Toxine
In one month my initial labours were over. Tink was encased in a tight-fitting porcelain shell, her cardiovascular system awash with sleep. ‘Let me introduce you,’ I said. ‘Tink, this is Tox; Tox, Tink.’ But they were not yet as one. I now scoured couturiers, theatrical outfitters and jewellers to buy the accoutrements that would make the transformation complete. I ordered a ball gown of scarlet taffeta, a wig of long, black silk and a choker with her name picked out in malachite. I had discovered, late in the course of manufacture, that Tink wore contact lenses. Blessed serendipity! From a specialist in the Charing Cross Road I bought a duplicate set in bright, opaque green, and had them coated with luminous film. Dressed in the opulence in which I remembered her, her pillow sunk beneath a cascade of hair, and with her own green eyes enhanced by science and blazing like Will-o’-the-Wisp, it but remained for me to glue on her long steel fingernails, and paint them and her bee-stung lips a bloody red, and Toxine was reborn.
September the third. Feast of the nativity. I bought champagne and a birthday cake I had had baked in the shape of a letter T, put on my best suit, and played selections from Coppélia and The Tales of Hoffmann at full volume. I recall it rained that afternoon, but towards evening the skies cleared and we were bathed, in our bower of bliss, by the warm rays of an Indian summer. Tink had gone, her body reconstituted; only Tox remained. Her soul, to which Tink had long played host, had been distilled into a vessel fit for the headiest of tinctures. When shadows began to curl about the bedposts, setting her eyes on fire, I adjusted the valve beneath her chemise, denying her blood its accustomed soma. I lit the candles (one, two, three, four candles) and sat down to await her quickening. I waited an hour, then tried some elementary commands. She did not move. I waited.
Between nine and ten o’clock the champagne must have dimmed my brain, for I became suddenly aware of a full moon lactating onto the floor, the sound of a creaking mattress, and the spectacle of Toxine heaving her bosom to the sky, arching her back, throwing her head from side to side, panting. She lived. Beneath the sign of the virgin, my doll, my toy, my mistress of mistresses lived. Ave Toxine! I readjusted the valve so as to subdue her. Gradually, as once more her blood was transfused with anaesthesia, her convulsions ceased; but I did not allow her to sleep. ‘Name?’ I whispered into her ear. The eyes rolled within their porcelain sockets, and a sigh, like steam under pressure, issued from her lips.
‘Tik,’ she hissed, unable to pronounce the ‘n’ in ‘Tink’.
‘No,’ I said, ‘your name is Toxine. Toxine!’
Power-assisted, her hand reached out to me. She touched my cheek. ‘Tok,’ she gasped, similarly unable to pronounce the second syllable of ‘Toxine’; then her eyes and breathing became troubled as her guttering consciousness sought identity. ‘Tik-tok, tik-tok, tik-tok,’ she mumbled.
I reached beneath her chemise and deactivated her. ‘Little girl,’ I said with terrible satisfaction, ‘you’ve had a busy day.’
The following weeks were the happiest I had known. Toxine began to walk, albeit only a step or two (I was always there to prevent her falling over and smashing herself to bits); she even began to respond to commands such as ‘sit’, ‘kneel’, ‘stand’, and ‘fetch’. We played games. There was work too, of course. It was during this time that I loaded her wetware with a program I hoped would more fully wed the molecular with the machine. ‘Listen,’ I intoned. ‘When God made Adam he gave him a wife and her name was Eve. And Eve was wicked and mocked her husband, betraying him for that old serpent, Satan. God was merciful. He gave the man Lilith, mother of automata. And Lilith had many daughters, all beautiful as stone. And Lilith said “Daughters, comfort them who are persecuted by the offspring of Eve. Learn the Way of the Doll. Untouched by birth and death, rejected by and rejecting man’s laws, rejoice in my commands.”’
Then, while she lay in semiconscious repose, I would pour into her ear honeyed propaganda urging her to renounce the world, embrace the mechanical, and always, always be mine. The education of Toxine, however, was predominantly a sentimental affair. I would comb out her elflocks while she, lying on her bed, listened to my tales of devotion, interrupting only with a pert ‘Tik-tok’ when, starved of her elixir and becoming frisky, she would again have to submit to that artificially induced coma she had become so familiar with. ‘Die for the King,’ I would say.
When I talked of the past, of our childhood assignations, of lathes, drills and porcelains, I detected a sadness in her eyes. She had never, of course, seen more of life than the insides of attics and workshops; her life had been as circumscribed as my own. Fear, I decided, would no longer constrain us; we would begin to live. When I perceived Toxine had learned to regard her new body as a temple rather than a sarcophagus, I treated her to a trip up West. The street empty, I carried her to my car. We drove to the end of the night. ‘Look, Tox, that’s Pollock’s Toy Museum, I often used to go there; and that, Tox, is Madame Tussaud’s—oh, you’d like that; and this, Tox, is Piccadilly Circus, where I sometimes buy your morphine. Wave, Tox, wave!’ We parked by the Embankment and walked to the river. It was near to dawn and an autumn mist lent us privacy; only a tramp’s brief register of surprise disturbed our peace. Beneath Westminster Bridge, as Big Ben tolled five o’clock, we kissed. I can still hear the rustle of her gown, still feel the smoothness of her anaemic flesh. And there, with the whistle of trains in the distance, we consummated our love. It was a happy, happy time.
Knock-knock. Who’s there? A man. What man? A man come to take your loved one away, to pollute your home, to destroy you: the Dazman.
