JUNE 25, 2016 / DELROV HOUSEHOLD

In a fit of rage, Asher stormed into his room.

Luckily Vasily was at the factory, unable to hear Asher slamming doors and stomping through the hallways. He ripped off his prosthetic, which thudded to the floor, and sprang back onto his bed. His nerves were a wreck and his body was sweating after taking public transport all the way back home.

Being dumped sucked.

Ryanel had proclaimed that he didn't think Asher was in it for the right reasons and that they were moving too fast.

"Is it because I said I love you?" Asher had blurted.

So two months was a relatively short time to fall in love. And maybe Asher only said he loved Ryanel after they'd had sex, but that didn't invalidate his feelings. 

Did it?

Asher recalled the solid conviction and slight pity in Ryanel's eyes when he'd proposed they postpone things. He looked so reasonable and mature that it was hard to argue against his points.

Except, postponing was only postponing when one had a backup date. What Ryanel had done was indefinitely cancel any sort of relationship between the two of them; which in layman's terms meant being dumped.

And maybe his reaction hadn't been the most mature. He'd kind of raged at Ryanel, shed one traitorous tear and hightailed it numbly back home until he could break down within the confines of his bedroom.

Now, Asher was forced to process the uncomfortable truth about what he was doing. Ryanel breaking up with him had forced a mirror up to his soul and now he had to weather the self-reflection he'd been avoiding. 

He'd used sex and dating and falling in love as sedatives, of a sort. Something to take his mind off the real source of his pain. Something to knock him out until it was safe to wake up and start living again.

Asher had relied on Ryanel as a beam of light. A flame next to which he could curl up and from which absorb some second-hand joy. Maybe that's what the problem was. Without Ryanel he was aimless and miserable. His dependency on Ryanel had been growing by the day.

"I can't keep filling you up at the expense of my own energy," Ryanel had said. "It's not my job to make you happy. I just, I can't do this anymore."

At the time it sounded like bullshit excuses. But then, at the time, Asher had been stunned and upset after the carpet had been pulled out from under him. He'd not seen any sign that Ryanel was having second thoughts. Despite him never having said I love you back, Asher assumed he would get there in his own time. 

But the whole time, he must have been seeing some sort of red flag.

Why does he always get to be right? Asher wondered.

His eye roamed over the bookshelf opposite his bed. He'd been reading since he'g gotten his prosthetic. The return of his mobility and some of his independence had engendered a tentative inkling of hope for the future. A pale flame of motivation that needed to be gently aired, not harshly blown, to make a steady fire.

He hopped over to the bookshelf (for quick trips, like to the bathroom or couch, putting on his prosthetic would be more hassle than help) and perused the shelves. Most of his mother's collection of classics had been devoured in March, then the poetry and philosophy books in May, and in the middle of New York's heatwave, Asher's interest had turned to her bio-engineering textbooks.

At present, Asher seemed to be at a loss for new content to consume. His eyes dropped lower to a cardboard box of papers from his mother's last project. It hadn't been opened since, well, the last time Ekaterina had opened it. It was one of the few keepsakes they had shipped from Russia, but one of the less heart-wrenching ones. 

The photographs, her old cardigan and the handmade jewelry Asher had given her were better examples of lingering treasures that he frequently revisited. Since he remembered her as only his mother, the souvenirs that alluded to their relationship touched him deepest. The remnants of her work as a scientist felt like a clinical, minor facet to her larger-than-life place in his heart.

Nevertheless, craving stimulation, Asher tugged the box onto the floor and cautiously took a seat on the rug.

His fingerprints left markings on the untouched dust covering the lid of the book. The notes that lay inside were slightly yellowed from age, but otherwise pristine. The sheets of paper were without wrinkles or folds, stacked in neat piles. The notebooks were in similar old, but tenderly-kept, condition. Flipping through them, Asher noted the familiar neat Cyrillic handwriting of his mother.

Reading through her work brought a wave of emotion over Asher. It wasn't longing or sadness, but a throbbing fascination with her work and her expertise. He missed her more in that moment, for he wished to be able to hear from her mouth and follow her pointing hands as she explained to him what she'd been developing.

There were diagrams scattered through the workbooks, and accompanied with the annotations, Asher gleaned that Ekaterina's longest and last endeavour was a type of bionic leg for transfemoral amputations. In transfemoral amputations the cut was made across the thigh bone, which was, coincidentally, the type of amputation Asher had undergone.

 As Asher read Ekaterina's annotations and notes, an overwhelming hope flooded through him. It filled him with an excitement, a giddiness, that had him itching to get a large sheet of paper and start sketching models of a prosthetic that could get him into motocross. Because, for the first time since January, he saw a clear path from his current stagnant situation, to the scintillating realm of progress and success.

His biggest goal of late had been to find one positive thing in every day. His physio suggested it, to draw his focus to the good aspects of his life, rather than the bad. And it had been working, in the day-to-day sense. Asher wouldn't try to hurt himself, but nor did he have any aspirations for his life past the next foreseeable day.

His only objective had been to endure the misery. Now, with his brilliant, inspired mother's designs, he could escape.

The materials Ekaterina had suggested were outdated by now, replaced by carbon-fibre and plexiglass alternatives that provided all the strength but none of the weight. Asher's current prosthetic was satisfactory for mundane activities (rather, activity, because walking was the only thing the prosthetic enabled). It wasn't flexible or lightweight enough to facilitate the flips or high-speed turns of which Asher was once a master.

Ekaterina's design featured incredibly mobile knee and ankle joints. It was hard to simulate the complexities of the human joints with an essentially mechanical hinge, but Ekaterina had departed from the unidirectional swivel system with a joint system that used electrodes placed along points in the quad, adductor and gluteus muscles to change the position of the prosthetic. She wasn't offering a replacement leg; she was offering an enhanced one.

With Ekaterina's design promising better prospects in having lost a limb, Asher suddenly saw a shining silver lining to his amputation.

His current body mass was far less than that of the average twenty-year-old, because he'd essentially had one-fifth of it removed. If he could modify Ekaterina's design — the suspension system was already ingenious but could be improved by today's 3D printing technology — to his needs, not only could he return to motorsport, he could extend the limits of the industry past anything anyone had ever known.

Ransacking his drawers for something to document the ambitious mechanisms he was imagining, Asher flipped open his old high school physics workbook and started to draw. His mind was racing with scenes from the future that had unlocked before him. 

What he could accomplish. What people would say about him.

Asher Delrov: the man who learnt to fly.