Your Body Has Accepted the Terms and Conditions

The first thing I do when I wake is ask my watch whether I have slept.

I am in bed when I do this. There is a pillow crease across my cheek, a sour little animal living in my mouth, and one bare foot outside the duvet. Nevertheless, I consult the report.

Six hours, forty-three minutes.

I had thought it was a good night.

Now I am tired.

It is Sunday. Beside me, my wife turns over and takes most of the duvet with her. She has no data to support this confidence.

“Sleep well?” she asks.

“Apparently not.”

She makes the small sympathetic noise people make when they have no intention of becoming more awake. I turn the screen towards her, but her eyes are closed. She finds my cold foot with hers.

During the week, she is usually at work by the time I do this. Her job has meetings. Mine has appointments. We share a bed more reliably than we share the hours in it.

I bought the watch because I wanted to take better care of myself. This is the sort of thing I say when I have found something expensive that might organise my terror.

It arrived in a white box. Inside, the strap lay curled around a cardboard insert, awaiting a suitable mammal.

Setup required my date of birth, height, weight and agreement. I supplied the first three with varying degrees of resentment. The fourth was easy. On screens, agreement has become a movement of the thumb. I scroll past several pages about my body without involving it.

Then I fastened it.

A few minutes later, there was my pulse.

I sat at the kitchen island watching the number change. Beneath the stool, one slipper had come off. The dishwasher needed emptying. Somewhere inside the ordinary mess of me, something was happening seventy-eight times a minute, and I could see it.

This still feels impossible.

The optical sensor uses light to detect changes in blood flow beneath the skin. Green light, blood, reflected light: a small practical arrangement that allows a thing bought in a shopping centre to count what used to require fingers pressed to flesh.

I lift the strap and catch the little green flash.

There you are.

I have said this to lovers. I have said it to lost earrings. I am embarrassed by how tenderly I say it to my own circulation.

At first, it helps.

A reminder gets me out of the chair where I have been folding slowly into a question mark. I walk further. I go to bed earlier on some nights. Patterns appear that my private account of myself has tactfully omitted.

My private account insists I hardly drink, move quite a lot and am only temporarily like this.

The watch has its limitations. It estimates. It misses things. It does not know what I am thinking, and the number on its face is not a diagnosis. I understand all this perfectly until I am frightened.

Then I lift my wrist.

There is a particular relief in a question with a numerical answer. Am I wasting my life? Difficult. Is anyone going to stay? Pending. What is my heart doing?

Eighty-two.

Thank fuck. Something specific.

By the third week, on a night off, I am walking around the kitchen before midnight to reach my step goal.

The room is too small for dignity. Fridge, sink, door. Fridge, sink, door. A tea towel brushes my hip on each lap.

I could change the goal. Nobody has locked the settings.

I chose it. This is considerably more humiliating.

My wife appears in the doorway, brushing her teeth. Around the toothbrush, she asks what I am doing.

“Nearly finished.”

“With what?”

I hold up my wrist.

She watches another circuit, then moves the laundry basket out of my way with her foot.

I reach the goal. The watch celebrates.

I stand in the kitchen receiving congratulations for a walk during which I have seen the same dirty spoon eleven times.

Yet I am pleased. Bodily pleased. A little lift beneath the ribs.

The spoon remains where it is.

The wrist is an effective place to put an instruction.

A phone can be in another room. An email can wait. This thing touches me before it asks. Its small vibration enters the sentence I am writing, the conversation I am avoiding, the moment when my wife has finally found the right place on my neck.

The following night, at work, a client notices me turning my wrist while we are having sex.

He stops.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Am I keeping you?”

There is still time left in his booking. I tell him so.

I have left the watch on. I take off my wedding ring before appointments and put it in the zipped pocket of my bag. The watch stays. It has followed me further into the booking than anything else I arrived wearing.

One hundred and twenty-six beats a minute.

Exertion, nerves, the room being too warm: several things can arrive at the same number. He cannot see the screen. He is looking at my face, waiting for reassurance.

“All good?” he asks.

“Yes.”

The number changes while he waits.

I turn the screen away. There is still time, and I am spending some of it checking how hard I am working at being here.

Later, alone, I wipe the strap and wash my hands. There is a damp line beneath the silicone. I put my wedding ring back on before ordering the car home.

My wife is asleep when I arrive. I leave my shoes by the door and lift the duvet carefully.

When I wake, the sleep after my shift has become a diagram.

Coloured blocks mark estimated stages of sleep. There is an awake patch I remember: water, bathroom, the unpleasant certainty that everyone I love will eventually die. Another patch means nothing to me.

I open the detailed view.

Perhaps I moved. Perhaps I woke and forgot. The watch has made an inference from signals; I start manufacturing a memory to match.

When the chart looks good, I sit at the island eating breakfast after noon, feeling flattened and faintly fraudulent. I have slept enough. The record says so. What excuse does the flesh have now?

On a Sunday when it looks bad, I carry the phone to the kitchen with relief.

“Look,” I tell my wife.

She puts down her toast and looks.

For once, my exhaustion has brought identification.

Long before I wore a sensor, I knew how to make a body acceptable.

Hold in the stomach. Smile. Sit properly. Be hungry later. Stay awake for this. Do not make that face. You cannot possibly be cold.

There have been years when “How are you?” seemed to offer two choices: fine, or a troublesome amount of detail.

So I am susceptible to an object that asks nothing about my tone. It records me without sighing. I can arrive with the same complaint every morning.

I am tired, but have I earned it?

I want to lie down. I check how many steps are left.

No engineer had to write that question. I supplied it during setup, along with my weight.

One afternoon, I leave the watch charging and walk to the shops.

Halfway there, I reach to check it. My thumb meets the pale strip of skin beneath the cuff.

My first thought is that the walk will not count.

I actually slow down.

The body has already carried me past the pharmacy and the little tree growing out of the broken wall. My calves are working. Air is entering me, being used, leaving.

Still, there is a small spoiled feeling.

At the shop, I buy bread and remember that I need washing-up liquid. On the way home, the bag knocks against my knee. I find myself rehearsing how to put the walk back into the record.

I want to tell you this leads to a revelation.

I get home and put the watch on.

I do not want to lose what it gives me.

Each useful thing arrives with a perfectly reasonable invitation to consult it again.

Eventually there is a tiny delay between waking and deciding how the night felt. Between coming home and deciding whether the walk was enough. Between being touched and remaining there.

I live in that delay more often now.

A second version of my body accumulates in the phone: a body made of intervals, averages, bright segments. I can scroll through it while the original sits beside a cold cup of tea.

The recorded woman is easier to read. I find myself preferring her account. She has no difficulty separating one day from the next.

I remember standing outside a friend's flat, unable to ring the bell. I had said I would come after work. I had not allowed for the small effort of becoming somebody's friend again.

I remember my wife's hair still wet from her morning shower as she bends to kiss me goodnight. Her lanyard catches against my cheek. She apologises without stopping the kiss.

I remember folding her clean work trousers before leaving for my own shift. A client asking how my day has been. Saying “quiet” because there is no reason to tell him about the trousers.

I remember carrying the shopping upstairs and resting on the landing, checking whether she has finished her meeting before I call. We discuss washing-up liquid. I have bought it already. Neither of us hangs up immediately.

The watch puts our midnight in a new day. My shift continues. At home, her alarm is still six hours away.

There is a small rise in my pulse around the time she kissed me. I open the detailed view, trying to remember whether I had already climbed the stairs.

Tonight, we are both home. My wife asks how I am.

We are sitting on the sofa. There is a bowl between us with two orange pips and a piece of peel curled inside it.

I lift my wrist.

She waits.

I have the screen halfway towards my face before I notice.

“I don't know,” I say.

“All right.”

There is no advice after it.

I rub the place beneath the strap. It is a little itchy. I have worn it too tightly again, wanting good contact.

She holds out her hand.

I unfasten the watch and put it on the table, face up. Then I give her my wrist. Her fingers settle where the sensor has been, and for a moment I expect her to count.

Instead, her thumb moves once across the indentation.

We sit until the screen goes dark.

Later I will put it back on. I want the alarm. I will probably check my sleep when I wake.

For now, she asks if I want the last piece of orange.

I do.