Pulse

The car died three-quarters of the way up the cliff road, with a small convulsion of the engine, and a silence so sudden it seemed willful. The dash lights stuttered once, their glow shivering like fish under ice, before collapsing into black. He sat there with his hands on the wheel, the hush thickening, the salt air curling into the cabin through the vents. The printouts peeked out from the glove box - a consent form for the procedure, and the initial advertisement that had got him here in the first place.

Seeking Emotional Relief? Apply for Seipher’s Advanced Symbiotic Therapy.

He opened the door. His boots grated against the loose gravel, sending tiny skids of stone into the weeds. Far down the cliff, water slammed against the walls, green shot with pale foam, moving in heavy rolls. Spray rose like smoke and vanished before reaching the road. The sky was a dull wash, pale grey rinsed thin, and the wind worked the zipper of his jacket against his throat gratingly.

He thought of his wife, though he hadn’t meant to. And you can keep the dog. I’m not coming back this time.

He had followed her to the door and asked, stupidly, where she was going. She’d looked at him then, her mouth twitching as though she almost laughed. And then she was gone, the slam of the door leaving the smell of bleach and wine hanging in the kitchen. He looked down into the cushion on the seat of her favorite chair. There was an impression of her thighs still sunk into it. He’d pressed his hand into that hollow, felt the heat, and hated himself for it.

The memory rose like bile. He hitched the strap of his bag higher and began to climb.

~

The road thinned as it curved upward, pressed tight against the cliff face, the air raw with brine and the metallic tang of kelp rotting in tidepools below. Shrubs crouched low to the ground, thorny, salt-burnt, their branches twisted like arthritic fingers. Once he stopped to breathe and noticed the culvert beside him, choked with sticks, plastic, a child’s shoe swollen with moss. Water seethed through anyway, pushing itself out in frantic spurts.

Her face appeared again, though it never arrived clean. The fight that last winter: she had found the receipt in his coat pocket, the hotel name scrawled in ink at the top. You want me to believe you sat in that lobby alone? she’d said, her eyes half-crazed with exhaustion. Tell me you didn’t take her there. Look me in the eye and tell me. What could he say? Her hand had come down on the table, rattling the cutlery, her palm bruising against the wood.

As he trudged up the hill, printouts flapping against his windbreaker, he pushed the thoughts from his mind. The facility broke the horizon then, low-slung and grey, concrete bolted to steel like an abandoned military outpost. From this distance it might have been mistaken for ruin, except for the lone sodium lamp burning over the door, its light jaundiced and patient. Gulls rode the updrafts above, soaring and dropping with blunt cries behind and beyond the laboratory.

He pressed the buzzer.

“Come in,” said the voice, clipped, without greeting.

Dr. Seipher met him at the entrance. She was small and self-contained, coat zipped high, eyes glinting the way wet slate does when light struggles against it. The air inside carried ethanol and salt and, beneath it, a sweetness half-rotten, like fruit left on a radiator. Glass tanks ran the length of the walls, their bases lit with columns of muted light that made their contents appear as if suspended mid-breath.

“You walked?” she asked, handing him a paper cup.

“The car’s dead or something.”

“It’s just the salt. Give it a minute to warm up on the way down.”

He drank. The water clung metallic to his tongue, like it had been infused with copper spirals. She nodded toward the interior.

They had spent a year talking, circling this moment. Questionnaires, therapy sessions, late evenings where she had asked him to describe exactly what he carried. Long mornings where she explained the entire procedure to him, calmly addressed all his questions, guided him through all the studies.

Today, she led him down a corridor to the tanks. They were tiny, no wider than a sink basin, filled with a pale slurry that shifted like muslin. At first glance it might have been only water clouded with dust, but the longer he looked the more it seemed to thicken, coalesce, ripple against itself in subtle contractions.

“This is the most stable generation,” she said, pausing before one of the tanks. “They begin almost translucent, and then they start to acquire texture, folds, something like muscle. But they don’t develop into an organ in the way you’re probably imagining. They never become one thing. They remain a field, an atmosphere, a tissue that wants to stay unfinished.”

Her reflection in the glass was faint, broken into ribbons of pale light. He watched it waver as the contents inside convulsed once, slowly, like a dream turning over in sleep.

“So what’ll it do? Once you put it in me?” he asked.

“It will listen. It will feed.” She did not turn toward him when she said it, her hands deep in the pockets of her coat. “The earlier iterations reacted only to sound, vibration, and pressure changes. Then we taught them to distinguish between kinds of sound, layers of speech, stresses in a voice. They learned, for example, the difference between a mother calling for her child and a mother scolding her child. Later they began to respond to pauses, to human stutters, emotional outbursts, and such.”

He thought of his wife again, her voice scraping raw. Look me in the eye and tell me.

“They’ve begun to respond to things we can’t quite quantify,” Seipher went on. “Not just tone, not just words, but intention. Proximity of thought, maybe. If you lean close enough to them, if you hold something in mind with sufficient sharpness, they lean back.”

The organism, if that was even the word, pressed weakly against the inside of the tank, a pale bloom spreading and retracting as though something was gently squeezing it from within. He realized he had been holding his breath.

“We culture a segment of it, refine it, and then introduce it into the bloodstream. It doesn’t replace anything. It doesn’t corrupt. It simply attaches to what is already there, nestles into the folds of your affect, and begins to drink. Think of it as a siphon, taking the weight from you and carrying it elsewhere to sustain itself. And then, one day, you find yourself free of the need to carry certain burdens. It metabolizes what you no longer want. Grief. Shame. Remorse. The feelings that rot a life from the inside.”

He pressed his palm against the cool glass of the tank and felt the faintest answering tremor, as if the thing within had lifted a hand toward his own.

~

The insertion was almost nothing: pressure at the base of his neck, a warmth radiating like an unfurling fever. He sat as she watched the monitor, lines settling into steady cadence. She wrote a note.

“That’s it,” she said. “Go live.”

He felt it, faintly, ticking in his wrists and jaw, as though he’d grown another pulse.

~

For a while, the world bloomed bright.

Driving back down the cliff (Seipher had been right about the salt) was like stepping into a version of the coast sharpened beyond recognition. The sea below was crystalline and jade, mineral and black, foam cresting like crushed marble. Even the gulls’ wings seemed to carve the sky with a surgical clarity.

At night in his apartment, he lay listening to the pipes and felt her beside him. The warmth of her shoulder pressed into the crook of his neck, the scent of elderberry and vanilla shampoo clinging to her hair. The memory did not break him, as it usually did. It hovered, almost gentle. The organism pulsed, satiating itself on the ache before it could bloom.

Days collected, unremarkable. The ache grew quieter. He went to work, came home, lay down. The rawness of everything dulled gradually: the apartment lobby’s red awnings turned to rust, the sunset sky flattened to pewter. When he tried to summon her voice, he heard only distortion, like a scratched up tape pulled too tight.

One night, he dreamed of them. They were in a small boat on the lake behind his parent’s house, the exact bend of water where he had once proposed, where the surface caught the sky in a perfect, shallow curve. She had purple flowers in her hair and petals scattered about her toes, and she was laughing at something he had said. He leaned forward to catch her wrist, to steady her or close the space between them, but the boat rocked harshly. Her expression tightened as she recoiled, her arms slackening as the oars fell away.

“Whats wrong?” He touched her arm.

She looked away, petals cascading down into the lake. “You’re leaving, aren’t you.”

He pulled her closer, hands threading into her hair, behind her ears. But her eyes, when she looked back up at him, filled with tears. And he knew whom she was crying for.

~

Seipher checked him once a month, eyes sharp in the penlight.

“Nausea?”

“No.”

“Dreams?”

“Few.”

“Good. The leeching’s stabilizing.”

He looked past her to the tanks, to the slow ripple inside one, movement without source.

“How long?”

“Not long,” she said. “You were abundant, though.”

~

By the third month, the city had washed to greyscale. Streetlamps glowed without color, pale and ectoplasmic. He still traced the same streets, past taxi stands and drainage gullies, but reflections in puddles looked like photographs printed on cheap newsprint. He no longer dreamt of her. The memories, when they came, evoked no response.

When he returned to the lab, Seipher smiled knowingly.

“I can already tell. You’re ready!”

She drew his blood, removed the organism. Under the microscope it swelled, membrane iridescent, filaments moving like grass beneath unseen current. It was totally engorged, a gluttonous, writhing ball of living tissue. Tiny folds and ridges had formed along its membrane, brief and dissolving, as though memories had been pressed into its skin like fossils.

“You’ve done well,” she said.

He looked, and felt nothing.

She tugged the extractor free from the base of his neck. His skin sealed clean. He felt lighter, as though something static had been unplugged.

“You may notice a… stillness,” she said. “It’s natural. Some find it comforting, but if you don’t like it, just come back.”

He nodded, though the words meant little.

Outside, the wind drove fast and low, scraping clouds across the horizon. He walked past the facility until the land broke into a cliff. The sea below was a grey churn, bundles of water wringing themselves thin against black rock.

There was no grief. No shame. No anger at himself for the affair he had never denied. He remembered the woman in the hotel room, a face blurred now, body faceless too. He considered it all, dispassionate and detached. All of it had been leeched, swallowed. He let himself think of his wife, ex-wife, one more time, that final goodbye. He had been sitting on the steps of the driveway, watching her shove the last box into the trunk of her car. You’ll tell people it was complicated. You’ll tell yourself it was complicated. But the truth is I’m leaving because you’re a fucking coward.

He was empty. It was what he had paid for.

The gulls wheeled overhead, their cries dry and stripped of pitch. He tried to imagine what came next but nothing moved him. It was as if he was watching a film of himself from a distance, like a television that had been muted and left to run in the background. A gust lifted his coat, and he let the stones tumble away from underneath his boots. He wanted to throw one, to see its sleek, white body plummet down silently into the mist.

The rocks below blurred with the water, the sand giving the illusion of softness. It would be like a cradle, he thought, for all the little stones he sent pitching down into the Earth. He thought of her eyelashes and ankles. He thought of how she had clenched his collar so tight her skin split when she found out.

He felt himself swaying back and forth, slightly. The wind caught him, cupping him gently like a pebble in a palm. He leaned, or the wind leaned him; and for a moment he remembered the way she had shoved him, clumsy, trembling, tears still wet on her cheeks, her hands leaving red imprints on his chest.

His breath stuttered, an involuntary hiccup, but by then-

The sea continued to roil, indifferent, green long gone to grey. High on the cliff, a single printout freed itself from a rock crevice, edges limp with mist, the letters bleeding into blur.