Adventures of the Artificial Woman

by Thomas Berger

  “Or have it as a refill.” He asserted himself with a move to the bar and won this encounter as she, carrying her glass, drifted into the living room and hesitated at the couch.

  Phyllis had, first time off the mark, mixed a better gimlet than any he had ever tasted. He nevertheless drank this one, and another, and began a third, Janet meanwhile drowning her troubles in multiple Scotches. They both were soon drunk, a condition that Janet, repellently, called “shitfaced.” He found little in her that attracted him, while realizing—despite or perhaps because of the alcohol—that much of what he was not attracted to were human attributes for which Janet could hardly be blamed. You would not catch an animatron wondering what she had done that was in any way responsible for an emotional estrangement.

  “Should I have been more understanding? They do have feelings, I don’t know why, but different from ours, I don’t know how.” Janet swallowed some Scotch, going at the tumbler as if she would chew its rim. She sat on the couch, while Pierce was in a chair, though not the closest. After another careful gulp she went on. “What I want to ask you, now I’ve drunk enough—well, I can’t find the person who owned Tyler previously and sold him to me: no response to my e-mails.” She took another swallow and said quickly, “You are an expert. You built Phyllis.”

  “Janet, let me speak frankly.” Pierce stared rhetorically at the ceiling. “I know nothing about constructing a male. Oh, there may well be certain similarities, eyes, balance, most internal organs, et cetera, but the basic differences are too major to be reconciled. I’ll even go so far as to speculate whether there might be greater differences between the sexes with artificial personages than with real.” He realized, not with displeasure, that he had never before spoken with anybody human on this subject, unless the exchange of remarks at the showdown the night before could be counted.

  “Well,” said Janet, not really listening to him, “I’ve learned my lesson. I—”

  “The respective genitals are the least of it, in my opinion. An erectile penis would be relatively easy to make and operate, but the triggering process might be a problem. Throwing a switch would hardly suit a woman.” He waited for her response, then asked, “How is arousal simulated in Hallstrom?”

  Janet fluttered her hands. “Please. I don’t want to hear that name at the moment.”

  Pierce was annoyed. Why then was she here? “But, as I say, the organs are in themselves not the issue.” He took a tongueful of his fourth drink, which now could have been water so far as taste went, his own having been stunned by alcohol, an effect unknown to artificial creatures. “I mean, you can’t start with a sexless dummy and then at a certain point install breasts and a vulva and call it female. It has to be a woman from the earliest conception, from the first sketches in what you could call the womb of a computer. That’s why Phyllis was such a success, exceeding my conception.”

  Janet glared at him. “Oh, listen, Ellery, you can talk all you want about how remarkable a machine can be, but they can let you down quite as much as humans can, and then what are you left with? You’ve given your heart to a hunk of plastic that doesn’t have one.” Apparently she had been looking angry so as to keep from weeping, and it had not worked.

  Pierce hated to see tears. “I’ll get you some Kleenex.” He rose and hastened to the bedroom, which still smelled of Phyllis—that is, of the perfume he had supplied her, which her own nostrils lacked the capacity to detect, along with any other odor. He had simply forgotten to provide her with a sense of smell. By the hour he was accumulating mental notes for the construction of Phyllis II, but the zest that had inspired and sustained him throughout the making of the first model was hard to reawaken. He had lost the spirit of romance. For example, what occurred to him now was that with sensitized nostrils she could add smoke-detection to her attributes.

  “What I need,” Janet said, having stolen in silently to encircle his waist from behind and press against him with her abundance of body, “is love.”

  The experience was in quite another category than the intimate moments he had had with Phyllis, but it was less repugnant than he had supposed, perhaps even more pleasant than not, for unlike the real women he had known in the past, Janet had been voluntarily generous about his performance. She was actually quite a nice person; a few years too old, perhaps, with a slightly crooked lower front tooth and somewhat leathery skin at the clavicles, and even with a reduction in weight her thighs would be sturdier than the ideal, but then he had played no part in her modeling, and her bright eyes would pass, as would her complexion, the subtleties of which would have been difficult to achieve with synthetic tints. Skin coloring had been a problem with Phyllis, if not as major as, say, an orderly yet feminine stride, then more difficult to resolve, for any conclusion must be subjective. Until she walked properly she would fall down, whereas there was no test by which one hue of Caucasian cheek was more natural than the next.

  Furthermore after three months Janet had not displayed any of the negative qualities that Pierce had identified in the other real women with whom he had associated. She was not moody, and above all she was not critical of him. He did not mind her self-possession as a successful businessperson. He was not offended by a slight pushiness, demonstrated in her replacing the pillows on his couch with larger and more vivid ones, and it was she who habitually made the choice of restaurants; he cared little about such matters. She never disparaged anything he said, and she had a deft way of stating an opinion or taste that differed greatly from his but did not seem to if considered superficially. He had never yet seen her in that resentful state he thought of as standard for females, perhaps because he contributed in no way to her upkeep, nor did they live together. Maybe that was the trick: their encounters could still be called dates.

  Janet continued to share her apartment and in fact her bed with Tyler Hallstrom, though she assured Pierce she was no longer sexually intimate with her animatronic companion. But she did own him or it, not to mention that Tyler was her business partner and had a real knack for investment counseling. She feared losing clients if she disposed of him.

  “You’ve helped me think better of myself,” she told Pierce. “I’m grateful to you.”

  He had never heard a woman say that before, and it was very gratifying to him. He determined to program such a sentiment into Phyllis II, which project continued to remain in the note-taking stage despite the need for haste if he was ever to have another artificial woman while he was young enough to make the most of her, but thus far he had been unable to rise above a disabling inhibition. Only several weeks after her departure did he realize he had been in love with Phyllis I.

  That feeling grew more profound in the months since he found himself in a condition for which he could use no other term than heartsick, and he despised himself for it. Brilliant as he was, there was obviously something wrong with him if he could be so obsessed with something he had made from scratch yet spinelessly allow it to walk out on him.

  He went to bed with Janet every Friday night after a restaurant dinner and a movie either in a theater or on DVD, and then often enough put another, an oldie, on television while they had sex and looked at it intermittently. They were thoroughly comfortable with each other by now, so much so that they rarely conversed.

  4

  When first on her own Phyllis had no address. She could not use most of what was offered by an abode. She did not eat, sleep, or require a bathroom. Heating and air conditioning were personally meaningless to her.

  To charge her batteries a source of electrical power was necessary periodically. She used the 110-volt outlets provided at public-library tables for laptops needing a boost, where the other patrons were scholarly solipsists.

  She spent a good deal of time at libraries, doing research into show business, in trade papers or on the internet. She learned that even to get a toe in the door could not be done without acquiring an agent, but little was more difficult than persuading one to sign you on unless you already had som
e work, which situation was another of the apparent absurdities in human affairs.

  But before looking for an agent, she had to establish a reliable means by which he could get in touch with her if he found her a job. Having no home and lacking the money with which even to rent a room, she had no telephone.

  At first a public phone on a street corner seemed to be the answer, but in choosing the right one she attracted the interest of some other women walking nearby. They were prostitutes. As soon as they determined that Phyllis was not the competition, they became friendly with her and, illogically, invited her into their ranks, another of the absurdities almost routine when trafficking with human beings.

  At the outset, Phyllis thought practicing this profession temporarily might provide her with an income with which to acquire a domicile where she could have a telephone. As a whore she would have certain strengths peculiar to a nonhuman: immunity to disease or pregnancy, tirelessness, and a constitutional incapacity to be offended physically, emotionally, or morally by any demand.

  But it turned out that streetwalkers were handled by agents known as pimps, who wore elaborate clothing and cruised in gaudy cars, and according to the working girls to whom Phyllis spoke, commandeered the moneys so earned, returning to them only meager allowances.

  This arrangement, which made no sense to Phyllis, because the pimp brought them no customers, all of whom the girls hustled themselves, was however perfectly agreeable to the hookers who were her informants. “He really love us bitches,” said Lily, six feet tall counting the height of the red wig, to which Ashley, shivering in her skimpy satin teddy on a 40-degree night, added, “And we motherfucking love that daddy. It’s a family, Phyl, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  But Phyllis could see no advantage for herself in this calling. She also learned that selling one’s body for sexual purposes was illegal though lending it for free was not. Human beings could also legally sell their own blood.

  Ashley did make one suggestion that seemed viable, namely, that Phyllis might want to try her luck at a strip club with what looked like a good body that hopefully, unlike Ashley’s own, was unscarred by surgery done by butchers and free of the track marks conspicuous on Lily’s skin-and-bone forearms.

  “Nice tits. Now drop your drawers,” said Eddie, a balding man wearing a dark suit over a black T-shirt, behind a desk in the office of a club called Flashes.

  Phyllis removed her underpants. Eddie’s office had dark-green walls on which photographs of naked female performers were displayed, along with a calendar, advertising a firm called Currier & Ives, which bore a picture of persons of a bygone age about to enter a vehicle to which a team of four-footed, long-legged animals was hitched. No doubt there was an explanation for this picture. Phyllis was at her greatest disadvantage when asked to deal with the past, having so brief a one of her own.

  “Great ass,” said Eddie, indicating, with a revolving motion of a hairy crooked finger, that she should turn. “Know what I like about your bush is you don’t have a bikini burn.” He made a shrug that involved his thick neck and shadowy chin. “Phyllis, is it? Okay, Phyl, you can go on soon as you get an outfit, which you pay for. Understand, no money ever goes from the club to you. The girls are all amateurs, not employees. You don’t get no benefits—health, vacations, that shit. But you keep all tips, and they are up to you so long as you don’t break the law, which is you can’t touch a guy’s cock with your hands and he can’t touch your tits or pussy with his. Between sets you go into the audience and do lap dances, rub your lower body against his clothed crotch, but he can’t expose his dick.”

  “I am stripped completely nude?”

  “That’s right, you’re naked but he ain’t. Also, you can’t jerk him off with your hand but you can get him off with your ass. Makes sense to the lawmakers, I guess, and undercover cops come in from time to time to check. We generally recognize them, but we got to be careful because at this time they’re not on the take and could bust you and close us down…. It’s risky to make dates to meet off the premises if money’s involved. You could be charged with prostitution.”

  “The club makes its income from the cover charge and the drinks?” Phyllis had observed that financial matters ranked among the most important in human connections, probably because they were easier than emotions and morality to quantify.

  “You got it,” said Eddie. He opened a desk drawer and groped within, at last finding and passing on to Phyllis a little printed card. “Where our girls get their stage outfits. Give ’em this and get ten percent discount. Now the only thing left to know is you don’t have to blow the bouncers for free, irregardless of what they tell you. They bother you too much for sexual favors, just let me know. As for me, that’s my old lady who’s the cashier. Nuff said?” He showed very white teeth in a probable smile.

  The performer did not simply take off her clothes when she came onto the stage at the far end of the club. While slowly stripping, the removal of each garment taking as much as a minute, she danced to the loud music that came over the public address system. For some this had a fast tempo and spirited rhythms, but other girls moved to slower, more measured accompaniment. When asked her preference, Phyllis had not had any. She could not understand why men who wanted to look at naked women needed all the unnecessary hocus-pocus attending what should have been the simplest of events.

  Also, she had never danced and had difficulty in making order of what she saw the other girls doing, most of which motions seemed to have no organic relation to those used in walking. The music, of whichever sort, was more hindrance than help.

  Phyllis had to get a loan from a reluctant Eddie to buy a costume at the fancy-underwear shop he recommended, two doors from the club: fishnet stockings supported by a black-lace garter belt under which was a black satin cache-sexe, the strings of which converged into one in the furrow between her buttocks. Above the waist she wore a filmy bra through which her breasts were visible but could be made even more conspicuous by folding back little panels that covered the apertures through which her nipples protruded. Though the dancer was almost bare to begin with, the prevailing style was deliberately to remove garment by garment, taking much more time than should have been needed to undress, but as Phyllis observed, it apparently did not annoy the audience of men, which began with those seated immediately around the U-shaped stage, the floor of which was low enough for them to lean their forearms on it, with fists clutching paper money. From time to time the performer would crouch before a man waving a bill and rapidly thrust her pelvis toward him, withdrawing it as quickly. On average she repeated the movement thrice before leaving her groin in the extended position until he inserted the bill behind the patch of satin concealing her genital organ—without, according to Eddie, touching the flesh with anything but the money, on pain of violating the law and being expelled by the bouncers.

  Phyllis had carefully observed the girls who performed before her, and when it was her own turn to go on she made an initial effort to imitate them, but could not quickly catch on to dancing, which, if she tried too strenuously, threatened to take her back to the early days when Ellery was training her to walk, when she had often fallen to the ground. Who would repair her if she damaged herself now? So she confined her movements to a vigorous stride around the U, undressing as she went, and when nude she knelt before the nearest man brandishing a greenback.

  He wore eyeglasses and graying sideburns. His nose was sharp with exasperation. “Where am I supposed to put it?”

  Phyllis relieved him of the problem by taking the bill with her fingers.

  After she had done the same with two more customers, Eddie looked out from backstage and gestured for her to come to him. “Listen, Phyl, you ain’t makin’ it. Go out and do some lap dances instead.” He told her to collect her garments and put them on. “You can sit facing the customer with your legs spread and rub your titties in his face, or you can spread his legs and get inside them and rub your crotch against his dick. Or you can
turn and sit down facing away and grind your ass into him. Collect the tips soon as you sit down, and then get some more from him if you stay more’n three minutes. Don’t quote a price, but you don’t have to accept less than you want. Also remind him he’s got to buy a drink every ten minutes. The waiters are the bouncers, and vice versa.” He smiled at her. “You never done any of this before, have you? What are you, some college student? I never asked for ID, was I wrong?”

  “I’m not legally underage.”

  Eddie chuckled. “Know how I knew that? I can tell a girl’s age within two years by one look at her snatch.” He raised his eyebrows. “I mean it. I seen so many!”

  Phyllis made her way as far from the stage as possible, suspecting that the customers who sat at tables in the twilit rear might constitute a better market than those closer to the dancers, who would be more interested in looking. A burly bouncer-waiter had just placed a bottle of beer in front of a frail-looking little fellow in a suit jacket that rose up and away from the back of his collar.

  “Twenty dollars? Twenty for a bottle of domestic beer?”

  The waiter pointed with a carrot-sized finger. “Get the fuck out.”

  “I’ll pay,” the little man said. “But I can complain, can’t I?”

  The waiter seized the extended bill. “No!” He lumbered away.

  “How do you like that?” the man said to Phyllis. “I don’t know why they have to be nasty in places that have to do with sex.”

  “I think it’s because these places are somewhat degrading. Many of the clients would not like it widely known that they come here, the married ones for obvious reasons, and even the single men would probably want to be discreet about it, because people might get the idea that they are incapable of normal sexual relations. So those who run these establishments feel superior to their clientele.”