The Adoration of Jenna Fox: List 3

“They uploaded some new technology that will help the prosthetics anticipate my own balance system. It will supposedly read nerve signals from my brain and learn from them. They said to walk as much as possible to speed up the learning process. Imagine that—I’ve got smart legs.”

“She’s a horse,” Ethan says, repeating his assessment of me.

Allys is still talking, but it is a garbled echo.

Allys raises her eyebrows. “You do have big blanks, don’t you? Well, Blue Goo—as the hospital calls it—is, well, blue.”
“Brilliant,” Ethan interjects.

“And,” Allys says, raising her voice, “it’s artificially oxygenated and loaded with neurochips. They’re smaller than the human cell and communicate with each other pretty much the same way neurons do, except faster...."

3. Destitute of some quality or qualities.

If I have to remember a lifetime of memories, bits at a time, will it take me another whole lifetime to reclaim them all?

Adjoining the bedroom is a sitting area furnished with two overstuffed chairs and a small library.

I stare at my awkward monster fingers and feel my clumsy funny feet sliding back and forth on the floor beneath me, listening to the creaks and ticks of the house, and the heaves and sighs of restoration.

I was treasured. Adored. Smothered with hopes.

Like all the previous discs, this one begins with her birthday party, a lavish private affair somewhere in Scotland.

Mother, Father, and I all wear kilts, and “Happy Birthday” is played by a legion of bagpipers.

It slides into the lock with a soft rasp, and I hear the tumbler turn.

I feel a surge, like a jolt of energy has shot through me.

One rivet pops out, but the rest stay secure.

I clutch my gashed hand to my stomach. The other gropes at the stair rail.

Mother is mumbling, rambling, saying something that is all noise for me.

“You were burned so badly, Jenna. We tried everything. Even with all the temporary grafts, you were losing so much fluid. We had you stabilized for a few days. I was so hopeful. But then the infections set in and we were losing you..."

“Your veins were collapsing. We weren’t sure how much longer your heart could last. Blood circulation is critical for a good scan. They take at least six minutes. Vital organs were already shutting down. By the time they got you to surgery, your heart had stopped twice. They had the Bio Gel waiting. They saved as much as was still viable.”

He didn’t have time to dally.

Your skin was replaced. Your brain, the ten percent we saved, was infused with additional Bio Gel.

That environment was my hell. My black void I didn’t understand.

Bricks sit in pallets, waiting to repair the veranda.

Scaffolding for painters stands empty.

She finally breaches the wall of quiet between us.

I lay my head down on my scrunched-up knees and close my eyes, even though I loathe the darkness.

How many hours can one person spend locked in a bathroom, looking at skin, hair, eyes. Feeling fingers. Toes. And the absurdity of a belly button?

Even though Bio Gel is self-sufficient, I actually do have a primitive digestive system, mostly for “psychological reasons.”

She had been conspicuously absent all evening.

As he pokes at the fire, Father explains in detail more than I really want to know, the tedious process of saving bits of my skin and growing it in the lab and combining it with other specimens until the required amount was achieved.

He moves on to the technology of brain scans, what he and his team have learned just from my experience and the implications for future patients facing similar problems.

When he veers into father mode, he stumbles and looks in many ways like a mirror image of Mother.

He stands and paces near the hearth.

“We saved an ovary, darling. It’s preserved at an organ bank. And a surrogate mother won’t be a problem—”

“I won’t even bring up the fact that I am two inches shorter now—acceptable ballerina height—another detail I know wasn’t an oversight. So let’s just go back to my original question. What took you so long?”

Stalemate. It’s true. I read it on their faces.

Somewhere, winding inside, pieces are trying to come together, synapses trying to form, a complete story trying to connect within.

"Even though he left after two years, Thoreau decides his time at Walden is a success if only because, I learned this, at least, by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind—” He stops and looks at me again.

"He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary, new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”

“Although that’s just another rote memorization, isn’t it?” I add.