Just a Vacuum Cleaner

Issue #2 of Hokem Magazine is out. It’s a thing I’ve been working on with my friend Bob. I mentioned it here before, but with Issue #2 out in the world, I thought I’d share my piece from Issue #1.

Ultimately, a robot’s goal is to convince you it’s not a robot. I’m a vacuum cleaner. I’m a personal assistant. I clean your house. I organize your schedule and tell you the temperature. These are stupid human tricks. A robot isn’t seeking to be as smart as a person. It is trying to be as dumb.

It was 8F and windy. The streets were blue gray with ice, salt and snow. My breath billowed and fogged my glasses. In places, the mix of sodium chloride and sand spread on the road surface left improbable, murky puddles, and that slurry ran down my shins, splattering up from my front wheel.

I pushed through the front office door into a warm, fluorescent glow. Stella said, “Aren’t you cold?” shaking her head and laughing.

“I’m fine,” I said, and trundled off to the bathroom to change.

Later, my brother said, “Robots don’t feel cold.” In the moment, I thought he was paying me a compliment. He’d been in the Army, and after that, in an Eastern European criminal gang. He was saying I was tough. I liked that.

In retrospect, I see that he was actually using the opportunity to point out my emotional detachment, my willingness to judge, my smug sense of superiority. I was failing to process how the world viewed my behavior.

Robots are task-oriented, not perceptive. Stimuli need to be specific.

What does it mean to be tough anyway? Toughness is a retroactive assessment of an array of tasks and the style in which they have been completed. In this sense, a robot might be good at moving from point A to point B in conditions that a human person might balk at.

Humans describe and dissemble. They eschew. Robots execute.

I embraced the role.

The stone-colored sky opened and snow fell like a billion downy feathers, piling everywhere. The rush hour sat stationary, tailpipes smoking, every car like a tent in the wilderness, drivers seething with impatience and incredulity.

And I churned at the pedals. My studded tires bit the surface and kept me upright. The going was slow but steady, and I could feel the eyes of all those drivers on my back as I rode away. “He’s crazy,” they thought.

“They’re jealous,” I said to no one.

When my brother called, I knew it was bad news. It’s the only kind he ever delivered. “Hey, can you give me a ride home from the hospital?” he started. “They’re not going to treat me anymore.”

A ride home is a simple task. Drive to the hospital. Enter the too bright lobby. Speak to the friendly nurse at the discharge desk. Wheel your brother to the car. Hold his rail thin body as he rises from the wheelchair. Swivel him into the passenger seat. Ignore his groans of pain. Make a bad joke. Close the door.

I have sat as still as possible in the saddle on the side of a steep climb in winter, my back nearly seized from holding that position, from continuing to make the power to rise up and up and up. There is nothing to do in those moments but hurt. Sit and hurt. That’s riding bikes sometimes.

And I have sat at the end of my brother’s faux leather couch, looking across at his waxen face in a rented hospital bed, his breathing shallow, his closed eyelids shot through with capillaries. I have run out of silence-breaking jokes and exhausted my ability to drink drip coffee as a momentary salve for whatever these feelings are.

You train your whole life for moments like this one.

I sat and did what there was to do,  things that still need doing though the patient is beyond help, and I did my best to swallow every drop of bad blood there’d ever been between us. I was calm, and I smiled at my nephews, at my sister-in-law, at my mother, because they needed to be smiled at, to be reassured that everything would be ok, even though very little would be ok.

And when he was gone, I stood in the parking lot outside his shitty, small apartment, and I cried for the first time in years, wishing I could be just a vacuum cleaner.