American Gothic

A story by Keith Croes

He hadn't expected a hardware store, exactly, but what he got was bureaucracy--the hollow, practiced manner of the receptionist, the colorless walls and functional furnishings of the waiting area, the feeling the room gave that here was a place that would waste a lot of time. He imagined himself aging, graying and dying and mummifying, his bones collapsing finally like pick-up sticks on the green vinyl chair. A puff of calcium dust lingering on the tepid, motionless air.

He allowed himself a smile and immediately regretted it, the pain leaping up his chest like a jealous beast that he should feel anything but the longing and the loneliness. It angered him, but the anger was nothing against its hard-edged fangs. He was pinned.

"Mr. O'Neil?"

The sigh of relief in the quiet room sounded to him an instant after it left his lungs as though it had carried the fury of a thunderhead. "Yes?" His glance tripped over the empty chairs.

"Mr. Reynolds will see you now." He stood, gathered himself in and approached the receptionist, following her extended arm to the left and entering a hallway. Doors diminished down both sides for a distance. "Last door on the right."

A balding man with a long face, oddly familiar, rose behind the desk and offered a dry handshake full of ligaments. He wore glasses and was tall and lean. "I'm Lawrence Reynolds. Welcome to the Family Augmentation Rental Agency. Please." He gestured to a chair. "You're...?"

"Kevin O'Neil." He sat.

The man sat at the same time, saying, "Of course," and the dark, flat face of the computer monitor tilted noiselessly up at him out of the desktop. "You've filled out our personal data form?" His fingers tapped on the screen. "Ah, yes. Well, Mr. O'Neil, this interview will be recorded." His attention still on the computer display, he stuck his thumb over his shoulder. "The camera is behind me. Is that okay with you?" His glance caught Kevin's steady eyes.

Kevin nodded, realizing that he had never met the man with the familiar face across from him, but that the lugubrious visage had been captured forever in the painting "American Gothic."

"Good. Please, tell me why you're applying for a wife."

"I lost my wife in an accident six months ago," Kevin began immediately. "We had just moved out here from Philadelphia. My wife is...was...an engineer. She got a position with Rand."

"You live in San Diego?"

"Mission Hills, yes."

"Go on."

"It was a better job than mine, so we decided to take it. We had been out here two weeks when...well, it was an auto accident. Some kid forced her off the road."

"That's tragic, Mr. O'Neil. I'm truly sorry."

"Yeah. Anyway, I've done all right. And there was insurance money. So I can afford this."

The man nodded at the monitor. "Yes, I can see that. You're an administrator for Apco?" The tone was a query.

"Wholesale produce."

"Mm-hmm. No problem here at all. But, uh, why, Mr. O'Neil? Why do you want a replacement?"

He expected the question but couldn't avoid the feeling that he'd just been asked to slice open his belly and spread his guts across the desk. "I miss her," he managed. "I...just can't live." His eyes blinked rapidly. He cleared his throat. "I mean, you've heard this all before."

The man nodded and leaned back in his chair. "Let me tell you a few things about biorobotics. Your wife will be programmed for compatibility based on a battery of tests you'll be taking this afternoon, but the result will be no more perfect, no more guaranteed than your compatibility with another human. Any evidence of abuse, of course, and the unit will be recalled immediately. The way court decisions are stacking up, you may be subject to criminal charges and penalties similar to those doled out for equivalent offenses against humans. We would certainly pursue you in the civil courts to recover damages. Is that clear?"

Kevin nodded.

"You will be entitled to make one exchange within the first six months and you may return the unit at any time for any reason, no questions asked. Federal regulations stipulate that you may replace any specific member of your immediate family only once and for a maximum of two years. We don't necessarily agree with that--after all, a lost loved one can create a permanent gap in your life--but that's what the government wants. For that reason, the units have automatic shut-off at two years."

There was more, but Kevin suddenly found it difficult to concentrate. The man's words came trippingly in glib, hypnotic rote, becoming a chant as dry as bone dust with a meaning that must have landed somewhere, though Kevin was little motivated to figure out just where. His entire focus was consumed by a growing horror so palpable he could virtually see it metastasize, a roiling, angry tumor of surpassing dread: This is impossible. I should not be here. How could I even consider replacing Barbara? Or believe for a moment that she could be replaced?

But something carried him on--through the interview and through the hours of testing--and he left knowing that he'd just completed the most nearly heroic endeavor of his life.

And, sadly, he knew what that something was that kept surfacing, masquerading as blind determination, staving off the repeated urge to run from the office and the building and never look back.

He also knew what it wasn't: his love for a dead woman. The love he had for Barbara was exclusively hers, nontransferable, and it belonged to her now and forever. What it was sprung from the gap--"A lost loved one can create a permanent gap in your life," the American Gothic man had volunteered so readily--and the gap was a vacuum that threatened to suck him in and force the blood out his ears. So there was no love when she showed up a few weeks later just as the man said she would--unannounced, with a name and a history and the key to his front door. Finding her browsing through the house when he returned from work that first day, he was only annoyed.

"Hi," she said, appearing poised in midstride on the braided rug in the living room. "I'm Diane." When he said nothing, standing in the shadowy foyer in his shirt sleeves and tie with his briefcase stretching his right arm, she ventured: "Kevin?"

He got off an affirmative grunt and set the briefcase next to a small table.

She clasped her hands together. "That's about all I know about you, I'm afraid." The hands separated, the palms rubbing the front of her jeans near the pockets, apparently drying themselves. She wore a white blouse. Her hair was black.

He entered the sun-dashed living room and stood with his hands on his hips, staring. She was attractive, but he saw her full of unfathomable machinery that he had no desire to fathom. None. It was a mistake. She retreated several steps toward the couch and sat with her arms locked straight and her hands between her knees, looking up at him.

In a fog of aching unreality, he walked back to the bedroom.

For days he said nothing to her, just watched her, was aware of her presence whenever he was home, her traces around the house. She was sleeping in the second bedroom, the one he and Barbara wanted their first child to occupy, and she was using the main bathroom off the hallway, the one he seldom used. One night after working late, he stopped in the triangle of nightlight on the floor of the hallway and peeked in through the open wedge of the door. Her cosmetics were arranged neatly on the glass shelves and marble vanity, and he took in the odd-shaped containers, the reflecting pastel colors and the smell of perfume.

They are exteriorly indistinguishable from humans, the words of the American Gothic man came back to him. She will be a woman.

Most evenings she made and received several phone calls and her voice had become familiar by now--her "I'll get it" when the phone chirped, her low, melodious conversations and, sometimes, her laughter like wind chimes. He had a hard time reading the paper. Adding to his distraction was the strengthening impression that she considered him something of a nerd.

She had his credit cards, he knew, and access to all his accounts. She was apparently working on a wardrobe: he noticed boxes and bags from the finer department stores in San Diego, first leaning here or there against the furniture or walls or resting like well-behaved pets on a couch or chair, then snatched off to the little bedroom down the hall. But never before a warm smile aimed in his direction.

She had just finished her third phone call of the evening, had entered the living room and was searching for a grip on a Niemann Marcus bag with a blueberry muffin stuck in her mouth when he lowered the paper with a loud crinkling. "I hope you're keeping track of all this," he said. He took in her wide-eyed astonishment. "The accounts. Are you keeping track of how much you're spending?"

"Sure." A spume of crumbs leaped from her mouth. The hand released the bag and headed for her face. "Oh!" More crumbs shot out between her fingers. She chewed and swallowed furiously, holding her open palm toward him, took a final, determined swallow and said, "He speaks."

He grunted.

Sliding her tongue around in front of her teeth to retrieve any errant pastry, she walked over and sat as far from him on the couch as she could. He had raised the paper, cutting her off from view.

"I need clothes. I start work Monday," she said quietly.

He lowered the paper again and gave a long exhale through his nose. "What do you do?"

"I'm an attorney."

Her tongue was still pestering a hunk of muffin near the upper right canine. Kevin watched it work, the mouth open slightly, unselfconsciously. Noticing his stare, she looked away, turning her head so that he realized her profile, the parted lips protecting the persistent tongue, and in the light of his reading lamp, the spreading, subtle blush of her cheek. Little burbles of laughter shook her shoulders.

She had been there a week and he had decided earlier that day to return her to the agency. But he suddenly discovered that the frenzied animal inside his chest had disappeared, gone a-fishing, vacated the premises. The act of looking for it--mustering himself into the empty cage to confirm its departure--felt to him like the first movement of a soldier who had played dead throughout a long, terrible, bloody battle.

He smiled behind the newspaper.

Not that he loved her. It was enough that she filled the gap. And she hadn't lied about keeping track of her expenses. The next week she bought a car and she explained in detail over dinner how her salary would cover it and then some. She had the figures memorized: his income, her income and investment income versus household expenses.

The logic that computations should have been her strong point never occurred to him.

In her way she was more playful than Barbara, an admission he made grudgingly to himself over the two weeks it took her to talk him into joining her for a swim. Wearing any of several bikinis, she'd buttonhole him in the living room or the kitchen or near the sliding glass doors off the dining room and she'd stand close--on tiptoes--look up at him and say the same thing: "How about a dip?"

The tangy smell of sunscreen, a woman whose total response to rejection was a shrug, a cocked head, a brief pout of disappointment and nothing else. No sarcasm, no hard feelings, it's your loss, buster.

Each time he found it more difficult to decline.

Finally, his eyes skipping around a tiny white bikini and a huge breath swelling his chest, he gave in, exhaled, said "Be right back." It was the hottest part of a sunny Saturday, he told himself, stumbling into his swimsuit in the dim bedroom. He'd be swimming anyway.

But he knew it wasn't so.

They swam and then sank back into lounge chairs pulled close together and suddenly she was up and leaving him. He watched over his shoulder, craning: rivulets sparkling down the backs of her long legs, coursing through the creases behind her knees, over the working muscles of her calves. Diminutive footprints brown as mud across the concrete, a hefty tug on the sliding glass door. She disappeared inside and returned quickly with two beers tucked into insulating plastic foam shells, handed one to him and regained the lounge chair in one long, smooth motion.

"Say my name." She sucked at the pop-top hole in the beer can, her upper lip reaching as though it were a little appendage, her eyes fixed on something across the bouncing, reflecting water.

"What?"

"Say my name. I've never heard you say it."

He shifted in the chair.

"Diane."

He took a swig, his glance tracing the sunshiny fuzz from her navel down her flat belly to the narrow hem at the waist of her bikini bottoms. She'll be a woman, he heard from somewhere.

"Diane." The change in the tone of his voice made her look at him. "You can move your stuff into my bedroom. I mean, if you want."

She stood and reached out for his hand. "Help me," she said.

She worked for the city as a public defender. Some evenings after dinner they'd sit on the deck with the gorged sun ready to fall behind the Pacific and she'd talk as quietly as the enveloping twilight about the poor, about the vicious cycle of poverty, about guilt and innocence. In her mind's eye, Kevin knew, she was seeing the long hours in the catacombs of Temple University's law library, recalling the exhaustion, the scramble of facts and precedents that she would unscramble well enough to be graduated magna cum laude, and her determination to work with the needy lived within these memories as real as rock. He saw it in her face. And as Kevin fell in love, he began to wonder if the memories were any less valid for the fact that they never happened.

He let the six-month deadline slip by with hardly a thought--perhaps a bemused internal chuckle of sorts. He had no intention of trading her in for a new model. So it was her or nobody. The marriage license he had signed arrived in the mail the day after the deadline. It had been blank when he'd signed it; now her signature--in precise, generous script--was alongside his: Diane R. O'Neil.

The winter-shortened days meant less time in the pool and plenty of time in the bedroom, making up for lost time. But with the passing of the deadline and the coming of spring, a sense of urgency was born within him.

It was a new love he felt, a clear and different love, building up new synapses, evoking new reactions, changing him. And he would change the premise, because the premise was wrong. That the wonderful creature who shared his pillow was a stopgap between Barbara and someone else became a maddening obscenity. In less than two years the animal would return. And he was convinced that it would be stronger than ever, that this time it would finish him off.

Driven by his instinct to survive and his new love--to save them both--he began to study biorobotics. In the strange manner of American science, much of the information was easily accessible in the literature, and whatever was proprietary he hoped to be able to figure out.

He told Diane that he was involved in an important project at work that would occupy his evenings at least for a few months, and she was proud of him, glad that it might offer him an opportunity for advancement, as he had hinted, and secretly vowing to disturb him only to bring him an iced tea and a snack now and then.

Ensconced at his desk in the small den night after night, poring over the diagrams and the formulas, he was surprised at how much he understood. His masters degree had been in business administration, but he had taken his bachelors in physics, and the old, dry stuff could still trigger a flutter of intellectual excitement. Even then, he knew he didn't need to understand it all. Just the mechanism by which the power was shut off. Only that.

He brooked his wife's nightly interruptions gratefully, perhaps because they were brief--a tinkling, sweating glass of iced tea on a cork coaster, a warm blueberry muffin placed next to the computer, a peck on the cheek--and consistent, happening always about 9:30. But once a week or so he'd hear the music come up in the living room, the door to the den would fly open, and he would be dragged out for a half hour of dancing. Intermission. It was her time and she liked it both ways: loud and fast, and soft and slow. She liked music more than Barbara had. Rock and roll. Sometimes the damn furniture would rattle. And he was grateful for those interruptions, too.

It was usually after midnight when he joined her between the sheets, intentionally touching his bare thigh against hers or pressing briefly up against her cool behind. And she'd press back even when he was certain she was sleeping.

Above the descriptions of plastics technology, semipermeable membranes and cellular software, above the soft clicking of the computer keys as he accessed technical libraries throughout the country, was the droning voice of the man from American Gothic and his own rising anger at himself that he hadn't paid more attention. An anger like that of an inattentive student at finals. But like that student, he remembered more than he thought. The units are protected against tampering, the voice said, but it's probably redundant. They'll react like any human if you try to open them up. In their minds, they are human. It's the only way to make them satisfactory replacements. If they are told what they are, they will deactivate.

Pushing through the black hair with his nose while they were dancing, he once brought his lips near her ear and whispered: "How did you end up here?"

"Mmmm. Just lucky, I guess."

He stopped her and held her face in his hands. "I mean, how did we end up together?"

She looked back at him as if he'd asked why the sun set in the west. "It's just the way it is."

But that was how he had always felt about Barbara.

He would need anesthesia and surgical equipment. He would need to get on line with a computer more powerful than his own. And he would need to do it soon.

Nine months after Diane O'Neil walked into his life fully formed from nowhere, it was finished. They had been sitting on the deck drinking beer and watching the fat, sinking sun.

Lawrence Reynolds felt himself a lucky man. Mrs. O'Neil had called for an ambulance, the hospital had called the answering service and the answering service had called him. It could've happened a million different ways and he hesitated to think too long about any of them.

And so it was down to the hospital, saying the right things to the right people in the ER, approaching the widow with the proper degree of official consolation and then a sober: "Please, come with me." And within an hour he had them both back at the office, the limp, spent unit carried by the ambulance crew through the service entrance around back.

"Your husband was a biorobot," he told the dark-haired woman. "He was designed to last two years. But he'd been distributed out of the Philadelphia office and our client--his former wife, Barbara--failed to notify the company of her change of residence."

And he went on a bit longer. It was a wholly different speech than the one he usually gave, the one he could recite in his sleep, about how the augmentation period was over, the worst was over, and now it was time to get on with the rest of your life, it was a new beginning, etc., etc. For an off-the-cuff job under duress, he thought he did pretty well.

He clasped his hands on the desk, satisfied. She was pale, sobbing softly, but he watched her pull together enough courage to stand and extend a hand. "Thank you," she said, and he walked her out to the cab he'd arranged for earlier.

Then he returned inside and watched the disk of the interview with Kevin O'Neil. He watched it three times.

This shit was going to happen again. Inevitably.

He leaned back in his chair and fingered his glasses up to the origin of his long nose. It was no new beginning for her, he thought. In a little more than a year she'd be gone, too. Barring the unexpected, his job would be safe.

Barring a lawsuit, maybe. Wasn't she an attorney?

"Shit," he said to the empty room. "I'm going home to get some sleep." He walked out through the waiting room and thought of the moment at the doorway when he'd touched her back and felt something underneath her white blouse. Something like a bandage. Outside in the parking lot the sky glowed with the new day.

Sunrise caught him a few minutes later driving east, thinking for no good reason of his college days at the University of Southern California. And the light, nearly blinding, focused hotly on the small disk case on top of the dashboard. He'd toss it into the reservoir he passed on his way home, he thought. No one would ever miss it.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com