Chapter 18
A Good Subject,
Never a Good Son
Vapor
The house talks even when I don’t want it to.
It speaks in tiny languages; clicks inside the pipes, breathless hisses drifting under the floorboards, a low groan in the walls when the wind from the harbor leans its whole weight against the siding, asking to be let in.
The roof answers with small, rhythmic taps, like fingernails or bones knocking politely.
Sometimes I imagine the house has a pulse, something slow and old, beating behind the plaster in places I can’t touch.
When I press my ear to the radiator, I hear a metallic rattling, like a handful of coins rolling down a throat that doesn’t want to swallow them.
I don’t know if the house is alive or dying, or if it’s trying to warn me about something I already know too well.
Downstairs, the lab hums. It never stops.
The sound crawls up the stairs like some kind of animal dragging itself upward, warm and heavy, waiting at the landing as if it expects me to pet it.
The hum is patient. Sometimes its vibrations slip under my skin before I even reach the basement door.
Sometimes it feels like the hum is breathing for the whole house when the rest of us forget how.
The machines whisper words I don’t understand.
The glass parts whisper too. Everything here has a voice except the people who most need one.
Father—ásgeir—says the hum is the sound of hope. He says it’s the sound of progress, of possibility, of “saving your mother if the universe isn’t entirely godless.” He never says it kindly. Hope to him is something sharp enough to cut your fingers on. He holds it like a blade.
The Serum he’s been experimenting with sits, along with others, in neat racks under the brightest lamp, each ampoule thin and perfectly shaped, filled with a colorless liquid that glints silver when the light shifts.
The shine is faint, like a memory of moonlight.
If you didn’t know what it was, you might think it harmless; just water pretending to be important.
But even from across the room, the glass looks cold, colder than anything should look indoors.
I’ve seen him snap the top off an ampoule, the way surgeons break bones with confidence.
A gentle click, clinically precise, the sound of something opening its eyes.
Mother moves slower every week, her nerves frayed and failing, her fingers trembling even when she grips a cup with both hands.
Sometimes she stares into corners as if someone is calling her name from behind the walls.
Sometimes she whispers back. Her degenerative nerve disease is the monster Father keeps trying to outrun.
He says he can fix her. He says he can save her.
But the first versions of the serum made her worse; her nerves sparked too hard, like wires chewing themselves alive.
She screamed once, a sound so sharp it felt like the air tore open.
Father said the formulas weren’t stable yet, that he needed better data. That’s when he started experimenting on us.
Father likes lines; measured, taped, exact.
He sets one across the lab floor and says, “Stand here, boy.” His voice is always quietest when it’s the most dangerous.
I stand. I always stand. He says, “Breathe normally,” and I try to make my breaths so small they barely exist. If breathing is something that can be done wrong, I know I will find a way to fail at it.
His writing looks violent, even when the pen moves fast and smooth.
His whole body participates; the lifted shoulder, the flexing jaw, the small twitch above his right eyebrow when something excites him.
And when he is pleased with the numbers or the way my body reacts, he bares his teeth in a smile that never reaches his eyes.
He says, “Good boy,” but it feels like he’s testing how much pressure I can take before I crack.
I hate that he calls me boy. Boy is something small.
Something that exists to be told where to stand.
Behind a closed door at the end of the hall, the wood swells when the weather turns damp.
Someone there breathes like each inhale is a negotiation.
Her coughs come fast, small, sharp things that make my stomach twist. Sometimes her hands shake uncontrollably.
Sometimes she stares at the ceiling like she’s following something only she can see.
She’s smaller now, hollowed out. Like the serum ate pieces of her she’ll never get back.
And only because of that one time Father didn’t use me, but her.
Mother drifts through the house as if she’s made of smoke.
She stirs empty pots, watches invisible steam.
She drops white pills into her mouth without water.
Some days she’s quiet as a grave; other days she breaks glass jars just to hear the shatter.
I sweep the pieces before Father gets home.
I hide the blood on my fingertips. Pain is information, Father says, but I’ve learned to file it away where no one else looks.
At school, I practice being normal. I don’t know how to do it right, but I try.
My face stays still, a door that never opens.
The boys don’t like doors. They like windows they can throw stones through.
They tug the scar on my lip, fascinated by how it snags under their fingers, by how it makes me look like I’m half smiling even when I’m not.
They say, “Smile for us,” like they think they can force my face into something honest. When they pull too hard, pain flashes bright and quick, reminding me of the white light that burst in the lab the day the glass shouted.
They laugh and walk away, but their laughter clings to me like damp wool.
The teacher touches my shoulder when she talks to me, and even that gentle pressure feels like a promise of something worse.
I flinch so hard my teeth clack together.
She says, “Use your words, kid,” but she doesn’t understand that words are not the language of fear.
Fear speaks in experiments. In the way my fingers half curl, remembering needles even when my mind doesn’t want to.
After school, I walk to the harbor because the air there is different.
Sharper. Cleaner. Like it wants to cut something open.
The water is a sheet of cold blue-gray glass, and the wind snaps at my coat, reminding me I still have a body.
I watch the boats rock on the tide and imagine getting on one, drifting so far the hum of the lab can’t reach me.
But my feet always turn back toward home, even when my heart wants to run.
Home is the scent of metal, old notebooks, solder, and something sweet rotting.
Home is the sound of the machines shifting, alive in the dark.
Home is the heavy jacket Father keeps by the lab door, the pockets filled with keys that clink like tiny skeletons rattling inside a tin coffin.
He calls the lab his church. Sometimes, when he thinks no one hears him, he murmurs prayers to the machines, to the serum, to the equations. I think the hum answers.
Some nights, when Father’s footsteps begin their measured descent toward the basement, I get to the stairs first. I block his line of sight to the door at the end of the hall.
I straighten my spine. My voice comes out before fear can take it.
“Use me,” I say. Always fast. Always first. He pauses, calculates, then nods. And I go down instead.
The lab swallows me whole. The lights burn so bright I see squares even when I close my eyes.
The air tastes metallic, coins dissolving on my tongue.
Father prepares the microdose; always only a drop, always just enough.
I hold my breath without meaning to as the needle enters my skin.
It’s always the same moment: the sting, the pressure, the cold rush sliding up my veins like frost water.
After time the experiments take me.
First it were my emotions, curling up like leaves touched by fire. Fear evaporates. Anger quiets. Empathy dims to a faint glow I can hardly feel. Pain switches off like a pulled plug. My pulse slows until it feels like the world must beat for me if I’m going to keep living in it.
Then came the side effects. My scars thicken, rising like something trying to crawl out.
My skin puckers and warps, rough in places that should be smooth.
My hands tremble even when I force them still.
My breath turns shallow. My body feels like an echo instead of a person.
But Father writes “promising” in his notebook.
I don’t know if he means the serum or me.
When I return to my room, the floor tilts in strange angles.
The roof above my bed leans down like it wants to press a secret into my ear.
Frost feathers gather on the window at dawn, and I draw circles in them with my fingertip until they melt into lines of clear water.
The room smells like old wood and cold air and me—whoever that is now.
I keep a jar of screws beneath my bed. The weight of it anchors me when the tremors get bad. I press my palm to the glass until the shaking slows. The radio beside it is broken, but if I twist the dial, I still hear clicks; ghost sounds, like someone trapped between stations.
There is a flower shop two streets away, glowing warm even in winter.
Inside, the woman arranges plants with names that sound like spells.
Foxglove. Belladonna. Monkshood. Pretty things that can kill.
She smiles when she says dangerous, as if danger is a compliment.
I stand very still and look at the purple foxglove bells.
Beautiful and poisonous. I feel seen in a way I don’t know how to explain.
At school, there is one boy who doesn’t pull at me.
He ties his little sister’s scarf every morning with gentle hands, knots that hold but never hurt.
I watch his fingers move, memorizing tenderness like it’s a foreign language.
In my coat pocket, I practice tying a piece of string into knots I hope won’t choke anything.
When Father finally sleeps, the lab hum softens, like it’s thinking instead of demanding. I sit on the bottom step and listen to the machines settling. People rust in places you can’t see, Mother always said. Machines don’t. Machines stay predictable. Maybe that’s why Father loves them more.
I don’t wish for much, not because I don’t want things, but because wanting feels dangerous.
Wanting opens doors in your stomach, and people will reach inside just to see what you hide.
But sometimes, when the house holds its breath and even the hum quiets for a heartbeat, I wish small wishes.
For normal. For Mother’s hands to stop shaking.
For her to get better. For Father to forget the tape line.
For the boys at school to misplace my face.
For the cold in my veins to loosen its grip.
For me to be a child, with a childhood.
In the middle of it all; I am eight years old. Not knowing that the thing meant to save us is already destroying every piece of who we might have been.
And that monsters can wear your father’s face, or that love can feel exactly like fear.