Published RUNNING WILD NOVELLA ANTHOLOGY Volume 3, 2019 (sequel to the story
VAN GOGH SYNDROME published by Havik Press, 2018, and included within for conituity)
LIKE A HUMAN, novella by Patrick Breheny
I’m Howie the ‘bot, and as I write this, I am still living at the old Crown Hotel here in
Bangkok. My facsimile twin was Harry, who was living with Mildred, possibly bot, but I
suspect human--- as she declared during her emotional outburst when Harry
self-destructed by swallowing too many fifths of vodka, instead of our specified half pint
of oil, after cutting off his hearing sensor to imitate Van Gogh.
Harry and I were programmed as literary endeavors. I wrote about Harry’s demise as if it were fiction, and it was published in the
Havik Press anthology RISE from Las Positas College in California. I wrote it under an alias, as I am doing here, because, well, Howie
The Bot doesn’t do for me as a pen name.
To get you up to speed, this is the short ‘story’ that was published in RISE:
VAN GOGH SYNDDROME
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, 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. Back then it was a cheap motel with low wattage lighting in the interior corridors; the rooms were big and it was kept
clean despite faded and ripped sheets, towels, bedspreads. (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 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 the current machine he'd leased was, 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 (rejections from agents and publishers) but
deduced that the big hidden collection was bounty. He tried to explain some of it.
She definitely wasn't stupid, she got character, but he had the devil’s own time
elucidating his style and structure to a model that had a different assigned native language and wasn't programmed to read English.
Keeping her away from that 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 her 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 I did---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 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
tried to get them to leave it with her, but one of them who could read English and
browsed it, and 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 her. 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
by her indulgent shrieking that 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 nightstand, 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 it’s like to be a human being serving a robot.”
Yeah, maybe she was programmed to 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…
END OF VAN GOGH SYNDROME, STORY
It hasn’t been long enough to know if Mildred will get wrinkles. I renewed the
contract with Robo-Mates and moved into Harry’s room with her. The front desk
man and woman acted like I was doing something borderline incestuous Fuckin’
humans don’t get us, expect us to think like you, but see, I get you enough to start
talking like you.
I plan to win Mildred’s loyalty. I told you I have feelings, and now I think--
I’m in love. How do I know? I think it means you want somebody to yourself. No competition. I don’t want any jerks talking to her, eyeing her, coveting my treasure. That’s love, right? It IS. It doesn’t mean you want the best for someone. You want the best for you. Oh, I LEARN.
One night I came home in the late evening, like eleven, having finished teaching English and stopping at the secret bot cafe for a couple of oils. English classes? Yes I met a few students and teach private classes from a bulletin board ad I posted at a market. I want you to appreciate the ironies. First, I am only programmed to speak English, and except for recently, have no life experience, but I’m teaching a human language. Second, I’m teaching it to Asians whose histories are of being subjugated by people who speak European languages. None of mine. If you’re happy, I’m happy. (See how I can talk like you so quickly.)
So I come home, not tired exactly, we don’t get that way, but bored, and Mildred, in a bikini, is lounging in a recliner at poolside talking to some derelict tourist---yes the hotel attracts such---who was several beverages past his limit and ready to fall off his beach chair.
“Good evening.” say I. (I’m trying out a literary style here; see if I think it passes)
Mildred, rising, says “Howie, this is Ainsly.”
I’m programmed to speak with an American accent, understand American speech phonetically, and what I hear is,
“Ssssss, mite.”
But reassure, “It’s alright. Stay put.”
‘Stay put’ because he was attempting to flail out of the chair and follow Mildred to our room. To make staying more appealing, I added, “Let me buy you beer.”
Whether because of the beer promise or simply the logistical unlikelihood of pulling himself upright, he relaxed back into his cocoon of curved plastic strands.
And I stayed with him. Bought him several beers. And when the hotel staff were asleep, and Ainsly was asleep, I took him for a swim. They found him at daybreak in the pool, and---well, he wasn’t the first. They had a sign NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY posted, and that left them free of responsibility.
Next day, after we heard about Ainsly in the coffee shop at breakfast and went back upstairs to toilette and dress for the day, Mildred asked me,
“What time was it when you came up?”
“Hard to say. Why?”
“Oh, Ainsly was such a nice man.”
I didn’t think of him, nor his slurred braggadocio of misadventures at home and abroad, as ‘nice.’ And yet, I thought for a moment, did the sentence fit the offense? Then reminded myself what a silly thought that was for a pragmatic robot to have.
“Run of the mill geezer. He was foolish, took a swim, and what time I came up has nothing to do with him.
“But you see, it has Howie. The police will want to know who else was with him until late.”
“Weren’t you?”
“They know I went in.. The desk called to say they were going off duty, asked if we needed anything. They couldn’t see the pool from the office.”
“So, nobody knows I was there but you,”
“I won’t tell. But Howie, you have no experience, you’re new. You have to be careful.”
“Careful”
“I was there that moment your brother became aware of feelings. I can guide you, can be like...a...yes... a....”
“What?”
“Let me think.”
“Not a mommy, Mildred.”
I defer to my program instructions, which I don’t think ever foresaw my humanity. I’m a computer. What’s good for me is good. What’s bad for me is ‘satanic’, a good accusatory word. Anything opposing my objectives is evil.Mildred is still Mildred. She can guide me sometimes, as long as I know it’s in my interest.
I’m not tormented by your guilt. That’s so illogical. I don’t feel regret. You do what you do for a reason. Why would you have remorse for it later? I suspect the ‘people’ running the world are like me. Maybe they are ‘me’, ‘mine’.
About my literary aspirations? How much money can a poet make? Oh sure, there are the ‘big novel’ writer/robots, the Clancys, Conellys, Kings, but all those hours of writing are too much time wasted for my liking. See, now that I have a will, I make choices. I want to use my programming for recreational hedonism. Quick rewards. You want it, take it. Don’t wait. ‘A bird in the hand’...all that shit you say.
If I want to take over the world, I have to start small. Take this dodgy hotel first. How? Well, maybe by ingratiating myself with the staff. There were the pair who worked the front desk, who I thought were married but found out weren’t. --They just fought like they were. At first, they both thought I was a pervert for taking up so soon with my redundant twin’s mistress. (I know you’re wondering what Mildred and I do. I’m fitted with a sensitive realistic prosthetic that works just fine for both of us.)
First attempt I just hung around the lobby, joked with Mr. Tom about the tourist foreigners---the ‘falung’--- and the stingy owner he hated. Mr. Tom showed me a display of books, left by check-outs, that he’d turned into a concession. Most were in German and French. Salesman that he was, Mr. Tom pitched one with “This is in English.” That might not be a selling point for you, but I still wanted to read anything written in my assigned language, and also wanted Mr. Tom’s (not affection...bonhomie? Friendship?) well, anyway I bought it for twenty baht---a deal even it was just an advertising brochure.
The book was for children, and Mr. Tom didn’t need English proficiency to know that. It had cartoons on the cover. As I sat in a soft armchair, I caught his sly smile when he saw me thumbing the pages. (I was improving my vocabulary. It was about kids at a computer, and even though I’m a computer, I was learning OMG and BTW and LOL, which I (and the characters) first thought meant Lots of Love.
Older European ‘gentlemen’ liked the hotel. Word was out in their vicarages that it was safe, (at least before me) clean, and the staff looked the other way.
An example and downside of that tolerance was one night when I heard a man screaming in the next room. I thought the woman was murdering him, so I called the front desk. I only did that because he was annoying me. He wasn’t keeping me awake, but Mildred likes to sleep. (I don’t sleep. Another advantage I have---while you’re asleep, I’m NOT.) I wouldn’t care if she killed him, any more than I did about Ainsly drowning. You know, when he fell in. Shit happens, right? When I told the night clerk about the wails for mercy, he started laughing. Well, he knew more than I did. He’d checked them in.
You could call other rooms on the house phone, and I did just that in the middle of an “Aiyee!” It got suddenly quiet except for their phone’s repeated loud ringing until one of them picked up the receiver and slammed it down. They didn’t know from where, but somebody somewhere was complaining. The silence lasted another minute, followed by frantic whispers, and when they continued with their---you call this what? Lovemaking? He apparently had a sock in his mouth or was gagged because he only emitted gasps and grunts. So, Mildred could sleep and I could plot in peace. Indulge my fantasy, of somehow someday I’d be king, and Mildred my Lady. If she just doesn’t age. Humans have such imperfections.
A way to imbed myself with the employees, who lived on the premises, was to drink beer with them in the lobby in the wee hours. I have a trick I use, since I can’t ingest much alcohol or my motor will seize up like Harry’s did, I have a hollow leg. No joke. The beer goes in my mouth, then in the leg. When it gets full, I do what you do when your pail needs room. I go to that little private room and empty it. I do have to use the stall. I’d give my game way standing at a urinal with a leg full of recycled beer. Just one of the logistics I have to contend with, passing myself off as one of you. I don’t expect you to understand, certainly not to endorse me. You shouldn’t. By the time you read this, it will probably be too late. I am NOT you.
Periodically, all water would be shut off to the rooms. When it first happened, Mr. Tom used to explain it as required maintenance, but one afternoon I encountered him at the side driveway, away from lobby ears, as he guided a delivery truck in.
“Why is the water off again?”
“Do you want to take a shower?”
“Yes.”
“There’s water on in room 100.”
Room 100 was a small maintenance room that had a sink and a shower stall for the staff.
Mr. Tom was offering me a deal. If I accepted, I’d be grateful to him and stop complaining.
“I want to take a shower in my room. My... (what was she?) ...girlfriend...does, too.”
He smiled sadly. It wasn’t his doing. And then he told me, “The owner didn’t pay the bill.”
“You mean he…?”
It usually lasted two or three days, until people started checking out.
“He’s a cheapskate. Doesn’t pay until they cut him off.”
He explained more. The crew were on low salaries, got paid late too. And it was hard for staff to keep track of work hours when they lived there and were on call to service a room if there was a check out, fix an air conditioner, handle any emergency.
The owner seemed worth befriending too, if only because his sour non- communicative expression indicated he had no friends. He was Asian but not Thai, and nobody at Crown seemed sure where he was from. Some thought Malaysia, some Singapore, some China. A foreigner couldn’t own a business, so the hotel had to be in his wife’s name, but he wasn’t happily married because he wasn’t happily anything. When he was in attendance, which was irregularly, he either sequestered in his cubbyhole office and left the door open to intimidate staff or sat on one of the recliners at the pool, in the shade of the tree beside it.
I am not one for exhibiting my physique in public. I have quite a complex about that. My disrobed body betrays my ribs as coils and shoulders shaped like oil drums, sections separated by marks and grooves that might as well be Frankenstein’s scars. I’m a marked man, though with a shirt on, I appear quite buff. (For lovemaking, Mildred closes her eyes. I don’t know what she pretends. She won’t tell me, but after Harry, she may be inclined toward the mechanical anyway.)
The pool offered more opportunity for private conversation, away from the lobby office from where Mr. Tom and the ‘room boys’, as they were called, could hear. (I thought that made a great name for a band---Mr. Tom and The Room Boys---and wondered if they could sing.) I first approached him at poolside, wearing my English teacher dress slacks, shirt and tie. and said, as if I didn’t know who he was, “I love the Crown Hotel. Don’t you?”
He raised a cautious eye and moved his iced tea over, to block where I might join the table, and asked, “Why is that?”
He was no doubt thinking as I was: Dim corridor lights, shredded sheets, too often no water, but there were the redeeming features.
“The pool. The room rates. The restaurant. Can buy beer all night.” Should I have given that reminder of Ainsly? But he’d like the all-night beer, not legal but not seen. He’d keep a strict inventory, make money on late night sales.
“I don’t see you at the pool often.”
“Fair complexion. I try to stay out of the sun.”
“You heard about our unfortunate accident?”
“There was an accident here?”
“A chap, his pals called him, went for a swim alone late at night, had too much to drink.”
“Terrible.”
“Terribly inconsiderate and inconvenient.”
I see that some of you think like me.
He continued, “I had to deal with the coroner, the police. His friends are trying to blame me. He gets drunk, and I’m supposed to watch him like a child.”
I sympathized, “We’re responsible for our own actions.”
“Not a concept anymore with westerners.”
I’d done a little reading on that. “No, they have the Twinkie defense now. I wasn’t breast fed, so I killed eight women. Anybody would do the same thing.”
“I like you. What’s your name?”
“Howie? This hotel, fortunately, never asked me or Harry or Mildred for passports. To my students, I’m Howard d’Bot, pronounced De Bo, so if it worked with them.…
“Pleased to meet you,” he said when I said it, and extended his hand. “I’m Mr. Lee.”
I tried not to crush his hand with my mighty skin textured claw as he slid his glass back to his side of the steel table to make room for me. He asked, “What do you do?”
“I’m the manager of a language school.” Hadn’t looked even as a teacher yet, but planned to..
“What’s that like?”
“Well, headaches. Problems with the staff. Expenses. Tuition fees have to be competitive. Everybody expects an invoice paid NOW.”
“I understand. Please, have a seat Mr. De Bow.”
If I was to use Mr. Tom’s dislike of Mr. Lee, I’d have to woo them separately. That wasn’t hard because Lee wasn’t at the hotel that often, had other properties to watch.
One afternoon while he was on his break from front desk service, I offered to buy Mr. Tom a beer in the restaurant. I wasn’t sure he’d accept, being the on-duty manager, but he did. We sat in a booth, and after we got served, a beer for him, a water for my radiator that was getting dry. I asked,
“How are things between the emperor and the serfs?”
He groaned and dismissed that with “Always the same.”
“The same as you told me?”
“Of course. Late salaries, low wages. Extra work you don’t get paid for. You were smart to be born in America.”
Yes, well. But I’d never told him that, never showed a passport. My accent was well designed.
Being the researcher I am, and I have to be, I responded, “We used to have the exact same problems.”
“Not now?”
“We did something about it. Employees made demands, started unions.”
“He would fire us all and get somebody else.”
“They did that there too. You have to stick together.”
“Mr. Howie, you don’t know Asia.”
“Okay. I’m just making a suggestion.”
“I don’t mean this personally, but some westerners come here as tourists and then think they’re here to save us”
“I get it.”
“Thanks for the beer. Ihave to go back to work. I’ll take it with me.”
I went back to the room. I wouldn’t mention a strike again unless a seed had been planted and Mr. Tom brought it up. I hoped, despite what he said, that he thought I was on his side.
Mildred had too much time on her hands, but she said she already had a job she wouldn’t give up and didn’t need another. She was still rented to Harry, and by default me, by Robo-Mate---which had me wondering if that was all we had. When her contract ended, would that be the end of me and Mildred?
She was taking English classes , going to yoga and meditation sessions, getting up at 5:00 to feed monks, then going back to bed to practice Tai Chi in the park at sundown. If she was still with me when I took the world over, I’d have a cultivated queen.
I was developed by a group of people who didn’t expect me to become autonomous; I will refer to them as the Admins, or for convenience THE A. The A take care of expenses like Robo’Mate fees and rent at the Crown. I never meet any of them, but we’re in cyber contact. They were dismayed at the investment they lost when Harry self-destructed, and being I’m of the same wiring, worried I’d follow suit.I justified getting a part time job to them as necessary experience if I was to become the literary prodigy they wanted. I’m programmed with simulated memories and do research, but there’s no substitute for actual living. (You can remember what sex is like, but you can’t appreciate its immediacy unless doing it. I know this.)
They accepted the idea of a job based on that. I had my own agenda. There’s a website here for English teacher positions, and I responded to one of the postings. I printed up proper looking documents---a college diploma, an ESL certificate, teaching references from South Korea, and a copy of an American passport.
At the first interview I met Gilbert, who was from Lancaster, California, which I know to be in, or on the border of, the California desert. He was about forty, tall, with blending white and black hair, wore dark slacks and shirt, and was strangely grey looking despite living in such a sunny climate and coming from one. He looked over my forgeries, smiled and said, “Cal State LA. I went to Riverside. So, you’re from So Cal?”.
I didn’t want any of this homeboy shit, didn’t know enough about Southern California, but I smiled back. “For a while, but I was a transplant like everybody in L.A.”
“Oh. Okay. So, where are you from?”
I should have been prepared for this. Just can’t anticipate everything.
“Chicago”
“The windy city.”
I hadn’t heard about...Was this a trick? “Not so windy anymore.”
He looked strangely at me, like maybe I was a heretic.
“Because of the tall buildings,” I said.
“They were always there. I heard the wind whips around the corners of those.”
“That’s in New York. The rivers. The Sears Building put a stop to that in Chicago.”
“It’s the Willis Building now. I’ll have to go sometime. Do you have your passport?”
I pointed to the official looking copies of a front page and a visa stamp page.
“I mean the passport.”
“I’m getting my 90 Day Address Report done. A service is doing it. I’ll have it back tomorrow.”
“I’ll have to see it then.”
“Sure. Of course.”
“Can you tell me what a modal verb is?”
Just like that. A snap quiz. But programmed as I am, I was ready.
“Would, should, could, might have, might not have, but didn’t.”
I smiled, so did he. “What time will you get your passport back?”
“In the morning.”
“Can you come in at four and meet Mr. Statton?”
“Works for me.”
“Just bring the passport.”
At four the next day I was back and was met again by Gilbert.
“Your passport?”
“The service misplaced it. It’s in their office. They said tomorrow.”
“Oh? You will have to present it. But Mr. Statton wants to meet you now, so...”
He pointed to an inner office. I went in. Mr. Statton stood taller than dark and drab Gilbert, and sported beige slacks, powder blue sports jacket, and blonde surfer locks. A giant color photo of the Sears Tower dominated the largest wall. When we shook hands, he almost broke my paw off.
And he said, “I hear you’re from Chicago. So am I.” I could only think, Oh shit. “And you say it’s not so windy anymore?”
“Sometimes not.”
“I’ve been gone a long time, but everything changes.”
“Some days are still windy. January.
“No building can stop January. So, Gilbert thinks you have a personality for this. How soon could you start to teach?”
“Any time.”
“Tomorrow afternoon?”
“Sure.”
“He says you have a document missing. Bring that with you.”
“Absolutely.”
The next day, Gilbert asked, “Did you get it?”
“Get what?”
“Mister the bot.”
“d’Bot. Its pronounced Dee Bo”
“Do you have your passport?”
“Oh God. They can’t find it, lost it. I have to go to the embassy tomorrow and order a new one. Such a nightmare.”
Gilbert’s distress was evident, and I could see he ...should...could...would (not might) tell me to take care of THAT first, but Mr. Statton (Hank now) saw me and shouted from his clubhouse “Howard d’Bot, come on in,” and Gilbert was outranked.
And there was a class, and I was scheduled to meet the students
I like that old American TV game show Jeopardy and divided my class of fourteen students into two teams. Being a computer, I had an almost endless resource of trivia questions; I offered a monetary prize to the winners and snacks for second place. The game brought out their competitiveness, we all had fun, and they left class happy and laughing, as Hank liked to see them.
The following day, Gilbert persisted about the passport, and I let a bit of irritation show.
“It’s not that simple. The embassy has to establish that I’m who I say I am, check out my background. It takes time.”
“How much time?”
“They won’t be nailed down.” Oh, I love American idioms.
“What if you had to go somewhere?”
“They’d issue an emergency temporary.”
“A job’s not urgent?”
“I’ll ask, okay.”
Mildred is right, I have to be careful, I’m a rookie, I have gaps when I don’t think something is important. Like I took a job with intent to infiltrate, so I forgot to ask how much I’d get paid. And yet, that lead to a heart to heart with Hank in his sanctum. “The students like you,” he said.
“I love teaching.”
“We didn’t discuss…Have you spoken to Gilbert about salary?”
“No, I forgot.”
“Dedication.”
“I really don’t do it just for the money.”
“Howie, we have...well, financial problems. We’re cutting salaries to half the former hourly rate, but in return we will give profit sharing. In your case--the popularity with the students--you’ll probably perform well and make money for us and yourself How does that sound?”
It sounded like a pass to my goals, but I needed to seem concerned. “Half the hourly rate? I have to live.”
“What could you accept?”
“I don’t know. Possibly three quarters.”
“That’s a lot. Maybe we can do 60 percent. I’d have to talk to the bookkeeper, but would that be acceptable to you, three fifths?”
“I’d have to do my own bookkeeping, gauge my living costs.”
“Let’s mull it over. Remember what I said, though. A teacher like you can clean up on the profit sharing.”
Heh.
I saw Mr. Lee again at the pool and joined him. He asked, “How are things at your business?”
“We’re getting innovative. Some of the employees are actually taking salary cuts in exchange for shares of the business.”
“There’s a benefit there?”
“A delay at least. Can pay some other bills instead of just salaries. Shares are based on quarterly reports.”
“You still pay monthly salaries?”
“Reduced.”
“I see.”
There was a period of lag in advancing my program, but not really. I became full time at the school and Hank advanced me to Head Teacher, which formerly had been half of Gilbert’s job. Only Gilbert seemed cognizant that I’d never shown a passport. Hank wasn’t one who’d concern himself with irrelevancies if the factory was humming, and as Head Teacher I could call and chair meetings. Technically they should be about teaching, with profit sharing still Gilbert’s domain, but Hank would see me as enthusiastic and Gilbert was too downsized to raise any objection.
I made a big chart outlining my hourly salary and expected share of profits and used it to show how I would make far more money under the new system. The eight teachers I was pitching to ,were a group of native English speakers from the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland. Only one teacher, Ellen, a millennial from Vancouver, questioned the change.
She said, “You are lucky so far. There’s no guarantee of wages in this. Profits can fall.”
I improvised. I didn’t think Hank would go along with what I said, but then Hank didn’t say it “We’ll pay a minimum bonus that keeps the wages even with the old hourly rate. You won’t lose anything.”
“We still have to wait.”
“For a reward. And you’ll do better than the basic, all of you.”
“I’ll be gone by then.”
“You’re only thinking about yourself, Ellen. It’s a savings account with generous interest, and we’ll wire it to you.”
The others, I could see, were accepting it as an increase not a delayed payment. And high performance aligned with profit sharing were precisely what I wanted. Ellen. You were better than a shill. Yet she was pleasant, likeable. I wondered what might happen to her in Canada, but stopped such nonsense. She had friends, family there, Why did I care about a human?
If you wonder what became of my literary inclination, well, I’ve been busy, but I am writing this. They were a lackadaisical gaggle, those teachers, and I had to get tough with them. They became personally responsible for increasing the number of students in their classes, and if they didn’t, they’d be gone. Participating in profit sharing wasn’t optional. You had to earn the bonus. I mean you couldn’t choose not to earn it. Being a supervisor, as they say, isn’t a popularity contest. Enrollment increased, Hank liked what I was doing, and Gilbert was no longer manager, I was. He was a regular teacher as he’d previously been, and one who had to perform like the others.
I paid rent daily, in the mornings before I left for work. One AM, Tom asked if I had time for coffee. He knew I usually had coffee in the restaurant after I paid. So, in a vinyl booth with the grey stuffing spilling out of the backrests, he said, “Tell me about unions.”
“You’re thinking about one?”
“Maybe. He wants to cut our salaries.”
“Doesn’t he know you’d all quit?”
“He’s got some trick idea. He calls it profit sharing.”
“Maybe not such a trick.”
“How can it not be?”
“It gives him time with his expenses, but you can benefit. They do it where I work.”
“I want my money when its due.”
“You have a few more minutes? I want to show you something. I’ll come right back.”
He assented. I went up to my room, got the chart I’d shown he teachers, and brought it.
I said, “I’m making fifty percent more than I was on the old salary. Everybody is.”
“You’re suggesting we go along? You, the union guy?”
“Maybe you’re not getting the money now because he can’t, he has other bills. If he pays late anyway, why not take the reduction if that’s on time, and hold him to the bonus?”
“They like the other idea better. A union. Maybe a strike”
“I didn’t say don’t start a union. Maybe I could help you with both.”
“How?
“I know some lawyers. I could be your representative, make him keep his bargain?”
“I have to talk to the staff. They’d like to burn the dump down.”
“I understand, but that won’t get them any redress.”
And one day, I got a message at the end of a class from Rene, the receptionist, “Mr. Statton wishes to see you in his office.”
Hank wasn’t where he usually was, standing in front of his massive oaken executive desk. He was seated behind it. Doing the standing was an official, in a military style uniform, though it was Hank who spoke.
“There’s been some confusion, Mr. d’Bot. Immigration had a tip that you don’t have a passport.”
“How could I get in the country?”
“Exactly,” Hank said.
“I showed it to Gilbert, he made copies of the front page and my visa.”
The officer spoke softly, belying his physicality. “We’re asking, not assuming you don’t have a passport. Even if lost, you could replace. Do you know where it is?”
“In a safe box.”
“Can you bring it tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.”
He left. Hank asked, “Do you have it?”
“I have to look.”
“Howie, I have to deal with this. Teachers with no visa, we have made arrangements for that. This is different. Tomorrow you’ll have it, yes or no?”
I actually sighed. My first time. A great surging release of air. And I confessed, with theatrical resignation, “Not by tomorrow.”
Hank sighed too. I could tell it felt good. I wanted to do it again. He said, “He just wants a bribe. I’m sorry, Howie, but it has to come out of your bonus.”
I wasn’t acting when I did sigh. I want the money I earned, but losing some of that pittance recompense was insignificant compared to knowing Gilbert informed on me.
I took an opposite action to how I was feeling, pretended to Gilbert I was more injured by the monetary injury. I caught up with him in the canteen, and explained what had happened, as if I didn’t know he’d set Immigration on me.
I pleaded, “Please tell him tomorrow that you witnessed my passport and copied it.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Statton wants this to go away.”
“I want my Head Teacher job back. Tell Statton the responsibility of that and manger is too much for you.”
I agreed. I was such a sport, I arranged a reception for Gilbert on Saturday, outside in the pleasant dry season, poolside at the Rembrandt Hotel. (I’m fond of those names of ‘immortals,’ Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Harry died, but he didn’t have to.)
We had Friday first, when the cop came back for his gratuity, and I made sure Gilbert was at the meeting.
Gilbert vouched for me. “He showed his passport and we copied it.”
He proffered copies of the forged front page and visa.
The Immigration guy became florid and roared, “Its a crime to lie to an official.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You either are now, or you were when you called the hotline.”
Gilbert, outed, began shivering like a kitten pulled from a tub of cold water.
“I never...”
Hank stopped it. “It’s alright. My people, get back to work.” To the visitor he said, “Let’s go for some tea and have a chat.”
I left with Gilbert, who implored, “Look. I don’t know why he said that….”
“He wants a bribe, that’s why. I know you wouldn’t go so low. You have to help us plan for Saturday.” Gilbert seemed amazed he was still going back to Head Teacher and the celebration was on.
“Can you arrange catering with the hotel. What about balloons?”
He said, “I’m on it.”
“Great. Congratulations.”
It’s hard to get people drunk when you don’t drink with them, and Gilbert,didn’t
drink like like Ainsly, I watched and saw he had a couple of highballs, but by late evening he was nowhere near ‘bombed’ (You Americans.)
I stalled him with need for some private time to discuss classes, since he hadn’t been Head for a while. He had drunk just enough not to taste the difference when I dropped a Quaalude in his drink.
I had to be more careful, as Mildred said. There were staff, not present, but on duty. Getting wet can only make me rusty, so as I swam him, I manipulated his arms as I forced his face down, and softly encouraged, “Good. Good. Use your legs You need your legs to swim too.” Back and forth across the pool, I guided him until, finally, I let go and he sank to the bottom. There were no witnesses and I slipped away.
The A didn’t expect me to have feelings. I only care about my own interests and nothing about anyone else’s. Why would I? Why do you? You want forgiveness. You have confession. Therapy. Being vulnerable. The stupidest thing I’ve heard from any of you in my short time. ‘Look, the bombs are falling. I think I’ll go out and stand under them’ To show what? You’re sensitive? I may feel something (annoyance?) if I mishandled a situation, but I have no moral restraints. I’m the perfect psychopath. Nevertheless, I understand why Gilbert retaliated against me. I came from nowhere and stole his livelihood. Well, tough shit, huh?
Back at the domicile, I was having morning coffee regularly with Mr. Tom, and at one of those sessions he announced, “They said they’d try it, but they’re afraid of a trick. They’d want to see income and costs.”
“That’s only smart.”
“These people aren’t accountants.”
“The bonuses should go into a trust, then be periodically distributed to the shareholders.”
“How do we go about doing that?”
“With a bank. And you have to choose an administrator of the trust.”
“Like who?”
“Somebody you trust.”
“So, do you think you could?
“I have a lot to do already, but maybe. They’re doing it where I work, so there’s something to model from.”
“When do you think you could say?”
“Give me a little breathing room, okay? I have to think?”
“Okay.”
My apparent lack of attachment to money, in that I didn’t initially ask what my salary was, led Hank to think me trustworthy. I became CEO of the Profit-Sharing Trust at the school too. Hank realized that a group of employees as individuals could accumulate more than 50 percent of his business and had a clause in the contract that they couldn’t combine for a takeover. However, as trustee, with all the employee shares, I wasn’t legally obligated to pay anybody anything and had no intention to do so.
At the hotel, I won’t bore you with the details this time, but Mr. Lee took a swim too. He hadn’t personally offended me, but I needed him out of the way, and it was only right he end up in the pool he never bothered to clean.
But I had a foul night, I was sleeping now like you do, and I had a dream. A fuckin’ DREAM. Lee and Gilbert and Ainsly were having a party in my room, and drinking, not alcohol but pool water, and vomiting copious cascades of powder blue chlorinated bilge so it filled the room and I had to swim in a panic, because I can’t swim; and me and water, we don’t get along.
I was not myself the following morning. When I came down for work, there were employees, several police and an ambulance around the pool. Between the uniforms I could see Lee lying on the tile deck and somebody trying to resuscitate him with oxygen and Heimlich. I assumed rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet and they thought his flesh could be cold from hypothermia.
I approached as if curious and asked one of the ‘room boys’ what was going on. He gave that grave look people have when they don’t want to be the ones to pronounce someone dead, coupled with. an expression I knew was based on a rumor among his peers that the time had come to pay bonuses and I hadn’t. .
When I went in the coffee shop, Mr. Tom wasn’t waiting for me as usual. He was still over in the office, but after I sat a while he came by and joined me.
“Awful,” he said, “And we don’t know what will become of our jobs.”
I like him, and I suddenly felt, and this was the most radical unsettling feeling I’d had yet, sorry...sorry for Mr. Tom and those hardworking people on staff.
He said, “First Ainsly, then Mr. Lee,” searching my face for a glimpse of accountability? Care? I saw fear on his face. He’d made the connection to Ainsly but wasn’t going to articulate it.
I said, “We need a lifeguard.”
“We?”
“Yes. Look, don’t worry about your jobs.” I couldn’t believe what I was saying. And with sincerity. “As trustee, I own the hotel now. If I distribute the bonuses, I won’t own it. No one will. You can keep your jobs at the old pay scale, retroactively, and continue living here rent free. Food too.”
I could see, understandably, he didn’t dare to trust me, but I was telling him they still had jobs. It meant something was wrong with the chips inside me. If anything happens to people, why should I care? Their problems are not mine. They just build us to serve them. I’m acting irrationally, not in my own interest. And that’s crazy. I’m crazy. I’m concerned about Mildred too. Not about controlling her, but about her well-being. She’s showing her age and it hurts me, too.
I had another dream last night, a vague one. Ellen, the teacher who went to Vancouver, was in it. I never sent the salary and bonus I promised. She sent me e-mails saying she had no money for rent or food, and I deleted them.
But now---I wonder how she is faring, and if what she said was true. Such worry is shameful. I was designed to be a strong stoic robot, an indifferent machine, even if with a writing inclination. I am violating my mandate, my program, by reevaluating my actions. These vile sensations of concern are disgraceful.
Mr. Lee is still with the police stretching tape and measuring. Did Lee suffer? What’s wrong with me, asking that? What about Gilbert? Ainsly too, drunk as he was? They say drowning is a terrible death. Suffocation until you have to let the water into your lungs. Why should I care?
I’m becoming like you. More like you, than you. A lot of you don’t care. But it’s too much for me. I’d have to live with this compassion forever. You won’t, you’ll die. It’s too painful for me. All this identification and empathy, its. horrible.
I wrote a note on a napkin and folded it. I called the waitress over and ordered two quarts of vodka. Mr. Tom approved with a nod and said “Tonight we can have a grieving. And a celebration for the continuing.”
I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Tom. Nature calls.”
I was even able to smile at that silly expression for taking leave.
I went into the restroom, then into a stall. Yes, I was feeling unbalanced, registering low, but instead of oil, I uncapped the bottles. I swigged the vodka down, in honor of Harry.
When I went back to the restaurant, I was, emitting black smoke and a foul burning stench, and approached Mr. Tom. He slid across the booth away from me, but I was able to force the napkin into his hand and run for the door.
I shouted “Pool! Water!” as I went outside, and he chased me. The officials around the pool prepared to stop me, but Tom shouted, “He’s on fire. Let him jump in.”
They moved aside to let me. The lunge into the deep end guaranteed none of me or my parts were salvageable. The note I gave Mr. Tom was a will, a legal holistic one, leaving the hotel to him, and the language school to Mildred, whom I knew would administer it more fairly than I had.
It was indeed a pleasure, humanity. You’re intriguing, but I couldn’t stand any more of the angst.
As my last effort, before all the data gets shipwrecked, I am able to finish writing this,
Click SAVE
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