Mechanical Sweetheart

Jerry Alper
Jul 23, 2017 · 9 min read

He broke from a deep, demonic sleep, convinced at last — ten thousand subconscious reasons murmured it was so — that his sweetheart was mechanical, like the others. It was not so outlandish — by his newspaper clippings, three such cases had already been uncovered in Manhattan. Although in each instance it needed an autopsy, commissioned by the wrought-upon though little-suspecting lover, to unveil the gleaming secret.

“Why is she childless?” he wailed, now prisoner of his idea, as he paced miserably in the handsome, second-story bedroom: one of nine heady rooms in the chimneyed rococo cottage, replete with splendiferous staircase, standing cabinets, flashing mirrored paneling and an august court, walled from the traffic.

“Or so wondrous happy?” Why, too, is he visited by forbidden dream sounds: distant siren-blasts, or great cat-shrieks, the clanging of a faint bell, sometimes a melodious, soaring humming? He remembered a long-ago shadowy nightmare in which he imagined his sweetheart, her arms swung out before her, her face choked blue, blithering in her sleep, save that her squeak-squeaking voice, repulsively, was that of a toy’s. Had she ever bled before his eyes, he asked himself, had he ever witnessed her living bloodshed?

In such perplexity he unfurled the florid, massive quilt from the torso of his sweetheart-she who each night for two years, similarly drowned in satin pillows, had rested thus serenely — and, in near-metaphysical anxiety, variously examined her: ringlets of honey-blond hair which poured from baby-soft temples to fragile shoulders, her parted sanguine lips, a chestnut bloom shimmering in the cheeks, veined shiny eyelids, a fresh-sparkling taut skin.

In the reflections of the queer city lights breaking through the immense bedroom window, impetuously he undid her kimono, leaned his ear under the pink rise of her exquisite breast in hunt of her heartbeat, and lingered so long — hearing naught but his own labored, wrathful breathing — that she at last awoke.

Perfect blue eyes, now, that open like flowers, a sinuous frame that springs carnally to life, and tan, purring arms plucking him upon her, undo Zorn: Zorn, the Neapolitan, brilliantined, jocund idolizer of spontaneity — who, happy to forget, drowns his compulsion in the Lethe of most beastlike, night-long love.

But the succeeding morning, en route to Flacon the Aristocrat, traveling by monorail through the goat-white, stained, luminescence-rinsing, minaret-mottled, futuristic Manhattan, his demon of doubt had again risen, pinching him a thousand fold. It was absurd, but he had shuddered as though palsied at a certain throat-clucking and stomach-growling, never before noticed, which accompanied her breakfast cereal ingestion; had turned flour-pale, afterward, at the homely spectacle of his sweetheart washing a single dish (her fingers had moved too blurringly fast for his liking); had been unsettled past endurance at what heretofore had enticed him: her semblance of oft-lauded, modeled, doll-like pulchritude. More significantly, at the first dawn-hour he had scouted, inchmeal, her epidermis, finding it porous and viable enough; plus this — what, never, in his love — circuitings, had he hit upon? — at the base of her spine, in dimmest tattooing — the word “Jane,” an anomaly she rapidly imputed to an impulsive childhood act that was never repeated.

All this and more “Zorn, in his high-spirited Italianate manner, transmitted to Flacon — the wire-lipped, fleering, aging aristocrat. They conversed in monstrous, mechanical chairs — which, at push button edict, could navigate innumerable flights of stairs studding this fantastic kingdom: the superhuman proliferation of surrealistic toy works (actually an immense shop-room), with Flacon as Foreman, that had been hewed from the innards of the old Coney Island Fun House.

Do you remember that Joker-faced olden pleasure-dome, that with giant chute, skirt-inflating, hiding wind and protean, mocking mirror had thrilled the joyless multitudes of the twentieth century? And who but a few would have prophesied that one hundred years later, at least in this odd particular, the circle would have run full: to wit, that the nerveless masses, beggared by cease-less emotive opiates, would wax impotent, even in execution of their voting prerogative; that, proportionately, the Western Super-State and its president would grow Godlike in their hegemony over the prostrate proletariat; climaxing in the unopposed self-proclamation of our recent emperor; his equally uncontended, tranquil nomination of inflexible social classes; with titled, landed Aristocrats, such as Flacon, topmost and, nethermost, slaves, such as the tall, jacketed bull-lesbians which now flank and attend Flacon and strangely, numb Zorn’s soul; that both classes, top and nether, conjoined, should labor in implementation of the emperor’s youngest fad: to wit, he creation of a metaphoric, aesthetic Coney Island; more specifically, the translation of Alice-in-Wonderland-type dream happenings into toys and constructs of terrible mechanical realities to be released in Manhattan?

“Her eyes could be rubber-cased, painted electronic-light receivers…her skin, a transplant. Her heart, that is simple, an ordinary pump would serve…her hair, an engrafted, fine wig, even rope…” Here Flacon halted his catalog, and –uncontrollably charmed at these ironies — dissolved into escalating, reedish laughter, which, thunderously echoed, climbed to the rafters of the cavernous, ghoulish vault: past the platform-stages, interspersing and affixed to the rising staircases, where goggled, blowtorch-brandishing lesbian mechanics pounded at headless manikin frames, waded through outlandish imbroglios of exotic puppets, welded small robotized animals or vicious, Leonardesque was machines, or simply transfused nutriments to strange cellular lumps suggesting embryonic human brains.

“But your fear is absurdly improbable, unthinkable,” reassured Flacon, who hastily strangled his laughter. After all, did he not love the presently petrified Zorn? Had he not years ago taken this Mediterranean peasant type under his dandified wing? And sponsored him to the best that was in him — a leading position in one of the emperor’s prime underground factories as a high-salaried, happy-go-lucky riveter?

“The three cases you cite,” Flacon continued coldly, “show the mind of a maniac. You go beyond, far beyond, even the wild imaginings of our adored emperor. But still you are not sure. What, you think, if her brain is a computer? Her memories transistorized and groove-stored: she would not have a soul, then — that is what poisons you? Then you must test her, Zorn, to rule out all possibility. You could x-ray her. It will be difficult. Hmm. How could you tell?” A look of mellowing craft grew upon Flacon’s withered countenance, as though he were sounding the deepest pools of his fabulous experience for the soul’s arcanum. “Play her music, majestic, courtly music. How could she appreciate? Watch her deeply. She would not be human, remember? Finally, well her heart’s dear blood — especially that which courses in the aorta-could not possibly be counterfeited. It could be dangerous though — to you. But I will signal you.”

And Zorn, slave now to his obsession that his sweetheart was mechanical, heeded his mentor, Was Jane dreamless? A vigilante of dreams, he touched electrodes nightly to her eyelids and temples. Until finally, waking as her lover wired her, she howled so piteously and long that Zorn, pleading her forgiveness, forswore his experiment.

Was her skin, which the more he suspected the more he doted on, a traitress? Was it honeycombed with grease or underpinned with rods? At his behest, under elaborate pretense, Jane loudly complaining, was multiply x-rayed. And her bones, straighter and more compact than he wished, anchored his doubt.

To ambush her soul, the ardent Neopolitan procured with his savings an aesthetic trove: a centuries-old recording of a master violinist executing a most sublime, eldritch solo. To what music, pray moaned Zorn, does she move? –for her azure eyes, as it played, stood static and lusterless.

Seven nights since Flacon and his perplexed testing, under a smoky ribbon of Manhattan moon, Zorn stood in his courtyard near a sundered, blackened medlar tree that, fantastically, had been lightning-struck. He knew that this year was the autumn of his love, that sans his compulsion, inescapably, he would have sated of Jane. Which is why now, more than ever, he was heartsick to think he may never have possessed her. Looking at the tree, he reminisced: how, months ago, their hands stroking its bark, marvelously, a winging bolt of summer lightning had ruined the medlar, and in that orchreus blazing gleam, he had thought Jane’s face phosphorescent-glowing, instinct with an ineffable, supernatural beauty. Now, wretched man, he wondered if, conducted through something metallic and lumpish in her body, the lightning ha been pulled from the ground.

In a doleful, dull trance, Zorn began to prowl meaninglessly through his tasteless, small mansion, bought for beauty. Three years ago, in quest of eggs or butter, Jane had knocked at his door; and from the start he loved the sweet harmony of her face and body, and pitied her luckless desolate childhood, that she had despised talking about.

Inertly Zorn climbed the flamboyant, soaring staircase, mulling these thoughts; and an unholy premonition, swept from his under-mind, screamed in his consciousness: “She has no mother.” Propelling him to the heavy vellum book in the cabinet at the head of stairs: Jane’s family album, which somehow had never been displayed.

Now, as he riffled the leaves, Zorn remembered: her bony fulsome sisters with their broad smiles and friendly, eager hand-shakes; he could still sense their clammy touch; his lingering suspicion that they were lesbians, both. But the photograph of her father was torn at the head, and the page for her mother did not exist.

He commenced a giddy, hysterical, tittering laughter when he espied their bedroom door standing inches ajar; cognizing at once that Jane — what she did infrequently, her arms before her — had sleepwalked: her destination being, as before, the immense closet that shelved in peacock-array the porcelain and plastic dolls which Jane so adored and which Zorn, with his riveter’s wages, adoringly purveyed. As before, Jane sat on the floor, slightly rocking reverently stacking the tiny manikins one upon the other in her lap. Save this time — what has since haunted Zorn-her eyes, not blue, or closed, were upturned little egg whites, and her face alive, made monstrous with the weirdest, most sluttish of smiles. Some primal protective instinct led Zorn with his horny palm to gag Jane’s mouth as it commenced to speak. Because at this instant, that tiny piping doll’s voice that inhabited his nightmares would have unseated him forever.

From the pressure Jane awoke, but partially, her arms still flung forward hypnotically — as though to woo or seize him; backing him through French doors, straight to a charming open-air terrace surmounting their courtyard and sprinkled now with quite bright moonlight.

With his head reared back, Zorn, halcyon at last, breathes prodigiously. He has resolved, excruciatingly, that know he shall. Above, as though a foil to his courage, two great eagles, rinsed in phosphorescence — such is one of a multitude of the new emperor’s mandates-glorify the night skies.

Now it is the harsh whistle scream directing Zorn to what he has prayed for; the scarlet-clad, hooded figure of Flacon, bestriding the fallen medlar tree, who taps his heart with a bleached finger and shines with an old man’s leer.

Almost simultaneously Zorn hurls the hatchet made ready by his side for the heart of his beauty, his love, his Jane, whose fingers and nails, with a strength he never guessed, gouge in his stomach. Zorn steps back and with boisterous, bull’s fury, Jane’s angelic braids in his fists, heaves at her hair, which like a fine, planted wig separates from a sheeny, nude pate. From the hatchet, sticking in her breast, a blue electric jet sputters; her teeth hammer together. And now , in that nightmarish voice, her arms and legs twitching in herky-jerky insane spasms — from her lonely doll’s heart, now truly spurned by its lover — comes a pitiful, feminine, last request: “Dance, sweetheart.”

And Zorn, more madly in love than ever before, seizing her gorgeous body, rains kisses on her skull, her teeth, her wound. Together they dance wildly through the great house. Into the room of many mirrors.

Music now — stately trumpets play as though to cheer their dance that still rages. Yes, and Flacon and Trumpeter Aristocrats, each of them caped gloriously and masquerading in a goat’s, wolf’s, fox or lion’s head, eerily file in. Dead silence, now. In unison, the Aristocrats aim their trumpets like rifles at Flacon, whose ancient eyes are blazing, fixing Jane, who herself returns a most thrilling smile. “He is her mother. He is her mother,” the august chorus of voices sardonically quire.

Zorn is maddened; his face flushes dangerously. Is Flacon mocking him, laughing at him? No. He is eyeing him beneficently. But is the evil man on the saffron throne, chaired by lesbians through the bowing Aristocrats, the emperor? Does he join, too, the Aristocrats’ scoffing chorus?

But now Zorn, bolstered by the quite-manifest benign paternalism in Flacon’s eyes, remembers what he has always known: the marveling boy of ten huddling by his sponsor’s side as the gelatinous guts of Jane were shoveled into the steel crib of her torso. Sadly, his eyes stray from Flacon and this pain-fraught remembrance to the tall mirror diagonally fronting him. An so, inadvertently, he at last knows this, too; he sees his arms and legs twitching in herky-jerky insane dancing spasms beneath his Neapolitan, weeping, robot’s face.

Gerald Alper,

Author God And Therapy

What we believe when no is watching

(My first published short story, written over 40 years ago (Anthologized In Strange Bedfellows) in which would anticipate by years the iconic film Stepford Wives).

Jerry Alper

Written by

Author. Psychotherapist. Writing about psychology for all to read. I also interview scientists.

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