The Hardyman | Page 7

no idea what would happen next. A small white hand floated out the truck window. It moved as unsure of its goal or purpose, sailing towards the envelope. Over the card, the hand paused. It lowered itself down. Gently, the fingers worked to free the envelope. In a flash, it was gone. The garbage truck roared back to life. Ignoring the overflowing garbage cans waiting for it, the truck made a U-turn.
He had asked her out on a date.
10
Sometimes, they would go to a movie theater, or a restaurant, or a park, and, as they were speaking to one another, the chair, or the recliner, or the bench upon which Jack was sitting would explode underneath the Hardyman's great weight. Most of the time, they would act as if nothing had happened, even if other people around them gasped, or screamed, or pointed frantically in their direction. At other times, the Hardyman would experience a technological malfunction that would stop their interaction altogether. Once, Jack had turned his hand heavenward and cocked his head to emphasize a point he was making, and, for a moment, he had been stuck in suspended animation, waiting for his gears to free themselves. At the end of their evenings together, they would part ways at the bottom of Jack's driveway. Later, he would stand in the backyard, still wearing the suit, listening to himself and the Hardyman humming in happy concert.
Her name, it turned out, was Betty Lane. She was the daughter of two scientists deeply involved in complicated laboratory projects consisting of carefully measured test tubes and calculatedly toxic substances inside labyrinth universities. At home, Betty's parents had been interested in little but their own scientific theories. For the small, be-pigtailed girl sitting between them at the dinner table, their conversations had sounded like long strings of Bleeps! and Bloops! that she could never understand. At bedtime, her parents could not quite bring themselves to cradle the soft, fleshy Betty in their stiff, unwieldy arms. To them, Betty was like an experiment that had gone terribly awry, her emotions akin to gelatinously spilling pools of need and viscously over pouring vats of want. As a consequence, Betty had learned to curb her needs so as to avoid a world of robotic resistance.
As an adult, Betty had left her parents behind to tinker with their chemical compounds. Initially, she had decided to model her life after that of Wonder Woman and, left dog-paddling in the post feminist wake created by Madonna, along with her female peers, she had not been discouraged from claiming independence from everything around her. For a time, she had worn a golden lasso and hot pants, ignoring the fact that no one could see her inside the invisible plane in which she had insisted upon riding. More recently, she had found solace in waste management. Now, she drove a truck weighing the equivalent of five elephants, meeting life's challenges where they waited for her. Left-over take-out, used kitty litter, partially-empty cans of pesticide--Betty took on the world's rejects so others wouldn't have to, stuffing them into her hopper and driving them to the dump, where she deposited them. Initially, she had felt a sense of relief at the end of each workday. Over time, the toll of 400 million pounds of refuse annually generated had begun to weigh upon her. The endless tide of garbage would never end, it seemed.
Lost in conversation, Jack would forget that he was wearing the Hardyman suit at all. At those times, he could feel something inside himself, a sensation of gears grinding against one another, of programmed systems breaking down, of aborted missions being reconsidered. It was hard to believe, he would think, looking at Betty, that he might one day have the opportunity to touch her. And, with that, he began to worry. She might not be falling in love with him, he feared, but with the Hardyman itself. He could not tell how well she could distinguish between the man and the machine. She might one day see beyond the monstrous armature surrounding him to discover who he really was.
What would happen then?
11
It was the Fourth of July. Jack was in the backyard with Betty. In each one of the Hardyman's mechanical hands, he was holding a sparkler and rotating the arms of the suit around and around himself in flaming circles. Showering sparks left looping trails of pyrotechnic light in the darkness. In front of him, Betty was sitting in a folding chair, laughing. In the wide-opening inner-territory of himself, his heart was ablaze. There was, it seemed, a superhighway of senses inside himself of which he had not been heretofore aware. Because of this, he wanted to grab her hand, to lift her in his arms and carry her away,