The package arrived safely, or as safely it could have, carried by the delivery man with my father tagging along right behind him. It was sealed, clean, sterile. Almost bigger than me, I noticed, like they were delivering a fridge to a happy new tenant, but instead of thank-yous they received only silence. My father started tearing it apart before I could touch it, saying I wouldn’t be able to do it, not with those arms.

“That’s why I bought her this assistant,” he said to the delivery man, humbled like an actor accepting an award. “So she’ll have someone to help her when I’m not around.”

Under layers of tape and cardboard was a box made of banana fiber with a logo and a message: everyone deserves a new start. Tracing the glossy words, I found myself wishing they were gone, the delivery man and his cart, my father and his generous tip, and the machine I’d never asked for.

The instructions promised an intelligent and helpful companion with the capacity to learn the most varied skills, speak several languages, cook, entertain, and clean. Trained in empathy, claimed one of the lines.

“You know, when I was buying this little beauty, there was a woman who commissioned an assistant for her daughter.” My father watched me from the door, but I kept looking inside the casket-like box. “A girl your age. Used to be a violinist. So pretty, so talented. Broke my heart to see someone like her needing something like this.” He removed the assistant from the box, holding it in front of me as he spoke. “And this woman tells me her husband passed away last year, and her daughter had hers customized to look like him, so he can keep watching over her.”

The assistant’s limp hand fell in front of me. Unlike the violinist girl, I had skipped the customization process and chosen the company’s only free skin. The design made him look like a life-sized art mannequin, but instead of a body my assistant was little more than a torso, cut right above the waist joint. The head rested behind it, neat and disembodied, waiting to be attached.

“Iara? Are you listening to me?”

“No.” I had to find the charger. The assistant might not have been my first choice, but it was all I had to deal with this body, with this life. The top of my list had been a pair of gloves initially developed for patients with Parkinson’s, but my father had gotten ahead of himself and bought a more extravagant gift for his only daughter, if you could call me that. “Are you done with whatever you were saying?”

“That’s why your mother told me not to buy you anything after what you did to us.” He looked over my shoulder as I failed to plug the charger into the socket three times, and I could almost see him smirking. “She said, if I keep spoiling you like this, you won’t ever …”

I pointed at the main door. The scar going from my wrist to the middle of my forearm seemed thicker, crossing over older, paler scars. It’s your fault, it accused him, and I saw something flash in his eyes. Not comprehension, not guilt, something. You did this to me. My father left before I could elaborate, and I was alone with his gift, which to me felt like an extension of him.

Every day, my phone chimes at eleven, activated not by me, but by my assistant. He says I have to sleep a minimum of six hours per night, but ideally seven or eight. When I told him that wouldn’t happen, that I couldn’t, wouldn’t sleep, he found me an online psychiatrist, then bought the medication she prescribed for me. At night, he hands me two pills, amitriptyline for the pain and the insomnia and the depression, fluvoxamine for the anxiety and the nightmares. I get up, sometimes feeling like I have been run over by a truck, sometimes feeling that I can get some work done, at last.

“Good morning, Iara,” he then says.

Torso, as I nicknamed him from the first impression I had of him, has restricted mobility, but when I connect him to the kitchen, he prepares a simple breakfast. A handful of cashew nuts, an apple, a cup of tea.

There is nothing Torso won’t plan for me.

“Morning,” I usually answer, disconnecting him from whichever plug I’ve left him in.

Torso places his left hand over mine as I eat. His articulated fingers preserve the illusion of a wooden mannequin, but his skin is slick, soft, warm. He guides my trembling hand so I can slice the apple without cutting myself. After that, he usually asks what I feel like eating for lunch. The food delivery platform tells him there are plenty of options in our area, and he informs me of all the ones he believes I’ll like:

“What about the Korean restaurant downtown?” There is a pause when I attach him to my shoulders, strapped like a backpack. The first time I saw how we looked in the mirror, his arms over my arms, I was horrified by the sight of this mangled half-man embracing me like a lover. I’m used to it now. “Or a classic, perhaps? Rice, black beans, salad, grilled tilapia, and a soda.”

“I don’t drink soda.”

But Torso is relentless. Like all assistants, he was programmed to take care of someone, namely me, and the company prepared him for my specific needs: damaged fine motor skills. I didn’t need anything but my old dexterity, but my father disagreed. Together with the medical statement of my disability was a list of diagnoses and symptoms, presented by my family like they always did, as personal offenses that needed fixing. So Torso is not only my art assistant, but my watchdog, paramedic, suicide hotline, and caretaker.

After breakfast, we move to the studio, and by studio I mean the only room of my apartment, the one that should have been my bedroom, but became my workspace after I moved to the living room. Everything is sunny in there, as light as it is comfortable and beautiful, so unlike the rest, so unlike me. There are two open wire shelves covering the walls, and some floating shelves I painted by hand. My pottery wheel rests near a wide window, and underneath it there is a bucket for water and a comfortable stool.

Ferns hang from each side of the window, a fiddle-leaf fig grows by the table, a series of small cacti and succulents nestled in colorful pots sprinkle the stands with life. Storage boxes keep glazing bowls, canisters, newspapers, mason stains, bats, underglazes, and pieces in different stages of readiness are displayed on the shelves. I have no passion for dinnerware, teapots, vases, and jugs, but there are dozens of them here, waiting to be shaped, glazed and wrapped in brown paper.

And, of course, the kiln.

Some days, Torso reminds me that the plates inside of it “have definitely cooled by now.” Other days, he suggests that we clean the studio together, which means he starts by gathering every scrap of clay, but only after I wear a mask. But invariably we return to the kiln, and I feel like I’m the one that’s bone-dry and frail.

“Do we have anything else to do?” I ask him, wiping the table with a sponge. His beige fingers are tangled to mine, following my movements, and I clean them too. “For the week?”

“No, not really,” Torso says in a small voice, and I wondered if he was programmed to act coy. “Only whatever you want to do.”

“You know what I want.” I turn around and smile at him.

Or smirk, just like my father.

My hands are stained white, like I have been painting the entire house to look like a hospital, or worse, a church. I’m too focused to remember when to breathe. In, says Torso in my ear, his cheek next to my cheek, out. He knows I’m in pain. In, he repeats, out.

Porcelain clay feels like a living thing. Most ceramists find it a challenging material, but I can almost hear it sing to me. It’s time for more water, now less, the clay guides me, and my hands move on their own, gently shaping and trimming it until it’s done. The result is a dead swan, lying on its back, wings sprawled, neck curling gently. In, I say with Torso, two fingers under the creature as I add details to the gaping wound baring the insides of its belly. Instead of white organs, a pair of arms comes out of it, then two legs. Women’s legs.

“I thought we were going for Leda and the swan, not Perrault’s Red Riding Hood,” says Torso, but there’s no sarcasm in his voice.

“I am.”

More statues wait inside the kiln. One is the grotesque opposite of my current piece: Leda, her fingers contorted in pain and horror, her legs forced open, and a swan tearing her apart. His beak pierces her abdomen, plunges into her womb, his wings stretched out. Another variation has Leda straddling the animal, her hands wrapped around his long neck.

“Should we glaze it?”

The delicate feathers I’m carving are just like I wanted them to be, but something in the result bothers me. Maybe it’s Leda, whose face never seems to be the same, whose body must be distorted, like in a spiritual possession. Maybe it’s the swan.

“No,” I continue, the jolts of pain pulling the muscles of my arms, tiring but bearable. “Not yet.”

After a few hours, I leave the sculpture inside the kiln. The others wait on the shelves. I look at them with a certain disgust I don’t direct toward teaware. I remove Torso from behind me, the straps that keep him tied to my back looking loose and lifeless on the table. Torso uses his palms to straighten himself, leaning against the wall. He has no eyes, but he watches me; no mouth, but he speaks; somehow, he seems to always know what is happening inside of me.

“Those are extraordinary, Iara,” says Torso. “All of them.”

“You were programmed to say that.” Every night, I tell myself that I can’t get attached to Torso. I can’t believe his lies. Not lies—lines. He was built to encourage me. His apparent kindness is a feature.

“I was also programmed to understand art history, criticism, and the market your talent belongs to.” Torso turns to the window, to the darkening sky outside, and closes the curtains. “If I thought you weren’t competent, I would tell you to keep pursuing pottery as a hobby.”

“Maybe you should,” I reply, tossing my apron over the chair. “This,” I think of touching one of the statues, but I remember the tremors, and I bring my hand back, “is a hobby.” I turn to a cup. “This is work. I know I’m good at working. The rest is pointless.”

If he were a person, Torso would have stiffened, his restlessness showing all over his body, clenching his jaw, whitening his knuckles. But we’ve been together for months, enough for me to know when I’ve said something that displeases him. Should he be displeased? I wonder. Should he have the right to dislike what I say? I should have bought the Parkinson’s gloves, instead.

“If you sold the sculptures, if you at least exhibited them, you could make a living,” Torso tells me, like he had to gather all his confidence to persuade me. “Allow me to create and manage your social media accounts.”

“Again, I …”

Torso drags himself to the chair with an odd sort of elegance. “As your assistant, I must tell you that the work you’re, quote, good at doing, is not paying most of your bills. Your father is.”

My neck stiffens. My jaw clenches. My knuckles go white.

“It used to.” I look at my trembling hands. I wish I could smash his ridiculous, featureless head against the wall, but I would just end up hurting myself. I look at the crooked scars on my wrists, marveling at my own strength. How did I do it? With my best potter’s knife, yes, but how? I remember everything as a feverish haze. My surprise at feeling no pain. How slippery the knife was. My inhuman precision. And the shock I felt right after, not out of fear of dying or love of living, but because of my unfinished sculptures. I’m never going to see how my other ideas will look. I’m never going to feel the softness of clay again. “Before this, I never asked my father for anything. Except …”

The kiln.

Torso cocks his head. He was not built to deal with feelings like mine, I guess, but here we are.

Here we fucking are.

“You don’t know how my life used to be.”

I want to tell him that no matter how much time passes, I’ll still feel stupid. What did I expect? One arm first, then the other, trembling yet determined. Blood everywhere. The present ache reminds me of the burning sensation of the cuts, molten lead charring the pathways of my veins. I try to remember how it was, but I only see fragments: unlocking my phone with my elbow, pressuring the wounds to stop the blood, panic. The ceiling of a car. The feeling of not being there at all, but the thought, the one remaining thought keeping me awake and alive. I won’t ever sculpt again.

My father carried me in his arms to the hospital, and I remember a distant feeling of surprise. His wide eyes, the drops of cold sweat, and his voice: keep going, Iara, love, you’re going to make it. But you don’t love me, I wanted to tell him, you don’t love anyone but yourself. My blood staining his white shirt. Don’t leave me, he cried, and the whole time I was in the hospital, I pretended he did care. He fought the doctors when they said I should be taken to a psychiatric hospital, that I should be put on suicide watch. I’ll take care of her, he said.

It all ended when he took me back home, kissed my forehead, and said my mother was coming to see me soon. You didn’t forget our promise, right? I bought you that ceramic oven, you can’t …. There was a pause, and he raised his eyebrows slightly, almost imperceptibly. The fantasy of love was gone. I looked at my bandaged wrists. I clung to the despair I felt at the idea of never sculpting again. No, I said. I didn’t forget. My father sighed with relief. That’s my girl, he bent over to kiss my face again, but this time I turned away.

I won’t talk about what you did anymore, but I’ll know, I whispered near his ear, I’ll always know. Nothing you do will take that from me.

“Iara, come here,” Torso calls me from the chair. “You need it.”

My steps falter, and I find myself between his arms. I drop to my knees. Torso presses my face against his chest. His articulated arms feel hot and living, and I hug him back.

Destruction can be soothing. Pieces of broken pottery cover the floor of the kitchen, fired clay over terracotta tiles, and the sight makes me smile. I caress the last statue with a trembling hand, wondering where to aim it. My small apartment has a wonderfully spacious kitchen, one of the reasons I decided to stay here, because I’d be able to cook and waste less money.

If only I knew.

At least my hands are good enough to break things.

I take a last look at the statue, memorizing its details, the feathers of the swan, the hands bursting its belly. Too bad; I liked this one. I watch the statue shatter against the wall, white pieces flying everywhere. The high-pitched sound of the impact brings me peace. The cycle is complete. For a moment, I stay still, admiring the debris. A beak here, a leg there. The faces are gone, but some of the shards still remind me of the original form.

Torso isn’t here to stop me. Since he can’t stand the fact that I always break my personal work, I only do it when his battery has run out. I don’t want him to lecture me. I know he will, tomorrow, when he wakes up charged and sees the pieces missing from the shelves, but this moment belongs to me. I close my eyes. One of the shards scratched the bridge of my left foot, drawing two red drops. A wild side of me wants to step on the broken sculptures and feel the fragments under my soles, poking, piercing, to stain the porcelain with a little blood.

My toe touches a chip of broken pottery, gently forcing it against the floor. It would be so easy to feel it break my skin, but I remember that if I need help, there’s only one person I can call. If you ever feel the urge to self-harm, Torso has told me many times, you can tell me, and if I assess that you need medical help, I can call your doctors. I kick the shard away. Like always, my father poisons everything in my life, just like he poisoned my future, my present, my past.

Some of the shelves are empty, free from the white sculptures that cluttered them during the past week. Torso doesn’t mention what I did, but every day he looks at the kitchen, at the dust I wasn’t able to properly clean, and turns away. He says I’m having a Greek phase, and I humor him by making a series of amphorae in the style of red-figure pottery, almost like an apology. He seemed delighted as we painted lively mythological scenes, but I tired of them after a while. At least they’ll be fun to break.

“I would be profoundly grateful if you didn’t destroy this one too,” he says as he removes my newest piece from the kiln, lifting it like it’s a delicate work of art found at an archaeological site.

“By gratitude you mean that you will feel relieved, or is emotional blackmail part of your job?” I glance at the statue he’s holding, the last of my Greek pieces. Philomela, naked, disheveled, on her knees, her mouth open, her right hand holding out her mutilated tongue, with two birds on each shoulder, one a nightingale, the other a swallow. “Besides, why are you complaining? I kept the fish plate.”

“The fish plate is hardly different from your usual work,” says Torso, still holding Philomela. “But very unlike your art.”

“That’s a good idea,” I say. “We could do a series of Hellenistic fish plates to sell. One could have squids and octopuses, the other—”

“Iara.”

“Yes?”

“You break everything we create,” says Torso. “Not a single one remains. The fish plate doesn’t count.”

Red streams of clay run through my fingers as I wash my hands in the bucket. “And?”

“And we spent too much time and energy making them.” Torso leaves the statue there on the table, turning around to see me. He registers everything around us, and I imagine the surface under his beige skin to be a compound eye with thousands of sensors. “What is the sense of destroying what you just created?”

“It’s fun.”

“But what’s the purpose? If you simply enjoy pottery, then you can just keep making cups and pots and other useful things. Why make a statue?” Torso pushes the wall, and the wheeled chair he’s sitting on rolls toward me. “If you were displeased with the result, we could discuss it. I’d explain my arguments, and try to convince you otherwise. We could even remake them.”

“I liked the result.”

“So did I.”

“And we’ll like many more, but there’s no use keeping them here, cluttering the house,” I say. “What do you think this is, a museum of amateur sculptures?”

“You are not an amateur.”

“Torso, define ‘amateur’.”

Torso freezes for a moment, then, begrudgingly, recites:

“Amateur, noun, person who takes part in an activity for pleasure, not as a profession.”

I smile. “Thank you.”

“Amateur, noun,” he continues, his believably human voice quoting with a vitriol I’d never thought possible to hear in a robot. “A person who is incompetent or inept at a particular activity. You’re the first definition, but not the second.”

“Proof?”

Despite my coldness, I can’t ignore Torso. Time has allowed me to understand the subtle shifts in his supposed emotions without needing visual cues. He’s upset with me. He’s been increasingly more upset as I keep turning him off to break more figurines. He resents my silence. I don’t know what to make of this.

“The proof is all around us. It’s in the complexity of your details, some of them impossibly difficult.” Torso gestures widely as he speaks, his arms engulfing the room. “It’s in the skill behind your craft, your capability of taming the material and turning them into whatever you want it to be. You shaped porcelain to look as malleable and thin as paper. You make every kind of clay bend to your will.”

“Stop it.”

Torso grabs my cheeks, the joints of his fingers brushing against my skin. He considers me for a moment. I wonder what he thinks of the blood pumping inside my veins, my rapid heartbeat pulsating as it does, my expanding chest pressing against the apron, then shrinking again.

“You can replicate any style, but you have chosen to develop your own. There is realism in your sculptures, there is stylization, there is beauty, there is horror. You—”

“Stop it!”

No one has ever talked to me like this. Not my mother, who never sees anything but the idea of a daughter she can present to others. Not my father, who only knows how to consume, who complimented me only in what relates to him: how I am his daughter, how I can please him, how I can follow in his footsteps. Iara was just a name he gave to this extension of himself, an extra limb.

I can’t tell Torso how I scare people away. I’ve had classmates who sometimes resembled friends, clients who liked small talk, boyfriends for short periods of time.

Only the statues like me.

“Stop it,” I say again, but what I mean is: understand that those images live inside me, that they haunt me, that I need to do something with them before I go mad. I need to have something others can’t steal.

“Do you wish to shut me down?”

I shake my head. This time, I’m the one who brings him closer, hugging him and hiding between his arms as his fingers run through my hair like he knows a part of me I never spoke about. Who made you, I want to ask, that knew everything I would need?

“Let’s agree to disagree,” Torso whispers into my ear. “Just this time.”

I feel him inside of me.

For a moment, I’m an insect trapped inside a Venus flytrap, paralyzed, numbed, prepared to die. For a moment, that’s what I’ve been that my entire life. My body was made to believe any touch will be a fatherly touch, that is, an invasion, and that I will always be nothing but colonized land. A sigh escapes my lips; the bed squeaks; the sheets crumple under my feet.

I don’t want it to end.

Torso takes me by the neck, placing me back on the pillow. I remember asking him to stay in my bedroom tonight. Torso had agreed. He’d handed me my medication, made sure I would have water on the nightstand, turned off the lights. I’m afraid of sleeping alone, I’d told him, and he’d looked at me, this creature without a past or dreams. As long as you need.

I don’t remember how it started. All I know is that I woke from my sleep or exhaustion and he hugged me from behind, tentatively at first, then more confidently when I leaned in. It took me a while to open my eyes. Fingers felt my scalp, violently even, plunging into the thick mass of hair scattered around me. The other hand was flat on my stomach, lifting my T-shirt slowly, up to my collarbone.

Can Torso want anything at all?

Please, I want to tell him, do want. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I want you to want. I turn around and we’re facing each other. I trace his neck, his shoulders, his chest against my naked chest. What’s wrong with you? I want to say. He looks at me like he can read my mind.

Torso presses me even closer, painfully so, and one of his hands drops to my legs.

Inside me, we’re one and the same.

The two of us stare at the blinking screen of my phone, vibrating with new messages. During most of my childhood, I feared my father had supernatural abilities because he always seemed to know when I was lying, all to keep me under his thumb. You OK? says the first message. I miss you, says the next. Your mother misses you. A picture of the family dog. Call us. Then, the tone changes to Why are you ignoring me? and Don’t I do everything for you? and You better remember your promise, because I WILL.

“Were you programmed to deal with anything like this?” I ask Torso, scrolling up and down the chat. “Because I sure wasn’t.”

“No.” Of course he wasn’t. “There are no guidelines for cases like yours.”

I have to laugh. “Yeah, I figured.”

“But I have been researching about …” Torso stops himself, remembering I asked him not to say the words out loud. “What your father did to you. It’s a very serious accusation, Iara.”

“It’s not an accusation. I bartered away my right to accuse the moment I accepted the kiln.” I set the phone aside. “I wish he would just die, and I would never have to remind myself that I sold the only thing I have left.”

Torso pulls me toward him. His arms are wrapped around me, constricting my bones, my fears, my desire to split open the scars in my wrists. Torso embraces me from behind, and I guess—I know—this is a glitch.

It’s not about me.

“What’s done is done.” Gently, I remove his arms and the straps keeping him in place. Torso sits on the chair by my side. “It’s not like I can change my mind. He is paying my rent.”

“We could fix that by turning your art into something profitable.”

“My sculptures are for me.” I glance my newest piece. A girl rests on a bed of leaves and apples, covering her chest with two stumps instead of hands. One of her chopped off hands lies on the grass, the other between her legs. Are we in a Brothers Grimm phase now? Torso had asked me before we bisque fired it. I just shrugged: it was my favorite as a child. “For my pleasure. My tastes. My needs.”

“Art was created to express oneself to others,” replied Torso.

“I create it to express myself to me.”

His fingers brushed mine like he wanted to soften the blow.

“You are talented, Iara, but hidden art does not exist. The purpose of art is the connection from one person to the other, or to thousands,” says Torso, his hand going up my arm in a way that reminds me of my father. He points at the girl without hands. “Art is the moment I see it. Allow others to see it too.”

“I do it because I need to.” I’m looking at his hand, fighting the wish to slap him away. It’s Torso. He wouldn’t hurt me, just like he wouldn’t love me. His affection is a programming mistake; the fear is a projection of mine. “It calms me down.”

“I know.”

“Art kept me alive when I tried to kill myself.” I show him my arm, and Torso leans down to kiss the scars, or whatever it is when he touches the lower part of his smooth surface to my wrist. “When I had nowhere else to run but my father’s arms, it was the only thing that made me believe there was any reason to withstand everything that I did.”

“I know,” repeats Torso, and I want to tell him that he doesn’t. He’ll never be a child overpowered by an adult, he’ll never live with the ultimate betrayal, which is to be hurt and unloved by your own parents, he will never grow up fearing to get pregnant with a baby who would be both a child and a sibling. His reactions are all semblances of emotions; he has no family to be betrayed by; his body feels no pain, and any damage can be fixed later, unlike my arms.

“If you know, then you understand that the purpose of my art is to be mine, and mine alone. It’s the last thing I have.”

“You can have more.”

“I don’t want more.”

“Then it’s no art,” says Torso.

“Then it’s no art,” I repeat.

It hurts to hear what I’ve always known. What I do isn’t art, it’s a channeling of emotions, it’s catharsis, it’s quietness, it’s expression, it’s joy, it’s purpose, it’s dialogue. It’s art, but it isn’t art.

“But it could be,” continues Torso, encircling me with his kind arms. “Sharing your art could improve your self-esteem. You would be able to discuss your experiences beyond the boundaries imposed by your father.”

He massages my wrist scars with his thumb.

“Iara, you live in fear. Of him, of your family, of faceless—” Torso points at his featureless surface, eliciting a smile from me, “—critics that might say the things your mother told you. That you’re a liar, a—”

“I know.”

“You’re afraid of selling your sculptures like you sold the truth.”

“I don’t want to be told how pathetic I am for thinking I could,” I murmur. “For thinking what I do has any worth. What if others think I’m cheating by using you?”

“It would be extremely ignorant and ill-intended to say so,” Torso assures me, soothing. “I’m an assistive device, just like a wheelchair is a mobility aid. I don’t create. The only thing I do is keep your hands steady.”

Torso guides my hand to unlock my phone, like I’m nothing more than a doll. I feel like a child is supposed to feel, like other children must have surely felt like, leaning into the comfort and protection of somebody’s arms. He tells me he has everything figured out, and I believe him when he shows me all the things he researched for me: grants, awards, scholarships, exhibition venues.

“We could start by creating a few accounts …. Actually, I already created some,” says Torso. “We could record videos of your process, or even of you breaking the sculptures to generate engagement.”

“Torso, I don’t want to generate engagement.”

“The goal of any artist should be public recognition and financial happiness.”

“Financial happiness? Are you listening to yourself?” I take the phone from his hand and scroll down the profiles he created for me. They have my photo and my name, and some have first posts waiting to be published. “Torso, I didn’t say you could do this!”

“You don’t have to look at them—”

“I DIDN’T SAY YOU COULD!” I push him away, jumping to my feet. A moment of dizziness makes the room swirl around me, and I realize Torso is on the floor, together with my cracked—but otherwise functional—cellphone.

“Iara,” calls Torso. “Help me up.”

“No.” I take a deep breath, and look at him from above. I kick the phone away from his hand, and it gently slides toward the shelves. “You’re my father’s creature through and through.”

“I did it for you.”

I look at his pathetic figure crawling on the floor, trying to reach the chair, and I inhale again.

“I forbid you to do anything like this ever again,” I tell him. “If you want to talk art, we’ll talk art. But I set the rules. And this …” I pick up the phone and show him one of the profiles I’m about to delete. “… is not it. Maybe you should check if there’s an update that makes you stop trying to make me a fucking influencer.”

“I will check.”

“Good.” I’m standing above him, one foot on each side of his body. “I’m not saying I don’t want to live comfortably. But my priorities and the priorities of your makers are clearly different.”

“Understood,” says Torso. “Finances aside, what I want the most is for you to see how admired you will be. How loved.” When he sees my disdain, he adds: “And I don’t say this because of my built-in encouragement system.”

“Can you even think beyond that system? Not despite, but without it?”

“I don’t know.”

I snort. “I imagined.”

“I could turn it off,” suggests Torso, “and then we would know.”

“Can you?”

He seems to think for a few seconds. “The worst that could happen is that I might have to be reset.”

“Then don’t—”

“I want to.” Torso touches my calf, fingertips brushing my skin. “I want us both to be sure.”

I kneel by his side. My heart beats painfully inside my chest and I feel like throwing up. He’s the only friend I have. The only one to believe in me. The only love I have experienced in a long, long time. But the fear that none of it is real is always present, just like the repulsion I feel at the thought that I’m using him like I have been used before, when he can’t want or choose.

“Do it, then.”

Torso shuts down.

I close my eyes. I wait for a few seconds, then a minute, two, three, four, five. I wait for what feels like my entire life. Torso remains on the floor, lifeless, speechless, a broken mannequin in an old clothing store. I want to hug him and apologize, say that any love is love enough, even if scripted, even if fake. I don’t. Just like he did what he thought was best for me, I wait, thinking I know what’s best for him.

“Torso?” My voice falters. Please answer, please answer. “Are you there?”

A long moment of silence follows.

If I have to, I’ll go to the store. I’ll call my father and bow my head, I’ll ask him for help. I’ll …

His body goes through a soft spasm, like he has been electrified, and he opens and closes his fists. I think of touching him, but I wait until he propels his body up and we face each other.

“Torso?”

Torso leans all his weight on his left hand, and the other reaches out to touch my face. “I maintain that you are truly exceptional,” he starts, “and if that means anything to you, assisting you has transformed me in ways I was not prepared to be transformed. Perhaps it is not only humans who are fundamentally changed by art. Perhaps I can change, too.”

I open my mouth to speak, then I laugh, squeezing the hand that’s touching me.

“I hope you’re changed enough to consider that your plans are flawed.”

“Don’t get your hopes up too high,” answers Torso, and he seems surprised when I hug him, causing both of us to fall back on the floor. “I’m no longer induced to please you. Nothing has changed for me.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.” Torso brings my head to his chest, and turns to see the sculpture, still on the desk. “Will you consider not breaking that one for now? Or not breaking it at all?”

The girl, still lying on a bed of apples, still amputated, still haunted, stares at the ceiling, unscathed. Torso brushes my hair with his fingers, and I close my eyes.

“Perhaps,” I say. “For now.”

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