Confessions of a Mech Made of Flesh

CONFESSIONS OF A MECH MADE OF FLESH

by KJ Sabourin

(Content Warnings: gender dysphoria, needles, mild body horror)

The premise is simple. I am asking the doctor for the vial of something to make me whole. He (or she) (or they) ask me a set of questions:

“What are your treatment goals?” 

“Are you aware of the long-term risks of hormone based therapy?” 

“Do you have a support system capable of managing your transition?”

My answers do not matter. The test begins the second I walk through the door. 

To pass, I act sad, but not too sad. I cannot give the doctor a reason to decide I lack the autonomy to consent. I agree with the doctor on every point and tailor myself to conform to their expectation: girl has wants-to-become-boy disease. They have been taught not to break delusions for fear of confusing patients, and so they applaud me for my courage and recommend ways to better become a man. My semisolid form takes the shape of their diagnostic tool. 

I leave with the prescription for injectable testosterone. The gender fluid makes the movement between two extremes less grating on my body. At times, the version of girl I acquired at my conception grates away at my ability to exist in the sight of others. At others, I’m reminded of how puppeteering the boy inside of me will always inflect my girlhood. For now, I use the fluid to suspend myself between the two, rippling between girl and boy with every touch to my surface. 

The drugs are second to the machine. It’s a mech I’ve made for myself, fashioned after the likes of Gundam and Voltron without the need to save the world. A mech is a machine moved by the body, puppeteered by the pilot inside. It requires the synchrony of metal and flesh. I crafted mine in my own image, perverted by the nature of reflection. I can only ever see myself in a state of change. Using the gender fluid will (I hope) soothe the pain that comes with piloting my machine. I was born into a world that doesn’t know how to process things outside of binaries. When filled with the gender fluid, my cockpit will accept this body for every deficiency it will ever have.

I made the machine to look humanoid, with four metal limbs, two eyes, a nose, two ears, one mouth. It’s three times my height and curls in on itself to fit in my parents’ garage. To it, I must look like a newborn swallow stranded on the ground, its wings broken and twisted from a failed flight. Each of its hands are the size of my body, shaped to cradle me to its chest so that I may climb inside.

My machine does not have a heart. Where that muscle would be lies the piloting chamber, where I sleep and read and write while the machine sleeps in stasis. For now, it’s tethered to the ceiling, suspended by its power cords. Its head hangs limp. How lovely are its ball joints, not burdened by the laws of ligaments and tissues. They rotate in degrees mine cannot. Though unfinished, my machine amounts to more than I ever was. 

Tonight, I continue to build it out of scrap metal and pieces of myself I cannot live without: one kidney, a vibrator, a septum hoop made from implant grade titanium, twelve rubber hair ties, and my own hands. They will be immortalized in the shape of it, glory and all. Perhaps when it's finished, I will travel the world unburdened. I’ll look out on the universe without fear of it seeing me in return.

•••

i am the puppet
the master
the strings

the animal
        sinew comes from

most puppets want to become a real boy
mine wants to become me

•••

While I wait for my machine to charge, I rewrite the pamphlets I stole from the doctor’s office. If transness is an affliction, or a mental disorder, then the onset comes quickly. You wake up one day unable to get out of bed. You begin to see yourself in the reflection of androids. Beware of the sudden desire to take in more and more as you compile yourself. You will acquire a unique affection for the collage.

Signs include drastic haircuts, weird sex, and an insatiable craving for lighter fluid. You may become addicted to the affirmations of strangers. The doctors do not have a cure. I add one final amendment in my own handwriting: luckily for us, the identifying symptom is the desire to never be healed.

Do you think this will work? I ask my machine. The lights behind its eyes blink a dull green, fully charged but not yet awake. I have long since given up on being seen as anything but a girl. Some things even surgery can’t change. But with you built around me, no one will question if five-two is the right height for a man. No one will even see a man at all. 

My machine can’t speak. It cannot reply. I am its mouth piece, and without me in it, it's only half of a whole. I feel its thoughts churning beneath my skin. If I press my face firmly to its metal, I can try and process the thrum of its mechanisms and their meanings. Without me, the machine is cursed to think in binary absolutes. It thinks in infinities of knowledge trees, leading it down paths that lead directly here. I programmed it myself so if I forget it lacks a brain of its own, it’ll run the program titled Reassurance in the Face of, Frankly, Absurd Odds. The thing is, I want an answer I don’t expect. I want a reading different from the one I programmed. I want my machine to create something new out of all of the parts of myself I sacrificed in the hopes of becoming something better. 

The only definite answer comes in a binary reading, printed on a punch card: “I H-O-P-E.” I run the program again and wait for a different response, but it never comes.

•••

i am a thing of flesh and blood
and other organic matter

you are gears and wires
mechanics i can only dream of

•••

Instructions for injecting testosterone: 

Clean the outer middle third of your thigh with an alcohol swab and let it dry. Squeeze the injection site. Needle must be inserted at a ninety degree angle in a single, firm motion. Remove your hand from your skin as you inject the medication. You may experience burning or pressure: this is normal. Remove the needle and dispose of any sharps.

This ignores the approximately thirty-five minutes I spent cleaning my workspace and the four times I washed my hands. It also ignores the process for prepping the syringe, which I did incorrectly. Hence the air bubbles. Hence the pain. 

A more accurate set of instructions comes from my mother the next day. She says something like: Stop bitching and relax your leg. Don’t move the needle while it’s inside. You didn’t let the alcohol dry, that’s why it burned. It shouldn’t burn, if it burns you’re doing it wrong. I stopped listening after that. Why does it have to be a needle, I asked. Why can’t I just drink it, or bathe in it, or absorb it through the skin. Like frogs, I asked, why can’t I just be a frog. She shook her head and told me that I should focus on changing my gender before I change species. I’m the one who wanted this so badly. My mother loves her daughter. She doesn’t like me. 

Filling the cockpit with gender fluid is much easier. The machine accepts testosterone much more willingly than my flesh body. I watch as the fluid drains from my syringe, spirals through the tubes, and siphons into the machine. It hums to life and begins to whir. The rhythm of churning cogs charms me out of my anxious state. I step closer, feeling the potential of it in every tremor below my feet.

My machine lowers its hand. I crawl up its massive limbs like boughs of a tree and nestle into its chest. Its hydraulics hiss as the door closes, enclosing me in the heart chamber. I cradle myself in the pilot’s chair and succumb to the darkness. It isn’t long before the fluid begins to drain into the chamber. It rushes around me, splashing at my feet. My vision strains to see through the dark, so instead, I feel for the fluid as it creeps up my legs, my chest, my neck. It submerges my face. I breathe it in.

The fluid inside the machine begins to resonate with the fluid inside of me. We are one and the same. Its arms are my arms. My body is finally my own. I look down at the ground from the machine’s point of view and see where I once stood from the perspective I’ve always longed for. My edges expand further into the machine, its gears grinding on my thoughts. Underneath my metal fingertips, what once weighed too much for me to bear now lifts without any effort at all. 

This comes with a wave of nausea, rippling up through my flesh core. All at once my metal hands ache, coiling as they reject the seizure of muscles and wire alike. Human sensations incompatible with my machine return to me: I hunger, I sweat, I urge to scream. I haven’t stopped my monthly bleeding.

It’s with this realization that I’m shunted from the machine perspective and into my body’s, the fluid now draining back into its tubes. As I slump out of my chair and onto the metal floor, I heave up what’s left, wasted potential dripping between the grates. My head spins. I’m soaking wet. The machine groans as it settles back to rest. I’ve exhausted myself attempting to become what I’m not. I wish I was made, never born at all.

Maybe this would be easier if I weren’t so human, I say to my machine. Maybe you could understand me like I understand you.

My mother was right. I am not a frog. I cannot absorb things through my skin and absolve myself of the specificities of this given form. But I still dream otherwise. 

The machine doesn’t move, and neither do I.

•••

when my flesh yields too easily to yours
i picture myself a plant instead    perhaps
like lichen or algae or moss
i’ll grown onto you in time
into the grooves of your very metal
until we are indistinguishable except
from under an electron microscope
or a mother’s glare

when the work gets too hard
and my body hurts to sleep       when
my hands begin to shake      i imagine
myself an amoeba so that i could reproduce
asexually
into two halves of the same whole

sadly     amoebas are too small for the joys
of wiping grease from your cheek
or the haptics    of a piece of yourself
clicking into place

•••

My injection site remains uninfected. The rest of me is less lucky. I put myself back together with carbon fiber in the hopes that it’ll hold better than my own skin. I water all of my plants before taking a shower with water that won’t heat up. I cut my hair. 

During the day I work in someone else’s laboratory, watching samples spin in a centrifuge. It’ll run until something separates out from the masses, until a once emulsified sample breaks down to its essential parts. I spin in my office chair as if the same will happen to me. If only I could take myself apart, I’d recycle all of my pieces for the machine. It would benefit greatly from my personality and suffer for my bad knees. 

I watch the samples and wonder, what would my parts be? A heart, a brain—things I can build for my machine—a wonky knee, two left feet. Could I distill the part of me that’s a bad dancer and leave it with the biohazard waste? Would my mother recognize my brain as me, or just as well, my own blood, separate from my plasma? If I were better with a needle, I’d find the thread of DNA woven into my girlhood and pick it out strand by strand. But I never learned to sew, so instead I run experiments and build mechs. Made of things other than machinery, I can never reduce myself down to the ones and zeros, can never find that piece of rotten code. 

In the lab, we strip things down in the hopes that someone else will make something new. That some chemical will become a drug that becomes a cure. Once upon a time, someone synthesized the very thing that lets me transcend my assigned form. In six months to a year, my voice will deepen and my fat redistribute from my hips. I’ll undergo metamorphosis, like a butterfly or a pubescent teen. If I can’t erase the parts of me I never chose to have, I’ll grow into the form of the thing I’ve created. 

•••

This body of mine regenerates against my will. When I sever my breasts from my chest to better fit into my machine’s cockpit, my flesh retains their existence in the form of scar tissue that raises against my ribs.

Ignore a mole and it just grows back. 

The machine will always need fixing. Left alone, its gears will rust and become obsolete. I must oil each seam and whet its edges as they dull against mine. This is a process of love, a continuity that will never cease. I will take my medicine for the rest of my life if it means I can live in its form. 

The promise of a mech is a lover: “Climb inside of me and we can become one.” 

Perhaps, over time, my hands will heal into its shape. If testosterone does anything, maybe it’ll make me pliable enough to become the glue holding my machine together. I’ll evolve into something inseparable from its parts. For now, I leave dents in the machine in the hope it will remember the body that came before. Some things ought not to be fixed.