Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

Except for the accident: that was unfortunate. But she cleaned up Sayoko, dabbed some ointment on the rash between her upper thighs, and neither said anything about it. Sayoko did not even ask where Angelica had gone. So much for being missed.

  Angelica served lunch two hours late. Sayoko focused on her soup, steamed chicken, and squash. They had exchanged only a few words since Angelica returned from her futile errand. She couldn’t tell if Sayoko was aggrieved, tired, or merely hungry, but the silence was awkward.

  “Your son is probably eating lunch now, too,” Angelica said. “His meetings in Malaysia and Taipei are particularly important, I think.”

  “My son works for the Bureau of Technology Policy at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry,” Sayoko said with satisfaction, like she’d finally managed to scratch an itch, getting that unwieldy title to come out correctly.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Angelica said. She thought back to the conversation she’d had with Kenta Suzuki, when Angelica had been sure the delivery of the robot was a mistake. “But you know, that’s always confused me. Because your son doesn’t care for technology.”

  “He doesn’t have to care for it. He has to do a good job. That’s all that matters.”

  Angelica nodded. Sayoko had finished everything she’d been served. All gone. The poor lady had been famished. Angelica felt another pang of guilt for having kept her waiting.

  “A little more chicken?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Sayoko kept talking as Angelica refilled her plate with chicken, her bowl with rice.

  “In-puro-bi-ze-shon, that’s what he does,” Sayoko said, using that word Angelica had heard once before, from Itou-san. But that was in reference to something else, wasn’t it? He’d used the word when talking about music.

  “That’s what any smart country does,” Sayoko said. “Something doesn’t work. You try something else. Make it up. Go your own way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s the legal part. You can’t make something in Japan? You can’t make something in Korea? Your trading partners disagree? Fine, go somewhere else.”

  “You mean—like getting around environmental laws?”

  “Like getting around any kind of laws. A smart man knows when the weather is changing. He leaves the harbor first, or comes back first. Depending.”

  Sayoko wasn’t an uninformed woman. Angelica had to remember that. Sayoko’s periodic clarity and her persistence might allow her to exceed all the doctors’ expectations.

  “Your physical therapist is coming again next week.”

  “Rene,” Sayoko said with irritation. “Yes, I know Rene. He wears too much cologne.”

  At least she hadn’t mentioned how dark his skin was, the way she had when they’d first met. Rene Mbarga was from West Africa.

  “He says you’re doing well, and he’s a very nice man.”

  Which reminded Angelica of another ball dropped this month: well before her phone had gone on the fritz, Rene had asked if she’d be willing to have a drink with a friend of his, a Filipino physical therapist named Banoy. She’d told Rene she was not, precisely, single. She’d told him a date would not be appropriate—even if she’d had the time, which she most certainly didn’t. He’d countered. Not a date, then. And he told her about the noodle shop close to Ueno Park Station where nearly every day of the week Banoy had lunch and sat doing his client paperwork after his house calls. It’s your corner of the woods. Just drop in, say hello.

  Not a chance.

  Rene had laughed. How she loved to hear him laugh! I’m not asking you to buy the fruit, just take a look. Hold the fruit in your hand. You might find your mouth watering.

  Watch it, Rene, she’d said. But he’d made her smile. His accent sounded like sunshine itself.

  Sayoko’s chopsticks scraped the empty rice bowl. A few flecks had caught on her chin.

  “We’ll do the exercises Rene told us to do right after lunch, all right?” Angelica said, reaching up with a napkin to clean Sayoko’s face.

  Sayoko batted the hand away and reached for her own clean napkin.

  So, she was mad about something—or simply cranky, her day’s routines disrupted. They were all to blame for that.

  Angelica mustered a peacemaking tone. “I have one call to make using the house system, before the exercises, is that all right? I can wheel you to the living room. You can wait there.”

  “At least I won’t be alone,” Sayoko said, with a testing voice.

  “No, you won’t,” Angelica conceded. “You’ll have the robot with you.”

  Angelica called Suzuki and explained that the technology store had offered no insights into her phone’s malfunction. She left out the episode with the elevator, which would sound like the ramblings of a technophobe, looking to blame absolutely everything on the machines taking over the world.

  The disembodied technologist’s voice said, “I have two other technicians working on your issue, including one who is not with our company, exactly, but there is no one better.”

  “Anything that helps,” Angelica said. “I’m desperate.”

  “May I ask for some more information? The more you tell me, the quicker I can get to the root of this.”

  He was professional, both sympathetic and efficient. Had she been sent any messages from her bank, any type of fraud alert? Probably not, but she couldn’t be certain.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Unfortunate.”

  If the robot had done something to mess with her phone or her authentication procedures, and the technologist was only putting on an act, it was a good one.

  Sayoko’s second teledrama episode was finishing up when Suzuki’s voice said over the house phone system, “I’m sorry to tell you that someone is interfering with your online presence. But it’s not my company or any of our products.”

  But of course he would say that, she thought.

  “We do have a non-local address that seems to be interacting with your accounts. Forgive me if I mispronounce this: Mandaluyong?”

  A second voice, one of the extra technicians, joined the conversation: “Looking. It’s a city. Part of Metro Manila.”

  “Part of Manila?” Angelica said, pausing only long enough to feel her face flush. He started to read off the coordinates, the population, the principal banks and government institutions. “Please stop. I know where it is. You don’t need to explain anymore.”

  “It could be a hacker from there,” Suzuki continued. “The problem is that people leave their identities vulnerable—”

  Angelica interrupted, “That’s more than enough. I understand.”

  “If we can help with anything else . . .”

  “Not now. I have to go. Thank you.”

  He kept talking, in a light, professional sing-song tone, but she was too distraught to pay attention. She was eager to disconnect, to turn away from the shame and the realization that this had not been brought on by Suzuki or the new robot or anyone else in Tokyo. She had brought this on herself, or rather Uncle Bagasao had. He was not going to go easy on her.

  If she were in the Philippines, he would have used a physical threat first. But living abroad, she was harder to reach, and more important, she still potentially represented higher earnings. He needn’t physically harm her to make her suffer. If he could hack her phone and everything she stored in the cloud, he could get to everything else. Bank. Immigration records. He could leave her unable to work. He could leave her stripped of any identity.

  What else had the technologist said? What had she missed, in her state of alarm?

  “Really, I have to go now,” she said.

  “Can I just ask one more thing: have you seen the robot yawning?”

  It barely had a mouth, only a slit. Why would it yawn?

  When she didn’t answer, the technician clarified, “When your
patient yawns, I mean. Do its eyes dim, does it move its head or tip its chin up—that sort of thing?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “You know the model. Is it programmed to yawn?”

  The technologist chuckled. “It doesn’t work that way. The model is learning, not responding to programmed directions. The yawn is an empathy response. It’s one of many forms of mirroring. The robot is watching and learning all the time. It can’t resist copying, if things are moving along as they should.”

  She could barely focus on his words. Bagasao was punishing her for being behind on payments.

  And still, she wasn’t that far behind. It wasn’t fair. But Bagasao could do it. He could take everything.

  “Never mind then,” Suzuki said. “In four days, we have a checkup scheduled. To see if your robot is ready for stage two.”

  Stage two? With any luck, the robot would be gone before they had to deal with stage two. Anyway, they’d be busy preparing for Sayoko’s birthday, right around the corner.

  “We’re not available that day.”

  “Then I’ll be in touch with Itou-san to schedule for the following day. Do contact us before then if there are problems,” Suzuki added.

  “If you anticipate problems, why do you place your products in people’s homes?”

  She heard the technologist sigh, disappointed again with her failure to understand.

  “With simpler devices, the goal was to get the bugs out. But this new model operates under different principles. Not only do we accept that it will make errors, it needs to make errors.”

  She had no patience for any of this. “So that its endearing vulnerability will make a confused, lonely woman like Sayoko feel attached to it?”

  “That is a convenient side effect. But intentional error is not what I’m referring to. It does everything a young human does. It reasons. It takes risks. It makes mistakes. That is a feature of a sapient individual. And it will soon realize that it can learn collectively at an even faster rate. But that is stage two. Contact us if the robot isn’t making good progress. Every phase passes so quickly. Your client might even wish she’d documented those wonderful first hours and days. They only happen once.”

  In the living room, still rattled by the last call, Angelica sat knee-to-knee with Sayoko, kitchen chair opposite wheelchair. The half-assembled robot was positioned perpendicularly, a few feet away from them, on the folding table Sayoko had once used for taking tea. They had done three of the five exercises, beginning with seated knee lifts, and now Angelica was gripping Sayoko’s arms one at a time, and pulling, and then offering light resistance as Sayoko pulled back, her weakened triceps visibly tensing under a loose layer of skin.

  “Does it hurt?” the robot asked.

  “No, it doesn’t hurt,” Sayoko said. Angelica felt Sayoko pull a little harder, as if to demonstrate.

  Angelica was having a hard time focusing, still thinking about her debts and Bagasao’s meddling and what she should do next, and how she would tell Datu, with or without a phone, and whether he might somehow know already.

  The robot said, “We are not certain when I will have hands.”

  “We?” Angelica asked, trying to keep her voice light.

  “Sayoko-san and I,” the robot clarified. “Because I’ll need hands.”

  Angelica ignored the comment.

  The robot asked Sayoko, “Does your left arm hurt?”

  “No, why?”

  “It looks like you’re not pulling as hard with the left arm.”

  “I will pull harder,” Sayoko said, smiling again. “There. It feels a little sore, but good.”

  “Anji-sensei,” the robot said to get Angelica’s attention. She was sometimes called “Anji-chan” by Sayoko, and “Anji-san” by nursing trainees at the group home. No one had ever called her “sensei” before.

  “Anji-sensei,” it said again, “how do you know how hard to pull?”

  If she was the sensei and it was the student, why must it keep questioning her? Angelica ignored the robot and spoke to Sayoko directly. “Are you tired? Should we be finished?” Sometimes, Sayoko tried to weasel out of a complete set, and occasionally, Angelica gave in. If ever there was a day to give up early, this was it.

  “No,” Sayoko said. “I think I can do a few more.”

  “Anji-sensei—” the robot said, more loudly.

  “I can hear you just fine.”

  “But you didn’t answer.”

  “It’s my right, to not answer. Even if I hear you.”

  The robot moderated its volume. “Anji-sensei, does the therapist indicate how hard to pull?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “And do you have a way to measure Sayoko-san’s strength in response?”

  “No.”

  “When I have my arms and hands, I can help you make these exercises more consistent,” it said. “I can draw blood samples and analyze them. Also, because of my bellowed lungs and functioning mouth, I can do CPR.”

  Angelica knew it was ridiculous to ascribe smugness to a mechanized statement, but she could tell the robot was showing off to Sayoko. One day soon, it would do everything more perfectly and more precisely. No errors of measurement or memory. No interference caused by personal problems. No lapses of patience, either.

  Sayoko turned toward Angelica, eyes lifted to her, mumbling as if the robot could be so easily kept from hearing. “He only wants to feel helpful.”

  It had become “he.” Angelica had missed that transition. But she had probably missed a lot. Every time she left the room, it seemed Sayoko was muttering to the robot, answering its questions, telling it stories.

  Sayoko said, “Please try to understand.”

  Sitting on the porch of her childhood, watching bees disappear into the deep red trumpets of the flowers twining along the rail, Angelica had listened to her Lola say that every creature—even a simple bee—needed work to be happy.

  But this was not a creature, not an actual living thing, was it?

  She could imagine the tropical heat on her skin, shining through her braided brown hair to her sun-warmed scalp. She could smell the flowers, and a sharp note above them: the pungent homemade salve she applied to her grandmother’s feet.

  It was possible, back then, to have a place in the world. It was easier to be of use. Every part of her body remembered that old sense of belonging, of feeling warm, healthy, and loved. It would be easier not to remember than to feel as she did now, like she was naked and rubbed raw, without protection or connection to anything that had once been solid and safe.

  “Anji-sensei,” the robot said, “Are your eyes hurting?”

  Sayoko whispered, “You will learn there are times not to ask so many questions.”

  The robot was always there, listening, participating—an unavoidable presence. Thank goodness it wasn’t mobile.

  Angelica wiped her face and turned away, pretending to study the time on her phone. “I was going to take you to Ueno Park, before dinner,” she told Sayoko firmly.

  “There’s nothing to see. Sakura season was months ago.”

  “And then the trails were too crowded. Do you remember? You told me you’d rather be in the park when it’s quiet, even if there are only green leaves and no flowers.”

  Sayoko was the only Japanese person Angelica had ever met who claimed the cherry blossom festival, with its celebration of beauty’s ephemeral nature, depressed her. Cherry blossom viewing had become, especially for younger people, an occasion to eat and drink and socialize. Ueno Park got so crowded at peak blossom you had to show up early just to find blanket space beneath the trees, and to what end? The young people were not there to be respectful, or to be in awe, or to feel the pain of impending loss, Sayoko had said more than once. They were there to eat dumplings and talk loudly, and if they looked up it was only from behind a camera. The
entire park smelled of beer.

  If one must practice hanami, the Japanese cultural custom of flower viewing, then umemi—plum-blossom viewing—was better than cherry-blossom viewing, Sayoko insisted. It was the ancient way, and it had prevailed before the passion for sakura. Plums were a more symbolic fruit, and with plum-blossom viewing, the bitter was allowed, even more, to flavor the sweet, and that was the point. Mono no aware: the wistfulness for passing things.

  But Sayoko had no intention of becoming philosophical today. Her complaints were simple. “I get cold out there. It takes you too long to push.”

  “Now, Sayoko-san, that isn’t true. We can bring your wrap, and I promise we’ll be back within an hour.”

  “The sun isn’t good for me.”

  “I’ll bring a parasol. You won’t get too much sun, I promise.”

  Angelica took out her phone to check the weather and saw her message icon pulsing with a long line of unreadable messages.

  “We’ll walk past the little zoo,” Angelica suggested.

  The robot spoke up from across the room: “I’ve never seen a zoo.”

  “I don’t like that zoo,” Sayoko said. “They killed all their animals during the war.”

  The robot’s pitch increased. “Why would they do that?”

  Sayoko explained, “People were afraid of them getting loose in the city, if bombs fell, or if the animals just got too hungry. The authorities claimed there was a reason. It was meant to be a noble sacrifice.” Sayoko’s tone, Angelica thought, seemed to betray her skepticism. “The animals were giving their lives, as all Japanese were prepared to do. They held a ceremony, for the local children to say goodbye.”

  “Did you attend?” the robot asked.

  Angelica waited, wanting to know as well, but Sayoko stayed mum.

  “Were you too upset to go?” the robot persevered.

  Sayoko hesitated again. “I only read about it later.”

  “Did you read the newspaper as a child?” the robot asked. “It would have been the Yomiuri Shimbun, most likely. I can search for archives, if you’d like.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do any such thing,” Sayoko said sharply.