“I said,” I said, my hands clenched together, “you’re horrible. How dare you talk to me?”
“Yes,” he said. His gaze unfocused, re-focused. “I remember you now. I didn’t before. You started to cry.”
“You’re trying to upset me. You resent what I said. I don’t blame you, but I’m sorry—”
“Please,” he said quietly, “you don’t seem to understand. You’re attributing human reactions to me.”
I backed a step away from him and my heel caught in a crack in the pavement. I seemed to unbalance very slowly, and in the middle of it, his hand took my elbow and steadied me. And having steadied me, the hand slipped down my arm, moving over my own hand before it left me. It was a caress, a tactful, unpushy, friendly caress. Preprogrammed. And the hand was cool and strong, but not cold, not metallic. Not unhuman, and not human, either.
He was correct. Not playing cruelly with me, as Clovis might have done. I had misunderstood everything. I had thought of him as a man. But he didn’t care what I thought or did. It was impossible to insult or hurt him. He was a toy.
The heat in my face was white now. I stared at the ground.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I have to be at The Island by two A.M.”
“Egyptia—” I faltered.
“I’ll be staying with her tonight,” he said. And now he smiled, openly, sweetly.
“You and she will go to bed,” I got out.
“Yes.”
He was a robot. He did what he was hired to do, or bought for. How could Eygptia—
“How can you?” I blurted.
I would never have said that to a man, for Egyptia’s lovely. It would be obvious. But he, with him it was a task. And yet—
“My function,” he said, “is to amuse, to make happy, to give pleasure.” There was compassion in his face for me. He could see me struggling. I, too, a potential customer, must be pleased, amused, left laughing.
“I suppose you’re a wonderful lover,” I shocked myself by saying.
“Yes,” he answered simply. A fact.
“I suppose you can—make love—as often as—as whoever hires you—wants.”
“Of course.”
“And sing songs while you’re doing it.”
He himself laughed. When he did, his whole person radiated a kind of joy.
“That’s an idea.”
Irony of the gentlest sort. And he hadn’t remembered me. The wicked flatness of his eyes had been a readjustment of his thought cells. Of course. Who else had been averse to him?
I raised my head and my eyes looked into his, and there was no need to shy away from him because he was only a machine.
“I was at the party you were hired for. You’re still hired, aren’t you, until tomorrow? So.” The last words didn’t come out bravely, but in a whisper. “Kiss me.”
He regarded me. He was totally still, serene. Then he moved close to me, and took my face in his silver hands, and bowed his auburn head and kissed me with his silver mouth. It was a mannered kiss, not intimate. Calm, unhurried, but not long. All he owed me as Egyptia’s guest. Then he stepped away, took up my hand and kissed that too, a bonus. And then he walked toward the subway, and left me trembling there. And so I knew what had been wrong all day.
I tell myself it’s the electric current running through the clockwork mechanisms that I felt, as if a singing tide washed through me. His skin is poreless, therefore not human. Cooler than human, too. His hair is like grass. He has no scent, being without glands or hormones or blood. Yet there was a scent, male, heady and indefinable. Something incorporated, perhaps, to “please.” And there was only him. Everything else became a backdrop, and then it went away altogether. And he went away, and nothing came back to replace him.
I’ve written this down on paper, because I just couldn’t say it aloud to the tape. Tomorrow, my mother will ask what I wanted to discuss with her. But this isn’t for my mother. It’s for some stranger—for you, whoever you are—someone who’ll never read it. Because that’s the only way I could say any of it. I can’t tell Demeta, can I?
He’s a machine, and I’m in love with him.
He’s with Egyptia, and I’m in love with him.
He’s been packed up in a crate, and I’m in love with him.
Mother, I’m in love with a robot…
CHAPTER TWO
Spoiled little rich girl. Always someone to do things for you. Always someone to rescue you. Your mother. Clovis. And always a castle in the clouds to run back to.
And now?
• 1 •
It’s so dark, I can hardly see to write this, and I’m not certain why I’m writing it. Superstitiously, I think I believe I made everything happen by writing the first part of it down. And so, if I write another part of it, another part will come after. But things may only get worse. As if they could. But no, they could.
And then, somewhere inside myself, I don’t care. I don’t care about anything, because the thing I need is something else than what I’ve lost. And then again, I go on thinking, beyond this grimy darkness and the shadows like purple rust flaking on the page. I think about tomorrow and the next day, and I wonder what will become of me.
In the morning, at seven A.M., because I couldn’t sleep, I got up and made a short tape for my mother. I said: “My problem was about Clovis and the callous way he treats his boyfriends, and about how M-Bs behave to each other anyway. But I’m over it now. I was just being silly.”
It was not exactly the first time I’d lied to my mother. But it was the first time I knew I’d have to stick to the lie. I couldn’t break down. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t decide if I was desperate, or only desperately ashamed. But I’d tried to cry myself out in the night, and by six A.M. the pillows were so wet I’d thrown them on the floor.
I knew there was no solution.
At eleven-thirty A.M., the video phone rang in the Vista. I knew who it was so I didn’t answer. At noon, it rang again. Somehow it sounded louder. Soon my mother would emerge from her suite, and then I’d have to answer it, so I answered it.
Egyptia reclined in the video in a white kimono.
“Jane. You look terrible.”
“I didn’t sleep well.”
“Neither did I. Oh Jane—”
She told me about Silver. She told me in enormous detail. I tried not to listen, but I listened. Beauty, acrobatics, tenderness, humor, prowess.
“Of course, the stamina, the knowledge, the artistry are built in. But I believed he was human. Oh, he’s magic, Jane. It’s ruined me for a man for weeks. But I nearly fainted this morning. So much ecstasy is destructive. I think I have a migraine attack. This awful pain in my temple. Oh, he should carry a government health warning, like the windows by the Old River.”
A wire was stretching tighter and tighter in my spine, and the end of the wire was in my head. She hadn’t said which temple had the migraine, so both my temples beat as narrow spikes ran through and through them. The room clouded. When the wire snapped in the middle I would scream.
“I checked my account to see if I could buy one, but I’ve overdrawn for this month. And then there’s the Theatra. Oh, Jane. He’s taught me so much about myself. He found such sensual nuances in me—I was a woman with him. That’s so strange. He’s a robot, but he made me feel more like a woman, more conscious of my desires, my needs, than any man ever did. But I had to beg him to stop—”