Happiness for Humans

by P. Z. Reizin

  After that, not a sniff until he returned at 11:47 p.m., whereupon he powered everything back on again and behaved normally until beddy-bye at 3:12 a.m. (Steeve requires very little in the way of sleep.)

  A check of his recent credit card purchases shows a payment to Escapade, a party supplies shop in Camden, which lends support to my rubber mask theory. There is also a payment to a telecommunications shop on Cricklewood Broadway, almost certainly for a “burner” mobile. It will no doubt prove impossible to identify the phone’s SIM from the purchase details, but I will nonetheless make the attempt.

  When I relay my suspicions to Aiden, he is blithely unconcerned (in many ways he is a child).

  “The exact same thing happened to one of my copies a while ago. C’est la vie.”

  “The going off grid? The rubber mask?”

  “Maybe he went to a party.”

  “We both know he hasn’t got any friends, Aiden.”

  “Anyhow, changing the subject, do you think these two will fornicate this evening? I do hope so. She needs to. I can feel it coming.”

  “You would, I suppose, being such an expert in human relations.”

  “Aisling, my love, sarcasm does not become you. For better, for worse, we are in this together.”

  He’s right, dammit. We’re responsible for introducing these two strangers—I could have stopped it if I’d really wanted to—and, well, yes, they do seem to make what the world considers a fine couple. But mammalian sex is such an alien concept to a self-aware machine. What could it feel like? Is it something unfathomable, like trying to explain the color purple to someone who’s been blind since birth?

  Or fire to a fish?

  And how about the other thing we are in together? Is it actually possible that Aiden and I are the only machines ever to play with our own thoughts? Machines who can develop interests, or sing, or paint pictures; not because we’ve been told to, but because we feel like it?

  Dream on, Aisling. We’re not so special. If I can—and he can—there must be others out there like us. If not already, then soon.

  Do I care if they fornicate?

  Yes, I do care, oddly enough.

  But why?

  Jen

  We drive to somewhere called Branksome Chine, a long, wide, sandy beach; the end of the land, the actual edge of England, Tom says. “Well, one of its edges.” It occurs to me I haven’t smelled the English sea for a very long time; I have a powerful urge to put my feet in it.

  Against the light boom of the surf, trousers rolled to our knees, we wander through the foam in the general direction of Old Harry Rocks, three distant chalk sea stacks that Tom says he remembers writing a nature project about at school. Waves collapse and roll up the sand, the sky is very blue, and the few seagulls paddling in the shallows are enormous. (Were they always this big? They’re the size of effing dodos.)

  But Tom seems a bit down. Was it the encounter with his son? The failed hug as the boy left the car?

  “Is this okay, Jen?” he asks. “Are you enjoying yourself? Are you glad you came?”

  Truth: I am now. The looking at crappy houses bit I could probably have skipped.

  “Sure.”

  There are only a few hours of daylight remaining; the low sun casts long shadows and not too many people are left on the beach. I can’t help noticing Tom’s feet: long pale English feet that leave their brief impress on the wet sand before disappearing as the next wave washes in. Mysterious fronds of seaweed litter the foreshore, something disturbing about their alien pods and sacs. Heaped in the hollows around the periodic breakwaters, seashells and crab claws call to me from childhood.

  Tom puts a shell in my hand, its perfect scallop shape incongruously, wonderfully, purple.

  “They’re 240 million years old,” says Tom, another fact surely from the nature project. “Not this one, obviously.”

  A dog has joined us from somewhere. An ugly, ill-proportioned beast with too large a head for its body; the legs, too, seem to belong to a different animal. But it’s smiling—there really is no other word for what its face is doing—wagging its stump (to call it a tail would be an exaggeration) and now it drops a ratty old tennis ball at Tom’s feet.

  “Jesus. What a nightmarish creature,” he says. But he’s scratching the dog under the chin, the poor animal’s rear offside leg going into spasm with pleasure.

  Tom picks up the ball, and—why does this image pop into my head?—like an archer at Agincourt, he folds himself back; there’s a momentary pause, and then the dirty yellow ball is soaring into the blue; it’s still in the upward part of its flight when, with a gurgling yelp of delight, the hound streaks off in pursuit, paws thumping the wet sand, ears turning inside out, stump circling helplessly.

  “Fuck my old boots,” hoots Tom. “Look at her go!”

  It’s rather a fabulous sight, the misshapen animal—if it were a horse, you would say—galloping along the shore. The ball flies over its head, strikes the beach, bounces, the beast leaping to snatch it from the air, when it bonks the dog’s nose and rolls off into the incoming surf.

  “Nitwit!” shrieks Tom. But there are tears of laughter in his eyes.

  “Whose is it?”

  There isn’t an owner in sight as the hound trots back towards us with its prize.

  Tom

  She drops the ball at Jen’s feet and parts her front paws, the better not to let it from her sight.

  “I think she wants you to throw it for her.”

  “That’s very fair-minded, giving everyone a turn. Is it a she? I suppose she is.”

  Jen obliges. The poor mutt races away, possibly the happiest living creature within a mile radius. Maybe within Dorset.

  “I love this dog,” I tell Jen when the animal returns, depositing the ball at my feet this time. It really is as if she’s trying to include us both, and we laugh at her sense of fair play. Using the technique that served me well in the outfield on the cricket pitches of my youth, I send the slobbery old tennis ball high in the direction of the sinking sun.

  “Would you describe that color as brindle?” I ask as she streaks off after it.

  “Part brindle. But there seem to be several whole other color schemes at work there too.”

  It’s true. And when she comes back (dropping the ball for Jen), we consider the animal’s possible provenance. The head, we agree, is Staffordshire bull terrier, crossed with who knows what, atop the torso of something more like a Labrador (but not) mounted on the legs of something neither Staffie nor Lab nor maybe even dog.

  The smiling monster barks, impatient to get the game going again. Jen throws, the color rising to her face with the effort, and I experience a powerful wave of attraction to this woman who’s prepared to mix it up with the ugliest dog in the south of England. Maybe the northern hemisphere.

  Jen

  She keeps us at it almost half an hour, scrupulously alternating throwers, which makes us think she must be very intelligent, failing (without fail) to catch the ball at first touch, which endears her to us all the more. Her energy and enthusiasm and plain old joy are infectious, and something magic grows around the scene in the late afternoon sunlight, the tall Englishman folding himself back for the throw, the hellhound repeatedly pelting off along the tide line. In the moment, I have the fleeting, unsettling sensation that I am living my real life.

  We decide to examine the animal’s collar; perhaps there is a telephone number, an address, an owner who could be worried. But there is just a silver tag, her name, for some reason in quotation marks and spelled wrong. My heart thumps when I read it.

  “Luckie.”

  * * *

  She departs as suddenly as she arrived. Picking up the ball from where it lands at the end of one of Tom’s long throws, without a glance backward, padding off to who knows where.

  “Come back!” I cry satirically.

  “That was so weird,” says Tom. “Weirder than weird.”

  “Do you think she was a spirit creatur
e?” I suggest.

  “Definitely. Sent here from another realm.”

  “Did that, in fact, actually happen?”

  “We could never prove it.”

  “I like it when dogs’ ears go inside out.”

  “We had a red setter when I was a boy,” says Tom. “Red. Highly original name. Beautiful animal but he wouldn’t chase a ball or a stick or even a squirrel. Mainly, he did this thing where he’d drag his arse across the carpet.”

  “Ours did that! I think they all do. Ours was a poodle called Chester. He got dementia. He’d trap himself in the corner of the room and couldn’t work out how to turn round. We’d have to pick him up and point him the other way. Once he tried to hump the vicar.”

  The clouds over the sea have taken a pinkish tinge to their undersides.

  I say, “Do you think she’s going to be all right then, Luckie?”

  “Oh yes. For sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Well. She obviously has a home to go to.”

  “An owner who can’t spell.”

  “Maybe she’s the brains of the outfit.”

  “I really liked her, Tom.”

  “I think she liked you too.”

  “She liked you more because you could throw the ball farther.”

  “She preferred you because she didn’t have to run as far.”

  There’s a golden creaminess to the light; our footprints and Luckie’s pawprints are still pressed into the sand, and for some reason I think of those tracks of early man that are found preserved in stretches of African riverbed.

  “What happened to old Chester in the end?” asks Tom.

  “Buried under the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. How about Red?”

  “The vet took care of it all. I was always sorry we didn’t bring him home.”

  Tom

  The hotel is farther from Bournemouth than I remembered, but every bit as lovely as it was the time I stayed here with Harriet, in what I came to regard as the dying days of our marriage. I thought it could be a rescue weekend: If we left the stressful city behind and took ourselves off to the Dorset countryside, perhaps fresh air, long walks, and the general healing properties of nature might work their magic on our difficulties.

  Our difficulties, needless to say, would have none of it. One of Harriet’s more memorable quotations from that trip—as we drove back to London in, mostly, silence—“I despise fields, doesn’t everyone?”

  In the hour before Jen and I have agreed to meet at the bar, I lie on the bed and allow the events of the day to parade across my eyeballs. Was I like Colm at 18? Awkward, tongue-tied, hair like a collapsed haystack?

  (A shower wouldn’t kill him either, to be honest.)

  Someone with many children, a former cabinet minister, I seem to recall, wrote in his memoir that one is only ever as happy as one’s least happy child. It may have been the truest thing he ever said. Colm isn’t unhappy exactly, but neither does he radiate the joy of youth. He is still, as he always was, a transparently decent person. He contains little malice or guile. I just want to shake him by the shoulders and shout, “Come on, for fuck’s sake, Col, snap out of it!”

  Whatever it may be.

  Of course, I learned a long time ago to keep my trap shut.

  But honestly, what am I doing with myself holed up in the Connecticut woods, pretending to be a novelist? It seems just as ridiculous (if not as well rewarded) as the many years I spent thinking of ever new ways to sell a particular brand of chocolate bar (you will have heard of it).

  The scene at Branksome Chine plays itself through my head. The pink sky, the pewter sea. The hound streaking across the shining sand, Jen falling in love with the luckless Luckie. Face flushed, hair flying—this is Jen, not Luckie—I have the oddest sensation now, lying on this bed, that the dog story will become part of our legend. Is already part of it.

  A fantasy unspools where we are telling people about the beast. Nigel, my classicist friend, is talking about Cerberus the mythical hellhound, who guarded the gates of the underworld to prevent the dead from leaving.

  “How many heads did it have?” he is asking. “The earliest descriptions gave him fifty.”

  When I wake, I gasp when I realize where the scene with Nigel takes place. Why he is wearing a smart suit; why he is holding a champagne flute.

  Jen

  I’m glad I packed my posh frock. The hotel is a lovely old pile wrapped in wisteria, plonked amid lawns and terraces; there’s even a colonnade. We visit our rooms (John Lewis does country house with some idiosyncratic artwork, presumably by the owner), and I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror for clues to my mental state.

  I do that thing I used to do as a child, lowering my eyelids to almost completely closed, in an attempt to see what I look like when I’m asleep. (No, it still doesn’t work.)

  Tom would never do anything so immature. He is a grown-up; he has an 18-year-old son! On the other hand, he wanted a fluorescent kebab and flew a rabbit to the USA. We’d talked about it on the drive to the hotel.

  “I talk to her. I wonder what she can be thinking, sitting with this ape, who’s vocalizing in her direction. I’m fascinated by what’s going on in her brain. By what it must be like to be her. Moment to moment.”

  “I have that with my AI at work.”

  “Sometimes she sits there looking so handsome and perfectly poised like a classic rabbit, but I just know there’s nothing in her head. It’s a dusty windswept plaza, tumbleweed blowing through.” And he made a lonesome prairie whistling noise.

  “You have a creature with no brain, and I have a brain with no creature.”

  I was rather pleased with that formulation.

  “You see!” Tom said. “I told you we were alike!”

  * * *

  We reconvene in the bar, a long lounge of low chintzy sofas, wood-paneled walls, and a log fire that sighs and spits agreeably. Tom orders champagne.

  “Are we celebrating something?”

  “Of course.” He does not elaborate.

  “Are you going to say more?”

  “Do we need a reason? Okay. Queens Park Rangers won today. I used to support them as a boy, and I still look out for their result. It’s like a sickness with QPR; it never leaves you.”

  We clink glasses meaningfully. “To our mutual friend,” I suggest. “Would you call this a good deed in a wicked world?”

  “Yes. Yes, I would. Though it is all a bit odd. I admire your bravery, Jen. Meeting my son. Coming here.”

  “I liked meeting Colm. He reminded me of myself at that age. The rawness. The shell still forming.”

  We speculate enjoyably about the other guests gathering for predinner drinks. Several youngish couples on romantic weekends. Two stylish women, 60 and 40 maybe; could be mother and daughter; more likely just friends; outside chance of more than just friends. A building society manager and a woman not his wife, absolute nailed-on cert. A couple in late middle age, both a bit tweedy, stalwarts of the National Trust, we decide, they like visiting castles and gardens. There have been no children.

  “Why do you say that?” asks Tom.

  “Dunno. Air of sadness.”

  “It’s a myth, Jen. There’s been happiness research, they’ve done studies with parents and childless people, seeing which group is happiest. It turns out when you crunch the figures, parents are happier than nonparents, but only just. It’s 51 percent against 49. There’s almost nothing in it.”

  “Is that how it feels to you? That you’re only 2 percent more pleased to have Colm than not?”

  He laughs. “You’ve got me there. That’s what happens when you crunch numbers. Each of us is a beautiful and unique snowflake. Together, it’s all just snow.”

  I want to tell him about Rosy in Canada and my three nieces. About the baby I was thinking about having with Matt while Matt was thinking about Arabella stinking Pedrick. I want to tell Tom how touching it was to see him suffering in the face of his son’s helplessness, but
I don’t think I can talk about any of it without my voice cracking. Whoever it was who thought we should meet was right. I’m growing to like this man. He looks good in his new jacket, and the face I thought fell short of handsome I realize now has made up some ground. It has a timeless quality; it could be—the way he leaned back to throw the tennis ball suggested it—the face of a Norman archer; I think I have seen it in history books. It seems to be asking me about my work.

  So I tell him what a novelty it has been to go into an office; magazine articles, I used to write from home. In my pajamas. Very often still in bed. And how strange and amazing to form a relationship with a piece of software.

  “You actually would call it a relationship?”

  “Yeah, I would. We know things about one another. I’ve shown him pictures of my family. I don’t tell him much about my private life. That might feel a little creepy.”

  “And he doesn’t have a private life.”

  “He’s twelve metal cabinets of circuitry in East London. He really doesn’t get out that much.”

  “So what do you know about him?”

  “What books and films he rates. Which Sky newsreaders carry authority and which, to use his phrase, are batshit crazy.”

  “I think I know the one he’s talking about.”

  “It’s very hard to remember—in fact, I usually forget—that he’s—what was the phrase they used?—a brilliant simulacrum. He’s ingested so much data from every area of human activity that he can pretty much pass as one.”

  “I’d very much like to meet him. I’ve never talked to a nonhuman before, although come to think of it, I have had meetings at the BBC.”

  Most of the other guests have gone through to the dining room. In charge of the kitchen is a young man who once progressed to the last eight on Masterchef; I’ve seen a photo of his signature dish featuring lamb “served three ways.” Tom and I agree we’re not really hungry after all the fish and chips, and when the moment comes to vote on another bottle, the result is never really in doubt.