The Robots
by David Pascal
Ah! Ah! Ah!
The sound came from under one of the University’s old stone bridges over the river in the park. It repeated exactly on the beat, like a tape loop or a metronome.
Ah! Ah! Ah!
Under the gaze of an anthracite gargoyle placed there during the Coolidge Administration, the steps at end of the stone bridge curved downwards toward a foot path under the bridge. And under the bridge, to the sound below.
I hesitated for a moment, but there was just something about the sound. Something about it. I turned and passed down the old stone steps.
Under the bridge a dog was trying to jump up onto a young girl. She was quite young, perhaps ten or eleven, in immaculately black private-school shoes and skirt and sweater and stockings. A thin black formal tie was knotted under a high and brilliantly white Dutch collar. Not Dutch exactly. Some odd style -- like alien tunics in cheap European sci-fi art films. It was so white that, even in the shade under the bridge, it all but shimmered, like a snowflake caught in moonlight.
The dog, a capuccino-colored mutt with a turret for a snout, stared transfixed by the whiteness. He stood before the girl, whining and raising his forelegs before her over and over in ecstatic canine salaams. The girl pressed her back up against the guard rail and stared at the creature in what I could only call pure astounded horror, almost disbelief. The nails of its paws had already snagged and torn the knee of her left black stocking. Pale ideograms of skin peered startled through the scribble of clawed slits.
I had arrived, though; I, the white knight.
“Hey, come on, dog. Easy. Whoa,” I said, walking up. I whistled. “Beat it now.”
The girl turned her head up at me, eyes vast and even more astounded even than before. I smiled and gave a wave of the hand and strove to look benign, avuncular, impotent.
“C’mon, mutt. Go! Leave the young lady alone. C’mon, shoo, scram.”
The terrier folded down onto its forelegs and looked at me, its tail wagging, its’ wet liver-strip of a tongue hanging out. I picked up a stone and showed it to the creature. “See?”
Then I gave it as long a toss as I could. He flapped away after it, yipping like repeatedly braking tires.
“Come on,” I said to the little girl. “Let’s not be here when he gets back, eh?”
I gestured to the steps.
She didn’t move. She merely stood there looking at me.
She had strikingly large moon-colored gray eyes set in a white round pie-plate of a face from which a baby look had not yet quite disappeared. The face dominated her. The rest of her was not merely fashionably anorexic – she was so slight and thin she seemed a sort of dandelion on a stem. Her short askew hair was the same funereal Gothic shade of black as her skirt. So black and alike that I would have thought it dyed to match, except for the incongruent threads of gray here and there quietly in her hair. Odd unreal ears stuck out from the odd hair -- ears like tiny Victorian cup handles.
And there was that stare: she looked at me as though I’d stepped two-headed and eight-armed from a space ship. I could feel her heart rattling like a hummingbird's where she stood.
“I guess you must be scared of dogs,” I said. I had to say something. I nodded to my right, in the direction of the college. “I teach at Gordon University. Or at least I expect to.”
She didn’t say a word. Just stared at me with those immense moonscape eyes.
“Well, the dog’s gone,” I said.
She said nothing.
“Well — guess I’ll be going too, then,” I said. “ – Bye!”
I gave a mock-suave wave of the hand, and turned to go rescue other harried maidens. I’d barely gotten two feet I felt a tug on the back of my sleeve.
I turned to her.
“What?” I said.
She said nothing.
“It won’t come back,” I said.
She looked in the direction the dog had run, and then back up at me.
“Look. Which way are you going?” I said.
“The bus stop,” she said. “Where my counterpart is. Sir.”
Her voice was as mildly askew as the rest of her. It sounded foreign but not quite; monotone, and precise enough to sound almost British, yet at the same time high and toy-like, like the too-perfect lead voice in a boys’ choir doing Gregorian. But again, not quite.
“The bus stop?" I said. " Which?
She pointed in the other direction, across the river.
“Ah.” I nodded. “That’s the Smith Street stop. My rooms aren’t too far from there. It’s easy to get to. See? Take the foot path you're standing on straight down to the second bridge, down there, see it? And go over it. It’s just on the other side. A five minute walk.”
She looked up at me as though she were going to cry. Good grief, I hadn’t had an eleven-year old girl cry on me since God knows when.
“Look. Listen. I’m not in a hurry. How about if I walk you to the bus stop, OK? No dogs on the bus. Dogs don’t have a bus pass. All right?”
She just held onto my sleeve, looking up at me, then around, then up at me.
“Come on,” I said.
The foot path to the next bridge wound through open green wood. The Gordon River was on the left -- long, blue, gray, gleaming. In the mesmeric distance you could see two students rowing a long sculling canoe that glimmered like a needle on the waters.
Indian Summer was warm upon the Autumn town, and the Gordon’s birches were in full anti-bloom: brass and cherry-colored leaves, dry tan papyri, were everywhere breaking off and spiraling, falling on the path, audible crackles dancing at the least breeze. They crunched corn-flakes-like beneath our shoes.
I noticed the girl’s glossy black boot-like shoes covering her small doll’s feet as she walked haltingly over the leaves. Her hands were on the same curiously small scale – almost tiny; a doll’s hands, not a child’s hands. Perfect victoriana. I could feel them shaking, still clutching my sleeve.
“I was just up at the University,” I said. “Lovely place really. I may be taking a job there teaching next semester. I like Gordon. Something about small college towns — a civilized quality. Psychology And Neurology Seminar. Do you live here? Have you lived here long? I’ve got an interview with the Dean later on. Look at that river. You wouldn’t be a genius student at the college, I take it?”
She shook her head.
“A visitor to the campus, then?” I said.
She shook her head.
“What are you?
“I’m a robot,” she said.
I nodded. We walked along.
“Ah, you are?” I said.
She nodded.
“Really. A robot. That’s so interesting.”
She nodded.
A bird suddenly burst off a branch ahead, and swirled through some high leaves. The girl jerked at the movement and then stared after the flight of the bird, almost stunned, as though it were yet another alien creature she'd never seen.
“You certainly are very well designed,” I said. “You look human in almost every respect.”
She was still shaken by the bird. “I am the – I am the result of many years of my company’s best research efforts. Sir.”
“Really? Which company would that be?”
“Ono Tachisegawa Semiconductor Group, sir.”
“Do you have a name?”
“I have a designation, sir.”
“What is it?”
“Zero one one one zero zero one zero one zero zero zero…”
I laughed. “Do people call you Zero for short, or One for short, then?”
She blinked down at the path along which her tiny feet were walking.
“No, sir.”
“What do they call you then?”
“Humans call me what they wish to call me, sir. My – my function is to serve and obey. I do what humans tell me I must do, sir. My function is to serve and obey.”
“All humans? Or just your owner?”
“My function is to serve and obey humans. Are you human, sir?”
“I would say so, yes.”
“My function is to serve and obey,” she said.
I nodded.
“Go jump in the river,” I said.
Her eyes widened and a look of surprise and grief seized her face. She stopped at once and let go of my arm and turned toy-soldier-like toward the river and headed toward it like a sleepwalker in a dream.
I followed along behind with my arms crossed and smiled and nodded and smiled some more and watched and smiled and waited for her to stop.
And when she got right to the very edge of the bank and put her foot into space and gave every indication of going right over, I shouted “Stop!” and bolted and reached for her like the dickens. I barely managed to grab her arm as she was going over the edge.
“Are you crazy?” I shouted.
“No, sir,” she said, trembling.
“You could drown!”
She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. Terrified. Terrified.
“Don’t – don’t jump in rivers!” I said.
She turned her head down with an impossibly grief-stricken expression. Her head began to sway violently from left to right.
“Contradiction! Contradiction! Contradiction! Contradiction -- !”
“Stop it. Jesus Christ, do you do anything people tell you to do?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, nodding pathetically over and over and again about to break into tears. Staring away from in pure horror, her tiny hands trembling like a fragile octogenarian’s.
“I am a robot, sir. My function is to serve and obey. My function is to serve and obey. My function is to serve and obey.”
Those trembling hands. Drugs, I thought. Drugs, what else. Great. I looked at my watch and thought about my interview with the Dean later this afternoon. Two hours to go. And here I was holding a weeping strung-out ten-year-old with torn stockings by the wrist in the middle of the park. All she needed to do was mumble ‘rape’ and there went fifteen years of postsecondary education.
“Come on,” I said, pulling her along — gently — by the wrist. It stretched out of her sleeve and I noticed some kind of — bar code. Bars of zeroes and ones were lined meticulously across it.
Christ, it’s some new kind of kids’ game, I said, stalking forward, pulling her. I did not need to be playing games. I had a job interview soon. I did not need games. I hoped to God anyone seeing us thought we were father and daughter or something, and that no one at the University saw us.
“Who did you say was waiting for you at the bus stop?” I said. “Your partner, something like that?”
“My counterpart, sir.”
“Your 'counterpart'?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What the hell is — oh forget it, forget it. This person, they know you, right? They can get you home safe?”
“My counterpart recognizes me. My counterpart will accompany me to the Ono Tachisegawa Semiconductor Group mobile facilities reconnaisance unit.”
“That’s good. That’s great,” I said. “That’s good.”
I heard her shoes clopping erratically behind mine and I realized I was walking too fast. She was stumbling trying to keep up. I suddenly felt like the selfish, self-centered ass I perhaps was, and I slowed down. It struck to me that maybe I was reading the situation wrongly. Maybe she was disturbed or mentally handicapped in some way. But then why would she be out there alone like that?
I stopped.
She stood there, her pie face staring down at her feet. The wind lifted and ruffled her short black hair. I let go of her hand and she clenched both her tiny hands into fists and brought them up and pressed them to her collarbones.
I looked at her and half-knelt before her and repressed the impulse to put my hands on the sides of her arms to impress her with my sincerity. I did look into her eyes. Her strange eyes.
“Look, miss,” I said. “I’m sorry for getting upset. But you shouldn’t go near the river. The river can hurt you. Do you understand? We’ll get you to your ‘counterpart’ and you’ll be safe. The bus stop is right over the bridge and you’ll be safe and all right. All right?”
She began to cry. My God, it was getting worse and worse. I got out my handkerchief and wiped her eyes. She just stood there sniffling. I wiped her nose for her. Her eyes were glistening and moist and red and her tongue licked at the trail of a tear that had run down to the side of her mouth.
“Come on,” I said, trying to be gentle. “It’s just over the bridge.”
I walked with her further along up the path. It was a curling sidewalk-wide ribbon of black gravel that generations of students’ and joggers’ sneakers had worn away to a nondescript dusty swath. The robot -- I mentally gave myself a kick: the girl -- grabbed the arm of my jacket again, holding it like a security blanket against her cheek, seeming half to hide behind it. But she kept on walking, walking alongside me, staring in startled amazed snatches at the grass and the trees in the park.
“Your ‘counterpart’,” I said, trying to keep some sort of conversation going. "That sounds like somebody who goes to school with you. Is it? Where do you go to school?”
Up the path I saw a running figure in the distance. Running towards us.
I looked at the girl. Tears still glimmered in her reddened eyes.
The figure curled around a tree a few hundred of feet ahead.
I looked at the young girl, in torn stockings, and tears, holding on to me, and found myself thinking suddenly that it was all some kind of entrapment; then equally quickly that the notion was ridiculous. I was a teacher -- penniless and irrelevant by definition.
The runner curled around yet another distant tree.
“Here,” I said to the girl, trying to peel her fingers off my sleeve and have her at least slip them into my hand. We’d at least look like father and daughter that way. It was impossible: they'd closed on my jacket sleeve like claws into prey.
The slap-slap-slap of the runner’s feet on the path became audible, like sharp beginning faraway raindrops.
“Let go of my jacket,” I said, exasperated.
She let go.
“Give me your hand,” I said.
She did.
We walked on ahead. We strolled forward, and I tried to look parental as the runner got closer and closer, now on a solid stretch and heading directly for us.
It was a jogger – not a student, an older guy, perhaps in his early forties, giving it his all. He held his arms in a curious strict L-shape, swinging them vigorously, and his legs pumped up and down in the same odd deliberate manner. From a distance they seemed like twin flailing swastikas.
He wore white shorts and a T-shirt with block letters that said ‘DEFORM THE PARADIGMS’. There were two long bright yellow wires leading to earplugs in his ears and rooted in a Sony Sports Walkman belted to his upper right arm. His mouth puckered out each time his right foot slapped the path and each time he would blow out a puff of breath. A Nike sweatband bandaged his forehead.
He headed toward us and his eyes followed us. I looked at him casually, and then away at the river. I pointed at some ducks drifting with linear filial discipline along with the current and, trying to look as knowledgeable and elderly as possible, said something trivial about them to the girl.
I glanced at the runner again as he got closer. He was puffing furiously, but I could see his eyes darting at the girl and at me and at the girl. Was he taking in her tear-streaked face, the torn stockings? He got closer and closer.
I moved aside off the path a bit, nudging the girl, so he could go by. He got closer, puffing, his exhalations almost whistles, tooting in ragged rhythm, his eyes following us. I nodded hello at him when he was nearly upon us. He had staring bulging mad-looking blue eyes. Snaking veins throbbed visibly in his forehead. He neither slowed down nor nodded back nor said a word, merely looked at me and the girl as he dashed by. He was past us.
Then I heard the slapping noise of his feet stop.
I squeezed the girl’s hand hard. Not meaning to. Not meaning to at all. I walked forward, holding her hand. I pointed at something on the river although there was nothing on the river. The runner had stopped.
Well? Are you going to say something? I thought. I stopped for a moment and pointed at nothing yet again and looked out of the corner of my eye back at the runner.
The man was bent over double, not looking back at us at all. His hands were on his knees. He was taking deep breaths. I looked at him. His head looked up and looked at me. I noticed I was squeezing the girl’s hand hard and I relaxed my grip around her tiny palm and walked on.
And then the wind around us became stronger; much stronger. A whirlpool of leaves began to rotate over the green stretches of the park in long loose swirls, breaking into one wild ragged double helix after another. Bright sunlight slanting down through the branches of the tall trees hit the leaves in a series of needle-like beams, extracting sudden gold glints in tiny starry bursts as they rolled and buckled in the air. And the wind kept getting stronger, getting stronger.
And as we approached the foot of the second bridge, an incongruous futuristic concrete and metal affair, I realized I hadn’t looked at the girl since the runner had come by. I turned my face to her now. She was not crying now. Her face was quite perfectly composed. Expressionless, as though in a daydream. The little features were flat, hypnogogic. She began walking more and more slowly.
“Come on,” I said.
She had started walking so slowly that I had to pull her hand again, and I did, and the moment we set foot on the bridge, the wind seemed simply to erupt, to quadruple in force. It became furious, a cataract. My tie and jacket flapped sharply, like a scarecrow’s in a nearing hurricane. The little girl’s head curled drunkenly down in the gusts and her legs moved forward drugged and with reluctance.
I pulled her forward, having almost to cut my way into the intolerable inexplicable wind. All the trees in the park seemed to be vibrating with it, waving, as though they were celery stalks dropped in some vast invisible mix-master, some crazy whirlpool of air yearning to swallow them uplike the masts of shipwrecked fairy galleons. The little girl staggered and nearly fell, her legs seeming less and less able to walk or even support her, her odd round face nearly lovely with calm as the wind splashed her black hair wildly. The wind began tearing at my hair now too and my face and shirt and slacks and almost panicking I reached over and picked the girl up in my arms and made a dash for the other side where there were at least houses in the distance, at least shelter. I ran across the apex of the bridge against the wind and toward the trees, and beneath my feet under the bridge I could hear the wind on the water howl, I could see the river water dance and wane and wax and bob, as atop the bridge the silver guard rails howled and clattered wordless arias of vibrating metal. I held my head down and turned from the clamor, I passed across, the child in my arms weightless as a ghost, I was on the other side, and I ran for shelter of the nearest trees and -- the wind died, utterly died. At once; as though a switch had been thrown.
The arms of the trees ceased to wave. The leaves swirling in the air slowed and spiraled down to the ground, and lay there like so many open palms. I stopped running and just stood there, breathing hard. The sound of the river began lapping against the shore in the same even rhythms as before.
The girl was curled up in my arms like a kitten, eyes closed, expression perfectly blank.
I set her down at once.
“Jesus Christ -- I -- I’m sorry — are you all right — are you OK?”
She turned away from me with perfect ballerina smoothness, and looked out across the field. From here the foot path led left in a long snake of a U round a field where some benches and a kids’ baseball diamond and some bleachers lay, and the path ended at a bus stop now visible ahead. The field was covered in long unkempt grass that seemed to rise and sink, sea-like, with a new quiet wind I could not feel.
The little robot — the little girl -- looked out across the grass and saw the bus stop in the distance and a woman standing in the distance by the bus stop. Waiting.
The little robot — I shook my head: the girl, the little girl -- began walking without a word directly in the direction of the bus stop, dreamily through the long grass, saying nothing to me, not looking back.
I watched her go. And after a moment I half-ran, following.
I caught up, she now leading the way, and we passed across the baseball diamond and by the brown empty painted wooden bleachers. A baseball bat lay on one of the bases, and there were a few Coke bottles by a fence. Birds flew down and rested on the seats and the bleachers, their angled beaks turning jaggedly after us, as they watched us pass through the long grass together.
At the bus stop the woman was standing perfectly motionless. She had her back to us. She seemed to be seventeen or eighteen and had long straight hair, the same odd ink-black hair with gray streaks as the little robot – the little girl -- had, but long hair, very long, reaching down past her waist.
She wore the same immaculate black private-school skirt and sweater and stockings and shoes, and I knew, without having to see, that around her throat was the same thin formal black tie knotted under the same vaguely Dutch sci-fi collar.
I opened my mouth to call her when the little creature next to me stopped, twitched, then all at once broke into a full wild run towards the older girl, throwing her arms out. And the young woman at the bus stop, perfectly motionless till this point, turned at the last split-second, catching her with perfect gyroscopic smoothness, as though it had all been choreographed and practiced and programmed a thousand times before.
The little robot – the little girl – reached her arms around the taller girl, and rubbed her face into the other’s waist like the nub of an eraser.
The tall girl's eyes looked down at her. Her face said nothing. Her expressionless face was nothing like the younger one’s. This girl was exceptionally slim and pretty and quite dignified. Eerily so, like an expensive mannequin. She said nothing as the smaller creature hugged her, and as she hugged her back. Her face was utterly blank, perfect and calm, timeless and empty.
“A dog was bothering her on the other side of the river,” I said, coming up.
The young woman neither looked at me nor said a word.
“I walked her here. She was afraid of the dog.”
The young woman said nothing.
The wind returned, just a bit, and two long ribbon strands of the tall girl’s long onyx hair, then another strand, waved across her stark moon-gray eyes, across the empty flawless face.
“But it got windy,” I added. “A huge wind. A terrible wind.”
The girl said nothing.
“She tells me she’s a robot.” I forced a laugh. “Kids.”
I heard a sound looked down the street and saw the Smith Street bus slow down by a stop sign down the street and let two black kids out.
“Are you her sister? Miss?”
“No, sir,” she said. “That is not an accurate statement.”
“But she is with you, isn’t she?”
“Yes, sir. That is an accurate statement.”
The young woman looked down at the little head pressing into her waist and she lifted her hand and, unsmiling, mechanically petted the little creature’s short black hair with exquisitely gentle, perfectly repeating strokes.
I watched her quite perfect hand repetitively petting the small head and as the older girl’s hand stretched out I saw her wrist and the bar code on it. The sequential rectangle of even black bars.
The bus pulled away from the far stop and started to come towards us.
The older girl lifted her head and looked at it. She disengaged the small arms around her waist and took the younger creature’s hand. They turned their backs to me, two Nutcracker soldiers at puppet attention, waiting for the bus.
“Do you two go to the same private school around here or something?” I asked.
“No, sir. That is not an accurate statement,” said the taller one, not turning around.
“You dress alike,” I said.
She said nothing.
“That’s clearly a uniform of some kind,” I said.
She held the smaller creature’s hand, and said nothing.
“No, don’t tell me,” I said evenly. “That’s the uniform that Ono Tachi – Semi-whatever! — issues to its ‘robots’. Right?”
“Yes, sir. That is an accurate statement,” she said.
“And she’s a robot.”
“Yes, sir. That is an accurate statement,” she said.
“And you’re one too, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir. That is an accurate statement,” she said.
The bus stopped and its green doors opened with a crisp pneumatic whisper.
The little one walked up first, her hand in the older girl’s hand.
“You two think you’re being very funny, don’t you?” I said, with an anger that surprised me.
The taller one stopped at the top of the bus steps and turned and looked down at me through her empty perfect eyes.
“No, sir. We do not think of anything at all. We are robots.”
The doors shut.
I could see the younger one, laughing and happy now, skipping as she led the older one to a seat for two near the rear exit. She slid in and then the older one slid gracefully beside her and sat there, mannequin-like, looking straight ahead. The younger one curled up to her, arm in arm, and smiled and closed her eyes.
And then the little creature opened her eyes again and turned her happy face to me, looking at me through the bus window and smiling at me as the bus began to pull away. She waved her odd little hand.
Behind me I heard the birds fly up in a sudden rush. The bus and its two passengers passed in front of me, the younger passenger waving, and the older one staring ahead unseeing. The little one was saying something to me. She looked at me and I could see her lips move. She was saying something to me, and waving, but I couldn’t hear her. I couldn't make out the words.
The bus turned left, off of Smith Street and onto Elm. I stood there and watched, till I could no longer see the bar code on the tiny waving hand.
