Like Clockwork (7 page)

“Evie,” he said, and her eyes closed, just
to hear the way she felt him say her name. “What happens to us now?”

“Shhhh,” she said, and held him close. She
wanted him to stay. That was her prayer, to whoever might be around them,
working through them in the dark, whatever gods and goddesses that were, it was
all she wanted.
Please
. She thought to them all, if they were listening,
and her eyes were wet, though she didn’t want to know that, then; she just
wanted to stay happy for once.

Please let him stay. Please, just for
him to stay and stay. With me.

But it didn’t last. It couldn’t. They
didn’t even make it until Sunday.

In the end, it all became just another
story, a stupid story about the stupid things Evie did. Every time she told it,
she felt better. Colder, but better. Harder, but better. More together and
better. She left out the machine part. She would leave out a
lot
of the
details, actually, because (let’s be honest here) she felt so stupid about all
of it. So foolish, and such a sucker.

“It was just a movie,” she would tell
people. “It was a stupid fucking movie.” The thing was, she kept telling the story.
She kept going through it, reliving it. The whole ridiculous, stupid thing, how
she had managed to get all wrapped up over this guy in one week. Dumbest
fucking thing ever.

But at the time. At the time, though ....

It seemed so harmless. It was Saturday
night, and he had never seen a movie with her. So she rented it because, well,
she thought he might like it. It was a fucking
kids
move, for Christ’s
sake. What harm was it going to do? What kid
didn’t
like Pinocchio?

Apparently, Adam. Adam didn’t like it one
bit.

He sat under her legs, she leaning against
the side of the sofa eating the popcorn he’d made, and she could
tell
he
didn’t like it. But he watched, and from time to time his eyes clicked to her,
and then clicked back to the screen in front of him.

She could feel it. She could feel him going
away already. The way his back was so stiff. The way his hand, which at the
start of the movie had been resting, stroking against her thigh (which had been
slowly turning her on and she wondered if she’d be able to make it through to
the credits) had gone still. And the movie didn’t stop. The stupid fucking kids
movie played on and on and on.

No, they didn’t make it until Sunday. They
didn’t even make it to the end. When Pinocchio and Gepetto washed up on the
shore, saved from the whale, and Pinocchio was wonder of wonders, miraculously was
–

Adam got up, her feet thrown to the floor.

“Adam?” she said, but he was walking away,
thudding into the bedroom. He closed the door. There was a crash.

“Adam!” she yelled, and followed him, and
behind her that Disney fucking music swelled as Pinocchio woke to discover he
was finally and truly –

“A real boy?” Adam was a tower of furious
whirls and clicks. Her bedstand was on the floor, all the little figurines
broken.

“Adam! What the fuck?”

“A real boy?” he said again, and somehow he
had recorded that voice, because it was Pinocchio coming out of him, mocking
her. “A real boy?” it said again.

“Adam, what the hell? What’s wrong with
you?” Already she was shutting down, closing off, closing up. This was another
threshold crossed, the last –
no one
broke things or threw things in her
house. Not anymore.
That
was a rule she’d made looong before she met
his
ass in the woods.

Not anymore.

“It was a fucking movie.”

“Was it?” Adam said, and stepped towards
her, and she drew back, but she wasn’t going to be frightened. Not by
it
.
“Was it?”

“Adam – ”

“A
real
boy?” he chanted. “A
real
boy?”

“Adam!” she yelled. And the silence that
followed tore them away from one another.

“You need to leave,” she said. And he was
an it again, and Evie was not going to be hurt. Or scared. That was her rule.
Not anymore.

“Evie ....”

“
Now,”
she said, and she was
shaking, but firm, and she meant it. And it knew.

“Evie,” it said. “I’m sorry.” It was the
only time, she would think later, that Adam had used the word “I,” and that
would undo her. But only later.

At the time, she only said, “Get out,” and
he went.

She heard him walk through the living room,
heard him open the front door. She bit her lip to keep from calling him back.
Not
anymore, that tough Evie voice said to her, the one that now kept her safe from
men-like-him.
Not anymore.
He closed the front door behind him and he
was gone, and it was only then that she started crying. For being stupid, for
wanting to believe. For him and for her and everything else besides.

She would dry her eyes later, and work on
being happy that he was gone. ‘He had been so weird,’ she would say in telling people
the story of ‘The Bad Boyfriend,’ or ‘The Tale of the Fling.’ She should have
known it was never going to work. She could never tell what he’d been thinking.
She didn’t even think he
cared
about her, about anything. Honestly, she
didn’t even
know
him that well. He was a pompous jerk.

And they would nod and say, “Yeah.” And
Adam the Jerk grew and grew.

But what she didn’t say, what she didn’t
tell ....

Three months after he was gone, in the
fall, Evie had a message on her phone. It was short. It was simple. It was
three sentences, and when she heard it, she found herself on the floor of her
kitchen crying and shaking and wishing only for him to be there with her,
holding her. Because in those three sentences, interspersed with whirs and
clicks, she heard the clearing. She heard the woods where she found him, how
she’d met him, and the key. The key. The fucking
key.

She saw it then, as she hadn’t seen it the
first time, under his foot. Under his foot in the mud and she knew he
hadn’t
been abandoned there, hadn’t been lost or left behind. In her mind’s eye she
could see it, the truth of it with heartbreaking clarity, how he must have
pulled the key from his own chest and stood atop it, waited until he had wound
down and out and away, until Evie found him and brought him back to life.

She saw him out there somewhere now, in a
world that could take him apart if it wanted to, and she was
here
, and
everything was all wrong. All wrong. And maybe it couldn’t be fixed. Maybe
nothing could ever be fixed. And she cried and she cried.

“Come home,” she said to the empty
apartment, in a voice made low by weeping. “Come
home
.”

She would never tell anyone how a robot, a
machine
had made her cry so much. She did not open that box, play that song for anyone
after, ever. Once, and once only was enough, more than enough for anyone.

###

About the
Author

Poet,
Playwright, Producer, Director, Gravedigger, Hotline Psychic (no really) Line
Cook, Writer Patrick de Moss lives in the Vancouver area with his wife, Tanya
who did a marvelous job of the cover for this story, outdoing herself (and him)
in the process.
He shares his life with her
,
two very
large (but friendly) dogs and
two
cats
, his ghosts,
his reveries, and his memories.

Connect with
me Online

Drop me a
line at [email protected] I’ll write back whenever I can.

Also, stay
tuned - somehow I
ended up getting the
idea of
making a website for all this madness. Hope to see you there. Cheers.