Nessie
by Benjamin Hale
There is no such thing as a cyborg. I have not spent the last decade of my life developing processors built from living tissue. I have never built a brain from these processors. And I am not keeping a cyborg in the spare bedroom of my 42nd floor loft in Manhattan. This cyborg, the one that doesn’t exist, does not dream. Neither does she record her dreams in prose, poetry, canvas or dance. This cyborg does not make art. I don’t fix this cyborg toast in the morning, and I have never made an asparagus tomato omelette for her. She doesn’t take cream with her coffee and she never drinks high-pulp orange juice.
The one thing that all the frequenters of my art gallery agree on is, for someone who works over forty hours a week at a biochemistry lab and twenty more at a technological research institute, I find a lot of time for mosaic, watercolor, airbrushing, gouache, visual poetry, stenciling and marquetry.
“I barely have the energy for my nine to five. Where do you find all the inspiration, the creativity, the time?”
And less often, “What kind of sweat-shop labor do you use for your art?” And there, the pang of guilt.
But even if I am exploiting a cyborg for her art she has it pretty easy. Plus, I fucking created her—hypothetically, of course. The most I ever ask of her is to read to me when my eyes are too tired from looking into microscopes all day. Or when I don’t want to put away the dishes, I’ll have her handle a few pots and pans. I’m not forcing her to be an artist, it is a natural release for the superabundance of information constantly in her brain. And I never make her cook. She prefers my mac and cheese over anything she attempts. Her preference is well founded—she is useless in the kitchen.
I don’t want you to think I’m making mac and cheese for her all the time. I usually stop by the yuppie market on my way home and buy overpriced local, organic groceries for dinner. We rarely have leftovers. Braised pork with cranberry sauce, fried tilapia with lemon-dill artichoke, fresh mozzarella and basil pizza, roasted potatoes topped with bacon gravy and fresh chives. When she decided to go vegan for a few weeks I could hardly stand it. Spinach salad with strawberries and lime-cilantro dressing. Spaghetti squash and tofu meatballs. Split pea soup without bacon. Rhubarb and jicama and so much fucking zucchini. I’m glad that phase is over. Bring on the corned beef and cabbage for Saint Patrick’s Day, the roasted lamb with all-red potatoes for Christmas and the sautéed onions with baked apples and sun-dried tomato sausage for no special occasion. Cooking is my only potentially lucrative art.
I have named her. I was calling her Golem during the early stages of development but after watching a Discovery Channel special on the Loch Ness monster I decided on Nessie. The main difference between her and the dinosaur is that, as far as I know, she has never been spotted and there isn’t a TV special about her. Yet.
Nessie doesn’t find much use in clothes, which isn’t to say she is walking around naked all the time. She has about forty bathrobes of different styles and colors that she rotates weekly, daily, hourly. And on those days after a dreamless sleep, I imagine she changes her bathrobe every forty-five seconds or so. It is a harmless game of clothing roulette—when she reaches her last clean bathrobe, she wears it until I get home and do six loads of bathrobe laundry. Permanent press with scent-free detergent and medium heat dry with cool down cycle. She doesn’t like for me to hang her bathrobes. She arranges them by sleeve length, hem style, color, robe length, length of waist tie, fineness of fabric, softness of fabric—she arranges them about as often as she changes them on a day after dreamless sleep, and still she tells me she has no use for clothes.
On the mornings after Nessie doesn’t dream I blame myself. I can see the sadness in her eyes and I know I haven’t stimulated her enough. Usually after dinner we watch a movie or read together. Since she memorizes books and movies instantly, there are few that have replay value. There Will Be Blood and The Secret Garden are the only two movies she is almost always in the mood for and I usually have to talk her out of reading either the Tao Te Ching or Of Mice and Men because even I have these memorized by now. Some days I am too tired or too disinterested to settle into stimulation. Some days I just want to sit on my balcony and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and watch the traffic forty-two stories below me. Nessie doesn’t drink but she doesn’t object to my whisky and she tells me she can see the practical application. And I always respond, “that’s more than I can say for my family.” She likes that.
On my first day off in weeks I woke up to find Nessie’s bedroom/studio covered in paint. I own this loft so I don’t mind. We finished The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus around two in the morning and I was surprised by her response. I couldn’t shut up about it but she hardly said a word. Usually we talk for hours about movies of this caliber. But she just walked over to her treadmill and started jogging with a five pound weight in each hand. I went to bed. In the morning I realized she had liked it. More than I had, for that matter, as she not only recreated Mount Parnassus but did so in some kind of tach-realism, a genre of art that exists about as much as Nessie.
“This is one of my favorites, Nessie. I mean that.”
“That’s usually what you say. Thirty four out of fifty seven times.”
Nessie remembers everything. And she reduces fractions: out of the four hundred and fifty six pieces she has completed, I have said two hundred and seventy two of them are “one of my favorites.” I wouldn’t say that means I usually say it, but she is the cyborg and has access to more mathematics than the Library of Congress. She can connect with the wireless Internet in my apartment by closing her eyes. (The closing-the-eyes bit is something I designed specifically so I would know when she was cheating in our Scrabble games. I had forgotten during our first couple games that she could just download the Scrabble dictionary before the game and access it while telling me about some pigeon that ate crumbs out of her hand on our balcony. I refuse to play against her in chess. You should see her finish a crossword puzzle. Seconds.) She knows when I am looking at pornography, which is seldom, and lets me know she disapproves by marching around singing “another man’s dick, make yourself sick” which is a rhyme she must have made up on a day after dreamless sleep.
The one thing I have to watch for in Nessie is suicidal tendencies. Because she is made of technology and human DNA she is prone to human emotion. I don’t want to explain my theories on why depression manifests itself in humanity but I will say that I didn’t expect suicide to be one of the major problems in having a cyborg as a roommate. I was more afraid of being choked to death in my sleep, but unwarranted violence is nowhere to be seen in her genetic makeup. The faculty for it is certainly there but with this little Shangri-La of an existence I’ve created for her I doubt she will never the need to execute the fatal attacks she has learned from top secret military documents or YouTube videos. I have seen her practice on stuffed animals.
Nessie’s depression after a night of dreamless sleep just kills me. The day I stop discovering evocative films or books or poems is the day I will regret creating her. But for now I can’t see an end to the mental and artful stimuli. Every time I discover an obscure Korean director or Irish author or Sri-Lankan poet I can see weeks of inspiration lined up for Nessie. And myself—her insatiable thirst for knowledge has done wonders for my own cognition.
§
I met Cholera at an exhibit premiere in my gallery of Nessie’s art. I chuckled at her name and she explained that her eccentric parents, both lawyers, read too much Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the night of her conception. "It is such a beautiful word for such a terrible thing," her mother justified to me, "not that our Chol is a terrible thing, I just, I mean"—and I saw in her eyes that she regretted it even if her daughter fully embraced it. Most people called her Chol but I enunciated every syllable every chance I got. She thought I was flirting, which I never do. I was thinking about getting home to Nessie. I left her with the original Star Wars trilogy which I had been saving for a special occasion. After the champagne toast I switched to whiskey and Cholera slowly became more and more interesting. She was fascinated by my art and repeatedly complimented my feminine touch. I told her she should see my interpretive dance to 8½, Fellini’s masterpiece, and felt an instant twinge of reproach. I didn’t know a single step of Nessie’s original ballet. Cholera suggested I perform the dance at her house, in the privacy of her bedroom.
On my end it was long overdue. It had been years since I had sex. I didn’t miss it until I had it and then I couldn’t have enough. In became a very regular thing.
Nessie was left for the most part to her own devices. I would come home after work, cook dinner for her, drop a stack of DVDs by the television and leave to meet Cholera. I didn’t tell Nessie about her but insisted that work was getting hectic. Lying to a cyborg is like palming a card in a game of poker against a magician. I designed her to identify bullshit and I was trying to feed it to her every night.
§
The first thing I felt upon coming home from an evening with Cholera was selfish fear. Outside my building emergency lights lit up the entire block. And when I reached the 42nd floor I smelled smoke and saw firemen in my loft through my open door. A police detective came out of Nessie’s room, jotting things down on a pad of paper. “Sir, do you live here?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.” He glanced over his shoulder at Nessie’s closet full of bathrobes. “Officer, what the hell is going on?”
“It seems there’s been an intruder, though there’s no sign of forced entry. A lot of your property has been destroyed, mostly artwork and books. There appearss to be no structural damage. Does anyone else have a key to your apartment?”
“No.”
“This wasn’t some random break-in. It must’ve been someone you pissed off. This was malicious destruction of property. Anyone like that you can think of?”
I shook my head no. Nessie.
It wasn’t malicious. There is a delicate boundary being crossed when creating a cyborg. A computer can’t feel emotion, but a human can’t memorize the Encyclopedia and reference it for you by volume, page, paragraph. But no matter how programmed my Nessie was, there was enough human in her that I forgot about the processors. I forgot about about the hard drives and the circuitry. And still I forgot about the heart. The human heart, built from my DNA.
Tomorrow, in the news, I’ll learn about a homeless protester whose cause was lost in a suicidal fire in Queens. Some Jane Doe in a bathrobe, whose legacy is as blurry as a photograph of the Loch Ness monster.
This cyborg, the one that doesn’t exist, does not dream.