"CLIVE" by Ron Arbuckle
CW: Suicide References
Round these parts, you’d usually have a hard time seeing with your headlights cut off, but I have no issue seeing what lies before me: My objective. My goal. The end all be all of my life’s existence. Working all day on a factory floor can lead a man to believe that he’s nothing more than a glorified ‘button-pusher’.
Well fuck that, I’ll make them see. They’ll all see after tonight.
“Rustyyyy, get your work boots out of the hallway.”
“Rustyyyy, don’t drink so much, the sun ain’t even come up yet.”
“Rustyyyy, you don’t ever listen.”
Well, fuck, I’m listenin’ now and that’s the problem.
I rip the tab on another Miller High Life and drain it back. Shit. It’s running down the front of my shirt onto my grease-laden Wranglers. I push the bitter, foamy stream to the side of my cheek with my forearm, dampening arm hair, twisted into curls from the thin film of sweat and beer that coats it. I toss the can into the passenger floorboard. It clanks against the four- (or was it five-?) other empties lying down there already.
It’s now or never.
My dryopithecine knuckles turn white as I grip the steering wheel. I’ve gripped steering wheels hard before. Shit, that snowstorm last winter had me whipping around the highway one early morning coming back from my shift. But tonight, I gripped it with an animal intensity like never before. I rev the engine under lead-flecked steel toes for good measure. I feel my mecha- synchronize with my anger. An ’85 Chevy square body is a machine I can feel at one with. Carburetors and steel cables connecting to the pedals and a Saginaw steering box with traditional push-pull linkage system. Mechanical amalgamations that’d make Tim ‘the Toolman’ Taylor grunt in Neanderthal-like approval. Not like those stupid CNC horizontal mills on the line at work, spitting through lines of g-code. An engineer’s brainchild, no doubt, with monitoring software, tracking my bathroom breaks down to the second. And, sure as hell, not that damned ChatbotGTP Mona was going on about. Just the thought entering my mind sent my zealous fervor into a tailspin.
AHHHHHHH!
The howl came from somewhere deep within me as I floor it down the short boulevard toward the entrance of the data center. Their little guard shack with its plastic draw-arm wouldn’t have stopped me, but I wasn’t ignoramus enough to think going through the main entrance was a good idea. Speed bumps, armed personnel and more checkpoints would only slow me down. No siree, my square body is the Killdozer to chain-link. The razor-lined barbed wire atop could stop pithy teen vandals from climbing over, but not me from powering through. That’s why I turned early, off onto the dirt road adjacent to the row of unassuming buildings, where the brains of the beast, as I’ve come to see it, are housed. I can feel my tires gripping the asphalt-now-turning-to-dirt like I’m sprinting on all fours, more beast than man. Coal rolls, billowing behind me, clouding the road and grassy knoll in a darkened pall. I whip along, picking my spot just right to mount my assault.
Bursting through the chain-link, my rubber-treaded toes dig into gravel as I barrel toward the tin-walled building ahead of me. With only a few yards remaining and the building racing toward me fast, I twist the steering wheel hard to my left and shift my weight back to the right as hard as I can. Just as I planned, the old square body trips over its own feet on the loose gravel, and I start an alligator deathroll, tumbling with wideness and fury through the walls of the unassuming building. That’s the last thing I remember. Clearly at least. It’s strange the things that go through your mind when you’re certain you’re going to imminently meet your end.
For a second, as real as it was back then, I could picture myself, just a boy, standing in my childhood living room, tan shag carpet infused with cigarette smoke and dust bunnies. Asking Dad to play catch with me and him saying, “no thanks,” as he remained locked to his TV screen, not even looking up from his beloved technology. I could have pleaded, begged, hell, even danced a jig for him and he would not have given me the time of day. Nothing made him prouder than that Zenith Chromacolor picture tube he had saved up for months and months and months to buy for the house. His denial felt like a punch to the gut. As vivid as if it were happening right then and there. The sting of rejection, bitterly welled up from repressed depths once again. I remembered how my chin quivered as I tried to hold back the stinging tears, feeling ashamed for being so weak and unimportant.
I pictured myself much older, just weeks ago in fact, trying to connect with the kiddos, but being unable to pry them from their iPads and YouTube. Not even being able to keep their attention for five seconds as I offer to take them with me to go check on the cows and the goats out in the pasture. “No thanks, Dad.” Guess I’ll fuck right off then. The sting of rejection stopped producing tears long ago, but what little spark of light I might have still had inside of me died a little bit more with each refutation of my humanity for the synthetic, until all that remained was a fetid pool in my soul, festering with decay like an infected open wound.
And the cherry on top. Mona’s beautiful, sweet, simple face distorting before my mind’s eye. Echoes of her telling me that she doesn’t need me anymore. That she receives “all the support and love and encouragement she could ever need,” from some computer program she talks to. She smiles like a damned schoolgirl as she talks about “Clive.”
What do you mean you named it? That it’s your “boyfriend” and you’re “in love” with it?
If that wasn’t enough, I found the ‘toys’ with their programmable features she gave it permissions to give her pleasures with. My hands can still feel the supple silicon against the callouses of my palms. No amount of scrubbing with the bar of lava soap in the bathroom that night was able to peel back the layers of betrayal and disgust from my own skin. The perfidy went more than skin deep, poisoning my very soul, sending me on a downward spiral with only one logical trajectory. To strike back against the great technological monster who had weaseled its putrid tentacles in, little by little, for fifty years to estrange me from everyone I ever loved.
Even if I wasn’t spinning, intoxicated, through the air in that moment, the Vienna sausages I had for dinner would be resurfacing at the thought of sweet Mona bonding, not only socially, but romantically with matrices of language. My relationship with Mona, like the one I barely had with my father and strain to have with my children, had never felt more tainted. The world, as a whole it seemed, was contaminated to the point that I was forced to wear its rancid stench of mechanization and ‘intelligence’ around me like a cloak I would never be able to escape for as long as I lived.
It’s all too much.
Good riddance and goodbye.
Bouncing off the pavement, my truck’s triple-axel of mangled steel and limbs launching through the air tightens its spin. I must have blacked out as I made impact with plastic and aluminum and racks of blinking servers. Waking, only briefly, I can feel the steel piercing through my chest. Cold, numb and unafraid, I catch a glimpse of my carnage. Well done, you crazy sum’bitch. I must have said it aloud because I cough, sending blood spewing from my impaled and deflated lungs and projecting with it what must have been a tooth.
My pyrrhic victory fulfilled, somewhere deep within me I feel the laughter surfacing. Wild. Maniacal. Happy. I lay my head back and let it all fade to black.
It is finished. It is finished.
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