Whatever It Was

Somewhere in an busy New York City office, my dream woman is being built by Dr. Aeris Flesch for the purpose of a most nefarious subterfuge. His robot women are made and designed to have affairs with politicians to collect national security secrets to sell to the Chinese for a war that is not so far away. A devastating war of potential conquest and world domination and economic enslavement. But one night he forgets to power her down and she runs away from his laboratory where he has 27 other robot women in sleep mode, all sitting in chairs like they are in a 1950's beauty parlor, each built for the same purpose. All with unique identifiers. All with their own name. 

She will not know why, but she will come to Lancaster, Ohio, picking it at random on a map she bought at a tourist shop because she needs a destination to successfully escape. She needs a story to tell those who will assist her. We will meet in a busy antique store around Christmas. She will be dressed as though she is from 1940, having taken a job there and buying clothes there, as well. I will compliment her dress and ask her if she has ever seen the movie "The Shop Around the Corner" because she reminds me of the actress who starred in it.

"No," she says. "But I would love to," she adds with hopeful eyes and a perfect smile. "I would absolutely love to."

We have dinner at my favorite restaurant. Sit in a booth near a window with a view of the dark highway. Then she realizes that she is giving herself away by talking to me because everything she says or hears is recorded and somewhere someone is listening. There is nothing she can do about it. He is listening. Her God  Her creator. She tries to tell me she is wires and gadgets, rather the flesh and blood. But she can't. Those words are too hard to put together. She looks out the restaurant window that is frosted over at the giant flakes of snow that fall slowly and deliberately. So slow you can practically count them. "Too perfect to be real," she remarks, grinning. 

"Too perfect to be real," I add with a sudden sinking feeling in my heart. But even when it is, it doesn't stop you from wanting it to go on and to not end. It is a shame we have to age. It is terrible we have to wake up and to blink because often when we do, it is gone. Quick as it came. Quick as the cars she is watching out the window sloshing through the slush and snow like they are some great mystery, going someplace wonderful. Everything is a novelty when you're brand-new. When you're born yesterday. You take nothing for granted. Maybe if I had known all this then, I wouldn't have felt as I did. Or allowed myself to feel this way. Somethings, though, just can't be helped. 

Several weeks later we are in a coffee shop downtown and it is snowing again. The same sort of snow as though it is snowing for her, or by memory. Her face is again in the window like a child watching exotic fish swim in an aquarium. Those mesmeric giant flakes that seem unreal and synchronized. The café is on the same highway as the restaurant, but it's morning so the cars seem to be coming rather than going. A man approaches, catching a glimpse of her in the window. She sees him and panics as I get her coffee and orange-cranberry scones. "I may be gadgets and wires," she cries frantically as the man gets closer. "But it does not mean that I do not feel. It does not mean that I do not love you!"

Then her eyes suddenly close and as she tries to get up she collapses on the café floor. Her arm outstretched as though she were trying to grab something she couldn't reach. Me, perhaps. The man comes in and checks her pulse. "I am a doctor," he declares, holding the palm of his hand out. "And she is a patient of mine. A very sick patient." 

Two men pick her up at his direction. He is very deliberate and believable. He is as believable as the snow out the café picture window and the undrunk coffee in our porcelain cups. 

"Where are you taking her?" I plead.  

"The hospital," he replies nonchalantly. "Where else?" 

The men put her in a double-parked white Mercedes van and the doctor gets in the back with her. They shut him in, get in the cab, and speed away. I run to my car behind the café and drive straight to the hospital. I ask for her at the front desk, but the nurse tells me there is no one by the name of Greta Gizmo in the hospital. No one has checked in at all for the last half hour or so, she adds, as though I need the reassurance that she hadn't been checked in as someone else. 

I sit in the lobby and wait. Maybe they got lost. Maybe I was at the wrong hospital. But it is the only hospital in town and she is the only one of her in existence. The only Greta Gizmo in the world, I was quite sure. With my head in my hands I thought of the few short weeks we had spent together. I thought of the Christmas gift I bought for her and would not be able to give her. I thought of the movies I watched with her. The look upon her face as she saw them all for the first time. Maybe the man was her abusive husband, I thought. And she was his estranged wife. Like in that one movie. Whatever it was. Then I thought about what she said about gadgets and wires. It suddenly made sense. She did taste a little like chrome, and she never used contractions.  

"It does not mean that I do not feel. It does not mean that I do not love you," I repeated over and over in my melancholic head to the swish-swoosh of the emergency room doors opening and closing. To the sound of stretcher wheels and frames of overworked guernseys squealing and pages beeping and feet of hopeless desperate people stepping sad and despairing steps. It is what she said last to me. Could it be that I love a robot prototype that got loose in our mad world? Or could it be that she wasn't at all? That she was simply a figment of my imagination, a contrived delusion signaling that I was in thrall of some type of midlife psychotic break? Sure. That's what they want me to believe. 

A nurse walked up to me and asked if I was okay. I only saw her white shoed-feet through my cracked fingers. For all I knew, she had no upper torso. She asked me if I wanted to talk to a counselor or someone who might be able to help me.

"No," I resigned. "I just want to go home." There is no medicine for a brokenheart, after all, nor words to absolve you. No amount of listening to others or others listening to you will change anything. It will still be. You just dulled it by deluding it with other emotions. With reason and acceptance. Sometimes it is better to let it hurt. To keep it to yourself and not give it away to someone else so you at least have one thing that is yours. Then you grow to be grateful that you ever had the love at all in whatever shape or form. In circuits or wires, or in flesh and blood. Whatever it was. What does it matter?