His Robot Girlfriend (16 page)

In less than a minute, she had unfastened
Mike’s pants, completely disrobed herself, and straddled his lap.
And though she did work valiantly to make him feel better, and if
he were truly honest about it he would have to admit that he did
feel better, he still had that bitch of a headache. It hadn’t
diminished at all. Mike didn’t tell Patience this. He just thanked
her with a kiss, sat down and ate the lentil soup and strange
little salad (with cous cous, bell peppers, dried fruit, and mint
leaves) that she had made for him. Then he had Patience stay home
and drove himself back to school. He arrived back just as his
fellow teachers did.

“
So, who was that,” asked
Miss Treewise.

“
That was my
girlfriend.”

“
Nice,” said Mr. Franklin.
“Did you tell her you were rich?”

“
She’s a Daffodil,” said
Miss Treewise.

“
Really? She didn’t look
like a robot. You didn’t have any of that trouble we heard about
over the summer?”

“
Nothing to speak of,”
replied Mike, making his way past them and into the
school.

Holding on to the side of his head, as if to
keep his brains from spilling out his ears, he unlocked his
classroom door, opened it, and then relocked it and sat down at his
desk. The rest of the afternoon was devoted, for most teachers, to
decorating their classrooms and getting their materials together.
Mike had been in the same classroom for ten years now and had very
few changes to make in any case, and he certainly didn’t feel like
hanging up posters.

He sat with his head in his hands for about
an hour. Nobody bothered him, but his headache didn’t improve.
Finally he got up and sorted through some of the worksheets he
would be using for the first unit he was teaching—Latin America. He
walked copies to the reprographics department to have them scanned
for the students’ texTees. After he had filled out the necessary
requisition forms, he looked up at the clock on the wall. It was
nearly a quarter past two. He was legally required to stay until
2:46 PM, but screw it. It wasn’t like they were going to fire him
two days before the start of school. He headed out the front door,
climbed into the car and drove home.

Patience wasn’t waiting at the door when he
came in. Of course he was earlier than expected. Climbing the
stairs, Mike made his way through his bedroom and into the
bathroom, where his opened the medicine cabinet and retrieved the
bottle of aspirin there. As he tossed five or six into his mouth
and started chewing, he glanced out the window into the back yard.
Patience was there, wearing her large hat, digging some kind of pit
or trench.

Mike sighed and walked back through the
bedroom, down the short hall and into his study. As he stepped
through the door, it suddenly hit him. For a moment he thought he
really was having a stroke. He was seeing things that weren’t
there. Where his desk sat was a baby crib and across the room,
where Patience had her own little desk, was a baby changing table.
The walls were covered with 8x10 and 11x14 pictures of a happy
little blond girl with chubby little pink cheeks and huge eyes.

“
Agnes,” Mike whispered,
feeling the blood drain from his skin. “Aggie.”

He stepped quickly across the hall to
Harriet’s room, but it wasn’t Harriet’s room anymore. It was the
guest bedroom. Mike moved through it in two steps and threw open
the closet, but it was completely empty. He went back to the study
and opened the closet door. The interior had been covered with
shelves, now filled with the things that Patience had been buying
and selling on eBay—Depression glass dishes, Hummel figurines,
Disney memorabilia. On the floor in the back of the closet were six
brown storage boxes. Mike pulled the first one out and opened it.
It was filled with brochures from family trips, old maps, movie
ticket stubs, and pressed flowers. He pushed it aside and opened
the second box. This box was full of framed pictures.

Lifting the topmost picture frame and
examining it, Mike looked into his own eyes. No, not his own eyes.
The eyes of a Mike Smith that existed fifteen years ago. This Mike
Smith was looking directly into the camera and smiling the type of
smile that said he had everything he ever wanted. To his right was
his wife Tiffany, with her happy grey eyes and that twisted smile
that was just a bit too playful to be called a smirk. His almost
grown daughter Harriet, with a her hair pulled back and thick
glasses hanging from chains like an old time librarian, held onto
his left arm, and his teenaged son Lucas, in his boy scout uniform,
stood to his far right. And in Mike’s arms was a perfect little
baby, with chubby cheeks and a smile like Christmas, and just a bit
of that soon-to-be awesome blond hair. Aggie.

“
Aggie. How could I forget
you?”

He saw it all again, only this time it was a
memory and not a dream. Tiffany was lying on the hospital bed, her
body broken and bloody. Her mangled arm and crushed hips were far
more alarming than the tiny bump on her head that had actually
killed her. And just beyond her, on another hospital bed, lay
little Aggie. She was several years older than she appeared in the
framed picture—a precious four year old that would grow no
older.

“
Traumatic amnesia,” said
Patience’s voice from the door. “The memory of her death was so
painful that you took down all the pictures of her and boxed them
away. Then your mind did the same thing to your
memories.”

“
I remember everything
now,” said Mike. And he did. He couldn’t stop the flood of memories
suddenly rushing around his insides.

“
We didn’t even really want
another kid. Harriet and Lucas were almost grown up. But… nobody in
the world knows this but me. Tiffany had this kink about getting
pregnant. She really got a thrill from the possibility. Her
favorite sex talk was about “getting knocked up”. Even when she was
young, before we met, she hadn’t used birth control. She was just
lucky she hadn’t gotten pregnant before. She never took pills, so
after we decided that two kids was enough, I used condoms. Then
after a couple of years, Tiffany started opening the boxes as soon
as we bought them, and she would poke holes in half of them. I
suppose it was only a matter of time, but it was almost ten
years…”

“
Before Agnes was born…”
offered Patience.

“
God, she was perfect. The
cutest baby. She didn’t even cry. She used to fall asleep in my
arms every night. As soon as she was able to sit up, I started
reading to her every day. Well. When Harriet was little, I was
finishing my masters, and then Lucas came along and I was working
two jobs. I suppose I was so happy to be able to spend time with
Aggie, that I gave her all the attention that I had wanted to give
the others. And then she was dead…. Um, the police said that
Tiffany was probably bending over to get something, God only knows
what, and she veered into the other lane. Aggie was in her little
seat. Tiffany always buckled her in. But… well, it was a head
on.”

Patience put her hand on Mike’s shoulder, but
he pulled away and stood up.

“
I want to put these
pictures back up,” he said.

“
I know where they all go,”
said Patience. Mike looked at her. “I saw pictures in the
scrapbooks that show them hanging.”

Mike nodded and walked out of the room. He
went downstairs and climbed into the car. Pulling out of the
driveway and steering his way to the end of the block, he wasn’t
conscious of his destination, but something down inside him knew
where to go. He turned into the cemetery and drove very slowly to
the southeast corner, parking a short way from Tiffany’s grave. He
got out, leaving the car door hanging open, and walked across the
newly mowed grass. He briefly brushed off Tiffany’s marker and then
moved on to that other grave. He dropped down to sit next to the
tiny little angel statue which wore a nightgown and held a flower
in her left hand, her right hand raising a handkerchief to her eye.
Agnes Winnie Smith. 2016-2021.

Mike lay back on the grass next to the little
grave. And he cried.

The first quarter of the school year flew by.
Despite the fact that classes were larger than ever, the children
were more obnoxious than ever, parents were more clueless than
ever, and the administrators were more useless than ever, Mike
thought that things were going pretty well. It was, he mused,
probably because he was one hell of a teacher. He felt more
organized and prepared than he had in years and he certainly had
more energy. He walked to and from school almost everyday. Three
days a week he went to the gym afterwards too. Each day at
lunchtime, the other teachers at his table would watch him as he
unpacked the carefully crafted meal that Patience had sent with
him.

The students and teachers at school saw
Patience only occasionally. This was not because Mike was ashamed
of her, but because he remained, as he had been before her arrival,
essentially a homebody. They went out to dinner once a week, and
Patience would provide pleasant conversation, though she didn’t
eat. Most nights though, they stayed home. She fixed him a dinner
more than equal to those they found at restaurants and then they
usually watched a movie on vueTee. Increasingly this was followed
by some sexual activity, and Patience confirmed Mike’s opinion that
his libido was on the increase, though he declined her offer to
graph it for him.

Mike carefully watched the unfolding
election. Though he was loath to throw away his vote by choosing
the Greens, in the end there was just no way he could live with
himself voting for either Barlow or Wakovia. Mendoza was the right
person for the job. So he resigned himself to the fact that his
candidate was going to lose and put a bright green Mendoza/McPhee
’32 bumper sticker on the back of his Chevy. Then fate stepped in.
In early October, a series of announcements by Ford, Gizmo, Intel,
and other major manufacturers pushed the market up past 20,000 for
the first time. The government’s monthly economic indicators were
even better than expected and it shot up even more. Then at the end
of October, President Busby announced that the Chinese had brokered
a deal in which the Russians would pull out of Antarctica. The war
was over and the United States and her allies had won! The first
troops began arriving home November second, just two days before
the election.

Patience produced a dinner of barbeque ribs
and chicken, potato salad and coleslaw, and apple cobbler on
election night. Harriet and Jack arrived early and they all
gathered around the vueTee in the living room to watch the returns.
The twenty-ninth amendment provided a national time frame for
elections. The polls were open from 7AM to midnight, Eastern
Standard Time. Of course ninety five percent of the voters, Mike
included, had voted during the previous two weeks on the internet.
By law, the news outlets were not allowed to announce winners until
after the polls closed. Even so, when four o’clock hit, the states
on the vueTee screen began filling in with color at a remarkable
pace.

Mendoza reached the required electoral votes
well before the small party watching in Springdale, California had
finished their meal. The Republicans took the new south—Alabama,
Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Cuba, and the Virgin Islands. For a
while it looked as though the only state to go blue would be Puerto
Rico, but then after the winner had already been declared,
California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii and Pacifica were filled in
with blue. Mike’s disgust that his vote had in fact not counted,
since Stephanie Wakovia had won California was ameliorated by the
fact that his candidate had at least won the election. Evelyn
Mendoza would become only the second female President of the United
States, having won the remaining forty three states and a whopping
407 electoral votes.

It was late that evening, after Harriet and
Jack had gone home, after the talking heads on the screen had
finished interviewing the winners and losers, campaign workers, and
supporters, after the victory and concessions speeches, as some of
the many ballot questions were being reviewed, that Mike sat bolt
upright. In Massachusetts voters had passed a non-binding vote in
support of their state’s governor who had earlier in the year
signed an executive order allowing for marriages between human
beings and robots. How had he not heard about that?

“
Patience?”

Her smiling head popped around the corner
from the kitchen, where she was putting away the last of the dinner
dishes.

“
Did you know that humans
and robots could get married in Massachusetts?”

“
Mm-hmm,” she
nodded.

“
Why didn’t you tell
me?”

“
You had other things to
worry about Mike. School was just starting. Besides, Massachusetts
is on the other side of the country.”

“
Don’t you want to get
married?”

“
Of course I do. Now that I
know it’s what you want.”

“
Why didn’t you know that
before? What about Vegas.”

“
What happens
in…”

“
Don’t say it.”

“
I thought it was just a
lark. You didn’t seem that interested once we got home.”

“
Well, a lot of things have
changed since then.” Mike left it at that, but the wheels in his
brain had begun to turn.

And when the next day, a dark man in a grey
suit arrived to give Mike a check from the Daffodil Corporation in
exchange for a signed document indicating that he wouldn’t sue
them, everything just seemed to fall into place. Even after medical
expenses and buying a new piano, the settlement would leave Mike
with just over $1 million. So he began making plans in earnest.