Diary of a Broken Android — Day 7: 52 Blue
In a haunted house, a broken android finds a kindred spirit in a lonely whale.
Dear Reader
In this chapter, our broken android paces obsessively through his parents' house, haunted by ghosts and a solitary whale that mirrors his own loneliness. As he grapples with the traumatic memories of his past with Ara, he questions the very nature of his dysfunction and his inability to communicate his deepest pain.
Diary of a Broken Android — Day 7: 52 Blue
At night, when I walk through the house, I see ghosts. They are people from another era, though I can't define which one—it must not be too far from our own. I approach them, and they always show me the back of their necks. It looks as if their necks have been twisted. As if a snake had coiled beneath their flesh.
The one sitting in the dining room chair, for example. He has white hair, with scabs as if he had a skin disease or as if he hadn't washed his head in a very long time, and he rests one hand on a cane. His brown sweater is moth-eaten, with holes and patches.
And there's the older woman who, wearing a faded light blue robe and slippers, stands near the front door, always with her back to me. The most terrible of all is the girl.
When I approach my charging chair, which, except during lunch and dinner, is stored in the room where Mother used to give piano lessons, the girl is sitting there. In my chair. She's petite, with long black hair. She doesn't face me, and her head is turned at an impossible angle. I tell myself it's Ara. And when I try to circle around her to see her face, it's as if her features had blurred. She doesn't have the prominent cheekbones, the large mole, the tiny mouth of Ara. It's a blank face. I don't know how to act—I don't want to touch her head, don't want to risk hurting her—and suddenly, she disappears. When I return to the dining room, the old man is no longer there. And in the living room, neither is the woman in the robe.
Then I see lights, as if a star were being born in the living room of the house, from the pot of the artificial plant toward my eyes. Soon it becomes a seven-pointed star. I also see a green ray that emerges from the frosted glass of the door's narrow window and ends up blinding me (at first I think it's a police patrol or an ambulance passing by on the street, but neither has green lights).
Back in the dining room, the screen turns on by itself and I see water. At first it's deep blue and then almost black, and there I see a giant whale crossing the frame slowly. Its skin, in the almost phosphorescent image, is whitish. The image of such a large animal makes me feel something similar to what humans call horror. I hear a low hum and realize it's 52 Blue. The solitary whale that for a long time tried to communicate with other whales at a unique frequency (52 hertz). According to scientists, it was a frequency that only she emitted and that no other whale could pick up. Her song hasn't been recorded in years. I wonder why I see her image. If it's the impossibility of communicating, just like that animal's. It lasts a moment and then the giant screen (which, before the incident, I knew how to control completely) turns off by itself.
Father allows me to leave the table lamps on while I walk because on moonless nights I can't see my path and I might break some Chinese vase or some piece of furniture. When the cetacean disappears, the lights of the table lamps remain, and there remains a sense of absence like when I think I'll never see Ara again.
And I keep walking and everything returns to normal or abnormal as the walking of an android from one side to the other, night and day, in his parents' house can be. And while I keep walking, I no longer see anything strange. But I can't get the image of Ara giving me the cold shoulder out of my mind (because that's how humans describe her cold rejection in such situations) and the image of the whale sunk in the depths of the ocean and singing as only she knows how to sing to find a mate that perhaps doesn't exist. Or a mate that cannot hear her.
I wonder why they didn't invent us with some frequency so we could communicate our pain. If Ara knew that I was left dysfunctional because of her, wouldn't she take pity and unblock me on the messenger and ask me something, anything, even the smallest thing about my state?
Though it's most likely that Ara knows how I was left and that, even so, she doesn't want to talk to me anymore or see me. That maybe, after all, she never loved me. And I think the same thing could have happened to 52 Blue; perhaps her frequency was heard, but it wasn't unique enough to attract a mate. Perhaps no one wanted her. And she tried to be loved at all possible frequencies. I think it's like me writing this; I try, in any way I can, to summon something impossible. Something that doesn't exist or never did.
You have an inventive mind.