"Yes, that’s true," I say.
Manuela returns for my bath. Now that I know the truth, I do feel some embarrassment. But I let her undress me and carry me into the tub, her movements as steady and gentle as ever. "Thank you," I say.
"You are welcome." The mechanical voice is silent a while. "Would you like me to read to you?"
I look into the cameras. The diaphragms open and close, slowly, like a blink.
(2011)
HI HO CHERRY-O
Becky Hagenston
Becky Hagenston grew up in Maryland and attended Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1989. She received her Masters in English from New Mexico State University in 1997 and her MFA from the University of Arizona in 2000. She teaches creative writing at Mississippi State University, where she also serves as faculty editor and advisor to Jabberwock Review, a literary journal. She has written three story collections: A Gram of Mars (1998), Strange Weather (2010) and Scavengers (2016). Her stories have been chosen twice for an O. Henry Award.
I’ve just asked Wendell to access data pertaining to twentieth century board games when he says, "Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour."
"Excuse me?" I say. Wendell has been my research assistant for six months. He lives with my husband and me, has his own workspace in a corner of the dining room. He’s a new brand of Service Robot my university recently acquired. He accesses other remote robots to help me retrieve data. He’s bright red, about four feet tall, and has a head that looks like two old fashioned blow dryers put side-by-side. He has round green eyes that blink. Until now, he hasn’t said anything more to me than, "Right away," or "You bet."
"Ha, ha," I say, because I’m guessing this is a joke. Not that I’ve ever heard him joke.
"There’s twine in the kitchen drawer," Wendell says. He has an Australian accent, but I could have made him sound French or Irish, or like a small Cockney child. "Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour, and then I’ll access that data."
"I can’t do that," I tell him. "Seriously."
He doesn’t say anything. I ask him again about his board game data and he still doesn’t say anything. "Are you okay, Wendell?" I ask.
"There’s twine in the kitchen drawer," Wendell repeats. "Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour, and then I’ll access that data." He sounds so cheerful and sure of himself.
So I do it. I feel a little bit weird, but maybe it has something to do with his electrical system. I figure Wendell knows what’s best for himself. I don’t really know how these robots work. I’m more of a historian. When I take him out of the closet an hour later and untie him, he says, "I’ve sent that data to your workstation," and I say, "Thanks, Wendell."
When my husband gets home from work, I tell him about Wendell asking me to tie him up. He looks horrified. "You didn’t, did you?"
"Of course not," I lie. "But—he’s a robot. He—it—can’t feel. It’s just programmed that way." This is what I told myself as I wrapped the twine around his metal body and rolled him into the closet.
"You should get a replacement."
"But Wendell’s already downloaded so much already. It’s too much trouble to find someone new at this point."
My husband says, "Well, keep an eye on him. It could be some kind of malfunction."
"Oh, I will," I tell him.
The next day, Wendell rolls into my office and starts working right away. He’s found commercials of children playing games called Lite Brite and Shoots and Ladders and Hi Ho Cherry-O. The children in these commercials are very white and dimpled and mostly wear stripes, and they shout a lot. They are very, very happy children. My research involves childhood in the twentieth century which, even though it wasn’t that long ago, is difficult because so much was deleted or destroyed in fires and floods. I’ve done some interviews at old folks’ homes. I’ve done some memory scans. What’s confusing is that most of what Wendell is finding doesn’t necessarily collaborate with the memory scans.
My husband works as counselor at a Home for the Disembodied, so he can commute remotely from the Virtual Station in our bedroom. We’ve talked about getting a larger apartment, but this works for now. He stays in the bedroom and I stay out here with Wendell, and then we have dinner together.
I thank Wendell for finding those commercials, but when I ask if he’s found anything about something called Battleship (which came up in the memory scans), he says, "I believe I can find that information. But first, scrape me with a knife hard enough to leave a mark."
"I can’t damage you," I tell him. "I won’t get my deposit back."
"Then put your hands around my neck and squeeze as hard as you can."
He waits. I wait. I say, "Who programmed you?"
"I’m programmed to work for you," he says, in his cheerful Australian accent. "I am at your disposal. I am here to make your life easier and assist with your research. This can go much more quickly if you please do what I ask."
So I do. When he says, "You’re not squeezing as hard as you can," I squeeze harder. He doesn’t so much have a neck as a plastic cylinder but I feel it getting warmer as I squeeze and when he says, "Okay, that was great, you can stop now," I keep squeezing a little bit longer.
At dinner my husband starts to say something and then stops himself. I know this is because his other family came to visit him at the Home for the Disembodied. He has a wife who’s an actress and triplet sons, aged seven. They’re always aged seven, which he says he finds somewhat frustrating—how there’s only so much you can do with them, how you can never hope they’ll turn out to be more than they are. But then he has the opposite problem with his actress-wife, whom he doesn’t recognize from day to day. Finally I told him I was sick of hearing about his other family. Even though he explained that he was with them because he felt sorry for them, and that he and the actress-wife hardly ever had sex anymore, we agreed not to speak of them.
"Well, what is it?" I ask at last. "Go ahead and tell me."
"I know you don’t like to hear about them," he says, but I make a rollie-motion with my hand that is meant to convey get on with it. "The triplets and I shot some hoops is all," he says. "And they were good. And they got better as they played. It was something." He forks some pasta into his mouth. "I think I can maybe get them on a team," he says, with his mouth full and muffled. "Coach them."
"Huh," I say.
"How was your day?" he asks.
"It was the usual," I tell him.
My husband and I have talked about having children, either virtual or real. We have polite, reasonable conversations about how we should have sex again sometime but then we just crawl into bed and lie next to each other until we fall asleep. But maybe someday, when we’re sixty, we might try for a child. Except the world is getting smaller. Most things disappear: cities, glaciers, mountains, civilizations. I don’t want to raise children in a Home for the Disembodied. I want them here, in the flesh, but my husband says that’s too dangerous, he doesn’t have the stomach for it. I wonder if he would feel differently if we could produce dimpled, stripes-wearing children who roll dice and make cakes in plastic ovens and rejoice when their plastic cherries fill up their little buckets.