by D B Hartwell
Rose had been told, gently, patiently, that Lucian was leaving. But she was four years old, and understood things only briefly and partially, and often according to her whims. She continued to believe her father’s silence was a game.
• • • •
Rose’s hair brushed Lucian’s cheek. He kissed her brow. Adriana couldn’t hold her tongue any longer.
“What do you think you’re going to find out there? There’s no Shangri-La for rebel robots. You think you’re making a play for independence? Independence to do what, Lu?”
Grief and anger filled Adriana’s eyes with hot tears, as if she were a geyser filled with so much pressure that steam could not help but spring up. She examined Lucian’s sculpted face: his skin inlaid with tiny lines that an artist had rendered to suggest the experiences of a childhood which had never been lived, his eyes calibrated with a hint of asymmetry to mimic the imperfection of human growth. His expression showed nothing—no doubt, or bitterness, or even relief. He revealed nothing at all.
It was all too much. Adriana moved between Lucian and Rose, as if she could use her own body to protect her daughter from the pain of being abandoned. Her eyes stared achingly over the rim of her wine glass. “Just go,” she said.
He left.
• • • •
Adriana bought Lucian the summer she turned thirty-five. Her father, long afflicted with an indecisive cancer that vacillated between aggression and remittance, had died suddenly in July. For years, the family had been squirreling away emotional reserves to cope with his prolonged illness. His death released a burst of excess.
While her sisters went through the motions of grief, Adriana thrummed with energy she didn’t know what to do with. She considered squandering her vigor on six weeks in Mazatlan, but as she discussed ocean-front rentals with her travel agent, she realized escape wasn’t what she craved. She liked the setting where her life took place: her house perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, her bedroom window that opened on a tangle of blackberry bushes where crows roosted every autumn and spring. She liked the two block stroll down to the beach where she could sit with a book and listen to the yapping lapdogs that the elderly women from the waterfront condominiums brought walking in the evenings.
Mazatlan was a twenty-something’s cure for restlessness. Adriana wasn’t twenty-five anymore, famished for the whole gourmet meal of existence. She needed something else now. Something new. Something more refined.
She explained this to her friends Ben and Lawrence when they invited her to their ranch house in Santa Barbara to relax for the weekend and try to forget about her father. They sat on Ben and Lawrence’s patio, on iron-worked deck chairs arrayed around a garden table topped with a mosaic of sea creatures made of semi-precious stones. A warm, breezy dusk lengthened the shadows of the orange trees. Lawrence poured sparkling rosé into three wine glasses and proposed a toast to Adriana’s father—not to his memory, but to his death.
“Good riddance to the bastard,” said Lawrence. “If he were still alive, I’d punch him in the schnoz.”
“I don’t even want to think about him,” said Adriana. “He’s dead. He’s gone.”
“So if not Mazatlan, what are you going to do?” asked Ben.
“I’m not sure,” said Adriana. “Some sort of change, some sort of milestone, that’s all I know.”
Lawrence sniffed the air. “Excuse me,” he said, gathering the empty wine glasses. “The kitchen needs its genius.”
When Lawrence was out of earshot, Ben leaned forward to whisper to Adriana. “He’s got us on a raw food diet for my cholesterol. Raw carrots. Raw zucchini. Raw almonds. No cooking at all.”
“Really,” said Adriana, glancing away. She was never sure how to respond to lovers’ quarrels. That kind of affection mixed with annoyance, that inescapable intimacy, was something she’d never understood.
Birds twittered in the orange trees. The fading sunlight highlighted copper strands in Ben’s hair as he leaned over the mosaic table, rapping his fingers against a carnelian-backed crab. Through the arched windows, Adriana could see Lawrence mincing carrots, celery and almonds into brown paste.
“You should get a redecorator,” said Ben. “Tile floors, Tuscan pottery, those red leather chairs that were in vogue last time we were in Milan. That’d make me feel like I’d been scrubbed clean and reborn.”
“No, no,” said Adriana, “I like where I live.”
“A no-holds-barred shopping spree. Drop twenty thousand. That’s what I call getting a weight off your shoulders.”
Adriana laughed. “How long do you think it would take my personal shopper to assemble a whole new me?”
“Sounds like a midlife crisis,” said Lawrence, returning with vegan hors d’oeuvres and three glasses of mineral water. “You’re better off forgetting it all with a hot Latin pool boy, if you ask me.”
Lawrence served Ben a small bowl filled with yellow mush. Ben shot Adriana an aggrieved glance.
Adriana felt suddenly out of synch. The whole evening felt like the set for a photo-shoot that would go in a decorating magazine, a two-page spread featuring Cozy Gardens, in which she and Ben and Lawrence were posing as an intimate dinner party for three. She felt reduced to two dimensions, air-brushed, and then digitally grafted onto the form of whoever it was who should have been there, someone warm and trusting who knew how to care about minutia like a friend’s husband putting him on a raw food diet, not because the issue was important, but because it mattered to him.
Lawrence dipped his finger in the mash and held it up to Ben’s lips. “It’s for your own good, you ungrateful so-and-so.”
Ben licked it away. “I eat it, don’t I?”
Lawrence leaned down to kiss his husband, a warm and not at all furtive kiss, not sexual but still passionate. Ben’s glance flashed coyly downward.
Adriana couldn’t remember the last time she’d loved someone enough to be embarrassed by them. Was this the flavor missing from her life? A lover’s fingertip sliding an unwanted morsel into her mouth?
She returned home that night on the bullet train. Her emerald cockatiel, Fuoco, greeted her with indignant squawks. In Adriana’s absence, the house puffed her scent into the air and sang to Fuoco with her voice, but the bird was never fooled.
Adriana’s father had given her the bird for her thirtieth birthday. He was a designer species spliced with Macaw DNA that colored his feathers rich green. He was expensive and inbred and neurotic, and he loved Adriana with frantic, obsessive jealousy.
“Hush,” Adriana admonished, allowing Fuoco to alight on her shoulder. She carried him upstairs to her bedroom and hand-fed him millet. Fuoco strutted across the pillows, his obsidian eyes proud and suspicious.
Adriana was surprised to find that her alienation had followed her home. She found herself prone to melancholy reveries, her gaze drifting toward the picture window, her fingers forgetting to stroke Fuoco’s back. The bird screeched to regain her attention.
In the morning, Adriana visited her accountant. His fingers danced across the keyboard as he slipped trust fund moneys from one account to another like a magician. What she planned would be expensive, but her wealth would regrow in fertile soil, enriching her on lab diamonds and wind power and genetically modified oranges.
The robotics company gave Adriana a private showing. The salesman ushered her into a room draped in black velvet. Hundreds of body parts hung on the walls, and reclined on display tables: strong hands, narrow jaws, biker’s thighs, voice boxes that played sound samples from gruff to dulcet, skin swatches spanning ebony to alabaster, penises of various sizes.
At first, Adriana felt horrified at the prospect of assembling a lover from fragments, but then it amused her. Wasn’t everyone assembled from fragments of DNA, grown molecule by molecule inside their mother’s womb?
She tapped her fingernails against a slick brochure. “Its brain will be malleable? I can tell it to be more amenable, or funnier, or to grow a spine?”
“That’s correct.” The salesman sported slick brown hair and shiny teeth and kept grinning in a way that suggested he thought that if he were charismatic enough Adriana would invite him home for a lay and a million dollar tip. “Humans lose brain plasticity as we age, which limits how much we can change. Our models have perpetually plastic brains. They can reroute their personalities at will by reshaping how they think on the neurological level.”
Adriana stepped past him, running her fingers along a tapestry woven of a thousand possible hair textures.
The salesman tapped an empty faceplate. “Their original brains are based on deep imaging scans melded from geniuses in multiple fields. Great musicians, renowned lovers, the best physicists and mathematicians.”
Adriana wished the salesman would be quiet. The more he talked, the more doubts clamored against her skull. “You’ve convinced me,” she interrupted. “I want one.”
The salesman looked taken aback by her abruptness. She could practically see him rifling through his internal script, trying to find the right page now that she had skipped several scenes. “What do you want him to look like?” he asked.
Adriana shrugged. “They’re all beautiful, right?”
“We’ll need specifications.”
“I don’t have specifications.”
The salesman frowned anxiously. He shifted his weight as if it could help him regain his metaphorical footing. Adriana took pity. She dug through her purse.
“There,” she said, placing a snapshot of her father on one of the display tables. “Make it look nothing like him.”
Given such loose parameters, the design team indulged the fanciful. Lucian arrived at Adriana’s door only a shade taller than she and equally slender, his limbs smooth and lean. Silver undertones glimmered in his blond hair. His skin was excruciatingly pale, white and translucent as alabaster, veined with pink. He smelled like warm soil and crushed herbs.
He offered Adriana a single white rose, its petals embossed with the company’s logo. She held it dubiously between her thumb and forefinger. “They think they know women, do they? They need to put down the bodice rippers.”
Lucian said nothing. Adriana took his hesitation for puzzlement, but perhaps she should have seen it as an early indication of his tendency toward silence.
• • • •
“That’s that, then.” Adriana drained her chardonnay and crushed the empty glass beneath her heel as if she could finalize a divorce with the same gesture that sanctified a marriage.
Eyes wide, Rose pointed at the glass with one round finger. “Don’t break things.”
It suddenly struck Adriana how fast her daughter was aging. Here she was, this four-year-old, this sudden person. When had it happened? In the hospital, when Rose was newborn and wailing for the woman who had birthed her and abandoned her, Adriana had spent hours in the hallway outside the hospital nursery while she waited for the adoption to go through. She’d stared at Rose while she slept, ate, and cried, striving to memorize her nascent, changing face. Sometime between then and now, Rose had become this round-cheeked creature who took rules very seriously and often tried to conceal her emotions beneath a calm exterior, as if being raised by a robot had replaced her blood with circuits. Of course Adriana loved Rose, changed her clothes, brushed her teeth, carried her across the house on her hip—but Lucian had been the most central, nurturing figure. Adriana couldn’t fathom how she might fill his role. This wasn’t a vacation like the time Adriana had taken Rose to Italy for three days, just the two of them sitting in restaurants, Adriana feeding her daughter spoonfuls of gelato to see the joy that lit her face at each new flavor. Then, they’d known that Lucian would be waiting when they returned. Without him, their family was a house missing a structural support. Adriana could feel the walls bowing in.
The fragments of Adriana’s chardonnay glass sparkled sharply. Adriana led Rose away from the mess.
“Never mind,” she said, “The house will clean up.”
Her head felt simultaneously light and achy as if it couldn’t decide between drunkenness and hangover. She tried to remember the parenting books she’d read before adopting Rose. What had they said about crying in front of your child? She clutched Rose close, inhaling the scent of children’s shampoo mixed with the acrid odor of wine.
“Let’s go for a drive,” said Adriana. “Okay? Let’s get out for a while.”
“I want Daddy to take me to the beach.”
“We’ll go out to the country and look at the farms. Cows and sheep, okay?”
Rose said nothing.
“Moo?” Adriana clarified. “Baa?”
“I know,” said Rose. “I’m not a baby.”
“So, then?”
Rose said nothing. Adriana wondered whether she could tell that her mother was a little mad with grief.
Just make a decision, Adriana counseled herself. She slipped her fingers around Rose’s hand. “We’ll go for a drive.”
Adriana instructed the house to regulate itself in their absence, and then led Rose to the little black car that she and Lucian had bought together after adopting Rose. She fastened Rose’s safety buckle and programmed the car to take them inland.
As the car engine initialized, Adriana felt a glimmer of fear. What if this machine betrayed them, too? But its uninspired intelligence only switched on the left turn signal and started down the boulevard.
• • • •
Lucian stood at the base of the driveway and stared up at the house. Its stark orange and brown walls blazed against a cloudless sky. Rocks and desert plants tumbled down the meticulously landscaped yard, imitating natural scrub.
A rabbit ran across the road, followed by the whir of Adriana’s car. Lucian watched them pass. They couldn’t see him through the cypresses, but Lucian could make out Rose’s face pressed against the window. Beside her, Adriana slumped in her seat, one hand pressed over her eyes.
Lucian went in the opposite direction. He dragged the rolling cart packed with his belongings to the cliff that led down to the beach. He lifted the cart over his head and started down, his feet disturbing cascades of sandstone chunks.
A pair of adolescent boys looked up from playing in the waves. “Whoa,” shouted one of them. “Are you carrying that whole thing? Are you a weightlifter?”
Lucian remained silent. When he reached the sand, the kids muttered disappointments to each other and turned away from shore. “. . . Just a robot . . .” drifted back to Lucian on the breeze.
Lucian pulled his cart to the border where wet sand met dry. Oncoming waves lapped over his feet. He opened the cart and removed a tea-scented apricot rose growing in a pot painted with blue leaves.
He remembered acquiring the seeds for his first potted rose. One evening, long ago, he’d asked Adriana if he could grow things. He’d asked in passing, the question left to linger while they cleaned up after dinner, dish soap on their hands, Fuoco pecking after scraps. The next morning, Adriana escorted Lucian to the hothouse near the botanical gardens. “Buy whatever you want,” she told him. Lucian was awed by the profusion of color and scent, all that beauty in one place. He wanted to capture the wonder of that place and own it for himself.
Lucian drew back his arm and threw the pot into the sea. It broke across the water, petals scattering the surface.
He threw in the pink roses, and the white roses, and the red roses, and the mauve roses. He threw in the filigreed-handled spoons. He threw in the chunk of gypsum-veined jasper.
He threw in everything beautiful that he’d ever collected. He threw in a chased silver hand mirror, and an embroidered silk jacket, and a handpainted egg. He threw in one of Fuoco’s soft, emerald feathers. He threw in a memory crystal that showed Rose as an infant, curled and sleeping.
He loved those things, and yet they were things. He had owned them. Now they were gone. He had recently come to realize that ownership was a relationship. What did it mean to own a thing? To shape it and contain it? He could not pos
sess or be possessed until he knew.
He watched the sea awhile, the remnants of his possessions lost in the tumbling waves. As the sun tilted past noon, he turned away and climbed back up the cliff. Unencumbered by ownership, he followed the boulevard away from Adriana’s house.
• • • •
Lucian remembered meeting Adriana the way that he imagined that humans remembered childhood. Oh, his memories had been as sharply focused then as now—but it was still like childhood, he reasoned, for he’d been a different person then.
He remembered his first sight of Adriana as a burst of images. Wavy strawberry blonde hair cut straight across tanned shoulders. Dark brown eyes that his artistic mind labeled “sienna.” Thick, aristocratic brows and strong cheekbones, free of makeup. Lucian’s inner aesthete termed her blunt, angular face “striking” rather than “beautiful.” His inner psychoanalyst reasoned that she was probably “strong-willed” as well, from the way she stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, her eyebrows lifted as if inquiring how he planned to justify his existence.
Eventually, she moved away, allowing Lucian to step inside. He crossed the threshold into a blur of frantic screeching and flapping.
New. Everything was new. So new that Lucian could barely assemble feathers and beak and wings into the concept of “bird” before his reflexes jumped him away from the onslaught. Hissing and screeching, the animal retreated to a perch atop a bookshelf.
Adriana’s hand weighed on Lucian’s shoulder. Her voice was edged with the cynicism Lucian would later learn was her way of hiding how desperately she feared failure. “Ornithophobia? How ridiculous.”