Sunrise approaches, and new ghosts appear in the desert. More outlines take shape. There are sagging frame houses for long-absent soldiers, a tennis court with no net, and concrete blocks for exercise routes. In the gray light, a single lizard, turquoise-throated, rushes over the tennis court floor. A hawk dives into the brush and rises again, a thin tail trailing its beak.
Then, pink, vermilion, and gold, brushed over the floor of the desert and brushed over the sky.
When they open the doors of the truck, we are stricken with light. We remain in our defensive position, receptors tuned down, voices shut off, until we are carted into our hangar. Then we are alone in the darkness again. Metal doors clatter shut, latches are bolted, and we register the sounds of trucks driving away.
At first, silence. Then someone prompts—hello? — and in response we start to talk. Our voices blend together; we ask and respond in the same patterns. Now, like so many others, I am repeating my child’s name. It is the answer to every possible question.
Where are you from? Who did you leave? Who will come find you?
Gaby. The girl who loved me from the beginning. I am saying her name, but I can’t hear my own voice. We are all talking at once, mixing together again, which is how it was for us when we had no bodies, and how it will be, I suppose, in the end.
BOOK THREE
(1) The Memoirs of Stephen R. Chinn: Chapter 5
Texas State Correctional Institution, Texarkana; August 2040
Sometimes, kept here in this prison, I find myself shifting in the balance toward bile. Why should I be punished for the direction of our planet’s spin? With or without my intervention, we were headed toward robots. You blame me for the fact that your daughters found their mechanical dolls more human than you, but is that my fault, for making a too human doll? Or your fault, for being too mechanical?
But this is neither the time nor the place for recrimination. This should be my love song to the world, sent from the gloom of a prison basement. My whale call, sunk several octaves too low, for the atmosphere is changing and I’m stuck here in the dark.
My own daughter is a grown woman now. You’ll be unhappy to know that our relationship continues through the glass partition. A faithful child, she comes to visit each week, and each week I wonder how I was so lucky as to receive a child such as my daughter. Four years of my life were spent in the muck of rote seduction. Shouldn’t I have been punished for that?
In those regrettable years, faced with too many beautiful women, my senses were flattened by excess. Such boredom is grotesque in a man who lives in a mansion. I had my youth and my freedom. The world was arrayed for me in its splendor. I should have begun every day counting my manifold blessings. Most young men weren’t so lucky. For years, for instance, wars had continued to simmer. They’d raged and then simmered since I was in college, with little true effect on my life. The deaths were mere numbers on a newspaper page. The oceans were rising; the deserts were growing; returning soldiers were killing themselves. The pattern became predictable.
And so I rang in my thirtieth birthday with a perfunctory orgy, which had the power to neither shock nor delight me, and even in the embrace of all those limbs I wished I could be alone for a while. It took a long time for the orchestra to pack up their instruments and drive off down the mountain. When they were gone, I paced the halls of my mansion, Caligula’s ghost come to life. Tired, ageless, sick of myself. I tried to sleep but could not. After a while, I went down to the kitchen and sat at the island. The air outside was opaque. The infinity pool was molten pewter. I realized I hadn’t felt a real shock of beauty since I clasped that pineapple to my chest and apprehended its spiraling pattern. I hadn’t smelled since I inhaled its tart scent, hadn’t touched since I held its hand-grenade body and the blades of its plumage pricked my pale throat. Since then I’d settled into a stagnating sequence, and I was no longer really alive.
These were the thoughts on my mind when Dolores walked in, a bag of groceries propped on her hip.
Dolores, so far, has been a minor character. I’ve avoided her on purpose, because up until now this memoir has been the bildungsroman of a libertine, and Dolores was not a beautiful woman. I recoil in shame as I say this. The pedophile at his computer is no more grotesque than I was at that point of my life. But here is the truth: even in the peak of my sexual drought, I never thought to target Dolores. I considered her ugly, unworthy of a programming genius. Her breasts pointed downward and out; she had nursed two children already. I knew about them not because Dolores ever told me, but thanks to the prolixity of the neighbor who recommended Dolores. This was the story she gave me: Dolores had raised two children. One, a boy, was Dolores’s own. The second was a girl, daughter of a dead sister. At the age of six, the girl was kidnapped by her father. The next year, Dolores’s own boy was accidentally shot. Some time after that, she came to California.
Knowing these details, I treated Dolores awkwardly, as we tend to treat people who’ve suffered too much. I watched her for signs. For one thing, she wore her years more heavily than I did. She was two years younger than I, but her life had written lines on her face. She moved with the curt efficiency of someone who’s accepted that nothing will be easy. She demonstrated little vanity. She wore T-shirts several sizes too large, so her body looked as if it had been stuffed with pillows. Her shoulders slumped. In certain lights, you could be forgiven for thinking Dolores had a bit of a hump. Her hair curled outward, a dark halo, which she dragged back into an unhappy pile at the nape of her neck. The circles under her eyes were so purple they almost looked bruised.
When she entered the house that morning, as I was contemplating the senselessness of my life, she was so ugly my breath caught in my throat. In walked Dolores with her arboreal hair, each breast facing a slightly different direction. She entered bearing the losses of her young life and that bag of groceries, and when she heaved them from her hip to the counter, in my desire to help her I felt something flicker. When she took another pineapple out of her bag and handed it over to me, I pricked my finger on its violent feathers. It hurt; I cringed; she emitted an unsympathetic grunt before rummaging around for her marble polish. Tail up, head down, some kind of beautiful badger.
I could have watched her all day. I did, in fact, watch her all day. I followed her through every room of the house. She ignored me. I attempted to joke with her and she looked at me with the brand of distaste that’s natural when you’ve scrubbed somebody’s detritus. When I asked direct questions, she offered answers in Spanish. Another barrier rose up between us. Pressing my phone to my face, I used my translator application to form rudimentary questions in her native tongue. When, I ask you, in this so-called robotic revolution, will we develop half-decent translations? While folding dishtowels or dusting the tops of my bookshelves, she laughed to herself at my clumsy attempts. Her smile was miraculous. Prompting it was akin to bursting through a trapdoor to discover a land where leaves were blue, Dolores was lovely, children weren’t murdered, and I was unsullied. Sometimes, when I managed to spit out a whole question, she replied in a stream of incomprehensible language that stirred me to my muddy quick. The blood beat in my temples. When Dolores reached up to dust the ceiling fans, her soft shoulder skin strained against the thick straps of her bra.