"Your Very Own Robot" by J. Michael Norris
I sat cross-legged in our foyer staring at the front door, daring the FedEx guy to stick a note on the outside and run off without knocking. I was sure he’d done that the past two days; how else did I miss those deliveries? I was on sabbatical; waiting for my son’s toy robot was all I had to do. One more missed attempt meant driving downtown for a pick-up, and that wasn’t going to happen. I positioned myself strategically on the foyer’s uneven tile, a discount terracotta my wife Channing and I picked seven years back when travertine seemed too expensive. Since our son Destin began his stays at Oschner Hospital, a room covered in travertine sounded like a good deal. When the FedEx guy finally knocked, I jumped up and threw open the door, hoping to catch him walking off so I could let him have it. Instead he smiled, handed me a package, then asked me to sign like everything was normal. I scratched my signature across his pad; everything was not normal.
The package seemed smaller than it should, a bit bigger than one for an upright vacuum. When I shook it, something large thumped against the side, followed by a metallic jingle. Figuring I needed to be careful, I carried it upstairs, still wondering if they’d sent me the wrong one.
The robot inside should be around 42” or so, right about the same height as Destin. Our son, short for six, took after my wife: pale, thin, delicate. He was more delicate of late. A mural of Disney cartoons I’d painted when Channing was pregnant covered his bedroom walls, and I realized the time had come for an update. He was getting older, and his recent interest in outer space seemed more suited to him than Bambi and Thumper. Those were kids’ cartoons—he was my little man now. I ripped open the top of the box, probably more enthusiastically than a man of forty should, but I didn’t care. In the past six months, I’d realized how difficult my lifelong attempts at stifling emotions had become.
Miniature metal scaffolding, multicolored wires, and an eyeless, latex head fell out of the box when I turned it upside down. The head bounced and rolled across the room, disappearing beneath the bed. I spread out the other items in front of me and dug through the box for an instruction book, pushing aside rubber arms, legs, and a hard, protective torso casing. When assembled, Your Very Own Robot™ would look a bit like a My Buddy doll from the 80’s, only its eyes would be bright red bulbs and its mouth would move like a Teddy Ruxpin when it spoke. The only instructions I could find, wrapped around two motherboards, were in Japanese and Chinese and some other logographic languages I couldn’t comprehend. I felt like a first-time parent with a newborn baby. After a difficult search on my phone, I found the website for the manufacturer, Robotica Corp., but no link to English instructions. Building a toy robot wouldn’t be any easier than raising a child after all.
It seemed the longer I lived, the more technology replaced the things I knew: cars starting to drive themselves, books made of pixels on shining screens, a phone in my pocket instead of on the kitchen wall. I’d even swapped my cigarettes for a silver, cigar-shaped vape meant to protect me from cancer, yellow teeth, and trips outside. I fished it from my pocket and took a puff, sensing my wife standing in the doorway.
“I didn’t hear you come in.” I said, putting the vape down next to me. I snapped a red wire from one motherboard into a juncture on another.
“I hate you smoking that thing. It smells like scorched microwave popcorn.” I didn’t need to look up to know she was glaring.
“It finally came.” I snapped another red wire into place. “After half a year. You’d think things from China wouldn’t take so long.”
“You should be at the hospital. It’s been three days.”
“At least,” I said, “it’s in time for Christmas. When I’m done with this, I’m going to paint the room.” I set down the pieces and stood up. Channing looked tired, thinner in the face these past few weeks. I tried to kiss her cheek, but she turned away.
“You have the time,” she said. “One of us has to work.”
“I’m thinking dark blue walls covered in bright yellow stars. And planets. Maybe even a rocket ship or . . . or maybe a UFO. And, you know, putting those glow-in-the-dark stickers on the ceiling for when he turns the lights off.” I gestured upward as I spoke, as if my words could show her the things I had in mind.
“I’m thinking of visiting our son. At the hospital.” She slammed the door behind her; a cold rush of air pushed through his room.
* * *
The same week the doctors diagnosed Destin with acute myeloid leukemia, I sent off for a Your Very Own Robot™ as a surprise. Channing had refused to consider a dog or a cat, saying Destin needed to be older to understand responsibility, so he could help out. I resented her for that, for her constant need to be practical. So, I went online and found the most lifelike toy I could find, something that could walk and talk and obey simple commands. Expensive, sure, but my son deserved it. It would give him a companion while he got better, since my wife had ruled out the real thing.
The accident had happened in mid-July. Destin and I, we’d been staycationing at home, him with a break before second grade, me with a break from teaching English Lit at Tulane. I could sense Channing’s jealousy during those summer months, her resentment of our time together. My son and I had been the lucky ones, able to spend hours lounging together in the pool; cooking up s’mores over the barbeque pit; singing old-school R&B songs as loud and off-key as we wanted. TLC was his favorite. My kid was cool.
Cliché, I know, but a warmth as comforting and tangible as the summer’s humid air had settled around us. Our fun came to an abrupt halt the day Destin tripped while running after a butterfly in the backyard. Banged his elbow against a paving stone; a dark brown and purple bruise spread over most of his arm within an hour. I rushed him to the emergency room, so panicked I forgot to give Channing a call.
Destin held his arm against his chest the entire ride, staring at it like an alien creature. “Will it fall off?” he asked halfway to the hospital.
“Of course not. It’s just a bruise.” I jerked the steering wheel, swerving around a car going too slow. I had no idea what was coming, but I needed to keep him calm. “People get bruises all the time.”
“Will they cut it off?”
I focused on the road ahead, alert for potholes and pedestrians—anything that might get in our way. His arm had turned almost completely black. I wondered if they might need to amputate. “They don’t,” I said, “cut off people’s arms because of bruises.”
“They cut off Paw-Paw’s foot. Then he died.”
I noticed a red light, too late to stop. I gunned the engine. “Paw-Paw was different. He had diabetes.” The next light turned red. I slammed on the brakes, flinging my arm out to hold Destin against the seat.
“Am I gonna die like Paw-Paw?” Destin looked at me, begging for comfort. I’m not sure what he saw on my face, but he started bawling.
I threw the car into park and leaned over, closing my arms tight around him. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.” I kissed his head. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
A horn blared, startling me. The light had turned green. I flipped off the driver in the car behind us, shifted into drive, and raced as fast as I could to the hospital.
The results came back in two days; the doctors seemed to know what to look for. Advanced blood cancer. Multiple chromosomal translocations. High mortality.
I assured Destin he would be fine. Staying positive in the face of adversity is always important, right? I’d always said he was my “Destiny without the ‘Why?’” No doubt he’d come through okay. Channing disagreed, thought we should let him know what the real odds were. Said it was only fair. I realized then she couldn’t understand the need to stay positive. My need to stay positive. Our need to stay positive.
The default between us ever since became misunderstanding, a deepening, unnamed resentment that crept in, sending us to opposite sides of our bed at night, forcing us to forgo our pet names. Soon after that I stopped getting up early to make her breakfast and she stopped coming home for lunch even though the bank was only seven blocks away. As each month passed, the season tickets we’d bought for Broadway in New Orleans went straight from the mail into the recycling bin, the envelops unopened.
* * *
The third day after the robot kit arrived, I struggled for hours trying to correctly join the limbs to the body. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t hook the arms to the shoulder sockets or the legs to the hip openings—no, that was fine. Everything fit together, but the robot just wouldn’t move the way it was supposed to. The arms, loose on their joints, swayed from the shoulders. The legs splayed from the hips, akimbo. I hooked the black and red wires for power to the battery box and flipped the switch. The whole production just shook, with one arm beating up, down and around, with no real direction. The headless body looked more like a giant, deranged hand mixer than a robotic boy. I called Robotica Corp’s helpline, but they just kept putting me on an endless loop of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”
After an hour of that, I decided to take a break and get some coffee at Rue de la Course, so I called up my best friend Hector, another English professor at Tulane. He was free, Christmas break and all, and I needed someone to talk to. I hadn’t seen him since starting my sabbatical and figured a face-to-face could help me put things into perspective.
I spotted Hector almost immediately, sitting inside at a wooden table next to a window. He looked like an Englishman from a PBS miniseries, wearing a thick brown sweater, a burgundy scarf, and a green Irish flat cap, typing away at his laptop. I went in and ordered an iced mocha and sat down across from him before he acknowledged me.
“Don’t you think iced coffee is a strange choice for December?” he asked without looking up.
“If it wasn’t seventy out, sure. What are you working on?”
Hector kept typing for a moment, nodded, then said, “Beyond their understanding is the plain lie that lies beneath the plane, a weighty guest standing there, just under the surface, waiting to be guessed.” He shut the laptop, then smiled at me. “Next semester I’m teaching on the fallibility of language. How easy it is to misconstrue things from our unique perceptions. Touching on Saussure. Urban. Presenting some of my own stuff.”
“And that’s your example?”
“No,” he said, cocking his head to inspect me. “My example is bathroom signage. Two rooms, identical. But slap a stick figure lady on the outside and suddenly you can’t go in.”
“So that stuff you just read is?”
“I got bored waiting and strung together some words.” He slouched forward and crossed his arms on the table. “Yes. It is going to be one example. And you look like utter shyte. When was the last time you bathed?”
“I don’t bathe, I shower,” I said. “I’m having some trouble with a toy robot I’ve been putting together for Destin. I needed some air. It’s driving me crazy. Every time I call they toss me down a Titanic death spiral, both literally and figuratively.”
“Titanic death spiral?”
“My Heart Will Go On.” I nodded. “Celine. For an hour straight. But in snippets. Over and over and over—”
“But how’s everything going?” He grinned, furrowing his brow.
“I can’t get the arms and legs to work right. One does. One arm. But it flaps around like a helicopter.” I swirled one of my hands in the air.
“I mean Destin.”
“Oh. He’s fine,” I said. “But Channing’s been off the charts lately. Nagging me non-stop. At the hospital every night until they kick her out.”
“Shouldn’t you be at the hospital every night until they kick you out? You said the last round of chemo didn’t go so well.”
“Not as well as the first couple of rounds, but it’s expected.”
“Cancer is never expected.”
“No,” I said, “but that’s not why I wanted to talk. It’s about Channing.”
“Don’t you think that can wait?” He spoke in a measured tone, as if working out the calculus of his words. “I know it’s difficult to accept—to understand—what’s going on with Destin, but shouldn’t you be spending as much time as you can with him right now? Won’t you regret—”
“I don’t need reality advice from some pompous asshole dressed like it’s thirty out just because it’s December. We live in New Orleans. You don’t need a scarf.” I slapped the table. “And the nurses said it would be better if we gave Destin some space, so I’m giving him some space.”
“Perhaps,” Hector said, maintaining his tone, “they told you that because you’ve been acting a little off?”
“Have you been talking to Channing?”
“She called the other day. Said she was—”
“Fuck you, man.” I stood up from the table, my throat aching. Desperation drained through my body. “I don’t need your shit right now.”
“I’m sorry. Look. I’m just trying to—”
I raised my hand to stop him from talking. “Fuck. You.” I left my coffee.
Things hadn’t always been strained between Channing and me. We met as students at LSU in Baton Rouge, both freshmen in a biology class. I hadn’t figured out my major, not for certain anyhow, but Channing was studying international finance. She was better at science, had the skills to see it in her mind, how it all worked. Somehow, kismet I often said, we’d ended up in a study group together. We were both from New Orleans and liked to kid with the others in the group that we were roughing it up in Red Stick, like pioneers in an unexplored wilderness.
I’d fallen for her the moment I saw her.
She was beautiful. She always kept her hair cut in a short bob that made her look smart, and she had this red flush that came up on her cheeks when she smiled. Destin would inherit that from her, the crimson cheeks, but his seemed to sit on his face like accents in an oil painting, something classic. She had a disarming laugh, loud and free, and she liked to let it loose whenever I tried one of my puns, something I was dedicated to back then. She made the first move, calling me one night after our study group, asking me to get together for coffee later that week. We somehow opted for red wine at my apartment instead and became more honest than coffee would allow. Years later we still shared a joke with our friends about Channing and I “wine-ing” too much that night.
Our courtship was typical, as typical as can be nowadays. We told people we were on the 5-5-5 plan, dating for five years, engaged for another five, and planning for a kid five years later. Channing’s banking mind kept us on schedule through the first ten, and I was lucky enough to get a solid job teaching at Tulane before we’d been married for three. Unfortunately, her ovaries weren’t as regimented as her brain, and we’d be married for almost thriteen years before we finally conceived, and only after help from a doctor. Channing had premature ovarian failure, what people like to call early menopause, and we were lucky we’d gotten started in time to have even one child. He was our one shot. That’s the reason I called Destin our “Destiny without the ‘Why?’” Plus, it was a pretty good pun.
I still remember her coming home with the news. We’d almost finished painting the rooms downstairs, and the house had that new paint smell that reminds me of fresh starts and freedom. We’d had to cut some corners on the house, with the expenses of trying to get pregnant, so we were doing the painting ourselves. Every night for three weeks, I’d come home after teaching two classes, one about Shakespeare and one about Chomsky, change into some tatty jeans and a white T-shirt, and get to work. Channing usually showed up from work a few hours after me, so I was surprised when she got in before I’d even changed into my painting clothes.
“Not feeling well?” I asked when she came into the bedroom and collapsed onto the bed.
She began shuddering, like she was going to cry, then burst into laughter, rolling side to side. I froze, like I usually do when surprised, and just stared at her thrashing back and forth on the bed, happier than I’d seen her in years, kicking her feet.
“We’re pregnant,” she shouted, sitting up and throwing open her arms. “Two months pregnant.”
“We’re pregnant?” I said, watching the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled, wanting to remember the moment forever.
She nodded. “We’re going to have our baby.”
I sat next to her, pulling her close. “We’re going to have our baby?”
She kissed my cheek. “We’re going to have our baby,” she whispered.
We held one another as we cried, eventually passing out, still entwined.
* * *
A few days after my visit with Hector at the coffee shop, I was sitting on the floor in Destin’s room with TLC’s FanMail playing on a loop in the background, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the robot, when I had an epiphany. Maybe the motherboards were in the wrong place. I had fixed the problem with the arms and legs and had gotten the eyes to blink when the robot talked. I was on the right track. I had just started disconnecting some wiring from inside the body when Channing came in, her face red and her eyes bloodshot.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but this is taking longer than expected.” I wrenched the two motherboards out from the hollow cavity of the latex head. “The instructional diagrams, as best I can figure anyhow, say they should go here, but I think they’ll work better where the heart goes.”
“It doesn’t have a heart. It’s a toy.” She jingled her car keys at me. “You’ve been on that thing for almost a week. You need to visit our son.”
I turned the head over in my hands, caressing the smooth rubber scalp with my fingers. It felt almost like rubbing Destin’s scalp, now that his hair was gone. Part of the reason I’d avoided the hospital was the need to reshave my own head. I’d buzzed my hair down and shaved it clean off when Destin started chemo, for moral support and all, but I kept slicing open my skin with the straight razor, getting blood all over the bathroom. Channing insisted I didn’t need to keep doing it, but I had to, to show him I cared. Besides, he’d be out soon. Doctors are famous for giving the worst-case scenario so you’ll feel like they’re heroes when things go well.
“You need to visit our son.” Channing shut off my music and jingled her keys again. “Don’t you understand what’s going on?”
“I’m not a dog,” I said. “And I’ve made a ton of progress, if you’d just look.” I stood up, my back to Channing, and raised the robot up in front of me, carefully lowering the arms to each side. “I call him Yvor, an acronym for the name on the box.” I slid the motherboards into the open hole of the neck, popped the head into place, and flipped on the switch at the base of his back. The red lights poking through his eye sockets lit up, and Yvor raised one hand in the air, as if to ask a question. “See?” I said, turning around to Channing. But she was gone. The doorway stood empty.
“No matter,” I said to Yvor. “As soon as we get you talking, it’ll be time to visit Destin.”
* * *
On Christmas Eve I finally had Yvor ready. I’d tested him all day in Destin’s room, asking him questions, listening to his answers. His mechanical voice struggled with some words, always wanting to sound out silent consonants. It would have to do.
Channing came home from the hospital at lunch, yelling through the door that I needed to stop talking to myself and visit Destin. The desperation in her tone seethed with melodrama, something I’d begun to fault her for. By the sound of her voice, Destin wouldn’t make it through the night.
I forwent shaving my head and decided to take Yvor out to Audubon Park before visiting Oschner, get a little sun and Vitamin D before I surprised Destin with his Christmas gift. I placed Yvor on a bench and practiced some of the things I’d taught him.
“Yvor, wave hello,” I said.
Yvor’s eyes blinked red, his right arm rising above him.
A woman in a pink jogging suit came up to us, pulling a black and white Great Dane. “What is that?” she asked.
“A robot from China. A toy, really. Gift for my son. He’s in the hospital.”
“His arms and legs are so lifelike.”
“My wife hates him,” I said. “I think she’s jealous.”
“She must be,” the lady said. “He’s really gorgeous.” She reached out and squeezed Yvor’s hand.
“Say ‘hello’ Yvor,” I said.
“Hello, Yvor,” he said, his voice tinny.
“Oh.” She smiled. “You’re a ventriloquist. My Uncle Bob was a ventriloquist.”
“No.” I shook my head. “It’s all him. Say ‘nice to meet you’ Yvor.”
“Nice to meet you, Yvor,” he said, his eyes blinking.
The lady giggled, smiling and tilting her head at me as if we were friends sharing a joke. “That is a really good act.” She pinched her thumb and forefinger together in front of her eyes. “But your lips are moving ever-so-slightly.”
I laid Yvor on the bench. “Listen lady,” I said, my voice rising, “I don’t know where you get off, but Yvor has taken me almost two weeks to build. And I am bringing to my son this afternoon.”
Alarm flashed across the woman’s face and she backed away, jerking at her dog’s leash. “Forgive me. I’m so very sorry to hear about your son.”
“And I don’t appreciate you coming up to me and being such a bitch!” I yelled as she jogged away.
***
When I got to Destin’s hospital room, I stood outside for several minutes, trying to decide how I should explain the time that had passed since I’d visited. Something about being there made it all feel so real. He’d understand, it was his nature, but I still needed to find the right words. I stuck a green bow I’d bought at the hospital gift shop on the crown of Yvor’s head and decided to let the robot do the talking, certain that would explain things better than I could. When I opened the door, the sight of my son in the bed, shrunken and bruised, shocked me, and for a moment I was dizzy, as if gravity had somehow stopped working.
A tube taped to the side of his face snaked up into his nose; a clear mask covered his mouth, a plastic hose leading from it off the side of the bed. His bald head, tinged yellow, sank into the pillow, making him look smaller than I remembered. His eye sockets were brown smudges, like he’d been punched. I could barely make out his body under the mound of blankets draped over him. Channing sat in a chair beside the bed, cradling his small hand in hers, an IV leading away from his wrist into a bag hung next to him. Beeping filled the room, with the occasional whoosh of a machine breathing in and out. The air smelled like disinfectant and decay.
“You came,” Channing said, looking up from Destin as the door closed behind me. She positioned his hand on his stomach and stood up. “Come say hello.”
I hoisted Yvor onto the bed between Destin’s feet. “Hey buddy,” I said, “I got you this little guy for Christmas.”
The equipment in the room continued its rhythmic beeping. The breathing machine wheezed.
I gazed at Destin’s face, willing his eyes to open. I squeezed his foot.
“I’m not sure he can hear you,” Channing said. “He’s been like this for a few days now.”
“Hey, Destin,” I said. “This is Yvor. He’s even more machine than you are.” I smiled at Channing as tears welled in her eyes. “Yvor is going to be your new best friend.” I rubbed my hand along Destin’s leg, his knee sharp and angular, even under the covers. “I’ve taught him to walk, and talk, and he can even sing that song you like so much. The one about the waterfalls.”
A mangled snort escaped Channing’s nose. She covered her mouth with her hand.
“Now, I know you’re probably a little mad at me for not coming, but I promise it was worth it.” I reached behind Yvor and flipped on his switch. “Now Yvor, say ‘hello.’” I looked at the robot, its eyes dead. I flipped the switch off and on again. “Give us just one second, Destin. Sometimes it’s tricky. Yvor, say ‘hello.’”
Confused, I looked over at Channing. She kept her eyes trained on Destin, her jaw trembling.
I flipped the robot on and off several times. “Yvor!” I shouted, shaking the robot. “Say ‘hello!’” The green bow fell from Yvor’s head, landing upside-down on the floor.
Channing sat back in the chair and took Destin’s hand in hers, petting it.
“It’s usually not like this, buddy,” I said, lowering my voice. “I promise. Just give us a little more time. Okay?”
I stared at the robot’s lightbulb eyes, hoping it would speak.
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