COMPLICATED AND ANNOYING LITTLE ROBOT
Um. It feels silly to admit this, but that little robot I bought was obnoxious. It was supposed to be fun. It’s a toy. A really, really advanced (and expensive) toy. But “fun” isn’t exactly the word that comes to mind when I think about the events that followed the purchase of that little robot.
First of all, he was way too commonsensical. And I don’t mean knowledgeable. The very first day, I was in the kitchen struggling with a jar of mayonnaise when from somewhere near the back of my knees I hear, in that monotone, condescending voice: “Why do you not break the vacuum seal with a knife around the rim.” I spun around to look at him. He looked right up at me with unwavering confidence. Those little square red eyes. I wanted one with blue eyes, but they were out. No one wants little square red eyes. Why did they even make them like that?
“What?” I asked it.
“Did you not hear or did you not understand,” he said. He continued to stare up.
I had heard, and I did understand. I reached into the drawer for a knife and slipped it under the rim and cracked the seal. The jar opened easily.
After a moment, I heard: “You are welcome.”
Second, when he wasn’t following me around the house being condescending, he was off fixing things. He tightened the screws on the banister so that it wouldn’t wobble anymore; he swept the foyer and vacuumed the bedroom; he reorganized the pots and pans in the cupboard. It was like my place wasn’t good enough for him. I didn’t ask him for any of that, and I had to thank him when he was clearly doing it for himself.
His anal-retentiveness came to a head while I was watching television and eating a sandwich. All of a sudden I felt it tapping my kneecap. I bent over, chewing, to see the little robot holding out a napkin.
“What the hell?” I said. “I thought you were reading!”
“I am finished. Here.”
“What, you think I’ll make a mess?”
“Will you not?” he asked without pitching his voice.
I was sure I’d get crumbs all over the place. “That’s not the point!” I hollered and stormed out of the room. In the doorway I turned around, sandwich in hand, to look at the little robot. He was still holding out the napkin but facing me. “You know who you remind me of?”
Then came the coup de grâce. That little robot lowered his little metal arm, dropped the napkin on the floor, and told me: “Make a mess. I do not care,” while zipping past me so fast I had to press myself against the jamb to avoid getting tripped.
This was followed by the little robot’s little martyrdom. He didn’t help out. He didn’t offer advice. He didn’t sweep or take out the garbage. He just knitted quietly all day long. When I asked him to help put groceries away, there was always a little pause before he placed down his needles and stitch holders. He helped, but he was mostly silent. Sometimes amid the shuffling of the paper bags I’d hear, “Do you want me to put the burger meat in the actual meat bin or do you want me to just throw it anywhere?”
“Throw it anywhere,” I’d tell him.
And I got it. I knew I had made him feel unappreciated. Trust me, his charade wasn’t subtle. So I did try, in my way, to make amends. It’s not like I wanted him to suffer. I just wanted him to chill out.
One night I knocked on his door, expecting to find him deep into a mock-cable stitch, and I didn’t hear a response. I knocked again and heard some scrambling, then “Come in.”
I entered cautiously and looked around the room. He stood in front of a towering corner of patterns, his metal hands behind his back.
“Looks like you’ve really done some work—” The rhythm of the sentence called for saying his name, but I hadn’t given him one. I saw his little metal arm quickly jab at one of his little square red eyes. And I swear I heard him sniffle. “You crying?” I asked him, incredibly curious. Could this wired metal contraption weep, or was he mimicking?
“What is it that you want?”
“I was wondering if you wanted to play some Monopoly with me tonight. We haven’t hung out in a while. So—”
He jabbed at his eye again. “That would be fun,” he told me. Or he asked it. I couldn’t really tell.
“Yeah. Fun,” I said.
He told me that he just needed a minute to finish up before joining me. I backed out of his space, careful not to break the treaty.
The little robot got Boardwalk and Park Place, but it wasn’t enough for my orange and red monopolies. The game was just the setting, though. I had become a little concerned about him. Although he was supposed to be different, and basically everything he did annoyed me, I couldn’t help but think that he would become fun if I gave him something he needed. I just didn’t know what it was.
So, I asked him: “You clearly haven’t been yourself lately.”
“Is that a question?” he stated.
“Yes. What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Bullshit.” I drove my pointer finger into the tabletop.
“I am here for you.”
“Look: I want to be happy. You want to be happy. We can’t be happy unless both of us are happy. So what’s wrong?”
The robot passed his thimble token absentmindedly back and forth between his little metal hands. “I feel like,” he began, but stopped. “Nothing.”
“No, tell me, please.” I leaned forward.
“Okay. I feel as though you do not want me here. I feel as though I am incapable of doing what you want.”
“What?” I exclaimed while scanning the room. “You are the best, man.”
He looked up at me when I called him man.
“Robot,” I corrected with a forgive-me gesture. “Seriously. You are great.” I knew I was lying when I said this. I knew I wanted to return him. When he was condescending, it was bad. When he was anal, it was worse. Now, having this soul-sucking, moping, needy little robot around was the worst. I just didn’t want him to feel bad about it, you know? It wasn’t his fault. I hardly read the product description. I didn’t do any research. Hell, I jumped in the day after hearing about him. It was me.
“Really,” he asked. I think he asked.
The following day I was on the phone with the manufacturer, asking about refunds, when it finally occurred to me to ask what they did with the returned little robots.
“What do you mean, ‘What do we do’?”
“I mean exactly that,” I told the guy on the phone.
“We crush ’em.”
“Like they do with cars?”
“Kind of. I mean, the robots are smaller. You know. You have one.”
“Right,” I said. “And you can’t just set them free?”
“What?”
“You, I mean I—I can’t just, you know, let him out the door?”
The guy on the phone told me I didn’t want to do that.
But I did do that.
I went to the ATM and withdrew five hundred bucks, got a child’s sized backpack, filled it up with yarn and some D. H. Lawrence books, and knocked on the little robot’s bedroom door.
He said, “Come on in.”
He was knitting and goddamn if I didn’t see a smile on the LED of his little damn mouth.
“This isn’t working.”
“How can I fix it?” he asked.
“No. It’s not something tangible. It’s not screws and mayonnaise jars and stuff. It’s not something you touch, but something you feel. And it’s real and true and broken. It’s unfixable. You have to go.”
The little robot stopped knitting. “You want me to go,” he stated.
I marched into the room, pulling the backpack with the yarn and books and cash in it from behind my back. “I got you really nice yarn. You remember when you said that you always wanted Icelandic wool? I got it for you. And I have some money to get you started. And. And. And I don’t know. I want you to take it and go make a life for yourself.”
I held out the offering for a moment while he examined it. He whirred forward and touched the backpack. He looked up at me. Then I dropped it on the floor and ran out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door, speed walking down the block.
I found a bar that afternoon and drank until the sun set and my brain came back to normal. He was just a robot, for crying out loud. It didn’t work out. At least I didn’t just return him like every other dissatisfied customer. I gave it a shot. He wasn’t for me. I wasn’t for him. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. And I was giving him a whole ’nother chance. Jesus! He was just a little robot.
When I returned home, I tried my best to enter slowly and quietly, but tumbled in drunkenly. After clanging through the doorway, I steadied myself and whispered, “Hello?” I waited to hear the whirring of his gears or the monotone of his robot voice or the clacking of knitting needles. There was silence. I shouted, “Little robot thing?” But there was nothing.
In his bedroom I found a printed note: “I made this for you. Maybe we will see each other again. Sorry I was not good enough.” It was resting on a kind-of nice scarf in the center of the otherwise empty space.
I picked up the scarf and wrapped it around my neck. It was sad. His farewell gesture was an article of clothing I had specifically told him I didn’t care for. We weren’t meant to be.
For weeks, I reveled in his absence. I loosened the screws in the banister. The pots and pans became a cluttered mess in the cabinet in no time. I swiped crumbs off my lap and onto the rug. I put beer bottles down on the coffee table next to coasters. I threw a jar of pickles into the trash, unable to open it. I tried balancing Monopoly’s thimble token on the tip of my finger.
I pictured that little robot wheeling around the streets with a knit cap on his metal head, mittens, and the child’s backpack. I pictured him huddled up in alcoves, reading the books I’d given him. I wondered how he was doing, where he’d wind up. Some afternoons, I wondered if it was him knocking on my door.
Months later, I ran into the little robot at the supermarket. He was zipping along with a tiny cart and a list in his little metal hand. I shouted before he rounded the corner to aisle four, “Oh my god, hey!”
He stopped suddenly and turned around. After a second, he whirred slowly my way.
“Hello,” he said or asked.
“Hi,” I said.
I kicked the floor. He looked down, then back up to me.
“You look the same,” I told him.
“You look good,” he said.
“So, you’re still here in the city?”
“Yes. I am living on Union now.”
“Oh. Nice,” I said.
“Yes. Really nice,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And it’s good?”
“Extremely,” he said.
I sensed it. I sensed that he wanted to hurt me. “You know that I spared you, right?”
“What?”
“Did you not hear or did you not understand?”
He was so smart. I knew he knew. He paused, then said, “Well. I suppose I should thank you.”
“No need.” My confidence came back.
“It was nice to see you again.”
“Yeah. Nice seeing you.” We turned to part ways. But I stiffened and spun back around. “Do you have a number? Maybe we could get together sometime. I don’t know … for Monopoly or something?”
He just stared at me with those little square red eyes for a minute. “No,” he said. “I do not think that is a good idea.”
“You’re probably right. Better to make a clean break.”
“Yes.”
And then we nodded awkwardly and waved.
I dropped my basket by the registers and began to walk out without anything I had come for. But I turned around. I ran down the aisles, scanning the space between linoleum and shoppers’ knees until I spotted him again, reaching up for a box of angel hair.
I shouted to him and he turned his head. “You aren’t even a real thing!” As soon as the words escaped my mouth I felt everyone’s eyes on me.
A moment passed.
“Okay,” said the little robot, then he turned back and extracted the pasta before whirring away.
Outside, the sun shone on a clear blue day. A seagull shrieked by the big green dumpster. I leaned on the chalky, rough brick wall of the supermarket for a moment, regaining my balance, letting my heartbeat slow down. Then, I took some deep breaths and began walking steadily to where I lived.