Kathryn Davis - Duplex

Of course there were enough dance partners to go around — one of the beauties of the operational apparatus was that it could be reproduced infinitely and at the drop of a hat. Every girl thought her partner was the handsomest and that she was the loveliest girl in the room. The later it got the harder it was to hear a thing over the noise of the orchestra and the dancers’ feet and the wind and the rain and the gray-brown birds. The girls were never able to compare notes to figure out what was happening — dictators gather crowds for the same reason. The rain swept in through the broken windows. The wind blew away the girls’ dresses. They were too busy thinking how ugly all the other girls looked to look at themselves in the mirror.

No one noticed when the first girl got taken up.

Taken up where? someone asked.

I would have noticed, said someone else.

Janice whirled around. You don’t notice anything, she said. None of you do! She pointed at the cigar box in my lap. It was empty. Did you see her stealing your cards? she asked. They’re your ticket out of here! Don’t you know anything? Where are your mothers and fathers? Shouldn’t they be calling you in right about now?

It is true, the full moon had risen so high in the sky it didn’t look any bigger than the baseball one of the boys had left lying on the grass verge below the stoop. The boys had gone home long ago; the street was perfectly quiet except for the sound of piano music coming from down the block. Whatever it was it was being played at the correct tempo, so it couldn’t be Mary.

If I could only begin to be a queen, Janice said, talking to herself, I could go wherever I pleased. She sighed and patted her hair, adjusting her hairdo the way the mothers did.

They were taken up in the scow, she said. One after another. The operator got there first and was treating his girl to a cocktail in a crystal goblet. From above, the mansion looked like a snack cake, with shadows sticking out at angles that didn’t make any sense unless you took into account the blue light cast by the scow.

Inside the scow everyone was busy drinking cocktails and trading cards. The robots thought of this as foreplay, having no understanding of physical intimacy. According to the prophecy a child was going to come along that would be part human and part robot and this child was going to change everything. Of course it was way too soon — both sides were totally unprepared, not to mention the fact that they had their parts mixed up. The girls were only interested in romance, and the robots in completing a transaction. Oddly enough, both sides were hoping for the same pair of cards, Blue Boy and Pinkie. The cards originally came from a deck belonging to the girl’s parents. Her parents had no need for jokers, since they played bridge, not poker. The cards were beautiful, with gold rims.

I’ve heard of them, someone said. Those cards were even more beautiful than the horses.

There used to be lots of beautiful cards, said someone else. Then the fairies got loose.

Listen to me, Janice said. Leave the fairies out of this. Do you hear?

Pinkie had belonged to Mary, she said. Everyone knew the story of how the sight of her blood on the sidewalk had moved Eddie to tears. The stain was still there — you just had to know where to look for it. Mary used to think of Eddie as Blue Boy, with his dark hair and soft lips and studiously downcast expression. She thought of Pinkie as herself, even though she would never have dreamed of wearing a hat that had to be tied with pink ribbons. To see her now you’d never know she’d been one of the ugly girls.

There’s no such thing as an ugly girl, someone said. My mom told me.

No one bothered to disagree, the idea was so stupid.

At first they didn’t notice, they were too busy trading, Janice said. Ever since the wind blew their dresses away the girls were just in their underwear; most of them had on bras, even if they didn’t need them. The robots moved closer.

The girl had gotten a little drunk from the cocktail. She was sitting on the floor of the scow when her dance partner reached across the cards piled between her spread legs and slid his finger up under the crotch of her panties. It was cool, his finger, being made of titanium, and he used it to stroke her, first on the outside, running it over her pubic hair until she began to moan, and then sliding it inside her. She’d done this to herself but she’d never had it done to her.

Everyone knows what I’m talking about, right? said Janice. Once you start you can’t stop, isn’t that so? Just try stopping and see where it gets you.

Now all the girls were lying on the floor with their knees pointing to the ceiling and their legs spread. Everything was going fine as long as the robots kept using their fingers. Give me the card, said the girl’s dance partner. The robots had based their plan on information they’d read in a book somewhere: “Rooted fast she’ll turn to flame and change her form but keep her love the same.”

Give me the card, the girl’s dance partner said again, sliding his finger in deeper. The card, or I’ll stop. There was one big pile with all sorts of cards in it. There was a fruit basket, a parrot in a cage, a red rose, a white rose, a bridge over a river, a black Lab, a golden Lab, the Mona Lisa, a kitten, a tree, another bridge, a robin, a pear, the Potato Eaters. All of this was being offered for Pinkie. To make the pair with Blue Boy, who was being kept hidden away in the drinks cabinet.

Take it, the girl said. The robot took this to mean the transaction was complete. It lowered itself into her.

What happened next was too horrible to describe. Naturally the girl hadn’t changed form the way the robot thought she would — none of the girls had changed form. The information the robots based their plan on was poetry, which they are incapable of understanding.

Janice poked me hard between the ribs.

You think that hurts? she said when I began to cry. That’s nothing compared to what it felt like. Nothing. You can’t even begin to imagine. Supposedly the sound the girls made was so loud no one could sleep. It wasn’t like being torn to pieces, because pieces are big. It was like having the smallest parts of your body like the corpuscles and peptides and nuclei and follicles rip loose from one another, every single one of them. The parts were so small they were practically invisible and all different colors, the main ones being red and yellow and blue. They were gorgeous if you didn’t know what they were. There was nothing left of the girls. Nothing for the doctors to replace with new parts, nothing.

The robots washed everything down the drain in the floor of the scow and for days afterward it rained beads. People tried leaving out bowls and buckets and trash cans to catch the parts — there was a rumor that if you caught all the parts of a girl she could be put back together again and you could keep her for your own. The mothers and the fathers tried hardest, of course.

Like Humpty Dumpty, said the littlest girl.

What about the fairies? someone else asked.

Shh, someone said, checking to see if Janice was going to get angry.

But she was off on another planet as she often was after telling a story. It had grown so dark you couldn’t see the expression on her face. The lightning bugs were out and they were the only bright thing on the block, except for the light at the other end of the street in Mrs. Trimble’s attic, where her grown-up son lay smoking cigarettes and reading books by French intellectuals.

The fairies? Janice said. Look! There’s one! She reached out and caught a lightning bug and squashed it in her hand.

You’re blaming the robots, right? That’s what everyone did. The robots didn’t mean to start trouble. They weren’t happy about what happened. It was a mistake, and they don’t like it when they make mistakes. It was no different from when a nuclear reactor blows up and for years afterward radioactivity rains down from the sky making people sick. It was better than that, even, because the robots wanted to make things better. It wasn’t their fault they didn’t understand the poem.