The Hardyman | Page 7

pick up the card with the truck's arm, he realized. For
what seemed like an eternity, Jack stood at the window, watching and
waiting. It was not possible, he feared.
Abruptly, the truck's arm retracted. Jack stared out at the scene from
behind the slats of his Venetian blinds. He had 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