Machine Man - Max Barry [9]
THE PROSTHETIST walked in with a bunch of artificial legs under each arm, like a Hindu goddess. She dumped the legs onto my bed and ogled me through glasses. Her hair was brown and limp and dragged into a merciless ponytail. Her shirt was white and huge. “Hi! I hear you got a transfemoral.” Before I could respond, she lifted up my sheet. “Oh. They weren’t kidding. That is a clean stump.” She rolled the sheet up to my waist and put her elbows on the bed, so she could look at it from up close. “Some kind of machine accident, yes?”
“A clamp.”
“Well, you hit the jackpot. This is amazing.”
I stared at her. She wasn’t the first person to act like my amputation was just terrific. But she was the first I believed.
“If you’re planning to do the other leg, you should definitely use the same method. I’m serious.”
“What?”
“I’m joking.” She sat up but one of her hands was still right next to my stump. “It’s Charlie, right? I’ll be honest, Charlie. I love a transfemoral. I see a lot of transtibials—that’s below the knee—and, no offense to those people, but it’s like fitting shoes. There’s no art in it. This …” She patted my stump. I jumped. “This is a blank canvas. This gives us options. Want to see some legs?” She turned to rummage through her limbs. A section of hair drifted in front of her face and she jammed it behind her ear like she wanted to teach it a lesson. “Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got here.” She lifted something. A pole. The toe was rubber. Like the bottom half of a crutch. The top was a flesh-colored plastic bucket with cloth straps. “This is entry-level. I’m only showing you this so you know what’s out there. Hey. Hey.” My eyes jumped to her face. “I’m not putting you in this. This is horrible. This is the public option. Although, just FYI, if your employer wasn’t giving you basically the best medical care in the world, this is what you’d get.” She put the pole leg on the floor, where I couldn’t see it. “Let’s forget that. Wait. Did I introduce myself? I’m Lola Shanks.”
I knew that from the ID tag dangling from her billowing shirt. She was grimacing into the camera. If my ID looked like that, I would ask them to take another picture.
“Let me show you something else.” From the ankle down it resembled a real leg. A real leg that had died a few days earlier. The toes were flat and squared off. The calf was aluminum. The knee was a band of jointed metal. At the top was another bucket. “This you can put a shoe on. And I see from your face that you’re not in love with it, but imagine it under long pants. The fullness here? It gives you a more natural look. Once you get practiced, nobody will know the difference. Not until you take off your pants.” She grinned. She was pretty young. How much education did you need to become a prosthetist? Not much, apparently. “What do you think?”
“How does it work?”
“You’re looking at the socket. Ninety percent of your satisfaction with the prosthetic will come from how well you fit the socket.” I noticed her choice of words; not how well the socket fits you. “We wrap your limb in a stocking, pull it into the socket through this little hole at the bottom here, and tighten it with these straps. But that’s not ideal. What we’ll do once the swelling has subsided is take a mold of your leg and build a custom socket off that.”
“How does it walk?”
“Well, you swing it. It takes some practice.”
“You swing it?”
“Right. It’s hinged. Your foot will fly out in front of you for a while. Steep