Diary of a Broken Android — Day 9

Lady Godiva and the Robot Bird

Mother and Father never hold hands, never hug, never bring their mouths together to kiss. I've never seen them do it in my entire existence. When I tried kissing with Ara, I felt like I was opening my eyes for the first time again. It must be like what newborns feel when they receive the first, artificial light of the world. And when we intertwined our tongues, Ara and I, it was like moving to another dimension. Scientists say there are twenty-six dimensions. And kissing like that was like passing through all of them at once. As if our circuits were being exchanged.

When I worked and was with Ara at the Dawson Hotel, I didn't have time to go to the chicken shop with Mother like I do now.

The chicken shop is around the corner from home. On the way, I see a circle drawn in chalk on the ground with the number 666 in the center of an inverted pentagram. A pentacle. I was going to step on it but Mother warns me not to. As a Baptist, she's terrified by these human occurrences (and even some android ones).

At Church, they believe the devil is what makes us sick. For example, I'm sick because the other one, the enemy, trapped me. They send missionaries to different parts of the world to fight the evil one, as they also call him. Now there are some in France where occultism and Satanism grow more each day.

Mother doesn't like the corner house either. The one covered by weeping willows. She knows that behind the stone façade, Maximus sees people—an android who reads tarot cards. She quickens her pace when passing by.

Near the neighborhood, there's also an Umbanda temple, improvised in a garage. At night they light red candles and go out to throw their offerings. A mixture of slaughtered chickens, popcorn, and fruits. When I returned early from the Dawson Hotel, I would see them. They wandered the streets like that other creation of darkness, as the Pastor would say. The voodoo zombies.

Mother buys chicken cutlets. When we return, there's a line of two people and an android at Maximus's door. Mother looks the other way. I do the same. But even though I don't believe in tarot, it occurs to me to escape one day to Maximus's house to have my cards read. I would ask him if I'll ever have contact with Ara again and if they'll ever let me return to the Dawson Hotel. If Mother and Father found out, they'd look more favorably on my dismantling requests. Though their love seems eternal.

Back home, while I walk inside without stopping, of course, I think about Freemasonry. The subject has always interested me, along with the Templars. I'd like to be a Mason like the android painter Albert Duo or the nation's president himself, they say. I know that the 32nd degree of Freemasonry corresponds to the Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret. I'd like to know what the secret is. They say it's what each person discovers for themselves. I don't know.

I imagine my confinement, my walking through this house without being able to stop, is like a Masonic initiation. A confinement in a kind of tomb from which one emerges as a member of a brotherhood. The problem is I can't leave. I can't stop. And my confinement has already gone on too long.

If I didn't leave the house occasionally, mostly with parents, I would be like the Howard Hughes from that Martin Scorsese movie that ends with Howard repeating: "The way of the future." I don't know what they meant in the movie by that. Maybe that in the future there would be more minds like his and they were right.

People are much more eccentric, obsessive, and crazy now than what you see in those old movies.

There's the neighbor who built himself a robot bird and makes it fly around the whole block (it’s a giant bird, with the size and appearance of a condor). He lives alone and spends his days improving his model. Or the woman who, like Lady Godiva, rides a robotic horse naked at night. She goes back and forth on the avenue with her long, curly red hair.

In general, much of humanity didn't take well to being replaced by androids, artificial intelligences, and robots. While what was expected (that the replacement would have been total) never happened, there are many unemployed people who are missing some screws. And people are very lonely. When a child is born, it's a whole event.

When I worked at the Dawson Hotel, it would never have occurred to me that I would experience loneliness as great as that of so many people. It would never have occurred to me either that I would lose Ara.

I think I didn't know how happy I was until, because of the incident, she disappeared from my life. Now I'm condemned to this wandering from which I seem to have no cure. And I gather strength to break a law. To leave here at night, go to the Dawson Hotel, look through the windows, and see Ara again.

I greet her with a nod of my head and she returns the greeting and approaches the window glass and places her hand and I place mine. I would believe in any god, in any entity, benevolent or malevolent, that would allow me to live that moment.

I would believe in angels, like those they say that every now and then an angel appears in the room of a dying child in the hospital dressed as a doctor to save him. The next day the child recovers his health and the parents want to know who that doctor was who appeared at night, but nobody knows him. He doesn't work at the hospital. He lives in the heavens. He's an angel.

If only one would appear to make my wishes come true, how grateful I would be to him! I would let him fill my inner emptiness forever. And I would return to being who I was before and I would sit for a good while in a chair with a big smile. Father and Mother would be moved to see me like that. And maybe I would see them hold hands or hug each other for the first time.

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What did you think about the android's memory of kissing Ara and his longing to see her again? Let me know your thoughts about this new chapter.

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