Wookie Love

Giving up a marriage should be harder than cigarettes.

So Michelle and I found ourselves at one of those New Age marriage clinics. It was called Montage Marriage Health and had several swimming pools to drown each other. There were steam rooms in which we were encouraged to really get our emotions out. Usually, Michelle would try to yell about my piles of dirty clothes for an hour, then she’d pass out. For some reason, the clothing pile wasn’t that important when she had to get an intravenous bag of sodium pentothal.

We tried the nautilus. There’s a machine where I sit on her for a while and then when she’s had enough she presses the red button and it pitches me into a pool of Nerf balls. It’s kinda fun and I ask if we can argue again. So she sets the tension spring to over 250 lbs and I’m like, “I don’t actually weigh that much.” and she gives one of those cute little winks and dares me to start an argument while I take my position, sitting on her abdomen with a giant spring loaded flap ready to trebuchet my body past the Nerf pit. I just noticed that the Nerf pit only has a catcher’s net about six feet off the ground. Can’t quite see what’s past the pit…

“Do you really think my sister is a midget troll and the stepchild of Satan?”

I do.

But I don’t want to be that honest at this moment. Relationships are about creating a friendly and hospitable place and her sister probably shouldn’t be in our marriage so much.

instead, I say, “You simply got all the good that your parents could muster. Angelique must have been sucking on the dirty teet…”

Oops.

I remember that I was trying to be artistically kind as my torso was flung through the air. It’s actually quite slow to travel at whiplash speeds while reconsidering your last words. I sailed over the 6-foot-high catcher’s net in front of the Nerf pool. I noticed there was a stack of chairs on the other side and tried to fight inertia and use gravity… but it wasn’t a free fall from a thousand feet. It was a targeted ejection system and the chairs were all metal legs, hard executive cushions, plenty to break bones, and then …

At the last possible second Divante slid over an inflatable mattress. The kind that purposely has a few air leaks so that the impact absorbs the body instead of bouncing it towards the tangle of chairs.

I rested on the dark blue Coleman inflatable mattress and thanked my stars for leaks and teeth. Divante wanted to help me to my feet but I motioned that I needed just a moment to process. He looked at his smartwatch and was stuck between being nice, avoiding a mattress lawsuit, and thinking of an excuse for his next clients because we were late.

Now I always leave the house ten minutes early but still, we are late. I have tried to lie about arrival times, and have tried to put make-up, dresses, and even a toilet in our car. But still, we are late. It grieves me to no end and now Divante will have to tell us to go home or he will be late for his next couple.

“Hey, guys. How about this… we have a new electronic protocol I want to try. Will you help me?”

Michelle is already on her feet, thinking of new ways to torture her spouse for our hour-long therapy session. She really likes Divante, who seems to often take her side, and willingly agrees to try the electronic protocols – even though she totally hates electronics.

We follow Divante to the talky chambers. These are a set of private rooms away from the physical therapies. The rooms all have sectional sofas and can be further arranged into recliners and settees and such. The odd thing about the talky room that Divante brings us to is that there is a surgical table in the middle.

We eyeball the pale blue paper sheets and the large surgical light that looks like it belongs in Hollywood. I am the first to guess the electronics.

“You gonna wire her Pleasure/Pain and give me the button?” I promised to only use it for the good of the country. It was so cool to think that we had finally gotten FDA approval on shocking our hypothalamus. There wasn’t much need to go outside if the thing worked.

“No, Mister Goround. We have a less invasive procedure. Please grab the microphone down there under the table. “

We each grabbed a mic.

“Now, I want you to go one at a time and list something you’d change about your spouse.”

Michelle understood but wanted parameters, “Do you mean _ANYthing?_”

Divante sort of shrugged and looked at his watch again. “Sure.. Give it a try.”

Michelle leaned into the microphone and whispered, “Kill his belly fat.”

Shocking! She gets carte blanche and starts with something so easy that anyone who really respected her could just go to a gym or grab a diet. I giggled that she was wasting her wishes.

“LOBOTOMY! I want that she forgets whatever I screwed up in the last 30 years.”

Take that.

“Oh yeah?” Michelle got so close to the mic it looked obscene.

“Give this jerk a better memory. Make it so he can remember what I was wearing when we met. I’m tired of him having to set alarms for our anniversary. AND MY EYES ARE GREEEEEEEEN, not hazel. (thank you). “

I didn’t know why she was thanking a machine. Divante was typing in his own ideas onto a keyboard and I was suddenly feeling like I should ask for something really outrageous and colorful.

“I want… I want her to have Olmac Lips!”

They both looked at me like they were high school dropouts.

“ You know, the ancient people of Latin America with those statues and the huge lips.”

They didn’t watch enough History Channel. Divante checked his laptop. “Is that O-l-m-a-c?”

It sounded right. I nodded. He clicked around his program and then a square curtain dropped from the ceiling over the table. We could hear a great clunking on the table. A drill. A set of animal sounds and electronic beeping. Then we heard a gurgle and the sound of a giant vacuum hose or maybe one of the HVAC lines suddenly getting pressure. Michelle and I were sorely afraid so we scooted over to each other and held hands.

Divante started typing vigorously. It sounded like he was hitting Control +Z all over our lives. Coding the necessary characteristics which would guarantee us another 30 years without violence. Perhaps he was making a designer drug that fit each of our personalities. The whooshing behind the curtain was hideous. It sounded like someone was beating a raccoon in a bag (I can only imagine because we have a family of raccoons across the street and they are like a violent version of Archie Bunker’s house).

We actually touched legs. Her skort was selected so that she could master the most aggressive couple therapies. I had swimming trunks because the trivia portion of therapy often got me dunked into the spa, the mud bath, and sometimes the cryo-chamber. So our legs were touching. The hairs on our legs were also braiding to the other. It’s like a couple is sent to hell and they both know they deserve it but all the animosity is gone for a split second as they realize they want the other person to also suffer.

Beep Beep Beeeeeeeeeep.

“Ok. Our session is good for today. I want you guys to take your wookies home and have some fun. We’ll see you on Monday.”

I looked at Michelle. ‘Wookies?”

Divante was gone.

We slowly peered forward, hand in hand, lifting the sheet fence above the table. It seemed naughty to go under the curtain skirt of the fence but Michelle said it was alright. I put in my head first.

“Holly shit.”

“What? What do you see?”

I actually didn’t want to share and told her to quickly run out of the room. She didn’t believe me. We were still working on trust and who ate most of the fries. I just didn’t think she was mature enough to handle the new marriage toys that Divante recommended.

Michelle was impertitinant. We are also working on that in our Lay Christian Counseling Service every third day. Michelle is supposed to listen to me when I say she should not look beneath the curtain. I try to hold her back screaming, “PANDORA! DON'T YOU BE A PAN….”

Too late.

She was just like her grandmother, Eve, always doing exactly what she was told not to do, looking under curtains, eating strange fruit. I thought she had a rather primordial body that was still attractive after all those years. It really is the little things…

“Tommy!”

The Tommy Wookie sat up.

I don’t think it was a real Wookie, just a robot using AI text to images to resemble me as a very hairy piece of six foot tall carpet. If you touch the T-Wookie then you swear that they packed the layer between the metal and the fur carpet with some chemical hand warmers. I think they chose Wookies because we all liked Teddy Bears and this is the natural evolution of a teddy bear with fangs.

I ignored the Michelle Wookie for a time, wondering what my wife would do with a hairy six foot tall version of myself with 1.) a flat stomach 2.) a good memory 3.) the assumption of obedience. To test this theory, I asked T-Wookie to get up. He did not comply.

“You have to ask it nicely.”

Then I saw Michelle, mother of my children, Local Saint, and proctor for the High School Virgin till Marriage Club – I saw Michelle take that strange beast and rub its tummy. She cooed for it to please stand up and “look beautiful.”

I don’t think she ever told me to look beautiful before. How did I miss this?

The Wookie was not a T-wookie at all. It had none of the classic signs of spontaneity. It did not quip when asked to look pretty, or “beautiful’ but simply complied.

“That little sell-out.” I had to whisper this under my breath because the Wookie garbage was already showing Michelle that it could pick up the table. It could smash the tile floor with its foot. She positively adored the thing. Then she motioned to the floor and asked the abomination to get down on one knee.

“I want you to tell me the color of my eyes…”

(Hazel!)

I nearly screamed at the thing: Say Hazel!

But I could not scream or she would say that I was giving it undue influence. It was obviously not imprinted upon anything I said or did. I pantomimed a large gorilla beating its chest and the wookie would not mimick.

Michelle took the wookie’s hand/paw thing and walked it to the door. She stopped ever so slightly and said, “Why don’t you take care of the kids for a few days. I want to try my new husband out.”

My jaw dropped.

Shocking! Absolutely shocking.

I triggered a neck spasm response and could not believe that I paid 999$ in co-pay to have a hair-heated robot take my place. I knew that the dog would be very confused. He would probably cock his head if we were in the same room and wonder which of the daddies he needed to listen to. I had the firm voice commands but a wookie can make the sound of a walrus giving birth. He was much closer to the animal command structure.

I threw off the sheet to my Michelle Wookie. It blinked and waited. I got closer and realized that a female Wookie reminded me of stray facial hairs from a lack of estrogen. This Wookie had a whole lack of estrogen. It was also six feet tall according to the ruler on the side of the table tray.

The lips were not Olmac. I don’t even think I saw lips at all, just a heavy mustache that came closer to cousin Itt from the Adam’s Family. Well, at least it wouldn’t hate me for 30 years of bad behavior.

“Come on Michelle. Let’s go to the dog park or something.”

The M-Wookie didn’t even get up and I resigned that I wasn’t gonna massage its legs or try to cajole it off the table. It looked like a very large dog to me.

“Michelle? What’s wrong… you don’t know your name? “

The Wookie just lay there and blinked for a time. Like it was still processing everything in the room. Like it just wanted to lay there and do nothing. Like it had no power of will on its own.

“That’s strange. Why would Divante think I wanted a robot spouse with no will? Stupid therapy.”

I decided to just ditch the Wookie because I hadn’t actually signed an ownership paper. It wasn’t a rental. I didn’t walk around the body and look for blemishes. Usually, I always get rental insurance on cars and U-hauls because it can take forever to look for blemishes.

“Last Call, Wookie. You coming?”

Michelle didn't need to be told twice but got up and grabbed my testicles in her large wookie hands. I laughed like she could actually use them.

“You know we’re not the same … race or species… right?”

Michelle, the Wookie, didn't care but decided to run around the therapy room in large strides. Someone opened the door. Michelle left in six-foot strides. I followed to the best of my ability realizing that robots were not the key to a fertile relationship.

The end.