Reflections of the Machine

Lisa was a diagnosed schizophrenic. The sole issue with her diagnosis, some might argue, was that she gestated in her womb the Lord’s unborn child, or, in clearer terms, his fetus. She loafed through life feeling neglected – as it was, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Angel (“It’s pronounced ‘Hey-Seuss!'”, she would whine), one day left their shared apartment to pick up milk from a nearby grocery store. As I like to imagine it, the Lord and his chosen female exchanged casual farewells while Lisa knelt next to her square, oak coffee table and struggled over a rainforest jigsaw puzzle. Jesus hastily donned his jacket and checked his pockets before he left the apartment, locked the door behind him, and absconded with their only car, never to return. Lisa waited expectantly at the coffee table, checking the time on her phone sporadically as she grew increasingly confused.

Even including a detour to the candy aisle, he should have been gone a half hour at most. She called him over and over again, afraid for his safety, but he never picked up. His phone had been turned off. After leaving many voicemails, frantic by the final one, Lisa enjoyed a sleepless night in the fetal position clutching her phone lest she miss the all-important phone call. She would not discover until three days later that our Lord and Light, Jesus Angel, had left her, alone and pregnant, to battle the world as a waitress.

Saul met Lisa only several weeks after her jarring departure from the life she had planned. In early summer of his nineteenth year, she joined the waitstaff at the local tourist trap where Saul found similar employment, The Legendary Smelterston Inn. That the establishment was not at all an inn amused him on a daily basis.

Saul sized Lisa up in short time, taking into account the pleading hardness of her ice blue eyes as she heedlessly droned about one complaint after another.

“My mother’s a bitch! Well, she’s my best friend and a bitch. Like, she’s there when I need her, but she’s always on my case for money I owe and, you know, other things.”

Lisa liked to entice, she enjoyed being the object of the hunt. In retrospect this was likely due to an intense desire for attention and interest after her recent and much discussed abandonment. Lisa’s pudgy face wore every sign of a hasty retreat into an adulthood for which she was not ready. If nothing else, Lisa maintained her hair fastidiously, sprayed to her head like plastic corn silk while she compulsively matted it down in the event it had become unhinged and frizzy in her wobbling saunters from one dissatisfied table to the next. The table was a microcosm of the waiter.

Lisa towered an impressive five feet two inches above the ground. The meaty flesh of her cheeks crowded her eyes in a petulant squint, except when she was accused of something, in which case her face assumed the innocence of a porcelain doll.

Weeks later, she lazily leaned one pale elbow – her mid-shoulder length hair was the same color as her skin – on the dingy red and beige papered coffee counter and sighed, exasperated, amidst another of her daily passing-the-time chitchats with Saul. It was a breathy sigh, the flagrant rebellion of one bored with work, bored with life. Her pregnant stomach swelled in the air. Saul had won her favor by taking all of her bait and indulging her desperate seductions. He asked the questions she implicitly begged him to ask by clumsy omission.

“Lisa,” Saul began, “what are you going to name it?”

“Welllll,” pierced her signature nasal whine, “I’m not really sure yet. I don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy, you know?”

He rolled his eyes at her. They had been over this before. Lisa wanted to be surprised by the gender of her baby and refused to look. That’s all it would take. Just a simple, stupid little look, and the agony of Saul’s uncertainty would be over. It was so important to know the gender of her baby. How else did one pass the time at work?

“You should definitely name it something biblical, to fall in line with the whole ‘Jesus Angel’ thing.”

“‘Hey-Seuss!’” She corrected him, bored, as always. This had become her nauseating mantra.
“Regardless, I think it’s very important that the baby go along with the whole Bible theme.”

“Alright.” She joined in his game. He loved when she fell for his traps. “What do you think I should name it if it’s a girl?”

“If it’s a girl? Hm.” Saul paused a moment, pretending that he hadn’t already watched this entire scenario play out in his head as he waited to fall asleep the previous night. “I think you should name her Jezebel. Jezebel or Bathsheba. Definitely one of the two.”

“Jezebel or Bathsheba? They sound familiar. Who are they?”

He had waited at least eleven hours for this moment.

“Whores.” He adorned the word with nothing, allowing its airy syllable to fall where she would take it. It sounded innocent, like something a baby learning its first words might squeak out, indifferent to the meaning.

“Whores! Why would I want to name my daughter after whores!”

“I don’t know! Her dad’s name is Jesus Angel, I just thought it was appropriate! He was all about whores you know – Mary Magdalene was a big whore of his. She followed him around everywhere and some people even think she was his wife. Didn’t you read that book?”

“No…” Lisa considered his words carefully, scrutinizing them for the hint of an insult. There was none, for he had orchestrated this moment carefully.

“Fine, then! Name her Sarah or Rachel or something boring like that.”

“Ew, no way! Those are so common!”

“Your name is Lisa.”

“Yeah, but my dad wasn’t named Jesus Angel, you know? Her name should be something that people like, remember.”

“Oh, so now it’s a ‘she’? Is there something you’re not telling me? You totally know the gender, you liar! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! I thought we were friends.”

Lisa’s eyes grew wide behind her glasses with this accusation, blue with shock, like they were holding their breath and refusing to give in, even to the point of unconsciousness, until Saul recanted his words.

“Okay, fine. So I looked. I couldn’t help it! How could I not look? You totally would have looked. It’s a boy – He’s a boy. You can see the penis. Do you want me to bring in my ultrasounds?”

“No, no. That’s okay. I don’t really need to see that.” He switched back to the crux of the argument, hardening his face with mock distrust. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry! I just didn’t want you to think I’d caved in. I’m not like that. When I say something I mean it. Usually. I have more morals than most people. That’s why I’ll either abort it or keep it myself. I wouldn’t want someone else raising it and fucking it up, you know? I want it to be raised right. With morals.” She licked her lips.

Here he latched onto another loose string, another opportunity to engage Lisa in yet another of their daily arguments. They had to pass the time somehow.

“You really should get an abortion. Twenty is far too young to be raising a child. What’s that phrase? Babies raising babies? Why don’t you get an abortion?”

“Because I don’t have two hundred dollars and Jesus Angel won’t give it to me. I don’t even know where he is!”

“Lisa, do you know how expensive it is to raise a child? It’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think two hundred is a pretty small price to pay for your freedom.”

“Oh yeah? Are you going to give me the money?”

“No way! I’m not the one who got pregnant.”

“You guys have it so easy! You just stick it in and go! You could even use your hand if you wanted to!”

“You could use your hand, too, Lisa.”

“Ew, no way! That’s so gross! Anyways, the point is, I’m the one stuck with the baby!”

“You could abort it.” Since when had convincing Lisa to abort her baby become Saul’s primary mission in life?

She glared at him. “Oh, and I suppose you’ve never forgotten to use a condom with your girlfriends?”

“That’s a ridiculous question and really none of your- Oh shit! My light’s on!” And he retreated to the assumed safety of the kitchen.

“You always do this!” Lisa let out an exasperated peal behind him, though the effort to follow proved too taxing. She collapsed again onto the counter and sipped her iced coffee through a bendy straw with her bulbous head cocked at a tired, lilted angle.

Saul worked at The Legendary Smelterston Inn. In a world of deceptive media and rampant fiction, stories of the real nature rarely find themselves comparable to anything involving the unleashed imagination. For the duration of a summer, three and a half months between his freshman and sophomore years of college, Saul lived in a writer’s Elysium of unbelievable characters and antics beyond the invention of even the most stalwart lunatic. Lisa represented only a single permutation of the Legendary Smelterston Inn, there were many others just as interesting. Each of them recorded in the pages to come affected Saul deeply. They were the last people he ever truly met.

Saul’s particular pocket of forest and madness resided among the verdant mountains of Appalachia, nestled in the fissure carved so beautifully through solid rock by a glacier thousands and thousands of years ago. Saul had heard, though he had yet by then to recognize, that his native home contained some of the most visually stunning landscapes in existence. When you grow up in the forest, trees are commonplace, detrimental and obstructive, blocking the erection of sidewalks and the efficiency of public transportation, and the only true beauty lies in escape, escape from the shadow of the forest, the lichen of the trees, the deer in the flowerbeds, escape from one self to another and perhaps, someday, back to its abandoned child.

Here, Saul found himself cut off from the bustling city life he had become accustomed to the previous year. The preternatural calm broken by birdsong, peepers, and a seldom cricket haunted his mornings, whose piercing light he at least staved off with thick, industrial blackout blinds. In the ideal scenario, Saul could remain all day in his darkened bedroom, passively shielded from unrealized photosensitivity. As a new waiter at The Legendary Smelterston Inn he had no such luck.

Despite his prior two and a half years of economic servitude as a stellar bus boy, restaurant management still insisted that Saul “open” the restaurant three out of five working days. It was only fair, they explained, to those who had worked there longer. On top of it all, he was a designated “runner,” meaning that due to his youthful legs he would primarily wait tables on the veranda, an arduous trek that passed through three rooms, a screen door, and worn, uneven wooden steps to an ivy-wrapped outdoor porch thronged with patrons and chickens. It was the most grueling duty possible to the waitstaff, save perhaps descending into the dank, purportedly haunted stone basement to retrieve buckets of ice from an ancient but reliable ice machine. One never knew when the cellar’s fabled denizen, the one-eyed cat, would make an appearance.

The Smelterston Inn carried a sense of history with it through time, wielded as a selling point and also as a source of pride to its employees. No one passed long through the restaurant’s doors before imbibing a unique oral tradition of colorful, expansive, and occasionally, risqué tales. By the end of his first month, he could easily enthrall gullible and inquisitive tourists with recitations of past hauntings, retellings of a centuries-old massacre and scalping of an entire extended family by Native Americans on the same street as the Inn. There’s the black carriage driver of the early 1800s, run over by his own carriage and carried to a second floor bedroom where he died and remains to this day as a ghostly presence in the window. Finally, no one forgets about Mabel, the previous owner of the Inn who dropped dead of a heart attack in the back parlor room decades ago and still wanders late at night with a peculiar attraction to the many mirrors that now adorn the room’s walls. The ambience of the battered, three story building, replete with a functional outdoor chicken coop and free roaming chickens, correlated perfectly with its historicity.

Though they worked at an inn, no one had slept in its lodgings for decades, save the gruff and wizened owner, Steve, who by merit of his alcoholism had slipped beyond even the gaze of spirits. He recuperated nightly in a bedroom on the third floor, a harrowing journey made by Saul only once in the past, years ago, as a Halloween dare. He had braved the menacing gloom of the often unlit and unpowered third floor for barely a minute before he deemed his dare fulfilled and dashed downstairs to the welcome company of his partner in crime at the Inn, Lauren.

“How was it?” she inquired with a conspiratorial grin. “You see anything weird?”

Saul laughed and shook his head. “No, but I only sat on the top step.”

They had known each other for years, first as classmates then compatriot bussers before finally, upon symbolic graduation into adulthood, as co-runners of the veranda. Longtime friends and trusted associates, they negotiated an easy rapport, though for a span of two weeks they once awkwardly and ambiguously dated until Lauren began to make out with other guys. By dated, I mean they held hands once at the movie theater and chatted with each other on the phone on a somewhat regular basis, Still, the duo discussed at length the restaurant and its psychiatric ward of characters. Lauren’s heart yielded a soft spot for the disenfranchised.

“I think Lisa’s really sweet. I feel bad for her.” The former utterance never announced without the qualification of the latter.

Saul wondered about the baby inside of Lisa. What sort of life could it know with such a mother? Further, how did Lisa, inept as she was, manage unconsciously the miraculous feat of morphogenesis? Her body, seemingly, carried wisdom beyond her mind. The infant boy would have no choice in this most important pivot of his life, the conditions of his own birth. No one receives the opportunity to make these decisions for themselves, but it seemed all the more cruel the son of our Lord should enter the world into such destitute circumstances.

By the end of Saul’s short semester at the Inn Lisa would accidentally-on-purpose bellyflop down the stairs of the green house with a full tray of food hoisted precariously on her right shoulder. Her deception served a twofold purpose: to injure herself to the point of legal compensation and simultaneously complicate the unheeded growth of Jesus Angel’s offspring in her captive womb. Lisa was crazy like a fox, as the adage goes, but this incident concludes Saul’s anamnesis rather than begins it. Its telling requires more history.

GARY

“Does one of your cooks have long, grey hair?”

Saul’s mind immediately flashed to an image of Gary’s Crusty The Clown coif, cooing fluffily around his head.

“No, I don’t think so.” He lied automatically. “In fact, I think they make all the cooks wear hair nets. I can bring it back to the kitchen if you’d like.”

She frowned, now confused by what random person’s hair had mysteriously ended up in her lunch. Could it have been someone from the processing plant where they made the pasta? “No, that’s okay. I’ll just take it out.”

With that, she disgustedly plucked the hair from her spaghetti, flecked as it was with chunky red pocks of tomato sauce.

“Gary,” Saul sighed upon returning to the kitchen, “I think one of your hairs fell into some girl’s spaghetti.”

“Uh oh! Does she want a new plate?”

“Nope, I told her all the cooks wear hair nets.”

“Good boy,” Gary commended as he hastily tucked his scraggly hair under the sweat stained rim of his cap. “That’s what I like to hear! Still, I should probably go talk to her.”

And out of the kitchen he walked, blatantly not wearing a hair net. Were these people trying to make Saul look like a liar?