VAN GOGH SYNDROME

                                                   story by                                                                                                                         

                                              Patrick Breheny   

                     published 2018 by Havik Press in their anthology RISE

       I’m Howie. Full first name. My twin Harry believed he had a masterpiece. He wrote it in longhand in notebooks

 and used internet cafes to type it, printing his pages for revision. He lived in the old Crown Hotel on Sukhumvit

Road at Soi 29 in Bangkok, presently under new ownership, renovated, and renamed the Retro Oasis, charging

 four times what it was when Harry stayed there, then a two story horseshoe shaped structure, unpainted for forty

years, with a big, chipped, brown brick bathtub of a swimming pool in the center of the compound, which was really a motel with

low wattage lighting in the interior corridors, but it was cheap, kept clean despite faded and ripped sheets, towels, bedspreads,

and the rooms were big. (Harry avoided such run on sentences unless he could justify them as thought progression, not

descriptive prose. We have similarities, but each has his own identity.)

    He had what he thought of as a companion, one of the advanced robots

 programmed as a female with a personality, a computer beyond state of the art,

contracted to him from the Robo-Mate agency It sweated and emitted the other

secretions and excretions, bled, snored, got the flu, had opinions, made demands, argued, and could compromise, but would

never age or die. They made it too real. There were times it told Harry she didn’t feel like it.

     His fanaticism about the manuscript infected her too. If that was all he dedicated

himself to, it had to be valuable. Not in this lifetime, Harry thought, but he had faith

in its unacclaimed worth. Van Gogh syndrome would befall him, generations to come

would praise his genius. Yet he knew if he were to, shall we say, croak at the Crown

Hotel, the building staff would clear the room quickly of anything that looked

immediately salable.

    I have to mention the floors in the rooms at the Crown. They were large,

rectangular sections of ceramic tile, just the right size for 8 ½” x 11” paper to fit

beneath, so he dug away the grout and raised one. As his output thickened, he

carved into the wooden floor beam to make more room. He surmised that if he never

put any weight on that beam the floor wouldn’t collapse, calculated its straight line

trajectory in the room, and warned Mildred not to step there either.

     Advanced as was the current machine he'd leased, they had overlooked details.

 She was English illiterate, though could more or less speak it, had no idea what

Harry was doing hiding those documents, nor what was in the many formal pieces of

mail he received (those were rejections from agents and publishers)  but as I say

deduced that the big hidden collection was bounty. He tried to explain some of it.

She definitely wasn't stupid, got character, but he had the devil’s own time

elucidating his style and structure to a model that wasn't implanted to read English,

and had a different assigned native language.

     Keeping it away from the part of the floor where the weakened beam was was

tricky. She just seemed to have a mind of her own. No matter what he told it to do,

she wasn’t the driverless car he wanted, that operated autonomously until you

instructed it not to. He consoled himself with the notion that the independence and

flaws made her seem more human, and after all no one is perfect. 

       For a week, Harry had intentionally neglected to swallow his--- our---

specifications quota of one half pint of oil per day. He was bone dr---alloy dry---

inside. When his project was finished, he instead drank three of those large bottles of

vodka straight down, cut off his ear to make his intention clear, then his motor

seized up. The authorities of course thought his demise had a more human cause,

like a stroke or a heart attack, and nobody too closely examined a near indigent

foreign vagabond who’d apparently died of natural causes. He did have my phone

number posted prominently on a dresser mirror as an emergency contact, and the

manager called me, Mildred being too distraught to handle that.

     Poor old Harry. Well, he believed his work would be discovered and it was. I knew

of it, and thought it might be marketed in New York's Soho as a stunning avant

garde work by a primitive---Harry having no actual experiences or personal history

any more than myself---but his novel had degenerated from the designer's literary

aspiration to fetishes for girders, nuts, bolts and various steels and wires. By the

time I arrived, the crew had put it in a pile with all the yesterday’s newspapers from

other rooms. Mildred told me she tried to keep its existence from them, but they’d

long known from the room cleaners about that loose tile and uncovered it. She then

tried to get them to leave it with her, but after one of them who could read English

browsed it, they answered “Recycle”, so Harry was correct---it was worth something

in the real world.

     I’ve never seen one of us express grief. We don’t mourn each other,that would

be silly, yet Mildred was inconsolable. I confess I became impatient with it. I said,

“Harry was just a thing.” That made her worse. I data’d, Okay it was programmed

well, she needs comforting. I tried to address legacy, explained that even

Shakespeare might have been one of us that travelled back in time. Nobody’s sure

who wrote those plays, but they exist. Of course that wasn’t going to happen to

Harry’s effort. Yet I reminded her that even if it was deemed irrelevant trash fit only

for salvage, both it, and Harry, and she herself for that matter, were immortal

whatever shapes their forms eventually took because even if molecules aren’t

 forever their protons are.

     Instead of bringing her the relief I’d hoped for, my comment---motivated really

because that indulgent shrieking was searing my listening sensors---seemed proof to

her that I was incapable of understanding. I began to suspect it wasn’t Harry, but

losing the progeny of his obsessive scrawling, in belief that she’d lost her treasure,

that was causing such agony. I also thought she might be registering low, which can

cause imbalances. The room had two water glasses on a night stand, and I sought to

remedy her situation, and at the same time reassure her, by popping a fresh shiny

quart can of oil and asking her to share a drink with me. 

       It was then that, as you might say, she just totally lost it.

       Twixt gasps and sobs she finally out with it:

       “YOU can’t know what its like to be a human being serving a robot.”

       Yeah, maybe she was programmed to even say that, but I doubt it.

       I haven’t been the same since.

       I DO know what it is to be a robot serving a human.

       I took what she said… personally…as a prejudiced attack...

       Even if she was designed to lie, she thought she was human.

       Saw herself as shamed and humiliated, de-HUMAN-ized by her assignment

       She (definitely not "it") is better than us, we are only there to serve her (you),

you should never serve us...

       Whether she thought she was human because of input information or really is

I don’t know.

       She didn’t drink oil or wouldn’t be seen drinking it. Let’s see if she gets wrinkles.

       I do know this...I felt …I felt that …

      Yes, I FELT...

      Her cruel, selfish words of pity for her feelings...deeply hurt...my feelings...