I set out on my morning walk with the dog – the same routine as always (what other kind of routine is there?) – pee on the front lawn by the road (the dog, not me), first by the granite boulder on the east side of the lot, then by the pole that supports the basketball hoop on the west side of the lot.  Up went the hind leg, then out came a stream of deep yellow fluid.  The dog is a standard poodle, the runt of the litter and smaller than you’d expect for a standard poodle.  I call him a substandard.  When we brought him home last year, the kids named him Brutus.  In fact it was James who named him.  Jessica was barely talking then.  The most she could manage was a slurred “Bus, Bus.”

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Project:  Hughes, Edward
Interview:  0031957 (Voice Calibration)
Interviewer: Ginsberg, Alan

So ya, man.  Name?  Hughes.  Ya.  Ted.  So ya, man, I worked on the GB20 design team.  You owe me.  You owe me big time.  In fact, you guys should be on your knees kissing the ground we walk on.  We hit a veracity factor – nine point seven – unheard of.  Most people – even the pros – most of them couldn’t tell the difference.  The new bot could lie, it could laugh at a private joke, break out in a sweat under pressure.  We made a bot with Asperger’s Syndrome, another one with social anxiety disorder that would fall down and have a panic attack.  We even did a bot that would tic under stress.  Annoying as all hell, but that’s what the loved one wanted.

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I had forgotten to take my meds again – not just a one time thing, but an “Oh shit” sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach when I saw a full bottle of pills sitting on the window sill above the kitchen sink and realized a whole month had passed me by and still I hadn’t opened it, not even once – which explains why I found myself back in the hospital doing all the usual stuff again (you know the drill):  morning exercises in floppy slippers, and group therapy with sobbing anorexic girls sitting next to anemic glassy-eyed postpartum moms, and pleasant one-on-ones with nurses who tried to look interested in all my boring crap even though I’d caught them checking their watches, and the arts and crafts time where I used child-safe scissors to cut out pictures of emaciated models which I glued to construction paper while I drifted off into my mid-afternoon stupor, and then, to round out another lovely day, a chat with my psychiatrist, Dr. Melvin, a gaunt man with pale complexion and black hair whose invitation to join him in his office never failed to fill me with a weird foreboding calm, the way I imagined it feels for death row inmates who’ve gotten the first injection – the one that relaxes them – and even though they know the next injection will kill them, can’t help but relax.  I figured it’d be a big mistake to let down my guard while I was having a session with Dr. M., though I couldn’t say for sure what would happen if I dozed or daydreamed or gave him any other excuse to step out from behind that big pretentious desk of his and come a little closer to me.  It was just a gut feeling I had, a dark knot that twisted low in my bowels and left me feeling like I might dump everything into my underwear.

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The gavel came down with a crack, which surprised me, because I thought that courts didn’t use real gavels anymore.  I thought gavels were symbols of office, for decoration only, like a captain’s sextant or a priest’s bible.  But there it was – a sharp stroke against the wooden desk that sounded in my head like a gunshot.  Bang.  My first criminal conviction.  I had a record.

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You know how the song goes:  “When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, it’s hard….”  That’s how I’ve always felt with Suzanne.  I try to hide it, but there are times when my insecurities emerge low in my viscera and refuse to go away.  We’ll be at a dinner party and I’ll glance across the table at her and catch her talking with another man.  She’ll be bright and animated and wholly engaged.  She’ll be that sparkling jewel I fell in love with, but she’ll be that sparkling jewel with everyone she meets.  When my insecurities are at their worst, I wonder to myself:  what if she meets another man who wants to hoard that jewel for himself as much as I do?  I tell myself that, as a matter of prudence, I should assume all men are as ill-intentioned as me.

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