Boy Oh Boy Read online

  He looks you up and down, a quick swipe of his eyes. We’re running a sale on floor models right now, he says, they’ve been lightly used here in the store, but we keep them in peak condition.

  You realize that the older fat man thinks that you’re poor, that you can’t afford a brand new boyfriend. I have money, you say, and you realize that this is the clumsiest poor person thing you could have said.

  What I mean is, you say, beginning again, I’m looking for something a little nicer.

  Ah, well then, the older fat man says, Can I interest you in one of our custom models?

  You feel that since you just said you had money, you can’t turn around and ask the older fat man, who might actually be the CEO of the boyfriend manufacturer or possibly your uncle, how much a custom boyfriend would cost. You think of your savings. You have a lot of savings, you live frugally, you don’t go on any expensive dates, you are good at your job and during the busy season, when your product is in demand, you earn a lot of bonuses and commissions on top of your salary. You’re doing okay, so why not splurge a little bit? Still, the idea of spending some incredible amount of money, maybe five figures, makes you feel nervous, on edge. Maybe I am actually poor, you think.

  The older fat man leads you to a computer near the back of the store. The screen shows a three-dimensional model of a boyfriend, and you can click on various parts and features to make the boyfriend what you want. You can click on his head and give him the kind of personality you want him to have, interests that would match yours, beliefs and values that you would have in common with him. There is even an option to tweak his voice so he sounds pleasing to you. The older fat man gestures at the machine and clearly you are supposed to use it to customize your boyfriend.

  This level of god-like power makes you feel uncomfortable. You feel uncomfortable choosing your boyfriend’s race, hair color, eye color. You feel uncomfortable assigning him a values system, religious beliefs. The boyfriends you’ve bought in the past have always been pleasing to you in their idiosyncrasies, the way that they are not ideal, the same way that a real boyfriend would not be ideal. The standard models are just like regular people, even after they learn to adjust to your particular needs, they are never quite perfect. You have never said, my boyfriend is perfect. You always imagined that if you had a real boyfriend, the flesh-and-blood kind, there would be things about him that would not necessarily be desirable. You have romantic notions about having a boyfriend, about opposites attracting, about loving someone that is imperfect.

  Still, as you play around with the digital model of your potential boyfriend on the screen, the idea of a bespoke boyfriend appeals to you more and more. First, you give him blonde hair and green eyes and freckles, but also a tooth gap and a nose that looks like it’s been broken. You change your mind about the freckles and give him a tan. You make his hair a little longer and then you make it a little blonder, so that it’s almost white. You add a few inches of roots so that his hair looks like it has been dyed and is growing out. But after all that, and after adjusting his cheekbones and brow height and forehead length, you realize the overall effect is not terribly pleasing. He looks strange, alien, like he has maybe had too much plastic surgery or is trying too hard. You check the time and realize that you have already been customizing your boyfriend for hours. The older fat man looks at you knowingly, asks if you need any help in a tone that suggests that you might be in over your head. You don’t need any help. Instead you hit the randomize button, and your boyfriend’s features blur and change dramatically. You don’t like that boyfriend either, so you reset to defaults and go back in to make the changes you want.

  Freckles. You definitely wanted the freckles. The gap in his front teeth. The crooked smile. The nose that looks like it’s been broken. It’s been more hours, and that’s just the face. You are an artist, you think. This is exactly what making art is like, you are pretty sure. This is also a little bit like what being God or a parent is like. You are making a human being. You make him look like an advertisement, like something out of a catalog. He is the exact generically handsome white man that would sell underwear in a Macy’s catalog. Nothing about him is challenging to a white middle-class sensibility, which is the kind of sensibility that you have. You look at his beautiful, open face, and you think, there is nothing about him that would frighten or challenge me, and that’s good. He might be unpredictable, but not too unpredictable.

  After all that work on the face, the personality is a breeze, you want him to love attention, to enjoy the performing arts, to be funny, to be smart about the things you like. You make him bad at math. You make him very bad at math, almost cruelly bad at math. Of course you make him very neat. He loves to clean and do dishes because you hate cleaning and doing dishes. He likes long drives in the country followed by picnics on checkered blankets and skinny dipping in a warm pond. He likes wearing a suit and dancing very slow to very old music. He knows all the dances. There is a list of dances and you check mark every one of them.

  You wave the older fat man over. I think this is the boyfriend I want, you say.

  The older fat man goes over your options and makes small adjustments, gentle things, like changing out a favorite song, adding in a few memories of Europe, descriptions of class trips to the museum, a preference for tangerines. He tells you that he is correcting the common mistakes, things that everyone gets wrong. He smiles knowingly, like he knows what kind of boyfriend you want. He tells you that there is some extra memory space because you made your boyfriend so bad at math, so you decide that your boyfriend will also like comic books, just for the heck of it. Then you change your mind about the comic books, and instead give him some additional sex knowledge, some weird stuff that you don’t even like. Maybe this will be the boyfriend you try weird sex stuff with. The older fat man tastefully averts his eyes.

  The completed boyfriend costs fifteen thousand dollars, including the extended tech support package. You are so enamored of him you pay it, almost your entire savings, more than you ever thought you would spend on an artificial human being who would live with you and perform sexual favors and do some light housework. The older fat man smiles at you, tells you that it’s worth it. It’s still cheaper than a real husband, he says to you, and this is meant to sound friendly but for some reason it makes you feel bad, very bad, but just for a few seconds. You wonder if the older fat man has a husband or wife or perhaps a small group of polyamorous lovers that dote on him.

  The boyfriend is delivered a week later. It took them some time to build him. He arrives in a long, white box that is almost exactly the dimensions of a coffin. You hurry the deliveryman inside so that the neighbors don’t see him bringing a human-sized box into your house. Inside, your old boyfriend is dusting, arranging knick-knacks on a wood hutch, whistling a cheerful little song that came preprogrammed. You have listened to him whistle that cheerful little song for many years, and you begin to feel bad, deeply bad, like you did at the boyfriend store. Something in your torso between your heart and your stomach begins to ache.

  Do you take away the old one? you ask the deliveryman, and he looks at you condescendingly and shakes his head, a tiny little shake that you take to mean that taking away your old boyfriend is absolutely not his job.

  Call the company, the deliveryman says, they have a recycling program.

  After the deliveryman leaves you stand in the living room with your hand on the soft matte surface of the white box for a long time while your boyfriend continues to whistle and dust in the background. You almost don’t notice him, despite him being all that you are thinking about. You whistle along with his little tune. This is a very difficult time, you think. You’ve smudged the matte surface of the box with sweat from your hand. Surely the new boyfriend will get you through it.

  You deactivate your old boyfriend gently, holding him in your arms as you press the power button. You kiss his cooling lips as his eyes go dark, and this reminds you of something you saw in a movie once. After
, you hold his stiff body in your arms, his skin cold and rubbery. It is easier to think of him as something else, something it might be easy to someday send in to the boyfriend company’s recycling program. But for now, you can’t quite bear the thought. Instead, you prop him up in your hall closet, next to the vacuum cleaner and a box of Christmas decorations that didn’t make it up to the attic and some winter coats, size medium, that don’t fit you anymore.

  With your old boyfriend safely stored, you begin to feel more comfortable opening up the new boyfriend. The top of the box slides off easily, despite its size, and inside the new boyfriend is carefully packaged for travel, nestled in a Styrofoam groove carved to exactly his dimensions. Otherwise he is naked. You touch his skin, running your finger along his neck and chest, and even turned off his skin feels more real than your old boyfriend’s, so real that you can’t believe you ever thought your old boyfriend was exactly the same as a real person.

  You power him on, and he is already fully charged. He has the new power cell, invented by the boyfriend company, and his charge will last for days, maybe a week if he’s not doing much. It is a very good power cell, you read a lot of articles on it when it was first invented. Charges instantly, lasts forever was the copy they used for the headline, an exaggeration, obviously, but still, you were very excited about the possibility of not having to charge your boyfriend every 12 hours to make sure he didn’t shut off unexpectedly.

  The new boyfriend sits up and stretches, arching his back and sighing. He scratches his balls and looks around. I like your house, he says.

  You aren’t sure what algorithm he has used to decide that your house is to his taste. Unlike your old boyfriend, whose processing was very easy to detect and follow, the new boyfriend has a kind of casualness, as if speaking off the cuff, as if these are his actual opinions. You look around to try to see what he sees, but however he has determined that he likes your house, it isn’t obvious to you. Probably he just did a quick search of decorating and architecture blogs, you think, but you are also a little mystified by your boyfriend having an opinion like that, volunteered unprompted.

  The new boyfriend mostly walks around naked for the first few days. You feel uncomfortable giving him access to your old boyfriend’s clothes, which you still somewhat superstitiously consider his belongings. You know that the old boyfriend, and the new boyfriend, for that matter, are not actually people, but technology that you have purchased, same as your ice machine or your television or your treadmill. But you can’t quite get away from the imagined narrative that you and your old boyfriend have broken up, and you subsequently replaced him with someone younger and hotter. You have been socialized to believe that this is wrong. You are pretty sure that you would consider that a dick move if someone else did it to a real person, but you remind yourself that your old boyfriend was not a real person. Just in case, you avoid the hall closet.

  You and the new boyfriend get used to each other. It is a slow process. He doesn’t whistle, but he plays music while he does his housework. He sings along with the songs you selected for him to like. He dances, shakes his hips and bobs his head. When you ask about the dancing, he tells you how he went to school for dance, studied for a time in France, got his MFA. You don’t remember programming any of this in. You made vague selections, but you guess that if someone likes being the center of attention, loves music, loves the performing arts, dance would actually be a good occupation. You remember that you wanted him to know how to do all of the dances.

  He’s not uncomfortable being naked. You bring up the subject of clothes and he shrugs at you. I’d like to have something nice to wear if we go out, he says.

  What kinds of clothes do you like? you ask him.

  The kinds of clothes that the new boyfriend likes are very expensive. You want him to be happy, so you get him a few things to wear, but having depleted your savings, you are now dipping into your paycheck, meaning that instead of putting more money into savings, you are spending it all on the new boyfriend. You become very worried about money, you are poorer than you have ever been. Thinking of the avuncular man at the boyfriend store, you don’t talk about your financial woes with the new boyfriend.

  Still, some of the clothing you purchase for the new boyfriend is more for your benefit than his. You give him some sexy underwear, fancy stuff, and clothes that it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to wear out. You expect him to wear the sexy stuff around the house but most days he wears baggy sweatpants and a tank top. You never bought him baggy sweatpants or a tank top, so you’re not sure where he got them. Like most things about him, this is very mysterious to you. He is a real surprise, an actual surprise, you’re never quite sure what he’s going to do. You discover that he knows how to shop online, has been using your credit card without your permission. You are now in debt, granted a very small amount of debt, but debt just the same.

  You are as angry at him as you would be if he were a real boyfriend. You are fascinated as well as angry, because you have never felt this before, anger at the person you are in a relationship with, but that doesn’t stop you from yelling, demanding that he ask your permission before going off and spending money like that. He is angry too, you can tell he’s angry because of the way his whole face darkens, the way the change descends on him in a sudden rush. All of a sudden you are in your first fight. A screaming match. You try to turn the volume on your boyfriend down, but the newest model doesn’t come with a volume adjustment and instead you stand very still while he yells at you.

  You expect this to be the last of your problems, but they continue. It is still the slow season at work, an unusually long slow season, and you’re concerned about money. You stay home all weekend, sitting in the dark to preserve power, eating cheap food out of a can. Your new boyfriend asks if you can go out, have a picnic, or maybe see some theater, but you refuse, you can’t afford the gas to drive out to the country, and theater tickets are certainly out of the question.

  Your boyfriend stops singing and dancing as he does his housework. He frowns a lot. He moves slowly through his chores, cleaning and dusting and doing dishes in a way that you might describe as resentful. He seems to be sulking. You try to make it up to him, pay extra attention, compliment him on his clothes, his hair, his taste in movies. Secretly, you consult the manual, but you find nothing there, or in the online message boards, that explains what’s wrong with your boyfriend. So few people have bought the custom model (the deluxe custom model, you discover, is in fact what you’ve purchased) that there are hardly any posts at all. Finally, you call customer support. You have a short conversation with a man who you swear is the same man that sold you your boyfriend, the same happy uncle voice, and he remotely accesses your boyfriend’s hard drive and tells you that your boyfriend is functioning perfectly. You persist, try to explain that there’s something wrong, but the customer support person hangs up on you.

  At night, your boyfriend asks you to try the strange sex things that you programmed him to like. You still don’t like any of those things, start to go through the motions and then stop, make another jerky, awkward effort, but you find you just can’t do it. He looks at you impatiently, makes disappointed noises. He doesn’t say that he’s having a bad time, but it’s clear from his body language that you are not meeting his expectations. When you pause, again, in the middle of attempting the weird sex, he scoffs in frustration and leaves. You’re alone in bed with the mess, disappointed and horny. Maybe you like the weird sex thing after all, you just don’t want to actually do it or have it done to you. Your boyfriend sleeps on the couch.

  After all that, you can’t sleep. You stay awake, staring at the ceiling, feeling confused and sad and furious. The new boyfriend has not been at all what you expected, which is something very much like the old boyfriend but better. The new boyfriend is more realistic but you realize that this isn’t better. This isn’t what you wanted. You stumble downstairs, to the hall closet, where you push the too-small coats aside and look at the old b
oyfriend, who appears to be sleeping. You touch his face and it’s so cold. You can’t bring yourself to activate him, look him in the face, explain why he’s been sitting in the hall closet for weeks. Instead you shut the door and wander down to the living room, where the new boyfriend is sleeping on the couch. You roughly shake him awake. You don’t need to sleep anyway, you say angrily.

  I appreciate the time to myself, he says, and he even sounds appropriately groggy.

  I want to fuck you, you say. Even you can hear how angry you sound.

  Do what you want, he says. You do what you want. Afterward, he says nothing, just shrugs and curls back up on the couch, wraps the blanket even more tightly around himself. You wander upstairs, passing the hall closet, checking it twice to make sure it’s closed.

  Over a period of days the new boyfriend continues to function more and more poorly. He refuses to do his chores. He burns his clothes, and then orders new clothes. He burns your clothes, and doesn’t buy new ones. Also, there’s the crying, he cries nonstop, sitting on the bed or the couch or at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. They are deep, convincing sobs, he sounds like a real person crying, and the part of you that instinctively reacts to a fellow human’s sadness feels profoundly upset at the way that your boyfriend is crying. You have to remind yourself several times a day that he is not real, not a real person.

  You try to call the company again, talk to the man who is like your uncle, so kind, to see if he will maybe take the boyfriend back, the boyfriend who you are convinced is defective. You have a long conversation with the man on the phone where you somehow do not return the boyfriend. Again, the man is convinced that there is nothing wrong with your boyfriend, that he is behaving in exactly the correct way. That’s impossible, you say. All he does is cry. But the man at the boyfriend company is unhelpful. The return policy is more unhelpful.