Uncanny Valley Read online

  After that, as if to punish the thing for conjuring such images upon its empty screen, he had tied it up with rope and slapped its bottom with stinging blows until his hand was sore, after which he had better luck ravishing it. This became his ritual…but one night, after drinking too much and failing to achieve an erection as he pretended it was Victoria, young again, he lay with, in disgust he had stabbed the thing with a kitchen knife in its chest and belly and the space where it had no face. The bloodless wounds had looked like a myriad of tiny, mocking vaginas. He’d disposed of the monstrosity the next day.

  Looking away from the couple, his gaze settled on the Asian woman at the end of the bar. How he longed to try one of them. Her sleek black hair fell around her face, her head tipped forward and one arm propped on the counter in front of her, perhaps shielding a phone she was staring down at. But he remembered how he had thought the woman in front of the elevators had been mesmerized by a phone, too.

  He motioned to the bartender and said, “I’d like to buy her another of whatever she’s having.”

  The man smiled oddly at Pegler and said, “She doesn’t need it.”

  “Oh?” Pegler couldn’t fathom the man’s smile, so he shifted uncomfortably on his barstool and said, “How about another martini for me, then?”

  By the time the bartender placed a third martini in front of Pegler, the Asian woman hadn’t budged, nor had the young couple at the back table gone to commence their intimacies. Pegler stuffed the last of his sandwich in his mouth, drained his drink more quickly than he would otherwise have done, and paid his bill. He wasn’t too generous with the tip.

  Well, all misgivings aside the bartender hadn’t skimped on the gin, and Pegler hadn’t slept enough to make up for his long day, either. He therefore found himself getting off on the wrong floor, not realizing it until he’d wandered the hallways for a while reading door numbers, never coming close to his own. He encountered no one else in the corridors, but he did pass a room with its door standing open, and peeking inside as he passed he saw a red-haired woman in a lacy purple nightie, standing in front of the room’s blank TV. He was tempted to linger for a moment to get a better look at her, but something about her stance – somewhat crouching – caused him to hurry along.

  He chanced upon the elevators again, or maybe it was a different set of elevators, and ascended another level. As he was now on his proper floor, he had somewhat less trouble finding his door this time.

  Having stepped inside his room, though, he found the light wouldn’t come on. He felt his way like a blind man to the bathroom, on his immediate left, but groping at the wall discovered the light wouldn’t come on in there, either. Yet there had been light, however subdued, in the hallway. Was there an outage, at least in this section of the hotel, and the hall had only emergency lighting?

  Had he neglected to insert his key card into a slot on the wall by the door, to activate the lights and AC? He knew many hotels outside the US had that feature, but it was his understanding this hadn’t really caught on yet in America. He was about to feel around the door for such a card slot, anyway, when he happened to notice – as his eyes grew more used to the gloom, and in the meager light that entered through a slit in the drawn heavy curtains – that there was a person in his bed.

  Dear God, had he got the wrong room after all? But he had read his door number carefully, drunkenly comparing it to his card, and then too why else would his card have opened the door to this room?

  One night very recently, after having had more than a mere three drinks at a favorite old pub not far from his former home, he had mistakenly returned there instead of to his new apartment. He still had the keys and fumbled the right one into the lock at last, staggered his way inside and upstairs. Even though he and Victoria had used separate bedrooms for a number of years before the divorce, for some reason he still stumbled into her darkened bedroom instead of his old room.

  She had sat up in bed in the dark, but he hadn’t needed to see her face to know she was startled and angry. She had begun yelling at him in a loud, screeching voice. Yelling and yelling…screeching and screeching. It had been terrible. So terrible.

  Despite the drunken and forgetful state he had been in, he could still clearly recall the panicky impulse he had felt to silence that screeching, by jamming a pillow down on Victoria’s face. Or putting his hands around her neck. Or stabbing her in the chest, and belly, and face. But instead he had slurred apologies and fled, almost tumbling down the stairs in his haste.

  This time, though, he had the right place…he was sure of it. He wasn’t as drunk as he had been that night. Nor was he drunk enough to misinterpret what he was seeing there on that wide foreign mattress: a woman’s figure, the blanket drawn up to cover her breasts, her knees bent up and outward invitingly under the tented blanket, and her long black hair spilling across the contrastingly white pillow like streams of oil. It couldn’t be the Asian woman from the bar; he had never bought her that drink. No…of course. Who else knew what room he was staying in? Who else had he propositioned tonight? Maria Garza had had second thoughts, after all. Age difference or no, fiancé or no, his British charm had in fact won out.

  “Well,” he said, smiling, beginning to undress as he watched her waiting form in the murk.

  Leaving his clothing in a pool, he stepped to the bed, sat on its edge and leaned down over her, with one hand on her warm shoulder. His lips found hers in the darkness. They were soft and giving. Too giving. They didn’t press back against his own. Had she fallen asleep while she waited for him? But then, before he could draw his face away, up close to her face he smelled the faint but unmistakable scents that had assailed him at the factory. Silicone and paint.

  “Bastard,” he hissed, snapping upright. Jude Loew. Despite having apologized for his offer, he had sent over his sample “girl” after all. The audacity of it sent a mounting wave of rage through Pegler. Did Loew really think this was something he would want? Did he really think he was doing Pegler a favor by arranging things quietly behind his back? Had Maria Garza been in on it? Did they truly believe he would be impressed, be grateful…or were they instead mocking his perceived staidness? Were they laughing at him even now as their hot living bodies were entwined at Loew’s home?

  He edged back and slapped the shadowy figure across the face, hard. The bright sound and the stinging of his hand gave him satisfaction. He drew his arm back and struck the doll again, with more force. Again and again.

  Slapping the indistinct face, seeing the head rock a little on the pillow, had aroused him. “Very well,” he snarled, ripping the blanket aside. “Very well,” he repeated, as he positioned himself over the figure. He reached down to guide his erection into a warm orifice so soft and flower petal smooth that it didn’t beg for lubrication. Embedded to the hilt in the figure, he began pounding away, crushing one large breast in his left hand and taking a fistful of silky black hair in his right fist. Through his gritted teeth he said, “Is that good, hm? I’ll make you impressed with me.”

  As he bore his weight down on the thing, its limbs flexed around him. Its warm hands came to rest on his rigid back. Its legs folded around the backs of his own. Its embrace excited him to a quicker, more violent rhythm. His skin smacked against its skin. The bed creaked in a high rapid whimper.

  His weight and his thrusts also seemed to be pushing air up through the chute in the thing’s throat, and out through its parted lips, because he felt subtle exhalations upon his face.

  Its large, unblinking eyes stared up at him, their whites seeming to glow in the murkiness. They were the eyes of Maria Garza. Then they were the eyes of his teenage niece. Victoria’s eyes. His mother’s eyes.

  He climaxed with a loud, tortured cry.

  Pegler rolled off the figure ponderously and lay on his back, chest heaving, body slick with sweat. Sobbing quietly and huskily. Eventually his breathing slowed, and his weeping trailed off, and he slept.

  ***

  The next day, at
noon, Pegler took Loew aside in the hotel lobby, out of Maria’s range of hearing, and demanded to know what had possessed him to sneak one of his Love Mate dolls into his room last night – and out again while he slept, because he had found himself alone atop that immense mattress this morning. He didn’t deny that he had used the thing – how could he? – but he at least wanted the man to know that arranging it all behind his back, presumptuously assuming he would make use of the doll, had been disrespectful if not outright insulting.

  Jude Loew seemed sincerely confused by Pegler’s accusation. He insisted, with an earnest expression of concern, that he had done no such thing. Nor would anyone else on his staff, he claimed. “Are you sure you didn’t just dream this, David?” Loew asked.

  Pegler bit back the urge to bark an obscenity at the man. He looked over at Maria, fuming, and saw that she was watching him with a wary expression. Had it been her in his bed, after all? Her skin smelling of the tainted atmosphere she was exposed to daily in Galatea?

  “Jetlag,” Pegler mumbled at last, but without conviction, as he trembled feverishly. “And too much to drink in the bar last night.”

  “Oh Christ,” Loew laughed, relieved, taking Pegler’s arm. “Come on, man, let’s get some food in you. I think our tour yesterday was a little overwhelming. We’ll do most of our talking in the restaurant today…how about that?”

  Pegler let the two attractive Californians walk him toward the hotel’s doors, past an arrangement of other pretty people standing about in the lobby near their suitcases or lounging on the furniture, smiling and staring with their eyes too blue, too green.

  STRANGER IN THE HOUSE

  For several minutes he sat in his car in the parking lot of his workplace, as if trying to recall why he was there. He stared ahead, detached or entranced, as though he might still be in bed and only dreaming that he was there, and reached out his hand to trail a finger through the membrane of dust that coated the top of his dashboard. He had read that the claims that seventy to eighty percent of dust was composed of particles of shed human skin were simply not true, but surely some amount of it was. After all, he’d heard that radio program last week, an interview with a scientist about his new book.

  He looked at his fingertip, the whorls that were said to define him as a unique individual obscured under a blot of ashy substance. He had cleaned the inside of his car only recently, wiped down the dash, but here he was again.

  He tried to remember the lyrics to either of the two related songs Dust 2… and …Dust on the CD When I Was Cruel by his favorite singer, Elvis Costello. It was funny; though once he could have recited most of Costello’s lyrics word for word, he realized that now he could barely conjure fragments. The rest had slipped through his mental fingers.

  Finally, he stepped out of his car to walk toward the building he worked in. Of course he knew where he was; he had worked here so many years that his photo was almost worn off the employee badge he used to scan himself inside.

  ***

  These days he slept alone, but years ago his ex-wife had suffered night terrors, almost every night around 3 am. Her doctor had suggested that he wake her up a little before 3 am every night to disrupt the pattern, and since he had worked second shift at that time and came home late, stayed up late alone, it had been possible for him to do so. “Wake up and go back to sleep,” he would joke to her. After a while the spate of night terrors had ended, but before they did, in her worst episodes she would leap out of bed screaming and dash through their apartment; one time she’d almost run into one of their living room windows. In her milder episodes, she would jolt awake and roll over to touch the wall nervously as if assuring herself of its solidity, that nothing was bending it outward or emerging from it. Or she would feel at his face like a blind person, wild-eyed, as if she had woken next to a stranger. Or maybe, as if the shape or tangibility of his face could not be trusted.

  Bearing in mind that radio interview he had heard two weeks ago, an odd thought occurred to him. What if his wife hadn’t been delusional during those night terror episodes, but had been seeing more clearly than when strictly conscious? Had sensed the mutability and impermanence of things? What if, even, this awareness – if only at the subconscious level – had inevitably led her to divorce him? Because she knew, deep inside, that he really wasn’t the same man she had married eighteen years earlier?

  “Welcome back. Having the usual?”

  His waitress had appeared to his right. As his booth was the last in its row, he had been staring into a mirror directly in front of him, such as restaurants used to make themselves look more spacious. He had been reminiscing about bringing his ex-wife here to eat, but now it seemed as though he was sitting opposite himself. In the mirror his face looked lit from below, as when he and his brother would hold a flashlight under their chin when they were small, so as to look spooky. He was pleased to experience this memory, though it was vague and general, linked to no specific occurrence.

  He turned his head dreamily to gaze up at his waitress. She was pretty; a black woman in her twenties. He believed he would remember her, but he didn’t, though he ate here at this restaurant in the mall from time to time while waiting for his car to have an oil change performed. Was she really remembering him, or was she confusing him with another customer?

  “Do you know my usual?” he asked her.

  “Dirty martini?” she asked. “With vodka, not gin?”

  “Yes,” he said, rather surprised. Well, but then in her line of work it was desirable to memorize regulars, he supposed. Plus her brain was young, yet.

  Age undoubtedly played a major part in dissolution, but he knew it was a mistake to think that it was only about things becoming old. The process of breaking down was ongoing; it occurred even in the young. Even in infants; how else did they change and grow? A snake shedding its skin, a caterpillar into a butterfly, a tadpole into a frog, a man today into the man he would be tomorrow.

  ***

  His eleven-year-old car needed more than an oil change; it needed to be replaced, but he didn’t have the resources to consider that right now. For now, he left the mall and drove out toward the nursing home he had admitted his mother to last year, to pay her his customary Saturday afternoon visit.

  He rode the elevator up to her floor, navigated a series of corridors past open rooms from which wafted the muted sounds of old TV reruns and the hospital smells of cleaning products and living decay. He found her room, peeked in from the threshold. The far bed was empty. She’d had two roommates since he’d brought her here – what was the second one’s name again? Had she died, too, like the first? Anyway, it couldn’t be bad for his mother to have a room all to herself. Or could it?

  He stepped into the room to find his mother propped up in bed, turned toward her little TV, staring at more so than watching a stop motion animation version of The Wind in the Willows. He had bought that DVD for her, hadn’t he? Yes, of course he had, though he couldn’t remember when.

  “Mom?” he said quietly, so as not to startle her.

  She cranked her head toward him, staring up at him blankly as she had been staring at the TV. Was he no more real to her than those articulated little dolls, living their false lives?

  “Who are you?” she demanded, her voice weak but gruff and a little afraid. “Are you my new doctor?”

  “I’m your son, Mom.”

  “Son?” she barked, sounding more afraid. “You’re trying to trick me. I don’t have a son!”

  “Mom...” He took another step forward. She needed a little time. If he sat beside her bed, held her hand, watched the show with her...

  But the look on her face as he had come that extra step forward halted his advance. Her uneasiness had leapt to terror. Her mouth hung open, toothless, black, empty, a pit...

  “I’m sorry,” he said to her, inching backward as if he might otherwise topple into that emptiness.

  With one of her blue-veined, skeletal hands gripping her bed’s rail and tremb
ling, she snapped, “You have the wrong room!”

  For a moment, he almost wondered if he did.

  ***

  Saturday night, back at home and still unsettled from his trip to the nursing home, he read on the internet about senile dementia, but he had already read about that before and drifted to an article on something called Capgras delusion. In this condition, the subject would harbor the conviction that someone they knew, someone they loved, had been replaced with someone only pretending to be that person. This reminded him of his mother’s early signs of dementia...how she had insisted that someone (insinuating him, without coming right out and accusing him) had stolen some of her jewelry and switched it with cheap imitations. Exchanged valuable old books with more battered or modern copies. Swapped good china with poorer quality stuff. And so on. Never, the notion that something of low quality had been substituted with something better. The constituents of the universe only degraded...they never upgraded. The only God was entropy.

  Reading about Capgras delusion, he was reminded of that song by Elvis Costello, Stranger in the House. He couldn’t summon all its lyrics, but he did recall: “There’s a stranger in the house no one will ever see. But everybody says he looks like me.”