Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

  From across the street, Eliot hears the music and watches the colored lights strobing against the windows of the firehouse. A teenage boy pisses against a wall. Another throws up his dinner. Others sit on the curb waiting for their friends before they’ll venture in. Music louder as Eliot nears. A line of diggers zipper-merges into the doorway, moving prematurely to a beat so simple, it’s almost binary, almost the stripped-down form and essence of sound.

  Eliot pays his admission and inserts himself into the feast of light and noise and bodies pushing against him. Couples tongue on the dance floor. Young girls sniff drip in the open. They wear shirts with the logo of the Android Disciples and hand out branes of wisdom by Lorca. They move like machines, clunky and dumb, imitating the bigoted depictions of robots from a hundred years of media, reclaiming this negative portrayal as kitsch, reinventing it as a mating call.

  Eliot pushes through the throng, passing a bare-chested woman with flourescent breasts, her nipples covered in electric tape. He passes the whirling dervishes and a Hasid handjobbing a black bot. He pushes forward through bits and pieces of conversation between the scratches and clashes of music:

  “You took too much.”

  “I love your hat.”

  “I’m gonna be sick.”

  “I never want this to end.”

  “I can’t find Jaime.”

  Careful, Eliot thinks as the tempo builds. Don’t give yourself away. Pretend this means something to you. Pretend that you belong here, that you’re enjoying yourself here.

  But Eliot isn’t here to dance or get laid or sniff drip (maybe a little later) or experience whatever sweaty joys arise from rubbing against those who wear the same fashions or listen to the same music or choose the same way in a voting booth. He is not seeking some communal euphoria; he is looking for a tangible thing: a Pink. A person who can lead him to Iris. A guide who can carry him back to a time when he was en route to a destination and a life in which he could feel complete.

  Weaving between bodies, Eliot can feel the low hum of the bass as it penetrates him. He can feel it expand. He pushes through the thick of elbows and perfume, stink and breath, through the devotees dancing before the DJ as if he were some Pharaoh overseeing his Egypt, as if the slides and scratches of his music revealed the subatomic wisdom of the universe, translated and beamed through the ear hole, to be understood for a fleeting moment until the sounds shift, challenging the audience’s collective mind to embrace a new perspective.

  The DJ looms above them. Tall with slender muscles, narrow hips, straight, blond hair, he stands erect above his turntables. He is a puppet master risen from the pavement of the city. The lights strobe and the shadows leap at his command. Ear in a headphone, hand on a lever, sounds changing, beats quickening, lasers beaming before his minions’ eyes.

  Is this he? Eliot wonders of the slender man violent with youth muscles popping, at the controls. Is this Pink or did I make a connection where none existed? Did I draw my conclusion more out of need than from the evidence presented? Is this Pink because I want him to be Pink, or is he empirically Pink?

  A small digger girl, raven-haired with a jutting chin, sways before the stage in her metallic skirt. Eliot sees her exchange sideways glances and sultry smiles with the DJ. The pull between them flows through his hands and into the gears of his instrument. He digitizes their desire into exploding waves of light and sound, peak and trough, frequency and volume. The bass builds. The room struggles to contain the twisting time and folding space, the madness and paranoia Eliot synthesizes into a searing pain in his shoulder. And just when the pitch can sink no lower, the tempo can accelerate no faster, the volume can get no louder—at that precise moment that the DJ through his craft has tempered and arranged—in that moment when his acolytes can tolerate no more of the sound’s cruelty, a pink strobe flushes the room to introduce a new drop to the rhythm.

  The crowd hollers and stomps, screaming their approval. Some fall to the floor seizing in orgasm until their friends raise them aloft like sacrificial offerings to some primal, erotic god.

  “Dance!” The order is shouted in Eliot’s ear. “Come on, man. Dance!”

  Eliot turns to see a girl with red dreadlocks swinging from the sides of her head. Her arms wrap around him in a wet embrace, leaving Eliot no choice but to let her movements determine the back-and-forth of his hips.

  “I can feel you,” she says, her lips against his ear, before spinning around and pushing her ass soft to his groin.

  Eliot pulls her closer, feigning interest, all the while watching the man at the levers, all the while judging and measuring, trying to find some clue that will convince him beyond a doubt that this is the man worthy of his contempt.

  “What’s his name?” Eliot asks the dreadlocked girl.

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “The DJ’s name?”

  A few songs later, there’s a new artist at the controls, and Eliot watches as the man he believes to be Pink exits the stage accompanied by the raven-haired digger in the metal skirt. They carry his mixing board and a crate of old vinyl out the back of the building.

  Eliot follows. He leads the dreadlocked girl through the exit behind them. He takes her into the alley and kisses her against the outside wall of the firehouse. He spins her around and presses his own back against the bricks allowing her to suck on his neck so he can watch the DJ and his girl over her shoulder. They load a white van with record crates. They lock the doors and hold hands as they romance down the alley toward the street.

  “I have to go,” Eliot tells the dreadlocked girl.

  She protests between kisses, stumbling half-drunk and dripped out of her skull. Eliot opens the door back to the underground and guides her inside.

  “You never told me your name,” she says as the door shuts between them.

  Eliot follows the DJ and his raven-haired digger down the dark, abandoned street as they walk to Charon’s Diner. It’s a wood and brass joint built to serve downtown hipsters during the neighborhood’s revival, before its descent. Eliot follows the couple inside, careful to leave a distance between their entrance and his so as to remain unnoticed and invisible. He takes a stool at the counter and touches the menubrane to order a shake. Chocolate. Extra thick. The blender spins in the kitchen. He watches the DJ and the digger’s reflection in a mirrored panel above his head. There’s makeup on his eyes. His nails are painted, he might even have some lipstick on. Nothing much happens at their booth. Just a lot of hand-holding and gazing across the table. They touch fingers now and then, but it seems they hardly speak.

  A botress brings Eliot his shake. He thanks her. He stirs it and takes a sip. He opens a newsbrane someone left on the counter and loads the latest update of Revealed! One of his brother’s loops is featured prominently in the sports section. Eliot watches it as he waits.

  A botwhore sits on the next stool. She’s heavy on the perfume with glow-in-the-dark Dyna-Hair wriggling about her head. The moving wigs had been a trend a few years back though Eliot could swear they were out of style now.

  “How’s your shake?” she asks.

  “Thick.”

  “You’ve hardly had a sip.”

  He puts the straw in his lips and sucks it down.

  “That’s quite an appetite.”

  “I’m all right,” he tells her.

  The botwhore turns and chats up a couple of diggers who didn’t get lucky at the underground. She hits them with the hard sell; they haggle over price and leave together out the front.

  In the reflection of the mirror above him, Eliot sees the DJ ask his botress for change. He settles the tab as the raven-haired digger stands to leave.

  Eliot drops a twenty-ingot note on the counter and follows them out. He stands on the corner and watches the couple hold hands back toward the alley. He hails a cab in front of the diner and tells the driver to park outside the firehouse and wait.

  The driver does as he’s told. He’s a rudimentary bot with hooks for hands and
a square head that sits on a modular hinge. Old Indian metal, there’s a cigarette dangling from the speaker that serves as his mouth. He takes a long, slow drag then sticks the loose end of his botcord into the plug for the cab’s lighter.

  The white van departs from the alley.

  “Follow him,” Eliot tells the driver, “but don’t get too close.”

  The van leads the taxi across the river. They pass the stadiums, the old convention center, the corner bots selling drip on Alvarado. They pass MacArthur Park and the forbidding darkness of the bot city west of downtown.

  “Don’t be so obvious,” says Eliot. “Let another car get between.”

  Eliot notes the driver’s reflection in the rearview mirror. He’s a sad, old bot with expired parts impossible to replace. Androids like he were a novelty before Eliot’s time. Tourists paid double to ride with them, interrogate them about the city, flick coins at the backs of their heads while they drove. This was before there were enough of them to threaten heartbeat jobs, before they became a reviled eyesore to the newer bots disgusted by this reminder of their primitive past. The old ones work the late shifts now, the rough neighborhoods and unsafe beats. The only reason they survive is because their metal isn’t suitable for scrap.

  The white van pulls into the parking garage beneath the El Royale apartment building, a giant, deco mausoleum rotting from the roof down. Eliot has the driver pass the driveway and pull over by the lobby. He hands over an amount that’s three times the fare.

  “You never saw me,” he says, and the driver is quick to agree.

  The garage gate closes. Eliot pulls his hoodie over his head and checks to make sure no drones are above him in the sky. He exits the cab and crosses to the front door. Finds it locked. Looks through the glass. Sees the DJ and the girl enter the lobby from the door to the garage. Eliot knocks on the glass to get their attention. The couple approaches, and the DJ opens the door.

  “What’s up?” He blocks the building’s entrance with a lithe arm stretched across the door frame. He’s taller than Eliot and aggressive in his posture.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I lost my key. I didn’t want to buzz my wife and wake the baby.”

  “Right on,” says the digger.

  Eliot follows the couple into the elevator. Pushes the button for the top floor after the button for nine is already lit. Standing to the back, he watches the digger rest her head against the DJ’s shoulder, watches them hold hands. Their fingers intertwine.

  Did he hold hands with Iris, too? Eliot wonders. As they climbed up to her apartment on Normandie, were they together as a couple? Did he force his way in or did he seduce her? Eliot can see the tag on the DJ’s designer street wear. Stylish. Young, but not so young that he lacks experience. Artistic. Good looking. Heartbeat. Iris was attracted to heartbeats, had heartbeat-envy, always talked about how she wished she had been a child so she could see the world through a child’s eyes. Did she go with the DJ willingly or was there some ruse, some promise that pivoted into something else? Or is this another dead end?

  The DJ and the digger exit at the ninth floor. The girl stumbles on the way out. Neither bothers to wish Eliot good night.

  He waits for the elevator door to move then sticks out his foot to keep it from closing. He holds it open and gives himself a count of five. He walks out the elevator and slinks down the hallway following the sound of the digger’s laugh. He peeks around a turn in the corridor to see the DJ fumble with his keys near the window at the end of the hall. So enrapt are they in their anticipations, they do not sense Eliot’s peeking.

  The DJ and the digger enter the apartment and close the door behind them. Eliot hears it lock. With the couple inside, he walks the length of the hall, stops at the door, and looks.

  It’s a door.

  It doesn’t tell tales. No secret reveals itself in the streaked brown paint of its surface or the brand of lock above the doorknob. It’s no different from any other door in any other hallway in Los Angeles or anywhere else.

  So what do I do now? Eliot wonders. Call it a night? Turn around and go home and lose another day in the search?

  The door offers no advice nor does it know if the man behind it had anything to do with Iris’s abduction. Eliot looks down at the filthy carpet and long hall leading back to the elevator. An open window to his right overlooks Rossmore Avenue nine stories below. Rain drizzles outside. Eliot walks to the window and leans out to see the light spilling through the blinds of the DJ’s apartment. Looking down, he sees a ledge several feet below. It’s sloping stone crumbles but appears capable of supporting a man’s weight. And the window to the apartment is only a length away.

  Have I come this far to be stopped by a locked door? Will it be any easier to pass when I return tomorrow, or might I not even get back inside the building again? Is this my only chance?

  Eliot climbs into the window frame. He puts his foot on the ledge, tests it against his weight, and it holds. He puts another foot down and feels the brisk, damp air on the flush of his cheeks. The wind fills his hoodie. He shoos away a pigeon with his foot. He steps carefully from the window and toward the apartment. His palms and his chest brush the facade of the building as he shuffles slowly, sideways along the rain-slick stone. Face to the bricks, he edges to the apartment window. Carefully, he peers inside the living room at the dim, colored lights and the couch backed against a graffiti mural on the wall. The digger straddles the DJ’s lap, licking his face, black panties showing beneath the metal skirt as her top comes off.

  Eliot waits until they’re too involved to notice before he shuffles past the living room, quickly, down the ledge past the window. Don’t look down, he repeats to himself as a mantra. The stone cracks beneath his feet, but it holds. He approaches the window of an unlit room. He sticks a finger beneath the lower sash where a crack of space breathes between the window and the sill. He lifts the window open from without. He climbs across the threshold and steps down onto a plastic lining that covers the carpeted floor of the bedroom.

  Eliot is inside now. He stands in the DJ’s bedroom with the couple in the other room. The plastic lining cracks with every step. He takes out his pocketbrane and shines it about the room. There’s a bed next to a closet with two doors made of wooden slats. There are restraints attached to the bedposts. There’s an antique monitor and a video camera on a tripod. An album collection stands in floor-to-ceiling shelves and a phonograph on a table looks to be from the early twentieth century. More shelves are full of comic books and graphic novels that look like they’ve never been opened. Vintage posters from B-movie slasher flicks adorn the soft, soundproofed walls.

  Eliot points his pocketbrane toward a desk in the corner of the room. He looks for a workbrane, something that might have information about Iris, but there’s nothing there. Just a pad of unmarked paper, some colored pens, and a metronome. Everything in the room is from the last century as if the guy stole his furnishings out of the Smithsonian.

  Footfalls approach from the living room. Eliot hears the digger giggle. He shuts off his pocketbrane and looks to the window but there’s not enough time to climb out. He breaks for the closet instead, squats inside, and closes the doors behind him.

  The DJ flicks a switch, and a lamp slashes red light across Eliot’s face as he watches between the wooden slats of the closet doors. The digger slips off her skirt. Crouching beneath the clothes in the closet, Eliot watches the couple continue what they started in the other room. They fall on the bed and the headboard obstructs his view, but he can still see their legs wrap around each other. Nice legs on the digger. Nice feet with black nail polish on her android toes. He can’t help but notice her toes.

  They make out for a while. One on top, then the other. They move up and down, moaning, grunting, grinding their bodies together. The DJ fingers her; she pulls on his cock. Eliot wonders how he’s going to escape. Don’t move, he tells himself, but all that squatting burns the muscles in his thighs. He has no choice but to wait unti
l some opening presents itself. There’s nothing else to do but wait.

  The digger coos as the DJ guides her wrist into a restraint. He locks it shut, and she laughs.

  “This is interesting.”

  He fastens her other wrist, and she pulls back to try its strength. It holds; he fastens her ankles. He pulls the straps tight to force her legs apart. She twists one way then the other. She tries to bring her knees together but can’t, so her body makes its peace with being vulnerable.

  The DJ stands. Pulls up his pants and puts away his erection. He turns on another lamp.

  “Too bright,” says the digger.

  Behind the tripod, he tilts the camera toward the bed and turns on the monitor. It shines a blue square of illumination across the room.

  “Oh, my God!” The digger laughs when she realizes he’s filming. “I’m going to kill you!”

  “Something like that.”

  Her image debuts on the monitor so that it appears the digger is looking toward Eliot through the vintage screen. Now he can see the scene from two positions: 1. from the closet, where he crouches behind the headboard, Eliot can see the DJ from over the shoulder of a bound android tied to the bed, and 2. on the monitor, Eliot can see from the DJ’s point of view, looking down at this expectant android, in her panties, waiting to be dominated.