Kathryn Davis - Duplex

It was the time of day when the moon and sun are both out at once. The girl rode to the end of the block, across the vacant lot and up the hill past the school and the water tower and over the trestle bridge. The shadow of the scow rode behind her, tapping her onward like a cat toying with the mouse it’s about to eat. She loved pumping her legs, feeling her heart beating — from above it was the size of the end of a pencil. The street ran along the western edge of the Woodard Estate and the only way in was a driveway so overgrown with vines she would have ridden right past it if it weren’t for the two goddesses crouched atop pillars at the entryway. “Young lady!” Aphrodite called. “Over here!” She was missing her nose, but Athena was missing her whole head, which was a pity since what the girl needed to hear more than anything at this point was the voice of reason.

I’m not telling her name, Janice said, so don’t bother to ask. It would make it hard to pay attention to the story.

At first the driveway was almost impassable, and the girl had to get down off her bike to wheel it in. She could see little eyes suspended in the thicket of bushes on either side of her, could hear the sound of small things moving under the blanket of vines, but she was too excited to feel frightened. The light was behaving the way it always did at the end of the day, the sun having hit bottom like an apple thrown down a well. Perhaps this is why she didn’t notice when the driveway began to change before her very eyes.

Now the lamps went on, guiding her footsteps. Mechanical things are able to communicate with one another, the way mushrooms grow out of a single long strand of fungus underground. The road was clear of brush and laid with paving stones and up ahead she could see the mansion, the windows brightly lit.

Very eyes, someone said. What are very eyes?

Shh! said someone else.

Inside the mansion the scow’s operational apparatus was waiting for her. The system was much less sophisticated in those days. It was a young man, but everything was not quite right about him. Still, it was extremely handsome, in an overly polished, highly buffed way. It could dance, like most robots, better than humans, and the girl was clumsy on her feet. Her father said she could trip on a smooth linoleum floor. She knew right away she’d been tricked, but she didn’t mind, because it was giving her its special pleading look, the one it had been designed to give her, to win her heart. It had nothing to do with love! It was her fate, remember? It could come from out of nowhere and mow a person down just like sickness, and no matter how many things the doctors did to try to stop it, no matter how many machines they brought in or how many parts of the sick person’s body they replaced with parts of a healthy person’s body, it kept moving, killing everything in its path, until all that was left was a jar of ashes.

She was a nice middle-class girl and he was a garbage man, which is the way this often happened in movies. And then he would turn out to be a prince or something like that.

They danced and they danced; the robot knew exactly how to lead the girl to make it seem like she knew what she was doing, and the music helped as well, because it was coming from a peardrum. Next time, he said, bring your friends. He encouraged her to imagine herself whirling among them, the most graceful and beautiful one in the bunch, stirring their envy, because after all she deserved to be envied, he said, just look at you!

It was then she noticed the mirror that ran along the entire side of the ballroom. How can that be, she thought, for the windowpanes reflected in it were missing or broken, with pieces of glass still stuck in the frames like knives, and the outside of the building was overgrown with a thick net of creeper that kept the whole thing from falling in a heap. The dancing partner looked handsomer than ever, the girl herself like a fluid shapeless sac of parts held together by skin and the skin pulsing with blood and pink with smudges here and there of hair and blowing panels of fabric. Meanwhile the creeper was filling with more and more gray-brown birds, hundreds of tiny bright eyes and beaks, cheeping and fluffing their wings.

This was the way robots viewed living flesh ever since they’d been granted the gift of color-sightedness and prophecy to compensate for the fact that they would never know love. In the robot universe there were six windows through which the sun rose, six windows through which the sun set, and the stars moved around opening and shutting the windows like servants. Even though they had no interest in the way humans measured time or how the planets affected their actions, the robots knew Mercury retrograde was a point of crisis for them, inaugurating a period of voluptuous activity, one that would grow more and more intense as the days grew shorter.

Really, it told her. Bring your friends! It told her there was a nice surprise in store for her if she did.

When the girl got home her shoes were torn to ribbons. Her father sat there in his easy chair in his white shirt and khaki pants, looking through his reading glasses at her worn-out shoes, the expression on his face like that of a person going through a closet trying to find some worthless article of clothing he suddenly realized he wanted more than anything. His hair had turned gray at the temples but was otherwise thick and black, his skin mostly unwrinkled. He hadn’t changed that much since when he was a boy, really — the girl was the one who had changed. I’m not made of money, you know, her father said and the girl laughed, because who was? People weren’t made of paper or metal. That was what made them people.

The next day she returned to the mansion, only this time she took her friends. Girls can talk other girls into doing things with them by making it seem like it’s the “in” thing to do, like trading cards or taking ballet lessons or going all the way or entering a religious order. When Eddie signed with the Rockets it wasn’t because he would have felt left out if he didn’t. He loved to play baseball — boys have always been more blatantly competitive and they enjoy roughhousing. Still, for the girl to get her friends to go with her she had to twist the truth. Another thing girls do is lie to get what they want. For instance she didn’t mention the mirror or that there was only the one dance partner.

How many friends did she take? someone asked. Because I think I know this story.

Lots, Janice said. Maybe sixteen or seventeen. Twenty? All the girls from her class, anyway. It was the first generation of girls.

That’s not the way the story goes, someone else said. There should be twelve.

But Janice wasn’t telling “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” That was make-believe. This was history.

The girls got to the mansion just as it was getting dark. Like now, Janice said, only night was sadder then. The wind was blowing and it was starting to rain, real rain, not what came later. O western wind when wilt thou blow that the small rain down can rain. Poets used to write things like that. The mansion windows were ablaze and the girls could hear music, very sweet and exciting, strings and horns and woodwinds and maybe, just maybe, if only they’d been listening more closely, if only they’d stopped their endless chatter and paid attention for a change, they also might have heard the tap-a-tap-tap of the peardrum.

A peardrum, in case you don’t know, Janice said, is shaped like a guitar and has three strings, but only two pegs to tune them with, and a little square box attached to the side for keeping fairies. They’re the most beautiful fairies of all; their faces are like crystal but alive, with real eyes that can see and the sweetest little tongues! You never want to let them out, though. They have no regard for human life.