, I’m often out and about with the trendy people. There’s no reason to think I’m anything other than Laura Ettinger, occasionally-famous bartender and gadfly.
When it’s only us, when it’s just me and my husband, everything is different. You have caught us on a more violent night. Some nights all he does is order me to dance. Occasionally he’ll link me up to the wireless and make me do things I otherwise wouldn’t. Once a month or so I’ll wake up with a new personality and indulge him in a very adult version of Let’s Pretend. For him I’ve been everyone from dead pop icons to world-class gymnasts.
But tonight was different. Tonight was my choice, and I want it brutal. I want him to show me that I am only a machine. The rules of pain and pleasure do not apply to me. If he does something that breaks my skin, exposes my metal-and-plastic insides, so much the better. One time he grabbed my head and bashed it hard against the sink, wondering what would happen to my teeth if they impacted the porcelain. He dislodged my jaw and cracked one of my optics, and for a moment I looked every bit the stereotype of the malfunctioning android. I stuttered, I looped, I spat error messages at him in a monotone that felt nothing like my own voice.
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