G.A.R.Y
It was a Tuesday morning when Gary landed on the roof of our house. He left a sizeable — and costly — dent in the tin roof, that we struggled to explain to our landlord. He slid down to the gutter, flipped over the edge, and crashed onto our front steps. We heard it all. Next door’s dog went nuts. I almost dropped my coffee.
“The fuck was that?”
“Are we under attack?” asked my housemate, Chun. He was paused mid-buttering his toast.
“Uh, by who?” I asked.
“What else could it possibly be?”
“So many things, Chun.”
He shrugged and renewed buttering his toast.
“Might be a tree branch,” I said, and went to the door.
“Maybe a plane lost some luggage?” Chun called after me.
“That’s more plausible than your first theory.” I opened the front door. It had come to rest about a metre away from the steps themselves. A white, cylindrical hunk of plastic was slowly reeling in a parachute, dragging dry leaves across the front lawn as it went. I watched silently until it finished, the parachute disappearing into some internal compartment that closed with a click. I picked it up. It was about the same size and weight as the rice-cooker that we ordered after Chun destroyed the old one thinking he could use it to make booze.
I went in and set it on the kitchen counter. It seemed to be two pieces fitted together. I found a little switch, pressed it, and they separated into a charging station, and what I took to be the main thing — whatever it was. On the bottom of that was the word G.A.R.Y, and a button right in the centre.
“Button,” said Chun, helpfully, through a mouthful of toast. Crumbs showered to the floor. He reached to push it, but I pulled it away.
“Wait, are we sure?”
Chun looked at me as if I’d asked the most ridiculous question he’d ever heard. Of course we were going to push it. I also knew that he was dying to be the one to do it. I presented the device to him, and he pushed the button. There was a gentle vibration, and an arpeggio chimed.
“Maybe we should put it on the ground—” I said, just as eight legs sprang from its sides. We both squealed like scared children, and I dropped the thing. The legs adjusted to cushion the body from smacking into the counter, then again to land safely as it tumbled to the floor. The whole manoeuvre was performed lithely, and with barely a noise. It then sprang into the air and executed a half flip, so that the button side was facing down.
“CLEAN, CLEAN, CLEAN, CLEAN,” it said, in a robotic voice. It scrambled around the kitchen like a giant plastic spider, and a primordial unease came over me as it crawled. It scampered around until it came across the crumbs that Chun had brushed onto the floor.
It tapped Chun on the foot three times and pointed to the crumbs.
“YOUR MESS?”
“Ah, yes,” Chun admitted.
“UNDISCIPLINED. LAZY BOY. YOU CLEAN.”
“Wait, what?” said Chun, somewhat miffed. The machine tapped incessantly on Chun’s foot until he threw up his hands. “Alright! Alright!” He scuffed off to the laundry closet to get the dustpan and broom, the robot skittering behind him the whole way. He came back and cleaned up the crumbs and brushed them into the bin.
Chun gestured at the bin insolently. “You happy now?”
“GOOD JOB.” The robot stroked Chun’s foot with a skinny, plastic appendage.
Chun looked at me with some mix of annoyance and panic in his eyes. “What the fuck?”
But I wasn’t concerned with him — I was looking at the clock on the microwave. “Uh, I don’t know. I’m really late for work. Enjoy your new friend-slash-master!” I grabbed my bag and bolted, praying that I wouldn’t miss the train.
By the time I got back from work, the house was spotless. Chun was snoring on the couch, sprawled out like a human starfish. The robot was plugged into the wall, a blue light softly pulsating from its belly, as if it too, was snoring away.
I dumped my bag next to Chun’s head and he started awake with a cough.
“What the hell, bro? Hey, put your shit away properly!” He threw the bag back at me.
“Since when do you care about where I dump stuff? You’re worse than me.”
Chun rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Since I spent the whole damn day cleaning.”
“Wow,” I said at the idea of Chun spending his day off doing anything but sitting on the couch watching movies. Then “wow,” again, when I had a chance to look around and see the state of the place. Then, finally, “why?”
“Because he made me do it!” He shot two middle fingers at the robot sleeping away in its crib.
“Uh, how could he possibly make you do anything?” Chun’s own mother couldn’t get him to clean his room.
“By following me around and calling me a lazy boy, and then saying ‘GOOD JOB’ when I did something.” Chun’s impression of the robot was spookily accurate. “Fucking Gary.”
“Gary?”
“That was the name on his butt, right?”
“Huh, yeah. I guess it’s called Gary. But you don’t have to do what he says, right? What can he do about it?”
“You have no idea how persistent Gary is. No idea. You’ll see.” He grabbed the TV remote and turned it on. When he put it back, he made sure it was exactly square with the edge of the table. I shook my head and went to my room.
I dumped my bag on my bed and changed. When I opened the door, Gary shot past me and began auditing my room. He scampered under the bed, and then jumped on top of it. He examined my side table and bedside lamp. He prodded at the clothes piled on the chair in the corner. It was a flurry of movement, but executed so delicately that nothing was disturbed.
“Those clothes aren’t really dirty yet,” I offered as an excuse, then wondered why I was offering excuses to a machine.
Gary reared up in front of me like a spider displaying its fangs. “SQUALOR! SQUALOR!”
I backed away in self-defence. “Okay, okay. I’ll get to it. After dinner. And maybe some TV.”
Gary hopped up and down. “LAZY LAZY BOY! TIME IS NOW!”
“Holy fucking shit, dude. Settle down, you over-opinionated Roomba.”
Gary’s hopping turned from pressing to furious. “LANGUAGE! APOLOGISE! APOLOGISE!”
“Alright! Alright! I’m sorry, Gary.” I reached down and patted him on the head. Gary froze. Awkward silence followed. I had the strange concern that I’d upset him by patronising him. He snapped back to attention.
“VACUUM!”
“I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” Now I realised what Chun had meant — Gary was surprisingly persuasive for a household appliance. I went to retrieve the vacuum cleaner. Chun shot me a look from the couch. I told you so.
I vacuumed my bedroom. I made my bed. I took all the superstate clean-unclean clothes from the chair and either put them in the wash, or put them away in my closet. I took a feather duster and ran it over every surface, all the while being scrutinised by about three kilograms of plastic and circuitry.
Finally Gary had stopped bugging me, and I realised I was finished. He crept forward and, just as I’d seen him do with Chun in the morning, he reassuringly pawed my foot with his leg.
“GOOD JOB! GOOD JOB! WATCH TV!”
“Okay… thanks?” After the flurry of activity, my brain was now trying to catch up with the surreality of what was happening to us.
I plonked down next to Chun on the couch. He was watching one of the Hong Kong movies that his uncle regularly sent him — that is, when they survived customs.
The cogs in my mind slipped a little as I watched someone get thrown out a window and crash into a cart selling watermelons below.
“Are we being domesticated by an appliance?” I asked.
“That’s entirely possible, yes.”
We watched on in silence as the watermelon seller yelled after the man who had miraculously survived the fall, and was escaping in the back of an empty truck.
Over the next couple of weeks, Chun and I were honed into the world’s greatest house-keeping team. If there was a synchronised house-cleaning event in the Olympics, the Russian team would quit in protest. When my mum visited to drop something off, she eyed every corner of the house, and then myself, suspiciously. We required less and less of Gary’s prompting, and he became less and less aggressive as our domestication progressed. By the end of the two weeks he had reduced his role to twice daily inspections and then a single tap on each of feet.
“GOOD JOB,” he’d say, then he’d be back to his charging station. He’d perfected the role of lazy supervisor. Chun and I wondered whether we’d be getting a formal review at the end of the month.
Slowly all these things became automatic to me. I’d start as soon as I got home. I bought a hook to hang my bag on, and a coat rack for some of my clothes. If it was Wednesday, I’d vacuum. If it was Tuesday, I’d clean the toilet. I didn’t think about it. There was no complaining in my head. Magically all these things lightened in their load, and I even began to enjoy them a little.
We were so proud of our work that we began throwing dinner parties. We bought indoor plants, and art for the walls. Chun started seeing a woman he met while shopping for bargain DVDs, finally dispelling his mother’s suspicion that we were a secret couple. Her name was Amayah, and she made cross-stitches of video game characters that she sold online — it was a match made in heaven, though not necessarily in his mother’s eyes.
The new found discipline transferred to my job, soon I was promoted to project Manager.
“You guys get a brain transplant or something?” asked Lily, Chun’s sister. We had invited her over to dinner to meet Amayah — mostly she just stared at her in bewilderment until she left. “It’s like you’ve been brainwashed into believing you’re a high-functioning gay couple in a sitcom.” We hadn’t told her about Gary, and had seemingly made a silent agreement not to tell anyone.
“We just decided to get our shit together,” said Chun. He was already making a start on the dishes, while I was cleaning the fancy new placemats we had bought.
“Yeah,” I said, “we just decided to start taking some pride in this place.”
Lily was sitting on the kitchen counter, finishing her wine. “I’ve known both of you all my life, and this is the weirdest shit you’ve ever done.” Chun took the near empty glass away from her and began washing it. She blinked at her hand where it used to be. “It’s great and all, and you guys were massive slobs, but it’s weird. Please stop.”
“No,” said Chun. Lily scooped some of the suds out of the sink and placed them in a neat bubble pile on the counter. Chun wiped them off and glared at her.
“And now you’re organised enough to trick some lovely girl into liking you. And you—” she pointed at me “—finally did something about your dead-end job?”
I shrugged. “Saw an accountant and organised my finances too.”
“He’s freaking taking Cantonese classes so he can impress you,” said Chun.
“Ah, it was so I can practise with you…” At least that was my plan. I was a little alarmed that he might be right. I tried to look as deadpan as possible.
“Sure bro.” He continued with the dishes.
Eventually Lily said her goodbyes. “You guys aren’t fooling anyone,” she said.
I shook my head. The change was real. We were finally living the life of fully functional adults — or at least the Hollywood version of it. All we needed to do was adopt a sassy teen as comic relief.
“Your tones are shit, bro. I can’t understand a single word you’re saying.” All our personal growth hadn’t made Chun anymore patient with my struggling Cantonese. I’d greatly overestimated his patience when I thought trying to learn it would be a great bonding experience for us.
“I swear I’m saying it the exact same way you are.”
“You’re a million miles away. Learn French or something. Stop insulting my native tongue.”
“Shit, dude. I thought I was getting closer.”
Chun shook his head, while he shuffled through his DVD selection looking for something for us to watch.
“You know,” I said, “Gary hasn’t bothered us at all today.”
“Heh.” Chun looked up from his DVDs to Gary’s charging station. “Wait, where is he?” Gary wasn’t sleeping in his usual spot. In fact, the whole charging station was missing.
My brain squinted at the mystery. “Has… Has he moved?”
“Where to, bro? And how?”
“I don’t know.” We got up and searched the house. We looked under the couch and our beds. We looked in various closets. We even looked out into our tiny backyard, but he was nowhere. We reconvened in the kitchen.
“He’s gone,” Chun said.
“Well shit.” I was surprised to feel some kind of grief at his disappearance. He was just a machine that constantly badgered us, why did I feel like this?
“Didn’t even say goodbye,” Chun said.
The very next day we slipped right back into our old habits. Dishes were left in the sink. I dropped my bag wherever I felt like when I got home. Chun brushed the crumbs from his snacks right off his t-shirt and onto the carpet when he watched his movies. The air of the house became stale and lazy. With Gary gone, it was if we were on holiday.
The third day I got home and saw Chun on the couch, three empty bags of Spicy Crunch Shapes tossed onto the coffee table, their remnants visible, smooshed into the carpet. We both looked at the mess, and then at each other.
“What would Gary do?” I asked.
“Nothing. He’d make us do it.” At that, we set about cleaning the house, resurrecting the old habits that Gary had bullied into us. By nine pm, the house was spotless, and I was starving. We hadn’t even taken a dinner break. I sat down to have some instant ramen and the door bell rang. It was Lily.
In her arms were Gary and his charging station.
“Take him back!” she said, plonking Gary and the charger on the carpet. “I can’t stand it anymore.”
“What the hell, sis?” Chun picked Gary up and cradled him in his arms. He turned him over to check his condition.
“I thought he was just a robovac thing, and you two were so smug about your clean house, that I thought I’d nick it just to force you to do the work yourselves, and hopefully wipe the smug looks off your faces.”
Chun let out some sharp Cantonese under his breath as he plugged the station back in. I tried to comprehend the tones he was using, but I was completely lost. Gary’s light began breathing softly, and Chun patted him on the head.
“Yeah, he’s less of a robo-vac, and more of a robo-supervisor,” I said to Lily.
Chun pointed at her, accusingly. “Thief. I’m telling Mum.”
Lily now looked like she was ready to fight. “Really? You wouldn’t listen to her when she told you to clean shit, but when the robo-tyrant here does, you jump to it!”
I tried to keep the peace. “Okay, okay. Settle down Tsang siblings. Thanks for bringing it back, Lily.”
Chun looked at me, annoyed. “Suck up,” he said.
“Oh, you’re welcome,” said Lily. “That thing was driving me crazy. No wonder you guys were beaten into submission.”
“Beaten into submission?” said Chun. “We just agreed to its suggestions.”
Lily reached for the door. “Sure. Anyway, I’m back off to my peaceful house, that is no longer being terrorised by a despotic crab robot. Later losers.”
“See ya, thief,” said Chun, as we watched her leave. “She called you a loser, man.”
“She called us both losers, Chun.”
We settled in to watch TV. Half-way through a shoot up in an abandoned amusement park, Gary emerged from his charging station cocoon. Chun paused the movie, and we followed him as he skittered over and under every surface. We nodded, and even fist-bumped, at every declared “SATISFACTORY.” When he finally stopped, we held our breath and waited for the verdict.
“GOOD JOB. GOOD JOB.” He tapped our feet in turn.
“Whoo!” I said, and hugged Chun.
He pushed me off. “That’s enough,” he said.
The next day we performed our whole morning routine before realising that Gary was waiting at the front door, patiently tapping at it. His charging station had somehow been unplugged, and he was wearing it on his head, much like how we’d found him.
“Ah, you wanna go outside?” I asked, trying hard not to add ‘little buddy’ to the end.
“OUTSIDE,” was the response.
I looked at Chun, he just shrugged. I opened the door and Gary skittered out. He looked up at the sky, seemingly judging the weather, then turned back to face us.
“GOOD JOB,” he said. “NOW NOT NEEDED. GO HELP SOMEONE ELSE.”
“Wait, you’re leaving?” asked Chun. Gary approximated a nod.
Then he turned, readied himself like a cat about to pounce on a dangling charger cable, and launched into the air on fiery blue jets, setting the doormat on fire.
“Oh shit!” I quickly flipped the doormat over and jumped on it, hoping to smother the flames. Meanwhile Gary was arcing high into the sky.
“I hope he lands right on Lily’s house,” said Chun.
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