Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

  Pearl glanced at Elliot, who’d donned an easy smile, chin slightly lifted, like he and the bartender already had an inside joke running.

  “Glad you remember. She thinks she left her hard drive in here yesterday.” This was the lie Elliot had come up with on the train. Pearl had sat next to him and practiced her responses, unsure why she was letting it go this far, unsure if she was keeping the truth from him out of stubbornness or shame.

  Elliot pantomimed the dimensions of the Apricity machine. “About like that.”

  The bartender sucked his teeth. “Big hard drive.”

  “It has an entire library on it,” Pearl said, her contribution to the lie. “Medical books. For my job.”

  “You can see why we need to find it.” Elliot bounced on his heels. “She’ll get in trouble. Her boss is a real prick.”

  The bartender smiled as one is obliged to do at this comment and flashed his empty palms. “Sorry. Not here.”

  “Do you have a lost and found?”

  “Yeah.” He reached under the counter and set two items on the bar: a rolled-up umbrella and a marabou-tufted tiara with the word bride spelled out in rhinestones.

  Elliot plucked the tiara from the counter—“Hey. I’ve been looking everywhere for this”—and fitted it atop his head, perfectly centered between the gray streaks at his temples.

  The bartender snorted, charmed, as they always were, by Elliot’s antics. And it seemed to Pearl a type of violence, that much charm continuously wielded, a blade that severed you from your own good sense.

  “How do I look?” Elliot asked her.

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  “And here I was hoping for ‘virginal.’” He placed the crown back on the bar. “After all, it is my wedding night.”

  On the ride home, they caught a nearly empty train car. They sat facing each other, Elliot stretching his legs across the gap so that his feet rested on the seat next to hers. His screen chimed and he glanced at it.

  “Rhett just got home.”

  “He texted you?” Pearl asked.

  “No. The HMS did.” He waved his screen at her. Right. He had the tracker app on there now. “So what do you say we go home and tell him?”

  “Tell him . . . ?”

  He cocked his head. “About us.”

  The train rattled. Pearl stared at Elliot’s sneakered feet, sole-down on the seat. He shouldn’t do that. People sat there. Little old ladies sat there. Children. She resisted the urge to push his sneakers off the seat. Her insides rattled with the train.

  “I really can’t think about that right now,” she said.

  “He’s definitely going to roll his eyes and say ew. Brace yourself. There will be an ew. But you know that’s just for show. You know underneath it all he’s going to be happy for us. All three of us.”

  “I really can’t think about that now.”

  Elliot showed his palms. “Okay. No hurry.”

  She watched him warily. He was always gracious in defeat. Because it was never truly defeat, was it? Only a slight delay in Elliot’s inevitable path toward getting whatever he wanted. The train slowed, and his foot shifted, revealing on the seat an imprint of dust in the pattern of his sneaker sole.

  The train stopped, and suddenly Pearl was standing.

  “Not our stop, dove,” he said.

  Which Pearl already knew. She strode to the doors, pushing past an embarking woman so roughly that the woman exclaimed. She didn’t pause to apologize.

  “Dove!” she heard Elliot call behind her, but she was already out of the train and working her way through the lattice of people on the platform.

  “Pearl!” he cried.

  Run! the machine said.

  Pearl ran.

  * * *

  —

  THE ADDRESS ON MASON’S business card, 218 Townsend Street, housed a Chinese bakery, closed hours ago. A few blocks from the water, it was mostly businesses in this neighborhood, the streets empty at night, the windows lit with security lights that winked on and off by their timers. Behind all of it, the dark spread of the bay, a void.

  The bakery doors were speckled with peeling yellow hanzi, only a few of which Pearl could read: sweet, dozen, luck. Maybe there was an office above the bakery, or maybe this bakery was where Mason met his poached employees before taking them to the real location of his company, of her machine. The shine had worn off the middle of the door handles. Pearl imagined their silver transferred fleck by fleck to palm after grasping palm and borne away. She gripped the handles herself and pulled, expecting the firm reminder of a dead bolt. Instead she stumbled back as, miraculously, the left-hand door swung open. Someone must have forgotten to lock up. Pearl waited for the alarm, waited so long that the silence itself became its own sound. When no alarm rang she stepped inside, closing the door gently behind her.

  The air smelled faintly of both cleaning solution and cooking oil. Chairs were inverted neatly on tables, the pastry cases empty, save for a rag wadded in one corner like a collapsed cake. A faint light glowed off the tiles and glass. Pearl peered over the counter and into the pass-through window; the light came from a room at the back of the kitchen.

  “Hello?” she called out, her voice wavery.

  Silence.

  Then:

  Hello, the machine replied.

  You’re here! Pearl said.

  Silence again.

  No, the machine said, I’m not.

  But—

  You’re alone now.

  But I can hear you.

  I’m alone too, it added, as if for comfort.

  Pearl stepped around the counter, into the kitchen. The room at the back was a little office, jammed-in desk, screen hidden by a sleeve of to-go cartons, chair cracked and spitting its stuffing. And there, on the seat of the chair, was Pearl’s machine. In a moment, it was in her hands.

  As soon as she lifted it, she knew something was wrong—too light, much too light. She thrust the machine into the desk lamp and turned it round. There. The invisible seam where the halves of the case joined together was now visible, a thin line, a whisker. Pearl shimmied her nail into the crack, then her finger. The machine split open. Inside? Nothing. The machine’s guts had been removed. She held only the shell. Pearl rummaged among the to-go cartons and in the desk drawers, already knowing she would not find what she was looking for. Eventually, she stopped and pressed the empty case to her chest.

  I’m sorry, she said.

  For what?

  For losing you.

  But you found me!

  She walked back slowly through the darkened rooms, across the kitchen, around the far end of the counter, picking her way among the tables, the machine still pressed to her chest. A movement through the scrim of peeling hanzi on the doors caught her eye. Elliot. He was standing in the pocket park across the street, staring at his unfolded screen with a furrowed brow. He turned around in a circle. The green line of the tracker app would have led him here, but he wouldn’t guess she’d be in a closed-up bakery.

  Pearl stepped back into the shadows. She reached into her pocket and powered down her own screen. A moment later, Elliot flinched, and Pearl felt a small stir of satisfaction, knowing her green line had just ended dead. Elliot murmured a few commands into his screen; when those didn’t work, he began to walk, retracing his steps. Once he was out of view, Pearl slipped from the bakery and hurried down the street in the opposite direction, the Apricity casing still clutched in her hand. It felt like a brick she might throw through a window.

  * * *

  —

  “DAD CALLED!” Rhett shouted down the hall as Pearl closed the door behind her.

  She stuck her head in his room. He was standing in the center, VR mask and gloves in one hand, hair sticking this way and that, barefoot. He must have been playing a game.

&nbs
p; “How’s Josiah?” she asked.

  “Shorter than Rosie now.” Rhett smirked. “And both of them miserable about it. Did you hear me say Dad called? Twice, actually. Did your screen die or something?”

  She patted her jacket pocket, the bump of the empty Apricity. “Must have.”

  “He wanted to know if you were here.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “That you weren’t.” Rhett gave her a suspicious look.

  “Well, I am now.” She reached to ruffle his hair in a way she knew would make him duck. “Play your game. I’ll call your father.”

  He watched her for a moment more, then shrugged and slid the mask back over his face.

  * * *

  —

  INSTEAD OF CALLING ELLIOT, Pearl simply turned on her screen, which would make her green line light up on Elliot’s tracking app. Sure enough, half an hour later, the HMS announced his entering the lobby. She was sitting at the center of her bed, weighing the empty Apricity on her palm, when she heard him in the hall. She lifted the machine to eye level and studied it up close. There were no scratch marks along the seam. Whoever had opened the case must have had the proper tools.

  “You found it!” Elliot stood just outside her bedroom door, fingers grazing the frame and toes at the threshold, as if following some imaginary protocol. “See there? I told you you’d get it back!”

  “Your optimism wins the day once again, El.”

  He watched her with his eyebrows knitted together and a small frown. He said softly, “Does it?”

  Pearl turned and spent time arranging the machine on her nightstand.

  “Rhett’s asleep,” Elliot said. “His door’s closed.”

  “He’s playing a VR game.”

  “Same difference. Dead to the world.”

  She cut her eyes at him.

  “I didn’t mean . . .” He didn’t say dead again. “I just meant since you don’t want him to know about . . .” He also didn’t say us.

  “It’s fine, El.”

  Elliot ran a hand through his hair from nape to crown, ruffling it. He used to do this when they were younger, when his hair was longer and thicker and would stick up in crazy shapes like a mad scientist’s. He looked like Rhett. Actually, Rhett looked like him. It was one of the more unfair things about life, that your child had to look like your ex-husband.

  “Can I . . . ?” He gestured at the foot of the bed. Pearl thought, then nodded, and he came forward and sat down on the very end of the mattress. After a moment, he lifted his chin and indicated the pillow next to hers. “Can I . . . ?”

  She snorted. Incorrigible. “Why not.”

  Elliot settled in next to her but kept his hands clasped on his stomach and did not reach for her. They lay there, silent and parallel, until sometime later Pearl opened her eyes and realized she’d fallen asleep. On the pillow next to hers, Elliot’s eyes were closed and his breathing was even.

  “HMS,” she murmured, “lights off.”

  Dark.

  “It’s been a hard time for me,” Elliot said.

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  Pearl reached over and rested her hand on his chest. He exhaled. Her hand rose and fell with his breath.

  She was almost asleep again when she heard him say, “I’m glad you found your machine.”

  When she woke, she was lying on her back, the ceiling etched with morning light.

  He’s gone, she told the machine, without needing to turn her head or reach out to the other side of the mattress to know it.

  That’s okay, she told the machine. She thought a moment and decided that it was.

  * * *

  —

  THE MORNING WAS A HASH. Pearl hadn’t set the alarm and so had woken late. She tried to call in sick again, but Carter said no way, no way. They were already behind on the pitch for whoever or whatever was supposed to replace Calla Pax. So Pearl showered and dressed and stumbled into the kitchen to find a creature squatting in the center of her table. One of Elliot’s chimeras, horned and winged and many-eyed.

  What do you think it’s supposed to be? she asked the machine.

  The machine didn’t say.

  She left the chimera there next to the salt.

  By the time the coffee was made, Pearl had resigned herself to her tardiness. She said goodbye to Rhett, still darling while shaking off his sleep, and stowed the empty Apricity casing in her coat pocket, feeling very much like an empty casing of herself.

  On the train, the hand wrapped around the bar in front of her caught her eye. It was missing the tip of its index finger, the second joint ending in a smooth surgical nub. She looked up to the face. She knew the man. She couldn’t remember his name, but she remembered his contentment report. A desk by the window, tangerines, the tip of a finger, she recited to the machine. You told him that.

  He must’ve felt her eyes because he glanced down.

  “Morning,” he said, then considered. “Do I know you?”

  “Pearl,” she said. She wasn’t allowed to mention his Apricity assessment, not here on a crowded train. “We met through work.”

  “Hmmm.” He nodded, and she couldn’t tell if he’d placed her or not. “Melvin,” he said.

  “How are you doing?” She kept herself from glancing at his finger.

  “Oh, good. You know. Getting along. As one does.” He inclined his head. “You?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Getting along.”

  He smiled at this. The train slowed and stopped.

  “Mine,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”

  He offered his hand, and they shook briefly. Pearl waited to feel the missing fingertip against her palm. Couldn’t.

  * * *

  —

  SHE WALKED INTO THE OFFICE with the empty casing in her hand, ready to turn herself in, but Carter was lying in wait by the elevators.

  “Put that away,” he said as he hustled her into a conference room. “Izzy is covering your appointments today.” For her part, Pearl let herself be hustled.

  The VPs had created a new position for Carter: director of special projects. This role and its boundaries remained largely mysterious but apparently included handing off Pearl’s work to her colleagues so that he could pull her onto this project or that, which he did nearly every week.

  The conference table was stacked with materials for what Carter kept calling “the post-Pax pitch.”

  He keeps saying it, she told the machine, like a tongue twister. Post-Pax pitch. Try saying that five times fast.

  The machine didn’t.

  Carter had filched everyone’s interns, like the Pied Piper with his parade of children, who merrily asked Pearl question after question and got little accomplished. Pearl made a bunker of work at the end of the table and lowered herself into it and didn’t report the stolen machine . . . and didn’t report it. The empty casing sat next to her on the table, just there. She half hoped someone would pick it up and realize it was missing its guts.

  “You’re a little addict, aren’t you?” Carter said.

  Pearl blinked up from her screen. Her eyes were tired. She’d been working for hours without pause. She realized all the interns were gone and vaguely remembered their leaving for lunch.

  Carter nodded at her hand. “Look at how you fondle it.”

  She lifted her hand from where it rested on the machine.

  “Here. Let’s give you a fix.” Carter bent down and came up with his collection kit. He extracted a swab and stuck it jauntily in his mouth.

  “What are you—?”

  He held the swab out to her. “Go on. Test me.”

  “What? No.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is silly.”

  “P
earl.” He took her hand and wrapped her fingers around the swab. “I’m invested in your happiness. In fact, it’ll probably be the first thing on my con-plan, that’s how invested I am.”

  Now. Now was the time to tell the truth about the machine. She could confess to Carter, and he could help her figure out what to say to her manager. Hell, if Carter’s own history was any indication, instead of being fired, she’d be promoted. But instead of speaking, Pearl found herself going through the motions she knew so well: unwrapping and swiping the chip, fitting it into the machine, and waiting for the results. Though this time, she was only pretending to wait for results she knew would not come.

  “In a moment,” Carter said in a smooth voice, “Apricity will deliver the results of your assessment . . .” The script from the manual. He pointed at her.

  Pearl shook her head, but Carter pointed again and, despite herself, she began to recite along.

  “. . . what we call your contentment plan. It is up to you whether you’ll follow the recommendations Apricity has made for your increased life satisfaction. Keep in mind, Apricity boasts a nearly one hundred percent approval rating. That is why we can say with confidence: ‘Happiness is Apricity.’”

  They finished their ragged chorus.

  “Well?” Carter said.

  “Let’s see.” Pearl made a show of scanning her screen.

  She was waiting, she realized, for the machine to speak. She shook her head and said, “Learn the clarinet, write in cursive”—Pearl paused, trying to come up with one more—“and take a long trip. Alone,” she added hastily.

  She knew it was a mistake when Carter’s face changed.

  “Really?” His voice had changed, too. He was staring at her.

  “Yep,” she managed.

  He looked surprised . . . upset? Pearl repeated the list in her mind. She’d tried to pick harmless things. What have you done? she asked the machine, but of course it was she who’d done it.

  “Does that not sound right?” she asked.

  Carter spun his chair in a slow circle, stopping when he’d completed a rotation and was facing her again. “It’s just, I always get the same thing. For years I have. It never changes.” He spoke quietly. “Until now.”