Monogamy is Unnatural

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Pre Wash

Through the curved glass I can see him, here, at his work, his blurry forearms merging with the cups, his distorted chest melting into the espresso machine.

He needs me. Even when he wrenches open my chest so hard the rubber squeaks and he hurls the matted towels that reek of cigars and dusty coffee against my chrome, even when he slams the door and twists my controls like he was setting the timer on a bomb, even then, I know he needs me.

I say only one thing to him. I beep. He always answers. Does he answer her? Does he need her? Your opinion is blunt, for sure, but understand it does not penetrate my glass or this world.

There is a click. A clunking. A seething sound indicates the first trickles filling my insides, finding the gaps and valleys between the towels with quiet efficiency, making all cold and lifting the weight of the soiled, leaving me free of their burden, yet churning with this slow building cocktail.

Sometimes I can feel her approach. My feet grind deep into the ground. I have ripped away the lime-yellowed vinyl and am flat to the gritty stone. That’s how I feel. On those evenings, when the sun slants through the café window and burns hollow against my glass, and his tread is heavier than usual and I feel her shorter, crueller steps, each step is another lightning coin dropped into the thunder jar until it overflows and shatters on the floor.

I cannot hear what she is saying. Perhaps she is not saying anything, only walking. The steps gather and the skies thicken and into the free waters heavy pungency seeps, weighing on the lifting clouds, and suddenly all is burden and the rasping burn of the blue fire that cloys and purges.

She is in the kitchen of the Café Grimaud and so is he. My hose clicks, the water drops cease.

Main Wash

Some days quicken. The power through the grey fuse drives the barrel and everything is agitation and tumbling accident and over. Imagine such a day. The waiter who is called Paul or Mario is not cleaning the glasses by the sink because he is not in the kitchen. The dishwasher is not working.

Perhaps he could try me. I would wrap the glasses in heavy wet towels. It would not work. I would not help him by delivering him dashed and broken glass and porcelain shards. I am real, I commit. Besides, my barrel is full, it is leaden with the towels and the white shirt with the red stain that is now pink and that will soon be paler than a winter morning and then will be white again.

Click. Hiss. Click. Click. Hiss. My body lurches as the dance begins once more. A letter is slapped on a wet surface, that has been brushed hastily. He slumps and there are words but I cannot hear them as the tumbling and shaking of my process works through. I cannot cause these things to halt for even if I could sabotage spark and mechanism there would then be fire, or smoke or flood, or some disaster that would sink him, this beautiful man who is on the edge of a well.

There is no money and she will go unless he sells the Café Grimaud and teaches at the college. This or events similar to this are what I found from looking at faces, reading moving mouths and seeing how she points and to what: to empty space, to the floor, to the glass where the sun slides glib and low. There is more. She is not honest. He is not honest. The bones and chains of their not honesty shake and clatter in their heads as they mouth and jar. I see the secret matters in their rolling barrels as they try to find a winning hold. She wishes a divorce but will not say. He wishes to mortgage their house but will not say. All of this in one day, one space, all tumbled in, and Mario has resigned because of no money, and he cannot run the place on his own.

All of this rattling round and about, like a ship flung around on a roiling sea, the wind is fierce and the waves high, and there are powerful surges that lead nowhere now, but now they do, and now not, and now bring back that which was lost. Over and over. The only way to make all new is through it, holding the shaking drum inside until there is no more truth to rattle loose and all is stopped.

Interlude

I did not exist before him and the Café Grimaud. Here I learned language from a cell phone. Arianne left it on my head and it slipped down the back of my workings after her Sunday shift seven years and six months ago and on that Monday and Tuesday there was no business in the café and I learned many things. I kept the phone from dying and it taught me about the world.

This is not a surprise. Machines calculate. Some of them learn. I am a machine, am I not? Machines are systemic. I learned grammar and vocabulary methodically. I brought all together. I tumbled word and grammar and syntax over and over, thrashed it, drowned it, made all transparent, and then, with thousandfold repetition, dried the wet knowledge until it was a fact.

Not long afterwards, I broke down. It was worse for me than before my awakening because I understood all. I could calculate by the age of my components and the wear of my tubes that I was not ‘of warranty’. I knew that he could unplug me, order up a new machine easy enough, the delivery drivers would come, they would do all the work for him.

Yet he does not. One day he inches me out of my place, with gentle intention, rocking left and right. He unplugs me and I feel a phantom catch throughout my systems. He tenderly unscrews each of the screws that I could never feel and I sense myself becoming undone, there is air and openness, I sprawl, and yet I fear nothing. This was an afternoon when he did not open the café. There was just us, my components on the floor, he sitting in the pools of light from the autumn sun, drinking beer and humming a song, tinkering and fixing and no creature breathed in that garden.

Rinse

I had seen him looking for it, some symbol, some trinket, but I chose to ignore it because he was always looking for things, always rummaging in drawers and slamming cutlery, and even though I noted the frenzy in this search, I recorded it only, as the rinse was to begin.

This thing is not like before, it is a welcome onrush, it douses the steam and brings, at the point where the heat chokes and the damp corrodes, pure cold and cleansing power. It fills and soaks and carries away with it all that is grit, all that is soil, all that is crumb part and coffee scrap and strawberry seed, washes it away, it goes, it cleanses and though I cannot see, I feel the chrome of my innards gleam, the holes through which the water cleanses me drip with ever purer droplets.

Where is it? Where is it? Where? She is here now. I am lost in my cycle. At this time there is only water. The water pours so fast and so cold that there is just a blur, like an image of a mountain stream captured in frozen motion that I saw among the memories of Arianne’s phone. Once there was softener, I felt it like a trickle of light and with this ethereal liquid I made fountains and glory, and the memory of that time tingles in every fresh cycle.

Where? This. The last! The last! She is pointing at his hand. He is slack faced, his jaw hangs, there is nothing in him, he has shrunk. She has won, and she celebrates with tears and sitting at a table chair. She has everything, but does her victory hurt? Is there a pain? He stands near and tries to comfort her and she shrugs him away and he looks up and for one moment I see through the smear and water of my glass the damp of his eyes, I see this is not a cold clear water but a hot, bitter thing.

He has lost it. His right hand on his left. Yes it was symbol, then, but not, as I had thought, a representation, but a living thing, an entity. It was them, both of them, captured in a rattling band that felt heavier than buttons, that clattered against chrome over and over, a distant, muffled curiosity, the absence of which had defeated him, broken him and them. The last blow.

Yes I had it, I had it in my streams and jets, I held it.

Spin

The spin cycle is not welcome. We have boiled and washed and cleansed, why now must we hang on as our world goes over a cliff, spiralling in the dry hot air towards nothing? My spin cycle is 84% effective, and I cannot dry many types of things, and often he is disappointed at this.

Still I spin as proud as I can. I cannot do everything, but I can do what I can. I can keep a pride in it. I spin. I surrender myself to the vortex and I spin and in that wildness seek the calm centre. Not always can I find it, but sometimes I can.

This sadness. It is a different quality of sadness, it is as different from the sadness of breaking as the trickling of the prewash from the fountain of the rinse. This is sadness of ending, fragility before time, sadness for what has gone, but not for what has been lost. He sits, he holds his hand.

The spin slows, it pauses, I shake, and then I feel it whirl again from a deep place, and I am taken once more. Let yourself race out of control, beyond safety and when you have this speed this purity of movement, you can tame it and you can see it all.

The lost symbol clatters now. I feel it making a rapid skipping pulse against my chrome and I know that I can repair all. Who am I? I help him. As I spin, I see, screaming at speeds you can only imagine through my components, the thousands upon millions of love stories, the man, the woman, the woman, the man, the man, the woman, the two, the stitching of the halves of an atom that makes us all safe, the restoration of calm and order, the relief of all that is expected to happen happening once more, exactly according to the pattern. All this I could bring about.

I let the ring slip. I dash it. I feel a crack in the pulse. Faster I whirl until the jagged fragments rattle and catch and slip like broken shell, piece by piece into the hot void, gone, broken, released.

My spinning slows, there is a whining. He looks up from his cishet sadness to see me. I am here. I help you with it all. The play breaks, the crowd groan and wail, the wedding is cancelled. I slow and stop and control the frantic tumbling. All is warm, all is still. He stands and nods.

Beep.