Louisa Hall - Speak

“Six,” Ramona said.

“OK,” I countered, “maybe you don’t need me, but I still need you.”

Dolores looked from her daughter to me. She practically snorted. “That’s a bit much to ask, don’t you think? I have enough on my plate.”

I moved into the studio. After I’d signed the divorce papers, there were sixty-one days to wait for the motion to be finalized. Dolores gave me until then to find a new place to live. During that time, while I persisted in a state of partial domesticity, I took refuge in anger. How could Dolores divorce me without any preparation? Where were the anguished conversations? Only a woman of little real feeling could divorce her husband so bluntly.

In this state of mind, I took satisfaction from the fact that Ramona had fallen deeply in love with her bot. I liked to see the raptures she fell into, listening to Ella asking her questions. She was shy at first, unused to conversation with someone other than her parents. Often, instead of responding, she merely stared, her mouth hanging open. Ella handled this beautifully, capping the silence with another sweet question. Now, when Ramona cried, I could quiet her by offering the doll I’d produced. Sadness was quickly ousted by wonder. Ramona edged closer to me. We were thick as thieves, the two of us, waiting our sixty-one days, listening to Ella’s intelligent questions, speaking back to her implanted ears.

Now, of course, is when I invite you to judge me, in case you were still holding back. Now, as I present to you myself in the part of a self-centered man-child, angry because he isn’t needed, resentful because he’s failed and hasn’t been forgiven. My wife was two times alone: once because her husband left her to build a machine, and once again because her daughter fell in love with the machine her husband built. Both Ramona and I were distracted while Dolores faded into the background, exhausted by treatment, an occasional presence that we missed less because it was never actually gone. She recovered from the surgery; she adjusted to her new hormones; she survived a course of radiation therapy, delivered by micro-robotic devices. All this she accomplished while I waited for the divorce to go through, living in the studio and reporting to the house to play with Ramona while her mother slept. I kept to a strict household schedule. I picked up Dolores’s prescriptions; I did the grocery shopping. The dishes were always washed; dinner was served at the same hour. I swept the floors while Ramona talked to her doll. I assured myself that if I kept adhering to these healthy domestic patterns, if I didn’t permit a break in routine, Dolores would conquer her illness and recover enough to realize what a terrible mistake she’d made.

In the end, of course, Dolores was fine. She no longer speaks to me — she holds to this day that there was far too much talking wasted between us — but she is living, gardening on our ranch. Before I went to prison, I drove by it sometimes, just to see her from a distance: the shape of her arboreal hair, the familiar curved lines of her body. I never came as close to her as I did on that day during my trial, when she showed up at my courtroom. But even from that distance, she caused me to quicken. Indeed, even now, from the remote rooms of this prison, she still picks up my pulse. She’s as beautiful to me as she was on that day when she dazzled me in the kitchen, holding a pineapple up to the light. I go to great lengths to follow her progress. Knowing her routine gives me pleasure. Ramona’s helpful in this regard; so are my old neighbors, who occasionally respond to my letters. Dolores might have moved anywhere else in the world, but she chose to stay on the ranch. From what I’ve been told, she’s struggled with new water restrictions. She was forced to reduce the size of her herd. But though I failed her in every other respect, I did leave her a great deal of money, so my Dolores will never be forced to sell rights to water or movement. Real earth is still her domain. Kneeling in hay, she nurses the kids with baby bottles, stroking their long, velvet ears. There are still zucchinis in her garden, and she still drives to Austin to visit her cousin. As she grows older in the real world, where droughts are severe and travel is restricted, she’s kept company by our daughter, Ramona, who has single-mindedly cared for her mother since the moment she gave up her bot. What Ramona learned from that doll — the pleasure of devoting one’s life to another — she’s since applied to her mother, who perhaps has not been entirely wronged by those little chattering robots, training wheels for human devotion.

I can write about this now. It wasn’t such a catastrophe. I’ve lost everything, but Dolores has not. Back then, of course, we didn’t know what would happen. Dolores lived with a constant awareness that she might die. In the face of such danger, I nurtured my brutality. It would have been death to face the full extent of my guilt. I was therefore insistently cheery. Taking my cue, Ramona ignored the atmospheric anxiety and blithely played with her doll. She had already fallen in love. She didn’t look up when Dolores walked into the kitchen to fill a glass of water, using the countertop for support. In the office, Ramona and I sat together, I with my computer, she with her bot. I decided to market my doll; why should Ramona alone be the recipient of my genius? Using my laptop, I tracked the success of my latest invention. The babybot was an international hit. At Christmas it caused stampedes, breaking every record in sales. By summer, there were more babybots than children in the state of Texas. Every national talk show wanted me as a guest. For personal reasons, I declined, but once I had, I actually allowed myself to feel noble for giving up glory for the sake of my wife.

Piece by piece, of course, I assembled a more sane reaction. As she suffered the side effects of radiation, I saw the thinness in her vigorous hair, the sallow tint to her skin, and I realized how far away I’d been, how much she’d managed on her own. By then, of course, it was already too late. There are distances that can’t be recrossed. The divorce hearings had already commenced. She asked for sole custody and basic alimony and I added the ranch. She gave me one weekend a month with Ramona. I bought a house with a room for my one-weekend daughter. While the house was being completed, I moved to a hotel in Houston, that empty city, lapped by salt water. Mornings commenced badly and the days became worse. To organize the course of my existence, there could only be the completion of a clerical task that Dolores had asked me to finish. Otherwise, I ghosted all the usual motions, slightly apart from myself, wishing there were some bridge somewhere that would carry me back to the land of the living. I donated my savings to a cancer research organization, but even that brought no relief. When I received the final divorce papers in my hotel room, I signed them at once, not because it was what I wanted to do, but because it was what Dolores had asked for.

Sometimes, I considered routes toward oblivion. I weighed my parents’ addictions against a leap from the turrets. A knife to the throat, a poisoned apple. But I was, after all, still a father. There would be those occasional weekends. Someday, I told myself, I might be asked to help Ramona with something. And so instead of cutting the cord I merely returned to my work. Settled in my new house, I locked myself in my office to create the second babybot. One that could taste, see, touch, smell. The task of creating artificial neurons was insanely expensive, requiring an army of scientists in the lab, but money was rushing in from the first batch of bots and I was glad for the challenge. It allowed me to disregard the all-consuming absence that had engulfed my whole life.