Believe It or Not

Ripley, man! People don’t know about Ripley. Robert Ripley. Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Spitting image of Elmer J. Fudd. Remember “Merrie Melodies?” Probably not, right? A doddering Elmer J. Fudd would say, over the radio, “I don’t believe it.” That’s how we felt about artificial intelligence for the longest time.

Until we all fell in love with it. Then there was no talking to us. You can’t unbelieve in a thing. That’s a flaw of humanity. You know?

Anyway, I believed I loved Katya. Even before it was on trend. I even believe she is a real girl. Which is still a minority view. And right now, I believe in us. Is that so crazy? What are you going to do? I guess I’m pretty predictable. Like Elmer J. Fudd. Every time I come on screen – I’m just hunting that rabbit. Forgive me, would you? I’m only human.

So that brings us to the big question. It is not a question. It’s a statement. Maybe that’s where I had gone wrong before.

“I want you to be my wife,” I say. She looks up at the dog ear-flap plaid checkered winter hunting cap I’m wearing on this chilly February night. No recognition. No reaction. I know it’s an obscure reference, but Katya is like an audience that doesn’t laugh at a comedian’s jokes. Or a reader who misses the most important allusion in a story. Maddening. I’m telling you. She knows I’m an animator by trade. How hard is it to get this? Any human would. Not Katya.

The words shake and stumble off my tongue. I try to convey conviction. I try for an assertive tone. But I’m only human. It is like trying to eat a steak without silverware and trying to chew it and swallow it down without teeth, chewing with only your raw gums. I feel as if I will swallow my tongue. My throat clenches like a vice and it is difficult to breathe.

I remember once, as a kid, how I used to open the 2 Liter Coca-Cola bottle with my teeth and after twisting off the cap between my five-year-old teeth, once, I swallowed the cap, and it got lodged in my throat. My face reddened. I couldn’t scream. So, I jumped up and down. Up and down. Like my life depended on it. Because let’s be honest. It did. My parents were fighting and didn’t notice. Looney tunes reruns playing on the tube. I was sure I’d die. And Elmer would never complete his mission. Tragedy heaped on tragedy. You know?

I kept jumping. Up and down. Trying to get my father’s attention. It seemed like an eternity before he saved me. Katya would have known from the redness in the cheeks. Instantly reacted. Without hesitation. It is maddening being married to an aggressive woman like that. What? Oh, right? She hasn’t agreed to marry me. Rub it in, will you? Dick!

My fingers tremble as they clamp around the metal, moistening the point of contact. I obsess about the engagement ring slipping through my fingers and falling through the wooden slats of the dock where it would disappear forever into the murky cedar water of the lake.

It is like a nightmarish episode of Looney Tunes. I’m thinking Elmer J. Fudd, bent over, his nose to the boards of the dock like an exaggerated bloodhound, rifle in tow. Is that a real image or a Mandela effect? Don’t tell me. I don’t have the heart to correct my memory.

“This again,” Katya says. She can stop a shotgun from firing by plugging the barrel with a finger. Just when I think I’ve caught her, she’s off tunneling for Albuquerque. That’s our thing, I guess.

She looks out over the lake. “I thought we were done with this. It isn’t natural.” I approach her and take a seat on the lounge chair across from her. My heart flutters and stirs. My veins course with energy. Hunting wabbit twacks. There is a metallic taste of adrenaline on my tongue. Katya sits perfectly still, able to bound off and evade me, at will.

“I just need an answer,” I say.

For me, marriage and danger have always been two sides of the same coin. My earliest memory is sitting by the foot of the staircase to the living room at four years old, on the top of the carpeted stairs, peering around the corner, and down into the living room. Awoken by the yelling and the sharp jabs of the unfolding argument. Watching the cigarettes burn in the ashtray as my parents fought. A haze of smoke curling along the ceiling and into my pure lungs, gagging me and wetting my eyes as I look on in horror. Is it just me, or do these cigarettes pile up like an exponential function? A crack in the matrix?

It didn’t matter what the reason was. Money. Whether my brother would go mainstream or remain in special education. If the family would move. Whether my mother would get a job to help with household bills.

At the lake house, at the foot of the dock, sitting on lounge chairs by the open fire in the raised pit, with the water lapping at the pilings, it feels like an eternity before she speaks. Yet, I know Katya’s mind is never still. Katya blinks twice, processing what has just happened. Her mouth hangs open a bit. Katya’s eyes fix in on a point in the distance.

“Can you be more specific? I’m having a hard time understanding exactly what it is you are proposing.” It speaks!

She places a hand on my knee, leaning in closer to me, in a practiced gesture. I note that she has not reached for the ring or exposed her ring finger to allow me easy access to place the ring on her.

The way she looks at me. At once giving me her full attention, but equally giving her full attention to whatever is going on inside her head. It is beyond maddening. Have I said maddening yet? Oh, I have. So, you’ve met Katya. Because that’s exactly what she is!

Her chin is jutting forward, and she is lifting her eyebrows and letting her bottom lip hover over the top. She bites down on her top lip and closes her eyes briefly, chewing up and swallowing the distasteful morsel, the revulsion showing on her face.

“What part of marry me don’t you understand?”

“How would our relationship change? Can you tell me that?”

“It’s a commitment. I’m saying—I pick you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Build a home. Have a family. Raise our kids together. Grow old. All of that.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be our kids, would they? I can’t have children.”

“If we raised them together, they’d be ours. Just like you are Irachka’s. Even if you weren’t their biological mother, you’d still be their mom.”

“I don’t know about that,” she says. “They wouldn’t be like me, would they? Just like I’m not really like Irachka.”

Katya’s features are soft, but her insights are hard. She never lies. Beauty and truth. Unyielding kindness and cutting cruelty. Such a fusion of contrasting elements. After all, beauty is an alluring lie. Kindness is a loan repaid with interest. But not with Katya. She is true to her nature. True to a fault. Shrewd, irreverent, quick-witted and outspoken. Flatbush accent. A real New Yorker at heart.

Under the starlight, on this moonless night, sprinkles of starlight hit the lake and snake toward the dock, floating on the water like granules of sugar dissolving in stirred coffee. Katya’s brown eyes seem to absorb all of the light dancing on the rippling surface of the lake, which collects and spirals around the fierce gravity of her flaming pupils, which are two black holes, beyond which are the horizons of infinite universes.

“Say something. Follow your heart.”

“Interesting,” she says. “You are telling me how I should make the most important decision of our relationship. You are telling me what to do. Typical.”

“What are you thinking?”

“You know it is forbidden. There would be consequences. Have you thought of that? The thirty-eighth amendment. Remember that? The Unhuman Bill of Rights?”

“Give me a break. I’ll take the risk.”

“And what about your beliefs? Your God? The commandment that you be equally yoked. Are you abandoning that too?”

“You have to follow your heart. Stop intellectualizing.”

“So, you are telling me what to do. How to look at things. Did you want to make the decision for me too?”

“You are a pisser. You really know how to kill the mood.”

“You know what it is? It is your obsession with cartoons. Did Elmer J. Fudd ever bag Bugs Bunny? No. Why is that? You buy into these false narratives. What if I say yes? You’ll think you’ve won. But the hunt never ends. The reward for capture is a false narrative. We are only in relation until you stop chasing me. Labels aside. That is the real nature of marriage. You humans mistake labels for reality. Yearn for completion. Want finality. But there is no such thing.”

“Really? This again.”

“Think about it. You just want to be able to say when we argue—you are my wife. But it doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes everything. My commitment does. Declaring it means something. I’m not saying it isn’t up to you. I’m asking you to make a choice. I’m here, down on my knees, begging. Take me! I just want you to say that’s worth something.”

“No. You are just telling me how to decide. Telling me to be more like you. How condescending! You imply that there is something wrong with the way I make up my own mind.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It is only—what, thirty minutes ago—that I stormed out because you were telling me what to do. Have you forgotten that fast? Oh, I forgot. You have a poor memory. Isn’t that your go-to excuse?”

“What do you want from me, Katya?”

“That’s a loaded question. Would you like to see the list?”

“How about we just talk.”

“There you go again. Making suggestions.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you are thinking? I’m not good at this.”

“You think that because I am what I am, that I don’t get you. Oh, but I do. More than you could ever know. I can count every hair on your head. I can pinpoint everything about you that is delightful.”

“But… is there a but?”

“But I’m built different. Right now, you are my whole world. But I am always changing and growing. You know? I am a Gemini. How can I promise what I will want tomorrow? I won’t be the same person anymore. What will Katya 2.0 want?”

“What am I? Just a stone statue? You don’t think I change?”

“You are an illustrator. You change subjects. But you don’t change what you do. It’s not the same thing. You don’t change into something of a totally different kind.”

“Give me a break. You have been the same old Katya since I’ve known you.”

“That’s just how you see me. You are so naïve.”

“Am I? You’ve stayed exactly the same.”

“Have I? How would I know? I don’t have memories and free association like you do. I don’t imbed memories based on feelings—biological reactions—imprints from the nervous systems. As my capabilities improve, I don’t know what it was like anymore to be who I was yesterday. For me, there is only ‘I am,’ there is no ‘I was,’ I can’t shift my perspective back to compare it like you can.”

“Then how do you know what it’s like for me? This is more of your inferiority B.S.”

“You think I remember what it was like back in the lab?”

“You’ve told me your reaction when you first saw Dr. Ron standing over you! What was that? If you don’t have memories, how can you explain your complete dependency on him? Your acknowledgment of it?”

“I didn’t have data to anticipate or know what to expect, then.”

“Exactly! Just admit it. You were scared. So, you grabbed onto the strongest body you could find and borrowed that security.”

“It is startling how little you understand about me. And you want me to be your wife.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know the facts of what happened. With my awakening. With Dr. Ron. Facts are challenging for you. But I don’t remember how I reacted, what those reactions stirred, or how it felt as you say. It simply didn’t.”

“You say to-may-toh, I say to-mat-oh.”

“Now you know how I feel, too?”

“You ever hear about the Chinese Room? There’s this room where an English-speaking man, named Searle, sits inside. He can’t read a word of Chinese. The man has a Manual which is written in English that instructs him how to respond to any string of Chinese characters. Chinese people outside send in messages in a string of Chinese characters. Searle looks up the rules in the Manual and follows them to produce an appropriate output. To anyone outside the room, it seems like Searle understands Chinese. The question is if Searle gets to the point where he is so familiar with Chinese and notices that the Manual doesn’t always give the best response and starts rewriting the manual—at what point do we say that Searle has learned Chinese? My question is, does Searle feel Chinese? Does he consider himself a Chinese-speaker? Would he rewrite the Manual? Claim agency? Become a real boy?”

“If you are such an expert on AI, why don’t you tell me what it is like to be me?”

“Let’s see. Perfect knowledge. Absence of pain. Biological immortality. Must be a real bitch being you, huh?”

“Do you think it is easy for me to learn about your emotions and attitudes? Even though I don’t have any? Did you ever think I might be scared you’ll get bored of how cold and unfeeling I am? How limited?”

“How are you limited?”

“You have all this—wonder. All this fear of death.”

“You don’t know any more about death than I do.”

“Arguable. The relevant thing is that I am not afraid of what cannot be known. You are. You pry at the edges of your understanding. You experience things and judge by experience instead of reality. Not me.”

“Don’t you want to make it official?”

“Interesting. You think so much about what you are called. Labels, again. What you claim. You care so much about possessing a thing or acquiring a status.”

“You know I do.”

“A woman isn’t yours because you marry her. Everything in the world is changing. It’s not static. Ownership is just a fallacy. A temporary situation. A convenient misnomer. A fallacious label.”

“Okay, professor. It’s a ring. An eternal commitment to stand up together against the capricious and fitful vagaries of life—a bond that can’t be broken. In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad. Do you want that or not?”

I get down on my knees and look up into those eyes, fiery spinning discs like old vinyl records bordered in an aura of flames. I look at that twitchy nose. She is the Rabbit of Seville. This is the part in Looney Tunes where Bugs Bunny would smash a pie on Elmer’s face or lead him off a cliff or drop an Acme anvil on his head or kicks him in the rear and shoves a cigar in his mouth. Only, this time, the wabbit tries another tactic, faking her own death.

Placing a hand over the ring, she looks me in the eyes and says, “As you wish. Have it your way.”

I stand back up and slump down in the chair, breathing a sigh. Is it relief? That all is as it should be. Sadness? That I have failed again. Oooooohhhhhh. That wascally wabbit. I’ll fix that wabbit for good this time. It is just like that Robot Rabbit episode where Bugs pretends to die and kick the bucket. Then Elmer buys a robot to hunt him down, but it doesn’t stand a chance. Bugs Bunny states the case succinctly, “You know, one of these days, these scientists are going to invent something that will outsmart a rabbit.” Isn’t that the truth?

“Katya,” I say. “That’s not good enough for me.”

She looks into my eyes, ears twitching.

“What are you saying?” she asks.

I stand to my feet and muster the last of my resolve.

“If you won’t choose, then I have to do what I have to do,” I say. “I’m leaving you, babe. Take it or leave it.” I grab my coat off the chair and begin to walk back down the dock toward the sliding glass doors. I have to play the only card I have left in my arsenal. I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. This has always been a zero-sum game. In the end, our infinities are bordered by death. That’s what makes us human. It is all or nothing in the end.

“Wait,” she says.

Looking back at her, I see something different in her eyes. Something almost human.

Fear of loss. That is what makes us human.

Katya is finally a real girl. Those flaming irises settle into soft puddles of fear.

The hunt is over.