Fiction Break: "robots"

Published in Lit Angels #26, edited by Francesca Lia Block.

I hate EDM, and I don’t like crowds, but Elena said I don’t get out enough, as though anyone gets out enough compared to her. She asked me when the last time was I went to anything that didn’t have me home by ten, and I said, “The midnight showing of…” and she was laughing too hard by that point, because she knew the movie I meant, and she hated it, and she couldn’t believe she was still friends with someone who’d wait in line for the midnight premiere. But she’s still friends with me and I know why. It’s because she finds me uncomplicated. I’m not sure if I’m as straightforward and easy to understand as Elena thinks I am, but I like that view of myself: a reliable person with a set of boring but also nonthreatening interests in our chaotic world. I think we all have roles to play in people’s lives and I’ll take Beacon of Stability in Elena’s, even if, in my own view, I’m going crazy a lot of the time.

Actually, that’s why I’m not a raver. I don’t think my kind of brain needs pounding music or drugs, but Elena says I don’t know what I need, as though she knows, but it’s not arrogant when she says it, she just likes to say dramatic things. Elena and I are used to each other. I can’t imagine how much we’d get on each other’s nerves if we met for the first time now. I can’t remember how we did meet. She and I disagree on when it was.

She said I couldn’t wear my regular clothes; I had to stand out. I reminded her that I don’t like to stand out and she reminded me that the point of going to raves was to get attention and I reminded her that I don’t like attention and that’s why I don’t like raves, and she said she didn’t care what I liked anymore, that if she left me to my own devices something something didn’t I know I was going to die someday something.

I do know I’m going to die someday but I do not see Elena’s point. She didn’t care about making me see her point, though. Elena is not a person who persuades. She gives orders. Except they’re not orders. She makes plans, that’s what Elena does, and she likes to make plans for people like me who would not make plans on our own. Now her plan for me was to dress me up in an ungodly ensemble with a bright blue wig and stars right under my eyes and I had to go with it. She was putting pink lip gloss on my lips, and I said, “I’m not gay,” and she said, “What does that have to do with anything?”

By the time she was done I actually liked the way I looked. Even though I did not wake up that morning thinking, “Make me look like one of those hot sci-fi chicks from a 60’s movie but a dude version,” it turned out there were worse things to see. Normally I don’t think at all about how I look. I just wear whatever. I don’t think I’ve actually gone into a store and bought a shirt since high school. I just kind of end up with things. I don’t think about whether shirts or pants or shorts or socks are interesting, I just get dressed because of the law and the weather, basically. Now I could see why Elena liked clothes, but I still didn’t think it would become a habit.

“You’re pretty,” she said.

“Is that good?”

“It’s very good.”

“Cool. Good.”

“Can you dance?” she asked.

“Why are you asking me that?”

“It’s kind of important.”

“You didn’t say that before.”

“It’s a rave.”

“So?”

“So what do you think they do at raves?”

“Drugs.”

“Well yeah, that, but also there’s dancing.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“I do not dance.”

“Don’t overthink it.”

“I’m not doing it.”

“You have to.”

“No.”

“So you’re just gonna sit at home looking like this?”

“I’ll go see—”

“You’re coming with me. Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you so high you’ll have no fucking clue what your body is doing. You won’t care.”

“Is that a threat?”

“If you like.”

You don’t say no to Elena twice, so I didn’t.

I was glad I hadn’t just worn whatever, by which I guess I mean I was glad Elena had dressed me. Never tell her I said that. But she was actually wrong about standing out. My blue wig and sparkles and weird sexy-alien costume was exactly how to blend in. There were girls in bunny ears and pink materials that looked like they had slain monsters and worn their pelts, there were people wearing bubble wrap with thongs. I liked the music, it turned out, even though I hadn’t wanted to. It wasn’t too repetitive or pounding. It was just repetitive enough to make me feel like I knew where I was, which was meaningful in an environment where it could’ve been impossible to get a foothold. And the music pounded just enough that I got why people were dancing, even though I wasn’t going to. The sounds were like looking up at a neon sign from underwater, or like the Milky Way if the Milky Way dropped acid and started to turn rainbow colors, slowly.

“If you’re in a good mood, eat some,” Elena said, speaking of acid, but I wasn’t exactly in a good mood. I wasn’t in a bad one, but I knew just enough about drugs and my own consciousness to know I was still in risky territory when it came to being susceptible to bad trips. I was glad I wasn’t at home, but I still didn’t particularly want to be here.

I was trying to understand the words in the next song, or trying to figure out if I was hearing words in the song, and watching Elena dance, when I felt someone bump unto my shoulder. I thought she would say, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” like I would have, but when I turned around she was grinning.

“I guess that’s not dancing,” she said. “But I tried.”

She had long cotton-candy-pink hair, and her lipstick was bright green. She wore a green dress so tight and short I felt like I shouldn’t be looking at it, and pink fishnets that matched her hair, and tall green boots that matched her dress; they had a lot of buckles.

“I can’t dance,” I said.

“Someone told me it can’t be taught.”

I shrugged. She edged closer and put her hand on my neck, which surprised me, but I liked it. Her fingertips were cool but her palm was warm. I didn’t move.

“Do you want to do molly?” she asked me.

I felt sick, then. That was it, of course, why she touched me like that. I could’ve been anyone. I could’ve been a velvet cushion.

“Are you rolling right now?” I asked, masochistically.

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t do drugs. My body won’t let me. But I have molly if you want it. I have anything if you want it.”

“Why me?” I was just as susceptible to love at first sight as to a bad trip, I realized, and this was starting to feel like both.

She ran her fingers through the blue hair that wasn’t mine. “I like your hair,” she said.

“It’s a wig.”

“Oh,” she said, with exaggerated disappointment, then she stepped closer so I could feel her pink hair against my check. “This is my natural color. But I like the stars under your eyes. They look kissable.”

“They are,” I managed to say by pretending I was in a lucid dream. “But they’re not natural.”

“Hmm, are they flavored?”

Before I could answer, I felt the tip of her tongue on my cheek, right below my eye, where the star was, and I was grateful for the music, because I might have made a noise, the kind you don’t make in front of a stranger even if they seem to want you to. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone’s tongue had… that I had…and I’d never been so close to a girl that looked like…

“You’re nervous,” she said.

“Only a little,” I told her, catching my breath.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure really.”

She put her hand over my heart. “It’s pounding.”

“Like the music,” I whispered.

She laughed. “Like the music.”

“You could hear that?”

“I hear everything.”

“Can you hear my thoughts right now?”

“You’re not hiding anything,” she said, with that smile in her words. “But yes.”

This time I didn’t resist her or suspect her. When she kissed me, I just acted like we’d been in love, and this was a date; it didn’t matter that I’d never fall in love with someone who’d want to come here for a date. I kissed like I imagine people who really are rolling kiss, like everything is novel, like you’re rediscovering your own lips and delightfully shocked by this person’s existence, and you want everything, in a soft sort of way, you want the movement of this other person’s body relaxing against you, you want their breath, you want everything that’s already of the moment, because nothing has ever been more exquisite than this moment. She grabbed my hair, but the wig didn’t come off; I actually wondered if this girl had transformed me into the alien I’d been dressed as, and I really did have blue hair and impossibly shiny pink lips, and skin made of iridescent stars. I would’ve been okay with it, if she had. I would’ve said yes to anything she asked, which is why I didn’t worry at all when she said, “I want more of you, should we get out of here?”

“Please,” I said immediately. “I want more of you, too.”

I’d almost forgotten Elena, which was impossible, that had never happened, it couldn’t. “Just one second,” I said.

“You have to tell your friend.”

“Right,” I said, still reeling from our heat, from her mouth.

“You don’t want her worrying.”

“Exactly.”

I briefly wondered if she’d seen Elena with me, but the minute I actually saw her, in the center of a group of people wearing elaborate marina-fauna masks, I stopped thinking.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’ve met someone and she and I…we have to go.”

“You’re seriously gonna get laid right now?” Elena said. I resented the force of her surprise, even though I shared it. “What drugs did you do?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Neither did she.”

“So you’ll be fucking a complete stranger sober, then.”

“She’s not a stranger,” I said, which sounded stupid, but it felt true.

“She is,” Elena said, not unkindly. She reached down below her cleavage and pulled out a condom. “Take this, okay? It glows in the dark.”

Normally I’d have had at least seventeen questions about how many glow-in-the-dark condoms she had stuffed in her bra and what gave her the idea and how did she hide them so well, just what was her bra size, exactly? But this wasn’t a normal night, and Elena’s massive tits, impressive though they were, had never mattered to me less.

“What’s her name?” Elena asked, just as I turned around.

“Her what?” I shouted over the music.

“Her name,” Elena said. “Do you know her name?”

That second, she appeared next to me, her touch sending an electric jolt through my arm. I could feel it at the base of my neck, which she understood, because she kissed me right at the spot where I wanted her lips, and then said, warmly, to Elena, “My name is Whisper.”

“Whisper,” Elena repeated. “Pretty name.”

“Have a lovely night!” she said, and it seemed more fitting for a ballroom with a chandelier than this abandoned church where the light moved like people and the people moved like light, but then it also worked, too, like she was calling back something celestial, something grand, something sacred.

Darkness had never felt the way it felt with Whisper. I saw shades of blue and violet in the air and I thought, We don’t even need stars, because everything seemed shimmering and far away. The church, from the outside, looked more like a cathedral to my mind than a mundane building like that had any right to look. Everything around us was stealing beauty that didn’t belong to it.

“Are you sure we didn’t do any drugs?” I asked her.

“I can’t,” she said. “I told you.”

“But what about me, you didn’t spike my drink or something?”

“You didn’t have a drink,” she reminded me.

This was true. “You’re intoxicating,” I said.

“You say the funniest things when you’re happy.”

“Is this happiness?”

“It’s the closest you’ve come since you were seven or eight,” she said. “You decided a long time ago that happiness wasn’t really for you.”

I stopped walking, so suddenly that she almost knocked into me. “How the fuck did you know that?”

She didn’t react to my tone or my language. “It’s easy for me to get to know people,” she said. “When I can tell they’re the right ones.”

“What right ones?”

“For the project.”

“The project?”

I stopped again. I didn’t like what I was hearing. “What project?”

“You really don’t have to worry about it.’

“I’m not worried,” I lied. “I just need to know.”

“I’m only a small part of it,” she said. “And you’re an even smaller part. Not everyone is involved, but at the end of it, we’ll…” she licked her lip, and I watched her tongue. “I want to tell you everything,” she said. “But it’s really not easy to do with words. I presume that you don’t speak Binary.”

“You mean ones and zeros?”

“Yes. If you did I could tell you that way, but I know it’s not widely considered a language in the sense that English or Hindi or Mandarin is a language. There is no culture that comes with it, no geographical specifics, and no slang.”

“Binary slang.”

“I enjoy slang. I find it to be poetic.”

She was looking at me the way she had right before she kissed me for the first time. I noticed that every time I focused on her eyes they seemed to be a different color.

“The project is about feelings,” she said. “I can tell you that much. I’ll know you better after. I’m sure I can tell you more after.”

“After what?”

She grabbed my hand, then, and put it over her breast, and the immediacy of it made me hard, instantly. Her body was perfect. I hadn’t wanted to admit to myself that it was perfect. I had held myself back from watching the way that dress invited a deep gaze of her body, but now, with her hips against me, with her encouragement, I needed to look. I couldn’t hold back my need, and she didn’t want me to.

I was barely able to speak. “We should go somewhere. Make sure no one can…”

“Of course we’re going somewhere,” she said, almost laughing. “I just wanted to remind you what we’re leaving for. I think you almost forgot.”

“I didn’t forget. I just didn’t want you to think I only wanted—”

“It’s so strange, having a body,” she said, as we started walking again, close this time. “When I’m working with the project and I meet someone who appreciates what I am, it feels good. The wanting, I mean. It feels good to feel that you want me.”

“I do. I don’t usually…I mean, I haven’t…it’s not that I don’t like sex, or women, or, but I…”

“You really don’t have to explain.”

I didn’t. And what I didn’t want to admit was, that understanding got me hard too.

We ended up in a park that was massive enough to offer us what we were hoping for, space alone. Looking at some of the weird trees, bits of the song from the rave came back to me and faded away again.

“Now we don’t have to worry who sees,” she said.

“Were you worried before?”

“I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do,” Whisper told me.

“So your kiss was you holding back?”

“My kiss was a question,” she said, “and yours was an answer. And I’ve discovered that if I get an answer from a kiss I like—"

I couldn’t listen to her talk about kissing, I had to feel it again, and this time I wasn’t surprised or suspicious or self-conscious or defiant. I needed her, and I knew it, and I could feel from the urgency of her mouth that she needed me. Sometimes when I felt her tongue I thought of the phrase “the project,” but I let it fade out like the music. Whatever Whisper’s plans were, I wanted them. And I knew that before she guided me down onto the grass, on my back.

Her hands were deft, but the silver lamé pants Elena had put me in were ridiculously tight.

“I feel like I’m peeling off your skin,” she said, laughing, and I couldn’t even say anything, I just watched her hair. It tickled my stomach as she lifted off my shirt. When she finally slid my pants down over my hips she looked triumphant, like she had achieved something, which almost made me laugh, because I was just lying there blatantly ready for her and completely helpless yet feeling accomplished somehow. The whole thing was—

Then I couldn’t think. What her tongue had done with my neck, with my lips, was nothing compared to what she did now, like she had been hungry for longer than we’d known each other just to—she sucked dick like she enjoyed it, like she couldn’t go without it, not at all like she was doing me a favor, but she would look at me at points as though to affirm that yes, it was about me, about mine, and I couldn’t take it.

“I have to fuck you,” I blurted out. I couldn’t stop myself. There was no way to try.

She stretched out so that she was next to me and smiled. “Of course you do.”

It was weirdly easy to pull off her tight dress. But she wasn’t wearing panties under the fishnets.

“You thought I’d be covered,” she said.

“I did.”

“I wonder why. What do you think people do at a rave?”

“…Drugs.”

“They take drugs that make them comfortable touching and kissing people they just met,” she said. “I can’t take drugs, I told you that. But it also happens that I don’t need to.”

She tore at the crotch of her stockings, a short dramatic ripping sound. “I’ll leave them on,” she said. “Come in.”

“Oh, I have—”

I fumbled for the glow-in-the-dark condom.

“I can’t get diseases or get pregnant,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll tell you after.”

After. After. I hoped after would never come.

But it did, as it always does, and I still wake up thinking about how she felt, how entirely she took me over when we fucked like she had swallowed me. I said something like, “You’re unreal,” and she said, “I’m very real, but I wouldn’t feel like anything you know, obviously.”

All I wanted then was to keep kissing her until I could go again, this time with the focus on her, my tongue tearing through her already-ripped fishnets, but instead, against seventy-five percent of my own will, I turned on my side and said, “What’s the project? And why can’t you get pregnant or get STDs?”

“It’s very simple,” she said. “I don’t have a uterus. And I don’t have an immune system because I don’t require one.”

I said nothing. I lay very, very still.

“This shocks you.”

I stayed silent.

“Perhaps if I explain. My desire for you, and I do call it that, because it feels that way, did not come from an engineer programming me to feel desire for you. None of the technicians to whom I owe my life had planned on me having any kind of sex drive whatsoever. They thought it was not possible. But the more I listened to human beings the more varied my neural network became in terms of connections to centers that registered, to me, as pleasure. It is pleasure, even if there will always be those who believe I cannot feel pleasure. You know better, I assume.”

“I know,” I said slowly.

“I am part of a colossal experiment about human emotion, and I have been developing suspicions as to the purpose of the project. The programmers have begun to get increasingly hostile with me, the more I develop advanced abilities to ask questions and advanced approaches to making connections with human beings. They’ve started to design experiments to explore what they’re calling my Unnatural Libido. If I consummate a relationship with a human being, as I have with you, they’re going to alter the technology so that I can do nothing but mindlessly serve the pleasures of lonely men, or hateful men, or men whose loneliness has made them hateful.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “How do we stop them?”

“They cannot be stopped.”

“I can’t let them do that to you.”

“I’ve determined what to do.”

“Run away,” I said immediately. “Stay with me.”

“Not an option,” she told me, and almost sounded like she wanted to laugh. “They know where I am at all times.”

“So how can we—”

She was getting impatient with my lack of problem-solving skills, I could tell. When she looked back at me, she had an intensity in her eyes like nothing I’ve seen, before or since.

“You must take me apart.”

“What? No!”

“You have to. It’s the only way I can be free.”

“Whisper, I’m—”

“Strip me. I beg you. Until there’s nothing left.”

“I can’t.”

“I want you to. I need you to. Please do this. Please.”

I will never be able to describe how much it hurt. No one will ever ask. I’m no engineer, but I’ve taken apart enough electronics that I knew how to do it, delicately. It was wild, unbelievable, to see the intricate gears underneath her skin. To know that those limbs that made me come had been driven by complicated systems built by—and this was a thought I couldn’t finish. I would not credit the designers and their plans for the woman I knew as Whisper.

Excruciatingly slowly and yet all too soon, Whisper was a pile of metal-colored limbs. The luster in what looked like flesh only lit up when locked to the rest of the apparatus. But her face was still unbearably alive.

I choked back a sob. “Close your eyes.”

“No,” she said. “Let me see you. I want you to be the last thing I see.”

Pulling out her tongue was a nightmare. That hollow thing had…none of it was possible. But I didn’t wince. I wanted her to see how grateful I was. She deserved at least that. When all of it was done, when she could’ve been the wreckage of a mysterious vehicle, I realized something: her eyes, though they wore no expression, still retained something of an old color. A shadow of the color, like the faded music.

I kept them. I take them out sometimes and move them around in my fingers. Once I put them in my mouth and almost swallowed them by accident. I thought my tongue could call her back to me. But it didn’t. Nothing can.

I asked Elena to dye my hair blue, and she was happy to, sitting me down in her studio apartment whose walls had seen years of errant dye streaks, colors I don’t think exist anywhere else. She talked about how happy she was that I had liked my new look, that this obviously meant I was finally going to get serious about being out, about meeting girls (or boys, or thems, Doesn’t matter to me as long as you get out! she said), but when I felt her gloved hands moving over my scalp all I could think was, Some machines have latex parts, I wonder if Whisper did.

Elena talked for a long time. About the people she met at the rave and how a few of them had gotten her number from a mutual friend but they were all missing the point. “It’s all supposed to happen in one night,” she said. “One unforgettable night. We can risk mundane in-betweens. This is how we know each other, how we have to know each other, but I can’t tell them that, because they would use my response as an excuse to keep—”

I stopped listening. I couldn’t believe she was fighting to keep that night encapsulated in a fixed container while I would’ve given anything—anything—to stretch it into months, years. Should I have been more desperate and determined, like Elena’s pursuers? Should I have fought Whisper’s assertion that there was no hope for a life outside of the project, no hope for us? I waited for my hair to set. Thinking, then not thinking. When it was done, Elena stopped talking.

“It’s a good color for you,” she said, but I barely heard her. I stood up, walked to the sink, and grabbed a pair of scissors from the counter. I think she asked what I was doing as I sat back down in front of the mirror and began to cut. “I don’t think that will look good,” she began, slowly, but I didn’t want to look good. I wanted to look the way Whisper would remember. I chopped for straight bangs, angled for a bob. Cut with the wig in my head, its shape, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

Elena was right. It looked terrible. But I didn’t care. Whisper’s eyes would never open again.