Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

  Even now there was a lightness to Rhett, a buzz, a hum, a (say it) happiness. He took sliding backward steps across the living room, a quirk to his mouth. “Got a paper due tomorrow,” he said, not even making her have to ask what he was doing with his evening. And in return, she did not remark that she’d never seen him so pleased about homework, and later when she heard the murmur of his voice from behind his closed door, she did not allow herself to pause and listen. Instead, she sat on the sofa and watched the terrarium for small stirrings between the leaves.

  * * *

  —

  THE COMING WEEKEND WAS ELLIOT’S. Pearl dropped a kiss on the top of Rhett’s head before she left for work; he would be at his father’s when she returned. Rhett was already up and sitting in front of his screen, still in his pajamas. The college brochures had moved from the hallway table to the corner of his desk, but Pearl didn’t make mention of this. Rhett’s head smelled faintly of their laundry detergent, from his pillowcase, the familiar scent altered slightly by the oils of his hair. She lingered; he hadn’t yet shrugged her hand off of his shoulder.

  “I’ll get to take the car out, right?” he asked.

  “‘Out’?”

  “You know. With friends.”

  “Maybe with a friend.”

  “Okay. One friend.”

  “Josiah?” she asked.

  “Josiah. Sure.”

  She squeezed Rhett’s shoulder. “And you have to get your license first.”

  “Check.”

  She thought of the asterisk again, a blot, a birthmark, a cancer on the otherwise pure screen of her mind. It could be nothing, the item the star stood for. It could be a minor infraction. Except . . . the spider, the mice.

  “And the city is busy,” she went on. “Lots of pedestrians. We’ll have to practice looking out for them.”

  Rhett craned up at her and said, with a whiff of accusation, “You think I’m going to hit somebody!”

  “Accidents—”

  “—happen?” He cut her off.

  “They do, though.”

  * * *

  —

  THIS TIME, Carter wasn’t in the break room. Pearl found him in the smaller of the second-floor meeting rooms, which was in the middle of a redecoration. The table and chairs had been taken out and the carpet yanked up. Carter was sitting on the padding next to a mound of carpet swatches, his screen balanced upon his knees.

  “She’s back,” he said, not even glancing up. “Still stargazing?”

  Pearl stepped inside the room and leaned against the wall just next to the doorway. “I was wondering if you could get me . . .” She pressed her lips together, suddenly unsure.

  “What?”

  “The list.”

  “List?”

  “The one they make and give the coders. The phrases to redact.”

  “Oh. That. It’s more like a book than a list.”

  “The book then.”

  He set his screen down on the floor. “It’s actually a file.”

  “Whatever it is, could you get it?”

  “Me?”

  “I thought you might have access, since . . .” She didn’t want to say the rest, Since you used to be my boss.

  Carter began piling the carpet swatches into small stacks. “I could get it.”

  Pearl closed her eyes, trying to quell her irritation. “Will you get it?”

  “I’m not supposed to. Restricted info. Restricted to”—his lip curled—“management.”

  “Oh. Okay. I under—”

  “But I’ll get it for you.” He arranged the swatches around himself like tiny battlements. “Because . . . fuck ’em.” His eyes flashed to hers.

  Pearl paused, then echoed, “Fuck ’em.”

  He nodded in satisfaction and put another carpet swatch on the stack.

  She wondered if he actually would get the file for her. He was more than a little pathetic, hiding out in a room that stank of carpet glue, his chin sinking into his neck fat, his haircut expensive and tacky. Surely he hated her for her part in his demotion. He’d probably give her the file and then report that she had it. She’d be fired.

  And if he did? Pearl found she didn’t care, not as long as she got the file first. It was powerful and painful both, this realization that she would do whatever was necessary to get what she needed. It was like sprouting wickedly sharp claws that then cut into your palms each time you made a fist.

  “I could take the P&Ps,” she said, “in exchange.”

  Carter raised his head slowly, his eyes slits. “Do you want to give me something in exchange?”

  “Um. No. Not really.”

  “Then why are you offering?”

  “Because I thought you’d expect it.”

  He lifted his palms in the air, showing them to her.

  “Hey,” he said. “Why can’t I just be a good guy?”

  * * *

  —

  THE LIZARD WAS TORPID. Pearl could barely see it beneath its branches, and from what she could see, its scales and eyes were dull. She looked up the symptoms on her screen and discovered that she and Rhett had been feeding it too many mice. The lizard needed a balance of mice and insects. Pearl had a vague memory of the salesguy telling her precisely this. She returned to the pet store and came back with a bag of colorless crickets, a few of which she shook into the terrarium, where they flitted and twinkled like antennaed confetti. The lizard appeared wholly uninterested.

  Pearl took out her Apricity machine, called up Rhett’s contentment report, and eyed the star. She felt as if her entire life had been denoted with an asterisk, the instructions simple enough until you scanned down to the bottom of the page and found the long list of exceptions and addendums.

  Rhett had been such a good boy, such a sweet boy, glimmering eyes and a puckish tuft of hair atop his head. He’d been the kind of child even complete strangers had doted on, and not out of politeness. It had been just the two of them at home for the first six years of his life, before he started school and Pearl started work at Apricity. Pearl and Rhett. Mother and son. Devotee and small god. Pearl couldn’t run an errand without being stopped every few steps by some new person with the same flat toothy smile as the last one. Can I say hi to the baby? This had continued as Rhett entered elementary school, where more than one teacher had leaned across the desk during parent conferences to confide in a phlegmy whisper, Your son is my favorite in the class. Elliot and Pearl routinely discussed how they would need to counterbalance this glut of adulation to keep Rhett from growing up to be an egoist.

  “It’s not like he’s something we made,” Elliot once marveled. “It’s like he’s something that was visited upon us. Like freak weather.”

  And like weather, Rhett had changed. His sudden sullenness could be explained away as typical teenage behavior, but then the withdrawal, the truancy, and finally the starvation. Inexplicable. It hadn’t been the divorce, which Elliot and Pearl had made sure was amicable, donning their mutual politeness like flak jackets. Or maybe it had been the divorce? Or maybe something at school. Or brain chemistry. Or societal messages. Bullying? Molestation?

  “Kids. You give them life so they can kill you,” Pearl’s dad had said with a chuckle one time she’d called her folks, panicked and exhausted after a day at the hospital with Rhett.

  “Dad!” she’d cried.

  “What?”

  “I’m your daughter, you know.”

  Over the years, Pearl had tried and failed to identify the cause of Rhett’s unhappiness. Always, even now, a small part of her brain was scanning and assessing, weighing and rejecting possible explanations, a machine that never ceased its calculations. Except she could now, couldn’t she? She could cease. She could stop trying to understand the cause. Because the type of poison doesn’t matter. Not if you already have the
antidote, a cold little bottle curled in your hand.

  Pearl stirred from her thoughts with the awareness that something in the room had changed. It was the chirping. Or, rather, its lack. The living room had fallen silent. Pearl looked to the terrarium. The crickets were gone.

  * * *

  —

  ON SUNDAY NIGHT, the HMS announced that both Rhett and Elliot were ascending from the lobby. Elliot didn’t usually come up when he dropped off Rhett, not because he and Pearl avoided each other, but because parking in Pearl’s neighborhood was a nightmare. Here Elliot was now, though, bustling through the door with Rhett’s duffel thrown over his shoulder, the two of them deep in an animated conversation about—Pearl decoded the jargon—a VR game. Both father and son played. It seemed that they’d been to a VRcade together over the weekend.

  Rhett broke off mid-sentence, turning to Pearl. “How’s Lady?”

  “Lady?” Pearl repeated.

  “Lady Elizabeta Báthory,” he said impatiently.

  “You mean the lizard? I thought we were calling her Báthory.”

  “‘Lady’ is prettier.”

  “Lady is fine,” Pearl said. “In fact, she’s due a mouse.”

  “Dad, come on, I’ll show you. It’s pretty sick.”

  As he passed Pearl on his way to the living room, Elliot paused to kiss her hello on what might be considered her cheek, but would be more accurately described as the corner of her mouth. Even though he’d divorced Pearl and married his mistress, Elliot needed intermittent reassurances that Pearl was still in love with him. She didn’t know what he’d do if she ever had a serious boyfriend. Probably kiss him on the corner of his mouth, too.

  Pearl watched from the doorway as Rhett got out the mice and urged Elliot to select one. Elliot’s hand hovered here and there over the open box.

  “I feel like I’m picking a chocolate,” he said.

  “All of them have the same filling,” Rhett said.

  “Yuck.”

  “What yuck? You and Val eat your steak bloody.”

  “Fair point.”

  Pearl watched, fascinated. It was a role reversal, Rhett now in Pearl’s place, urging the kill. Elliot glanced at Pearl, the reluctance in his face like ripples in a puddle. Behind him, behind the glass, Lady emerged silkily. Her head was turned to the side, but she didn’t fool Pearl; the lizard watched them all with one eye. Elliot selected his mouse, held it over the tank, and with a grimace, dropped it down. Lady tipped up her head and caught the morsel before it hit the ground. Elliot made a noise of disgust.

  “I used to feel that way, too,” Rhett said, folding down the corners of the box. “But then someone pointed out that she’s got to eat in order to live. It’s not cruelty. It’s life.”

  Had Pearl told Rhett that? She couldn’t remember doing so.

  “After that I was okay with it.” Rhett stood and turned from them, putting the box back in its place on the shelf. “I don’t want to watch her starve.”

  He didn’t say this with any particular feeling, but the sentence skewered Pearl. And it must have skewered Elliot, too, because he sought out her eyes.

  Rhett, oblivious, was already halfway out of the room. “I gotta check my classes. We played way too much VR this weekend. I did, like, zero work.”

  “You’re going to get me in trouble with your mother,” Elliot said woodenly. “Tell her I’m not to blame.”

  Rhett disappeared into the hall, calling back, “It was all Dad’s fault!”

  The second they heard his bedroom door close, Elliot rose and moved so swiftly across the room that, for a preposterous moment, Pearl thought he was going to sweep her into his arms. But he stopped an inch away, tilting over her. Elliot had a rare quality, the ability to tower over people without seeming looming or intimidating. Val called Elliot “the friendly lamppost.”

  If Elliot was a lamppost, the bulb, his face, was now aglow.

  “What?” Pearl whispered.

  “He ate dinner with us.”

  “You mean food?”

  Elliot nodded.

  “Not the horrible shake?”

  Elliot kept nodding. “A Mediterranean salad. Rice. A couple bites of lamb.”

  “Lamb? You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “The salad—?” she said, and didn’t need to ask more because Elliot knew what she wanted to hear and was already listing the ingredients.

  “Tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, onions, olives, parsley, an oil dressing.”

  A feeling rose in Pearl that was too big for her chest. She put her hands to her cheeks, then moved them to Elliot’s cheeks. He was still nodding. She kept her hands there, lifting and lowering with Elliot’s nods, until she realized she was crying. She brought her hands back to her own cheeks, pressing her tears flat.

  Elliot glanced toward Rhett’s room. “We didn’t make a big deal of it.”

  “No, no. That’s good.”

  “And he was back to the disgusting shakes the rest of the weekend.”

  “Of course.”

  “But he ate.”

  She exhaled, her breath hitching on its way out. “I’ve been trying something, and perhaps—”

  “Val says he’s in love.”

  “What?”

  Elliot nodded with new vigor. “She’s convinced of it.”

  “Did Rhett tell her that?”

  “She says she knows the signs.”

  “I’ll bet,” Pearl said, and regretted it immediately, for Elliot was already moving forward to take her hands, ready to capitalize on any sign of jealousy. And Pearl wasn’t jealous, not of young, brash, pink-haired Val, not of her marriage to Elliot, not anymore.

  “Dove,” Elliot said, charming and chiding.

  “It’s just that he doesn’t go out much,” she said. “So I don’t see how he’d have the opportunity.”

  “Maybe it’s online love.”

  “And when he does go out it’s only with Josiah.”

  Elliot raised his eyebrows. “Maybe he’s in love with Josiah.”

  Pearl plucked her hands out of his. “I don’t know where Val gets her ideas.”

  Elliot chuckled. “Yeah. Me neither.”

  Pearl looked back at the terrarium, the lizard nowhere to be seen.

  “It’s a nice thought, though, isn’t it?” Elliot said from behind her. “That after all we’ve tried, the cure was love.”

  “You’re being a romantic,” she said softly.

  “Can’t help it.” He snuck in another kiss, this time on the soft place beneath her jawbone. She resisted the urge to turn and bite him.

  * * *

  —

  PEARL DIDN’T HAVE TO SEEK OUT CARTER; this time, he found her. He caught her coming out of the bathroom and, sidling by, tried to surreptitiously press the memory tab into her hand. Pearl jerked her wrist away, startled by his grab at it, and the tab bounced across the carpet like a coin. When Pearl realized what he was trying to do—like a spy movie—she had to stifle her laughter. Besides, maybe it was like a spy movie. She didn’t know the risk he’d taken in getting the file, but she knew the repercussions if they were found in possession of it.

  “You seem to have dropped something,” Carter said, snatching up the tab and handing it to her.

  “Thank you.”

  “What is it?” he said.

  She looked around to find that they were the only ones in the hallway.

  “Just a coin,” she said, uncertain of this game.

  “Is it antique? It looks antique.” His eyes betrayed no twinkle, no smile.

  “No,” she decided to say. “It’s a regular coin. Like any other.”

  “Better put it in your pocket then,” he said.

  “Um. I will.” She slid the tab into her pocket. “Thank you for te
lling me I’d dropped it.”

  Carter half smiled, half shrugged. “No need to thank me. It’s what any decent person would do.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FILE WAS HORRIBLE. Of course it was horrible, and in all the ways you would expect. Firstly, its size. Pearl waited until she got home to open it—she didn’t want to do it at work—to find that the file was over a thousand pages of dense tiny text. She kneeled on the couch, not allowing herself to sit, and began to scroll through. The phrases themselves were horrible, too. The variety was horrible, the cruelty, the knowledge that someone had thought of each one. Horrible. Horrible. Also horrible? Knowing that Rhett’s phrase was here somewhere. Not knowing which it was.

  The file was also punishing in ways she didn’t expect. The tedium of it, and then how she became inured to it, deadened. Yes, that. Sure, that. Of course. Why not that? She started feeling strange in her head, like her thoughts were being spoken, not by her own voice, but by a faraway announcer. She breathed thinly between her teeth and was overly aware of each time she blinked. Then the HMS chimed, announcing Rhett in the lobby. Stop, she said, the thought in her own voice now.

  She made herself get up from the couch and circled the room, ending at the terrarium, but instead of bending down to peer into the glass, she reached for the little cardboard box on the shelf. She held it in her hands for a moment, then loosened its flaps. Movement from below: Lady gliding out from under the branches, eyes keen. She must have learned that the sound of the box opening meant a meal was coming. Pearl peered into the box. The mice were repulsive, a blind undulating knot of flesh. Steeling herself, she picked one out and set it in her palm, where it lay flat on its belly, its legs splayed. Then it gathered itself and began to crawl forward, nosing, and Pearl could see the little knobs where its ears would be. Below her, Lady’s head whipped once, impatiently.