for nearly six months at a time, she can forget she is a robot and be less sad. Hal will take this all in stride. He will think that since he has always loved her and she has always been a robot, nothing has really changed. But afterwards, he will experience a loss of libido every time they are in bed together. He will constantly obsess over the fact that at age 38, he has never actually had sex with a woman. Lisa will have been his only sexual partner, and the return of his virginity will bring him back to the first twenty-four years of his life, when he certainly felt like a sad robot, even if his insides were made of proteins and lipids and not exotic metals. She will be understanding because, being a machine, she can experience orgasm regular as clockwork even if his heart is not in it. Hal will stop being able to sleep, waking afraid from dreams of labyrinths and gears until he has sex with one of his clients – Eve, from Greenpeace. Although Eve will have too much metal in her face for his liking, he will realize what he’s been missing and sad Lisa will not be able to satisfy his desire. Although he truly loves Lisa, he will decide to file for divorce. In an attempt to keep their relationship alive, Lisa will tell him that she is okay with him sleeping with women who are not robots, but reminds him that not all women are women, and some of them are robots.
Hal will then only sleep with women who he has seen go to the doctor. So he will cruise walk-in clinics. Lisa will eventually tire of this parade of infirm women passing through their bedroom. She will fail to respond to Naveed’s next letter and will deactivate herself in the corner of the bathroom as Hal ejaculates into a woman with a stubborn crater of plantar warts in her left heel covered with duct tape. This woman, not being a machine, however, won’t experience an orgasm regular as clockwork and will actually be kind of disappointed; she will forget her disappointment when she opens the bathroom door and finds a motionless woman with her chest open to reveal gleaming metal and her finger on a switch marked “off.” She will scream and exit the house. Hal will bury Lisa in the woods behind the university. *** But right now, now that Lisa has folded up the note and put it away, Lisa and Hal make love and Hal ejaculates in what he believes is the slippery warmth of an actual woman with the electrical force of a lightning strike.
Jeremy Hanson-Finger is one of the founding coeditors of The Moose & Pussy, Ottawa, Canada's only literary erotica magazine.