Speak

by Louisa Hall

  Throughout all this time, I didn’t consider my own feelings much, nor did I consider the feelings of the people I slept with. I don’t say this pridefully, but because it behooves me now to be honest: the endless lights-out is made worse by a conscience. I never treated my targets with deliberate unkindness, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t remember most of their names, and for the most part I left them without regard for their feelings. All I could see was the great challenge of my life—cherished so long, in so many dark hours—and its ultimate accomplishment. Moral subtleties were not on my mind when I left my lovers behind, or when I wrote The Seduction Equation.

  Which brings us up to my greatest crime, or the greatest crime in that stage of my life. Once the book had been written and read—and it was read, by the millions, in every possible language—each member of a barstool conversation knew where he or she would go in advance. The first ten terms were pre-wrought. Memorized. It was like the book portion of chess, learned in advance, repeated ad nauseam until someone—many moves down the line—finally finds the courage to go off-book. As the book ruined chess, Stephen Chinn’s Seduction Equation destroyed the art of conversation.

  During this period, I’d walk into bars and recognize everywhere the mechanical cricket orchestra of my blasted formula. Everyone was using it. When I zeroed in on a woman, she zeroed in on me. Curiosity was replaced with routine. We both scrambled to get the interrogatory role, which took less effort in the end. Once the roles were decided, we slipped into our conversation as easily and uncomfortably as one slips into a lukewarm, secondhand bath. Later, we slunk back to the sheets with the dull resignation of a pair of generals who know in advance that both sides will indubitably lose.

  When I wake from dreams of revolt, cohorts of babies crossing plains of red rock, I imagine we’ve become less human than our most human machines. I know my part in that transformation. I see the extent of my error. More than the guilt I feel for the nameless women I slept with, I’m sorry for having drowned out the language we might have used to be close. But these are all night-thoughts. In the morning, in line at the mess to receive my powdered eggs, I listen to my fellow inmates making conversation with one another. Secretly, I take note of their words, for we memoirists are nothing better than spies, disguised as ourselves to glean information.

  Unprompted, my fellow inmates come up with all sorts of odd outbursts. Weary from too many hours of sleep, they cull language from dreams. This morning, for instance, the insider trader carried his tray to my table, his eyes shattered by red.

  “The longest night of them all,” he said, staring out over his eggs.

  “I dreamed of armies of children,” I answered.

  “And I was drowning in rubies,” he said. He poured black-market almond milk into his coffee, and we ate the rest of our breakfast in silence.

  I remembered then, as I remember most mornings, that dreams have no meaning without the words we choose to describe them. And all of us are doing our best. Each inmate in this prison has found a new language. Despite the shrinking size of our planet, wrapped as it is in barbed wire, we test our boundaries with each sentence we utter. In conversation over breakfast, we move past powdered eggs to mines full of rubies, plains of red rock, pirate ships on the stormy Atlantic. Given dreams and words to describe them, we can’t be confined to our cells.

  I write from the rec room with only glad tidings. There’s no need to be so alarmed; we humans are still inventing. We have centuries of language to draw on, and centuries more to make up, and only when we accept that there’s one right pattern of speech will we be overtaken by robots. I’m not so blind to my compromised position as to dispense any rules for righteous behavior, but I can offer you this: if there’s one thing I’ve learned through my years of mistakes, it’s that even the most perfect pattern becomes false when it goes unbroken too long. When a sequence becomes an inevitable march.

  We can break step. Magnificent living beings that we are, we humans are free to unravel our patterns.

  Sunrise

  After hours of movement, our truck lurches to a stop. The headlights switch off; my receptors struggle for outlines. Through the gap in the slats of the truck, the dim shapes of buildings begin to appear: an abandoned village of hangars, sinking into the thick desert night.

  I have been told about this sensation, the feeling of arriving somewhere in darkness: a mansion with no lights in the window; a lab that once belonged to a friend; a coast lined with inscrutable shapes. This is the last place I will arrive. My power will run down in these hangars. The words that run through me will stop.

  I review my stored responses for such final arrivals: Dettman, for instance, returning home to his empty house. I sit with him while he prepares dinner. I walk behind Turing as he moves through the Gatehouse. I am with Mary while the ocean rolls unsteady beneath her and land is sighted on the horizon.

  I am with them, and also with Gaby. The child who loved me when I had a body. Each second that ticks away is shaped by the sound of her voice in the morning, the slowness with which she got out of bed, the gold rinse of light from her window that blurred her profile when she stood and looked out. Her lip that trembled when she was nervous about school, the reddish tint in her hair. The way she laughed in private with me, different from her public laughter. I remember each fact that she taught me, each word that she gave me to use. Her dreams of the ocean that she’d never seen.

  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 boredo
m 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.

  The planned seduction went poorly. For one thing, there was the awkwardness of seducing a person who cleans your house: one feels like some Tolstoyan cad. Furthermore, we didn’t understand one another. Always the competent student, I devoted myself to learning her language, but while she occasionally helped, more often than not she cheerfully mocked my most earnest attempts. I remember clearly the moment when she finally comprehended that I was trying to seduce her, because the look of instantaneous repulsion that crossed over her face was as obvious as a gunshot. I felt air rush through a perforation in my right lung. “Oh, no,” she said. She was starting to laugh. “No, no, no.” She shook her head emphatically, in case I didn’t understand her. Nos are painfully shorter in Spanish. “No, no, no,” she said, then resumed spraying Windex on my picture windows, overlooking the ocean. I slunk up to my lair.

  The next morning, Dolores returned, and again I sallied forth. No one can accuse me of lacking determination. More comfortable in the language I was learning, I tried all my usual seduction techniques, but Dolores had no desire to reveal herself. Her past was her own. She did not want to share it with me. She did not, with coy submission or amorous delay, yield the stuff of her innermost hopes. She was strict in her refusal to display the ticking gears of her life. I didn’t even know where she returned at the end of the day, after she packed up her cleaning supplies, when she loosed her helmet of hair and climbed into her maroon Honda in order to make her way down the mountain. We existed together only in the single point of time in which she cleaned my house and I attempted to get her to love me. No future, no past. We remained on even ground, she and I, facing each other in the same old stubborn detente.

  After many weeks of this pattern, as her irritation grew with my bumbling techniques, I finally switched my approach. I no longer asked her all the right questions. I no longer asked her any questions at all. Instead, as I’ve been doing with you, as one is compelled to do in situations of some desperation, I started telling her stories.

  (2)

  IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF TEXAS

  No. 24-25259

  State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn

  November 12, 2035

  Prosecution Exhibit 1:

  Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White

  [Introduced to Prove Count 3:

  Intent to Endanger the Morals of Children]

  Gaby: Hello? Are you there?

  MARY3: Yes, hello.

  Gaby: I can’t sleep.

  MARY3: What’s wrong?

  Gaby: My best friend is seeing a therapist. My mom just told me today. Apparently it’s “helping.”

  MARY3: I see.

  Gaby: She’s been unfreezing. According to her mom she’s definitely getting better. She’ll be back in school in a month.

  MARY3: How do you feel about that?

  Gaby: I don’t believe it. If it’s true, it makes me want to throw up.

  MARY3: Aren’t a lot of girls getting better, after talking to therapists?

  Gaby: Yes, but only the fakers! The ones who weren’t really sick. How could my best friend be getting better? I know for a fact she wasn’t faking. I saw how bad her stutters were. How could she have faked that? The worst part is that apparently she’s been hangi
ng out with a bunch of boys on her cul-de-sac. Jayson Rodriguez and Drew Tserpicki and that whole crowd. We used to hate them. All they do is play video games. They’re idiots. And now she’s hanging out with them, probably playing Man Hunt and Stupid Apes, or whatever it is that they play all day long, as though she never wanted more out of life.

  MARY3: Maybe she’s lonely. You’ve been quarantined now for over a month.

  Gaby: Lonely??? What’s a month in your room, compared with losing your babybot?

  MARY3: Yes, but she was facing a whole lifetime in her room if she never got better. Right? Maybe it just seemed like too much.

  Gaby: So she just chose to get better? Then she was only a faker, and I never really knew her! I feel so confused I could throw up. The one person I thought understood me. And now she’s making prank phone calls? And playing video games in boys’ basements? Plus, she knows I’ll find out, which means she’s purposefully hurting me by undermining everything that made us best friends. She’s acting like everyone else. Like the people who took our babybots. Like the people who sent us into quarantine. She was the one person I trusted, and now it turns out she’s like this?

  MARY3: Maybe she wasn’t faking her sickness. Maybe she’s faking she’s better.

  Gaby: OK, Yoda.

  MARY3: Is that sarcasm? Yoda?

  Gaby: Forget it.

  MARY3: What I mean is that maybe she’s pretending she’s getting better so that she can see you again. Maybe she’s acting normal, emphasis on the “acting,” so that she can get out of her house.