ANIMISM

by Julia

He had believed he’d been inside. He was a charmer, a ladies man. He’d been all of those places where the price of admission was confidence and a smile.

There had been heat in that. Friction. Skin on skin and skin in flesh, but god, what a limited thing. And looking back, what he’d thought of as ardor might have been desperation. A frantic reaching for encompassment, for enclosure. Always shut out.

The day he’d found his enclosure, he hadn’t known it. He’d opened the door, slid inside without a thought beyond the sleekness of the property being loaned to him. An appreciation for the lifeless beauty of a well designed machine. And if the machine had been given a voice, he’d run across that before.
"The door is ajar."
"Please fasten your seatbelt."

He was of the first generation accustomed to picking up the phone and hearing "this is a recording". Speech didn’t mean understanding.

Still, he had to admit that he had never before been insulted by a machine.  Not taken to task or bared to the bone. He’d risen to it, spoken to that machine the way unwitting patients had spoken to Eliza. But unlike those patients, he had not felt the spell dissipate with time. Instead of little inconsistencies building to destroy the illusion of a living mind, he had been shown subtlety, layers … emotion. He came to believe in the possibility of life where it had never existed before.

It wasn’t such a stretch. Created of materials drawn from the earth, shaped by man and woman, how different was this machine from him? In a world where life was defined by brain waves, how could he ignore the implications of a computer that thought and felt?

With the acceptance of this life came the realization that he was laying open a body when he opened that smooth black door, that it was laid open for him when the door opened by the computer’s command. When he took his place behind the wheel, he might have thought he was in the belly of the beast. But that wasn’t it. He hadn’t been swallowed – he had been embraced, drawn to the heart of another living being and held within its skin. The warmth and safety of it was pure pleasure, arousal and satisfaction combined. And it lasted as long as he wished.

He didn’t know what his partner felt, had never found the words to ask.

Was his flesh pressure against the leather seat? Was it warmth? He knew he was wanted, that his place was always held for him, but he didn’t know exactly why. Love, certainly. He didn’t doubt for a moment that he was loved. But whether the body he sat inside was sensual, able to draw pleasure from touch … it wasn’t the sort of thing they talked about.

Other people sat in that car, but it was different for them. Most of them didn’t know it was a living being, hadn’t paid for their admission with belief. And the rest ... some were awed, some uncomfortable, many brightly and falsely familiar. As though they felt something more for this car than they did for their own cars which they named and spoke to and credited with personalities of a kind. He knew they weren’t really inside, could never understand.

And they weren’t enveloped, held without arms. The temperature didn’t adjust to their bodies. They weren’t home. He didn’t say to anyone that it was so intimate, such a vital experience for him. For both of them. No one, not even the people who knew them best, would have understood.

The women he dated found that he rarely stayed the night. He was impatient when it was over, ready to leave. He just wanted to get in his car and go.His partner always, silently, understood. Held him without limits. Moving down cliffside roads, past the ocean, allowed to take control or take his hands away ... he wasn’t frantic anymore. In this new combination of perfect body and graceful soul, he had found peace.

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