So my father fixed me and kept fixing me and at some point I was fixed enough for him, perhaps because I had grown larger, perhaps because he was bored. And I did not have to die every day but was put to work making things die. And because I knew what it was to die, and because I knew how it was to come back, I tried to make it pleasant, to make it count. Things should be fixed and pinned and certain, like the numbers the Company found so important, the 10 and the 0, the 3 and the 7. They should not be the opposite of that. Thus, my father, I realized later, was so frightened of the Company that he fixed me out of fear that he was not doing right by the Company and had no control over that distant entity or even the numbers but only over me.

Or it could be that he liked to hurt me and there was no one to stop him.

Listen:

Once there was a boy-man who had a magical garden. He hid it behind the laboratory, at first nothing more than a large storage closet that no one else used, that was where his father made him sleep after his mother died. The boy-man who we will call Charlie, and leave off the X for now, took all of his mistakes that he could hide there. In part, to avoid the dying all over again. In part, because Charlie did believe he could save them. Just not in the laboratory, not at the wall of globes, and not at the holding ponds (which did not fix anything but simply let the unfixed escape to pollute the world).

Charlie remade his mistakes into good things and found his bones less cracked the more he restored in the magical garden and the less he tried to fix in the laboratory. Everyone was happy in that place. Charlie made them happy, and even, perhaps, taught some of them to smile who would not, ordinarily, be wont to smile. Charlie was glad when they weren’t sad, because if they were sad, he would have to make them glad.

There grew in that sacred space a tiny empire of wonders, of creatures spliced together, each to save the other, and things that hobbled but still yearned for life not snuffed. There were plants that formed miniature cathedrals for the row of faces Charlie could not reattach to torsos and benches of tough vegetal life glowing red, green, purple upon which lay the torsos Charlie kept alive with their brains embedded within them. There grew up in this weed-filled garden of all that was possible, birds stuck to the end of leaves and flapping wings in midair. There thrived lizards emerging snake-tongue-like from the midst of poppy blooms, an eviscerated green to the arterial red of the flowers.