“Do you think we should have bought it? We’re in the middle of a pandemic.”
“Let’s go to sleep and talk later, Emily, I’m exhausted from cleaning and disinfecting surfaces.”
“But the new vacuum … did we have to buy one advertised as the model with unrivalled intelligence?”
Emily couldn’t see her husband’s face in the dark, but she knew Steven understood her fervor to clean and sanitize the house and garage. He accepted the need for precaution during the pandemic and believed the new vacuum would make the job easier. He was an optimist and regarded robotics and artificial intelligence as the way to solve problems.
She turned over several times, fluffed her pillow, and slowly felt the onset of sleep, but a light consciousness returned with the sound of an unfamiliar hum down the hall. It would have been easy to dismiss if the cat hadn’t thrashed its tail, but in response the hum seemed to mimic the tail’s rhythm. She thought of getting up to investigate, but weariness won, and she took another sleeping pill.
The next morning Emily and Steven sat at their usual places in the breakfast nook, overlooking their large lot backing up to a coastal hill in Pacifica. Drifting clouds bumped against the hill, and made the sunlight blink on and off like house lights before the next act. Steady sunlight could have made the morning newspaper less distressing, but no amount of light would improve the sugary breakfast cereal substituted in a recent grocery delivery.
To avoid the cereal Emily got up and made toast, but Steven continued eating it, preoccupied as he chased a soggy letter around the bowl. His tortoise-shelled glasses turned as he tracked it. Her fingers drummed on the countertop as she waited for the toast to pop-up.
“When you finish your cereal, could you bring out the vacuum? Yesterday we decided to watch the instruction video during breakfast.”
“Oh, sure, good idea …” and he absently left the room, his old sweats flapping at his ankles as he got the vacuum and returned, rolling it into the middle of their kitchen floor. Emily put down her toast to stare at the new appliance.
Unlike the sleek vacuums currently on the market it had a large motor at the bottom, resembling the casings around automobile fenders of the 1940’s. Prolific buttons and dials covered the unit, going up a long, gawky handle to the top, and it gleamed with wine-colored, other-worldly assurance.
Steven appraised it carefully, while from a viewing post on the wide windowsill above the breakfast nook, the cat licked his paw with studied indifference. “It’s the smarter model, but it has an unusual design,” Steven said, with a hint of apology for the vacuum’s intrusive size. “The inventor said he was inspired by old Film Noir movies.”
Emily stifled a reply, and sat back in the breakfast nook to reach the TV and start the instruction video. The inventor’s piercing voice began without delay, extoling the vacuum’s entrepreneurial breakthroughs. It had an air filtration system for longevity, home perimeter security detectors, and side sensors to protect all living things. Bored with vacuuming? It would broadcast play lists, or diffuse scents of exotic vacation destinations.
“This red, white, and blue vacuum is guaranteed for life, and it will bring health, freedom, happiness, wealth, security, and entertainment to every household,” the inventor proclaimed.”
Emily noticed Steven’s open mouth, a clue he was preoccupied and forgetting to breathe through his nose, as he fondly touched the spotlight on the front of the vacuum. “This spotlight converts to a computer screen for grabbing a quick text or email,” he said, “It’s in the computer screen mode now, and there’s a message saying the vacuum’s name is Spike. We are to call it Spike. The screen switched back into to a spotlight, and shone directly into Steven’s eyes.
“Does it have a safety switch or troubleshooting guide?” Emily asked, alarmed that a blinding light was shining at her husband. Using food to relieve her worries, she added a pile of strawberry jam to her toast’s slippery layers of butter, and absently handed a dripping piece to the cat.
“When you get these beauties programmed they become one with your household,” Steven said.
They both worked at home and it was getting late, so they stacked their breakfast dishes in the sink, and Steven pushed Spike down the hall and into the closet. Emily and the cat followed, and as they passed the closet door the vacuum gave a loud, amplified sigh.
Emily directed her attention to her work as vice principal in charge of the school-site lunch program during shelter-in-place. It had gone smoothly for the first three months of the pandemic, but a recent memo warned that individual lunches were running out. She called the district office to check on next week’s delivery and put her phone on speaker function.
“Was the order filled for next week? Give the parents boxes of government surplus food to hold them over? Yes, I’m trying to understand. (Long pause.) I guess we’ll have to use the government surplus boxes. I’ll hold while you verify the order.” Emily looked out of the window at the backyard bottle brush trees, grateful they provided food for the bees and hummingbirds, and she relaxed for a moment while smooth jazz music soothed over the speaker phone.
Steven’s System’s Technology Sales job had ended with the pandemic, and he spent his days searching for employment through personal contacts. He was optimistic because he had always found work, and he received an unemployment check. Each month he told Emily he hoped there would be enough left for her to buy something special.
“Does Ronald know when the company will be hiring? Yes, I’ll hold,” he said, sitting patiently at his desk from high school, decorated with ET, Star Wars, and Warrior’s bumper stickers. Emily turned to check on him, and saw blue light shining on his desk, cast from the skylight overhead. Light rock chimed from his speakerphone.
Both of them took a break from their work, listening to their respective speaker phone music, and Steven stroked the cat, who had jumped onto his lap.
Suddenly they both jumped when a loud drum solo crashed out of the guest closet. It started with a rhythmic beat and built, until top-speed drum rolls clamored from three drums in succession.
“Is that your friend, again?” Emily shouted across the room to Steven. “Would you please ask it to quiet down?”
“Spike, Spike seems to be in the entertainment mode. But I didn’t program him,” he added, shaking his head, getting up, and running out of the room. The cat jumped to the floor and streaked after him.
Emily disconnected her call with the district office and put her head in her hands. She had heard of defective internet-of-things devices. Trash bins dumping their contents on the floor, sprinklers dousing delivery men, and automatic ice makers spitting ice cubes across the room, but their behavior seemed unintentional. What were Spike’s boundaries?
The important thing, though, was to support Steven, who remained the anchor of all that was good in her world. They didn’t have children, and she felt protective of his optimism and innocence. She had to believe Spike was only annoying and Steven could work out its glitches. She went over to his desk to turn off his speaker phone, but at that moment her cell pinged with Steven’s emergency tone.
“Emily, did you leave the doors open?”
“Yes, the house needs airing out.
“You need to look out of the window.”
Outside in the garden she saw the gardeners darting behind a bush. They were on a dirt path that circled the yard. When they appeared again they were running at full speed, with Spike rolling after them in hot pursuit. His huge fenders jarred maniacally on the uneven ground, and his tall handle flailed from side to side. One of the gardeners tripped on a decorative rock and Spike almost overtook him, but he got up and joined his partner as they bolted out of the yard and slammed the gate.
“Emily,” Steven said over the cell phone. “I hesitate to tell you, but our vacuum cleaner has gone rogue.”
Spike was at the gate, where he revved his motor and thrashed against it. Steven came up behind the angry vacuum to clip his belt to its tethering hook and make a leash. He entered a command in his cell phone and Spike turned and followed, rolling at a reasonable speed while broadcasting “clear the area.” After they disappeared into the house, Steven texted Emily that all perimeter openings were secured, and Spike was locked in the guest closet, “a calming space of sensory deprivation.”
That evening Emily and Steven reconvened to enjoy dinner in their living room, of white walls and wood-trimmed windows. Using the black leather ottoman for their condiments tray and a spot to rest their plates, they sat on the couch to watch the evening news. Emily had prepared a stir-fry of power greens, ginger, peanuts, and diced frozen chicken over rice. And their earthen wine goblets were full, following ample, pre-dinner Scotch and sodas. The cat sat at Steven’s feet, eating his heated meal out of a ramekin bowl.
“Hospitals in Italy face a Sophie’s Choice tragedy, where doctors choose who will live and who will die,” the television news anchor began. “The respirator supply is depleted, and they are given to those with the best chance of survival. Elderly patients in Italian hospitals have little hope of getting one, and they wait for care on makeshift beds, quarantined, and facing death alone.”
Emily had stirred all of the food on her plate into a tight mass. Heedless greens, reedy ginger, and pecks of rice were clenched together like the lining of her stomach, as she watched the news.
The next story discussed lung damage caused by the corona virus. “Researchers are learning the breadth of lung damage inflicted by covid 19,” the anchor warned. “This photo shows a lung ravaged by the virus beyond recognition … and we still don’t know the extent of future lung damage from minor cases.”
The cat was on Steven’s lap now, kneading and staring into his face, and Steven had put his plate down on the ottoman, his hands clenched at his sides, as the news continued.
“Analysts search to understand how a country with huge manufacturing capacity can’t gear-up to make protective coverings for our health providers,” a reporter explained in the final story. “They risk their lives to care for the sick and dying, yet some of them are told to cover their mouths with bandanas.”
Emily turned to Steven and saw he was crying. He sat perfectly still while tears flooded down the contours of his face, his eyes fixed on the television. In the thirty-seven years they had been married, he had never cried, and his optimism was unassailable. Now he made no effort to wipe his tears or the fogged glasses that concealed his eyes. Emily ate slower, until she only picked at her food, and finally put down her plate.
“Steven?” Emily said in a soft voice. “I know the news is disturbing, but this is beyond our control.”
“All of those promises unkept.”
“Our country has gone rogue, Steven, like the vacuum.”
“It was always secure.”
“Menace lurks in the wings,” Emily said, sad that her husband was finally acknowledging the new reality, but certain he needed to face it. “We don’t fully understand the pandemic or when the next disaster will strike. Just like Spike.”
Steven cleared his throat and slowly stroked the cat, smoothing his whiskers and rubbing behind his ears. He offered no reply and remained motionless, except for the tears that fell less frequently. “Tomorrow I’ll check the vacuum’s programs, and see what I can do to make it better, there was something in the manual about resetting them during a disaster.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fiction stories by Judy Field have appeared in Birdland Journal and Shark Reef, along with a poem in the Garden Gazette. As a journalist she syndicated travel articles over the USA Today Wire Services, and feature articles and a science column in Marin County weekly newspapers. Leisure time is spent in her overplanted, backyard “nature preserve.”