by Zachary Doss
You shrug and your boyfriend shrugs and you both keep walking. You came all this way to get a cake for your anniversary but actually it makes sense to both of you that there wouldn’t be a cake. Cakes have all gone bad, your boyfriend says, and you think he sounds thoughtful, but you still can’t tell what he’s thinking. Seems like, you say.
How the Day Goes VI
YOUR BOYFRIEND ASKS you to try holding the baby. You are aware that he is testing you, but you take the baby anyway, you hold the baby like someone who doesn’t want to hold the baby. The baby smells like baby, which is to say like very fresh garbage, and his head is soft, visibly soft, like modeling clay. I could make this baby into anything, you think as you hold him. You should rock him gently, or coo, but you stand stiffly with your forearms positioned so the baby cannot possibly be comfortable. But the baby is so soft he just takes the shape of your arms, so it’s your back that hurts from holding the baby this way and the baby is fine. Babies are always fine, you think, and you notice that the baby’s mother is telling your boyfriend that babies are surprisingly resilient. They can survive anything, she says, and the way she says this is grim and terrifying. You want to hand the monster baby back to his mother, but what you do is blurt out, I didn’t want this. Going forward, your relationship with the baby and his mother is unfriendly.
How the Day Goes VII
YOU AND YOUR boyfriend are talking about your dream jobs. You say that you want to be extremely wealthy, and he asks what job you want to do in order to become extremely wealthy. You hadn’t thought about it that way before. You pick at the piping on the cushion of your secondhand couch from the ’70s. It was your dead grandmother’s couch, and it looks like a dead grandmother’s couch. Your boyfriend asks you again about the job, the actual job, because you went to state college and got mediocre grades, and right now your actual, non-dream job involves selling golf balls, and your boyfriend points out that he doesn’t really see a clear path to wealth for you now, and then he asks, what would you do differently? The question floats between you like something deadly, a poisonous insect maybe. You are both very quiet as you’ve realized what he actually said. One of you has to change the subject now, before it’s too late. If a silence like that continues on for too long, it becomes impossible to get rid of.
How the Day Goes VIII
YOUR BOYFRIEND GETS a job at the Ghost Factory. He works the morning shift so he’s usually gone before you wake up. After he is gone, the pillow smells like him but it’s lukewarm, the same temperature as the air, the walls, your skin, and your breath. At the Ghost Factory, your boyfriend pulls a machete off a rack on the wall and by the time you wake up and heat a cup of tea, he is hacking the ghosts apart. He finds it satisfying, your boyfriend, the way the blade bites into joints. He tosses the ghost parts into bins marked for example ‘legs’ or ‘arms’ or ‘torsos.’ There is a bin marked ‘scraps’ for genitals and heads, the useless parts of a ghost. Your boyfriend is slick with blueblack gore up to his biceps. You can’t drink your tea fast enough, the last half-inch always goes lukewarm, the temperature of the air, the sidewalk, the bus stop, your hands, and the tip of your tongue. You are waiting for the bus. Your boyfriend is staring into black eyes, carving ghosts into parts small enough to carry, or hide, or swallow.
How the Day Goes IX
YOU AND YOUR boyfriend purchase land on which you plan to build a home. The land is far away and located at a place so inconvenient to reach that you can’t imagine living there until you have fewer obligations that require you to be in the city. For now, you rent a small apartment and go to your jobs and put away some of your paychecks to someday be able to build on your land. In the meantime, the land has been subject to some mishaps. Recently there was a flood. You hear about the flood on the news, you and your boyfriend climb in his pickup truck and drive to your land. There is a dirt road leading to the center, where you plan to build your home. However, the road is impassible; the center of your property has filled with water, a wide, low lake. The rain has cleared and the still water is a perfect reflection of the sky. You sit with your boyfriend on the bed of his truck. It is warm and humid because of the rain. Your home, you imagine, is somewhere in the middle of all that water.
How the Day Goes X
FINALLY, YOU AND your boyfriend decide everything is so fucking boring you’re not even going to bother with it.
III
I Am Having a Very Authentic Experience, You Think
Bespoke
YOU DECIDE TO order a new boyfriend. You don’t exactly need a new boyfriend, not yet. Your old one is just fine. Sure, he’s running a little hot these days, his fan whirs a little loudly, his memory a little slower than you would find on newer models. But in all the particulars, he’s serviceable. You’ve had your boyfriend for five years, and he’s been a good boyfriend. There for you when you need him. He dresses up nicely for work functions, where you take him to show off how handsome he is. He is nice to your mother. He likes to watch television exactly as much as you like to watch television, and you like all of the same shows.
You are a compulsive catalog shopper. You have been looking online, surreptitiously, sneaking glances at the newest models when your boyfriend is charging or while you’re at work. On your work computer, you stream the conference where they announce the new boyfriends, slim and toned and shiny. An older fat man gestures towards the new boyfriends, a row of them, and they stand on the stage and smile. A blonde boyfriend waves. A boyfriend with dark skin gives a thumbs-up. The older fat man turns a tan boyfriend around and jiggles his butt with his palm. The crowd laughs. The tan boyfriend looks over his shoulder and grins. He has impossibly clean, white, even teeth. He looks like a Hardy Boy. He is the beach model, you think, checking a dog-eared page in the catalog. This is the boyfriend you’ve had your eye on.
A new boyfriend is thousands of dollars, but you have some money saved up. You look at the catalogs and the websites and the online reviews again and again. It’s the slow season at your job, so you don’t really have that much to do. You’re earning your paycheck but not much in the way of commissions or bonuses. This time of year is exactly like that, slow. In your spare time, you convince yourself that eventually, you’ll need to get a new boyfriend anyway. Every time your old boyfriend drops a plate in the sink and breaks it, bumps into a doorframe, forgets the word for traffic or tractor or cheese, spontaneously loses his charge when he is supposed to have 20% battery life left, you’re reminded that really, it’s only a matter of time.
You can’t exactly live without a boyfriend. You’ve always had one to take care of you. You justify the thousands of dollars a boyfriend costs by reasoning that, really, they do a lot for you. You interact with your boyfriend fairly regularly, even if that just means fucking him a couple of times a day. You’ve always had an active sex drive. When you were a teenager, you masturbated four or five times a day. Once, on a Sunday, you got up to eleven times, an accomplishment you still remember with some measure of pride. The boyfriends are kind of a sex thing, although you’ve convinced yourself that they aren’t really a sex thing. They are a thing you have sex with, sometimes, but they’re more than that. Just like a real relationship.
You got your first boyfriend in college. He was on sale, nine hundred dollars, maybe nine hundred and fifty. A lot, for a college student, but even then you recognized a bargain and loved to save money. You remember the first boyfriend fondly. He was cheap, only lasted a little over a year and a half before his processor fried, but you had some good times. He was handsome. All the boyfriends are handsome, but this one had a crooked nose. The boyfriend designers thought introducing minor physical idiosyncrasies to the boyfriends might make them more attractive, not less, although that proved an unpopular design choice. You liked it, though. You looked at his crooked nose and believed in him.
That first boyfriend did everything you needed him to. He kept your apartment clean. He did dishes, although he wasn’t great at it, and you often fou
nd plates with missed spots of caked-on food. He did a good enough job for a college student. He couldn’t drink with you, or even fake it like newer models can, but he sat next to you while you smoked pot and he rubbed your thigh and told you the things you were saying were very smart. His speech recognition was bad, so sometimes he gave the wrong response to something you said, but you programmed him to call you Daddy in bed, something you found pretty funny at nineteen, and he could do that without screwing up most of the time.
The boyfriends aren’t really a sex thing but they’ve always been best at putting out. Actually, they are marketed as friends and companions. In the commercials, they do light housework, they take notes at meetings, they mimic active listening, they make convincing small talk. They can wear suits at funerals and they can sit by the swimming pool on a sunny day without overheating too much and they can save your spot in a long line and they can go to a movie with you and offer their opinions, which are based on a synthesis of the top fifty most popular online reviews, which is to say, they have opinions that are objectively more correct than yours.
They do other things in the commercials too, like drive cars and cook meals and babysit and play tennis, but a disclaimer appears at the bottom of the screen in big white letters saying basically that the boyfriends can’t do any of those things, or they can, but not very well, and you should not let the boyfriends operate heavy machinery and you should never, ever leave your children alone with a boyfriend and you eat their cooking at your own risk. They cannot, for example, tell the difference between salt and sugar and rat poison. They cannot really differentiate between your child and someone else’s child or a medium-sized dog unless your child or the dog is microchipped.
But obviously you can fuck them too, they have all the correct parts for that, and the anatomy is so convincing you honestly can’t tell the difference, and why would they make the boyfriends attractive and fuckable if they didn’t want people to fuck them. They used to sell a non-fuckable variety that was so unpopular that almost nobody ever bought one. You’ve never seen one, although you heard rumors that parents would give them to teenagers as birthday presents, handsome and neutered chaperones. Now, they sell online for hundreds of thousands of dollars to obsessive collectors, the same people who collect dollar bills with printing errors or dolls made with three eyes instead of two or stamps printed upside-down.
The time you spend researching a replacement boyfriend makes you feel guilty about your current boyfriend. You have weathered difficult times together. He has been your boyfriend for what seems now to have been a very, very long time. It seems like longer the more you think about it. Sitting on the couch watching superhero TV shows together, the shows that he likes and you also like, you take his hand and say, We’ve weathered difficult times together, haven’t we?
He pauses briefly before responding. We have, he says finally, weathered difficult times together.
It is comfortable to hear him say that. You imagine that the times were difficult for him as well as for you. You have imbued him with a life, with a backstory. You pretend he has a job. You pretend that he had difficulties in his life that were equal to the difficulties you had in your life. No, you go back and decide that maybe his difficulties could be a little bit less than yours. You like the idea that you got him through a hard time but the hard time you had was worse and you were still available to be his rock. You could have scripted these things and programmed them into your boyfriend’s memory, so that you could talk him through his difficulties and he could be incredibly grateful to you, like you deserve, but you’ve never done that. His personality is the default personality. He is not at all distinctive. What passes for his persona is cobbled together from people in movies and people on TV shows and people in songs and people in romance novels. You don’t care; to you, he is convincing. You don’t want him to tell you things that you wrote for him to say. You would prefer to come as close as possible to not knowing the outcome, even though you know the outcome.
Tonight, for example, you know the outcome. The TV show you’re watching comes to the end. You ask your boyfriend what he thinks will happen in the next episode, and in seconds, he has repeated a theory he found on a message board online that his programming has deemed most compelling. The pitch of his voice changes, and his speech speeds up so he sounds excited. He leans forward, his eyes widen. You try not to notice them individually, but you know there are a thousand tiny cues programmed into him to communicate interest, excitement, boyish charm.
Instead of thinking about that, you kiss him. You have not been with many real boys, real boyfriends with asymmetrical faces, too-large foreheads, gap teeth, but to you it seems like your boyfriend feels exactly the same. His skin is exactly correct, the right amount of give, the right temperature; his mouth still tastes like dinner even though he didn’t eat any. When you press closer to him, he whimpers slightly, exactly as if he were surprised and aroused by your passion. I am having a very authentic experience, you think.
You and your boyfriend have always had fairly boring sex. People assume boyfriends are for weird stuff, a partner who is totally pliant and willing and discreet. You thought that too, you thought you would do weird stuff with your boyfriend, learn a new kind of sex that was extreme and perverse, but not really. Your boyfriend can be programmed to do just about anything, but you couldn’t think of exactly what you would want him to do except the regular stuff. The defaults. You have watched videos of the other stuff online and it just made you feel uncomfortable. You didn’t really want to program your boyfriend to do any of that. You don’t really have the kind of imagination that would require. Sexually, you are very normal, you think. You are very average. You have an average body and an average dick and an average amount of passion. You have no STDs, or fetishes, or weird feelings about race, or special sexual tricks for which your ex-lovers might have remembered you. There is nothing overwhelmingly exciting about you, but there is nothing wrong with you.
There is nothing wrong with you. With your boyfriend, you perform admirably. You don’t skimp on the fore-play, even though your boyfriend is already aroused, or as aroused as you want him to be. Even though his arousal is some secret switch inside of him that flips immediately and stays flipped. Even though you don’t need him to be in the mood because he doesn’t have moods to be in or out of. You wonder what he thinks about, if he’s still compiling theories about the superhero TV show in some sub-process while he is also being fucked. You wonder if he is also compiling your routine for tomorrow, setting alarms so that he can gently wake you, stroking your forehead while he tells you what’s coming up in the day ahead. You wonder if he is wirelessly reviewing the inventory of your refrigerator and making a grocery list. You wonder what he thinks about when he’s alone.
Mid-moan, his eyes roll back in his head and you think, this is new, but you realize when his eyes close that he has simply shut down, his battery has lost its charge. You are still inside him, but you feel awkward suddenly, as if you had been caught doing something wrong. The heaters that kept your boyfriend’s skin warm and lifelike cool quickly and his skin begins to feel strange, rubbery and cold. At this point, you have two options, you can finish, because you are very near completion anyway, or you can stop and pull out. You are considering this problem when you realize that you have gone almost completely soft, your problem is no longer a problem. Maybe you didn’t feel like finishing anyway. You plug your boyfriend into the wall so he will charge, and as he’s charging, he begins to generate heat again. His body is as warm as yours, maybe a little warmer, which makes it easy to fall asleep next to him.
At the boyfriend store, the only employee is an older fat man. He looks just like the older fat man you watched in the video of the conference, the man with the broad, chubby palm who jiggled the butt of the tan beach boyfriend. You swear it is the same man, but you also think, how strange that the CEO of this company also works at the retail locations. You go back and forth on this, trying to convin
ce yourself that it is or isn’t the same man. He watches you calmly, a pleasant expression on his face, as if he is waiting for you to resolve this train of thought before he says anything.
The boyfriend store is incredibly sleek, all metal and glass and white light and pale wood. It is a long, narrow store full of long, narrow tables, rectangles of light supported by wooden frames. They look like tables from some futuristic movie. The boyfriends lay on the tables, deactivated, their faces frozen in grins, their eyes fixed on some point at or past the ceiling. When they are active, the boyfriends look just like real boyfriends, so convincing you basically can’t tell, but here, deactivated and stretched out on tables like in a morgue, they are disconcerting to look at, human but not quite human, not quite anything. You remember the name for this, uncanny valley, the way that they look like humans but are recognizably not humans.
Do you leave them deactivated like this all the time? you ask the older fat man, who has been watching you and smiling pleasantly for several minutes as you’ve wandered through the store.
When we get busy, I turn them all on, he says. Everything he says sounds very agreeable, like he was your uncle or father or grandfather speaking to you, as if he were enormously fond of you and you could tell that just from his voice. But on slow days like this, I let them rest, he says. Saves them some wear and tear.
I’m actually in the market for a new boyfriend, you say. You say this in a very conversational way, but what you really mean is, he should turn the boyfriends on because you are a paying customer. What you really mean is, the creepy morgue vibe of the boyfriend store is not making you want to purchase a boyfriend.