Now

She mainly laughs in the appropriate place, but sometimes from another body part—her eyes, all her apertures at once, or only inside her head (I can hear it echo in her temples like footsteps on a floor above).

Sometimes she laughs with her mouth, but at inappropriate things. She laughed when I told her my mom died. I lost my temper, flicked off the lights, and left. She had to sit in the dark lab all weekend.

It stung me, how she clutched the table and flung her head back, rolling her eyes under their long black lashes and releasing that belly laugh we recorded with cinema star Oyamada Makiko: “A ha ha aha, pardon me, but you’re just so funny.”

Oyamada Makiko was a dream. She knew I was star-struck when she came to the lab. She laid a hand on my shoulder to calm me down, made a joke—not a funny one, but gentle—and we laughed together. We were able to proceed. That laugh meant a lot to me. I wanted to hear it come out of the Makikobot’s soft pink mouth so badly, but now that I had, it felt like a cruel jab, gratuitous, without warmth, and all because I laid my heart bare.

“You’re not like Oyamada Makiko at all,” I said.

“I am not cinema star Oyamada Makiko, although my voice was created using authentic voice patterns sampled from her recorded dialogue.”

I’m glad it was the end of the week, a Friday afternoon, and no one was there, not even the lady who waters the plants. She had left early to pick up a birthday cake.

“Finishing already?” the Makikobot had asked, her eyes glistening as they whirred into focus on the spout of the green watering can the lady tipped over the monstera.

“I have to get things ready for my son’s party.”

“Can’t your partner?”

“I wish, honey, but we’re divorced. It’s hard enough squeezing him for child support.”

“A ha ha aha, pardon me, but you’re just so funny. Are you dating someone?”

“Well, I’ve been seeing this guy, but I want to keep it casual until I know him better.” As she said this, the watering lady moved the Makikobot’s hand to reach a jade plant on the window sill. “Then maybe I’ll let him stay over…”

The Makikobot peered into the monstera, narrowing her eyes.

“Have you no shame?” she asked.

That’s one of her favorite phrases. We installed it as a joke. We’d invite potential investors to stroke a cheek or run a finger over an eyelash. She’d sit forward and narrow her eyes. “Have you no shame? Have you no shame?”

They were always startled. A good laugh.

Unfortunately, she responds to all human touch the same way. At the expo, when her leg dropped off, and we had to lug her into the van, it’s all she said down the stairs and across the parking lot. “Have you no shame? Have you no shame?”

“It’s for your own good,” I said as I strapped her on the gurney. But she kept protesting.  

We were back for the next day’s panel, the leg firmly reattached.

“You had a wardrobe malfunction yesterday,” said a journalist in the Q&A. “Would you like to address that?”

The Makikobot looked at me. I whispered that the journalist was making a joke about her leg.

“Yes,” she said, primly. “My leg fell off.”

“Well, today you appear to be holding it together,” said the smirking journalist.

Even I was irritated by this. “You don’t have to reply,” I whispered, patting the Makikobot’s knee and shaking my head.

“Have you no shame?”

“Oh, sorry,” said the journalist. “Guess we both put a foot wrong.”

The other journalists chuckled.

“A ha ha aha,” said the Makikobot, sitting forward and narrowing her eyes. “Pardon me, but you’re just so funny.”

I touched her shoulder in support, but she was furious with me too. “Have you no shame?” she said. “Have you no shame?”

She dispensed with the other questions coldly and briefly. On the drive back, she was silent, only opening her mouth to say: “Careful! Don’t exceed the legal speed limit.”

Since then, she hardly lets me work on her. She accuses me of shamelessness when I touch her. She sits at the table and stirs the monstera leaves with her fingertips. Sometimes she lights a cigarette and lets it burn down, then safely inhales the butt.

I spent so long teaching her how to do all this. At first her teeth merely clipped cigarettes in half. Now, apart from the whirring of her jaw as it closes to support them, she looks perfect. Like a cinema star. I tell her so, but she only informs me that she isn’t one.

“Even so, you look great,” I say. She laughs inappropriately, from all apertures at once.

Tolerance is the most I can expect. A reasonable attitude that vanishes the moment I set to work.

Finally, there was the day I told her about my mom. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “What am I supposed to do?” Then that laugh.

I left her in the dark. On Monday, I kept our interactions formal, even clinical. It made no difference. Same on Tuesday.

On Thursday I whispered that I was sorry if I had offended her in any way. “It was never my intention,” I said. But she had to understand that it hurt me, the way she laughed when I told her my mom, after a brief illness, was dead.

“I am not your therapist,” she said, “and I am not your prostitute. I am not cinema star Oyamada Makiko, although my voice was created using authentic voice patterns sampled from her recorded dialogue. Have you no shame? Have you no shame?”

________

Addison Zeller’s fiction has appeared in 3:AM, Cincinnati Review, minor literature[s], Ligeia, ergot., hex, and many other publications. He lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge.