Chapter 6: Man-Like Machines

6

“Wazzz, dude,” Norman says into the phone.
Lou laughs at the salutation they have comically shared for the past few years (a remnant of that night Norman first astrally projected, when he heard the word blurted from a perhaps-incorporeal being). “Wazzz, man,” Lou replies. “How are things in the East?”
“Something is happening,” Norman says. “Everything is suddenly coming together like all the puzzle pieces of how things needed to be for me to be able to do what I need to be doing have been floating around each other in a tornado and all of a sudden they’re all just falling together perfectly into place, almost, like, in a path for me.”
“Great,” Lou remarks with underlined sincerity. “That’s great to hear. It’s about time.”
“Fuckin’ a, it is,” Norman agrees with a brief smile. “It’s almost unfair, it seems. I mean, check it out. I’m getting paid twelve dollars an hour to enter dollar amounts into a database from images of invoice documents that are in regard to these environmental remediation sites at SE plants throughout the country. So really, all I’m doing is recording how much money this big fuck-off corporation paid the local government and various landfills and such to allow evil to be done to these small towns near their plants. It’s depressing, but still it gives me a hell of a moral anchor everyday. You know? Like, every day I’m reminded that fucked up shit really is going on, and I fill in the dollar amounts involved. It’s fucked up. It’s kind of depressing really, but shit – I’m getting paid twelve dollars an hour.
“And check this out, man. My hours are completely open. I can come in whenever I want to. I work with all these guys who are young and hip and liberal and intelligent, and they use some of the same words we use. They talk about the Revolution and mean pretty much the same thing we do. I mentioned enlightenment briefly at one point and they totally jumped on it. These guys are very cool. It makes me realize how the Revolution-focused our-generation crew of dudes must be a zeitgeist thing that’s out there in many similar forms right now.”
“That’s probably how a lot of the quote terrorist cells unquote would appear,” Lou notes with gravity to his voice.
“Hmm, I wouldn’t doubt it. That’s crazy. But the best part of my job, really, is that our supervisor, this woman named Kendra, is never around. She sends us emails every few days asking how we’re doing and letting us know that we’re doing a great job. We just fill out time sheets for our hours. I’m realizing how easy it would be to come in, plow through a couple hundred documents in a couple of hours – somehow I’m like ten times as fast as anyone else there…”
“…I’m not surprised…”
“…and then just put eight hours on my time sheet and no one will ever know. I’ve done twice as much as everyone else in two hours. As it is, the guys have asked me to slow down, since this is a temporary thing until there are no more documents.”
“Yeah, right. You’re hurrying the end of your own job.”
“Right. So the way I work anymore is I do like a hundred documents in half an hour or so and then sit around for hours listening to music on headphones or talking to the other guys.”
“That’s not unlike my job. I code for maybe fifteen minutes out of every hour, and the rest I surf the web.”
“I wish I could surf the web. That would be fucking brilliant. But our computers aren’t given internet access. Fucking fascist.”
“I guess they don’t want you guys fucking around, surfing.”
“Right, but pretty much all we do is fuck around. I mean, Kendra, our supervisor, told me that they wanted us to do around fifty documents a day.” Norman pauses a moment for a little scoff. “I do that many in like ten minutes, seriously, if I’m doing it fast, which is not hard to do.”
Man-Like Machines

“Funny. Ah, efficiency.”
“Productivity,” Norman chuckles.
“Liberty,” Lou remarks with sarcasm.
“But, so most of my days I’m just sitting there in front of a screen with headphones on, staring forward and thinking. Very Fitter-Happier. The other guys all play solitaire but I’ve been kind of letting it be meditative time for me.”
“Cool, cool. Sounds like it’s a pretty soft gig.”
“It is, really. And so there’s that, and then there’s this whole Laura thing.”
“Yes, tell me about that. You met her on Friendster?”
“Yeah. She’s on my friends list now. You should check out her profile.”
“I did, of course. Seems interesting.”
“She is. She’s fucking … interesting, man. I don’t know what it was that drew me to her. I just saw her picture - the extreme close up with the kissing lips and the closed eyes - and I knew somehow that I needed to meet her. So I sent her this really long, cryptic message about awesomeness and my early Christ-complex years and a bunch of other random shit.”
“One day I blew a kiss, et cetera? Yeah, you sent me a copy, I remember. I can’t believe that’s what you sent to her and she still wanted to meet you. I don’t know what I would think if I got something like that from a girl.”
“Oh, come on…”
“You know … you’re right. I would think it was awesome. You’re just lucky she was the right kind of girl.”
“You know I don’t believe in luck. Or, rather, I don’t believe in randomness. In no-reason.”
“It’s good to talk to you, man. It isn’t the same out here without you. But I’m glad it sounds like things are going well for you.”
“They are,” Norman agrees. “I miss you, too, man. Things aren’t perfect, you know … Lee and Ben are still fighting in the mornings and things are weird sometimes, but it is good to be around Lee again. And anyway, the moment I entered Laura’s apartment I was struck by this weird sense that I would be spending most of my time over there soon. It almost felt like I had seen her apartment before in a dream.”
“Maybe you did,” Lou says excitedly. “You know, maybe you saw the future in some past moment but just thought it was your imagination or a memory or something.”
“I love that idea,” Norman laughs, “that we can see the future sometimes but we just never really can be sure it’s what we’re seeing. And maybe sometimes we see a moment in the future that doesn’t end up happening in this timeline, or it is just such an inconsequential thought at the time that it gets thrown away and when you do finally get to that moment maybe you have a feeling of some kind but beyond that you can’t be sure.”
“It’s like we’re zipping up the timeline as we experience it.”
“That’s a nice visual. But I’m not sure if it’s such a destructive scan...”
“I think we should get back to work at some point soon,” Lou interrupts. “I don’t want our momentum to fall just because Turing didn’t end up getting made this summer.”
“I know. I agree. We should be working on something. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I have plans in my mind to start work on the new novel.”
“Which one is that? The Wildman and the King?”
“No, the one I have in mind is the one about what it is we do – the enlightenment adventure of the fictionalized Norman character.”
“Oh, okay, cool. I remember you talking about it.”
“Yeah, I’ve tried writing a couple of bits, but I haven’t kept anything yet. You know; I’ve been writing bits ever since I finished Under the Undertow. So it’s very present in my mind. So that’s what has been on my mind the most lately. But I do want to work on the Turing Registry short, and maybe on Sings to Crows. We definitely should be working.”
“Agreed.”
“You know – something else that’s been on my mind a lot lately is the Machine Enlightenment and our spiritual progress and the Revolution, and I think … I think maybe you and I need to design like a future religion, a post-human religion. Not really a religion, per se, because it would need specifically not to include all that dogmatic bullshit, but more just, like – like a system of open-source existential technology. Because, you know how we’ve talked about interacting with the interface of existence, and figuring that out…”
“Existential technologies, I’m with you,” Lou assures Norman. “I know what you mean. Fuck yeah.”
“And it ties in with the book, anyway, or maybe the book ties in with it. Because the book is very much the story of all the stuff we do, of the Norman character achieving enlightenment and struggling then with the realities of this world from the higher perspective of enlightenment.”
“Right on. I look forward to reading that.”
“Well of course you do. If anyone is going to like it, you will.”
Norman and Lou laugh together for a moment.
“So what about Under the Undertow?” Lou asks after a moment of silence. “Are you still going to try to get that published?”
“Of course. It needs to be edited in parts. I’ll probably work on that from time to time. I’ve just kind of gotten pessimistic about Under the Undertow’s chances at actually getting published.”
“Why? It’s a great story.”
“Yeah, but…” Norman stutters. “It’s just so weird. It’s so non-standard. I mean, is it even really about anything?”
“Of course it’s about something. You’re the one who wrote it. I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”
“I know. I just don’t know if anyone will really like it.”
“I liked it. Lee liked it a lot, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Norman replies, and it makes him smile to recall her comments about his first book. “She told me it was a modern Catcher in the Rye, but I haven’t read that since eighth grade and hardly remember it at all, so I have no idea really what that means. Like, I mean, I have a vague sort of Zeitgeist conception of it just from context clues within other things or editorial writing pieces I’ve read that have referenced it or whatever – precocious, troublesome kid, lives on the edge of society in some way or something, Igby Goes Down, The Good Girl, Bottle Rocket, et cetera. But I don’t really know what it means.”
“She clearly liked it. Anyway, all I’m saying is you should keep trying to get it published.”
“I appreciate the encouragement,” Norman says somewhat sarcastically.
“I’m serious.”
“I know. I said that with sarcasm despite meaning it sincerely.”
“How obtuse of you,” Lou says with a laugh. “Ah, I expect no less, Norman.”
“Can I run an idea by you that I had?”
“Sure,” Lou says.
“So I’ve been researching online … I’ve been researching romance novels. It all started with an idle remark Laura made when I was talking to her about my book the night we met, and it got me thinking. Romance novels are pretty much the biggest literary market there is. If there’s anywhere a writer can make easy money, it seems, it would be in writing romance novels.”
“Makes sense. They publish as many of those things every month as I lose in sperm count each time I jerk off.”
Norman laughs. “Nice. I imagine you ejaculating millions of tiny romance paperbacks. But, so what I’m thinking is, if I can just do one romance novel in like a weekend or a month or whatever, from what I’ve researched, I could expect to make anywhere from two to fifteen thousand dollars for my first romance novel.”
“Crazy. Is that really what you want to do, though?”
“Well, I’m just wondering how long I could write before my characters became self-aware and started talking about their own fictional nature, and, you know? I don’t think that would go over very well with your standard romance reader.”
Lou laughs.
“Anyway, it’s something I’ve been thinking about. So while I work on this new serious next novel, I might try to knock out some romances as well. After all, what a brilliant beginning to an important artist’s career, right? Making my initial money off romance novels and then going on to do shit like Turing and Death and the Ladies and Agamemnon and all that brilliant, esoteric shit.”
“There is definitely a certain you-ish awesomeness to it. Would you write them under your name, or a pseudonym?”
“I think I would do it under a female pseudonym. Vivian Nin is what I’ve come up with. I can already see her in my mind.” (Though really, he is just seeing Maria de Medeiros in Henry and June.)
“Nice. Like Anais Nin.”
“Right. And I always thought the name Vivian was really sexy.”
“It totally is. Honestly, Norman, I think it’s a great idea. Who knows, it could be that Vivian Nin ends up financing The Turing Registry instead of Sylvia.”
Norman nods to himself, smiling, imagining being able to fund his first film with his own money. “Yeah. And then it would be our money and whatever Turing makes would then be our money too, to spend on Death.”
“And then DATL wins at Cannes and we just blow up. And then it’s a direct path to Agamemnon, motherfucker.”
“Fuck yeah. We need to make sure we don’t lose our Turing Registry momentum from the summer, yo.”
“Right on. I’m excited about your idea. I think you should really try to do that. I mean, fuck – I am all about us getting to do this shit. I’m all about, you know, building the future empire.”
“Empire of enlightenment,” Norman amends. “Excellent. So we’re really just a few logical steps away from the moonbase, then.”
There is a startling beep.
“Oh, goodness. I think there’s another call,” Norman says. “Hey, you remember those emails you sent me right after the Canada epiphany, the ones about dimension and matrices and such? Could you send me whatever you have of those? I want to research for the book.”
“That’s cool,” Lou replies. “I should let you go. Eleanor got home a few minutes ago, and I’ve been on the non-cordless this whole time because the cordless is fucked up in a weird way, and my back is killing me from sitting here against the wall. So I’ll just talk to you later. But, yeah, I will email you that shit.”
“Right on. Later, dog. Communicate my love to Eleanor.”
“Moonbase, man. Stay up. Adios.”
Norman presses the button to hang up and the phone instantly rings right in his face, startling him. He presses the button again and says, “Hello?”
There is a pause lasting a few moments, then Sylvia’s mellifluous voice says with charming derision, “Hello, Norman.”
Norman’s heart instantly becomes a nervously flexing and unflexing fist. He didn’t leave things on the most certain terms with Sylvia. First Imogen left for Maine and it was suddenly just the two of them in the house in South Bend, then Sylvia decided that she wanted to finance The Turing Registry with her inheritance. Then things got complicated, the whole thing fell apart, Norman moved back out to Maine and Sylvia moved back in with her father and sister, or something (it’s still foggy to him yet).
“Hey, Sylvia. What’s up?”
“Oh, not much. I’m just sitting here in my backyard, smoking a cigarette, thinking about Saint Augustine.” Sylvia has recently gone back to college at Saint Mary’s, a Catholic women’s college in South Bend. “I think he’s my new hero.”
“Does that mean your days of sin are over?”
“You know, they may be,” she admits. “There’s something to be said for the Valley-of-the-Dolls lifestyle, but I don’t know. The whole scene is getting a little stale for my tastes, honestly. I may be interested in actually moving forward.”
“That’s fair.”
Norman takes a moment to light a cigarette, and Sylvia must take the silence as awkward because she coos softly, “What about you, Norman? How are you doing? I’m worried that no one has been concerned about that, lately. I know it can’t be easy for you out there right now with Imogen coming by every afternoon. Poor, dangerous Norman all alone without a lover. I fear for the very air.” He hears her lips kiss a cigarette and her throat pull in the smoke.
“I’m okay, Sylvia, thanks for asking. I do miss you.”
“Mm. I miss you, too,” she says with audible reluctance.
“I’m actually doing really well. I’m making more, I think, than I ever have before – even more than at the Academy, where I was salaried. Twelve dollars an hour.”
“You could have made that out here if you had been willing to strip for it. I still think you should have given that a try.”
“That place was the fucking creepiest,” Norman laughs, recalling the gay strip joint in South Bend where he auditioned in the spring, before he finally found the job at the book warehouse that he held over the summer. “The dancers’ changing room was a basement down some rickety steps with ripped-up chairs and a tiny black and white TV showing gay porn. I didn’t want a job where I had to wear a cock ring to keep my dick hard. That was not an office environment I was comfortable returning to night after night. Sorry, Sylvia.” Norman can’t help but laugh.
“I suppose,” Sylvia giggles. “But it would have been so good for me. I had already told all my friends before you decided not to do it, you know.”
“If the only asset I have left is my cock, I’m in a bad job market,” Norman sighs. “Especially now, given the choice between dancing at a gay bar or sitting at a computer with my headphones on, the choice is easy.”
“Who knows how much money you could have made.”
“Yeah, well. There are other ends in this life.”
There is a brief pause long enough for Norman to inhale smoke, hold it for a moment, then exhale it slowly, repeatedly mouthing the word ‘Oh,’ and successfully making two nice smoke rings.
Sylvia says, “So, I should tell you, though I hate such things, that Imogen wanted me to find out, if I could, why you’ve been avoiding her. Not that that is the purpose of this call. I don’t know exactly what you’re doing, of course, because you don’t exactly talk to me either. But if this Laura girl is what you’re doing now, don’t you think you should talk to Imogen about it, or talk to me about it so I can talk to Imogen about it?”
“Talk to her to elaborate upon what?” Norman spits, a bit annoyed. “Elaborate upon the fact that she and I broke up six months ago and I’ve just now begun seeing someone new?”
“Oh, Norman,” Sylvia reprimanded, “just now? Come on. You had Elise over the weekend Imogen left.” Elise is the seventeen-year-old belly-dancer with whom Norman worked at the book warehouse and had a brief affair at the beginning of the summer, much to the frustration of Sylvia, with whom he was trying at the time to plan the production of The Turing Registry, among other nebulous things.
“Anyway,” Norman says hesitantly, “I don’t know what to say to Imogen. I don’t know what she’s doing, or what she expects from me.”
“Just so long as I don’t have to hear any bullshit about you two getting back together.”
“I’m just trying to do my thing, you know? I’ve got other, bigger concerns than her mysterious depression, as far as I’m concerned, at the moment. I blacked out again.”
“Oh did you.”
“On my first evening with Laura. I blacked out in the middle of a kiss, and I showed up in this, like, cloud temple with this God-being and his angelic servants, and…”
“Norman, please,” Sylvia interrupts him. “Enough. Don’t speak.”
“The last time I blacked out was with you, on the drive out here in August.”
“I know, Norman,” Sylvia sighs. “Who are you, Basil Exposition?”
“I saw crows that time. That time you caught me.”
“And before that it was a spinning tunnel made of glowing symbols,” Sylvia says like she’s heard it a thousand times. “It’s all quite magical and mysterious. Your stoned hallucinations will no doubt save the world.” (All sarcastic vitriol.)
Norman ignores Sylvia’s attempt to bait him into argument. “Have I told you I’m thinking about writing romance novels?”
“I read your MySpace blog about it. I’ll invite you to my wedding and you can be my long-haired, esoteric romance-novelist ex-lover in the back row. It’ll be fabulous. I’m sure your fictional romances will be even more sordid than your real ones. I am positively shivering with anticipation.”
“Well anyway, I guess that’s the new idea for making the money with which to make The Turing Registry and start the Damn Thang.”
“You and your lexicon of terms,” Sylvia chides. “Such a silly man.”
“Hey girl,” Norman retorts playfully, “words have power.”
“Are you after power now?”
The question stops Norman’s thought process in its tracks. “Of course not.”
“So what are you after, then, Norman?”
“Enlightenment,” Norman responds. “I didn’t mean that a word has power like a gun has power. I mean energy, life. Words are alive. All anything is is words; and similarly all anything is is alive. Names. We’re all just holograms.”
“Enough, Norman. Honestly, just don’t speak. Anyway, that other book, the follow-up to Gigantomachy, what about it? Is it on hiatus now in favor of these silly romance novels?”
“It’s alive in my head. In my thoughts. I’m still working on it. I’m just going to focus my actual writing process on these romance novels, on Vivian Nin, for the time being.”
“Vivian Nin? I don’t think I can get behind that. The only Vivian I ever knew was a prissy bitch.”
“I’ve always liked the name Vivian. Something sexy about it.”
“Destroy all sexy. You don’t feel at all like Hercules B in Turing? Like you’re sort of selling out?”
“How dare you,” Norman says, genuinely hurt by the suggestion. “I think it would be badass to start this really brilliant, artsploitative, esoteric film/music/literature career by making my money off trashy romance novels. Don’t you?”
“There is a certain Normanish charm to it, I guess. But I know you better than that. You’re not going to work on a romance novel more than once before you get sucked up into the real book you want to be writing and then you’ll disappear again.”
“Is that what I did with Under the Undertow – disappear?”
Sylvia laughs. “I told you not to call it that around me.”
“That’s the title now, Syl.”
“My name is Sylvia. And your first book’s name is Gigantomachy.”
“Anyway.”
“Anyway…” Sylvia mimics. She sighs, and there is silence for a short moment, then she starts spouting off numbers in her radio voice (she does a classical music radio show for St. Mary’s), “Seven plus eight is? Fifteen plus sixteen is? Thirty-one. Plus … thirty-two? Is?”
“Why are you doing math at me?” he asks. Sylvia has a strange habit of doing arbitrary math problems aloud when she is frustrated. Normally she does it under her breath.
“Just thinking. I don’t know if I like the sound of where you’re going with all of this.”
“What do you mean, Sylvia?”
“Don’t use my name that way you do, to have power over me. Two plus two is … four. Four … I don’t know. I’m worried about you.”
“There’s no need to be concerned for me, baby.”
“Don’t call me baby again, understand me? I didn’t say I was worried for you. I’m not certain that you can be trusted, and I think maybe you’re gonna go too far. Just for the record.” There is a pause, during which she can barely audibly be heard taking a drag from her cigarette. “And when you do, don’t think for a second that you can come running to me and my army of Catholic cyber-apes. Where did you two get the name Man-Like Machines, by the way?” she asks on a side note.
“From that I, Robot poster I had in my room at the Academy, and in college before that. Remember that poster? It was in the middle of three above my couch, between Fight Club and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, on the wall above my old couch.”
“All I remember about that room is you with your shirt open when you had us up to watch Fear and Loathing.”
Norman chuckles to himself, “Ah, yeah. That was for you, even then. Truly.”
“I can’t believe they let you work at a school.”
“Anyway, the I, Robot poster. And that is, of course, an old cover-art poster from the Asimov book, pre-Proyas-film. It had this line above the title that said, ‘Man-Like Machines Rule The Earth! Fascinating Tales Of A Strange Tomorrow!’” When Norman repeats the tagline, he does so with hyperbolic vocal enthusiasm and hand gestures like he’s selling soap in the late nineteenth century, even though he’s alone in the garage.
“Well, it’s very fitting,” Sylvia says breathily, no doubt through an exhale of smoke. “You are very man-like. Not quite, though. A bit more incorporeal these days.”
“Not sure quite what that means,” Norman cringes with a laugh.
“All I mean to say is that, yes, it is wonderful all that you think and write and such, all your lovely ideas, but it was all too easy for you. Sure, you skip two grades and tear out your eye and you’re gonna think you’re special. But you ignore reality. Try seeing from a real person’s point of view sometime. Try facing actual events.”
“Are you saying I’m not a real person?”
“Not anymore. I’m speaking to a phone. I’m standing here all alone, aren’t I? In fact…” Her voice trails off.
“So am I,” Norman replies, but Sylvia hangs up in the middle of his am.