Diary of a Broken Android — Day 10
Saturday Burns
Today at six-thirty in the morning, Mother and Father rush down the stairs in agitation. They find me walking from the garage to the dining room. They say the neighbor went out to have breakfast in her garden and found two hooded men standing under the palm tree. The neighbor ran and locked herself in the house so the burglars wouldn't rob her.
Across the street, the kids who were drinking alcohol and listening to brainrap and neurocumbia saw the thieves jump over the gate of the neighbor's side passage. They chased them away at a run, brandishing beer bottles like weapons. One of the kids fell and hurt his knee. Then they ended the party and went to sleep.
Mother and Father know all this because they communicate with the neighbors, even with the one who spends his time perfecting his mechanical bird.
In the afternoon, while I walk through the house, we hear an explosion. Mother and Father get scared and we approach the window. We see that the car belonging to the kids, in whose speakers they play music at maximum volume, is on fire. A neighbor, the one who owns the lottery business, is in the street going crazy. She must be the one calling the firefighters. Mother comments that it's revenge from the chased-away thieves.
Father and Mother go out to the street to join the neighbors and I stay inside, behind the curtain.
The firefighters arrive and spray water toward the car. I see that on the truck there's a drawing of the Malvinas that says "They were, are, and will be Argentine!" I see that only one of the firefighters, the one approaching the car, is an android. He's filming up close and at the same time taking notes on a tablet. I think I could be doing that job and it would be something dignified. Not like this endless walking through the house.
The flames are extinguished and the car, charred and crusty white, looks like a beached whale. The android takes down the information from the kids, who grab their heads.
The whole thing is amusing because in the past it was thought that in our era, hypervigilance would end robberies and violent acts. But nothing could be further from the truth.
When I saw the flames I thought about purification. About the phoenix that rises from its ashes again and again. A resilient bird. Instead, I can't cope with my life anymore. I learned that phrase at the Dawson hotel where a young musician, Morton's patient, told me before getting out of the elevator that he had just been discharged from a mental health clinic and that he had admitted himself because he couldn't cope with his life anymore.
I regret that there doesn't exist a clinic for the mental health of androids like me. I think it would make Father and Mother suffer less. But they would never leave me there. Although I see them getting more tired of me all the time.
Episodes like today's, the explosion, the fire and the firefighters, make me momentarily forget my misery.
Since it's Saturday I suffer twice as much. Saturdays we used to go with Ara to eat at her house. I felt good with her family as I already wrote in this diary. And I miss them and miss my old life so much that I feel my brain burning as if it were going to explode like the car this afternoon. That would be a good ending for me. For my brain to explode and Mother and Father to watch the flames until nothing remained except my asymmetric body.
I remember that I once thought that character could be judged by asymmetry. If I noticed that a person had the right side of their face larger than the left, I distrusted them. Instead, if the left side was broader, I trusted them. It was crazy what I thought. Another sign of the progressive deterioration of my neural network.
Because sometimes it seems to me that's what I have, that for that reason I attacked the rude guest at the hotel and broke Ara's neck, unintentionally; I think I had progressive brain deterioration. Maybe it wasn't a sudden failure of my neural network, but that.
I see that all the time I feel the need (as Morton tells me) to explain to myself the reason for the incident at the Dawson hotel. And that I'll never find the reason because only the facts exist, but we don't know why it happened. What went through my head, as they say.
When what happened with the burned car is over, and the street is empty, I ask Father's permission and go out to buy a carton of cigarettes. After all, he has few packs left. I go to the corner, cross the street, pass the bus factory, the car wash, the veterinary clinic, and other businesses I don't look at, and reach the avenue.
I see that ahead of me walks a short girl with straight black hair. It terrifies and gladdens me at the same time that it could be Ara, although she lives in another neighborhood. I see that she stops at a corner and turns around to cross the street. It's not Ara. It's a human who looks like her, with an android's way of walking.
I approach her and ask if she can hug me, I tell her it would be something important for me because I was the boyfriend of a girl who looked like her whom I loved very much. The girl looks at me, realizes I'm an android and gives me a strong, quick hug. I hug her too. I thank her and continue walking to the kiosk, where I buy the carton of cigarettes.
On the way back I see, in the hair salon, sitting and being attended to, another girl who looks like Ara. I stop the impulse to go in and ask her for a hug. Hugs are contagious and work to take away some of the sorrow.
That's why there exist in the city center groups of professional huggers who walk the streets to give a hug to whoever needs it. Although those in need are usually not androids.
In the city center, people live alone in their apartments and don't even speak to their neighbors. Every so often they find corpses from many years ago, people who died alone in their houses and no one ever found out they were missing.
Because of the isolation, people are needed who, while humans aren't yet corpses, hug them. The huggers are usually very plump people. Nothing better than the hug of a fat man or woman, they say. In my neighborhood there are no huggers because the neighbors have enough contact among themselves.
I return home calmer with the carton of cigarettes in a bag. But soon the calm passes and I start walking faster. Mother and Father follow me with their heads like I watch the fish swim from one side to the other in the Armendia's fish tank.
I feel withdrawal from a new hug from a girl who looks like Ara. For it to work better, I tell myself, it should be a descendant of a Syrian-Lebanese family who on Saturdays prepares triangular empanadas. That would be perfect. I would explain to her how important that symbolic act was for me and she would hug me and I would hug her. And I would tell her how much I miss the Syrian-Lebanese people.
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Diary of a Broken Android: CHAPTER INDEX
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