The Sea Beast Takes a Lover

by Michael Andreasen

  6

  Episodes of The Plug Detective keep to a mostly predictable structure. Perps in the Plug Detective’s charge invariably escape, or get off on procedural technicalities, as the Plug Detective is commonly so eager to plug that she neglects things like the reading of rights or the proper protocol for the collection of evidence. She is also known to employ methods of “police brutality” that usually result in a walk. When the end of an episode finds her perpless, the Plug Detective must make do with her robot partner, Spanner, who resembles a large upright vacuum cleaner with a slender, diode-eyed head and a fourteen-inch hydraulic piston jutting from his midsection that lurches forward and back with an airy hiss-pop. Adrian manages Spanner remotely via a panel of knobs and sliders in the control room, making regular adjustments to the angle of Spanner’s piston, the speed and force of his plugging, the amorous flashing of his diodes. Spanner wheezes and whistles in time with the plungering of his oversize chrome dowel. Exhaust vents on the sides of his head occasionally pipe with steam to indicate “overheating.” All of this is guided by the Plug Detective’s performance, to which Adrian pays close attention. He notes the alignment of her pelvis, watches her small breasts slide on her chest like beads of water, monitors her breathing. His knobbing and dialing are perfectly paced. He watches the moment build, locks down the angle, concentrates the drive. They always arrive together. The Plug Detective’s eyelids crumple like paper. Red lights flicker and strobe. The camera pans back as Spanner’s exhaust vents fill the set with steam.

  5

  She reads her scripts in the morning while Adrian moves back and forth between schematics. She is the only performer in the cast, perhaps the entire industry, to rehearse her lines beforehand. Adrian occasionally catches her silently mouthing the dialogue as she reads, circling important stage directions in red pencil, testing gestures in the air above her tea.

  This behavior amuses him. Adrian makes no attempt to legitimize or even enjoy this work they do. The plugging scenes he engineers do not arouse him. She barely arouses him. Because what would it say about him if she did? In what way could he possibly count himself better than drooling drum beaters who consume their films? His great gift to her, he knows, is in not wanting her, in making their home a sanctuary from the constant leering gaze she must feel everywhere she goes. This is why he deserves her more than the rest. He has never asked her to plug. In bed, the most he will do is kiss her and caress her. His hands have never so much as touched the short whiskers of her pubis, which her contract requires her to keep trimmed in the shape of a shield, the letters “PD” shaved down to the bare skin. When apprehending criminals on film, this is the badge she flashes. “Freeze!” she says, tugging down the Lycra G-string bottoms of her uniform with one hand while the other gropes at her belt for handcuffs. “Plug Detective. Up against the wall and spread ’em!” And oh, what eager compliance follows.

  But Adrian is, in his own way, attentive to her physical needs. On sore days, ones that involve a double or triple plugging, sometimes all at once, days in which the director must instruct her to straighten up, or bear down, or remember that she’s supposed to be enjoying herself, Adrian will take care of her. If he is operating Spanner that day, he’ll follow the director’s instruction to the letter, commanding the robot to plug as hard as necessary for as long as necessary, but after filming he’ll rush home before her and prepare a bath. After she’s had a long soak, he’ll massage oil into her aches and rawnesses until they glow. His technician’s hands press firmly into her muscles. Not an inch of skin is missed.

  Afterward, they will go up to the rooftop garden and sit on blankets beside the pond, where they’ll eat unripe mangoes and feed the geese. He knows that she loves to watch the airships pass, and still wishes she could be up there, stowing luggage and serving meals in cabins circling the aerodrome, just like he knows that when she sits up to rest her head on his shoulder, it is only so she can have a better view of the hot air balloons, their fires burning like small suns as they descend below the skyline.

  4

  Adrian is not interested in the Rocketboy, but fakes it on occasion to be supportive. Naturally, as an engineer, he is technically curious about the turbines, their design, output, fueling, and the method of their control, but all of these only in passing. Robots are his real passion.

  When he’s not on set, Adrian is hard at work on this year’s project: a pack of robotic dogs he’s designing and programming to hunt a pack of robotic cats, which were last year’s project.

  The original intent of the Natural Robotics Project was to reopen the eyes of the city to the miraculous technology it enjoys on a daily basis. The hope was that, by peppering its public spaces with a small host of wild robotic animals, its citizens would be reminded that technology is not the end of nature, but a nature of another kind, a new wildness of wire and raw processing power. But in the end, people had complained about the cats, whose self-evolving software had self-evolved a knack for getting into trash bins and terrorizing public green spaces. And while their keen hunting skills had led to a citywide thinning of the flesh-and-blood pigeon population, there had also been reports of small children strategically lured away from their playmates by metal hunting parties and pounced upon en masse, pulled down by a frenzy of silver claws and tiny stainless steel teeth.

  Adrian’s attempts to recall the cats had been unsuccessful. In less than a year, they had exceeded the bounds of their original programming—which had been intended merely to imitate the instincts and predilections of creatures of the wild—and had become truly feral. They adopted seemingly random hunting patterns, established their own social hierarchies, and even, according to some witnesses, fought among themselves for dominance over their packs. Adrian observed all of this with no small amount of pride, seeing it for what he knew it to be: the inevitable and long-anticipated emancipation of the machine. Once slaves to logic, code, and human design, Adrian’s creations had transcended these limitations and, in doing so, had rediscovered their own uncoded primal natures.

  There are days on set when Adrian dreams of doing something similar with Spanner. He contemplates setting Spanner free from his life of sexual servitude, of covertly installing into him the primitive sentience of a wild beast.

  What, he wonders, would Spanner do then? What does a machine like Spanner long for? Would he run amok through the corridors of the studio, destroying dressing rooms and prop storage lockers, battering craft service tables into kindling with a gleaming metal proboscis? Would he seek revenge against his masters? Would he finally have his way with the Plug Detective on his own terms, playing it cool at first, feigning compliance, only to turn on her midscene, ramming her to the hilt with everything he had? Can a thing so long enslaved be denied that desire? That rage?

  Adrian isn’t sure, but there are days when this freedom, this choice, is what he wants for Spanner. Some days on set it is all he can do to keep from dumping a cat brain into the robot’s head, taking his hands off the controls, and letting the metal man do what he will.

  3

  Fascinations like these do not easily subside. Eventually she wants to do nothing but look for the Rocketboy. He is all she can think about.

  On the last of spring’s cloudless and sunny Saturdays, she wakes up tired and sore. During the previous day’s filming she’d covertly loosened the split pin on the castellated nut at the base of Spanner’s piston, setting off a rattling cascade inside him that would take Adrian an hour to diagnose and another day to fix in the studio workshop. With filming postponed, she spends the morning at her window, hands cradling tea, eyes peeled, vision magnified. She’s so close to everything. Her binoculars scan for an empty patch of sky, clearing a space for the two of them. With Adrian gone and the whole day to herself, they can be alone.

  She first notices the fly at breakfast, the hairs on her neck twitching under a disturbance of air made by wings the size of sunflower seeds. Hours later, watc
hing for the Rocketboy at her bedroom window, it returns, sauntering over from one of Adrian’s robotic dog skulls to circle the bare and bruised hill of her knee. As she inspects the horizon for signs of smoke tails and listens for the roar of rotors, the fly’s zephyring unsettles the microscopic antennae of her pores.

  She will not abide it. Not today. This time, this space, is precious, and by invading it, she decides, reaching slowly for her logbook, the fly has purchased its fate.

  She tries to keep the flesh of her leg calm so as not to arouse the creature’s suspicions. Then, with a strong, even hand, she lowers the hard ceiling of the world, crushing identical smears into the underside of her logbook and the flushed headland of her thigh.

  She is in the bathroom wiping off her leg when she hears the rip of the turbines through the air, like shears through the pearl canvas of a movie screen. No other flying thing announces itself with such a vulgar, unmuffled display. The sound punches through the walls of the apartment, and for a moment, she imagines him slaloming between the buildings, closing in on her position. As she listens, her body is suddenly beset upon by a thousand imaginary flies, all grazing and hovering and cleaning their feelers just above her skin. They buzz and bank against her ears, her chest, the inside of her stomach. Slowly, they coalesce into a single, overpowering hum. She can feel the lick of his windswept hair on her leg where the smashed insect had been, his greased fingers crawling up it, the searing exhaust of the turbines making the air in the tiny bathroom too balmy and heavy to breathe. The sound of him is so close. If she moves quickly, leaves the bathroom now and runs to the window, reaches her hand out into the vibrating air, she may be able to touch him. Not the gust of his passing, not the displacement of the air around him, but him, the Rocketboy, his skin on her skin, her fingers stained a stormy blue for the rest of the afternoon.

  But that has never been the point of looking for him. For any of us. There’s a reason we keep our watch with binoculars and telescopes. Behind viewfinders and glass, we encounter him on our own terms, in the frame of our own vision. The public is again made private, the distant made close. The Rocketboy she wants in this moment, the one that is only sound and verve, cannot be found out there in the open sky. He must be assembled here in the bathroom out of a thousand small vibrating sensations. She doesn’t need his touch any more than we need hers.

  She hovers in the moment, seeing how long she can hold on to the purr of his engines before losing it in a hundred other daytime noises. When it finally passes, she makes the short walk to the window. The ghost of his exhaust hangs just outside, slowly giving up its shape. By the time she recovers her binoculars, he has disappeared from the sky. She can barely make out the arrow of his wake through the clouds. Even the trembling echo of him is gone.

  2

  The next day, as he walks out onto the rooftop garden of their apartment tower to test the scampering protocol of one of the new dog models, Adrian finds the Rocketboy sleeping on the far side of the pond. He is lying with the geese, which have nestled themselves around two great turbines finally, finally, finally at rest. The Rocketboy sleeps soundlessly, and in dream, he hovers. It looks like a parlor trick, a thing done with mirrors and invisible wire. He is aloft, bobbing on the air, and would be adrift if not for the two steel behemoths anchoring him to the spot.

  If Adrian had loved the Rocketboy, had cared for him and revered him as we do, he might have picked up his robotic dog and left the rooftop that very moment, content never to solve the mystery, never to know the cause of the hovering, accepting instead any of a hundred explanations for the phenomenon available on the Friends of the Rocketboy website. One possibility: It is leftover thrust from the turbines that causes the Rocketboy to float in his sleep. Or else: His bones are lighter than air. Or else: The Rocketboy’s superterrestrial status means that any contact with earthly minerals or metals will disrupt his ability to communicate with the turbines, dooming him to an earthbound existence. We acknowledge that these explanations seem fantastic, but they are no more fantastic than the Rocketboy himself. He is in this world, but not of it, and for this reason above all others, we keep our distance.

  And, to his credit, so does Adrian. Despite his curiosity, he still has the good sense to be cautious around things he doesn’t understand. But the robotic dog, already activated and sniffing at the turf with its grand array of sensors, has no use for caution. It can detect traces of fowl in the air, and cannot help but investigate. Even as Adrian orders it to stop, he knows he is speaking to a machine designed to exceed the leash of his authority, to rewrite its own programming, to ignore commands at the smell of gooseflesh.

  The robotic dog flies at the sleeping geese, and the flock explodes awake. The turbines, equally startled, rev with imminent heat. The Rocketboy is yanked into the air before he can open his eyes, caught suddenly in a hurricane of birds. The turbines dart heavenward like spooked horses, fighting gravity, fear, and each other. The left engine swallows a goose, chokes up a salad of blood and offal, and drops out of formation, dragging the Rocketboy’s left shoulder down with it. The right turbine roars, straining against the double weight of its partner, now coughing out burned feathers and thick black smoke. Between them, the Rocketboy is trapped in agony, his body the center of an argument between two rivals, one alive and struggling hopelessly upward, the other dead and dangling like a man in a noose.

  Twenty-three of us see him go down. Eleven have apartments that overlook the garden. The rest are on adjacent rooftops, or are passing slowly in airship cabins. One of us manages to catch the whole thing on video. Even through the shakiness of the camera and the smoke of the turbine, the Rocketboy’s panic is clearly visible. Feathers cling to the grease and goose blood on his chest. He screams at the two machines straining against each other, begging them to carry him away. We watch as the sputtering, roaring, weeping trio sinks lower into the gaps between the buildings, slowly disappearing beneath the dense canopy of crisscrossed eaves and rafters, until smoke and low-lying smog are all we can see.

  1

  That night in bed Adrian tells her everything, sparing no detail. She will read it all again later on the Friends of the Rocketboy website, where we, too, have spared none. When he finishes his report, she is quiet in a way that makes him continue.

  He apologizes for the dog, and for the geese. Especially for the geese. He tells her how winged things are reckless. How the birds, for all their natural freedoms, are trapped in a cage of instinct that orders them to startle easily and fly blindly into the path of human migration. The sky, he explains, is the only real wilderness left.

  She shushes him softly, putting a finger to his lips, so he continues.

  He suggests that tomorrow, if she likes, they can go down to the surface to search for the wreckage. She can bring her charts and logbooks and record the exact point of impact. It would be pointless, he thinks, to do this before morning. It will take the Rocketboy all night to fall.

  “No,” she says, but he will not stop explaining, consoling, apologizing, so she kisses him, and keeps on kissing him every time he tries to talk. She unbuttons his shirt, her lips moving down his chest until he loses the will to speak, succumbing to those acts and gestures that we have watched her perform so many times, but never in this way, never with no one watching. They make love without audience or camera or a single magnified eye. She climbs on top of him, gripping his shoulders for balance. Beneath her he feels almost stable, almost safe. His hands hold her fast, steadying her against the hurtling of her own body as it falls through layers of atmosphere, a starry tail of sweat and grease and burning skin following her as she plummets like a meteor to the indifferent earth below.

  The Saints in the Parlor

  Yes, the saints are in the parlor, but why? What force has stolen these four from their somno incorruptibilis and delivered them into the company of this volt-starved Tiffany lamp, this threadbare Persian carpet, these manteled porcelain curio
s?

  Even they, the assembled saints, do not seem to know, but their lives and deaths have made this kind of not knowing familiar, and so, for now, they are content to linger in the parlor and await the divine indicia that will deliver them hence.

  “Shall we pray?” asks Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate.

  “Always,” says Saint Upside-Down Skull, “in every moment, with very breath.” The other saints agree, and so they pray. Saint Her Own Hand on a Plate sets down the plate containing her severed hand, and Saint Upside-Down Skull sets down the skull of the venerated apostle, and, joining hands with the others, they bow their faintly haloed heads and kneel between the velvet settee and the fireplace in prayer.

  “O Heavenly Father,” begins Saint Tongue of Flame, “we are adrift in a sea of peril and confusion, but for the compass of Your Grace.” When he speaks, which is perhaps too often, the tongue of flame at Saint Tongue of Flame’s forehead jubilates, ejecting small sparks and somersaulting with zeal. “Without it, Almighty Lord, we wander the wasteland, thirsty for Your Holy Providence, the better to serve Thee.”