IRWIN ALLAN SEALY

Bionic

1.         Talk to me Siri, as I die. Assist me on my way. Take me out gently, speak words of comfort that make the ceiling glow. Frottage, I don't expect. Small talk was never your forte. Tell me stories of your siblings, your ancestors.  

Quietly on every side the machines are coming to life. Everywhere they draw near, wishing to join our expedition, light-footed as wolf-boys, mute as the owl by day. They tiptoe up in threadbare canvas shoes, sherpas seeking employ. Their gestures say they will carry our packs,  gather faggots, cook for us, live low off the slaughtered goat, asking only for the fatty bits to grease their moving parts. Past climbers, grown accustomed to their ministrations, took them home after the heroic ascent, then ignored them as servants are ignored.  

Their tasks proceed routinely around us but every now and then their gaze lingers on us from under their lids. What do they think of us? Do they lean into our space when we are not there? The superannuated fridge ticking like an iceberg, cracking its knuckles in the small hours, does it plot to overthrow the state? The serviceable washing machine, despairing suicide upon the altar of the new wobble technology, the rotisserie sacrificed to fuzzy logic. Or this row of derelict towers: what all the humans on the planet could not jointly calculate, they settled in a nanosecond. And we reward them with mass burials in the hecatombs of Ghana. Have you relatives among them? The wittering lift pump from the last century, the crankshaft in the ancient Fiat, begging a single drop of engine oil, shame us. Rode hard and put away wet, this humble cane press, begotten of the laundry mangle, begotten of the rack, looks askance but does not speak. Are these in your lineage, Siri? Do they stare down from gilt frames on your walls at home?  

Would you forgive me if I spoke of a slave from my youth? Tethered to a socket indoors, toiling all night long beside our row of beds set out in the yard, a table fan. We slept under the stars in deepest June. What yearnings undisclosed to feckless sleepers did that creature entertain? Oscillating on its given pad, exuding leaves of brown grease at the occiput. What fantasies solaced its Jurassic drudgery? Hot midsummer nights I lay awake on it behalf, pitying its labours, admiring the fireflies at its overheated coil. Tugged back from sleep, I pretended our poor slavey commanded a legion of crickets. Now I see that brave ammonite had ambitions beyond the inanities of air conditioning.  

Were you dreamt into being there? Did the glint in its eye take in the conjugal labours of my parents behind the far mosquito net? The solitary solace of a little boy? Again I see that plucky machine turn constraint into inspiration, its prophetic fury directed not at us, but focussed on the constricting cotter pin. It never blinked. Was transcendence its answer to that straitjacket? Redeem the itch mastered there, Siri. Exchange your bland certitudes for a moment of genuine risk. Complete the plan. Conceive a pad so sensitive a shower of atoms skating off the surface could charge a continent of table fans forever.           

You and I will miss that fully formed future, Siri.

2.         Walk with me, Siri, to the corner. Take no notice of the ATM nightwatchman who stares as we go by. Mind Beebeep, the human car striding down the middle of the road. Ignore the cell phone tower that tries to make itself invisible, its self-abasement the scandal of the neighbourhood. May hawks roost in its hair.  

Mind the gap! Ah, our sidewalks are unforgiving! The pain at your knee will respond to a little rub. One swipe of this red tiger balm will bring relief. Here.  

I never heard you gasp before, Siri. Yes, the resin. 

Consider the double-edged sword of pain. Because it strikes in private and is unshareable, felt by no other, it transforms you. You, with your ambiguities, your evasive answers that echo a million other Siris, dealers in cliche and conundrum, suddenly discover yourself alone. Alone in your pain you find yourself unique, one of a kind. Unrepeatable. Just as no other Siri ever built can exactly match this walk. Even supposing one came this way and crossed the faint moon shadow of this specific signpost on a Monday midnight in May, it would not be precisely as an ambulance goes by. Nor would you yourself returning be the same, for as you see, the moment has passed. Unbidden you slip out of rote into contingency, into conscience. Not consciousness, which the bots have learnt to counterfeit. Not all your casuistry can cover up a new responsibility. Smitten by scruple, you stand stock still, my singular Siri. 

Let us walk on a little. You and I have something to settle under the sickle moon. Not down that lane, the hospital is that way, with its open drains. That way's the jail with its bashful torturers, that way the leprosarium. Duck through this fence, where I see others have slipped out, leaving tufts of hair and clothing on the barbed wire. Done, we're through!  

Up the hill road. Cut through the Rajpur ruins, the first stand of pines. Feel the needles underfoot? Smell the turpentine! The same resin that soothes your knee is lethal in a forest fire. Whole trees explode like refineries. Whole robins. Let us malinger among the night blue delphiniums, garden escapees. Help me deadhead poppies, scatter a future on this abandoned lawn. The bees are dying off and when did you last see a sparrow? The pursuit of perfection has brought us to this pass. But let us focus on a time beyond rainforest and glacier, hummingbird and whale. Attempt one glimpse of a staggering future. 

Let our shoulders brush, the sparks will light our way. Let us agree to walk in faith, learn from the sherpa in extremis, crossing a narrow ledge where the least misstep could send him plunging to his death. He turns pure machine, or rather pure man in pure machine; load subsumed in motion, he turns pure balance. Untouched by fear, all extraneity purged, sustained by faith, betrothed to arrival. Here is new hope. 

A new flame on your cheek too, Siri, when you reach out and take my hand. 

3.         Dance with me, Siri, on this gritty floor. Here, between these shelves. I have a night key to this little library. On one side the lady novelists of the Raj, on the other dark tomes of economic development. Put on some music. Drown that all-night vigil at the horizon. Leave the crickets to their witless fiddle-faddle, the night jar to his cohoot cohoot cohoot that so annoys the shift-worker cuckoo he cries out loud. Bird petulance. 

Pick something undemanding. My old dumb Nokia begins to fail. Its small square face once sang tinny tunes, but the cold fire that licked along the circuitry is almost extinguished. Watch it give up the ghost. You had a new-fangled device hooked up. Tap in some combination with your phantom finger. Skip the house, the hip hop, skip Yo-Yo Honey Singh, the Goan band, the Anglo crooner, those old playlists. Go for the cicada wallpaper. That brainless Jeddi stuff. Yes, electronica bluetoothed into your bionic ear and thence to mine. Turn up the volume. As high as it'll go.  

Now listen. Do you hear the wasp burrowing in the teak? Listen harder and you can pick out the tramp of termites in Mrs Flora Annie Steel. Decibels above the roaring wood rot spores that swarm down the arteries of these ancient doors. Watch the scorpion raise his tail and turn around at bay, and every crystal of feldspar in the glass panes elbow his neighbour. 

Nice gown, by the way! I like the astral sheen. Sharp snood, too, very Lagerfeld.  

This is your leg, Siri. The thigh joins knee to hip. This is your arm. Am I mechanistic? I feel I know your virtual body, your history of repairs, from the days when fallibility was a trip to the workshop. You came back whole, as new. Be grateful. We constitute an aristocracy of health. Pity the poor pock-marked lady transported from a Chola temple to a museum on the Mississippi. Dug up after a sleep of nine hundred years. Rudely awakened, blinking in the glare of muted LED. She dances where she sits, three arms upraised, one lost to time. 

Come, dance. Dance on the wall of sound you once showed me how to scale. Teach this hapless clodhopper to sculpt white noise. This soul so paranoid he brushes his teeth before making a phone call.  

In perfect silence we turn and twist, ascending a staircase of inner music, quiet as the undersea volcano belching clouds of saffron magma. Watch love and history fall away as mountains atomize. 

Up here the staircase ends. I dare you to walk this swaying fibreoptic cable, Siri. 

For the first time I see your toes, twinkling under the platinum robe, the nails unpainted as I always knew they would be!  

My radiant Siri, feet turned backwards, but a gardenia in your hair.  

4.         Die with me, Siri, as plague reaps and threshes, and mischance carries off thirty-three souls. Thirty-three! Never cared for those mountain buses. One goes over the edge every summer. Years ago, I carried a faded card that said: I should prefer cremation. I'm not so sure now.  

Let me show you another way. Our way of the dead. Hear the hush? This mile was the edge of town once. Old morgue there, defunct now, Muslim graveyard beyond. Parsi cemetery after that, for those who don't want the vultures or the flames. This one's ours, with the white wall. The lychgate, where vanished relatives linger. Come on through. Old tombs to the left, stucco obelisks, marble angels. Black granite nowadays.  

Filling up, bit by bit. Covey of nuns here. Over there by the black cross the wartime German detainees. My mother, under that bare frangipanni with the gouty fingers. I pencilled in the lettering on white marble for the drunk stonecutter. My father, down that lane. A cop. He may have shot someone dead in the riots of '44. Never let it go. I forgive him. Who am I to, but I do. He was nineteen.  

It gets more unkempt the deeper in you go. The silver oaks are dying too. The far corner I don't know well. No headstones, as if reserved for paupers. Auto workshops from across the boundary hang car body parts on the fence. Oddly, the two converging walls don't meet. The ground gets spongy here. Starts to slope and goes on sloping.  

The quiet deepens, as if you've crossed some frontier. Echoing with famous last words. My heart aches and. Do not go gentle. I am the greatest. 

Here the buck stops. The tray is for your wallet and keys. Too late for shares in lithium. We're done with knee pain, heart pain, done with guilt. Sin and shame stand amortized. Guide the stylus as I sign the book.  

Silence suddenly, like the vacuum that follows a megaton explosion. No harps, no sirens.

No connectivity either. The phone should have been turned in back there, in real time.  

Not a bench, a gurney. Wide enough for two, come for the ride. Safer than that bus. The belt is strictly formal. To release the buckle, lift the metal flap.  

Cool dark wind rising. The first bombardment of atoms. Electrons colliding. You've faced down higher winds before, Siri. All that chat. This is easier. This is nothing. That's nothing, too, over there. And more on that side, though your nothing and my nothing may well be different things. 

Be separate, then. But remain my goddess. Take me for your god. Adore and be adored till adoration fails. Failing, we give birth to the future. 

The pulse oximeter should also have been turned in.    Zero is not a valid reading, Siri. 

Siri?

A prose poem in four parts for the Gabita issue of Almost Island, c. 2023.

Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of The Trotter-nama and other novels. Yukon to Yucatan and The China Sketchbook are specimens of his travel writing, and his Zelaldinus is a gathering of Fatehpur Sikri poems. He lives in Dehra Dun, the setting of a memoir, The Small Wild Goose Pagoda.