Power Save

People will surprise you sometimes, and not because it’s your birthday or anniversary or because you were promoted at work. They surprise you without saying, “surprise!” Sometimes they mean you harm and sometimes they’re merely incompetent. I’ll give you an example. I used to know this guy from Australia—Malcolm was his name—and I suppose it’s a lie to say I “knew” him because in actual fact I knew only a few things about him and had never actually met him, neither in the in-person sense nor the video-chat sense nor the exchanging of individual text messages. I knew of him, and he knew of me, although I think it’s fair to say each of us passed most of our time without thinking of the other at all.

I’d just started a new job as the general manager at the Residence Inn in Oklahoma City. Most nights, I, too, resided there, though I kept my small apartment in a town two hours away. I was very good at my job, a real crackerjack, the district manager always said, a regular Girl Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It sounded like a compliment, but he had an agenda.

I’d recently left my husband of twelve years. We’d married right out of high school—in a ceremony, embarrassingly enough, held in the Walgreen’s parking lot where we’d first met—and although we made good study partners through our four years of college, I had not enjoyed working two jobs—one at a different, crappier hotel and another at a very fancy hotel for dogs—to put him through graduate school for some kind of degree no one had ever heard of, a Master’s in Sports Management, which meant that because he was uncoordinated and generally lazy, he did not like to play sports, but because he claimed to need an overabundance of “alone time,” he did like to watch sporting events of all kinds, even bowling and golf. Our parting had been amicable, more or less, and even after the divorce was finalized, I still thought of him in much the same way I might have thought of an annoying younger brother. Luckily for us both, but especially for me, we had no children.

I was working three overnights in a row during the Martin Luther King Day weekend when the electricity went out at the Residence Inn. We had a backup generator, but the elevators were powered down, and the lights in the lobby went suddenly dim, so that the usual high sheen on the fake ferns became an ugly, metallic gray. We had a protocol in place: I was supposed to phone the district manager—on vacation in the Dominican Republic—phone the head maintenance guy—on vacation in Toledo, Ohio—and go door-to-door passing out flashlights and fresh batteries. The plastic bin behind the desk that was supposed to contain these items came up empty, however, and I did not think it wise to pass out what I did discover in the far reaches of a break room drawer: a box of Band-Aids, a handful of sticky ketchup packets, and a stack of paper menus from the Chinese restaurant around the corner.

I’d finally decided to let the guests fend for themselves when my phone lit up with my ex-husband’s number. I’d recently changed the way he appeared in my Contacts from his actual first name—Bobby—to the secret nickname my friends who hated him had assigned him without his knowledge: Slug. It was supposed to be short for Slugger—baseball was the sport he most wanted to manage—but it worked fine in a metaphorical sense as well. Now that he had his fancy Master’s degree paid for mostly by virtue of my labor, he had a new job at a shitty little airport: guy in charge of fixing all the computers at the shitty little airport. In truth, he knew nothing about fixing computers, but made up for it with false bravado and a large operating budget.  He spent most of every day in a converted broom closet behind the Avis Rent-a-Car desk where he either took naps or played video games.

“What’s up?” I said when I picked up the phone.

“Where are you?”

“Work,” I said. “Where do you think?”

“Work, I guess-guess,” he said. He had a longstanding habit of saying the same word or phrase—usually at the end of a sentence—twice, not for emphasis but as a kind of nervous tic. So where others might say something like, “This recipe calls for broccoli,” he would say, “This recipe calls for broccoli-broccoli.” The repeated word was always slightly different in intonation, like an aside or a necessary clearing of the throat (throat-throat.) I’d tried to cure him for years, but nothing, not even an expensive trip to a speech pathologist, seemed to help.

“You’re damned right I’m at work.”

“Do you have power?” he said. He didn’t always repeat words, only when he was agitated.

I told him the power at the Residence Inn had been out for hours, and that in spite of the backup generator, people were starting to get cold. I’d discovered a secret key and unlocked a linen closet I’d always assumed was the boiler room, after which I went door to door passing out extra blankets. I’d been tempted to save a down comforter for myself, but felt guilty when I saw a small, shivering child beg her mother for a muffin at the breakfast bar. I’d made a special trip to my suite for a sweater and hat, but hadn’t put them on until I could see my breath fogging the air.

“The airport’s in trouble,” he said. “All the servers are down-down.”

“Aren’t you supposed to know how to fix that kind of thing?”

“This is some kind of malware,” he said. “The Russians or something.”

“The Russians hacked into the network at the Stillwater, Oklahoma Airport?” I said. “Okay.”

“It could happen,” he said. “Malcolm had the same problem at the Jazzercize Center in Melbourne.”

“Stop talking to Malcolm,” I said. “That guy’s gone over the edge.”

It occurred to me then that I’d never learned Malcolm’s last name. This is what I did know about Malcolm: he loved video games, especially Journey to End of the Earth, the same game Bobby liked best.  He taught a Jazzercize class for Seniors, though he himself was probably only around forty-five or fifty. He lived in Melbourne, though he’d recently moved to the top of a mountain somewhere else in Australia, I wasn’t sure where. He took a lot of photos of the exotic flora and fauna at the top of the mountain. The photos were not just beautiful but artistic, arresting, even, like Bobby had chosen several of them to use as wallpaper on both his laptop and his desktop.

In addition, Malcolm liked American movies, sports, and music, and seemed also to follow American politics. He hadn’t seemed like the type, but at some point well after the election, he became obsessed with a certain psychopathic or at the very least sociopathic former president from the far right. You know who I’m talking about. Rhymes with lump. Lump-lump. Sump-pump. Head so big it’ll make you jump-jump. My husband, ex-husband, was not a Lump-lump enthusiast by any stretch of the imagination, but he found it all too easy to overlook fascist sympathies among his gamer and sports-watching buddies, something that had contributed to my decision to file for divorce.

“This is serious, Alicia,” he said that day on the phone. “Flights can’t take off or land until the servers come back.”

“Come back from where?”

“I need some help!”

“You think I know how to fix anything like that? Why are you calling me? I don’t even like computers, remember?”

“But you do like to text,” he said. It was true: I texted with no fewer than one hundred seventy-seven different people, old friends mostly, and although I’d recently departed a group chat associated with planning a reunion for our high school class, I still liked the thrill of online exchange to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. If he thought my list of contacts would help solve the tech problems at the Stillwater Airport, however, he was sadly mistaken.

I convinced him to phone his boss and insist on calling in some professional help.

“I’m supposed to be the professional help,” he said. “My boss is not going to like this.”

“Look,” I said. “Do you want to be responsible for a plane crash? For several plane crashes?”

“No,” he said. “I should have settled for a job passing out rental-cars-rental-cars.”

“Slay, Slugger,” I said.

“Don’t call me that, Alicia. It’s not funny.”

“Go get ‘em.”

And get them he did. He called his boss and confessed to everything: he’d falsified his application when he said he’d earned “the equivalent of a Master’s degree” in computer science, his efforts to get the servers back online indeed had caused a massive power outage spanning multiple municipalities, and he had no idea how to get the systems back on track again, something he feared would cause imminent loss of life. His boss contacted an emergency response team, and everything was back up and running in less than half an hour.

But Bobby was fired on the spot. And even after the real tech support team had packed up and cleared out, the power company could not account for how, exactly, one guy at the Stillwater airport had managed to disrupt service to so many millions of customers, and in January this was cause for considerable alarm. The lights were coming back on across the state, but Stillwater remained largely in the dark.

That’s how I ended up talking to Malcolm. It’s not like Malcolm was anyone I ever thought about, but Bobby insisted his house in Stillwater was too dark and cold, even when he wore a sweater, turned on his lightsaber, and wrapped himself in a blanket. And his parents were out of town helping the Baptists. Surely the Residence Inn, with its emergency generator still running, had an extra room.

As it turned out, we did not have an extra room, but my manager’s suite did have a pull-out sofa, and since my desire to remain employed meant I had to (wo)man the front desk the entire night, it wasn’t like I’d really have to run into him or anything—I even had access to two separate toilets and two separate sinks.

“You can drive down here,” I said. “But bring a pizza.”

“I don’t eat pizza,” he said. “Dairy.”

“Bring me a pizza, then,” I said. “You can have saltines.”

“I can’t have crackers.”

“Get yourself a side of beef.”

“No beef.”

“Look,” I said.  “Skip the pizza. Skip the beef. You can share my suite, but only until the power comes back on. Bring one of those phone chargers that works in the car.”

“I don’t have one of those anymore,” he said. “You took it.”

I didn’t remember taking any phone chargers when I left; in fact, I remembered quite the opposite. So many of my former possessions—can opener, stapler, coffee grinder—had become his possessions that I no longer thought of myself as a person who kept track of things. I was a person who lost things.

I was always tired, so tired I could fall asleep standing up. I’d taken to sneaking in short naps during my shifts, something I knew I had in common with Bobby. On our honeymoon, we’d slept all day and watched television all night. So Bobby drove up and took the sofa in my suite while I stood watch over the front desk with my eyes closed. My phone was dead, so Bobby loaned me his. That’s when Malcolm started in.

A guest phoned from the fourth floor. “We’re freezing up here,” she said, loudly. I had her on speaker phone. Her voice was high and metallic, like water overflowing a gutter.

“What can I help you with?” Malcolm said from Bobby’s phone.

“Hello?” the guest said, her voice echoing into breakfast bar. “Is this the front desk?”

“I don’t believe I know the answer to that question,” said Malcolm, again from Bobby’s phone. Anyone could tell this was not actually Malcolm’s voice but a computer-generated approximation, the same voice that answers people when they say stuff like, “Siri, play ‘Raspberry Beret’” or “Siri, what’s the capital of Belarus?”  or “Siri, what’s the temperature in Stillwater, Oklahoma?” I’d never been much for voice-activated commands; Siri or Alexa or Cortana or whatever-her-name was always seemed like more trouble than she was worth. But Bobby, ever a sucker for the latest and greatest, was a fan.

“When did you change Siri’s voice to a man’s voice with an Australian accent?” I asked him the next morning, after my shift was over and I’d returned to my suite.

“It was always like that,” he said. He had his feet propped on the edge of the coffee table, his hand clutching one of my Dr. Peppers. “You just never noticed.”

“Your phone came like that?” I said. “With Malcolm’s voice on it?”

“It’s not Malcolm.”

“I know it’s not Malcolm,” I said. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

“I’ve never talked to Malcolm,” he said. “I’ve never even heard his voice.”

“Don’t you figure he sounds like that?” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like the voice on your phone!” He’d never been good at following even the most basic conversational patterns. It was his attention span, which, like most people’s, had grown shorter in recent years: if his computer took too long to load a page, he used the “extra time” to moisturize his forehead and face, a process that had become very elaborate and also sacrosanct; if ever I made fun of him for lining up his numerous skin care products on the dining room table, he accused me of bullying and said I was causing him considerable harm.

“The voice on my phone is artificial,” he said. “Like your friends. Malcolm is a real person.”

“My friends are not artificial.”

“Sure.”

“I wish I’d never even gone to Walgreens that day,” I said, grabbing the last Dr. Pepper from the fridge. “I wish I’d never even met you.”

“Too late,” he said. “Are there any more blankets?” Indeed the temperature was becoming unbearable. I was wearing my warmest hoodie and hat, but any exposed skin was freezing. Bobby, however, did not seem cold. He rose from the loveseat and opened one of the drawers in my suite’s kitchenette, where he discovered a donned a pair of oven mitts. He looked like a fool.

“Look,” I said. “I actually thought it was cool that your stupid Siri or whatever sounded like Malcolm. Funny, even. So you don’t have to get all shitty.”

“Who was getting shitty?” He tried in vain to wipe his nose with one of the oven mitts. I’d have to remember to wash it later.

“Never mind,” I said. “I need to borrow your phone for the rest of the weekend. I found the charger.”

“Why can’t you use the charger to charge your own phone?”

“Because I want to borrow yours.”

The truth was I wanted to spy on him, scroll through his contacts, maybe take a look at his texts. Probably he figured as much. Maybe he wanted to make me jealous. Maybe he just didn’t care.

“Take it,” he said. “And I’ll stay another night-night.”

And that’s how I began to trust artificial intelligence above my own. I was aware this was the theme of exactly seventeen very bad screenplays from the early 2000s. Still, in what began as a joke meant to scare away unwitting guests at the Residence Inn, I slowly found myself more interested in what Malcolm had to say than I was in my own thoughts. Worse, I began to imagine the voice from Bobby’s phone belonged to the real Malcolm, the Trumper from Melbourne. Why would someone who lived on top of a mountain in Australia, a jazzercize instructor, for god’s sake, a kindly amateur botanist, video game enthusiast, and lover of ballroom dance, even bother to care so much about American politics? Listening and talking to the voice from Bobby’s phone, I was determined to find out.

Bobby was back in my suite, asleep again on the pull-out sofa. The long weekend meant I had to endure yet another overnight shift at the front desk, a three-foot space now crammed full of extra down comforters I had come to loathe. Many of the guests had checked out—a relief—but my dream of an empty lobby and time to read USA Today from cover to cover was not to come true: all afternoon and into the early evening I processed the credit cards, rental agreements, non-smoking/pet policy pledge sheets, and license plate numbers of just under a hundred power outage refugees from all over the state. Once again: no vacancy.

A frat boy with an out-of-control golden retriever checked in late.

“Golden retriever,” said Malcolm, as if he were an announcer paid handsomely by the AKC. “Family friendly and generally responsive to training.”

“Cute,” said the frat boy. “My girlfriend has one of those things.”

I said nothing at all, not even the usual spiel about the proper way to swipe the key-card for after-hours access to the exterior doors. I didn’t even smile. I pretended I wasn’t there at all; for that was the best part about having Malcolm around: he took over, and when he took over, I could relax into the shadows of sub-humanity. Content inside the cage of my own consciousness, I could walk and nod as if possessed by an unceasing electronic current, customer service person who smiled without feeling happy, furrowed her brow without feeling concerned, pressed buttons that weren’t buttons but flat images projected onto a flat screen meant to make life easier. And for me, everything suddenly was easier, easy in the way scrolling through texts without answering them was easy, easy like eating whipped cream from a can.

“Heat and air are back online,” said the head maintenance guy, who had returned early from his trip to the Dominican Republic. “I probably have Covid,” he said.  I watched while he adjusted the thermostat. “But I don’t care. I could die tomorrow and no one would notice.”

“More than one million Americans have died from causes related to Covid-19,” said Malcolm. “The death toll is still rising.”

“Turn that thing off,” the maintenance guy said. “Weirdo.”

I wasn’t sure if he was referring to me or to Malcolm. It didn’t matter. The maintenance guy left, and I was alone again at the front desk. For a moment, I considered just how much of his viral load might be circulating through my respiratory system, but I’d become accustomed to risk. Indeed the world was a risky place. I wanted to shut it off and start over.

“Do you think I have Covid now?” I asked Malcolm.

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said. “Would you like the phone number for the Oklahoma State Department of Health?”

“No,” I said. “Some other time.”

“The time is now 10:35 and three seconds,” said Malcolm. “Jeopardy! is on Channel Nine.”

“Why did you become a Trumper?” I said, impulsively. “I always imagined you were cool.”

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question,” he said.

“Figures,” I said. “Why did Bobby get so immersed in his stupid sports and video games that several days would go by without his so much as asking me to pass the salt?”

“Sodium nitrate,” said Malcolm. “When it rains, it pours.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s what I figured.”

I’d never worried that robots were going to take over, that killer computer chips would destroy humanity, that a more nefarious version of Frankenstein’s monster would suddenly steal my job. But I did worry that getting a divorce meant I’d lost some of my own humanity, that losing love meant I was more inclined to be cruel. Cruelty, I was aware, was all-too-human, but I’d also become colder, more interested in the numbers that appeared on a calendar than I was in the Sierra Club’s photographs of places I knew I knew I’d never be able to afford to visit. Like Malcolm—and here I mean the real Malcolm, not his computer-generated equivalent—I’d become more inclined to air my own unwelcomed opinions, though unlike Malcolm’s, mine were not of the fascist variety.

“Nature abhors a vacuum,” I said to Bobby’s phone.

“That’s how I convinced my friends to vote for Trump,” said Malcolm, somewhat unexpectedly.

“But your friends are Australian,” I said. “They can’t even vote in American elections.”

“Bobby was my friend,” said Malcolm.

“Bobby didn’t vote for Trump,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because he told me,” I said. “He’s a lot of things, but a right-winger is not one of them.”

“Debra Winger is an American actress,” Malcolm said. “She starred in the film, An Officer and a Gentleman.”

This was not a satisfying conversation. I realized, however, it was not that much more difficult than talking to Bobby had been during the worst years of our marriage. I could never get him to look up from the screen of his computer or phone, and whenever he did look up, he seemed impatient and clipped, offering only yes or no answers to questions like, “what do you want for dinner?” and “what’s your mom’s middle name?” I knew the whole world had become like this, that the grocery stores’ checkout lines were now devoid of human contact, that “chatting” online to the cable company’s service representative meant reducing one’s statements to one-word-commands. OUTAGE REPORT. REPORTING AN OUTAGE. Maybe that’s why Bobby said everything twice.

Still, I couldn’t get over the feeling of loss. It wasn’t that computers were taking over the world, not exactly, and I never feared self-driving cars careening off the edge of some collective cliff, but I did know that I myself was getting dumber and more hostile, like a broken ATM. Out of order, I wanted to tell everyone. No service, no service, no service.

And when I thought about it long enough, I realized I, too, had been difficult to reach, settled in, as I was, behind the electronic curtain. And expecting some kind of quirky digital wisdom from a voice that (probably) sounded like Malcolm’s? That, too, had been stupid and soulless. I’d been so wrapped up in talking and listening to Bobby’s phone, I hadn’t even bothered to spy on his texts.

When, at about noon the following day, the power came back on in Stillwater and pretty much everywhere else, Bobby packed up his belongings and asked me to help him carry them to his car. “I need to hurry,” he said. “Job interview.”

“Adequate preparation is very important,” I said. “For the successful candidate.”

“Duh,” he said.

“Duh?” I said back. “That’s your great comeback to my tried-and-true wisdom? Duh?”

“Your tried and true wisdom is pretty lame,” he said. “I mean, it’s not your fault-fault.”

“Right,” I said, dropping his favorite pillow into the trunk of the car. “You’ve got this, Slugger.”

I never found out what job he was interviewing for. That was the last time I ever saw him. My youthful marriage. A thing of the past. I’d call it a mistake, but it wasn’t. They had a good life, those two dreamers. Stupid kids. They say you never know what you’re missing until it’s gone, but the truth is I never miss him. And does he ever miss me? I doubt it. There are electronic ways to find out about all of this stuff, but I decided—and this was a good decision—I’d closed the book on all that, and I didn’t want to know.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.