Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

“A minute!” she called.

  No, she, Pearl, was the horrible one.

  She pushed through the crowd, intending to tell Mason the truth, or to tell him goodnight, or to tell him she’d go home with him; she didn’t know which. And she didn’t get to find out because when she got back to the table, she discovered that Mason and the machine were both gone.

  * * *

  —

  PEARL’S THUMB JABBED AT THE LOCKPAD, missed it. Before she could try again, the door was opened from the inside, ruining Pearl’s plan of creeping to her bedroom so that Rhett would not see her drunk (and tease her forever and ever). But it was, in fact, Elliot, not Rhett, who stood in the doorway.

  Here again, the machine would’ve observed.

  What is it that they say about bad pennies? Pearl would have replied.

  That you’ll have luck for the entire length of a day!

  That’s a lucky penny. I said a bad penny.

  How can a penny be bad? the machine would have asked. Aren’t they all the same?

  But the machine wasn’t there to say any of that.

  Elliot was in his reading glasses and sweats, a pair of needle-nosed pliers jammed in the waistband. He’d been at her kits again then. He liked to mess with them, mixing up the parts of different animals—wings and scales with furred haunches. Making chimeras, he called it. And judging by his clothes, he assumed he was staying the night. Pearl sagged against the doorjamb, too tired to lather up even a little irritation.

  Elliot took her in with a twitch of an eyebrow. “Had a few, kitten?”

  Kitten, lamb, duckling, dove: she listed the nicknames Elliot liked to call her. It’s like I’m a one-woman petting zoo.

  But the machine was no longer there to hear it.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “Gave Rhett a ride home from my place. He’s not here, by the way. He’s staying over at Josiah’s. Hey, you all right?” He took her by the shoulder, guiding her into the apartment. “You gonna be sick?”

  Pearl gave up and leaned into him, pressing into the place on his chest, the meeting point of joint and muscle, where, perfectly, annoyingly, her face fit.

  “I lost my machine.” She muffled her voice in his shirt, half hoping he wouldn’t be able to understand her.

  He heard anyway. “What? Your screen?”

  “My machine,” she repeated.

  “Your Apricity?” Elliot was silent. He knew what it meant. After all, when he’d borrowed her old Apricity to make his Midas series, he’d had to sign all the same severe and forbidding forms she had, “personal liability,” “complete and full responsibility,” “damages in excess of,” and so on. He cupped a hand on the back of her head. “We’ll find it. We’ll retrace your steps.”

  It was hardest when he was kind to her. It made something within her bristle.

  She ducked under his hand and took a step back. “We won’t find it.”

  “If we look—” he began, but she barreled over him.

  “No. It’s not lost. It’s gone.”

  The words seemed to echo around the room, or maybe just around the inside of her skull. Not lost. Gone. Gone.

  Elliot’s hand was still lifted, his palm curved to fit the shape of her head. “It’s not your fault.”

  “It is, though.” She made herself look up at him. “They’re going to fire me.” And damn it all, she was crying, not for herself and not for her job and certainly not for her sham of a date, but for her machine.

  * * *

  —

  AND WASN’T IT ONLY A MACHINE after all? Pearl asked herself an hour later, her spine pressed against the headboard, her knees folded to her chin, the sound of Elliot’s shower through the wall a white noise shushing her murkiest thoughts. She would have to go in to work tomorrow and report the machine lost. She might be fired, but probably not. She’d been at the company for years. She was loyal. Carter would take up for her, and he was back in favor with the VPs. Most likely, they’d issue her a stern warning and a new machine. Even the thought of this new machine felt like a betrayal. Pearl’s eyes spilled over. The shower shut off.

  Elliot came from the bathroom, towel wrapped around his waist.

  “What’s this?” he said upon seeing her face.

  Pearl brushed her cheeks with the backs of her hands to hide her tears, but she could have done that before, couldn’t she? She’d heard the water turn off, had warning of his return.

  When they were first married, Pearl would make a performance of her tears, working them up in another room and then emerging with them dripping off her chin like diamonds. It’d been her only recourse, she’d told herself, the only sure way to end a fight with Elliot without completely giving in. But then Rhett had gotten to the age where he’d begun to use tears to get his way, and Pearl had recognized it for what it was: a child’s tactic. So she’d matured. She’d dried up. Instead of forcing amnesty, she’d learned how to avoid the fight in the first place.

  “Oh no no no no no,” Elliot said when he saw her. He belly-flopped onto the bed and wriggled forward, leaving the towel behind. He began to dot her cheeks with kisses, taking up her tears with his lips. “Not allowed.”

  His comforting soon became sex, as it often did with Elliot. Laughter became sex. Boredom became sex. A bad day became sex. But it’d become something else altogether, having sex with him now. Now again. Sex with Elliot used to be a lark. Now it was like being left and returned to, over and over again.

  When Elliot had first come back to her, Pearl had looked for evidence of the years that had passed and found it in the high ridge of his clavicle and the stringy muscles of his arms. Pearl’s own body was older than it had been, too, of course. Was older, certainly, than Valeria’s. In her mind, Pearl composed the questions she could ask Elliot about Val’s body—Taut skin? High breasts? Tight pussy?—but held them in her mouth until they softened on her tongue, until they slid down into her stomach, her soft middle-aged stomach.

  Sick on her swallowed questions, she’d started to spit them out to the machine, who’d said, enthusiastically and unhelpfully, How beautiful to have a body!

  That’s not what I asked, Pearl said.

  How beautiful when two bodies touch! the machine replied.

  * * *

  —

  PEARL WOKE IN THE MIDDLE of the night, her dreams picking their fingernails at the edges of her waking mind. Though once she opened her eyes, she couldn’t remember a one of them. She knew her machine wouldn’t be there even as she turned to the nightstand to look for it. She had a moment of panic when she turned the other way to find Elliot sleeping next to her; then she remembered that Rhett was at Josiah’s. She didn’t want Rhett to know about her and Elliot.

  “Not just yet,” she’d told Elliot.

  Not just ever? the machine had whispered.

  Pearl observed her ex-husband’s face, soft in sleep, mouth half-open, hands sandwiched palm to palm between his thighs. It used to be precious, Elliot’s sleeping face unclothed of its ceaseless charm, like a peeled lychee, something pale and vulnerable only she was allowed to see. That feeling was gone now. Lost. Stolen. Maybe if he’d only fucked Val, married her even, but not slept beside her each night. Maybe then Pearl could forgive him.

  Where are you? she called to the machine.

  She knew it had all been pretend, the machine’s responses only Pearl talking with herself. Still she listened for its reply.

  Nothing.

  Pearl slipped out to the living room, gathering her screen and a glass of water on her way. She put Mason’s name into Spark Stats, fully expecting his profile to have been erased. Not only was his profile still active, he had sent her a message.

  Pearl,

  I’d like to see you again, if only to explain.

  Would you be so gracious?

  —Maso
n

  Pearl thrust the screen away and gulped down the entire glass of water while staring at the note. It was like an evil haiku. Would she be so gracious! She was so angry she could have spit. So she did. The glob landed on the coffee table, where she left it for as long as she could stand before wiping it away with her sleeve.

  She had to respond. What other choice was there? She wished she could talk it through with Elliot, but she hadn’t told him about Mason or Spark Stats. Not that she’d done anything wrong, not technically. She and Elliot didn’t have a commitment, not even an arrangement. He’d shown up at her apartment three months ago, a mess after finding out that Valeria was leaving town entirely. First Val had left him; now she was leaving her whole life. Pearl almost admired her. The woman had quit her job, cut ties with friends, and was moving out of state, as if her marriage were an entire city that had been sacked. And here Pearl stood among the bombed-out buildings and smoking chunks of mortar.

  It would’ve been one thing if Elliot had told Pearl that it had been a mistake, leaving her for Val. It would’ve been one thing if he’d promised her he’d still been in love with her the entire time. It would’ve been one thing if he’d said he was sorry. But it was not any of those things. Not a one. All Elliot had had to do was touch her cheek and say, Dove, and Pearl had let him in.

  She pulled the screen back into her lap, typing a flurry.

  Mason,

  I will meet you so that you can return my property.

  The bar opens at 2 pm.

  Pearl read it over again, silently apologizing to the machine for referring to it as property. Other than that, she was pleased with the firmness of her message. Though her hands had shaken as she’d typed, and still shook. She reread, then added one more sentence before hitting Send.

  Do not mistake me for gracious.

  * * *

  —

  PEARL WAS WAITING ON THE STOOP when the bartender unlocked the door at five past two. He seemed both surprised and annoyed to find her there.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  She stepped across the threshold, somehow expecting Mason to be already inside, but of course the bar was empty. The design of the tile on the floor was beautiful, she noticed, without all the people standing upon it.

  “Do you have coffee?”

  “I can make a pot,” the bartender said begrudgingly.

  She sat in the window so that she could see Mason coming, which he did soon enough, no bike this time, a carryall slung over his shoulder. Was her machine in there? Mason paused when he saw her in the window, then tilted his head and smiled sheepishly, a shrug of a smile. A smile Pearl did not return. Would she be so gracious indeed?

  He came in and ordered a beer. At the look on her face, he pushed the pint glass to the center of the table and said, “I’m not drinking it. I only ordered it so the man could do his job.”

  “How considerate of you,” she replied, barbed. Usually Pearl took pains to be pleasant—she knew how sour women were seen—and it was an unexpected pleasure to act the bitch.

  Her eyes went to his carryall.

  “It’s not in there,” he told her.

  “Then where is it?”

  He took a breath and then, as if stepping off the precipice, said, “At my office.”

  And suddenly it was not Mason but Pearl who was falling, falling, with no ground below her. She had thought him a petty thief; she had thought him a bored narcissist; she had thought him a kleptomaniac. But she had not thought—why had she not thought?—of this option, which was worse, far worse. She could be more than fired; she could be sued. Even so, the image that rose in her mind was not of lawyers or courtrooms but of her machine in pieces on a table. She spoke the words aloud: “Corporate espionage.”

  Mason’s mouth twisted to one side. “That’s dressing it up quite a bit.”

  But it wasn’t. The Apricity technology was proprietary and zealously guarded. CEO Bradley Skrull was on public record promising the machine was to be used for only one purpose: to help people achieve happiness. The lawyers had buttoned this down in all the contracts. Pearl and her coworkers were given quarterly trainings about what to do if approached by a rival company. The first step was Secure the machine.

  “You targeted me,” she said, “on Spark Stats.”

  Mason looked away.

  “What did you do to my machine?” she asked.

  She imagined it dismantled, tiny screws strewn like chips of bone. A violence. Pearl bit the inside of her cheek.

  “We’re exploring new applications for the technology.” But this was not answering her question. “You’ve heard about palm screens. A screen in—in—the palm of your hand? After those hit the market there’s going to be a wave of bio-embed tech.”

  She stared at him. “You want to put Apricity inside people? And it would . . . what?”

  “Do what it does. Tell people how to be happy, day to day, minute to minute. And the commercial possibilities are off the charts. A new spin on direct marketing, right? Companies would be climbing over each other to . . . Why are you shaking your head?”

  “It’s a perversion,” she said, loud enough that the bartender looked over.

  Mason appraised her. Then he asked, “Do you know what the name means? Apricity?”

  “Of course I do. ‘The warmth of the sun on one’s skin in the winter.’”

  “And just think if you could feel it”—he slid his hand along the table so that the tip of his finger touched hers—“right there.”

  She jerked her hand away, had the impulse to slap the back of his.

  “I want my machine back.”

  “And we want you.” He had a tab in his hand. He touched it to her screen, which flashed with his business card: Apex Analytics, 218 Townsend Street.

  “Me? What for? You want a coder. I’m just a technician.”

  “We already have coders.”

  “Who?”

  But of course he wasn’t going to answer that. He simply smiled in reply.

  “We want you,” he repeated.

  “Well, you can’t have me,” she said, and what a joy these words were to say out loud. She repeated it in her head: You can’t have me!

  Mason’s eyes changed, and he was something else again, not the middle-aged bachelor, not the petty thief, not the corporate spy. He smiled at her, and if it was an unkind smile, she could not tell.

  He said, “But you’re not happy.”

  She met his gaze. “I want my machine.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE DID NOT RECEIVE IT. What she did receive was a job offer as a “consultant” at triple her current salary. Her response to this offer was to reach down and pull Mason’s carryall into her lap. He watched her gamely as she picked through the contents. As he’d said, her machine was not within it. She deposited the carryall at his feet and left the bar without paying for her coffee. A bad date indeed.

  Pearl had called in sick to work that morning, so there was nowhere to go but home. Rhett was still at Josiah’s, but Elliot was there, and he was all action. He ushered her through the door and sat her down in the living room, not even asking where she’d been. He’d synced his screen with the HMS (and of course he knew the HMS password; he’d set up the damned thing) and projected its display onto the wall: a map of downtown San Francisco, a bright green line zagging through its center.

  “Here’s where you were yesterday.” He ran his finger along the line. “Or at least where your screen was.”

  They’d downloaded the tracker app when Rhett was in elementary school to help coordinate drop-offs and pickups and after-school lessons, the busy schedule of a young family. It’d been years since they’d needed it, though the app had clung on through software updates and device transfers. After Elliot left her, Pearl had found a new use for the app, opening the city map
two, three, many times a day to trace the vector of Elliot’s movements, until one day his line had traveled to a lawyer’s office, and Pearl had known that he was requesting divorce papers. At which point she’d locked herself out of the program and into the bathroom with both the sink and shower running, making sure to pitch her sobs below the sound of the water so that Rhett would not hear them. When Elliot had shown up with the papers the following week, Pearl had experienced the strangest feeling, like she’d had not foreknowledge of his arrival but a premonition of it.

  “My guess is you lost it somewhere here.” Elliot pointed to a segment of the line. “Maybe at this bar. Do you remember having it there?”

  “I don’t know where I left it.”

  “Maybe Izzy remembers.”

  She didn’t correct him that she had not been at the bar with Izzy. In fact, a soft “I could ask her” escaped her lips.

  “All we have to do is follow the line,” Elliot said.

  “But if it was stolen . . . ?”

  He shrugged. “If it was stolen, it was stolen. But we don’t know that, so we can at least look, right?”

  “I suppose. I—” She bowed her head, touched her fingers to her temples. “I don’t know.”

  Elliot stepped close to her, an inch away. She waited for him to ask, What’s wrong? And she knew that if he did, she would be brave enough to say, Why did you leave me? Or Why did you come back to me? But Elliot didn’t ask that or anything. Instead, he pulled her fingers from her temples and replaced them with his own, rubbing small circles there. Pearl pictured the tracery of the movement like the green line on the map, a person turning round and round in a circle, and she felt despair open up in her chest. And she hated him. And she longed for him. And she craned up until her forehead rested against his.

  * * *

  —

  EVENTUALLY, FOLLOWING THE LINE, she ended up at the same bar for the third time in two days. This time with Elliot in tow.

  “Back again?” the bartender said when he saw her. He didn’t seem angry; Mason must have paid for her coffee, then.