Part 1

“I’ll slice you. I swear I’ll cut.”

“Please don’t. Don’t cut,” pleaded Lila. Harlan pushed the blade closer to her face while his other arm wrapped around her neck from behind. They stood in the darkness under the trees. Snow crunched under their feet. Harlan’s sparse beard rustled against her parka, and the crackling resembled stones clacking underwater. Her jacket swished. Steam from Harlan’s mouth froze in her nylon hair. For a broken second, the breath hid Lila’s face from Harlan’s sight.

“Don’t you scream or I’ll cut.”

“I won’t. I won’t. Please let me go.” The words crept slowly out of her throat. The cold seeped into Harlan. His eyes widened. As his arm tightened around her neck, he felt her soft body against him. Her hands gripped his forearm.

He loved her artificial perfection, her absence of human substance, her manufactured soul. He imagined her birth, the plastic body moving down a conveyor belt, in and out of whirring machines and steaming moulds. Amid the smell of machine oil and paint thinners, her arms and legs attached, her head attached, and her mind attached with hollow plop-plop sounds, the rough edges of the head, arms, and body coming together with swift mechanical movements.

* * *

A winter ago, perhaps – Harlan wasn’t quite clear on when – he glanced at her for the first time. She sat in an empty classroom, reading under the white neon light. A long coat, grey and fluffy, covered her from neck to her ankles – the same coat and the same bag with its odd drawn sigils she always dragged around. Reading a book with an orange cover, she had one finger on her radiant cheek and her black hair falling into her face. She appeared not to breathe.

As he passed the open door, his head swivelled and he noticed her. Then his head turned back toward its destination. Then his head stopped his body and tried to name what it had just seen. His body blocked the way unexpectedly, and people stumbled over him. The irritated glances, backpacks, and thick jackets scraped against him before disappearing in the sallow, steamy air. His lungs pumped, and his heart heaved in his chest, but he didn’t dare to turn back and stick his head into the room with that near-artificial form inside. He didn’t dare to aggravate this apparition, but the face stayed with him from that day on. She appeared in his dreams. During the days, she lived in the living room of his brain. She sat in his centre surrounded by grey mass, and the fissures and crevices of his mind. Her haunting face, its big silken cheeks, and her elegant head hung inside his mind. He gleaned her name in passing from a classmate – Lila.

* * *

Sitting alone in the university office, he stared into the December darkness beyond the window. His phone rang. It rang again. The phone rang and Harlan picked up the black apparatus.

“Hello.”

“Hi. Is Lila there?” the woman’s voice asked. His chest contracted. He swallowed and his voice bloomed slowly like rust flowers at the bottom of a water barrel in the summer garden.

“I… I – no. No, I don’t… there-is-no-Lila,” he spat out the words. “You got the wrong number.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, then,” the voice said, and a long beep of the hang-up tone surfaced in Harlan’s ear. How did the voice know that he knew that he was aware of Lila’s existence? The complete impossibility of the fact stunned him in the quiet lonely office. He stared into the December darkness beyond the window, catching his own splintering reflection. Harlan grew distant and uncertain of the world outside the door of the office. Was the hallway still out there? Did the lobby and the polished elevator door still exist? The phone rang again. And again, a new woman’s voice announced itself into Harlan’s head.