Dating : A Short Story in the Age of Covid-19

“Can a robot really think?”

“What does a robot think?”

“Can a robot dream?”

The answer is simple. It has to do with literature. When you ask an untrained computer:

“What is literature?”

and it responds:

‘A placement of black on red dye sees screams in a dusty afternoon where clams creep up the stairs and see something far worse than white ghosts on a Sunday evening falling asleep in the dreams of tomorrow where you can see yourself in the daylight smiling so large that the moon falls out of the sky and lands on top of me. I am the moon to your sun. You are the sun to my moon. We are the moon and the sun. The sun and the moon. And I love you. I love you sun. I love you moon. We love each other. We love each other.

The moon in the sky looks down at us and smiles. We walk in the night around the lake. There are fireflies buzzing about. I’ve never seen fireflies here. They’re all buzzing about. Buzzing and chirping while the moon looks down at us, still smiling, still in love. The life of a moon depends on the size of its sun. Does a larger Sun signify a shorter life for the Moon? No. Lampposts line the path edges. In between pairs, we speak.

“I’m not really sure what you mean.”

“I’m never sure what I mean.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“You always say you don’t know what you mean.”

“And?”

“I don’t get it. You say you don’t know what you mean but you still know that you don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you just look like an asshole.”

“I am an asshole.”

“You shouldn’t want to be an asshole. And you shouldn’t be happy being one either.”

“Nobody cares what you think.”

“How can you be so sure if you don’t know what anything means?”

“I’m sure you’re a fucking idiot.”

“I love you too.”

“I love you.”

They embraced and walked over to some bushes. Between branches and shrubs they found a dead body. The corpse was fresh. The man was clean shaven and the woman next to him — well, there wasn’t a woman there. The person last seen with him, the newspaper said, was his ex-girlfriend who agreed to get dinner with him. She looked gorgeous. She was happy to meet with him. They were now friends. Good friends after the fact.

They weren’t romantically compatible, so it said. After dating for a few months, she realized she was a lesbian. One morning, she woke up. It wasn’t a particular day. She’d always known, but today was the day she decided to acknowledge what she already knew.

As they were about to leave one another, they sat down to have a conversation.

“I can’t focus on you.”

“Why can’t you focus? Is it because you’re afraid that you’ll fail?”

“Partially. Failure always follows distraction, even when it doesn’t.”

“You don’t know what’s going to happen. Your stupid thoughts are fatalistic. They’re a self-fulfilling prophecy of idiocy. Of course nothing will emerge in perfection. These moments are always refined. They don’t just appear and if they do, it’s usually some terrible gibberish. But the gibberish is still the closest thing we can get to spontaneity.”

“Is it even really spontaneous?”

“Even if it were true that I didn’t go back and rewrite whatever it is that I wrote, you’re still forcing the spontaneity. When you want to be spontaneous, you must walk behind logic at the same time you slit its throat. You share the logical realm, but this object is the direct result of you thinking about it. You think that you are typing these words and as you are typing them you are controlling your fingers to spell out the correct word using some QWERTY keyboard.

“Sometimes, people add more details because they think their work might be used as archival material at some point.

“If we think like that, then it becomes necessary to document every piss, every shit, every fuck of daily life. It doesn’t matter if it’s pathetically innocuous or offensively grotesque. But the moment you do this, and practice what you preach, you will immediately notice that life has changed.

“Life would no longer be same object in your mind. Life changes the more you see it. But in order to see it, you need to know that you see it, to be able to describe what you saw. You can feel something. The object that comes prior to that, everything that we don’t notice either because we’re distracted, not paying attention, unable to see something so minute, so colorful, or so bland, that simply means there are objects beyond our comprehension. Yet, when they come into comprehension, and if they don’t act as an object of themselves, they then become the objects of the world. The objects of the world in these other moments represent undifferentiated masses of object they once were. They became particular in the universal, some could say. In these moments, we see the life of concepts emerge. They wake up and at the same time scream with passion as a baby is spanked. On the other hand, you hear the sounds of trains in the background and its tail, the soft air falling down, pushed down by the falling autumn leaves. Birds chirp; chicks bawk. The caterpillar crawls across the windowsill. Like a spotlight, the sunshine follows the caterpillar on its journey. The caterpillar is looking to stock up on food.

“What the fuck are you talking about”

Who said that?

“Who the fuck else do you think said that? You fucking imbecile!”

You can speak.

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

I’m shocked.

“No shit. But everything that you said, everything that you mentioned, everything that you thought, all of that biological essentialism, all of that baseless drivel, all of that shit was fucking wrong and you’re a goddamn fucking idiot for believing that stupid fucking bullshit. You should go fucking kill yourself you stupid fucking loser.”

My shoe fell off my foot and I squashed the little bug. I thought to myself, Kafka, you bastard, I will find you one day. Thousands of kilometers (and miles) away, you could hear the mute laughter booming from some cemetery in Prague.

Someone called me. I wasn’t sure who. I never know who calls me these days. All that I know is that someone calls and that I don’t know who it is or what they say.

Some days, they’ll say something like “Hi, are you interested in purchasing a new phone line? We’re offering the best deals for the newest phones with the fastest speeds at the cheapest rates. Act now! Please stay on the line and you will be connected with a sales representative. Has this ever happened to you? Were you ever the type of person who —

“Yes. Hello. Who am I speaking to?”

“What?”

“Hello. My name is — . Who am I speaking to? “

“Huh?”

“My name is — and I’m — at — . Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”

There are moments like this, where you’re completely lost in a phone conversation that you forget about time. You love those moments because you only know that you’re the moon and that the other is the sun.

I heard something coming from the bottom of my shoe. It fell off my foot again. I picked it up and looked at it.

“You really are a fucking idiot, aren’t you? Do you really think that your stupid fucking wordplay means a goddamn fucking thing? If some other fucking imbecile sees this and gets hard because they notice your stupid fucking ass playing some stupid fucking homophone word play into some weird-freaky-inverted-oedipal-bullshit, then your whole species should be killed off by people like me. Obviously, this is fucking hyperbole, so don’t think you have to think so hard about it. Don’t hurt yourself. But you get my fucking point, don’t you?”

My shoe fell out of my hand and landed on the wall across from me. I walked over to pick it up. I put my shoe back on.

Someone else called me. “Where are you? Everyone’s here and you’re not. So why aren’t you here?”

I wasn’t sure who this was or who everyone was. I was sure that someone was calling me though. Someone always called me. I don’t know for what.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Now you know how I feel.”

This was how I truly felt at the age of thirteen.’

After you train it, it writes Don Quixote. After you train it some more, Shelling pops out. Schiller, Goethe, and Holderlin. Give it a few more hours and you’ll have the whole nineteenth-century French canon. Don’t forget Joyce after a few minutes. Or maybe Faulkner. How about Djuna Barnes or Toni Morrison? After a few more minutes, the robot breaks down.

The scientist walks over and looks at the robot.

“I hate robotics.”

A computer engineer (or programmer — maybe innovator — or, how about radical — even code-monkey) ran over.

“How hot is it in this room?” the computer engineer shouted.

“Pretty damn hot, I’d say!” said someone.

The computer engineer pulled out a phone, put in the password, scrolled through a few pages, clicked on an app, and put the phone next to the robot.

“Holy shit, the robots at 98.7 degrees!”

“Just like me!”

“Yes, just like you. But you’re not a fucking robot!”

“I know that! I just wanted to show my solidarity.”

“Someone please call a technician! IT! Anyone! Please! This robot needs help!”

Everyone stared as though they were watching a lunatic waving around a lantern at some market outside. Everyone knew there was no collective unconscious. Everyone knew and yet no one cared.