The Silver Metal Lover

“You’re not a seal.”

“I don’t want a ten-ton truck on my nose, either.”

“It seems—I can’t imagine how it could work out.”

He put the guitar aside, took my hands and held them under his chin. He looked up into my face.

“Listen,” he said, “is it just that you’d prefer to go back to your house in the clouds? If I’ve stopped amusing you, if you’re no longer happy—”

“Happy?” I cried. “I was only ever happy with you. I was only ever alive with you!”

“Are you sure? Because you have a number of options. If you’re simply worrying about my side of things, let me remind you, for the hundredth time, that I’m a robot. My function is service, like any piece of metal junk you buy in a corner store to shell eggs.”

“Stop it,” I said.

“It’s true.”

“It isn’t.”

“It is.”

He lowered his head to rest it in my hands. His face was hidden, and my fingers were full of his hair. And suddenly, with a little still shock, I knew what had happened, was happening, only I couldn’t quite believe it, either, and I wondered if he knew and if he believed it. “Silver,” I said so softly I could hardly hear myself, but his hearing would pick up a whisper. Perhaps even a soundless whisper. “The first time you saw me, what did you think?”

“I thought: Here is another customer.”

“Silver, the awful way you looked at me when I said that terrible thing to you—because I was afraid and confused—that was the same look you turned on Jason and Medea last night.”

“Maybe. Perhaps you taught me the value of it, as a means of antisocial behavior.”

“You reacted against them and for me.”

“I told you why.”

“And I told you why, but that isn’t enough.”

“Jane, we went through this a number of times. My reactions aren’t human. I can’t object to playing human here, because you asked me to, and there are good reasons. But when I’m alone with you, you’re going to have to accept—”

“No,” I said, still softly, “you’re the one who’s going to have to accept that you are not acting like a robot, a machine. That you never really have.”

He let go of my hands, and walked by me and stood looking out of the window. The embroidered shirt showed new pleats and tensions in the fabric that described the tension in his shoulders. Human tension.

“And you find it disturbing,” I said. “But please don’t. It isn’t anything bad. How could it be?”

He said nothing, so I stopped talking. I took up my brush and began to brush my still-wet hair, in long crackling strokes. And at each stroke I said to myself: I don’t care if it’s against the law. He’ll sing and I’ll collect the cash, just like Medea. Because I can’t let this go. Not ever. Especially not now. Not now.

When I finished brushing my hair, he had come away from the window and was standing in the middle of the room, looking at me. His face was truly serious now, and very attentive, as if he were seeing me for the first time.

“Of course,” I said, “if I do stay, my mother may hire men to track me down and drag me to her house.” It was meant as a sort of joke.

He said, “Your mother would never do that. She doesn’t want to publicize the fact that she hasn’t got the totally balanced, perfect, well-adjusted, enamored, brainwashed mindless child she intended.”

“How cruel you can be,” I said, astonished. “Crueler than Clovis. I think because Clovis’s cruelty is based on untruths.”

Relinquishing the window mood, Silver: smiled at me. He sat down on the couch, and said, “Brush my hair.” So I went to him and did just that, and felt him relax against me, and I thought about every moment I had spent with him, through and through.

“You have a beautiful touch,” he said at last.

“So do you.”

“Mine is programmed.”

And I smiled, too, with a crazy leaping inside me, because now it seemed he was protesting far too much. But I let him get away with it, magnanimous and in awe.

“What’s the best way for me to persuade money from the crowd?” I asked.

“So the lady agrees.”

“Yes. Do I walk round the edge, or just stand there?”

“I thought it was wrong to take their money as I’m so much better than a human performer?”

Of course I had triggered the change in him. By admitting that I thought him a robot—even when, really, I never, never had… How cunning of me, how psychologically sound. And I’d never even figured out what I was doing.

“I don’t care anymore,” I strategically said.

“Whatever we use to collect the money will be on the ground. Don’t forget, you’ll be singing too.”

I almost dropped the brush.

“I will?”

“Of course you will.”

“I can’t sing.”

“You can sing. I’ve heard you.”

“No.”

“Think of the human element it will add,” he said. “You have a natural instinct for spontaneous harmony. Half the time you sing with me, you slip into effective and very original descants. Didn’t you know you were doing it?”

“That’s—because I can’t hold the tune—”

“Not if it’s perfectly in harmony it isn’t. You’re a natural.”

“I—those were just fun. I’m no good at—”

“Was it, by any chance,” he said to me quietly, “Demeta who told you you couldn’t sing?”

I paused, thinking. I couldn’t remember, and yet—

“I just never thought I could.”

“Take it from me you can.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“How do you know you don’t?”

I had lost my omnipotence for sure.

“I can’t,” I squeaked. “I can’t.”

He smiled.

“Okay.”

At midday the rain stopped. The world was wet and grey and luminous and complaining as we went out into it, he wrapped in the red-black cloak, with the guitar slung from his shoulder, I in my now very grubby fur jacket and my now very grubby jeans with bright pretty accidental paint dabbings all over them. At intervals, as we walked off Tolerance, along the boulevard, under the elevated, I said to him: “I can’t, Silver.”

And he replied lightly, “Okay.”

People passed us, splashing and slopping through the craters in the streets that had turned into ponds and lakes. Some of the flat roofs were reservoirs, with picturesque waterfalls down onto the pavements below. It was the kind of day to hurry home on, not to walk out into. And helplessly I remembered days at Chez Stratos, curled up in the warm library with a book, or in the Vista eating candies while music tapes played, the cold unfriendly sky furling and unfurling like metallic cream, the rain falling like spears, while I was safe from the weather, safe in my cocoon, while I waited for my mother to come home. And: “Mother, can we have hot buttered toast?” And Demeta, recognizing my childish foible for classic home comforts, agreeing. And one of the spacemen wobbling in with a tray of china tea and toast and strawberry-and-orange jam. And my mother would tell me what she’d done, and I’d