My wife and me have been together for a couple of years now, and it has been a beautiful marriage. I can tell you with confidence that watching her on that surgery table with her skull open while they wired up her brain was the most traumatic experience of my life. Maybe the surgeons shouldn’t have let me in the room, but it was my wife, and I demanded to see what was happening to her even if I couldn’t understand.
It was just earlier that evening that we were at an Italian restaurant, I got a lasagna, and she got fettuccini alfredo with shrimp like she always does. We talked about our plans to have a child, what we might name them, what school we would send them to - the sort of plans that leak their way into fantasies. Occasionally she would have a drop of alfredo just below her lip that she would gingerly dab with a cloth before indulging in the life we were both looking ahead to. She sipped her glass of chardonnay, and looked away thoughtfully for a moment, and turned to me.
“Before we have a kid - before I get pregnant, I want to go sky diving”
“Sky diving? that sounds horrifying, and why before our kid?”
“I didn’t say we, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to, I want to go. Obviously, I can’t die if I’m a mother, I won’t be able to take risks like that anymore”
“How about you don’t take any risks at all?”
“Dave, I love you, but marrying you doesn’t mean that I can’t have fun”
“Fun? Fun is a night out at a club, and a movie”
“Fun is also jumping out of planes, Dave”
Truthfully, I couldn’t argue with her much, we both knew that her sense of adventure was one of the many reasons I married her in the first place. And I only assume my ultimate willingness to go along with these adventures was a reason she married me. We finished our meals, paid our tab, and walked out the door holding hands, a little tipsy, and very in love with each other. It was a wonderful evening, with a bright moon out, and only a couple of gray clouds. We had parked a bit further away but didn’t mind at all, there are few small pleasures more delectable than a walk through the city in a cool breeze while holding the hand of your beloved.
We were about a block away from our car when I saw a hand creep over Teresa’s shoulder. She stopped, and I stopped right there on the sidewalk. It occurred to me then that there wasn’t anyone around, we had never had any problems in this city, tonight was our unlucky night. I would call it fate, but sometimes I don’t even think a God could be quite cruel enough to allow this. It’s easy now to feel alone in the world.
“Turn around, and I’ll put a bullet in your fucking head,” the voice said with a convicted authority. I knew he meant it. Terri was the adventurer though, she was the brave one, the one wouldn’t take shit from anybody no matter how much bigger or stronger they were. She was the one who in high school spent a week in suspension because she hit another kid with a crowbar because that kid wouldn’t stop making fun of another classmate for being gay. She didn’t even know that classmate, she just knew that she had to stand up to bullies, it was like an instinct for her. And that instinct proved nearly fatal.
She started to turn around and didn’t even make it halfway before there was a gunshot, and she collapsed to the ground. blood pouring out of her head. I looked at her crumpled on the ground, trying to stifle any reaction. Trying desperately to stay alive, hoping that there might be time to save her.
Son of a bitch ran off after that, maybe he thought he had gotten in too deep, maybe he just wanted to shoot someone. I don’t know, but he was gone. Thankfully we were near a hospital, and the ambulance arrived after I called emergency services, she was in the hospital pretty quickly.
A surgeon spoke to me, and I barely remember it, asking questions that he knew the answer to. Of course, I was going to say yes to anything that might possibly increase the chances of Terri staying alive. A microchip in her brain, some wiring, it was all cherries to me. I just wanted to be able to hold my wife in my arms, to have that hope for the life we dreamed of together. Fuck, I wanted her to be able to go sky diving like she wanted.
It was a two-week recovery in the hospital before she was finally able to be discharged. When we were signing papers, the doctor gave us instructions about how her new life would be going forward.
“About a third of her brain is hard-wired now, and it’s connected to a network. This part of her brain will control her sleeping schedule, her reflexes, and maybe some interplay in her thoughts. You will need to physically push a button on the back of her head to wake her up, and one of you will need to press the button when she wants to go to sleep. I know this is difficult, but there are some positives”
“What positives?” I asked.
“Because her brain has access to the internet, she will be able to access information locally, and from around the world. she will, in essence, have man’s accumulated knowledge in her mind”
“You mean she’ll be able to google things even if her phone isn’t on her?”
“yes”
“That just sounds like a gimmick”
“It basically is”
“Look, I’m just happy she’s alive”
“We all are sir”
The first day back was pretty easy, we both took a week from work, so we could be together while she recovered. We woke up together at about eleven in the morning, or I should say, I woke up. I turned my wife on at about eleven in the morning. I thought about how convenient it would be to get a few extra hours of sleep in sometimes or wake her up early when I needed to, but then I cast that aside. Being a good husband in this situation meant helping Terri do exactly what she would want to do if she had full control of herself. She was a person, and she was my wife, just like she had been before all of this.
“Honey, let’s go for a walk today, I wonder what the weather is like”
“The weather today is seventy degrees and partly cloudy” my wife answered matter of factly. She put a hand to her lip, the natural part of her brain stuck in a juxtaposition of astonishment and embarrassment.
“well, that sounds perfect” I replied, smiling to show that nothing was out of the normal for me. That this life together was one I was perfectly fine with because I was. Because it was with her.
I was wrong. My wife being connected to the internet proved to be pretty useful. The capital of a state, what the traffic was going to be like, what movies were available on Netflix, it was all right there. I tried to be modest with it, but it was so much fun, and Terri had fun with it too. She would spark up little quizzes, and puzzles for me.
“Who Was the last King of Egypt?” she asked
“I have no idea, who?”
“Oh come on, guess”
“Cleopatra”
“You’re not even trying, that’s a she, a king is a he”
“I really have no idea”
“Faud II, he was deposed in 1953”
All was cherries. That evening while my wife sat in bed reading one of her novels, I was on the computer checking e-mails. And there was one that said in the subject line simply
“For Your Wife”
I looked at it for a moment, it didn’t tell me who the sender was, I figured it must be from the hospital. I didn’t think much of it, so I opened it. There was nothing, it was just blank. There was no pdf attached to it, no link to a website, just a blank page. I closed the e-mail in frustration and then tried to open up another one. I couldn’t. My computer had frozen entirely.
I clicked the buttons over and over again and slid the mouse around the table, the typical things that probably don’t work. The equivalent of hitting your television though from what I understand that actually did work sometimes.
I walked over to the bedroom to see how my wife was doing, and she wasn’t. She wasn’t doing, she was sitting absolutely still as if she was on pause, her eyes not so much staring at me, but just staring, blankly. She was on pause, she was, holy shit, she was buffering.
Then she started shouting
“Little dick problems? Lots of men have problems satisfying their women in the bedroom. But there’s something you can do, you have penis potential. Big penis potential. Our experts spent five years in the Columbian Los Llanos finding the same remedy the indigenous people have been using for years for massive dongs, and throbbing orgasms from all the women in the village. Unlock the ancient power of your penis”
I stared at her, I had no idea what to say. She started crying, Terri was back at least for the moment.
“Oh God, Dave, I’m so sorry”
I held her in my arms, I knew immediately that it was that e-mail. Terri’s mind was connected to our network, and that network gave her brain a virus. It wasn’t something I had at all considered a possibility when she was discharged from the hospital, but it was so obvious now.
We walked to the kitchen with plans of having glasses of water and talking through this, figuring out some kind of plan. It wasn’t that easy, it was immediately not that easy. As soon as we were in the kitchen her eyes locked onto the knives, and her arm went for one of the handles, she pulled out, and held it up in the air.
“Dave, I can’t stop this”
She started stabbing the knife in my direction while she cried, and tried to apologize, each sob punctuated with another attempt by her body, by that damned wiring, to end my life.
I dodged out of the way, but her instincts were too quick, there was no hesitation, and I barely had time to block my face as the knife stabbed into my forearm. It didn’t hurt until she pulled it forcefully out of me, blood poured like a geyser out of my arm, and I had just a moment to run out of the room.
I had time to take my shirt off and make a tourniquet around my arm. I had my back against the door, and she pounded it on it relentlessly.
“Dave, whatever you do, don’t open the door, please don’t open the door”
“Terri, I love you, I love you so much, so fucking much”
“I love you, Dave, I’m sorry, I should have just died that night”
“Please don’t say that, we can get through this, I promise we’ll get through this”
Then I felt it, she had stabbed the knife through the door and into my back, this one hurt, and it hurt really fucking badly. I quickly leaned forward, working entirely on adrenaline, and swung the door open to meet her while the knife was still stuck in the door. I knew what I had to do, I didn’t want to, believe me when I say I didn’t want to, but I had to, and I did.
I quickly pulled up her hair, the hair that I had touched, the scent that still managed to guarantee me the sweetest dreams every night, the hair that now was attached to a woman without control of herself, trying to kill me. I pulled her hair up and pressed the button on the back of her skull. Her off switch.
She folded to the ground. Her hand slipped away from the knife, and her arm landed with a thud on the tile.
I sat there down next to her, exhausted and in pain, and I put my hand on her back and glided it softly up and down her spine in the way that I know comforts her.
I was able to make it to the hospital that evening and got away with some stitches, and an oxycontin prescription that I hoped I wouldn’t need to use a lot of.
I’ve managed to get her into bed, and she’s lying there asleep, or off, whatever you want to call it. She looks so peaceful, but I don’t know what to do now.
I’ve told you my story, and I hope you can give me some advice.
Should I turn my wife on?