Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

  * * *

  —

  WHEN ELLIOT ARRIVED HOME, he found Val on the couch reading. Without a word, he lifted the screen from her hands, took down her pants, and hoisted her hips to the edge of the couch. He persisted over her laughing questions and moved the hands she laid on his head back down to her sides so that his mouth was the only point where he and she joined. He thought of the honey, how it brimmed above the curve of the spoon while still holding its droplet shape. Val didn’t taste like honey of course; she tasted briny and close. He worked at her tenderly, stopping to kiss the folds and scallops of her, tracing them with the tip of his tongue and nose. After she came, she looked down at him, her eyes not opaque anymore but transparent, glass.

  Then she saw something in his face that made her push him away, scrambling back on the couch, her eyes becoming stone.

  “That was a lie, wasn’t it?” she said in a small voice.

  “What?”

  “That. Just now.”

  And it had been. The sex wasn’t a lie, but the tenderness was. He didn’t even have to answer.

  “You’re not who I thought you were,” she said thickly. She fumbled with her pants, her legs and ass pale, the insides of her thighs shining. “I know that’s what you’re thinking about me, but you should know that I’m thinking it about you, too.”

  Elliot stayed kneeling on the floor in front of the couch, listening to the sounds of his wife showering and dressing and putting items into a bag. The sounds were at a great distance, then they rushed in close, his hearing still distorted. The hinges squeaked open from a front door miles away. The dead bolt slid closed right next to his ear. And he realized he could hear normally again; the whooshing sounds were gone.

  * * *

  —

  APRICITY CONTENTMENT PLAN: Listen to music.

  Now I know what to do.

  And I like music, I do! Maybe I’ll be a singer. Maybe I’ll have a band and they’ll play the cymbals every time I jump in the air. I already have eight different albums and twenty-six singles on my screen at home. And I don’t have to ask permission to listen to them.

  I did have to ask permission to have the artist man give me the test, and what was bad is that Mom forgot to sign the permission slip even though she’d had it for an entire week because I’d taken it out of my backpack the day we got them and put it in the place on the table by the door and set the little brass pig on top and that means Sign this. I almost cried when I remembered I didn’t have it. Mrs. Hinks was going to have me go sit in the library with Risa J. and Matt S., who didn’t forget their permission slips but whose parents wouldn’t sign them for religious reasons. Everyone can have a different religion, and we respect that. And people can have no religion, and we respect that, too. But even if I respect Risa J. and Matt S. and their religions, that didn’t mean I wanted to sit with them in the library while all the rest of the class got their futures told. We were all lined up at the door and everything just waiting for one of the librarians to come walk us over when I saw Mom in the hallway. Her cheeks were pink from running and she had a white paper in her hand. My permission slip! And I was happier than maybe I’ve ever been.

  * * *

  —

  THE INVESTIGATOR WITH THE BLOBBY rabbit sweater called him that night.

  “I found the thing,” she told him. “Or at least, I found a thing that I think is probably the thing.”

  “How bad is it?” Elliot asked.

  “I don’t know, man. I don’t know your scale. Do you want me to send you my report?”

  “Yes. No. Can you send it to me through the mail?”

  “Like in an envelope?” He heard her exhale impatiently. “I don’t have stamps.”

  “I’ll pay you extra for your trouble,” Elliot told her.

  And the envelope arrived in the mail two days later, though Val did not arrive with it. Elliot had held out for the first night she was gone but had called her screen the next morning and every few hours thereafter. She never answered, and he never left a message.

  If Elliot held the envelope up to the light, he could see the border, a fraction of an inch, that marked the edge of the paper folded within. He didn’t open it, though. He left the envelope sealed and went through Val’s clothes instead, hanger by hanger, sliding his hands into the pockets of jackets and pants, a curious feeling when there was no body wearing them. Deep in the pocket of a winter jacket, he found an earring Val had thought she’d lost. He held the little gold circle in the cup of his palm. He called her screen but could think of nothing to say beyond, I found your earring, so he hung up without saying anything at all.

  He drank whatever was left in their bar. He lay on the couch with the cat perched on his chest and one of his feet on the floor to steady the room. He pictured Val snapping the cat’s neck, castrating an ex-lover, drinking a goblet of blood. Did he care what she’d done or only that she refused to tell him? Or was it that she had denied him this last inch of her? He rose up from the couch, startling the cat, and made it to the bathroom just in time. He threw up; somehow it still tasted like honey.

  He wandered to the gallery and hovered by Nita’s desk like a ghoul. Midas was over, after garnering a handful of listings, a few middling reviews on lightly trafficked blogs. One blogger thought it was an indictment of capitalism. Another a rejection of the physical body. The only review Elliot had liked was the one where most of the screen was given over to a hand-drawn illustration of a vicuna. So it seemed Midas would not be lucrative after all. Irony. It was midday on a Tuesday. The gallery was near empty. Nita gave him a sharp look and did not rise from her seat at the desk to greet him.

  “She’s staying at Lisette’s,” she said, adding, “If you were going to cheat on her, at least it could’ve been with me.”

  Elliot didn’t bother correcting her.

  He waited in a coffee shop across the street until he saw Nita leave for lunch, turning the little white sign and locking the door. Elliot let himself in (Nita had thumbed him into the locks long ago), leaving off the lights and walking through the dark to the second display room. Nita hadn’t removed his platform yet, the small plywood stage, painted over white. He stepped up onto it and stood facing out into the darkened gallery.

  From his back pocket, Elliot took the envelope the investigator had sent him. He tore it in halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, until the bits of paper were so small that they escaped his fingers and fluttered to the floor. He closed his eyes and imagined Val standing in front of the platform, watching him make scraps of her secret. Her face turned to canvas, to clay, to papier-mâché, to blown glass, to moss, to marble, to metal. He reached forward into the dark, wishing that his fingertips would find her cheek, that it would turn back to flesh at his touch.

  6

  Origin Story

  My mother didn’t get a wink of sleep while she was pregnant with me. The moment she closed her eyes, she would feel me within her, quickening, spinning, a churn of synapse and star matter and amniotic fluid, commanding her to stand, commanding her to get out from whatever ceiling she was under and put the sky over her head. She might catch snatches of sleep, a few minutes slumped in a chair or leaning against a doorjamb, until I noticed that the rhythm of breathing around me had deepened, at which point I would begin to thrash. I was terrified of you before you were even born, she used to tell me, and then she’d reach out and press the tip of my tiny nose like she was ringing a doorbell.

  The birth was worse than the pregnancy, a horror of labor. My mother vomited, shitted, was wracked when, finally, she expelled me. Under the dim lamp in the recovery room, my skin looked blue, and her blood appeared black against it. She gazed down at me, a live creature balanced there in her own two hands, an infant. But no matter how intensely she stared, my eyes would not open in return. They remained closed, two little crevices in my tree knot of a face. I was not dead, the doctors ass
ured her, only sleeping. As I was awake within her, I was asleep without her. You slept. Ah! How you slept! she sighed. And so she named me Valeria for the valerian root, used to cure insomnia. Others wish their children ten fingers, ten toes. Others wish their children happiness. My mother prayed that I would not stir.

  * * *

  —

  THE TESTING FACILITY is busy today. Wednesdays are when the parole officers have their reports due, so all the last-minute appointments pile up on the bottom of Tuesday. My PO is Georg, and it is Tricia when Georg is on vacation or in court. Though the waiting room is full, the chairs on either side of me remain empty. I am more dressed up than I normally would be for my swab-and-swipe because I have a meeting after with a client. Across the aisle a teenage girl stares at my fine stockings and dress, openly covetous. The girl has an eye tattooed on each of her cheeks. The tattooed eyes are the same size and shape as her real eyes, inked an inch below in sure black lines. They leak fat tattooed tears.

  A man slips into the seat next to mine. With a congenial smile, he lifts a strand of my hair, holding it beneath his nose. He inhales deeply. “I wanted to see if it smelled pink,” he says. When I turn and fix my gaze on him, he drops the lock of hair and moves away with an air of professional courtesy, as if he has recognized that I am not a customer but a colleague.

  That man has done something very bad to someone. I know this without needing to read his file. The girl with tattooed eyes has done something very bad to someone, too, possibly to herself. All of us in this room have done something very bad to someone, and so we must sit here and wait. The woman at the window calls my name.

  These days, Georg lets me swab my own cheek. We have been meeting for over nine years now, Georg and I. Nearly a decade. He has owned the plaid shirt he is wearing for eight of those nine years, the second-to-last button changing circumference and color as it falls off and is hastily replaced, by either Georg or his husband, Samuel. This, our tenth year, is our last together. Georg will miss me when I am gone. Maybe I will miss him, too.

  Georg slides the sample of my spit into the machine and furrows his brow at his screen as if the machine can be shamed into speeding its calculations. Machine: the word comes from the Doric Greek by way of Latin by way of French, makhana, “device.” The words that led to makhana meant something not mechanical at all, they meant a unit that functioned on its own, as in a body, that human machine. The machines at the testing facility are refurbished models bought cheap. Hence, they are slow. Georg tuts at the machine.

  “How’s Samuel?” I ask.

  “Ha! Obsessed with the new Calla Pax show. Last night I caught him writing something on a fan feed. ‘You are a fifty-year-old gay man,’ I told him, ‘not a teenage girl.’ Samuel looks at me over his glasses—like this—and says, ‘That is the same thing.’ Ha! How is Elliot?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine? Good.”

  “Fine until I chopped him up and put the pieces in the freezer.”

  Georg sniffs. “I don’t know why you make these jokes.”

  “What joke? I wrapped the body parts in waxed paper.”

  “Waxed paper,” he repeats.

  “You know.” I shrug. “To prevent freezer burn.”

  Georg’s brow smooths. My results have come up on his screen, and he has seen whatever he has wanted to see, or not seen whatever he has wanted to not see. He signs his name to a thick packet in my file and initials a slip of paper for me to give the front desk on my way out.

  “Next month, I will bring you a cupcake,” he says.

  “What’d I do to deserve cupcakes?”

  “One. I said I will bring you one cupcake.” He plants a thumb in the center of my file. “What did you do? You finished your probation.”

  I stare at his thumb. It’s a funny word, thumb, unpronounceable really. It’s related to an Old Dutch word duim, meaning “to swell.”

  “You may want to check again.” I indicate the folder. “I’m pretty sure you’re stuck with me until the end of the year.”

  “Ten years from age of majority: April. Next month is April. Your birthday is in April, yes?”

  “The eleventh.”

  “See? You’re done.” As he hands me the slip of paper, he pats my hand awkwardly. “Don’t worry.”

  “Who’s worried?”

  “Valeria. I know you have a good heart.”

  “Yeah. In the freezer. Wrapped in waxed paper.”

  The teenager is still in the waiting room. She blinks a long blink as I pass so that she has only one set of eyes, crying ink.

  The name Valeria means “to be healthy.” It also means “to be strong.”

  * * *

  —

  THE WORD FOR SPELL, as in casting a spell, comes from the same root as the word for narration. This is evidence that ancient people believed language to be a sort of magic, the simple act of naming something akin to creating it, controlling it. If you know someone’s true name, you can destroy him, or so they say. In the old stories people hide their names from all but their most trusted loved ones. Supposedly, God hides His real name, even from those who worship Him. In college, I had a professor who asked the entire lecture hall to cover their ears before he whispered the real name of God. I left my ears uncovered and found myself disappointed by the syllables.

  The meeting with the client goes on for over an hour. They want me to name their new eye cream, one of those tiny little pots containing tallow, perfume, and whatever manatee phlegm or powdered unicorn penis is supposed to make your wrinkles go away. They even have Calla Pax signed on as the spokesmodel. I’ll have to tell Georg so that he can tell his husband.

  I know immediately what the name of the product should be: Crone Cream. I also know the executives are not ready to hear this idea. They’re off in the swan-feather, flower-petal, snowflake realm. But I can see her, the crone, waving from the window of her little house. I’ll have to wait to suggest it. If I say, “Call it Crone Cream,” right now, these men will all blink at me, then one of them will reply, “Sincerity is the new irony.” As if they understand irony. They don’t know that irony means God’s laughter. Yahweh’s laughter.

  After the meeting with the eye-cream clients, I take the train downtown to meet Elliot and Rhett. On the train, I watch strangers’ eyes, studying the wrinkles that curl from them like script, like talons. How much squinting, how much laughter to earn each of those lines?

  Crone Cream.

  I would like to wander down a wooded path to the sod house among the pine trees. I would like to stand at its window and ask the crone my three questions. No, that’s not what I would like. What I would like is to be the crone, the answers hidden in the folds of my skin. The word crone comes from the word for “carcass.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FRENCH HAVE A TERM, enfant terrible, which we now use to mean a young person with preternatural skill, a prodigy. Originally, it meant a child who says something honest but impolite, for example asking, “Why are you so fat?” to your cherished dinner guest. Cruel is the word we use to describe children, as in the cruelty of children. Cruel comes from crudus, for “raw” or “bloody.” What we mean is that there’s something natural to a child’s feral behavior, a curiosity untinctured by empathy or social rules. Think of the child bending sunlight through the magnifying glass to raise tendrils of smoke on the ants’ backs. The child isn’t acting unkindly. Kindness does not occur to the child.

  To my mother I was an enfant terrible in the traditional sense. My behavior sent her to bed with migraines, then to longer and longer holistic retreats. My father would describe me as a spirited child, if you asked him, but he loved me too much to see me clearly. My mother knew what I was.

  When I was six and discovered our little cat Sooty curled up and cold under the bushes, my mother took my chin in her hand and said, What did you do to t
he cat? Tell me now, and I won’t be angry.

  I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to confess. I didn’t remember having done anything to the cat. I had liked Sooty. I had named him. When I wore a certain sweater, he would knead his paws against it and suck the wool into wet tufts like he was nursing at his mother’s belly.

  What did you do? she asked again.

  I had prodded Sooty’s side when I found him curled under the bush—that’s how I knew he was dead and not sleeping; maybe this was what she meant. But when I told her those words, I only touched him, her hand flew from my chin to her own temple. I can’t hear any more! she said desperately, backing away. Don’t tell me what you did next!

  What I’d done next was stroke his soft gray forehead.

  I feel a headache coming on.

  When the cat we got after Sooty, Mister Stuffing, ran away, she said, I don’t want to know what you did to this one.

  We had no more cats after that.

  Elliot and I have a cat now. Her name is Slip. She has perfectly spaced stripes down her tail and she’ll eat the rind of your breakfast cantaloupe down to the pebbly green. When I stroke her, she arches her back to meet my hand, and I say, “Careful now,” unsure if I’m talking to her or to me.

  * * *

  —

  PALOOKA, ELLIOT TEXTS ME: the password to the bar I’m to meet them at, one of these faux-speakeasies that are constantly going in and out of style. This one has you enter through the back of a Chinese restaurant. You walk among the laminated tables and straight into the kitchen, past the string of dead ducks, and up to a hulk in a fedora to whom you announce the day’s password. The password is always some Prohibition-era slang yanked from the Internet, something like giggle water or bee’s knees. Prohibition! Everyone loves a flapper dress or a fake tommy gun, but who remembers the thousands of people who went blind drinking unregulated wood alcohol?