The New Math IV?

Robot Psychology

For a few weeks, I liked a robot psychologist. He didn't reciprocate the sentiment. He sent me an email: I can not give you what you want. I re-read it six times and finally began to cry. I suppose things ended much better in my imagination. In my imagination, things did not end but began.

I wrote the above story for the robot psychologist in question. I told him I would write him a story because he was enthusiastic and encouraging about my art, far more than he was about me. But, now when I read it back to myself, I realize that it is not a story at all, but a poem. So, I am writing a new story for him because he told me I could if I changed his name. But I also wanted him to have the story because it was something I could give to him even though we no longer had contact. The poem is brief and I wanted to write a story about my rage, which was large.

For a few weeks. Let us start with that lie. Because as a writer, I lie. I lie all the time and I steal. I steal moments from people. I steal their personalities, their histories. I steal their gestures and mannerisms, their facial tics, their secret shames, their unknown weaknesses. They rarely know because I take them in pieces, in fragments of flesh and memory. And then I take my hoard of picked bones and dump them into the page. I spread out my collection with my hands like I’m finger painting. I push blood through their veins and reconstruct their faces, recompose them, remake them, turning them into men who walk and think and speak for themselves while I am their omniscient God who cares nothing for the truth, only for the beauty of my creation.

So, about that first lie. Let me take that rib and show you the carcass from which it came. For a few weeks. I liked the robot psychologist more than a few weeks. It was for a few months. In fact, it was closer to a whole year. From May to May. I knew him before May, but I suppose I didn’t really like him then. We stopped speaking in March, and so in the end, he didn’t really like me either. In all things there is balance. I do not know if the time in which he was a nonentity to me is equivalent to the time he purposefully abandoned me.

Why didn’t I care about him at first? Cherchez l’homme. When I met the robot psychologist, and for quite a period of time afterwards, I was intermittently swapping saliva with young Jonathan, who betrayed his real thoughts when he squeezed my breast and purred Heidi. Coitus interuptus! I yanked on the string hard to find a chain of desire, in which I was by no means at the bottom or top. From my vantage, I could squint and see Eric at the top, who was the disinterested boss of Heidi, who in her turn took periodic interest in Jonathan when Eric failed to ask her for a coffee in the morning, who in turn took middling interest in me relative to the attention (or lack thereof) he received from Heidi, while I barely noticed the robot psychologist at all. Perhaps there were others below him, but I could not see below me, only above. Squished by the weight of circumstances, the robot psychologist leaked love for me from every pore. Somewhere in this primordial sticky sap of his love was the gamete that crawled up my legs and made its way inside my soul, the male contribution to the embryo that developed into the child of my love for him.

It was an unexpected pregnancy. One day in May, I woke up and he was the first thought that kicked. Bam! “I would like to kiss the robot psychologist.” It was absolutely clear to me then, as if I had never thought of him otherwise (though in fact, I had never thought of him at all). “If he were here, I could kiss him,” I thought. And whether him or someone else, I really wanted to kiss someone. I was sprawled on my bed, a clear indication of the lack of flesh and breath beside me. So, I embraced my pillow and buried my face into its down and kissed it with my eyes closed. The pillow was too pliant to kiss. The flat pillow, a better kissing pillow, was on the ground. I folded my hand into a fist and kissed it instead, which was marginally more satisfying, at least firm, warm and slightly salty and simultaneously sweet. These naïve, simple affections might seem the most innocent of sexual thoughts, but all potency of feeling in me could be conveyed to basic gestures. When the alarm rang, I washed my hand and left the pillow sideways on the bed where it had served as my makeshift partner.

Thoughts, once inside me, are not easy to abort once they begin to grow. Throughout the day, and the week, my thoughts returned to the robot psychologist. I wanted to tell him immediately how I felt. I sat at my computer composing and decomposing a letter that expressed my feelings. I changed my mind, thinking that such a blatant and aggressive stance would chase him away. He seemed sensitive and not very resilient. But, a request to do something we had always done – see a movie – seemed too long to wait to tell him. I agonized under these psychological contractions, whether to say something or nothing. Though ultimately, there was only one direction for this fetus to go, and that was out of my mouth. And once released, confessions have their own lives and they do not always fulfill their parents’ desires. My feelings persisted long after I confessed to him how I felt, long after he told me he could not give me what I wanted, long after I wrote the poem of rage, long after he was gone.

The imaginary robot psychologist who dogged me was a distillate of the real person who I had only seen a few times in my life. The real robot psychologist invited me to a show at the Casa del Popolo, a local café/bar. No, that is a lie too. He didn’t invite me to the show. He told me he was going to it, and I decided to go too. For safety, I called upon my unreliable friends to back me up, but they all wiggled out of the obligation when they heard that the band playing was a noise band. I was not so easily deterred, figuring I might have checked out the show on my own anyway. I even bought my ticket a day early and arrived ahead of time. Instead of going into the venue, though, I was plagued with panic. I hid for two hours in a coffee shop across the street, drinking and waiting, pretending to read the free weekly paper. When at last a crowd came outside for a set change smoke after the first band played, I summoned my courage and went inside.

Cowardice is a stronger force than desire. I hid in the back of the room at the bar, chatting with a stranger in order to avoid looking at the sea of heads between me and the stage. I knew his head was there, somewhere, and I could probably spot it, but I didn’t want to see it. Worse, I didn’t want him to turn around and see me. I decided then and there that going to the show was a stupid stupid stupid idea.

I ordered a coffee for myself and sat at the bar. The Casa makes excellent coffee. I drank the coffee with a spoon, so I would drink it slowly, trying to find more ways to avoid any interaction. Actually, the Casa makes lattes and not coffee, but that is beside the point. I was about halfway through the latte when he was suddenly beside me. He stood next to me, too close, and whispered in my ear. “I’m happy to see you here.” I heard nothing he said after that because all I could think about was how happy I was that he was whispering in my ear that he was happy to see me. I think he was talking about the band playing and his friends who were there. He pointed people out to me, but I didn’t remember their names. His whisper shook me and heat and anxiety built in my stomach. I walked away, trying to avoid him, but he would follow me with his big eyes, grinning and watching. I wanted to puddle into the floor of the Casa. I liked him so much and I was waiting for him to reciprocate. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to escape. I couldn’t leave the show and I didn’t want to stay. Each time I walked away, making a show of listening to the bands, trying to step away, he would come stand next to me, shepherding me, breathing on me, brushing against me. “Do you want a drink?” he would ask.

The entire night, my anticipation built. I thought that perhaps it would be a good time to ask him if he liked me. I drove him home and he spent two hours talking to me in my car before he left. I felt so burned. I drove home and went immediately to sleep.

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I liked. The second lie. I didn’t just like him. That should be self-evident.

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the third lie. a robot psychologist. He called himself a robot psychologist. At first, I thought that meant he built robots. My brother and I once tried to build a robot in our basement. We took out a book from the Malverne Public Library about building a robot. The robot we wanted to build could amble around on wheels and learn where things were located. We thought it would be funny to move things and confuse the robot. It was very complicated to assemble, but the book was very clear and it also gave the program one had to enter to make the robot work. My brother was an expert with a sottering iron and had built at least 25 radio controlled cars and boats. We figured that if we had the right parts, we could build the robot. However, all we had at our disposal was our old Vic20 computer and our old Colecovision. We dissembled these in hopes that we would find the right components to build the robot. When we discovered that the parts needed cost upwards of $2000, the robot project was abandoned. At any rate, because of this childhood failure, I was quite impressed when the Robot Psychologist told me he built robots. And I liked how he spoke about his robots. He talked about them like they were his children and they were alive. He wrote to me once, “My baby robot threw up all over the floor.” I did not know what that meant in terms of robots or electronics, but it was a poetry that could speak to me.

However, later I found out that he did not build robots. I was very disappointed by this. In fact, I almost felt as though he had lied to me about what he did for a living in order to make himself seem more interesting. Perhaps he had, since in the early days, the situation was such that he wanted to impress me and not the other way around. Ultimately, though, his job something related to robots and no less interesting. He wrote computer programs, including those for ATM machines. ATMS are robots – not the kind in George Jetson’s world, but they are robots. So he said, he works on robot brains, he worked on robot psychology.

When I think about things that made me fall in love, it was what he said about his job. He talked about how he felt like a father as his robot children crunched and processed numbers while he slept, that they were greater creations than he was. And when I heard him speak that way, I wondered how he felt about his own life – had he exceeded his own father’s expectations or fallen short? It was such an odd thought to have about one’s work. I thought of my students as my children, but not as their mother. They were my sheep, maybe, temporarily in my presence, and they existed before and after me. But he created things and felt like a father, or perhaps like a God. I wanted to think we saw the world through the same lens. I always looked at things through a lens of possibility. While I walked around, I would focus on things and begin to see what could happen. On highways I saw accidents and drove defensively. In crowds, I saw panic and would have anxiety attacks. In white vans, I saw bands or serial killers and watched from afar. In faces I saw friends to be made and smiled. I could create and destroy whole lives in my head. But he saw the world through a less carnal lens, a more poetic lens, a more intellectual lens. He was a robot psychologist. He saw himself as something more beautiful. Whereas, I saw him as he was a person without the potential to love me.