The Nesting Doll

He couldn’t stomach anything beautiful anymore. He was alone, and nothing is beautiful alone. He could only tolerate beauty if it reminded him of her. In his opinion, there were only three beautiful things left in this soggy existence. The two brilliant red objects perched on his desk, and the machine sitting in the chair opposite. The rest of the apartment looked bleak to the man, so he shuffled over to the colours that beckoned at his desk. As he got closer, he found comfort in the familiarity of the objects. He knew these objects intimately. He knew what their weight felt like as gravity pushed them down into his hands. He knew each texture, each ridge, each corner. He liked how dependable they were. Every day he would wake up to be greeted by his very brown apartment. It had brown cracked plaster walls. A brown table in sat the centre of the room, kept company only by a solitary light. A brown bed sulked on the floor dressed in brown linen sheets, whilst a brown desk looked longingly out the window. Everything was brown. Even the air in the place felt brown. It was thick, ripe from years of the man's breath. Murky brown seemed to consume everything in the room with its regret. Everything except for the little red sanctuary that consisted of two objects: A vivid red nesting doll and a crimson picture frame.

The objects sat proudly on the left-hand corner of the man's desk. He nestled close to his red menagerie. On this particular morning, the doll seemed especially vibrant to him. He picked it up to inspect. She was heavy in his hands just like the memory that she signified. He rolled her around in his hands, causing his thoughts to roll over in his mind. The man was not often blessed with the gift of clarity but today it arose through the twisted thoughts that ailed him. Through the haze, one memory waded to the front. And he remembered… HER. Not the version of her he has been trying so desperately to preserve, but the real her. It wasn’t her appearance that the man recognized but the wildness that seemed to proliferate from within her. It was intoxicating. It expanded through every crevasse of his mind setting him alight with calm peaceful excitement. He felt fulfilled, safe, and comfortable. He felt at home. But then as quickly as she arrived, she retreated. She journeyed back to the perimeter of his mind. Only daring to venture closer when she needed to remind him of her presence to incentivize him to continue protecting her.

But she was gone again. A distant silhouette on the horizon of his mind. All that was left was the distorted image of the woman he had loved for all those years. He knew full well that who she is to him now, is not who she was when she was alive. That’s why he kept her red trinkets. It grounded his memories. It gave his imagination something to tether to. But today his thoughts were poisoned with anxiety. He didn’t feel comforted by the doll the same way he normally did. Today she was taunting him with her existence, with her perfection. His grip tightened around her neck, turning his knuckles white with effort. The doll was unaware of him. Her looping black eyes always fostered a semi-smile, whilst her lips hung soft like a loose hammock on her lower face. Red curls cascaded out of the scarf that elegantly held her face in its silky clutches. She oozed kindness and tranquillity, which seemed to suffocate the man. He choked on it. His fingers rippled around her as he brought her closer to his face. Exhausted from his relentless grip the doll negotiated her way out of his grasp. She seemed to fall in slow motion inching towards the desk. She slammed down ogains the wood and rolled helplessly towards her desk companion.

The dolls companion was a six-by-six wooden picture frame that had been painted a deep crimson. The photo nuzzled inside was of him and his wife. There she was in her signature heart shape locket standing poised next to what felt like a stranger to the man. He could barely recognize his younger self in this picture. He had a smile smeared across his face, that was a perfect replica of the smile on her face. On his sweet Tabitha’s face. This picture was taken the day she gave him that nesting doll. She made the doll by hand, spending hours obsessing over every detail, needing it to be perfect. This doll was going to be the first Christmas decoration they owned as a couple. She told him that they should “start their marriage as they intend to finish it, with love and heaps of effort”. He loved their life together, she brought him out of his shell and he grounded her. He couldn’t help but think back on this time fondly. The corner of his lips wavered upwards for just a second and his heart blossomed in his chest. Muscle memory began to take over, forcing him to feel the remanence of love that still festered in his old heart.

He clenched his fists in discomfort. His chest burned. The sensation started as a fiery passion and then quickly bittered with remorse. He felt his fingernails carving out little crescent-shaped valleys in the palm of his hand. His skin suffocating itself. He became aware of the tightness in his chest and how his lungs hung like flaccid discarded trash bags in his wiry chest. He parted his lips only slightly causing air to rush in, yearning to fill the empty space in his chest. The man inflated. His eyes brightened, his posture straightened and his hand fell loose at his side. His fingers swayed, luxuriating in their own stillness. Any resemblance of the man standing at the desk a mere 5 seconds ago, had vanished.

Normally this is how the man appeared, a slightly weathered-looking man that radiated decency, but today the mans’ apprehension weighed on him. He gazed over at the beautiful metallic creature that sat in the brown chair in front of him. She sat with her head hanging loosely down, whilst her hands rested gently in her lap. She looked so lifeless. He couldn’t let this become her permanent position, sitting there looking as hollow as he felt. The man hadn’t updated her operating system since last year and if he didn’t complete the update soon he could lose her.

He begged himself to remember that if he did lose her, that loss is natural, expected even. People die, that’s a part of life, he argued with himself. But people don’t die now. After the climate disaster of 2060, the earth made it its mission to obliterate any sign of humanity by throwing tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, and lava at us. This wiped away a good majority of the human race. This pushed the scientist, Roy Stevenson, to find a cure to death. Whilst mapping out intricate signalling pathways in the brain, Roy found a way to digitally store the memories of any individual. With the advancement of robots, it wasn’t long before you could buy a bot and then implant the minds of deceased loved ones. For the few left this was their only solace from the loss and loneliness that closed in around them.

The man was no exception. He had lost everything; his home, his life and his dignity. He moved from what remained of the countryside to the brown city, full of plain people, where he yearned for his wife. He lived to make her happy. When that smile simmered across her face all his other problems seemed to melt, everything was so insignificant compared to her. When memory scanning became commercial, the man took his wife immediately. He wanted to make sure she would be safe. He wanted to propitiate her, and he did. He made his robot, T, and vowed to keep her safe, stored away within T’s memory.

“I made a vow”, the man whispered to himself.

He had concluded, that updating the system was the only way to keep her safe. So, he nervously clicked update. An ominous black loading bar appeared on the screen. Numerical values flashed next to the bar as it calculated the load time. “72 hours!?”, the man yelped. What was he to do with his days now?

On an average morning, he wakes up at 8 AM. He would roll over and ogle the empty place beside him in the bed. In this position, he would become aware of his body for the first time that day. He would feel the aches beginning to ignite in his body. He would then call upon his muscles, asking them to obey him. They did as commanded and flung him out of bed and into the kitchen. By 8:15 AM the kettle would whistle as he ate his cereal and blankly looked into the distance. 8:30 AM was coffee time at his desk, where he would schedule his morning. Most days, were the same, spent repairing and coding his machines. At 9 AM he would power T up for the day. After routine system checks, he would make her a big breakfast. Freshly sliced bread topped with bacon and eggs. T would ask for orange juice, as per usual, and he would prepare it. He would then empty the metal container that acted as her stomach (so food start to rot) before reading to T on the couch at 10 AM.

Others might find reading with T very tedious, but the man relished in every second of it. When she would forget what he had read, he would patiently summarize and carry on. When she would ask for breakfast, he would calmly explain they had already eaten breakfast, but that it was lunch time soon. At noon, he would begin preparing their food. T would sit idly by and ask him at least 12 times if he had added her favourite pepper. The man would coo back at her, promising he wouldn’t make a dish without it. They would then sit down and eat together. After lunch, he would again empty her stomach and prepare for activity time from 1-5 PM. The man knew that T wouldn’t remember what they did each day, but he knew that his Tabitha would hate to do the same repetitive routine, so he changed it up. One day it would be crafts or singing, another would be baking. Either way, they did the activity together and so he could be by her side when she glitched. It’s what he did for Tabitha every day of those last five years, and now it’s what he does for T.

At this point, the man didn’t know how to do anything else. He’s was a carer. He cared for Tabitha every day, even when her Alzheimer's ate away at what made her beautiful. Even when she hit him, or yell at him, he cared for her. Memory scanning wasn’t made available to the public till a few years after Tabitha was diagnosed with the degenerative disease, so by the time the man got Tabitha’s memory scanned she was already a bit eroded. The man didn’t mind, as long as he had some version of Tabitha. And when Tabitha was gone, he had T. Now, he wakes up each morning to take care of T, the same way he took care of Tabitha, with relentless patience and endless love. When she glitches he’s there. When she needs emptying or fixing or coding, he will be there. And until death finds him, he will continue to be there because without her the world is brown and she will forever be a brilliant red.