Don't Disappoint (Ch. 21)
by Martin Van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next three weeks, we’ll be serializing the remaining chapters of Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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She pulled up in a convertible ‘67 Mustang, black with bright orange racing stripes and he got a flashback to the smell of her body odor at their first encounter, which was now imagined or real and mingling with the leather of her seats and her jacket and he imagined finding the source of that smell, anticipated, as he was entering the car, how Detroit had forged the door and the seat, the floor and the engine to receive the passenger with fixed resistance and transmit to him every small explosion radiating from under the hood. Every irregularity in the road.
What was her mother’s saying about preparing for a man? The obsessive perfection of one’s body. The emphasis on presentation. She always had her nails done (short, clear) and got waxed once a week, so for her preparing meant getting someone to cover her pager. He had skinny jeans and black leather chucks and a T-shirt. The car had an aftermarket Hirst shifter that she adroitly abused between each set of stop lights. He was talking almost nonstop—the senior point guard—and had the easy earnestness, the eager wit, the self-unaware smell of goddamn happiness, of someone whose heart has never been broken. She decided, as soon as he got in the car, to sleep with him. That night. They cut through the cool, briny night air and climbed off PCH towards Santa Monica. She also wore black jeans and some kind of tank top under the leather jacket and was driving barefoot to operate the clutch, producing black heels from the back seat when they arrived. The car had the original radio which was tuned to KROQ. She left the top down when they parked, using a key to lock her phone in the glove compartment, some telepathy regarding attention over dinner. He ordered a beer and she ordered a beer. It was the year where reporting what people were searching for on Google began passing for journalism.
He’s banging on about the party from the other night and the heat running longer into the Fall and the fire season starting sooner and basically running all year and the Santa Anna’s this year and think about what the self-driving cars will mean for traffic. She’s listening and smiling and slightly amused despite herself.
He is talking too much, Jason thinks to himself. He is not going to say another goddamn thing until after they order.
He orders a steak which seems, for reasons she can’t place, out of character.
She orders fish and eats with both hands and although she’s right-handed, holds the fork in her left hand and never puts her knife down. What did HH call it? The sophisticated European manner or some such thing. The outdoor dining area was pleasantly crowded with the West side free range hipsters. In his self-enforced silence, conversations from the neighboring tables narrate their dinner.
Yes on the rent control one.
It’s called topping from the bottom.
They are trick questions.
Raise taxes on you.
You have to work on your back and core.
Fiscal impact.
Yes or no on the judges and I don’t even know them.
I fucking hate semicolons.
Person and not for the party.
He has experience.
Birthday in the same month as mine.
Fucking transgender punctuation.
Focusing on glut-dominant squats.
The funny thing.
The economy sucks.
Flip the house.
I think you mean gynadromorph.
Dude fuck.
They won’t get it.
I only do machines.
Very long time coming.
It’s not really something that she decides.
They were both—and they both knew they were both—past the stage where dates were allocated to precoital exploration, where unspoken thresholds are passed in some sort of order for reasons of decorum or bashfulness or politeness or gumptionlessness. What is the origin of that transition, which eliminates the possibility of prolonged anticipation? Impatience? Practicality? Adulthood? Fear? They drove back down to PCH heading north. She pulled a U turn and parked next to the beach near the Getty Villa and they got out and scampered down to the sand.
The first night, at the party, she had calculated exactly when to deploy the non-professional smile, the smile without the stiff arm that says it’s not impossible. For a split second, towards the end of the conversation. The smile that none of her coworkers had ever seen, save one, the smile that doesn’t tell a man stay the fuck back.
They say a cigar shaped asteroid was probably some alien type of probe. Looking for intelligent life, she said.
It got within a million miles of earth, which is pretty damn close apparently and radioed home: nothing to see here. Come back when they have developed AI.
Our only chance is if the super AI computer is selfish.
What, like, stares at itself in the mirror instead of wiping out the human race?
Not selfish, wrong word. Like if it evolves ego.
Perfect. An egomaniacal super intelligent computer controlling everything. We’re headed into the matrix.
Hear me out, hear me out.
Which didn’t make any sense, by the way. Using humans for energy. Humans consume energy like every other living thing.
Hear me out. Not the matrix, but the computers decide not to wipe out humans because they have evolved ego, the computers have, along with super intelligence. And the one thing you need if you are super intelligent and have a huge ego is someone to appreciate that ego.
So we become the computers’ pets.
Basically yeah. The dog has benefited immensely as a species, gained substantial reproductive advantages, from domestication.
No more roaming the forest for food.
Little disease. Treatment for disease. No natural predators.
In most countries. And lots of new experiences. Without man the dog would never chase a ball or stick its head out the window of a moving car.
The pinnacles of canine existence.
Up there, I would imagine.
You know they say cats domesticated humans. Taught humans to provide them a ready source of rodents by building cities. So, what do humans have to look forward to after the robots take over. What’s the head-out-of-the-window chase-the-tennis ball equivalent?
I have no idea. That’s the point. Interstellar travel? Time travel? Longer lives free of disease.
AI doctors. I can retire.
They might not let you keep your car. The super AI computer is one billion times…
Ten to the ninth.
One billion times smarter than the smartest person who ever lived and will ever live. A billion times smarter than Hawking or Einstein.
A billion times the ego.
Maybe. But maybe it’s one to one with intelligence and so it’s matched? Maybe there is a ceiling on ego?
A billion times Jagger, Jordan or Elon.
Maybe. But here’s the thing, is, if the computer has an ego, it needs someone to appreciate its intelligence and only man can get close to appreciating it.
Why did God create man…
Exactly. So the computer has to keep man around and conscious and aware so he, man, can appreciate all the really cool shit the computer can do.
Time travel and space travel and driverless cars.
But here’s the real question. Here’s the kicker.
The computer gets tired of his pets and wants something different.
He wants more. Or she.
He doesn’t want to spend the whole day throwing the tennis ball, Jessica said, excited now, smiling.
That would get old after a while. So what does he do?
Invents a bunch of androids slightly less intelligent and therefore subservient to them but slightly more intelligent than the most intelligent human.
Maybe.
The computer makes a computer.
Maybe. Or he figures out that in order to find a sufficiently sophisticated interlocutor…
A girlfriend. He needs a woman!
A girlfriend perhaps. To find a sufficiently intelligent girlfriend he can’t make it, he needs to look for it elsewhere in the universe. Ego. He needs to know what’s beyond. To find her and take her for a drive.
Take him for a drive…
She takes him for a drive. Eventually. But before then he sets about exploring the universe and he sends humans as information vectors.
Sounds very sexy.
And they reproduce on the ship, many many generations.
Maybe he sends dogs along for the humans to play with.
And tennis balls. And rackets. And then they eventually make contact.
And the other ship coming from the other direction has dogs and people and tennis balls too.
Exactly! And what has he learned?
That it’s just caprice. A tale told by an idiot?
Maybe. Or that he was asking the wrong question in the first place.
He shouldn’t need to find someone else to be happy?
That survival is enough?
There is no answer. Come to think of it, couldn’t he just clone himself if he wanted to get laid?
Or the real question is: why not just power down?
Ego.
She put a hand on his chest and then a second later on his side and pulled herself to him, he had one hand on her neck and the other on the steering wheel which he moved down to the shifter and then to her leg and then between her legs, at her knees. Wrapping some of her hair in his fingers he moved his mouth briefly to her ear and then her neck and then back to look her in the eyes. Down in the sand they walked north along the shore to refuge behind rocks the size of buildings, placed there by a geologic event, a once in 100,000 year tsunami or glacier before the Anthropocene, where miraculously no teenagers had beat them to a hideaway, hidden from the road and entombed in battling reverberations from the waves and the traffic, the lights of the city running south along the impenetrable ocean, his hand on her hip brought hers back to his chest and their lips together, and then between her legs again, this time with intent, she worked on his belt with one and then two hands as he lifted off her shirt and went mad, the smell again, he had found the source, struggling for purchase in the sand, one hand on her head a careful firm handful of hair, turning her face to the side and kissing her neck, she worked it out, high school point guard like a taut door spring, she squeezed her legs against his hand on her from behind, took hold of him again, his hands on her shoulders, he entered her then and again later that night in her condo, struggling for purchase against the dawn.
