"Hungry Robots" by James Alyce
He wakes her gently, kneeling naked by the bedside table, a white sliver of moonlight dividing his face into tearful halves. Emily laughs. Coming so suddenly out of sleep, she can only perceive her husband's shivering mouth as comical. He's playing some kind of joke. Jack's always playing little practical jokes on her and the kids. Physical stuff, spooking them, snatching them up, or throwing his body around like a boy.
"I ate all your bad-day pills," he says, very softly. "I can't throw them back up."
"What?"
"I thought maybe I wanted to die," he tells her, "but I've changed my mind."
She sits up. Her husband's eyes are bloodshot, pupils overly-dilated in the dim light.
"I want to take it back," he says.
The urge to laugh returns. If this is one of his jokes, it's the most twisted yet—unforgivable either way.
"My pain pills?"
"Just three at first," he says. "To get a feel for it. Then the rest."
She says his name and then says it again. He stares up at her from the floor like a dog, glassy-eyed and waiting for the next command.
"I tried to throw up with my fingers. Then a spoon. Then I tried to feed a tube down, but I'm too high. I keep choking. I need you-" He's mid-sentence when she jams her index finger into the back of his throat. He topples over backward, cowering and coughing, but not vomiting. She follows him to the floor, smacking his face with her open palm, whispering, "What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?"
The dream-like weirdness of waking recedes all at once. The seafloor is exposed, all its trash and bones and this strange creature where her husband had once been.
She gets off of him, snatching her robe from where it hangs on the back of their bedroom door and slipping into it.
"You understand we can't go to the hospital," he says on his back.
She pulls him to his feet, and they walk together, arm in arm to the bathroom. He's hard to control, unsteady, but they are gentle with their footfalls. They say nothing. Careful not to wake the kids. Whatever he's done to himself cannot be that bad. He's an emergency room doctor. Triage. He must know if someone, even himself, is dying. If he's calm enough to keep quiet for the kids, it can't be that bad.
Arranged on the bathroom floor are a bucket from the garage, a length of clear plastic tubing, three bottles of saline solution, and her Medela Symphony brand breast-pump.
"Why do you have-"
"We need suction," he says.
"Jack, this is so fucked up."
He sits on the tub's edge, shivering now.
"All I need you to do is guide it down. The moment we get it going, everything will be ok." He crosses his legs, and his eyes waver, rolling around quickly before refocusing on her. He looks like he's about to sleep, looks somehow younger, like he did when Hallie was a baby, when it had been just the three of them. He'd be up and to her crib before she'd even start crying, soothing her wriggling, unnamable discomfort, slipping back into bed, waking before sun-up to drive to the hospital, burning himself down, sleep-deprived, but smiling all the time.
He smiles now.
"You don't look ok," she says and realizes that what she needs to do next is to leave him holding the length of tube he'd cut, the one he was hoping she'll feed down his esophagus and into the sac of his stomach, and call 9-1-1.
"We need an ambulance," she tells him. "I can't do this."
"You can. It's as simple as it gets," he says.
"Jack."
"You've cleaned the tub drain with a snake, right?"
She takes two steps forward and pukes into the open toilet. He laughs.
“My stomach is so strong from seeing them bleed out and seize and shit themselves and die,” he says. “I can't remember the last time I threw up. I'd really love to feel like that again."
She wipes her mouth. He tugs on the hem of her robe.
"We need to call,” she says.
"We need to hurry," he says. "Just try. If it doesn't work, you can call whoever you want." He pushes one end of the clear tubing into the breast pump's housing and looks up at her.
"It fits," he says and pulls the tube back out and hands her a bottle of saline.
"Listen," he says as if she weren't.
"I'm listening."
"When I say, just slowly push it down," he clasps the tube in the corner of his mouth like a cigar but continues to talk anyway. "You'll feel resistance when my throat closes, but push anyway. When I try to say stop but can't, you stop. Dump the saline down the tube. Then slip the tube into the machine like I just did, and I'll know when it's time to turn the pump on. Then you can go back to bed."
It occurs to her that this could be a dream. She read somewhere once that if you think you’re dreaming, you should try the light switches. If they don't do what you expect, cast light or darkness, you're probably dreaming. She reaches behind her and presses. The bathroom goes dark.
"What're you doing," he says, and for the first time, he sounds scared.
She thinks about walking out of the bathroom and sliding back into their warm, expensive bed, leaving him there in the dark. Maybe that bit about the lights was just bullshit, and she'd go back to sleep, and when she woke it would have all been the dream it seems to be. That, or he'd have accomplished what he half-heartedly set out to accomplish.
"Em?"
She turns the lights back on.
"I was checking if this was a dream," she tells him. "It isn't."
"Sorry," he says, "it isn't," and then he goes back to the breast pump.
He plugs it in and turns it on. A familiar whir. It reminds Emily of that strange leaky feeling, the pins and needles, as the machine pulled on her and the container filled with her pearly liquid.
"Hungry robot."
"What?"
"You called it a hungry robot," she says, pointing.
He presses the palm of his hand on the pump's tube and tests the suction.
"It's strong enough. It doesn't have to be that strong, but we'll really crank it. Just in case." He turns a dial, and the whir grows louder, suction increasing to 350mmhG. Then he kills the power.
She comes closer to him sitting on the tub's edge. He takes her hand and wraps it around the tube. The end is warm and roughed up from where he's been chewing.
"I'm going to gag," he tells her, "but don't rush. You're doing great already."
"Don't compliment me," she says.
Her heart is pounding, and all at once, she really wants to do this. Her stomach flutters hungrily, and when he tips his head back she doesn't hesitate. She places a hand lightly over his damp forehead and begins to guide the tube into him.
There is an exhilarating moment when the tube goes from merely being in Jack's mouth to actually traveling down the narrow passage of his esophagus. He stops gagging when that happens and instead takes deep, shuddering breaths. His nose wheezes desperately, but she doesn't let go of the tube. This is what he does, and she can do it too. Hurting someone for their own good is easier than she thought it might be.
His eyes are pouring tears, and he says something that sounds like stop. So, she stops even though there is another voice, one right behind her ear, telling her to keep going. Why? She doesn't know but can figure that out later.
With the tube coming out of him, she takes hold of the loose end. He mimes for her to lift it over his head, and she does so. Then she slowly pours the first bottle of saline solution down.
Jack is a gurgling baby, sounds coming from him like boiling water.
When the bottle is empty, he grabs the tube from her hand and tries inserting it into the hole on the pump, but his hands are shaking and the tube arcing out of him makes it difficult to move his head. She takes it back and easily readies the machine.
They eye each other and wait.
"What did you do?"
What do you mean? says his look.
"To make you want to die?" she asks. "Did you cheat on me and your children?"
Something like no, and an eye roll that may or may not be intentional. Why had she phrased it like that? About the kids?
"Why did you do this?"
Shrug.
"What if you'd been successful?" she asks him.
"Sorry," he says around the tube with a toddler-esque lisp.
"You have so much to live for," she tells him. "Don't you?"
Delay. Then a nod, yes.
"That was a long pause."
Shrug.
"Did you think about the kids?"
A nod, yes. He drops his eyes to the breast pump.
"You can be so selfish. Do you know that? Do you know I have always thought that about you? When I decided to marry you, it was the biggest thing I swept under the rug. And everyone told me." She waited for him to make a sound or gesture with his chin, but he just blinks at her. "And now you want to back out of it and, of course, you need my help. And here I am."
He slouches a bit. Looks at his feet. Then with his big toe, he reaches out and jabs the switch on the pump.
At first, nothing happens. The machine whirrs. Maybe it won't work, and he'll die. She'll have to take back every true thing she's said just so they aren't her last words to him.
"I need to call an ambulance," she says. "This was a stupid idea, and I let you talk me into it because you are good at talking me into things."
Then he groans. At first, the liquid that comes up is perfectly clear, but it grows opaque quickly as bile mixes with the saline solution. She can see a few crumbling, oval-shaped pills float bluely by and dump into the breast pump’s storage container. The liquid changes color again, greener and something else skitters along. Something metallic. It splashes into the pump's glass milk holder and clinks off the bottom. She looks at his hand.
"Jack, did you eat your wedding ring?"
He nods, yes.
Down the tube slides another strange object. Something made of paper. She doesn't ask this time but instead opens the top of the container and fishes it out from where it floats on the surface. It's soggy, but holding shape, and she's glad to have already emptied her own stomach. She unfurls the paper, which he'd rolled up before swallowing. It's a photograph that she knows very well. The first of her daughter: in utero, curled little worm body, bulbous alien skull.
"What else is going to come up?" she asks.
Eyes down. Bad dog. So much more, she knows.
Next is a clipped twist of hair. The lock from baby Hallie's first haircut nearly clogs the flow. She tugs it free by snagging the tiny red bow that cinches the now matted, blonde hair and adds it to her growing collection. Ring, photo, hair. From under the sink, she finds a small plastic tub meant for holding toiletries and repurposes it to stash the vomit soaked mementos of their life together.
"I'm disappointed you didn't feel you could talk to me," she says, fishing a pressed carnation from the container. "You gave me this. It wasn't yours to eat."
He says sorry again, but with a little less effort this time, just a wet, lispy grunt.
She places the tattered flower delicately into the bucket.
After another bottle of the saline solution goes down, there are concert tickets, the key to their first apartment, a letter he'd written her when they'd lived far apart and he'd drive to her on weekends and then leave before the sun came up to go back to his residency. Then these relics grow stranger, older: a guitar pick, the jewelry of dead grandparents, a handful of his own baby teeth. There are bits of glitter from some unidentifiable source. When he sees them, he smiles, but she doesn't ask why.
The toiletry basket is nearly full when she places the final item on top of the pile, a tye-dyed rabbit's foot he'd won for her at a county fair on perhaps their third or fourth date. She’d hated that prize, and he’d promised never to give her the severed limb of an animal as a gift again.
The last bottle of saline goes down his tube quickly, and they watch together as it comes back up nearly translucent. He takes hold of her hand, and, at his direction, she begins to gently pull the tube out of him.
When it's all over, the sun is nearly up. Jack puts on his robe, and they sit together in the big empty bathtub, looking out the window. Their yard is neatly green, and as the sun crests, it divides the square lawn into perfect green halves with its band of yellow light. This model of the house cost more, with its little flourishes like a wide window over the tub, and it suddenly seems like money well spent. As they watch, a single deer crosses their lawn and walks casually out into the cul-de-sac. They sigh.
Soon, the kids are pawing at the bathroom door like cats. Hallie comes in first draped in one of Jack's old t-shirts, little Aubrey trailing behind in a sodden diaper. They rub at their eyes and moan and ask what has happened. Hallie climbs into the tub and falls into her father's lap. Aubrey begins to poke at the basket of Jack's stomach contents.
Jack and Emily do not answer any of the girls' questions, and the girls forget very quickly that they had questions.
"Who wants waffles?" Jack asks.
The four of them shuffle downstairs, and Jack goes to the kitchen. It would've been easier to offer pancakes, but he pulls out the old waffle iron and sets about the task of churning batter and doling it carefully out into the castiron slots.
When he finally comes into the dining room with a plate of golden-brown waffles, no one is waiting for him. Instead, he can hear them giggling out in the living room, giggling and hushing one another and running back and forth with their little elfish footfalls.
He finds them gathered around the coffee table. The giant bowl, which is usually filled with decorative abstract objects, has been emptied. Now it holds the contents of his pumped stomach.
His wife and children have gathered the ragged, damp objects into a small, colorful shrine. It's as pleasant an arrangement as they could've possibly managed given the material they had to work with. When they see him enter the room, they turn and spread their arms to show him what they've done.
He sits with them before his shrine and sets the food down. Emily and Jack reach under the table and hold hands while the children eat, hardly breathing between bites. They can not tell which of them is holding harder, but it feels like, at any moment, all of the bones of their hands might just crack under the pleasurable weight.
"It’s so beautiful," Jack tells them.
They agree, smiling and, when the food is gone, they ask for more.
James Alyce is a writer, editor and teacher living and working in eastern Connecticut. This is his first published work of fiction.
