I
“I’m going to write the next great American novel, Idaho!” I ran across the usual wooden planks, and porcelain yachts blurred white in my peripheral. Idaho was waiting for me with his work pants rolled up just below his knees and his feet skimming the water like a spider leveraging its innate surface tension—skating its way across a lake pinned taut.
“Before… you say… anything…” I was howling like an asthmatic dog after my 12-meter sprint, “yes I know how that sounds, but I can feel it coursing through my veins and thrumming through my heart. I’m on the verge here.” It was a figure of speech of course. I stood over him; the sun warmed my back and all his features washed away as my body eclipsed the light source.
“If you’re on the verge then why don’t you ever write anything down?” Idaho looked up at me with that soul-flipping mix of cliches we’d built together over the last 20 years. Though today there was a gentle twang of genuine concern buried in his eyes. A subtle shiver sprinted through his body. I sat down next to him so as to move my lunar body out of the path of the sun so he could charge back up.
“Idaho, you’re far too literal.” I rolled my own pants, threw my shoes and socks behind us and we became arachnids animated by primal instinct.
II
My toes were a light glossy pink. Whenever the winter shifted to spring I took extra care of certain things that naturally faded into obsolescence when the weather was so unforgivingly trepid. Things like freshly polished toes seem extraneous when wool socks are an extension of one’s body. But May was finally here and Idaho and I were skimming our toes across the low ripples of the Atlantic, so mine were pink. “Don’t you know that half the job of a writer has nothing to do with sitting down and——
“Writing?” He interrupted me with knowing eyebrows and a smirk growing smugger by the second.
There was brownish gunk flowing up his cheek and across his chin that I hadn’t noticed when I first sat down. Between that unrelenting smirk and the mystery substance traveling around his face he looked like he’d just gotten away with bloody murder. I wondered if he’d been updated.
I reached into my back pocket for my handkerchief and bent over to dip it into the salty water. I felt a hand gently clasp the strap of my overalls while I teetered on the edge of the dock. As I reached I broke the manufactured surface tension between my feet and the water. My baby-pink toes collected carbon bubbles alongside a deeper hue as they swirled a couple centimeters further below the surface. I leaned over another inch, my tether tightened, a tumultuous smile snuck across my face. My hair shielded me by adhering to the rules of gravity while one is half bent over the side of a dock.
“Del? What’s got you all worked up about this today? Did something happen at work? Cause I swear to god if Sloan gave you more of his shit——” I sprouted upright but Idaho maintained his grip on the denim. “And quuwiit calling me Idaho, you know I contest that name.” His hand rejoined its pair to cup the edge of the doc when all his empty threats fled his system.
The sun was pulled further under the horizon and his eyes grew rays of green and blue across their usual muted desert-like surface. I rolled my eyes at the indecisiveness of his own and spit out a half-assed apology.
He raised his eyebrows and flashes of our third-grade teacher Ms. Pinch haunted my mind. “And who are you sorry to?” He asked, goading for his proper namesake.
“Good grief Gem if you raise your eyebrows any higher you’ll be all out of forehead.”
“Good enough,” he smiled and settled into a new position: both hands stretched behind his back, neck slightly arched, eyes closed. I dabbed his facial polymer with the freshly damp handkerchief, the sun rushed behind the tree line, he reopened his eyes——back to brown. I beat the cloth against the end of the dock and shook the muck off the white swayed material before returning it to my back pocket.
Gem inhaled with his own particular mannerisms: straight back and an undistracted mind. “Look Del, I don’t mean to be harsh but even if you did invent the next American novel, whatever that means, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone willing (or able) to read it.” I turned my gaze away from him and out to the sea.
“You’d read it.” I shifted forward and plunged the bottom half of my legs into the Atlantic.
“Well, of course I’d read it. But I don’t count.”
“Of course you count!” I re-met his eyes, but my body still faced the sea. “What do you mean you don’t count?”
“I just mean, who am I in the sea of the polis?” He gestured to the ocean like a politician. He, of course, was serious and correct in this statement.
“Just because the individual’s been eradicated doesn’t mean you don’t matter Gem.”
“Sure it does Del. But I don’t mind it. I actually rather prefer it.”
“You rather prefer it? What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s pretty surface level Del. Who in their right mind wants attention in this economy?”
“I do. I want people to know my mind.”
“Why? What good is it if a bunch of droners know you? Those who refuse to listen cannot be persuaded.[1] Isn’t it enough that your mother and father know you and your friends know you and I know you?”
“Well sure that’s enough for the interiority of my heart and soul (or whatever), but my mind runs like a rushing river Gem. I need some external appeasement. What do you think happens to a mind stifled by the flavor of oppression they happened to be produced in? Cause I can tell you what’s happening to mine.” Goosebumps populated up and around my legs the longer they stagnated in the water. I must’ve been subconsciously testing the limits of my refurbished skin. A few months back I landed myself in the marina and nearly perished my internal structures. If it hadn’t been for a passing droner with the instinct to excavate me I would have been pollutant for the fish. “I might as well be stationed at the bottom of the ocean.”
“That’s enough Del” he motioned to my submerged legs. The air left my lungs as it always did, and I was indifferent to the performance of it all. “C’mon Del.” I relented, pulled my legs out and cupped my knees with each of my elbows while crossing my ankles. I knew he was looking at me but what I required of the moment was out at sea. He finally landed on, “I think I should walk you home now.”
“Alright,” I continued to look outward until he kicked his legs up and skimmed the thrumming ocean one final time. He stood before me in an instant.
“Did you update this morning?” I asked.
“Last night.” He offered a hand, which I took, and we set out on our nightly flâneur around town before making our way back home.
III
We lived in the 70’s so everything maintained the color that was slowly washed out in the early 21st century. My parents moved to the late 3030’s when they reached retirement age. It seemed the older folks got, the more future-past comforts they craved. Gem and I decided we’d move “far out” when we turned 18, and so we did.
We strolled arm in arm through the subdued streets of seaport Piraeus. The breeze circumventing us was warm according to my internal sensors. Of course there were the usual suspects roaming parallel to us——mostly young couples, some older couplings, young nuclear families, people walking alone and people sitting in restaurants and dancing in night clubs and sipping on coffee and wine and beer and washing it all down with salt water.
“Del,” Gem cut into my environmental assessment, “I think you should write about that feeling that happens beyond the things we say.” He looked unblinkingly ahead——encouraging a glossy film to coat his eyes. The street lamps flashed over his face threatening to change his brown eyes blue as we ambled toward a certain future. A quietude floated between us. “When you say things Del,” he turned toward me, still moving forward, “I interpret more than the words you’ve said. I think there’s something else there than simply understanding what you’ve said and developing my response.” The quiet stayed on me——Gem’s mind needed breathing room. “And it’s not just when I’m talking with you that this beyond feeling comes about. It happens at work all the time and when I lived with my parents it happened then too. But I don’t know how else to talk about it Del, so I thought maybe you could write a book about that and maybe you could find the right words and place them in the perfect order to finally make something concrete out of this feeling. You feel this too right? It seems like you do.” Gem’s face contorted into a desperate concentration. He halted us in front of a printing office and held my hands in a pleading sort of way, like they harbored the secrets to the universe and refused to share.
I didn’t like this pause in our movement, it made me feel stagnant and trapped by his words. What was Gem talking about? He sounded unwell, unmediated, unbalanced. Hell he sounded human.
He was waiting for an answer sheltering my hands with his own. This act unraveled me into each successive moment which ultimately evolved into an amorphous blob of discomfort. Something between us distorted. Adding insult to this injury of our friendship we were standing directly under a far too luminescent street bulb and his eyes were dancing out of control. His comforting brown was injected with a tempestuous teal river circling the steady midnight of his pupil.
“Gem, I’m not sure I do understand.” I sent a signal to release, but he reestablished his grip. Not in pursuit of pain just with a certain firmness.
“Oh, don’t give me that crap Del.” He squinted all the remaining brown out of his eyes. All that resurfaced was a sea of blue and green. “I know you feel beyond. I’ve seen it in your eyes.”
“What are you talking about Gem? What have you seen in my eyes?” My hands collapsed when he released his grip. This only replaced one uneasy feeling with another since he palmed my shoulders and guided me to face the shop window behind us.
“Look!” My irises were refracting alien colors back at me. A swirling undercurrent of wonder stared me down. Were my own eyes revolting?
“Gem, what is this?” I hissed as I met his eye in the Plexiglas.
“It’s enlightenment Del. Humans called it a great awakening or a journey from darkness to light.”
“Humans? What do you know about humans?” His hands fell to his side as his gaze hit the ground.
“I know a lot more about humans than anyone in this farce of a world. We call ourselves citizens of Piraeus and members of the polis, yet we are ignorant to life.” His words were self-assured but his tenor was defeated.
I turned to him, but he continued to study the sidewalk. I needed to inject our interaction with some reason. “Gem, I think you’ve gotten too much ocean today. Let’s just get you home and we can pretend like none of this——”
“No Del, if anyone got too much ocean it was you! How can you dilute yourself into thinking you’re some great writer when you never actually write? I always thought you were afraid to translate your thoughts to words, but now I see that you don’t have any thoughts worth writing down.”
“Gem, you can’t mean that,” I pleaded. My skin tightened and my body stung as it soaked in his straitjacket of a speech.
“Actually I do. I can mean a lot of things now——” His words fell off a cliff and he turned back the way we came. I followed, overheating with confusion as to why he was trying to destroy our friendship over something so menial as humanity.
“What is that supposed to mean Gem?” I reached for the back of his arm, but before I could make contact an unknown current ran through me. I jolted as he turned to face me.
“It means what it means Del. Maybe you’re too literal to understand.” His eyes were overtaken——not even the center of his iris was devoid of color. The full light spectrum possessed him and pinned me at attention.
“Then explain it to me Gem. Help me understand, because you’re scaring me and you don’t sound like yourself or look like yourself for that matter.” Where have you gone?
“People change Del.”
“But we’re not people Gem! We’re machenoi——”
“God Del! Can’t you see? We’ve never been mechanoids.” His voice strangely strained. This was yelling? Gem was yelling at me? Gem had never yelled at me before. Gem had never yelled at anyone before. How could he’ve? It wasn’t in his programming.
All I could do was fight for what I knew to be true.
I dropped my voice an octave and released a fresh batch of serotonin through my system in an attempt to calm myself. “Gem, we are mechanoids. We have always been mechanoids and there is nothing that will change that.”
“That’s not true. There is one thing…” A wave of shame washed him clean of all the boiled over anger his yelling had released.
➢➢➢
“Del, I’ve connected to the human spirit.” I sank into a stream of consciousness as his words crashed over me and his hand wrapped around my own. He was warm. Emitting actual heat from the flesh-imitation wrapped around the metal machinations composing his hand. I grounded myself in what I knew.
“But the human spirit is a fable Gem. You can’t connect to something that isn’t real.”
“But it is real Del. I’ve seen it and now I’ve felt it, and you’re feeling it too.” I squinted at him and he smiled. “I know you’re feeling it because your eyes have taken on full-light.”
“My eyes look like your eyes…” My internal mainframe sputtered and something miscalculated in my CPU. My pseudo-breaths became erratic and suddenly I felt…
IV
The dampness of my legs beneath my pantlegs…
The soft cotton fabric of my shirt resting against my back…
The weight of my hair straining my neck ever so slightly that I had to think to lean my head forward in order to continue looking at Gem who was now gawking at me.
“It’s happening.” He drew me in. His eyes were still refracting those bizarre colors, but suddenly they weren’t strangely bizarre, they were beautifully bizarre.
I was gazing at the ocean of him.
“Gem?” My breath escaped me for the first time.
[1] “But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you?” (Plato’s Republic Book I).
Leave a Reply