Samsa & Shabeezi

Samsa was now a human.  He’d recently become a human after his architect decided to put a human heart in him and give him feelings.  The five litres of blood that now pumped around his body warmed him up.  It made for incredible nose bleeds, spasms, cramps and bruising, to name only a small fraction of the symptoms, but his architect assured him that it would all be worth it and that he'd feel normal very soon.  He didn't know what normal was, but he knew it wasn't puking and shitting and bleeding all over the place for the first two months and then just feeling terrible for several weeks after that.  Human life is agony, he thought, but he trusted the process.  One day, a little over twelve weeks after the operation, he woke up from his first good night's sleep and was able to open the curtains without the light splitting his skull in two. 

Samsa had known Shabeezi before she became a human woman.  All they had done was fight.  Samsa especially liked doing flying kicks on Shabeezi in the stupid little skull of hers.  Shabeezi liked to push ugly boy Samsa down massive flights of stairs and laugh as she watched him tumble.  They tried their best, but they couldn’t kill each other.  They couldn’t be killed.  When they were too broken to move, they were wheeled back to one of their technicians and fixed.  When they were fit enough to fight again, they fought. 

Shabeezi was the first thing Samsa thought about when he woke up from getting his human heart.  He couldn’t move for a while so all he could do was lay there and wonder how she was because she had been given a human heart at the same time he had.  Strange how I used to like doing flying kicks in her head.  He wondered if she was thinking the same thing about pushing him down large flights of stairs.  He remembered her laugh as he fell.  He realised now for the first time that Shabeezi had a nice laugh and Samsa, above all other things, wanted to hear it.  And he hoped he wouldn’t have to break his neck to do so.

There was a female pre-human called Suki who’d been programmed to care for Samsa and clean everything that had come out of him in the weeks and months after he’d been given a heart.  One day, when Samsa was beginning to get better, he asked Suki to stop the cleaning and warm her bloodless hand on the radiator to mimic a human hand so that he might work out and get used to the mechanics and the feeling of sliding his fingers between someone else’s fingers.  The radiator had done little to warm them up, but he did get the practice he needed.  They walked around the room holding, unholding, then re-holding hands.  Samsa had asked Suki to push the bed into the middle of the room so they could walk around in a circle.  After a few hours of practice, he had reached what he considered to be a good standard of handholding.  It didn’t mean anything to Suki because she didn’t have a human heart, but Samsa appreciated her help nonetheless.

On the night Samsa and Shabeezi were due to meet for the first time as humans, the snow came in.  They were given woolly hats and duffel coats that were almost too weighty for Samsa’s new human body to bear.  His architect had told him to take it slowly.  You won’t be used to walking in the snow.  You’ll need to lift your feet more than you usually would. 

Samsa saw Shabeezi the moment she came out of her room.  Her cheeks had a glow he’d never seen before.  And her eyes – had they always been an emerald green?  Her hair was how it had always been: dark brown and thick with tight curls that ended halfway down her back.  But somehow her hair had more relevance, held more poignancy than it did before.  He wondered what it was like to run a hand through it.  And then it that moment a wave of feeling: the way she looked at Samsa when she saw him.  The jumping of his new heart made his legs wobble.  Samsa wondered whether he’d ever be given a seatbelt or a chair to sit on for these things he was feeling.  He knew the answer to that and the answer was no.

They were shown an open door and were free to walk through it. Thirty minutes max, they were told.  Shabeezi pointed towards the park just across the street.  They watched as they both breathed frost for the first time and they smiled at each other.  It was night-time, close to Christmas.  It was safer at night: there was a strict curfew on traffic and noise and there were guards with batons on every street corner who were more than happy to enforce the law.  Samsa and Shabeezi walked through the old wrought iron gates of the park.  Theirs were the first footprints in the newly-settled snow.  Samsa looked back occasionally to see the steps they had made together.  The park’s promenade was straight and wide, with the mottled bark of London Planes flanking them on either side.  They felt imposing at first, but then they became grandfatherly.  They had red and gold solar lanterns hanging from them, glowing more warmly than anything he had seen before.  He unfocused his eyes and made the lanterns blurry.  Red and gold, gold and red.  Dotted warm and bright against the black.  Stretching many hundreds of metres in front of them.  He turned to look at Shabeezi and brought his eyes to focus. 

Shabeezi looked weak.  She nodded towards a bench and they sat down. Bathed in yellow from the lamp above, these were the vulnerabilities of being human.  She told Samsa her heart wasn’t taking, that her body had been fighting against it right from the start.  If Samsa had known what to say, the words would have got stuck in his throat.  He hadn’t been given any homework on how to respond to things like this.  He didn’t think there would be a cheat sheet on all the things you had to do and say as a human, but if there was one, he wasn’t shown it.  Shabeezi was looking at the lanterns in the trees.  Samsa watched her as she looked at them.  He’d read a little bit about trees while he was in his room.  That’s how he knew these trees were London Planes. 

‘The London Plane is a hybrid of two trees,’ he said. ‘The Oriental Plane and the American Sycamore.’

It was a stupid response, he thought, and he felt stupid for saying it.  A silence took over for a while.  Then:

‘A hybrid like us,’ Shabeezi responded. 

‘Yes,’ Samsa said.  ‘A hybrid like us.’

The temperature was dropping so they got up and continued walking. 

This was the moment Samsa wanted to hold Shabeezi’s hand.  It was here, right at this moment.  But two pairs of hands were firmly in two pairs of pockets.  He took his hands out.  How do you hold a hand when it’s in a pocket?  He knew nothing of handholding etiquette.    Is it wrong to ask or does it just happen? He didn’t know anything.  He put his confusion of fingers and thumbs back where they'd come from. 

‘I need to turn back now,’ Shabeezi said.    

‘Okay.’ 

They turned around and Samsa saw that he was now on the side of Shabeezi’s past footsteps walking towards him.

Samsa moved a step to the left so he’d leave their tracks unspoilt.  Shabeezi moved a step and a half closer and slipped her hand into his pocket and that was the moment Samsa knew he'd remember forever.  An energy surged down from his arm to the soles of his feet and back up again.  He felt a heart beating in the holding of hands, although he wasn’t sure whether that heartbeat was his or Shabeezi’s.  Her hand stayed in Samsa’s pocket for the remainder.  Nothing further was said.  Nothing had to be said.    It was the most wonderful ten minutes of Samsa’s human life.  Every now and again they would turn to each other and smile.  He wanted to touch her hair, but decided to save the delight for next time.  Before Samsa had to let go of Shabeezi's hand, and shortly before they reached the old gates of the park, he did a funny walk with his feet and knees turned outwards and it made Shabeezi laugh.  There was absolutely no doubt about it, Samsa thought.  This human heart - in all of a flutter now from hearing her laugh - had been worth it.    

A little while later, when Samsa was back in his room, his architect came in and asked him what had happened.  He said he needed to be thorough in his description because Samsa was contractually obliged to tell him everything.  Samsa shrugged his shoulders and said nothing had happened, nothing had happened at all.  Just walked and that’s it. His architect gave him a hard stare for a moment, clicked his tongue and left.  When he was gone, Samsa whispered under his breath…because, Mr Architect, it’s none of your damn business.  He drifted soundly off to sleep and dreamed of Shabeezi.    

The architect completed and submitted the necessary forms and got a response within five minutes.  It was decided that neither Samsa nor Shabeezi would wake up the next day as per the agreed terms of the experiment.