Chapter 9: Cyberpunk Perfume

The last time I spoke to my mom, we got in a fight before I had a meltdown and spent three months in Spain. Nobody ever knows they’re going through a meltdown until years later when you look back on how fucking estupido you were acting. My stupidity began in the Mediterranean and involved flamenco, hiking through the Sierra Nevada, wandering museums, fucking strangers in ancient palaces, and drinking with mountain gypsies, all while writing a dissertation and cashing myself checks from my bottomless credit card. What a nice meltdown.

You’re probably wondering what started the fight with my mom. I’d come home for a week, at my dad’s behest, because my mom wasn’t sleeping or eating. She’d lost her job after too many drunken weekend weather forecasts. At first, you know, it was funny, but even the most alluring middle-aged seductress can only swipe her hand across the wrong state and declare “a helluva lot of rain in this area” so many times before people doubt a news station’s integrity. The time she warned everyone about CIA snipers riding a super cell, I think that one led to a review of her contract.

My job was to convince my mom to start taking her court-ordered meds again. I’m not sure how a family intervention turned into me confronting her with years of backlogged emotion, but it happened. My mom was just too worn out to care. When I was done narrating her failure as a parent, she sighed and muttered, “Whatever. At least your brother’s not a wreck.” I neglected to mention that he was upstairs at the time of our show down, masturbating to anime in his old bedroom after losing his job at Starbucks for showing up late three times.

After my grand finale, my dad lit a cigarette and consoled himself. “It’s fine. I brought Jessica here to help, but if she wants to act like a spoiled child, we’ll just sign Mom up for another month at the retreat,” meaning the mental health clinic.

A week later, I was watching Tropic Thunder in Spanish on a plane to Madrid. I returned with a killer tan from all that running on the shore, a second mortgage on life, and enough debt to motivate an insane research agenda. I ended all my self-pity and focused on my doctorate and my writing. And toward the end of my year of forced, Benedictine discipline, well, that’s exactly when I met Kyle Lockhart.

Kyle was the most intense, stoic guy I ever developed feelings for, and it’s no surprise he wound up winning me for keeps. We met at a local writer’s conference that Amy dragged me to as a guest speaker. I didn’t mind the extra cash, but I did take issue with men guilty of various fashion crimes (i.e., tropical-themed shirts, seersucker suits, flannel in May) asking if I would read their manuscripts on the spot, like, right there, maybe over a drink? The best offer I got was a 500-page medieval fantasy novel about a football player who gets stuck in an alternate version of the War of the Roses. I suggested he name it, A Miami Dolphin in King Henry’s Court. He didn’t get my joke. Asshole.

Amy and I were trading stories at the hotel bar, enjoying overpriced mojitos, when I saw Kyle across the way with a gaggle of crime novelists. If I were really clever, I would say an attempted murder of crime novelists because three crows make a…and…okay, I’m going to shut up and let you figure that one out. I couldn’t stop glancing in Kyle’s direction, hoping he’d take his eyes off the other cute girl in their group, who might’ve been a college student, or his wife, who knew? They showed up at these things sometimes.

Amy snapped her fingers, regaining my attention. “So I floored the entire room when I shrugged and said Oprah has no fucking idea what she’s talking about. Sure, she interviewed Toni Morrison. Who gives a fuck?”

I frowned, casting my eyes back over toward Kyle. “Hey, I liked Song of Solomon.”

When Kyle caught one of my glances, I felt a gust of excitement and turned away, hand grazing my hair as if it were written into my programming.

I imagined my robot-vision zooming in on his chiseled face, a slight five-o’clock shadow and leagues of hair all messed up as if he’d been awake for a couple of days. He wore a thin black blazer over a black shirt, half unbuttoned.

Amy threw a straw at me. “Go up and introduce yourself to him already.”

To be honest, I can’t even remember what we talked about in detail. I just remember trying to clear through the group conversation and make a space for me to prompt him to ask for my phone number. That was around the time I learned the groovy way to exchange contact information with people by calling each other. And, of course, we traded business cards and then I secretly ordered two of his books on the spot with my Amazon app. His author photo was something I liked to look at pretty much anytime I had my phone out. No joke, I would text someone and then think, hey, I should look at Kyle’s picture again.

Kyle had published four disturbing crime thrillers, and two of them I burned through in about a week between bath-time reading, poolside reading, and audiobook listening in the car.

He was a gripping story teller, and his protagonist was a female detective, named Contessa! Move over, Temperance Brennan. (Not really, love Bones.)

Our first date involved the usual coffee and stroll scenario. I showed up eager with questions about Contessa, about his serial killers, and about the portrayal of serial killers in general, namely how they all seemed like Hannibal Lecter fanboys. “But, I mean, yours are different because they’re artists,” I hastened to add. “Why did you make them so artistic?”

First, he almost couldn’t believe I’d read two of his books before our first date. Major points, Jessica. So he had to talk for a little while about girls he’d dated who didn’t care much about his writing, didn’t understand the time it took, or why he wasn’t famous yet.

“You’re sure kicking my ass,” I said. “Your Amazon rank is in the triple digits. I’m somewhere around 70,000 on a good day.” As I would learn later, the trouble was that I was writing safely from the backseat of my life.

He apologized for only ordering one of my books, which he hadn’t started yet. And so then it was my turn to express disbelief that he’d even ordered something I wrote.

It’s not often that someone who writes about draining a woman’s blood can make me feel so at ease.

How do I evaluate the quality of a first date? By how much I don’t want to leave.

I drank so much coffee my heart practically imploded, which is saying a lot for me. I followed him to his car feeling like a desperate kitten. Sensing he was not the type to get physical right away, I took the risk and offered a hug, then stole a kiss on his cheek when he wasn’t looking.

The look in his eyes when my lips glanced his skin, there was some kind of surprised sadness in them that he tried to blink away. “Thank you,” he said and rubbed my back. Then he climbed into his car. I stood still, watching him drive off as if we were at the end of a Bronte novel.

On my bed at home, I curled up and let my joy out in what I can only describe as little meows. Do guys know this is how some of us act when we’ve found THE GUY? Well, now at least a few of them do. But be careful, she will never tell you she did anything like this until you’re married because you won’t believe it until then.

It’s worth mentioning that Kyle had made me completely forget about my secret identity as a fembot. I just wanted him to kiss me for days, as if I were a real girl. But, oh, he would understand me better than any other living soul.

That’s the thing with us writers. We have active imaginations. We can put ourselves in other people’s brains for a little while. Kyle applied this special skill to me, with amazing results.

Our second date ended with slow kissing on his couch. Always eager to learn a new partner’s sexual history, I started asking questions, only to have them quickly turned back on me with an intense curiosity. Tipsy on wine, I confessed more than I should have as he sat opposite me, stroking my calves. He asked for even more information, and I referred him to websites and books before he walked me back to my car with a final goodbye kiss.

Encounters between us eventually led to his bedroom, and at first I thought he didn’t care much for robot role-play. He was so serious all the time, partly due to his work on his next thriller, which he wouldn’t tell me about.

Maybe I should’ve known what was in store for me, given his peculiar avoidance of one door that remained closed every time I was over. I assumed it was his writing sanctuary.

One night, as we flirted with sex, kissing on his bed half naked, he got serious and asked me to lie with him. He spooned me and said he wanted my opinion about something.

“Of course, anything.”

“What do you think about me?”

I blurted out, “Fucking perfect.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re fucking perfect,” I said. “Wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

His hand warmed my tummy, then slid down into my panties. Fire spread through me. “I love you,” I said.

He worked me into a little frenzy, then paused. “I’m planning something for your birthday,” he said. I was turning 26 soon.

“What are you planning?” I guided his hand back down to my panties.

“Something very special, but I want to make sure you’re okay with it. I’m going to spend a lot of money, several thousand dollars.”

My vision focused, and my world suddenly sharpened. There was no way for me to contain the guffaw. I sat up, fixing my hair. “Kyle, you don’t have to spend that kind of money on me.”

He studied my face for what felt like an hour. What was he looking for? I wasn’t creeped out or scared. Pure and simple, I tried to explain, I didn’t think I was worth that much. And there was no guarantee he’d want to be with me in three months, or six.

He smiled, gentle and reassuring. “Let me worry about that,” he said.

I protested, and he put a finger on my lips. “It’s done. Besides, this is a little bit for both of us.”

We returned to my pleasuring. His fingers started a riot in me, quelled only with his kisses, and we spent the night together under his slinky black sheets.

Over breakfast the next morning, Kyle led a nonstop interrogation of my fetish. He knew I was holding things back, and he kept at me with the intensity of a master crime solver. “I’m just not…I…can we talk about something else?” I said and tried to make a joke about slicing fruit that earned a pity chuckle.

Kyle said, “No, we can’t talk about something else. You’re going to tell me everything.” He sat back, hands behind his head. “Would it help if I told you mine first?”

I looked up, curious now. “You have a fetish?”

“Of course I do,” he said smugly. “Let’s play a game. Who has the darker fetish?”

The tone in his voice was turning me on a little. Kyle didn’t have to work that hard to draw me to him. I sat forward, resting my chin on my palms. “I’m all ears. Tell me, but first. What do I get if I win?”

Kyle eyed me over his black coffee. “You get a night written by best-selling crime novelist Kyle Lockhart.”

If anyone could pull off my fetish, it was him. I reached out playfully to shake his head. “We have a deal.”

He kissed my knuckles, and I inhaled deeply. Kyle could make one part of my body jealous of the other.

We decided to make our contest a literary one. We sat on his deluxe sofa, writing each other a chapter of the darkest erotica we could fathom happening to us. It was a lovely day outside, birds and squirrels and all that.

We exchanged after an hour and read in front of each other. I kept glancing up from his piece to gauge his reaction. He smiled, laughed, and went oooo that’s wonderful. At no point did he indicate concern for my mental health. In the end, Kyle won. My story was about a beautiful robot named Jessica who malfunctions during a public speaking event and ultimately provides material for a customer service video as her head is unscrewed and then taken apart piece by piece in front of a live audience. Not bad for a first draft.

Kyle’s narrative described a cyberpunk version of Perfume. He kept the anti-hero’s name, Jean-Baptiste Grenoille, but changed his obsession from creating the perfect scent with the hair of a dozen women’s corpses to creating the perfect fembot from the parts of those he captured and disassembled.

The only word for my response is a neologism: flabbergasmed. I finished the story with a hand on my sternum, my mouth open as my eyes moved from the pages to his smug little face. Not only had he won, he had one-upped me at my own fetish, and I now believed I was going to be his forever. “You win,” I said with a low, satisfied breath.

Kyle retreated to the kitchen for more coffee, bringing the pot by to refill my cup. He kissed me on the forehead. “But next week is your birthday, so we’ll pretend you won.”

For sure, Kyle acted peculiar the week leading up to the surprise he was planning, sending me a new outfit via mail from Saks — a cropped blazer, blouse, and trouser combo that fit snugly and made me marvel at how he’d known my size. I was expected to wear it to my birthday date.

That night, the door to his mystery room stood ajar. A cool blue glow emanated from inside. Kyle’s voice came from behind me in a low, hushed tone. “Are you ready for your first present?”

He eased me onto the couch and placed a wrapped box in my lap, watching me tear into it with an anxious tremble.

At first I didn’t even know what it was. The box showed a topless couple in coital comfort. The woman had pads stuck to her nipples and neck. The label on the box said, “Electro-Erotic Thrills.”

I raised my hand to my lips, biting my index finger. No such thing had ever come across my sex toy shopping.

Kyle grasped my wrists and kissed them. “Do you trust me?”

I gulped. “Of course I do.” I scrunched my shoulders at the possible directions this might go.

“I want you to walk back outside and return like you’ve come here reluctantly. You’re meeting me to discuss what I want from you, now that I’ve sent you photographs and documents proving that you’re not Jessica Wilder the human, but a robot with a highly functional A.I. bought by a publishing company to market chick lit.”

Happy birthday to me, I thought and pranced outside. He closed the door, telling me to wait ten minutes. Readers, it was the longest six hundred seconds in my sexual history.

Finally, as the minute hand crossed the top tick of my watch, I pushed open the door and entered a now-darkened apartment.

“Hello?” I called. I stepped inside and shut the door with the toe of my mary jane flat. I moved cautiously, glancing around at the dreadful emptiness. “I’m here, like you asked…please don’t post those photos, okay? I’m sure we can make some kind of arrangement.”

I advanced toward the blue light coming from the far room, the door now wide open. My processor was predicting a 75 percent chance of imminent assault. A message ran along the bottom of my vision, “Warning. Ground Vibrations Detected. Find immediate exit.”

Before I could turn around, Kyle’s arm pythoned its way around my sternum. My breasts swelled against the bend of his elbow, his strength almost crushing the air out of me in a heavy exhale. His other hand covered my mouth. The feigned feeling of helplessness was intoxicating, and I squirmed just a little as his warm breath rushed over my breast bone.

“You’re going to be quiet,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

I nodded, trying to kiss his fingers even as they silenced me.

My eyes closed, and as much as I tried to prepare, nothing could brace me for the intensely playful surge of the electro-shock wand between the dimples of my back. The feeling amazed me, actual electric pulses running through my body that made me jerk and twitch out of control. I thrashed against his tight hold.

Kyle whispered, “Don’t fight the pulse, Jessica. I’m overriding your safety protocols. The harder you resist, the more damage this will do to your systems.”

I blinked and stuttered. “Pleease dddd-d-d-d-don’t…I’m so exx-x-x-xpensive to repair.” My eyes practically rolled back in my head and I let out a long monotone vowel combination, “Aaaauuuhhhmpph,” then relaxed my muscles, going slack in his arms with my head awkwardly tipped to one side.

He dragged my body into the blue-lit room, holding my eyes closed as he plopped me into a hard chair. I felt my wrists cuffed, then his hands pressing against my chest, the side of my head, then my neck as he attached the current conveyer pads. I was going to feel every setting the power box had to offer tonight. What a lucky girl I was, best birthday night ever, and we’d barley begun.

When he held his thumb against the soft skin under my ear for 3 solid seconds, I knew it was my signal to reboot.

He stood over me with his hands on his hips. I let my eyes track wildly over the room, unable to focus. “Hi, I’m-m-m here to sign some auto-autographs,” I stuttered. “Where is this hotel? I love this drink. Are you free for lunch?”

“Looks like there was a little damage,” he said to himself, leaning forward on his knees. “Hopefully nothing we can’t fix.”

I glanced down at the cable extending from my open chest panel, eyes and mouth wide. Then I surveyed the rest of the room he’d prepared for me: a white table with a….was that a sex doll lying there amid various computer parts? It looked like her lower abdomen was sliced open. A bushel of wires gushed up from the wound.

A splash of shock hit as I studied the doll’s hair and face — she looked just like…me?

I couldn’t decide if I was creeped out or head over heels. I’ve always gravitated toward the more obsessive guys, and seeing me literally turned into a copy of myself was an unbelievable turn on.

Kyle followed my shocked expression to the sex doll and smirked. “I see you’ve noticed your predecessor,” he said and stepped over to the doll, lifting her upright by the neck. How had he found a wig so close in resemblance to my hair style? The makeup was uncanny.

Kyle caressed the doll’s face. “You see, I used this trap to capture two other Jessica models. And, as you can see, they wear out rather quickly. The cyber-crimes division has no idea who keeps abducting you. It’s an awful inconvenience for HarperCollins to keep ordering replacements.”

He directed my attention to a large screen on a cart to my right, then wheeled it closer. It showed two different displays, a command prompt and a holograph of a woman’s head. Such effort wouldn’t go unrewarded.

“This is your neural net,” he said, touching the holograph as it danced with glowing lights. “In just a few seconds, I’m going to initiate a complete recode of your personality. Most of your identity will vanish, making room for Jessica the Sex Toy. Don’t worry, you’ll love your new outlook on life. The old Jessica will barely be missed.”

I fluttered my eyes and shook my head, regaining some of my focus. “You’re not authorized to access my systems in this manner. Please disconnect me and no further actions will ensue. If you persist, I will be — -aauhhh — -I will be — auuhhh — whaaat are you d-d-d-doing?!”

I closed one eye, twitching, and my body convulsed as Kyle twisted the nob on my new electro-erotic power box.

Electric currents wiggled through my body, settling into a rhythm that my back and shoulders danced to as I let my head rattle in every direction, eyes squeezed shut. Kyle told me the recoding would take several minutes…

Already aware at how my moans and whimpers aroused Kyle, I kept them coming.

My throat became a clarinet.

The prospect of erasing my life hadn’t occurred to me before, but wouldn’t it be nice to rid myself of the sad, withered flower of my childhood? I wondered how much of me would remain after a true memory scrubbing.

The feel of the electricity mesmerized every square inch of my skin and the quivering muscles beneath it. Why hadn’t I ever looked for a toy like this before? I never knew other people found sexual pleasure in gentle electrocution. How many years had I longed for something like this? And now it was happening.

Kyle knew exactly what I wanted. He pulled a chair beside me and explored what he called my exquisite silicone casing. “Can you still hear me, Jessica?”

I whimpered. “Y-y-y-esss, I can-n-n-n still hear…hear…hear you. Please don’t erase me.”

He held my chin between this thumb and index finger, speaking with a fatherly tone. “You need not worry, Jessica. You’ll still be you, just without all of the worthless identity as an author they wrote into your code.”

The electricity still hummed through me as he spoke, skimming the tip of his finger along the outlines of my hips. “I love the way your bony little hips highlight your abdominal muscles,” he said. “They really put a lot of work into you. Such a unique, special creature. I hate that you weren’t built exclusively for sexual pleasure.”

“Recoding 50 percent complete,” I blurted, and his eyes narrowed.

“A shame indeed. Your battery is going to burn out in a few months at best, considering how much I’ll be using you. I keep hoping the next Jessica will have a replaceable battery. But until that happens, I might as well get a whole new one.”

My reprogramming finished. Kyle stripped off the current pads and rebooted me.

I shimmied to life and smiled up at him. “Hi, I’m Jessica.” I stood from the chair and arched my back, accentuating my breasts, my arms straight at my sides.

Kyle made slow circles around me, tracing lines of longitude across my body as he made throaty sounds of approval. My eyes flirted open when he squeezed my left breast.

I concentrated on the Jessica doll draped across her hard bed of electronics, smiling at it while telling myself I no longer cared at all what would happen tomorrow or the day after. The paradoxical freedom of fembots had always appealed to me. I might be used up, disposed of, damaged or broken, thrown away. Robots were nothing but an honest description of our disposable lives, and they had no idea about their mortality.

Feeling spontaneous, I ran my hands through my hair and tiptoed toward the inert Jessica with a childlike wonder. I looked at Kyle, placing a hand on the doll’s abdomen, above the protruding wires.

“She’s so pretty,” I said then cocked my head to one side. “Am I pretty like her?”

Kyle approached me and leaned across the doll, planting a firm kiss between my eyebrows. “You are very beautiful,” he whispered, his breath whisking across my face.

I flashed my eyes, grinning. Then I looked down, expression fading as I perused the doll’s lifeless stare. “Is she going to be okay?”

“Don’t worry about this one for now,” he said. “I’m trying to fix her. Now, let’s take you back to my room for some fun, shall we?”

“What kind of fun?” I said, taking his hand.

“You’ll see,” he said, pulling me behind him down the dimly lit hallway, toward his bedroom.

“Have a seat,” he said. His face grazed my arms as he inhaled my perfume, a must to hide the slight silicone scent of my skin.

“Lie down,” he ordered.

I did as told, resting on my elbows. I spread my legs, feet tucked behind my buttocks so that my thighs framed his face as I looked up at him with innocent curiosity. “Would you like me to remove my pants?”

He nodded, and I undid the button and slid the zipper down, noting his hungry gaze at my baby blue panties as he grabbed the fabric by the cuffs and pulled them off with several firm jerks. They lay wrinkled on the bed as he bent over me, popping each button of my shirt loose before pulling me upright by the base of my neck. Kyle was insistent about removing my shirt himself, with no help from me, as I were just a mannequin he needed to undress.

Folding it all neatly, he placed the discarded clothing on the nightstand and lay beside me with a devilish smile at the sight of my chest rising and falling, my breasts tight against my bra. His hand slid from my stomach to my nether city as he pressed his fingers through the fabric of my panties. The friction warmed me, and I let out a perfunctory sigh, always careful to control my emotions, though that was becoming increasingly difficult as he played with me.

I cleared my hectic thoughts, assuming my timeless persona of vacant, hollow Jessica-bot. When I mounted Kyle, my face began performing the animatronic expressions of something programmed for sex but not quite fluid enough to pass for human. Kyle watched, his hands firm on my hips, giving his approval as I initiated our journey.

His sex hardened, and with a quick motion he reached into the nightstand drawer for a condom. “Put it on me,” he said.

“Of course, I can put a condom on you to protect against accidental shock,” I said vacantly and tore open the package.

In no time we sailed deep into the sea of ecstasy. His palms pressed firmly against my breasts, practically holding me up as I sank deeper and deeper to get him as far inside me as possible. It felt so amazing that I worried I would start breaking character, which hardly ever happened.

Pleasure flooded me as our pace quickened. It felt like his hands were everywhere, as if he had four or five of them.

My body began with a murmuring chant that crescendoed into a four-movement symphony, each one with its own special key. I was singing to him in flats and sharps as he repeated the refrain, “Oh Jessica…Nexus…Oh Jessica…Oh Jessica…Nexus…”

I didn’t know if I was real Jessica or my robot persona, but I didn’t care. With sex this amazing, the two became one. We moved with Kyle in a heated trance that ended when he released himself inside me, and I absorbed his combustion before curling down to cover his panting mouth in a final deep kiss.

I dismounted, reclaiming real Jessica to declare my love for Kyle, but he was a little more focused on declaring his for me.

We lay facing each other on the damp sheets and stared at each other just how you’re supposed to in the erotic films I’d been watching my whole life. Kyle was petting me and calling me his “Little Wonder.”

Not long after, I moved in with Patrick and experienced a whole new level of human feelings. He made such space for me in his life, and we became not only lovers and friends but more like dependent organisms. If I was having a rough day, he knew it before I did and patted the kitchen counter. “Hop up here, and let me give you an inspection.” He would inspect me like a dentist, asking questions about my power management plan and if I needed a recharge (nap). Such little moments showed me that Kyle could care in the way I needed him to. In kind, I started to feel and show him the real emotions he needed.

We’ve lived together for a year now. I’ve never been happier, and I’ve never had such great sex…great everything. Like one time, he came home and caught me masturbating to selfies I’d photo-shopped with open access panels and joints at my limbs. At first, I tried to pull up my yoga pants and hide my shame, but he thought it was both sexy and hilarious. He even insisted on helping me finish, and that afternoon probably goes down in my top ten kinky climaxes of all time. Of course, relationships thrive on much more than sex. We do things together all the time. I miss him when he’s gone at book signings. I jump at the chance to travel with him, and he likewise. We read each other’s writing and admire each other’s flaws. When I see him, even on ordinary days, I feel the flutter of an electric current without the toy, and know it’s love. Actual love.