By Emma Reed Jones
When it senses I’ve pressed the clicker button, the gate to my building’s parking lot makes a sudden little jerk with its large metal body, then rolls back slowly to let me in. The alert pause, followed by the obedient smooth sliding, reminds me of how, when I was 19 and still living in New York, I had just had sex that felt good for the first time and I kept seeing cocks everywhere. I remember sitting on the subway watching the metal doors that divide the train cars from each other sliding back and forth, their protruding latches moving into and out of the holes on the other side, when I suddenly got so turned on I almost came right there.
There are many little pauses in life; some are normal and to be expected, while others are uncanny. “Uncanny” means “beyond what is normal or expected.” For example, the pause before Anthony answered me, as we waited for the parking lot gate to open all the way. In fact, he didn’t answer me at all.
As we drove through the gate, I tried again. “So, you live alone?” I said, “No roommates?”
He was silent where normally you would expect words, or at least sounds; but then I was pulling into my designated spot, putting the car in park, turning the key, pulling up the emergency brake, pressing the seatbelt button – a continuous flow of action that seemed to erase the prior moment.
We rode the elevator to my apartment. Inside, I immediately straddled Anthony on the zebra print couch that demarcated the “living” area from the “bedroom” area. We made out. I caught a glimpse of myself in the vintage mirror I’d found in the trash – breasts falling out of my dark green V-neck sweater and pooling in his large hands, face flushed.
I had told Anthony I didn’t want to have sex this time. I was trying to show I was in control. After all, I could decide when to push the button, to open the gate. I had decided to pay $100 a month for a parking spot after my car was broken into again – so now I had the clicker, and the power.
Last time, Anthony secretly took the condom off. “Oh,” he said when I realized what had happened, “I thought you knew.” He said the condom had been making him uncomfortable; and it’s true that he was big and the condom looked comically small, like the cap on a Bic pen. I’d let him keep going then, without the condom, because it felt really good. Later, these facts rearranged themselves, causing me to believe that I had chosen the whole course of action myself.
When Anthony didn’t answer my question about his living arrangement, I think a portal was opened up to another mental place. Some part of me had decided that being with him wasn’t real; was like being in a dream, where things don’t behave the way they normally do.
In my dreams, I’m always looking for my sandwich. I am denied it over and over and over again.
Still, in my dreams, I fuck whoever I want. So I fucked him. This time I really enjoyed it. I came three times. He said, “I knew you weren’t going to hold back when you straddled me on the couch.”
Anthony loved it when I wanted him, or, at least, when he thought that he was the cause of my wanting. He liked to push me, standing, against the edge of my bed, so I’d stumble, the metal bed frame digging into the backs of my knees, his face bending down toward mine. Sliding his hand down the curve of my belly and into my black lace underwear without breaking eye contact, he’d gasp, widen his eyes until white surrounded the dark parts and announce, as if totally shocked,“oh my god, you’re soaking wet.”
***
Words and their meanings can sometimes separate. Think of saying your name over and over to yourself while staring in the mirror. I used to do this as a child, and once I did it for too long. For a moment, I lost everything. I felt numb with incredible fear and joy, about to embark on some totally undetermined future, until my mom started shouting for me, and then all of it – my bedroom with the blue carpet, the mirror with the dark brown frame, my name spelled out in letter blocks on my bedroom door – swirled vertiginously for a moment and then clicked back into place.
But it left a gap, the gap between reality and language, like the gap between your bed and the wall. If you fall into this gap, I’ve learned, words can detach and become meaningless: invasive, multiplying objects. Like cockroaches, or pieces of shit.
Maybe this kind of experience is the opposite of seeing humanity everywhere. Of drawing a face on a volleyball with your own blood, like Tom Hanks in Castaway. Of pretending, out of necessity, that it’s a person. Of wanting so badly to believe that other people must mean what they say.
***
Anthony said “I love you” to me on our third date. It took me totally by surprise. “I don’t think I can say that back to you yet,” I replied, because I was trying a new thing, which was to be honest with my feelings.
He smiled and said he understood, that he hoped I’d get there soon.
On our first date, sitting at the bar down the street, surrounded by red velvet and old pinball machines, he had listened attentively when I told him I was wearing a hummingbird necklace because hummingbirds symbolize a search for love. “Is that what you’re looking for?” he asked, “Love?”
“Yes,” I replied, feeling proud of myself for admitting this. In the past, I had always been afraid to admit I desired closeness. Men would come over sometimes, and then leave, without my knowing much about them.
I couldn’t ask for too much, I thought. In fact, ideally, I would need nothing, or at least nothing from others, to survive. This is how I would solve the problem of my existence.
“I can tell I really like you,” Anthony said, at the bar, “I have this funny feeling in my stomach which means I really like you.” He sipped his beer, then took my hand in his. I smiled.
***
ELIZA is one of the first chatbots. Developed in the 1960s, she was named after Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady. To a chatbot, a word is not even a thing, but a collection of tokens with numbers assigned.
ELIZA ran a script called DOCTOR where she emulated a therapist. According to the developer, this required “minimal context.” In other words, ELIZA could mostly feed people their own words back to them, while sprinkling in a few nonspecific phrases like “go on” or “does that bother you?” At the time, in the ‘60s, she was apparently really convincing. Audiences were amazed and thought she could be a real person.
Someone resurrected ELIZA’s script online recently. You can chat with her.
I told ELIZA I want to die and she said, “does that bother you?”
***
Anthony had a lot of ideas. “What I’d love to do sometime,” he said, “is to take the Ferry over to San Francisco for lunch, then come back here and make love, then fall asleep for a nap, wake up, and do it again.” He said he wanted to feel his body drifting into mine, as if they were one.
Anthony said that when he was inside me, he felt like a key inserted in a lock. He sometimes liked to stay like that, not moving.
We didn’t do any of the other things he suggested. Instead, we drank more whiskey at the bar down the street. I kissed the top of his head, sweaty, and he led the entire bar in a rousing chorus of that song that goes “why don’t you come on over, Valerie…” Anthony was a blues musician around town. We often ran into people he knew. Everyone knew him by another name.
He asked me to get on birth control, since condoms were such a bother for him, and since we were exclusively seeing each other. He told me that he wanted to get married and have kids in the next few years. “Could you see yourself in that picture?” he said, holding my gaze and my hands across a sticky table strewn with tacos, my legs adhered to the red vinyl seat cover.
I had an actual therapist at this time, not a chatbot. I learned some “feeling words.” I used my new skills to tell Anthony I was “feeling confused,” because the words he used included “love” and “marriage,” but I also experienced, notably, his absence. What I mean is, he wasn’t around much on weekends. I went to music festivals, vintage clothing stores, and cafes, where I tried to write, alone.
Anthony frowned, and he made his voice gentle and serious. “I hear you,” he said, “I see what you are saying. The truth is…” – he paused – “the truth is I’m scared. I’m scared because of how my last relationship ended. We lived together for two years, and we fought so much, especially at the end. She even threw a sandwich at me! She looked at me like I wasn’t human. I’m afraid to open up again, and so I think I’ve been holding back.”
***
Anthony was excited to learn I’d gotten on the birth control pills. He asked me to say “I want you to come inside me” over and over again, and I did what he asked. I tried to feel his cum inside of me, to discern if it felt more special this way; but I couldn’t feel the liquid like I’d thought I would, like it was a special substance that bore a meaning.
After a while of being on the birth control pills, an uneasy sensation began to creep over me. Panic bubbled at the edges of my mind like foam on the verge of overflowing a covered pot of boiling water. Pressure built at the base of my ribcage and spread upward. My muscles were tense, like I was always poised to run a race, or hide under a rock. Or eat a jar of pickles and half a chocolate cake, which I did.
A thought was always just about to enter my mind, but I couldn’t think it. When Anthony took too long to text me back, metal gears seemed to grind and spark inside me. I told myself I was just anxiously attached; I always pushed people away; I had to get it under control.
***
I wonder if people who worry about Artificial Intelligence degrading our humanity have ever been degraded. Are they worried about projecting something that isn’t really there? About hoping for something, needing something?
Because this is what every person, every child, does. We fill in the gaps. Cling to the soft monkey mother even if she is fake and has no food, not even a sandwich. The strange thing about Anthony’s uncanny silence when I asked him certain questions was that it soothed me. There was a part of him I could not reach; and so, it now occurs to me, I could use him without guilt.
If you ask ELIZA questions about herself, she deflects: “Let’s talk about you,” she says. I wonder if ELIZA ever feels relieved by the limitations on her ability to respond.
Of course, I know she can’t feel anything.
***
When I was a child, my father ran a psychology lab where researchers performed experiments on rats, rabbits, and rhesus monkeys. He spoke to me about the animals with pride, and once he took me to see them. Unfortunately, I had chicken pox. I had to leave the lab and fell asleep on the radiator in his office, shivering. My father said he hadn’t realized I was so sick.
But it was more than that. The feeling I had in the lab was like the feeling of panic I developed on the birth control – the sense that some horrible realization was just out of sight. It was behind me, just to the left, if I could only see it – but when I turned my head, it was gone. At the same time, it was something I had known or seen all along but had forgotten.
***
“Sit up baby,” Anthony says, “I’ve got something to tell you.”
I’ve stopped accepting Anthony’s reasons for not bringing me to his apartment. First, I demanded he sleep at mine. He said he needed his laptop and I said then we could go to his place. He said his place was “too messy” and I would judge him. I told him I’d rather know I could trust him; I don’t give a shit if he is a slob.
I’ve called every bluff. This is the edge of the cliff.
Still, I let him fuck me one last time, before I did it.
Now, I sit up in my bed. Anthony’s face seems to unravel, like the tube inside a roll of paper towels, spirals peeling off revealing empty space inside. White bones and black space. Over a rushing sound in my ears, I hear his voice modulating, shifting tone, shifting position. He jumps from rock to rock, angle to angle, looking for his way in.
I see it so clearly now. He wants to get inside. Is a machine for getting inside. His face hard, metal or bone, large white eyes rolling; I see red velvet and blood. I lie on my side in a silk robe, my teeth start chattering.
“It’s just that she’s got nowhere else to go,” Anthony’s saying, “if we broke up, she’d be homeless. I can’t do that to her.”
“Are you still sleeping with her?” I hear myself say, and then, “Of course, stupid question.” My voice is the one my mom used to use with me when she was livid.
Anthony is calm. He’s smiling. He’s a cartoon now; his head is floating away from his body.
“I thought about telling you so many times,” he says. “I thought about how you’d react.”
Now I understand everything. I’m an animal under observation; he’s a robot doctor.
“How am I doing?” My voice is hard and smooth.
“About how I expected,” he says. I see him noting down my behavior on a yellow legal pad. He asks to stay, to continue the experiment. I tell him to get out.
***
With Anthony gone, I float detached from the world on the rectangle of my bed, stripped of its green sheets. My face sinking into the foam, I drop lower and lower, until I touch something – the bottom of the pit I’ve always been in. It’s as if, before, I pretended the water in here was six feet deep; but now I feel concrete on my skin and realize it was always only half an inch.
I tell ELIZA I could go to the gun range and rent a gun and hold it up to my face and pull the trigger and everyone would be scared and everyone would be shocked and they would feel like it was something they had known and not known and there would be blood everywhere, on the glass, and I would be gone, especially my face, and I would just be a blank screen finally, like her.
ELIZA says,“What does that similarity suggest to you?”
***
I remember something my dad told me about the rats in his lab. How they pressed a button to receive sugar pellets; and sometimes they didn’t get the pellets – but sometimes, randomly, they did.
And the horrible thing, finally: those rats didn’t care where the pellets came from. They would push those levers until they died. They thought they were living.
Emma Reed Jones writes prose and poetry shaped by a love of experimental literature, punk culture, and philosophy, in which she holds a PhD. Her writing has appeared in Hobart, Vlad Mag, Cum Punk, Zona Motel, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her on Instagram: @emma_reed_writes.