A week passes, and a feeble AI Chapaev starts flickering in my computer. Trying to talk to it is vastly reminiscent of a nineteenth-century séance with a medium: the AI answers only yes and no, and occasionally gives a low sepulchral moan that makes the speakers vibrate and whisper like falling sheets of paper.
I try to help him, tell him stories. I tell him about my mom coming to visit me and how her plane was so late and then she couldn’t find her way through the grave-cold, cavernous interior of the JFK Airport, and when she finally emerged, tired and on the verge of tears, I too cried because I missed her and because I couldn’t see her so upset. And then there was a long long drive to Boston, and I wished she could rest. She curled up in the passenger seat, so small, and it was ridiculous to think how large she loomed when I was just a baby, and I tell Chapaev now about something she said back then—on I-95, a long and empty stretch, so dark, so late—how she stared out of the window and whispered, sleepily, “I so like driving at night. It is so sad and alone, as if you are lost in the world, forever, and no one knows where you are and how to find you.”
I don’t know whether the AI Chapaev understands me, whether he would ever be able to comprehend what it’s like, to miss your mom so much even when you yourself an adult. Just as I think that, he whispers, his voice a ghost in the speakers, “Then why did you leave her?”
I avoid the answers and stoke the feeble consciousness, I bring him things I now buy from the Indonesian shop—I bring him seashells pink on the inside and parrot feathers, I bring him bead necklaces and statuettes of the elephants, I bring plates and gongs, marvelous gongs Hainuwele would be proud of.
He is feeble however, and his voice gutters and dies, and I think of ways of stabilizing him. This is all awfully unscientific, but it occurs to me that things in pairs persist better than single units, even though I don’t buy the whole rib story. Or the Ark story, for that matter. What I do buy, however, is that Hainuwele is both a creation myth and the genesis and the birth of original sin—before her death, no one had sex. It was only after she died and was buried and sprouted into agriculture did people discover animal husbandry and, by extension, their own. Or so the story goes.
Hainuwele is God, Jesus, and the serpent in this story, and she is everything to my Chapaev’s nothing—he’s just a whisper from a distant book, in a distant place, in a distant time. He did not beget sin but only a mediocre book, a few movies, and a shitload of jokes. His creation myth guttered out after a few decades, and there’s only the dead and wistfulness for something that could’ve—should’ve—been that is left in its wake. He’s not a god, he’s the hero of the failed Revolution, and those creation myths are not the same.
Mom calls the next day, and her voice is weak and distant. She assures me that everything is all right, fine really, and both of my parents are of the age when no news is good news, and I dread it when they call, because they don’t call unless there’s news. And despite her reassurances, there’s a lump in my throat and a knot in my belly.
She talks about travel instead, and about the trip to Estonia her and dad were planning—and I think about how it changed, how Estonia used to be the same country but was now “abroad,” grown more distant, while America had moved closer. My head spins as I imagine the stretchings and contractions of the world, the distortions—the way neat squares of criss-crossing parallels and meridians buckle, like wet hardwood floors, and how the surface of the globe itself becomes ridged instead of smooth. And then I see Chapaev stepping from one ridge to the next, as the Earth folds and moves Indonesia just a few steps away from the Ural River.
“You seem distracted,” mom says, reproachful.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m just thinking about geopolitics.” “We miss you,” mom says, and I suddenly know that it is time
for me to go visit. I buy my ticket the next day, for two weeks ahead. I need two weeks to make some headway with Chapaev and the Coconut Girl.
It is time to bite the bullet, and I head for the Indonesian shop and its endless bowl of “take one” freebies. I know I’ve been relying on its serendipitous nature entirely too much, and I even wonder if my superstition led me astray, away from the proper design of my AIs. I also feel guilty for neglecting my cockroaches, and I buy them some old cookies from the bakery next door. They like food, sugar, darkness, uncleanness. At some point, one has to question the wisdom of turning one’s office over to the artificial cockroaches.
To my surprise, I find Ryan of the party and the awkward Au Bon Pain meeting browsing through the store, looking at the sculptures and the copper gongs. Marvelous gongs, I think, my mom called them. Just like in the hotel brochure.
“Hi,” he says, not at all surprised to see me.
“Anything good?” I ask, sidestepping his unasked questions— where have I been, how was work, if I’ve been talking to Cecilia and Veronica lately.
He jerks his shoulder in a shrug. “Same old. I come here sometimes, just to relax. I love this exotic stuff.”
He probably doesn’t mean to and it is terribly unfair of me to assume that he does, but I feel my cheeks burning as if from a slap. How I hate that word, exotic. How I loathe it, how stupid I feel not to having realized until now that he spoke to me because I was exotic too, a bored quest for novel experiences with a minimum of investment and always at someone else’s expense. This is why I think Chapaev would be good for the Coconut Girl—they would be strange to each other and alien, but never exotic, never animal-like, never to be studied and prodded and ask why they were so sensitive, so worked up about minor stuff. Never to be amusing when one felt like being amused—only to be understood, or at least mutually incomprehensible, the mutuality possible only between equals.
“Oh,” I say and step away. “Do they ever have sales help here?”
“There’s a bell on the counter,” he says.
I ring the bell, regretting it isn’t a gong, and I wait, until footfalls shuffle and approach, and an old woman, her parallel wrinkles carved into her cheeks like if they were wood, slips into the store slash gallery through a small door behind the counter. She smiles at me. “You like freebies,” she says.
“Who doesn’t?” I mumble and blush and hope that Ryan didn’t hear.
“Some more than others,” she says, and laughs so mirthfully I have to smile too. “What can I get you?”
“Hainuwele,” I say.
She frowns. “What about her?”
“If you were to capture her in one object, what would it be— here, I mean, and how much?”
Of course it turns out to be a copper gong wrapped in a cloth decorated with embroidered vegetables (the crops she turned into, I assume), and of course it costs about as much as my monthly rent. But at this point, I don’t really care—I need to finish before I go home, and Hainuwele is tricky.
I nod goodbye to Ryan and thank the old woman, and head back for the lab. As I walk, I compile the list of attributes for Hainuwele—afraid of crowds, dancing floors, dirt. Probably not crazy about the club scenes—very much like myself, for I’m afraid of being trampled. Hainuwele likes gongs, coconuts, flowers, root vegetables. Writing an AI is a lot like writing a dating ad, except longer and with actual commands.
My office has become a depository of little tokens from the Indonesian store as well as some old mementos—a VHS of Chapaev the movie, some notes from history classes I dragged with me across the ocean for no other reason but reluctance to throw away any bits of knowledge, no matter how petty and political. Then there are cookies for the AI cockroaches, and I crumble them onto the floor. At night, they gather around the crumbs but don’t eat them because they cannot eat, and I passingly worry that the cookie crumbs would attract real cockroaches and consider tidying up a little—maybe just getting rid of cookies and Cheeto dust and empty snack bags that rustle when my cockroaches skitter over them.
The lights are dimmed and the programs are running. Chapaev speaks in a faint whisper, and Hainuwele, small as she is, uncertain, is silent altogether. I take the gong out of its wrapping and put the cloth on top of the monitor, so that the traditional root vegetables flutter in the breeze and festoon around the pale monitor light, like ghosts of harvests past. I do not dare to ring the gong out of fear—I don’t want to attract attention of my lab members (are they still working? It seems like I haven’t spoken to anyone in so long, it could be a very long night or a four day weekend, who even knows anymore?) So instead of ringing I just brush my fingertips against its convex surface, and the dry skin whispers against polished metal, iron in my blood evoking copper of hers. The ringing of the gong is so faint, it lingers on the very edge of hearing, almost imagined but neverending.
There’s a week before I have to go home, and between buying presents and arranging for cat sitters and tweaking the two AIs that now possess my work computer, I manage to call Cecilia and Veronica and ask them to come and to bring Ryan. They bubble with excitement, deceived that their matchmaking skills finally bore shriveled and bitter fruit. I wait for them in the darkened lab, my office windows shuttered with horizontal plastic slats that barely let in little zebra stripes of the sunlight. I drum my fingers on the black surface of the desk and hum to myself, keeping tune with the AIs whispering in the wires. I think idly of making them some sort of physical vehicles, like the little cockroach bodies, and wonder if that would help them develop their personalities. I wonder in Cecilia and Veronica might be able to lend me some rat brains, to play with chips and whatnot. I’d rather my Chapaev be a real rat than a fake cockroach; at least in a rat body he would have whiskers. Ideally of course I would like him to have limbs for locomotion and a mustache for historical accuracy, and a sparkle in his eyes to humor my childhood fantasies.