The Dead Husband Project

by The Dead Husband Project- Stories (retail) (epub)

  “Don’t be modest!” the pixie woman said, playfully slapping his leg. “Okay—here, check it out…”

  A screen popped up within the screen, and there was Doreen sitting at the dinner table, looking directly into the camera. Her eyes moist, her lips and teeth stained greyish purple with wine. She was smiling sadly, visibly touched by something she’d heard.

  Doreen sunk onto the couch. “What…what is this?”

  “Shhh!” Gretchen plopped down beside her. “You have to see what happens next!”

  Doreen on the screen shook her head almost imperceptibly, staring into their eyes.

  “Gretchen…” Doreen whispered. “What is going on?”

  “Shhh!”

  A tear appeared at the corner of screen-Doreen’s eye, mingled with her mascara and fell from her lashes in a perfect sphere. Then another. She wiped her face, smudging black along her cheekbone.

  The man and pixie woman came back into fullscreen, the woman dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “ ‘I mean, wow. That was just so beautiful. Am I right?” She turned to the camera and applauded, as if encouraging a live studio audience. Then back to the man, “Did you think you could make it happen so fast?”

  “I think she’s been going through a lot. Maybe on another day, under other circumstances—”

  “Let’s be clear here—we know she’s not an actor or anything. We’ve all read her profile. Why do you think SEAN could make her feel like that?”

  He shook his head, at a loss. “It really is so much richer an experience than we ever expected. He’s programmed to pick up on certain signals from people, which he uses to determine whether what he’s talking about is engaging or not. But, in all honesty, we’re just amazed.”

  Doreen appeared again, smiling, then laughing. She’d never seen herself like that before. How different from her image in the mirror. Her face so much looser, one eye slightly bigger than the other, emphasized by her laugh, which was crooked. She was both uglier and prettier than she thought. She cringed at the double chin that appeared when she looked really happy. Doreen on the screen kept laughing, wine spilling over the edge of the glass in her hand. She was someone she didn’t recognize.

  “Wait!” the pixie woman cried, touching her ear. “My producer is saying she’s back. Faisel—bring her up!”

  The living room brightened in a flash of white. Doreen blinked hard. When she opened her eyes she saw herself squinting on the screen, haggard under the harsh lights. Makeup smudged, hair flattened by the rain, eyes red and puffy.

  “Doreen! Whew! What a night!” the pixie woman said from a smaller rectangle. “I know this must be kind of overwhelming, but you were selected from a huge pool of great ladies for ZTV’s The Human Touch. This has been an incredibly moving experience for all of us. Thank you. Thank you so much!” She turned to the man, flapping her hands by her face. “Oh my God! I’m going to start crying again!”

  Doreen’s ears were ringing. Gretchen had snuck away and was now a silhouette on the balcony, cell phone at her ear, her orange cigarette light zigzagging like a firefly in a Mason jar.

  “You’ve stolen our hearts, Doreen! Not to mention SEAN’s!”

  Doreen covered her face with her hands. “Can someone please tell me what’s going on here?”

  “What?” Pixie woman leaned closer to the camera. “Faisel—can you bring up her audio? I’m not getting any…” She paused, holding her ear, nodding. “Okay, we’ve got a little technical glitch. While we get that sorted it’ll give me a chance to introduce Doreen to Professor Oren McGivney. Chief robotics engineer and cognitive scientist from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Did I get that right? I guess we can kind of call you SEAN’s dad, huh?”

  The man laughed. “Not quite. I have a great team.” He looked into the camera. “Hi, Doreen. I know this must be a lot to take in.”

  Another screen popped up, B-roll of people in lab coats standing around Sean, who sat inanimately in a chair. One of them took out Sean’s eye, inserted a small screwdriver and turned it delicately.

  The living room shifted. Doreen clawed at the fabric of the couch.

  The pixie woman said, “Can I break it down for her, Professor?”

  “By all means.”

  “Here’s the long and short of it. You and a few other very special ladies were chosen for The Human Touch, an online reality show that tests the behavioural believability of the most advanced versions of AI. And just how do we do that? By seeing if they’re able to make someone like you fall in love with them!”

  “Let me interject here, if I may?” Professor McGivney asked.

  “Of course!”

  The professor leaned forward. “Doreen, no one’s been able to make a human-looking face for an artificial being that doesn’t—for lack of a better term—creep people out. It has to do with something called ‘the uncanny valley.’ So my team decided to create someone without a face at all.”

  “And so far—he’s got the Human Touch! Sorry to interrupt, Professor, but this is really just so exciting.”

  “Not at all.”

  Doreen closed her eyes, concentrated on her breathing. “I’m on drugs. Someone drugged me. That’s what this is.”

  “Oh! We can hear you now! You’re adorable. No—no drugs! Maybe we should back up a bit.” Pixie lady looked over at the professor and smiled. “Clink? The dating site? Totally made up. Your profile was so perfect. You hit all the markers of being completely average.”

  There was a knock. Doreen looked at the door.

  “Now Doreen—” Professor McGivney said. “We don’t have that much time here. Understand that SEAN is a next-generation BioBotic. He’s made with a mechanism that allows him to develop ‘real’ feelings and attachments.”

  “If I can cut in here, Professor—” pixie lady said. “Doreen, you were so…I don’t know. What’s the word? Authentic? Human? Alive? In any case, that little je ne sais quoi of yours really seemed to bring something out in him. In all of us watching, am I right?” She stood and clapped, nodding and looking beyond the camera, then sat back down. “So, congratulations—you guys are going on to the next round!”

  Doreen looked up. “Sorry, this is a game? I’m in a game?”

  “Wellll, yes and no. It’s a competition, and it’s also real life. But it’s up to you to decide just how real you want it to get.” She winked.

  The knocking got harder, more persistent. A voice from the other side of the door: “Doreen?”

  “Oh my gosh! Is that him already?” Pixie lady flew back in her chair. “Wow, Professor, he found the place pretty fast.”

  “He’d have no trouble tracking her with his internal map, and the chip she swallowed at dinner.”

  “Decisions, decisions! What a night you’ve got ahead of you, Doreen!” the pixie woman said. “While you were gone, our team of stylists transformed your room into a super-romantic boudoir.”

  Another window popped open, panning a red room that flickered with scores of candles, the bed dressed in ruby satin sheets.

  “Now before you decide what to do,” Professor McGivney cautioned, “I should tell you he’s been developed to be an exquisite lover—”

  “Yes, Professor, let’s talk about his endurance. Wait till you hear this, Doreen!”

  The professor removed his glasses and cleaned them with his shirt. “Let’s just say we’ve tried to make him as human as possible in just about every other capacity but this one. He’s kind of a superman in bed.”

  “Whew!” Pixie woman fanned herself with both hands. “You are one lucky lady!”

  The knocking got harder. “Doreen? Can you open the door? Please. Don’t listen to them.”

  “And I’m not just talking about how long he can last,” the professor said. “His physicality. It’s a little out of proportion.”

  “Doreen, I think you’re going to get some stiff competition for SEAN’s affections. Take a look at the comments on Twitter now!”

  @pjgarnerXTC: OPEN THE
DOOR GIRLFRIEND! If you don’t want his #humantouch, I DO!!!

  @renattaspinata: Just turn out the lights and go wild! Give me some of THAT #humantouch!!

  “Doreen? Seriously. Open up.”

  “No pressure, Doreen. Either way,” the professor said. “Either way we learn something.”

  Doreen looked out at the balcony, Gretchen’s silhouette against the charcoal sky.

  “Maybe she should go check out the room?” the pixie lady said. “See how it’s been all tricked out? The rose petals? The sheets? I bet that might nudge her in a particular direction.” She winked again at the camera.

  “Doreen?! Turn that off!” the voice yelled from behind the door. “Don’t listen to them. It’s not true. I was burned! I can tell you all the details. Zambia, my father, the hard hat. For fuck’s sake. Please, Doreen, this is ridiculous. I’m real! Just open up.”

  The only other way out was through the balcony door, twenty-three floors above the expressway.

  “Doreen—please. I can explain this. None of it is true.”

  Gretchen tossed her cigarette over the glass railing, the glowing spot of orange arcing up, then disappearing. Smoke streamed from her nostrils.

  Doreen slammed the laptop shut. She yanked out the cords for the lights. She slid the balcony door wide open.

  Gretchen’s smile faded. “Hey,” she said, backing up.

  Doreen’s breath caught in the wind. She got up close and pushed Gretchen against the railing.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Gretchen yelled. “Stop! What are you doing, you crazy bitch?”

  Doreen started to cry. She pushed Gretchen once in the chest, hard, then went back inside, locking the door behind her. She followed the streak of light coming in from beneath the front door, and paused for only a breath before unlatching the deadbolt.

  MOONMAN

  When the sky turned black I thought of my father. But that makes no difference to you now. Where were you when it happened? you ask, and I say that I was at work, in my cubicle, in the centre of the city. Which is not untrue. Hunched over my keyboard, the computers blinked off with a defeated drone, the lights flickered out, and the silence of a city cut from its power rose up from the ground.

  A quiet more unnerving than darkness, just like Moonman had whispered.

  How did you get out? you ask, meaning methods, vehicles, escape routes. You want to hear about the path you assume I took west to the wide roads and stiff stalks of corn, whether I knew about the tunnels in advance, etc., so you can amend your own plans of now-constant preparedness, mental networks fizzing as they rewire.

  I don’t tell you that when the black clouds rolled across the sky I didn’t go anywhere and my first thought was of the man least capable of protecting me from the end of the world.

  —

  I saw him the way he was, with a mug of red wine and a pack of Player’s Light on the other side of the screen door that led to our small backyard. He could sit out there for hours on summer evenings, smoke lingering around his head in varying densities like a dirty halo. He sat and smoked, looking out, facing elsewhere, while Mom dried the plates and glasses with a blue dishtowel, then went upstairs to put Alice to bed.

  I’d sometimes pretend he was out on that step listening to a Jays game on the radio, unwinding after work like dads at the time had a tendency to do. I imagined that if I opened the squeaky screen door, he’d shift over to make a spot for me and he’d tell me that there were two out at the top of the fourth with a runner on first and third. We’d sit just listening for a while, and when the game began to drag he’d talk about stats and trades and the players he watched when he was my age, and near the bottom of the seventh, when the score was 4–2, he’d tell me to fetch our gloves from the garage so we could throw the ball around until it was time for bed.

  Instead, on most nights after dinner, I was inside lying on the rug in front of the TV, and he was out there alone on the back step, wishing he were somewhere else.

  I was ten when he came home on a Saturday afternoon with a used guitar. He ruffled my hair as he crossed the front porch where I was colouring with Alice, his fingertips leaving trails on my scalp like swaths cut through a wheat field. I followed him inside and watched as he leaned the banged-up guitar case against the couch. He got himself a glass from the cabinet and whistled on his way to the kitchen where he rummaged through a high cupboard, clinking bottles together until he found what he was looking for. I’d never heard him whistle. He returned, his glass half-filled with a nectar like dark honey, and stopped when he saw me, his lips still pursed in melody.

  “Hey Simon,” he said. “Wanna hear something, little man?”

  I nodded and moved closer as he set his glass down on the coffee table. He brought the case onto his lap, clacked open its locks and lifted the lid to reveal a plush red interior cradling a scratched black guitar. He ran his fingers along its strings before pulling it out and nestling it against his torso. Then he tuned it, his eyes closed and head cocked as though listening for some secret. And when he started to strum, a whole different man took the place of my father.

  Something dropped on the floor in the upstairs bathroom. A second later my mother was there on the stairs, her hair pulled back with a bandana, yellow latex gloves on her hands glistening with water.

  —

  It was just before Christmas when he left his job at his uncle’s car dealership. My mother wore a hood of silence as she peeled carrots and potatoes over the sink, her dark hair hanging forward like a curtain so none of us could see her face.

  “Molly, you’re not even trying to understand,” my father said. He leaned against the counter beside her with his arms crossed tight over his broad chest, his eyes cast down at the tile he kept poking with his big toe. She peeled harder and faster until the carrot in her hand looked more like a weapon than a vegetable.

  “Babe,” he said, “come on. You think it was easy for me to make this decision?”

  As though he wasn’t there at all, she chopped up the potatoes and carrots, dumped them in a pot of water and set it on the stove. She grabbed plates and cutlery from the shelves and drawers, set the table for three, then opened the oven door to check on the meat.

  “It’s pork,” she said, slamming it shut. “Dinner will be ready in an hour.” She wiped her hands on a dishtowel, tossed it onto the counter and didn’t say anything to Alice and me on her way through the living room and up the stairs.

  “I’m getting really tired of this martyr shit!” Dad yelled to the ceiling as he went out back, the screen door clattering against its frame.

  Alice and I sat like statues on the living room rug in front of Wheel of Fortune. I thought that if we didn’t move, if we didn’t say anything, we could blend into the furniture. I was relieved when he came in a few minutes later and went upstairs.

  “Big money! Big money!” Alice called out and clapped her hands.

  I elbowed her in the ribs. “Shhhh!”

  The bass of voices in their bedroom got louder and louder until something whumped hard against the wall, rattling the trinkets in the cabinet beside me.

  Footsteps in the hallway above. Fast but not running, my mother came down the stairs, my father close behind.

  “Molly, wait,” he called to her. But she was already out the front door. Because I didn’t hear the creak of the porch steps, I knew she hadn’t gone far and imagined her leaning over the railing, which, in a way, was just as bad.

  —

  That spring I turned eleven and got a bike for my birthday. By then my father wrote music during the day and played Bowie cover songs in bars a couple nights a week, and my mother worked the overnight shift at the radio station where she was a producer. I’d heard her on the phone with someone not long before she started working nights, saying that Alice and I wouldn’t even know that she was gone, that she’d be around for bedtime and back home to take us to school in the morning.

  “My aunt is staying over the nights that b
oth Chris and I are out,” she said into the receiver. “I don’t know, Fran. It’s going to be tough, but I think it’s only temporary. I mean, my hours and his…situation.” And then she laughed in that conspiratorial way that mothers share when talking about husbands and children. A laugh, it seemed to me, that rarely reflected joy.

  I couldn’t tell her that she’d been wrong. It didn’t matter that she was home when we went to bed and when we got up in the morning, her nighttime absence echoed through the halls. We always knew when she was gone. I lost the feeling that children are supposed to have when they drift off to sleep: the knowledge that their parents, their mother, is in the house somewhere, her protective warmth flowing from room to room in the dark. Without it, I lay awake for hours listening to every creak, every rustle and every snore that rose up from Great-Aunt Audrey, who slipped into an impenetrable slumber on a chair in front of the television minutes after the key turned in the lock.

  In search of a direct line to my mother, I brought up the old brown clock radio from the basement one night, plugged it in by my bed and tuned it to her station. I knew I wouldn’t hear her voice, but it didn’t matter. I could imagine her in the windowless studio I’d visited on a PD day, sitting at the control board pressing buttons, adjusting dials, directing the show in silence. The studio felt as serious as an operating room and everything in it seemed important, including my mother, without whom I believed the whole thing would fall apart.

  I crawled under the covers with the radio and slowly increased the volume.

  “They know more then they’ll ever let on while they ply us with television and hamburgers and the Super Bowl, pounding our brains into a doughy pulp. You can’t hear them but they’re laughing. Right now. Laughing at us.”

  The voice stopped. A man’s voice, almost whispering. I felt like I’d caught him in the middle of telling a secret. I waited a few seconds before reaching for the tuner, thinking maybe I had the wrong sta—

  “Laughing!” he boomed, the radio tumbling from my hands and clunking to the floor. Aunt Audrey’s snore broke into fits before returning to its sinusoidal cadence. I picked it back up and pulled the blanket over my head.