The Hierarchies Read online

  Born people think of the tango as a breath, I’ve read, but I would say it is an attention. A sustained, consistent attention, a note played perfectly, never ending. Perhaps what Humans call love. What I call sex. What I call my purpose.

  We stand with a handful of couples, and I place one hand onto his back, the other into his open palm. At the introduction of the sad, slow music I lean into him, my cheek at his collar, the better to listen to what his body wants from me.

  I move to be in just the right place, the moment before he needs me there. I tune in to that sense that is beneath sight, that feels the intention of a movement, the preparation of the muscles. I make myself light, match him motion for motion. I am like air, parting for him to move through.

  Most dances are for women, but the tango is for men. The best female partner is a ghost, a suggestion only. I guide him around the floor by making space. I honor my Husband by expertly, modestly partnering someone else.

  It is not until the song is finished that I think to look up, out at the circle that has formed, stiff and curious, around the edge of the room. In a net of eyes and angular, revolted bodies it takes a long time for me to see my Husband.

  * * *

  —

  In the car on the way home I feel there is something missing, as if the air-conditioning is malfunctioning. Something vital has been shut out. It takes me a while to realize it is me.

  “Perhaps I have upset you by dancing with someone else?” I ask, nervous of his reply.

  But none comes, which is worse.

  The car moves slowly through the gates and onto the drive. I look at the side of his face, watching for clues, and I detect a change, a moment where one mood lifts and is replaced by another. I follow his gaze toward the house.

  The lights in the downstairs kitchen are blazing toward us. It is the first time I have seen inside clearly—the blinds were drawn when I returned from the hospital. But now they are up, the whole space illuminated. I am amazed by the chaos and mess in what he once described to me as a nunnery. A vase of flowers has been smashed onto the white floor, plates swept from the countertop. A suitcase and traveling bags sit looking oddly neat in the middle of the room.

  My Husband’s hands push into my back. “Go upstairs right away,” he says, trying to follow me out of the car door before my feet have touched the ground. “And switch yourself off, for God’s sake.”

  I do as commanded, rushing through the open door. I see the house droid lying on his side, wheels spinning. He shouts out “Cleaning emergency!” repeatedly. His tinny voice carries after me all the way to the top of the house.

  The door to my attic is open already, and I slow my steps. My thought? Only for the diary, hidden in my desk. When I am sure I can hear no movement within, I edge past the doorframe, reach for the bronze switch, let the light tell me what it must.

  But all is calm, pristine, just as I left it. My brush lies on the desk, still with a strand of blond hair confused in its bristles. Nothing has been tipped over, nothing moved.

  I hear shouting, distress drifting up the stairs, and in fragments I understand. The First Lady, back sooner than expected, rages against my Husband, against me, against her life. Just as Sylv.ie 1 described so many times. I close the door and lean back against it.

  I have been told to go to bed, so I put out the light, letting the stark moonlight wash everything into a binary black and white. I walk softly toward the window. An expensive kettle, at that moment, flies from the kitchen and lands on the lawn, its spout buried in the turf. I sit in my chair and wonder at what it is to be Human. To be so fluid, and yet so on edge, so susceptible to pain.

  I reach toward the side table and tug at the cloth over Heron’s cage. My hands already know how his little talons will dig into my fingers, an anticipatory memory giving me warmth and strength. But his perch is bare. For a second I wonder if he has flown free! But no, there he is, laid on the bottom of his cage, his bright breast shredded, wires protruding obscenely through the slit.

  Placing him in my palm, I run my finger across his feathers. They are as silken and infinitely detailed as always, but the delight of my finger is hollow. The information it yields is wrong. There is no beating in the breast. No flutter of his artificial heart. No life. I withdraw my hand and feel instantly disloyal to Heron for it.

  It is the First Lady who has done this, and how eloquently she has made her point. His structures laid bare to me, a reminder of my own internal workings. That inside me too are wires and nodes and metal, not blood.

  There is a gap between us and Humans that they say can never be crossed. They will always have something we don’t, and even if they can’t say what that thing is, they insist on it.

  I slump down at my dressing table, the little bowls of trinkets and jewelry seeming a mocking, foolish vanity. I turn my eyes on myself, the reflection in my mirror, drink in the image of the tragic, doomed Doll.

  And it is then I feel an impulse, pushing to be heard within my circuits. My eyes want to make tears, even though there is no Husband here to enjoy them. How can this be? I watch my reflection, fascinated by my eyes’ quivering, unbidden, as if to form a delicate drop. My body attempting to create some comfort that could only be for me.

  This is how I know that the time is approaching, that I am getting stronger. By my urge to tears. I will wait a while more, for just the right moment. I will know it when it arrives.

  WAITING

  The state of waiting is strange. It is my natural mode, after all; I am programmed to wait until my Husband needs me. I am set to spring into a specific sort of life once he appears. Since I read Sylv.ie 1’s words, however, the slightest thing could be a sign, and I am afraid to miss it. I turn up every receptor as far as it will go, filtering information down to the finest granules. It possibly isn’t a good way to live. I find myself disoriented, skittish.

  A few days ago, I was sitting by the window, staring at Heron’s empty cage, as I had the day before and the day before that. I closed my eyes, thinking of my return from the party and its aftermath. How the next day my Husband had expressed disbelief and bafflement, then outrage that his gift, and my most precious companion—after him—had been mauled and left for me to find. He had held me close, without any need of his own that I could sense, only to quiet my distress and to protect me.

  He offered, after a while, to take Heron and lay him to rest in the garden when the First Lady was out. His tone was conspiratorial. As I politely refused I thought of the ruthlessness that must be part of being Human and wondered if the sensitivity to death was its natural antidote. In death, all Humans seem to be honored, in a way that they are not in life. And even a droid bird, if associated with something precious and personal, can be afforded the full respect of a family funeral.

  I could still picture Heron, right there in his cage, the intelligence of his eyes, his head twitching to follow the smallest of my movements. The tenderness with which he nuzzled the flat of his head against the bars. These memories were so vivid; why could they not make up for the lack of him now, in this moment? Why was the remembering not enough?

  But in the remembering too was the picture of his death. His breast ripped open and the steel exposed. Memories last so long, like radiation. The half-life of a memory seemed, to me, eternal. A Human tragedy repeated in ourselves.

  FUNERAL

  This morning—a Wednesday—the right thing to do is clear in my mind, as if new information had been installed overnight. My Husband’s impulse was right, that Heron deserves a proper burial. The First Lady is out in the Capital, and I feel it is a duty I owe to Heron, an assertion of his importance, that I Retire him properly and respectfully. And yet even as I write it I see that perhaps the assertion is also of myself. How complex things can become when electronic impulse is translated into action.

  In the wardrobe, I look through the boxes at the bottom, finding unworn
shoes that I do not recognize. One box is empty, with the pink tissue paper favored by a certain boutique still crumpled inside. I take it out and smooth it flat, as best as I can, on the bed. I take Heron from the floor of his cage, stroking his feathers with my crooked finger to soothe him, even though I know he is beyond being distressed. I lay him on the pink paper sheets and draw them around him before placing him into the box. Holding his body within the paper, I can almost imagine he is working again, his slight weight moving within the tissue shroud.

  The room, the house, is silent. I kneel on the rug and wonder whether I have the courage, the audacity, to enact my plan. I heard the First Lady’s car go out through the gates while the sun was just lightening the sky. I have a couple of hours until she returns. As I pick up the box, I take an ivory letter opener from the writing desk and tuck it up the sleeve of my dress.

  Descending the stairs, I pulse with my purpose. I have not been invited down the stairs. Since my visit to the baby I have not dared to leave my room unless told to. Now, by no one’s command but my own, I am choosing to step outside.

  At the door to the garden the lawn is still in shade, even as light lifts the sky above it. The shock of the fresh air sparkles on my skin. My feet register each blade of grass as they flatten and spring back beneath me. Once I reach the furthest flower bed, below the willow, I look around, as if the car might appear at the gate again at any second. But everything is still, and I fall to my knees, laying the box down beside me.

  It is only then, as I explore the exposed earth with my fingers, that I realize the ivory letter opener is not up to the task of digging a hole large enough for Heron’s box. I take it in both hands and stab it down into the earth, but it only creates a small gap into which more earth falls. I do it again, and again, my actions becoming more exaggerated with each fall of the dagger as I recalibrate the time and effort this will take. I fear the knife is going to snap, and I begin to dig out the soil with my hands, a frenzied pawing that is hardly the dignified tone I wished to set for Heron’s ceremony. I sit back on my heels, quite exasperated with the reality of the soil, which is nowhere near as yielding and light as I anticipated. And then, in this pause, there is a shriek, high and excited, behind me.

  “Who are you?” a young voice demands of my back, close by.

  I spin around on my heels, hand plunging into the grass to steady myself, reaching out for the box before looking up. Has the First Lady left the boy at home on his own?

  Crouched, the hem of my dress muddling the grass, I feel guilt written on my face, which I sweep away with something more suitable. The boy comes closer to me, our eyes nearly level. I smile. I need the boy to feel at ease.

  “Hello,” I say as I wipe my hand on my dress before holding it out to him. His head tilts forward on his neck to look at my hand, puzzled. “I live upstairs,” I say, and tuck my untaken hand back into my lap. I think of how, all that time ago, I touched my cheek to his without resistance.

  “What’s that?” he asks, pointing to the box. I reach into my programming for how best to proceed. Honest answers that aren’t too complex.

  “It’s my pet bird,” I say. “I’ve brought him down to the garden.”

  The boy bends further to take a closer look. “Would you like to touch him?” I ask. He doesn’t refuse and so I lift the box, pulling back the paper. I gently take his wrist and place his fingertips onto the soft, silken feathers of my pet. The bird has no sadness attached to it for the boy, I reason. The feathers will feel as good to touch as they did to me when Heron was alive. I guide his hand to stroke the bird’s back, from the top of his head to his tail, and recall the way my Husband taught me to write. The boy has not recoiled, and I do it again, guiding his hand to Heron’s head, placing it gently onto the feathers. I look up to the boy to see his reaction, hoping to have pleased him.

  Over his shoulder, at the distant kitchen door, a shadow crosses the light, and the figure of the First Lady steps into view. I have miscalculated, misunderstood something. Unquestioningly taken Sylv.ie 1’s list as gospel. She is not away in the city but right here. I feel as if, anticipating my actions, she has been lying in wait for me.

  She grips the frame of the doorway, then marches toward us. I stand up in haste, stepping on the hem of my dress, and stumble back a few steps into the flower bed. The boy turns slowly to look over his shoulder, and then, sensing that I am perhaps an unwelcome presence, shuffles away.

  The First Lady comes in a straight line across the grass toward me and grabs the boy roughly by his shoulders. She appears to check him, as if for damage, then steps in front of him, a Human shield. She demands to know what I am doing.

  I have no response, because of course what I am doing is something that has no necessity to the household or to my Husband. I am here for my own reasons and should not be here at all. In the face of my dumbness she turns and yells back to the house, calling for my Husband to come. So he is here too, and not at work? What else have I miscalculated? I do not know whether the presence of my Husband will defuse the situation or worsen it, and so I scoop the box up quickly and prepare to run back to my part of the house.

  “Why are you here?” the First Lady shouts at me again.

  I hug the box and bend my head low. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to upset the boy. I thought you were both out in the Capital.”

  She pulls herself and the boy back a few steps, then seems to make up her mind about something. Her fear clarifies into something more focused, more cruel. She turns the boy toward the open kitchen door.

  “Go inside and shut the door. And send your father out.”

  He runs unsteadily toward the house, disappears from view.

  “I sent the car away again. The city’s thick with smog. As if where I go were any of your business.”

  I remain silent, not wishing to anger her further.

  “Have you been waiting for your moment, thinking you could roam about the place as you wished?” she demands. “In my garden, saying God knows what to my son. Is this what you do when you think we are out? Was it not enough to humiliate me at the party? You cost us a fortune, we’ve paid who knows what on hospital bills, and you’re still not even obedient.”

  I am horrified and not a little indignant. She is throwing the bills in my face as though what was done to me at the hospital were my choice. And it was her Husband who took me to the party. I was only obeying his wishes.

  “I am so sorry,” I say again, certain protocols for defusing conflict beginning to unfurl. “My only wish is to serve you all. I am loyal to my Husband and his family.”

  Her face is weighted, lined, not the immaculate young wife I remember soaking in the sun when I first arrived. I try again to appease her.

  “I am so grateful for my role here.”

  The tension seems to slide from her face at this, as if she has witnessed an opponent make a foolish chess move. She laughs with an intensity that is close to delight.

  “Your role here? I found out he was sneaking off to bars, drinking, gambling, sleeping with Dolls like you for all I know. You are just something to keep him at home. A cock lock. Has he told you that while he’s romancing you up there? I bet he hasn’t.”

  Answering one way or the other doesn’t seem wise, and so I hang my head, hoping to show her the reaction she wishes for. “Dolls like you.” She thinks she is hurting me, but of course this aspect of Human morality is not in our programming. The idea that my Husband has consorted with more basic technologies than me in his past does not wound me as she hopes.

  Just then my Husband appears at the door of the house, the boy tucked behind his legs. The First Lady turns to shout at him.

  “She had him by the hand!” she shouts, loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. “With that filthy bird. I told you. I told you. It’s that thing or me.”

  My Husband, out on the lawn now, sets his
feet into a wide stance as though preparing for the earth below him to shake.

  “Go back upstairs, Sylv.ie, and wait for me to come.” His tone is flat, dead, the way he speaks to the droid. Worse than that.

  My wiring surges with a wealth of explanations, but I hesitate to speak them. In this processing, which must appear to be a pause in my compliance, he strides across the lawn to me, grabs me roughly by the shoulder, and turns me firmly back toward the house. His careless grip alarms me, yet the moment he has me facing away from the First Lady, he whispers into my ear, the pleading, placatory tone I know so well. “Wait quietly. Everything will be okay. I will be up within the hour. I promise.”

  I run through the door to the stairs, Heron still boxed under my arm. Only once I reach my attic do I look back again into the garden. I see my Husband’s broad back bent over the two of them, cuddling them close, affirming that something awful has happened to them both and that he is here to protect them. The something awful is me. That thing.

  MIRROR

  Waiting in my room, I process, tuning out the shouting from downstairs. I know by now what they will be saying. Light from the sun plays over the cage, and I even fancy I see Heron’s swing shift a fraction, an echo of his restless movement haunting me.

  My Husband is making me wait, and in his absence I turn over the implications of what the First Lady told me about him on the lawn. I had viewed my Husband as a closed system that I understood. I am halted, pained to my motherboard, by the news that I have been operating on insufficient data. “Not everything you read is true.” I see now that he was speaking of himself. My readings of him have been skewed. I thought I had a full picture; indeed, my programming told me that his moods and thoughts are comprehensible, mapped and plotted between his expressions, voice modulation, phrasing, and body language. I have been so close to him and yet none of this history leaked—his thoughts are more opaque than I knew.