A Memoir By Nate Methot

I stare at the faces as they stare straight ahead. Examine them, take them in, an assembly of clones in row after row set out just for them. They’re just kids; they’ve never looked more like children, dressed up by their parents, silent and still, wide-eyed and utterly bewildered. Blindsided. No one prepared them for this.

I’ve known them for years, but still, I can’t recognize faces. I’m sure they don’t recognize mine. I’m not who they knew, and they know it. We’ve never been here before; these faces were born just today.

I’ve already seen what they see. I fell asleep on one planet and woke up on another, rocketed through space without consent. Its atmosphere synthetic, my heart, lungs, and spine weren’t prepared. I designed a robot to survive me: encoded my memories without their emotions, tested its systems, then let my human body wither and expire.

Dragging themselves from the life-giving sun, the Vermont of late spring, our guests funneled into a stagnant, aged chamber, full of gloom. Energetic youth, brimming with activity and optimism, invincible, glorious summer set before them. All of life stopped upon entry.

Uneasy, uncertain, unsure, they forced their way forward and gave hugs to the robot, all charged up and programmed to receive. Despite each embrace, an inscrutable chasm divided: flesh, blood, and feelings on one side, steel, circuits, and automation on the other.

In the face of all the beginnings and possibilities in the opaque space between adolescence and adulthood, of all of their plans for the future, they’d been forced to acknowledge an impossible ending. Confirmation lay in a box for that purpose. We had to show them, and they had to see—had to look, but couldn’t. Not really. Not fully. 

I watch lifeless mannequins stare blankly at memories. They’re hopelessly lost, drifting away and returning, stuck between logic and nothing, as if on the hunt for a clue. He matches his pictures but doesn’t. Are we sure this is him? Surely, this boy isn’t gone. Seeing is believing, and yet…

Unasked questions fill the collective conscious, saturate the tedious, lifeless space. How did this happen? The images are fresh—graphic, vivid, concrete, tattooed on my brain. But sharing’s not possible, and comprehension eludes.

Someone broke into our home and our lives and took him away. I awoke to a scream as Mom discovered the switch—a sound I’d not heard, no one’s heard. Haunting blue face and frozen body at its center, a universe of panic swarmed in. But it was over at the start. I burst out the door and set to work on my robot, unable to breathe and desperate to survive. Her most precious, her first born—her beloved—was gone, replaced by a vile, revolting stranger. 

At the front of the room on display is that stranger; everyone’s eyes on the stranger. Nobody knows him or understands why. We’re all strangers; for the first time we’re strangers; the strangest among us up front. 

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Nate Methot is the author of A Life Derailed: My Journey with ALS, a memoir. He was diagnosed with ALS at twenty-seven in 2011. He lives with his parents in Vermont and writes with one finger and a mouse. His memoir, blog, social media, and local newspaper column can be found at natemethot.com.