As a boy he dreamed of robots. Not the shiny metal visions of Asimov's future but imperfect soft fleshy robots that said they were his family. In the dreams only he was human, the single warm blooded being in a house of cold automated companions. The Mom-bot was over weight, with bad hair that was gray at it's bottle black roots with a wheezing respiratory system. She perpetually clutched a soiled tissue in her left hand, when the boy took out the trash he examined the discarded wads of thin paper, they smelled of cheap machine oil. For breakfast the Dad-bot ate onions fried in axle grease with eggs and washed it all down with coffee prepared by boiling used grounds in vinegar.
The boys' two brothers, almost identical looking models although they rolled off the assembly line three years apart, with skin like waxed paper freckled with splatters of orange juice. Their bodies long thin, loosely jointed, moved as if dancing to some unheard music. With reedy, nasal voices that spoke from some place located in a southern bayou they would call the boy in from the yard for supper.
The family meals were shared in a semi-converted garage; a sheet of plywood on saw horses for the table. A mismatched set of cane back chairs scuffed the plain plank floor as they were seated. One end of the room was just open framework, the studs and electrical work protected from the outside with tacked up layers of plastic. The afternoon sun through the plastic and carpentry cast slippery shadows across the table as the family began to eat.
The Dad-bot filled his plate first. The meal was always the same: wild greens, mustard and shard picked from the local hillsides and boiled in the brackish water from the well. Fat back, greasy slabs of it, added to the greens as an after thought. Cold biscuits served dry… no butter or jam or even flavorless white margarine to spread on them. Tea in a surplus aluminum three-gallon pitcher, made from loose boiled leaves, sickly sweet with five heaping cups of sugar.
The boy was careful to chew slowly and try to eat his fill; this early supper was the last food he would see till morning. After the meal the boy cleared the table and stacked the chipped enamel plates by the sink for his brothers to wash.
Behind the house a back yard cut like an uneven wedge of pie led down to a mostly dry creek bed over grown with bamboo and cattails. Houses on either side of their lot stood empty, boarded up, yards a mess of rusting industrial rending equipment overgrown with sour grass and black ivy. It was in the silt and mud of the creek that the boy found the disintegrating skeleton of an infant-bot.
He carried it from the muck to the side yard where he hosed it clean and examined its tiny bones and circuitry. He rubbed dirt out of a marking on the infants' breastplate; the lettering was in a fine, feathery type. It read: Princess Ann version 3.6 rev C.
He gathered a pile of clean rags from the wash room floor, used the first batch to wipe and dry the remains and the rest to wrap it up like a doll. In the living room, seated cross-legged on the wood floor in front of the 16 inch black and white Television the Bro-bots are watching a baseball game. On a sagging sofa the Mom-bot is reading a second hand Women's Day magazine in the light of a 60-watt lamp. Her features look ashen in the poor light.
The Dad-bot sleeps on a cot at the edge of the illumination; his snore rattles about the room like a trapped pidgin. The sound drowns out the voice of the sportscaster as he talks about the home teams' pitcher. The boy shows the salvaged remains of the Ann-Bot to his mother. Chewing a piece of candy the Mom-bot inhales sharply at the sight, sucking the candy down her windpipe. She sits up, choking, motioning towards her throat with her hands.
The ever present clutched tissue flutters loose from her grip to the floor. Broken down oil, dirty from use, boils from her tear ducts. The eldest of the Bro-bots runs to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. Bro-bot two pounds on the Mom-bots back. With a convulsive hack she chokes the candy up. It slips from her lips and falls to the floor with a trail of shiny red spit. Still unable to speak she takes the Ann-Bot from the boy and looks at it as she forces her breaths to steady. Saying nothing she gives the Ann-Bot to the younger Bro-bot, picks the candy up off the floor, rinses it off in the glass of water, puts it back in her mouth and resumes reading. The older Bro-bot scowls.
The sun sets, winds blow through the canyon, the Moon is obscured by clouds, there will be no stars tonight. As a boy he dreamed of robots.
To Sir With Love
13 years ago
2 comments:
the hissing noise was getting bothersome....nothing should be hissing like that ....it sounded like air escaping? Which would be bad news when you are in a war-surplus spaceship orbiting barely outside the event horizon of a black hole....well, things looked pretty bad, even without the hissing noise....if only you could wake all the way up....but that seems to be hard to do.....they put you on too many drugs on these spaceships....the ship brain is next to useless, gravatic wave pulses from the black hole have scrambled it's cyber-synapses like two eggs and pork sausage on Sunday morning....breath in, breath out....that part is still working, for the moment.....
Meanwhile, in a divergent reality stream....I awoke in the woods, somewhat cold and damp. Two moons stared down at me through the tree branches overhead....looking like baleful glowing eyes of evil....tinted red, like moonlight after a forest fire. The sun rose eventually, fat and squirming with those sunspot things that make you feel like maybe you got some of those tainted drugs from overseas at the four dollar generic counter at the supermarket. I could hear a highway sound down the hill....I made it to the roadside, and tried to hitch a ride, but the big trucks all had robot drivers who looked just like crash test dummies....they looked neither right nor left, just stared straight ahead and kept rolling. I kept walking with my thumb out when I heard something coming. A pink Cadillac came cruising down the pike, looking like one of those Mary Kay jobs. The brake lights came on just after the lady went past....I could see what had to be a peroxide wig....."Jump in, honey." she said. It was the Phyllis Diller robot from "Space Balls"....or maybe that was Joan Rivers, I get those two confused. We rolled on down to a truck stop, to get some eats. Clark Gable and W.C. Fields were in a booth by the window, in black and white. Betty Boop was our waitress, and Dagwood was behind the counter, flipping burgers. Indiana Jones came out of the mens' room, wiping his hands on his slacks, like when there aren't any paper towels, and you have to use that silly air blowing thing. Come to think of it, I had seen a motorcycle with a sidecar out front. We slid into a booth, and ordered two burger baskets with iced tea. My robot friend got her's to go, since she's a robot. She said I could have the extra meal later, as we rolled on towards evening.
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