Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Through the half-open bedroom door, Angelica heard Hiro say, “Itou-san. Hajimemashite.”

  She strained to listen: only silence. Itou had been startled, coming face to face with the robot at the door.

  But then she heard Itou’s response: a soft chuckle. “Nice to meet you. So, you’re the reason I had to change flights?”

  Angelica hurried to dress and brush her teeth and hair. Then she caught her expression in the mirror. She hadn’t worn any makeup in about two weeks, which happened to be the last time she’d seen Itou. A little foundation under the eyes then. A little mascara and just a hint of blush. Better. There was no excuse for looking as drained as she felt. Just as she was turning away from her reflection, she felt a tickle of nausea and clutched the edge of the sink. Her vision dimmed slightly and then brightened again, the dizziness passing.

  You are being silly about this, she told herself. Five days ago she had fainted in the street—but what a five days. Yesterday she had bought the pregnancy test, and then, in the chaos of the hours that followed, forgotten about it. Her purse was hanging from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. The test was inside.

  She remembered the last time she had used such a urine test, sitting in a college bathroom stall, watching the pink indicator line brighten into view. The incontrovertible knowledge: yes, you are carrying a baby. An unwanted baby. She’d been twenty-two.

  She’d gotten pregnant accidentally, with a fellow nursing student who had already stopped calling by the time she missed her first period. She knew what her future held in store: working abroad, almost certainly. And she knew what other women in her situation, married or unmarried, did when they had one or more children and needed to go abroad without them. They left the babies home, in care of family members or, very often, in the care of low-paid nannies. The Filipina abroad sent back money, usually for many years. The substitute mother, often illiterate, sometimes with her own children cared for by someone else—a never-ending chain of outsourced love and care, each successive link more fragile—became all your child knew. If you had a husband, half the time he and the nanny ended up pairing off. It was so common it didn’t even count as a scandal. Women gave up their children temporarily—as Yanna had—because it made economic sense. Five years passed, or ten, the child or children reached adolescence and sometimes, a Filipina would return as a grandmother without ever having experienced being a day-to-day mother.

  Not Angelica. She knew what it was like to feel abandoned, to call out in the dark and hear no answer. She loathed the thought of another person trying to replace her, and doing it imperfectly, creating damage and guilt on all sides. She would never do that to her own child.

  An abortion, illegal and risky, seemed preferable. But it was not safe or painless. The quacks who performed the surgeries were not above punishing their patients, leaving them scarred and often infertile. The first gynecologist Angelica visited in Japan was accustomed to seeing barren women, but not for this reason: vengeful third-world doctoring. He’d tried to reassure her that things could be done—perhaps the scarring was not so bad and she could still save her fertility—and she had listened, politely nodding, dubious and apathetic. She wasn’t wealthy and she wasn’t Japanese. She accepted the fertility clinic brochure he gave her with both hands and disposed of it later that day.

  When she’d started sleeping with Junichi, he had asked, and Angelica had assured him—I can’t get pregnant, I’m sure of it.

  How do you know?

  Women just know these things.

  She had not relished telling a man who had been trying for years to have children that she herself had given up a pregnancy and fallen into the hands of a doctor willing to damage a womb.

  Angelica opened the testing kit now, returning the empty box to her purse rather than leaving it in the house garbage. It looked no different than the kind of pee stick she’d used in her college days. She followed the steps, withdrew the dampened stick from between her legs, sat staring at it for one long minute, feeling silly for wasting even these few seconds when Itou was home, in the house, waiting to see her. The results indicator remained blank. Done.

  She started to get up then forced herself to remain, counting: one one-thousand, two one-thousand . . .

  From out in the hallway came the sound of Itou’s voice: “Good morning? Hello?”

  She kept counting.

  After another minute the second pale pink line appeared. It cleaved her mind smoothly in two. One side silently insisted: “No, impossible.” The other said: “Of course. What else?”

  She got up, hid the used stick in her purse, washed her hands, and looked in the mirror at one of the few female forty-somethings in Japan who did not want to have a baby. A cosmic joke.

  She took a breath and opened the bathroom door. “Coming!”

  In the kitchen she bowed deeply at the first sign of her employer, who was already making himself breakfast as Hiro watched.

  “Can I get you something?” she asked. “You must have left KL so early. Let me—”

  He continued to pour boiling water into his cup, taking his time.

  After a moment he said, “I think I heard my mother just now.”

  “Hai!” Angelica said it too loudly, bowing again, more nervous in his presence than she had felt since the first day he’d hired her. She had to focus, leaving every preoccupation behind, save one. It was imperative that she stay in the kitchen, that she observe Itou interacting with Hiro, that she overhear their initial conversations and have the opportunity to parse his words and gestures for surprise, acceptance, doubt. How could she develop any strategy at all if she missed the opening moves?

  Angelica had not started toward the bathroom, where Sayoko was waiting.

  Itou said, “I think she may need assistance. Perhaps with a delicate matter.”

  Angelica bowed again, blushing. “Hai. Sumimasen.”

  Sayoko was just as eager to make her way to the kitchen and annoyed by her failure to make the transition back from toilet to wheelchair when she had done just fine getting herself up and out of bed in the first place.

  “My arms are getting weak,” Sayoko said, out of breath, when Angelica arrived to help her. “That isn’t age. It’s laziness. I’m sorry, Anji-chan.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  “You’re right,” Sayoko said, her contrition dissolving into renewed impatience. “Now hurry, won’t you?”

  “Yes. Let’s clean you up first.”

  The end result of two people hurrying in such close proximity was more delay—tussling over clothes, excess splashing at the sink, another shirt change only minutes after the first to replace a damp top, a too-quick combing of hair.

  “And a little rouge, please,” Sayoko asked. “If you will.”

  Angelica forced herself to slow down and reached for a rarely used makeup bag on a nearby shelf.

  After applying powder, rouge, a touch of eyebrow pencil and a dab of lip gloss, she told Sayoko, “You look lovely.”

  “I look well?”

  Angelica glanced up, their eyes meeting in the mirror. Staring at Sayoko’s reflection, that pale oval face, surprisingly smooth despite so many decades on this earth and with dark eyes that shone, Angelica saw a beauty and a strength she sometimes forgot to notice.

  “Better than well, Sayoko-san.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You look better than you’ve ever looked. You are timeless, Sayoko-san.”

  “Such flattery!” Sayoko pretended to scoff, but she was evidently moved. She looked up, blinking hard to hold back any tears that would spoil her makeup. “That’s important. I must look healthy or my son might think Hiro’s no good for me. It’s up to us to make him understand. Will you do that? Will you help him understand?”

  Angelica didn’t reply.

  “Promise me,” Sayoko
said.

  But Angelica couldn’t promise. Nor at this moment could she lie.

  “Please, Anji-chan,” Sayoko whispered. “Don’t let him take Hiro away.”

  They were still staring into each other’s eyes when Itou called again from the kitchen. “Mother? Are you coming? Don’t you want to see your son?”

  “So,” Itou said to Angelica later that night. They were alone at last: dinner finished and the dishes washed, Sayoko helped into bed, Hiro in there with her, on sentry duty, as Sayoko liked to call it, standing in the corner with his eye lights dimmed and his trunk opaque.

  In the kitchen, Itou filled Angelica’s cup with tea, then his own.

  “I can see you’ve had an interesting week,” he said.

  This he gathered from the day they’d spent both together and apart—a long morning during which Itou, tired from his early flight, listened as his mother talked and showed off Hiro’s functions, and as Hiro was made to perform, answer questions and allay doubts, as if he were some new boyfriend brought home by a young woman to her family.

  Itou had asked questions, only some of which Angelica could answer, about Hiro’s full physical abilities and his optional upgrades, as well as the cloud-computing, social-learning AI functions that were currently “disabled,” awaiting his stage two checkup. Did that mean he never went online at all? No, he accessed the internet all the time, Angelica explained. Without being connected, he couldn’t fulfill his duties.

  Even the smallest details interested Itou. Hiro’s slit-shaped mouth had a small hole at the center. That was for blowing air, and doing CPR, but it could be used for other things, even blowing up children’s balloons. Over his simple eyes there was a visor which could easily become a screen, the size of wraparound sunglasses, on which could be played an image of human-like eyes, with more expressiveness than Hiro’s simple eye slits conveyed. Then why, Itou asked, was Hiro’s visor never animated? Because in early tests, Sayoko had not responded warmly to those kinds of robot faces. Nor had she responded to video presentations of the more mannequin-like, almost-but-not-quite-human faces—the kinds one saw in taxis and department stores.

  When Itou had been at his most interrogatory, pressing Hiro for more of these details, Sayoko had called out in a distressed voice: Don’t change his face. Don’t change anything. I like Hiro the way he is. I don’t want to hear any more.

  In the afternoon, Itou had ordered a car and retreated to his office for several hours, finishing the work he had abandoned in KL. Then he’d returned for a family dinner, which Angelica had cooked more carefully than anything she’d prepared in months: fried pork cutlets, steamed vegetables, white rice. She had tried making a tonkatsu sweet and sour sauce for the pork, but something must have gone wrong, since Itou gave it a sniff and then ate his cutlet plain. After dinner, Sayoko sat in front of the television. Itou pretended to read the newspaper, an expensive vintage format he subscribed to—Junichi had called the habit an affectation—printed on big sheets that were hard to hold and fold without rattling. Angelica sensed he was watching his mother and Hiro, quietly. Just as they were watching him.

  Now, finally, Angelica and Itou had some privacy.

  “It’s unusual, I grant you that,” Itou said. “She seems very attached. It’s what the manufacturer claimed, but I didn’t believe it. I was adamant that if any person were to resist a new technology like this one, it would be my mother, second only to me. Perhaps that only convinced them that I was the best test case.”

  She waited for him to say more, but he removed his eyeglasses to rub his face. He took his time putting them back on.

  “We’ll resolve this,” he said, finally. “Obviously, this was not what I had in mind when I consented to a test trial.”

  “A test trial?”

  “For now. We have to stay informed of our options.”

  Options? For replacing her entirely? Would he ever come out and say it directly?

  “I know about the new glitches with the relief agency,” he said. “It’s only the beginning of long-term problems. There are liabilities involved with using machines, but we can own a machine, and we can choose those liabilities. Someday, the human care companies and even hospital emergency rooms won’t give us a choice.”

  Out of nervousness, she finished her cup of tea.

  He started to pour more, realized the pot was empty and gestured for her to stay seated. “There is a time to be firm and a time to be flexible. Perhaps I have been too skeptical about the new advances. More old-fashioned than my mother, in too many ways.”

  While he was busy at the kitchen counter, back turned, Angelica searched inside herself. What was the best thing? What was the truth? Did she have any immediate doubts now about Hiro’s reliability or about Sayoko’s safety? Aside from facts, there was strategy. If she wanted to persuade Itou, would it be more convincing to be adamant, or to feign ambivalence, as if still weighing the evidence with an open mind?

  When Itou returned to the table he didn’t speak, staring at the teapot as the leaves steeped. There was never any point in hurrying him, especially when he was troubled.

  After pouring fresh cups, he said, “I trust your opinion. I know that you want only the best for my mother. Has she been acting differently with this robot in the house?”

  There was not one way to answer. There were a half-dozen ways. There were facets and patterns, clear or obscure. When Itou was negotiating some new trade deal or chairing some policy debate, what information did he choose to share? Information that benefitted Japan, of course. He did not share everything.

  “She is more worried,” Angelica began to say, choosing one piece of the truth, fitting it into place. “I’d say she is more emotional in general.”

  “I see.”

  “And she talks more. Much more. Some of her stories seem . . . invented, or at least exaggerated.” If he pressed, where would she start? With the story of having Itou taken away, however briefly, as a baby; with romantic imaginings of some valiant first lover; with allusions to being mistreated as a young woman; with a constant worry that Hiro would be taken away? Even her story about the animals of Tokyo’s zoo being slaughtered seemed odd and unreliable. “I don’t mean to question her veracity. It’s only that—well—paranoia is a symptom. And memory is always fallible, even in the best cases.”

  Hai, he sighed, as if none of this was new to him. Because Itou was not surprised, Angelica felt her own tentative, partial disbelief harden into something else—a choice. Sayoko was not making sense. That made everything easier.

  Angelica said, “Her appetite and energy level has been unstable as well.” That was true. Sayoko had been ravenous one day, willing to skip meals another. She had been exhausted after staying up too late with Hiro and full of energy later in the week, when she’d had fun interacting with him and with Gina.

  “Ah,” he said. One syllable.

  Was that all he could say? The reserve and restraint that epitomized proper behavior here would never feel natural to Angelica. She had grown up in a house where people sang like birds: women laughing and gossiping, but men, too. Her father, on the porch at night, telling stories to her and Datu and their three sisters as well as any other kids who’d come up the lane at the sound of his storytelling voice with its squeaky imitations and low comical drawls, the sounds of frogs croaking, roosters crowing and fish blowing imaginary bubbles.

  Forever gone.

  Itou oversaw the third pouring of tea: curling steam, the feeling of heat through the porcelain as Angelica touched the crackle-glazed surface.

  Itou finally said, “You’ve been put into a difficult situation. It would be less so, if you had found that you and the robot could work together.”

  Hadn’t she tried? Hadn’t she waited and experimented and adapted, coping at every turn with the certainty that none of this was to her benefit?

  She found it hard
to breathe and had to remind herself: nothing was decided yet.

  Itou folded his hands together and looked up, expression stony. “Permit me to ask: do you think she is in immediate danger?”

  His eyes were on her. She was tempted to answer immediately, positively, emphatically. But what would that accomplish? If he doubted at all, then he could disregard her as alarmist. If she drew a line, he would have to step on one side or the other. But if she drew no line, he wouldn’t know where to stand. He would experience a taste of the vertigo that was her daily life.

  “I don’t think anyone can know for sure,” she answered after a moment. “He—it—is an untested kind of intervention. And it’s constantly changing. That seems to be the most essential part of the robot’s design.”

  “Of course you’re right,” he said. “Untested, which means unpredictable. But we shouldn’t make rash decisions. Untested doesn’t mean unsafe.” He stared into his teacup. “What do they seem to do when they are alone?”

  When Sayoko and Hiro were behind closed doors, how could she possibly know what they were doing? But Angelica did know, a little.

  She knew that for a period of time each night after bedtime she heard Sayoko’s muffled voice talking without interruption, as if she were educating Hiro, or telling him stories. Angelica had rested in bed, eyes closed, straining to hear, catching bits and pieces, the word “Grandmother” often, and “Daisuke.” The name did not seem to belong to her deceased husband. It did not match the name on a framed diploma from the 1950s, hanging in the hallway, which Angelica had always associated with Itou’s father. It was someone else, from a longer-ago past. Angelica felt too ashamed to admit that she had eavesdropped, and even more ashamed that she felt left out and jealous, knowing Sayoko had not chosen to tell her these stories, which she felt so desperate to transmit, night after night, to a mere machine.

  “I’m sorry—I forgot to ask you,” Itou said. “There’s more to life than this robot problem. How did your last language exam go?”