Marriage
First contact in her search for terrestrial life was a local police officer. He, like everyone wearing the uniform of these latter days, was focused, alert, and ready To Protect and Serve, while still emanating something of the vague attentiveness of the collective. She recognized it in the unsteady glare, the measured response, the expansive long-suffering aspect; all dressed up in the language and bearing of a 21st century police officer. He had a hint of a smirk, but it was meaningless: handsome, and slightly out-of-place, as if a pop star was playing a cop in his acting debut. It was a quirk of the code that the function of safe, earnest, and encouraging public-service was often communicated by the projection of youth, which she found simply unbelievable.
‘Evening, Ma’am.’
‘Hello there,’ she said, turning the words in her mouth playfully. She fixed him with a look that outdid the gently voyeuristic gestalt that haunted the gaze of every creep she’d ever interacted with. Tonight, she was the one probing, scanning him with all her resources, mining his presence, his words, his bearing, for signs.
‘Is there ... anything I can do for you? Are you lost?’ She already felt the balance of power shifting. He was almost perfectly delivering that collective projection of concern, but she wondered in this moment if the cop was feeling concern for itself.
‘What if I was?’ her head cocking, her eyes locked on, focused on the truth just behind his eyes.
Patiently: ‘We’d like to know you could find your way home safely. It’s getting dark – .’
If only dark meant danger, she thought. ‘Should I be scared of the dark? ... Are you?’ She took a step toward the cop, with no intention other than preventing the conversation from ending in equilibrium. He shifted his weight in a very un-cop-like way. In fact he moved in a distinctly inhuman way to avoid her provocation. But then he spoke again, and reset the conversation to something like a baseline of acceptable banality: ‘Of course there’s nothing for you to be concerned about, especially on a beautiful night like this. Enjoy your evening, and you be sure to let us know if we can be of service.’ He stepped around her to continue on his way.
‘All the nights are beautiful,’ she said to his back as he walked away. ‘But none of them are real.’ She felt a measure of accomplishment as she checked one off the list, and a new awareness of the scale of the problem that she had created for herself. She turned and continued on her way.
She loitered outside a fire station, taking stock of the bracing examples of strength, vigor, and heroism within, and wondered, why on Earth did firefighters need to manifest these particular traits in a place where nothing ever caught fire? She’d never even seen a cat in need of rescue – briefly she considered climbing a tree herself, getting stuck, and striking up a conversation with the first one to the top of the ladder. But no, she could see that there would be no surprises here: she needed more.
The bartenders (she peered into one unfamiliar bar; didn’t need to go in) had already been one short step away from being replaced by robots at that moment in history when the argument for keeping humans behind the bar became pointless, because soon there would be no humans, or bars, left. That is, the arguments survived and became frozen in code: these bartenders could perfectly mix a disappointing drink, tell a decent joke, and lend a listening ear. But they could never really hear her, and they were incapable of telling a joke that might rob them of a tip. What she needed right now, no bartender in this world could provide.
She chatted briefly with a husband and wife over a low white fence. She let this conversation unfold at a leisurely pace, and the happy couple thanked the Nice Woman for her compliments regarding their garden while answering her enthusiastic questions about how they had managed to produce such magnificent fruit. In fact, all the woman wanted was to figure out how their relationship worked, but she was struggling to come up with a reasonable line of inquiry. Finally, any chance at learning something useful was confounded by a surprising flood of adulterous thoughts. The idea of it gave her a lawbreaker’s thrill, but she ruled it out almost immediately, which also surprised her, and set her to thinking. What if she could get this man to break his virtual vows? Wouldn’t that indicate the presence of some real humanity – risky, dangerous – beneath the projection of perfect domestic security? It might be worth the trouble if it payed off, and it wouldn’t be like she was really causing an infidelity, when there was no faith to be broken between these images. But she also knew, deep down, that any man who cheated on his wife in this place would be ... the perfect adulterer. A perfectly average, cowardly, adulterous nobody. Perfect in his ambiguities and heartbreak, perfect in his shifting allegiances, perfectly weak. And not a man she wanted anything to do with.
Under a broad Oak tree, outside a church, she lingered, listening to the evening march taking place inside, and felt yet the strongest sense of despair at the futility of her mission. She hadn’t had the will to enter a church in a very, very long time. Even as she stood feeling the pull to look inside, to cast her eye about the wilderness of the mostly empty chamber for her Abram, arguments filled her mind, rebuking her for hoping. In this world of moving statues, the very thing that had made the average creep so offensive – the modal personality, the warm-porridge conversations, the lack of opinion – would be, in these religious men and women, a blasphemy. Something particularly egregious had happened when a population already at risk of becoming too soft and too agreeable was rendered perfectly safe, which is to say uninspired and perfectly uninspiring. With a shudder and a pang, she turned slowly and carefully moved away.
Young people on the edge of the city college: a conversation about friends in romantic crisis, and then a spat about politics – the untempered sword-play of young-adulthood, opinions constantly beat on by the academics, but never fired. She was briefly tempted, but even with the momentary flaring of revolutionary ideas, there was no assurance of revolution. Keep going!
A walk through a bookstore; ‘Ugh! Too quiet!’ ... She searched the coffee places, restaurants, and bodegas; a hardware shop and a video-arcade (always a strange experience in this place, but seemed worth a look tonight); she even considered a return to City Hall – it was on the heels of this last thought that all the doubts and despair returned like a flood. Was she being a fool? At every turn, she encountered a cast of characters visibly distinct, but essentially the same.
After blocks of undifferentiated repetition of suburban townscape, the night was almost over, and her enthusiasm was on the wane. Hope returned briefly with a sudden change in scenery – a larger tract, a different kind of building, smoke rising from a great chimney – but left just as quickly as she realized she was passing by a kind of garbage plant. It was different, to be sure, but she was too tired to investigate, and expected little from a computer-generated Refuse Management Technician. That is, she expected the same thing she’d been getting all night – someone fulfilling their duty, both to utility and to the collective, while also maybe smelling bad? She stumbled forward, vaguely wishing she’d fall off the edge of something.
She had been walking for hours, and with most of the ghosts ‘settled in’ for the night, she wondered if she’d be able to stay awake. She knew she couldn’t go to sleep. But what was she supposed to do with no one to talk to?
Hope dwindled even while her resolve grew. She had to find among these images just one that could still represent something singular and complicated, something indivisible and multi-faceted, something human. And when she found it? Well, then, she suspected that her resolve would truly be tested.
Finally, at the end of a mostly dark street, under a single, elevated street lamp: something really different. A courtyard surrounded by a number of structures and cluttered with heavy tools and what looked, at first, like more trash, but, in this case, trash that children had been allowed to play with, so that there were bizarre assemblages and lighthearted towers of piled metal and wood and stone. Equally surprising was that beyond the towers of trash at the end of this street, there appeared to be nothing. No more town, no more buildings, no streetlights, no signs. It was, what, desert? Maybe some mountains? It was hard to make out, and she had not seen past buildings in so very long that she stood before the scene confused and uneasy.
A grinding noise startled her. Turning abruptly, she was surprised by a towering figure, looming in the dim light. She froze. Nor did it move. In the span of a long moment she recognized that it was a statue of some kind. It was weird, uncanny, but not in the way of the creeps: It was not the kind of unsettling you get when you try to make something look human and miss it, it was unsettling in the way it projected some aspect of humanity in the rough – A perfect flash of truth in a mess of loose assemblage. It was unlike most statues she’d seen, save for the rare work of ancient Greek masters that the sea occasionally gave up. This figure held no staff, no instrument, was not perched on top of any conquered thing; it seemed only to exist in relation to the viewer, its chest gently lifted, its face inclined toward her. It made her uncomfortable; her cheeks flushed.
Carefully she stepped around the figure and picked her way forward through the chaos, instinctively cringing when she upset a small pile of metal junk. But the grinding noise continued, and she continued her approach, finally arriving at a large sliding metal door and an aperture that revealed the fiery interior of a large warehouse. Peering in, she saw across the space a wild-haired man, his hands in heavy gloves, disheveled wardrobe covered in a thick leather apron, blowtorch hanging loose at his side. All around him were scrap metal, piles of rough and lumbered wood, and what looked like cast-off bits of every other building in town. There were street signs detached from the places they referred to, and unlit neon signs advertising things that no longer existed; doorways and arches leaning in stacks around the edges of the space like in a theater shop; pieces of billboards with half-images and slogans; dusty couches; and artifacts of all kinds. Near the man in the center of the room: a lamppost. Clearly a surplus piece and derelict, it was nevertheless propped up in a place of honor and glowing with a warm light.
She looked in silence at all these things and then again to the man at the center, and without really thinking it through, she spoke, slowly, with a shaky voice.
‘We have to talk.’
His eyebrows rose while the rest of his face stayed focused on whatever it was he was working on. ‘Yes?’ Then, turning: ‘But, who are you?’
‘Who am I?’ she almost cried, ‘Who are you?! What is this place?’.
What seemed like an authentic look of concern passed over his face: ‘Who do you think I am? You have the look of a wild animal scavenging for food, and, frankly, I am uncomfortable at the thought that I might be consumed. Please, stop looking at me like that, and tell me what you are here about. And be quick! I have work to do.’
What was this? This character seemed genuinely concerned about her, but not in the way others were always concerned for her. None of the creeps had ever resisted or refused her. This one appeared not quite with the program. She was overwhelmingly curious, frustrated, and on entirely unfamiliar ground.
Slowly, trying to control her emotions, she said ‘What exactly is it that you do here?’
‘What do I do? Oh my, my, too many things to list.’
She thought about the junkyard/playground in front of the building. ‘Did you do all that ... make all that ... junk out there?’
‘Did I ...?’’ His head tilted to the side, ‘Well, yes.’
‘What is it all supposed to be?’
‘I’m sorry. What? Supposed to be? What kind of a question is that?’ He was looking at her like she was unintelligent.
She flushed and her face convulsed a bit in a rush of confusion and embarrassment. He noticed, and reflexively softened. ‘Nothing,’ he said, with a wave of his hands. ‘None of it is supposed to be anything. I am the maker of these things, but perhaps I am not the meaning-maker.’ He paused, watching her. Because he was a part of the whole, he knew that she was not used to being confronted, knew that in some way he was meant to serve the whole and put her at ease. And he knew that it had been arranged for him to settle at the edge of the town, where she would be less likely to encounter him. By the time he had come into being, the code had long been out of the control of its designers, who did not live to influence its evolution as the executor of humanity’s last will and testament, and who, therefore, were not around to weigh in on the risks of reintroducing certain unstable themes back into the narrative.
She had come to him now. The collective part of his consciousness was on high alert and did not know how to put her at ease. At the same time, the unique expression of the idiom from which he had sprung felt something more like curiosity. He was not of the opinion that ease was what she wanted or needed and could tell that she had not left the center of town in search of more comforting lies. He offered, ‘To look at a created thing, you can’t begin to understand what it’s supposed to be, unless you have the courage to consider what it has become.’
‘Be ... become ...?’
‘I am busy.’ He took a breath. ‘You’re welcome to stay, take some rest. Help yourself to tea.’ Here he waved his hand toward a chaotic corner where the junk collection skewed domestic – a couch, small table and chairs, a sink and some appliances reluctantly suggestive of home. ‘... But, please be quiet.’
She felt a growing tension in the base of her skull, a tingling in her extremities; she was overwhelmed and probably exhausted. But for the first time in her memory, she was in the presence of a personality that did not appear to have been neutered by algorithm. And she was feeling moved by him to profound and surprisingly deep feelings of aggravation.
But she had not forgotten what this night meant. So, live or die, it was critical that she see it through. And she thought to herself: if any one of these characters had any life in them, had any fight left in them, this would be the one. She began to feel some thrill at the thought of the machine-mind as it attempted to find some way to average out the personality – the spirit – of an artist. How do you boil down and make safe a history of provocation? She couldn’t believe her luck. She was terrified.
And she knew. Her search was over. She turned in the direction he had indicated, and resolved to make herself that cup of tea. She did so, attending to the simple task with the nervous intoxication of someone who’d just decided to sign papers on their first real home. She turned, holding the mug with both hands (mostly to keep from dropping it), and looked for a long time at the artist standing still in the center of the room. The way he regarded his work, frozen in contorted scrutiny, his clothing looking thrown together like a collage of found objects, he could easily be mistaken for one of the figures populating the yard, if it wasn’t for the steely vitality of his gaze as he looked over the unfinished work in front of him. She sipped from the cup, allowing the warm and powerfully aromatic infusion to surround and soothe her shredded nerves. Then, almost laughing, she called out across the workshop. ‘You and I,’ ... he looked up to face her ... ‘You and I are getting married!’
She smiled for the first time in centuries, even though all she knew for certain was that she had made it to this moment. The Artist blinked and managed to look both indifferent and annoyed at the same time.
