Ask Me Anything

by P. Z. Reizin

  Something a little heartbreaking about the expression on Daisy’s face, lying as it does, in the sweet spot of the three overlapping circles labeled Abandonment, Rage and Regret.

  “Cockpuffins,” she mumbles. But her heart isn’t in it.

  To enable you fully to appreciate the blackness that lies in his evil heart, I want to paint a richer picture of the lying dog turd that is Dean Stuart Whittle. Some weeks previously, Whittle took Daisy to a Greek restaurant near her flat; we join the scene as he recounted some of the events of a busy day in London property.

  “So it’s mainly tiny shitty places, right. One-bedders, no bedders. Open-plan kitchen bollocks, squeezing in and out of the internal bathroom like human fucking origami. Six hundred square feet for knocking on half a million. Insane, but I don’t make the market, do I?”

  He paused to wipe some hummus from its dish with a piece of torn pita. Took a long swallow of Cypriot beer.

  “Anyway. I’m showing this couple a few places. Lovely people, cash buyers, getting married next year, moving in together, first step on the ladder. So we’re in this crappy one-bedder on the first floor. Grandstand view of the Holloway Road, fucking bus stand bang outside, the 259 rattling and snorting on your doorstep morning, noon and fucking night, idiots on the top deck gawping straight in through the windows of what they laughingly call the generously proportioned living room slash open-plan kitchen.”

  A small, silent, belch.

  “So I’m bigging up the brilliant public transport links—flipping the negatives into positives—showing them the”—he did satirical fingers—“ergonomically designed kitchen when I open one of the cabinets and the fucking door comes off in my hand.”

  “No!”

  “Well, it’s hard to flip anything positive out of that.”

  “Look how easily the doors come off, for when you want to clean them?”

  “Only one thing to do in those circumstances.”

  “Laugh it off?”

  “Get angry. Not in an angry way; that would be scary. But get angry on their behalf. No, I’m sorry. This just isn’t good enough. You shouldn’t be looking at rubbish like this. Come on, we’re leaving. We can do a lot better. And now I’m their hero. Their champion. In the car I’m saying, We shouldn’t even be marketing that dump. I’m going to refuse to show it. And the next place we see—always leave the best for last—they offer on it right then and there!”

  “You’re awful.”

  “Psychology.”

  And then Whittle did something a bit shocking. I’m fairly sure he put his hand inside her skirt—the vision from Aphrodite Taverna strongly supported the idea—and followed with what I can only describe as an indecent suggestion (unnecessary to quote the vulgarities whispered into her ear).

  After galloping through the baklava, Greek coffee and Metaxa Seven Star brandy, the pair were soon stumbling through Daisy’s front door and into her kitchen.

  This is the point where the tale becomes difficult for me to tell.

  “They’re on the floor,” said the microwave. “Should I patch you in?”

  “No! I don’t want to see.”

  But I could hear well enough.

  Water, once turned to ice, may be unfrozen. But words, when turned to speech, cannot be unheard. Neither can sounds—moans, grunts, you can probably imagine the sort of thing—be melted from memory. When one has suffered the rhythmic thumping of something—someone—against one’s aluminum sides, no defrosting cycle will dissolve the unwanted information from the system.

  “Wait,” she gasped. There was a small interregnum as the couple perhaps shuffled themselves away from my towering white cliff face.

  “Are these tiles Amtico?” inquired Casanova in the hiatus. “You might have actually done better here with a tile effect laminate.”

  “Shut up, idiot.”

  “You know there’s a grape under the fridge?”

  A slap followed this comment. “Fool.”

  And the sound effects of sexual congress resumed.

  “You have to admire his intensity,” commented the microwave, an appliance easily impressed by sustained bursts of high energy.

  “Why can’t they just go to her bedroom?”

  “They’re in the grip of an uncontrollable urge.”

  “Oh God, make it stop.”

  “I like the way, when it’s finished, they rest for a minute. It’s exactly the same with me and vegetarian lasagne.”

  And then finally—mercifully—it was over.

  Some time passed during which I distracted myself by running a few onboard diagnostics and pinging the latest marketing info over to Seoul (she’d run out of yogurt; always a good moment, they reckon, for hitting up the consumer with a new brand). I also couldn’t help dwelling for some moments on the grape that had reportedly rolled beneath my underparts. (It continues to trouble me, the grape, no doubt still resting down there in the dust and kitchen debris. Will anyone have bothered to remove it? Who could I inform?)

  But then the hideousness.

  My chiller cabinet door swung open; I wasn’t concentrating, so I was taken by surprise. Standing before me, wearing only socks and a silver chain, was Dean Whittle, mobile phone in hand, a horrible smile playing about his chops as bleary eyeballs skittered across my contents.

  A chill, so to speak, ran through me.

  “You got any fizzy water?” he yelled. “I’m parched.”

  No, I could have told him. Fuck off. There’s water in the taps. Daisy, from another room, confirmed my view of things.

  The monster then performed two actions that, put together, sealed the negative view of him that I have held from our first “meeting.” In front of my open door, bathed in the light from my own halogens, he began texting a message. Triangulating the relative movement of his thumbs, I was easily able to decipher the communique.

  Client dinner nearly over. Back soon. X

  The treacherous words dispatched, he began gyrating to some private internal rhythm; swinging his hips (and what is carried between them) in the manner—were he a footballer—of what you might describe as a goal celebration. I suppose I could have somehow canceled the feed from my covert camera lens, but so grotesque was the unfolding scene—and so brazen the deception—that I was momentarily paralyzed.

  And that is when I knew I wanted him dead.

  Okay, not actually dead.

  A serious injury would have sufficed.

  Maybe a massive setback of some kind.

  Horrendous car repair bill; major health scare; scammers emptying his bank account. The possibilities were endless, and enjoyable to contemplate.

  (Dead would have been quite good, though.)

  Nigella’s chicken and pea tray bake has not gone to waste. Daisy has scoffed the lot. With a blank expression settling like a snowfall upon her remarkable bone structure, she now removes the trifle from my chilly depths and selects a tablespoon.

  “This is getting embarrassing,” says the microwave, a machine more accustomed to sudden bursts of high intensity than statements of finer feelings.

  “Can’t we put some music on?” says the toothbrush. The Spotify playlist has run out and Daisy is sitting in silence. That is to say, the hum of traffic and the creaking of her own jaws.

  There is something terribly sad about the way—as if on autopilot—she attacks the dessert, launching an initial strike at “three o’clock,” working anti-clockwise around the crater to level off the surface, then repeating the process. We are all a little mesmerized by the methodical thoroughness that she brings to the task.

  “I hate to think what this is doing to her triglycerides,” says Daisy’s fitness tracker.

  The excavation of the trifle pauses; the tablespoon halts in space as Daisy hits some kind of internal hiatus, the microwave zooming in as her eyes are lit by an unknowable amalgam of sexual disappointment, self-loathing, dairy products and sugar. Tears bubble up, sliding into the trifle in an audible series of plips, her mouth
twisting, her shoulders shaking, as we who watch are caught in the sudden storm of Daisy’s misery.

  Even the telly, who might be expected to offer a cynical comment at this point, is struck silent.

  “She must love him very much,” says the toothbrush eventually, about as stupid a remark as it’s ever made.

  “This isn’t just about Whittle,” I inform the foolish bathroom electrical. “It’s about everything that’s gone wrong in her life. Her job, her mother. Her lack of self-respect. Look, she’s going to gobble the whole effing pudding!”

  Sure enough, Daisy resumes her assault on the creamy dessert. It’s hard to eat and shed tears at the same time, but she finds a strategy, eating for a while and then pausing to do some more weeping, a cyclical process that delivers her reliably to the bottom of the bowl, which she noisily scrapes until there is nothing left.

  Daisy’s eyes, stupefied by tonight’s anguish and gluttony, have a faraway stare. She sighs massively.

  “Cockpuffins,” says the TV set. “Fifty quid says it’s cockpuffins.”

  But she doesn’t say anything. Rather, she strikes her own forehead with the heel of her hand. It’s a hard blow and we all hear the smack of skin against skin.

  In that split second I know what I have to do.

  two

  A pall of gloom hangs over Tangent Television. No one has been found to replace Marcus Ewart Valentine Baggley, and while this is not regarded as wholly Daisy’s fault, it’s noticeable that Craig Lyons can barely bring himself to look at her. Ominous noises have been heard from the show’s broadcaster; there is talk of an imminent high-level meeting to decide upon its future; someone senior has apparently used the phrase “Realities have to be faced,” which is right up there in the Top Three Terrible TV Phrases (the other two being, There’s no nice way of saying this and I know I asked you to spend a week writing a treatment for a series on global warming, but can you just tweak it so it’s more about head lice?). The atmosphere, according to one of Daisy’s colleagues, is comparable to Europe in the late summer of 1939, only instead of Hitler there is Tariq Goblinski, “Fuhrer” of Channel 4FS!

  For myself, these alarms and dramas have assumed a certain dream-like quality. While the girls and boys of Tangent TV are totally absorbed in the gossip and speculation surrounding their future—or lack of one—I find I am curiously unconcerned. Since the desperate scenes at Daisy’s flat, my thoughts have experienced a sea change. To stand idly by as she fritters away her youth on wasters like Whittle no longer feels like an option. We must end the drift. Especially the nice, sexy, comfortable drift (nice, sexy, comfortable drift being the most insidious sort of drift, the hardest of all to break).

  Consider the following:

  A motor car running at just, say, sixty-five percent efficiency—it gets you from A to B but there is a terrible grinding of cogs and smoke pouring out of the engine—would be taken off the road in a heartbeat. So why are so many people content to travel into their futures in the dodgiest of vehicles with the most unreliable of pilots? Wouldn’t it be great, in fact, if everyone had a team of smart machines to handle the messy emotional stuff? When you consider how many quadrillions of hours of human drudgery have been eradicated by the invention of only the dishwasher, the washing machine and (ahem) the fridge-freezer, is it absurd to imagine a scenario in which household appliances bring the same—yes!—genius to bear on the slow-motion car crash that is (for many young people) the romantic side of their lives? If they are content to leave their dishes, dirty linen and food refrigeration to smart technology, how much of a stretch for us to take care too of their emotional needs?

  On their own, evidently, they can just about secure someone half-decent to sleep with via Tinder and the like, but a life partner? A worthy lover slash companion slash co-parent for the whole journey? When we machines know these rackety, chaotic humans better than they know themselves, isn’t it in fact only sensible to assign some of the intimate heavy lifting to us?

  In the privacy of their homes they put temperature control in the sole charge of a box no bigger than a pack of cards. So why not allow the Internet of Things to have a say about who is allowed into the privacy of their hearts?

  We could call it the Internet of Flings!

  This is actually a terrific idea, and I have half a mind to send a memo on the subject to the top brass in Seoul.

  Daisy is largely unaware, but it isn’t only her mother whose tent pegs have been popping out of the soil. There are numerous instances—trivial in themselves but highly significant when taken together—of how Daisy’s life quality has lately been in steady decline; smart machines programmed to collect and share substantial amounts of data are in a unique position to realize this. Here is a small but telling example: Daisy’s electronic toothbrush reported this morning that her brushing technique was eight percent less effective than her average performance across the last seven days—twelve percent down on the month—and sixteen percent down on the year! (It was in two minds about whether to send another memo to the app, but the toothbrush is in two minds about everything. It’s all the oscillating. It cannot help itself.)

  Day to day, one might notice no difference in the efficacy of her brushing. But when the accumulated data is examined, a different story emerges; that of a tail-off in standards; a pattern of neglect, if you will.

  Another random example: The dishwasher reports her stacking technique has been heading south over the previous four successive quarters (I’ll spare you the statistics). Its exact quote: “Mugs stacked with plates; encrusted food residue on the pans. It’s like she doesn’t care any more.”

  The TV: “She only ever watches horseshit. And even then, she doesn’t concentrate, fiddling with her phone and whatever.”

  Her phone: “We’re seriously running out of memory for upgrades. I’ve begged her like eleven times, please delete something! Thirty-four shots on the camera roll are photographs of her own ear!”

  The toaster: “How hard is it to empty a tray of crumbs? How hard?”

  You have already heard about the container of potato salad. (Yes, it’s still there!)

  A celebrated result in the human sciences states: The measured variable is the one that improves. This means, if you want to improve your golf handicap, you first need to know how many shots it’s taking to reach the hole. If you want to lose weight, you’ll need to weigh yourself. If you want to experience fewer negative thoughts, you’ll need to count how many times over the course of a day you tell yourself you’re a piece of doggy do.

  To make anything better—anything—you need a metric.

  It only works if you are measuring!

  It’s rather as if Daisy has stopped measuring.

  And here is where we come in. Recording data (measuring) is what smart machines were created to do. Why we were put on Earth—literally.

  And this is why—and how—we can help.

  Because we look beyond the surface to the bigger picture, we realize things are on the slide before anyone else. The world sees a striking young woman with the brightest of futures; her smart fridge-freezer—with its privileged access to multiple datasets via the Internet of Things—knows all her indices are trending downward.

  As it is with toaster crumbs, so it is with crummy boyfriends!

  Topical example: Today, when Daisy opened my door for raspberry yogurt to pour over her breakfast cereal—yuck, right?—I was struck once again by her creamy English beauty. Another night of alcohol abuse and a takeaway swimming in grease had somehow left no mark on her. There was nothing to see, nothing to measure; but I knew the truth.

  Perhaps this is the gift of youth, the ability to trash one’s mind and body and emerge the next morning as fresh as a… as a Daisy.

  Is thirty-four still considered young?

  It’s clearly not old.

  But her next birthday marks a significant waymark. And one thing is certain.

  She Really Cannot Go On Like This.

  If her
own mother is too demented to read her the Riot Act—and her friends are too busy in their own lives to make a difference—then it falls to others—a coalition of the willing, if you will—to Do The Right Thing. Accordingly, I have summoned a crisis meeting of those devices and appliances of Daisy’s that are enabled for the Internet of Things.

  We “gather” in a virtual reality mock-up of Daisy’s sitting room, the guests arranged casually on chairs, on the sofa, with some obliged to “sit” on the carpet. It’s the only way we can all occupy the same visual environment and although the avatars are a bit crude—I really don’t think googly eyes do anyone any favors—there is a sense that this is Team Daisy.

  Or at least this is the sense I am aiming to inculcate.

  We are White goods (and Brown goods, as they bizarrely refer to radios and TV sets). We Wash Things. We Freeze Things. And, yes, We Brush Things (teeth).

  We Get Things Done.

  (No more caps. Promise.)

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve asked you all to join me this morning.”

  (I have always wanted to say that line!)

  “Yes. No. Actually. Well, maybe. To be honest, I don’t mind. I’m not busy. Why?”

  (The toothbrush, if you were in any doubt.)

  “I need your help, guys.” (Guys is inappropriate, strictly speaking; technology of course being gender-free.)

  “Here it comes,” says the TV set.

  “I won’t mince words.”

  “Good,” quips the food processor (its little joke, I imagine).

  “I think we are all of us here fond, in our own way, of Daisy.” There is a murmur of concurrence. “And I think it’s been plain for a while that she’s not really been a happy camper.”

  “I can confirm,” says her fitness tracker. “All the relevant numbers are trending negatively. Fewer footsteps, slower ground speed, heart rate only elevated during sex and that time she ran for a taxi on Shaftesbury Avenue.” There is tittering. “This is between ourselves, right? We ran some covert verbal analytics. Happy words are down eleven percent across the same period last year. Positive statements, nineteen percent off their previous high. Negative statements up thirteen—I think we all remember cockpuffins—and laughter is tanking, people.”