Mary, Mother of Androids

Can I talk to you about Mary?

When I was very young, Christmas eve was my favourite. My mother’s a devout Catholic. I wasn’t a very religious child, but this idea of an immaculate conception, that some otherworldly entity could plant some seed, some gruesome little Christ inside the body of a woman… well, I could get on board with that. With the horror of it. Like the Chestburster from Alien, I always thought. 

This isn’t about that Mary. This is about Mary, my wife. Lovely Mary. We met when I was still fresh out of university, the denseness of a mechatronics degree still weighing down the part of me that remembered how to have fun. Mary was more maternal than I ever was. Right away, too. Lesbian relationships are a bit like that: straight off the deep end. A year and we were moved in, talking of things like getting married and starting a family. My Mary was an artist. 

I said I wasn’t religious. I suppose that isn’t entirely true. When my Mary painted or sang or brought me to the beach so that we could kiss and everything would taste a bit of holy salt, I was devoted. We always joked that lesbian love was the religious kind. Faith and worship, the full-bodied and soul experience. Within our first three years we had moved houses so that we were down by the coast, and most nights I had the divine pleasure of laying with my head beside hers, so that the inky blackness looked as though it would swallow me up.

My Mary, my Mary. Into the inky blackness of her hair were the words “I love you”, swallowed beneath a tongue. Hands against flesh, parting flesh. I lived for the swell of her thighs moulded against my palms. I lived for the whisper of hair on her body catching against my tooth. My Mary, swallowed whole by me. Some kind of holy fruit. Some kind of divine human thing.

The night before the monster comes, we are intimate. It has been seven years of knowing Mary. I cling to her like a child, my chin beneath her breast. My palms flat on her belly, I think of some distant future where our child is growing inside of her, when instead, the monster lurks in her guts. Alien. Chestburster. I am not thinking about Jesus, but instead of Mary, my Mary the mother, my Mary a woman possessed.

In the night the monster comes to us, but it is only Mary that it eats. Mary that it breathes in. Mary that it hunts. It is Mary’s flesh that the monster finds, claws into, burrows under. The monster is nestled sweetly beneath her skin. In the shattered morning light I feel it moving, squirming, and I weep. I weep for Mary’s skin. If only Mary could be sliced open, the monster removed like some eager parasite.

We are holding hands when the word “terminal” is first uttered, and my mind rolls keenly to airports. A mistake, I think, some misplaced document between this doctor’s reptilian lips. In the first few months she becomes sickly faster than I am prepared for. My Mary, reclined in a hospital bed, the luscious hills of her body folding onto her bones, eyes becoming muddled like flotsam. They expect me to know what to do. Me, the scientist. But I am not a biologist. It is only Mary’s body I know.

Nobody talks of lesbian grief, how it differs from the normal feminine kind. How it consumes, its totality. It feels like: Her, then nothing, nothing, nothing.

They ask you to be brave, like a woman is brave. They tell you to cry, like a woman cries. How do you express that you are not a woman? You are not a woman, if not for this woman you love. The sex of woman, of female, is nonexistent: the lesbian identity immutable. How do I cry like a woman when I am only a woman for loving her?

How do I cry like a woman when I am less woman, more machine?

I take to reading. The doctors tell me they are doing everything they can, but when I walk by the cafeteria in the afternoon, see two oncologists on the way to their break laughing together, fury becomes me. Have you ever heard that before? “Rage becomes her.” I understand it, because I go home and I read. I read about robots. And my hands stray to my elbows.

My workshop becomes a sacred space. When I was a child, my father had a workshop where we made bots and taught them to fight. When you grow up you learn to fight in a different way, but words, but skin, but lips and teeth never do the trick. My workshop becomes the sacred space. I become the workshop. And I read for Mary, my Mary, wasting away in a gown.

I fear death like a black dog, though more than that I fear losing her. After months of reading, and months devoted to my sacred space, a visitor brings me lilies. I wait until they leave, eager to call my friend Jodie so that I do not have to weep. I look at the flowers, and I find myself suddenly, irrationally furious with the person who bought them. Couldn’t they have thought of less impersonal platitudes? Hadn’t it crossed their mind not to bring me something that would die? Flowers are the cheapest kind of condolence. Hospital gift store sympathy. I hurl them in the trash where their petals shatter gracelessly atop last night’s meal-for-one leftovers.

People send me messages while I hide in my sacred space. Kind words. I have learned to hate them. I prefer the noise of machines, or the tender noise of Mary filling up my brain. The words these people send me suck and cling. I am a woman for my suffering. The female form a ship, our thoughts expressed in emotion expressed back at us in language, barnacles affixing to the skin. These ‘girl power’ platitudes do not apply. Machines are not nearly so patronising. 

I tell Jodie, first, about my idea. She asks me what it would be like, loving something that is not human.

I tell her I love my cat just fine. Jodie says, loving your cat is one thing. You want to put the brain of your dying wife inside of a computer.

An android, I answer, would be ideal. Not the brain. Just the mind. My Mary. Sweet Mary, her mind. A woman immaterial is not a woman, but my Mary in any incarnation is rich as holy salt. I think of her now, lying in that hospital bed, tubes fed down her throat and into the shrivelled concave of her belly. My Mary will never be a mother. Not in this body. Not with this flesh, sewn finely together like mine to hold the horrible human things inside of her.

Love, says Jodie, is confined to animals. I do not love my television.

I would love my television if my television was Mary.

What is a human? Asks Jodie. Where are these invisible lines? What is it that makes us human?

Is it our bodies? asks Jodie.

I say, yes, it is our bodies that make us human.

Then I am reminded that I am able bodied. I think of those missing voice, missing limbs. Those confined to wheelchairs, those lacking mobility, those paralysed. How much of our bodies make us human?

If you took away the limbs?

If you took away the eyes?

If you took away the skin?

I say, no, I don’t believe that it is our bodies that make us human.

Is it our ability to feel emotion? Asks Jodie.

I say, yes, it our emotions that make us human.

What about the mentally ill? Asks Jodie. What about psychopaths? What about empathy disorders? Are these people not human?

You just called them people, I tell her, so no, I guess they’re human.

I don’t believe that it is our emotions that make us human.

Is it our ability to communicate? Mary, the human can do that. Mary, the dying cannot. Mary, the android can communicate. Even if she lost her voice, if she were a series of beeps, of the gentle machine sounds that fill my sacred space. I would love her there. I would love her as if she were some holy technology.

The doctors argue with me. I spend months convincing men in coats the same colour as mine. I spend months convincing artists. I spend months convincing Mary.

They say it is wrong. The evangelists, they especially tell me that I am something of an abomination, that I am not human, but machine. Frankenstein’s robot. My Mary who loves art, who science cannot save. How can they not allow me to save her with computers? How can they tell me that immortality is unnatural, when the computers in their palms turn cold overnight?

In the night I occupy her bones, just as the creature did that grew in the cavern of her insides. I carry her only in shadow and I lay her down on the cold metal slab of my sacred space. Nobody finds us here, two human women exiting their selves. Nobody finds us here. It is just us. Just Mary. Just waiting for the rotting and the decaying to stop.

I wait for the computer to tell me that she is brain dead. I look for the monster in its convoluted data, but it is tricky. The monster is an organic thing. It grows, it shrinks, it dies. We would talk about it over the phone sometimes, when we were apart. Her robot voice talked of dying, and reminded me of speaking into the fan as a child. 

When tears slide down my face I think of myself as more woman than ever, a lady of sorrows, my Mary’s electric currents streaking my wet face in lines of bright white. Finally. Finally, at the end of the world, I cry.

I weep my love for her and it tastes of religion, of salvation and of art. It is science that saves my Mary, but her body, decomposing on the grass outside, like meat, like flesh, like flowers. They tell me that this is an act of God.

In some distant future I no longer hear the machine-made music, the wail of sirens, grief through hoarse metal throats. I no longer feel the flowers and the holy salt and the whir of her silence emptying out of my split skin. In some distant future I have won, even when God exposes my bones to the bleached sky and heavens. They do not bury computers. In some distant future there is my sacred space, my place for us. And she becomes a mother. Birth to a creature unholy.

In some distant future she lurks in the body of a machine. My Mary, mother of androids.