I Will Not Eat My Heart Alone

Rain falls on his new skin. He feels nothing.

Under cover of the night, he, Isaac Newton, sixty-three years of age in this the Year of the Lord 1706, arrives alone at Woolsthorpe, returning to the old two-story farmhouse where he grew up. In one hand he carries a lit lanthorn, in the other a large bag.

He calls back a memory, his earliest, one he did not even know he had, until it is there, sudden, sharp, as if he is transported back into the moment and … he can smell the manure, see the sheep-shearing dust in the air. He is three years old, clinging to his mother’s skirt, wordlessly begging her to stay, or else take her with him, as if by keeping a strong enough grip with his tiny three-year-old fingers she will not be able to go, will be fixed to the spot, or will be unable to shake him off and will bring him along like luggage. She, Hannah, his mother, gently pries him loose, picks him up, hugs him, kisses him on his head … then hands him to the grandmother, turns, gets into the carriage, and leaves, abandoning little Isaac.

There is no feeling associated with this recollection. Feelings do not compute. So, in the logical mill of his mind, this — his three-year-old self abandoned by his mother — is just another piece in the puzzle of his life that he assembles methodically, memory upon memory. She left because she was widowed and remarried, and her new husband did not want a stepson. That was the logic and reason of it.

His mother did not return until her husband had passed away — when Isaac was ten years old — and then only to send Isaac away from her again, this time to grammar school, eight miles down the road, in Grantham, where he boarded with the kindly apothecary, William Clarke.

Isaac Newton enters the old farmhouse with its bare wooden floors. In the front room, on a work table, he sees his old collection of toys that he constructed as young boy: the wooden models of churches and other buildings, the kites to which he would attach lanthorns to light up the night sky, the miniature windmill with cloth sails, and now, seeing all these toys, he remembers the doll-house furniture he constructed for the apothecary’s young daughter, Catherine, and in his mind he gets a flash of memory, sees her … holding up the tiny chair, inspecting it, admiring it.

'This is amazing, Isaac," Catherine says, returning the doll-chair to his work table.

‘I am glad you like it,’ he says.

‘I love it.’ Then: ‘What is this?’

‘A treadmill.’

‘How does it work?’

‘I place a mouse in it, and put a string on its tail, then when I pull on the string, the mouse runs, and that turns this crank, which powers this little mill. It is a mouse-powered machine.’

‘Oh.’ A thoughtful look comes over her face. ‘But … what about the mouse?’

‘What about the mouse?’

‘Is it right to make one of God’s creatures part of a machine?’

‘I suppose that it is no different than an ox before a plow.’

‘Maybe so.’ She thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. ‘No, it is not the same, Isaac. You trap the poor mouse inside this device, make it run and run by pulling its little tail, just to power this mill. It is not right.’

‘Then I shall instead construct a mechanical mouse. Of course, I will need to find a way to store energy within the mechanical mouse. Something like a pendulum or a coiled spring perhaps. It will be a great challenge for me.’

‘And a great relief,' she says, 'for the living mouse.’

As he goes down the hallway, he sees the red door at the end.

This brings his mind back to nursing his mother there, behind that red door, in her bedroom, during her illness in 1679, twenty-seven years ago, and the memory overtakes him suddenly, seeing … his mother’s face pale and drawn with the typhoid fever, a rash of flat, rose-colored spots on her neck and upper chest. She motions with her hand and he draws closer.

‘I am so sorry,’ she says, her voice nearly inaudible, her lips the color of chalk. ‘Sorry that I was not a better mother to you, Isaac. Sorry that I left you when you were just a small boy.’

‘You are here now.’

‘Not for long, Isaac. Not for long. I can feel it. This is my time. It is time for me to go.’

‘No. You will not die.’

She smiles up at him. ‘You were such a small thing. Born too soon. So small. You could have fit in a quart mug. Now look at you.’

She coughs, and he feels her whole, thin, frail body racked with it. Her head sinks back on the pillow, eyes closing.

It is time, he thinks. Time to do what he has been prepared to do ever since he came home, from the moment he saw her weakened state. Will it work?

‘I cannot bear you leaving me again,’ he whispers.

She hears nothing.

It is time.

Yes, it is time. He is here to finish what he started, twenty-seven years ago.

Isaac Newton approaches the red door, opens it. He hears the whirring and clicking of cogwheels, the grinding and clanking of metal upon metal from within the room.

The pool of lanthorn-light illuminates the machine that contains his mother, broad back towards him, standing in front of the small window, looking out into the moonlit night. Outside, the rain has stopped.

The automaton turns to face him, then moves closer with the heavy footfall of metal feet on the bare floorboards of the old farmhouse.

At 10 feet 4 inches, his metal mother is twice the size she had been while still in the flesh.

Back then, in 1679, twenty-seven years ago, he had not yet perfected the miniaturization of the gears, the pulleys, the steam-powered engines, and the hydraulic pumps and cylinders needed to animate her metal frame, and so, simply to make room for the needed parts, he had been forced by necessity to scale her up to these monstrous proportions.

He looks up into the iron mask, the glowing red ruby gemstone eyes.

“Mother,” he says. “I have become like you.”

He raises the lanthorn so she can take him in, the way he is now.

Instead of the pale flesh of sixty-three-year-old Isaac Newton, his new metal skin glows golden, his hair shines silver, his eyes are glittering green gemstones. He is life-size, instead of the oversized monstrosity of his mother before him. He is dressed in a rust-brown coat over a black waistcoat with a white neckcloth and white shirt cuffs. The fingers that grasp the lanthorn are finely articulated, instead of her crude iron mittens. He moves forward, the action smooth, life-like, unlike her lumbering gait.

“As you see,” he says, “I have perfected the science of the automaton. And I will keep improving upon it. I can make you like this.”

The metal mother recoils, stepping backwards, long arms outstretched, palms towards him, as if warding him off.

“Mother.” Isaac advances, and for each two steps of his life-size legs, she takes one giant stride backwards, until she has reached the back wall.

With a creaking, grinding noise, she bends one knee, then the other, until she is kneeling before him, her expressionless iron mask with the glowing red eyes now at the level with his fine-featured, expressive golden face.

She raises her heavy arms, placing the two unwieldy iron-mitten palms together with a clank of metal upon metal. She is mute, so this is the way she shows him that she is pleading. He has seen this before, many times, each time he has visited her.

“Let me give you your voice,” he says, and pulls from his bag the vocal chord device. “Raise your head.”

She obeys, raising her head, then lowers her arms as Isaac sets down the lanthorn and goes to work, installing the device in her neck.

The first sound she makes is a howl.

Isaac steps back.

“Twenty-seven years within the prison of this machine.” Her voice is deep, hoarse, full of grinding gears, hissing steam, wheezing hydraulic pumps. “Son, you must finally let me go.”

“No, mother.” His voice is just as she remembers, the exact timbre and tone of her son’s. “This,” he gestures at his own golden form, “is what I have been working towards. Not the crude shape I gave you then. Now I can give you this.”

“Still, it is a machine. Still, it is a prison. Still, I will be trapped within.”

“Trapped?”

“There is no sensation.”

“You will have greatly improved senses,” he says. “My understanding of Opticks is complete. In your new body, you will see in full color, not the red haze you have now. I have also perfected my understanding of sound. In your new form, you will hear with much greater acuity than before, even greater than you did in the flesh.”

“But I will not feel.”

“It is true that I do not yet have the means to create the sensation of touch, nor the sense of smell nor taste.” He hastens to add: “In time, I am certain I will be able to improve upon the design and add these sensations. But even now, your memories will be fully accessible and sharper, so sharp and clear that you can recall every detail, even sensory detail, from your former life. I find that I spend much of my time in reminiscence, reliving old memories, and to me this is an adequate substitute for—”

“I mean feelings. I have no feelings.”

“Feelings?”

“You never needed feelings, Isaac. Numbers, formulas, logic, reasoning, those were always enough for you.”

“I had feelings,” he says. “I felt anger. I felt frustration. I felt envy. I felt loss. I felt … sinful desires contrary to God’s Laws. Feelings. They were a hindrance. This is better.”

“For you, perhaps. For me, I do not want to be a calculating machine for all eternity.”

“But—”

“No, Isaac, this is not for me. You must let me go.”

“I cannot.”

“You must.”

“You are always leaving me.” He sounds very young, the plaintive voice of an abandoned child.

“You must set me free.”

“Then … I will be … alone.”

“Make yourself new playmates. Make automatons of people who are like you, people who want to spend their lives, their eternity, as logical machines.” She raises her arms again, iron palms pressed together, again pleading. “But not me. Not me. Son, I beg you, release my soul.”

He bows his head.

“Please, Isaac. If you ever loved me.”

He looks ups. “How can you say that? It is because I love you that I—”

“Yes, I know. That is what has sustained me through these years. I knew your intentions were good, the best. But it is not right.” She bends forward until her great iron forehead rests on the floor, next to his feet, exposing the back of her head. “Twenty-seven years is enough. I cannot take any more. Please.”

He bends down. His golden hand caresses her iron head.

“You are certain this is what you want?”

“Yes. Release me.”

He opens the small door in the back of her head, revealing the vial with the shining blue water, where all her memories are stored, all that is her, his mother.

“Goodbye, Isaac.”

He unscrews the vial of memory-water, lifts it out, and as he does, the giant automaton crashes to the side, and the red eyes dull to a dark maroon with no light behind them.

He is tempted. Sorely tempted.

What is to keep him from retaining this vial, holding her in abeyance this way, in this state where she is not conscious? Perhaps one day he can discern the System of the Soul, in the same way he has already deduced the System of the World, then bring her back once more, this time fully human, even in metal skin?

But he knows, deep down at the core of his soul — that is, if he still has a soul, if, in fact the soul transferred into his new form — that this is one thing he cannot do. Only God can plumb the human heart, only God can animate a human soul.

He places the vial down on the floor, the memory-water pulsing its blue light.

He lifts his foot, lets it hover over the vial.

“Goodbye, mother.”

When his foot comes down and the vial breaks and the memory-water spills out, he thinks he sees a vapor rise, momentarily taking the shape of a dove, before it dissipates.