Solid, Liquid, Robot

By Natalie Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 8 Minutes

She was eighteen when she met him, nineteen when she fell in love with him, and twenty when they last spoke. On the first day of college, she watched him stumble into their classroom just as class started, the back of his dark hair standing straight up, uncombed, but not because he’d overslept. He had been buzzing around at breakfast, becoming friends with other morning people, making the night owls regret their need for dry French toast and milky cereal, slipping his tray on the conveyor belt as he sauntered off to class. 

Jason was the first person she met who adored philosophy and hated The Lord of the Rings movies. Against her better opinions, she saw him as a rebel and an outsider, a lollipop tattoo stamped on his bicep, sticking out from under the sleeve of his black t-shirt. He was a world-class contrarian, he explained to her once, and she suspected that his mother had called him that first, but not as a superlative he should desire. 

Nikki wasn’t someone to get swept up by the usual things in college. She liked having her own space, taking the desk under the lofted bed when she studied in her dorm room, tacking pictures of her high school friends in a row around the bookshelves. She accumulated accessories around her like a lint roller on a concert tour. A sticker from her favorite band, a free t-shirt from one that sucked, an extra coffee mug from the giveaway at a church she had attended once in high school, tokens from bits of her life that had passed by but that she remembered because the pen reminded her of the therapist who had told her to keep it. 

Despite how poorly he saw the world, Jason saw Nikki clearer than anyone: she was here to learn, she wasn’t afraid of new things, and she was smarter than him. He wouldn’t admit to knowing any of this, but his instincts, usually so very far off, were correct for once, and he moved his seat before the next class so he could sit closer to her. When she entered the classroom and took the same seat again on the second day, their elbows practically bumped each other, and they were assigned a group project: theories on the nature of the human soul. 

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Solid, liquid, gas. Solid, liquid, robot.

Years later, she awoke from her dream, stretching her mouth to yell, but she found that no words would emit. She paused, suspended in her moment as her physical form still slept and her mind awoke, trapped, waiting for the rest of her body to follow. 

She was liquid in these moments, her soul sloshing around independent of her body, unable to move her hands, unable to leave her heaving chest behind her, unable to turn off her mind. Her husband slept next to her, unaware of her mental rattle. Her ponytail locked sweat between her neck and her pillow. Finally, an itch on her calf told her it was over; she could move again. Most nights, she finished her yell, satisfied to hear the timbre of her voice, to feel him roll over to throw his arm across her as a blanket of comfort, and to move one foot up the sheet to scratch the rogue spot on her calf. 

But tonight, she kept her scream to herself. She still itched her calf and moved her ponytail from under her head to above it, but she clenched all noise behind her teeth, like a bug trapped under a cup, too big to kill until a braver moment. 

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Jason was the first person she ever told about her nighttime moments, the simmer and boil inside her during her dreams and the calm over the waters when she fully awoke again. Her soul was liquid, Nikki would say, trapped inside her, threatening to empty. 

But he assured her it was nothing, nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. The soul was nothing but the motion of electrons when a computer powers up, he explained, their dance causing all that we see on our screens. If we believe that the soul lives beyond the body, it is like believing that what we see on screen occurs beyond the power coming into the computer from the very obvious cord plugged into the wall. 

“That’s it,” he said, “that is life.”

She watched him sigh impressively. They were sitting on the benches near the library, meeting for a few minutes to discuss their project before entering the red brick building behind them to study. She let her feet that were folded beneath her drop down to the pavement.

“What about love? What about pleasure?” 

“All functions we see on the screen, just reflecting the electrons that flicker underneath.” 

She had no better answer than him now. But he was certain in a way that made her doubt that his theory was very good.

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Solid, liquid, gas. Solid, liquid, robot. 

They sat under crimson leaves, watching as one fell on the bench between them, discussing all the things they didn’t know anything about, finding that just by talking about them, they could learn a little more. They had begun discussing their project, but quickly drifted into discussing their own theories, ones they had thought before but never said aloud, testing out their voices now as the sun set and the air cooled. The sky stayed light longer than it should have, letting a few extra straggling sentences march across the grass before the conversation faltered and they were both left in their thoughts. 

Jason had never seen anyone die, but he had thought about it a lot. He was convinced: we shut down like robots. 

Nikki had been at the hospital when her grandfather had breathed his last, her grandma sitting by his side, wondering as he left them if she had remembered to tell him everything she needed to, as if he were leaving on a business trip and would be back in a few days. In Jason’s description of a robot powering down, she could almost see it that day at the hospital. Maybe it was the change in the machines around him, that he had first been surrounded by when he entered the hospital, that were no longer there by the time he was gone. One machine after another had left his hospital room until he was the only thing remaining. Then he was gone too. Just another robot?

But perhaps there was another option. Solid, Nikki thought, solid like a separate person had gotten up and walked away. She had been standing in the doorway at the time, and she felt someone pass behind her in the hall. It was a nurse. She knew it was a nurse. But she wondered if it could also be her grandfather, a duplicate walking past her as solid as the door handle that she clutched on to, the metal warming underneath her hand. 

She would see him sometimes after that, just as solid as if he were still there. Not memories that drifted in and out but solid pieces of him on the street near their home, in the presents they unwrapped that Christmas, across the street mowing the lawn. She couldn’t help but feel that he was still solid somewhere, as solid in his new life as he had been before that trip to the hospital. 

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Jason’s wife got sick in their tenth year of marriage. They had three kids, and they were each so different that he couldn’t help but wonder of their randomized genes, lines of coding combined between him and his wife to make three discrete humans that both were and weren’t them. He watched them grow up, and he watched his wife grow up with them. She watched him do the same, from a scruffy twenty-four-year old with too many opinions to a staid thirty-four-year old with too many account passwords to remember for all of the things that kept their house going. 

They joked that he owned the castle on paper but she held all the keys. If he was ever locked out of their home, she was the one to let him in. What he was not prepared for was to be locked in without her. The day she got sick was the day that he realized that his life was not robotic anymore. He had to figure it all out himself, at least for a season.

Her absence left a gap in his software, a bug he couldn’t work around. He tried—ordering out for dinner, letting the kids eat what they wanted, disciplining misbehaviors harshly, rewarding their softening faces with later and later bedtimes. There were no rhythms in those days, just whatever activity was in front of them in the moment, and each moment was laced with a waiting for the heartbeat to come back, for the software to repair itself. 

When she finally came home from the hospital, she recovered slowly, from a wraith to a waif to a wife again, she quipped, but now that he knew the emptiness of when she was gone, he saw her fading in, coming back to him day by day, not just in the putter of slippered feet in the morning, but the hairs in the shower drain, the coffee moved to a different place on its own, more dirty mugs in the sink again instead of just his own. She was alive in a new way, not a robot trashed for parts or a computer with a new operating system, but his same wife growing from a thirty-four year old with a family to a thirty-five year old who had faded away but had come back renewed. 

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Solid, liquid, gas. Solid, liquid, robot. 

Gas was impossible, they both believed. At least they agreed on that. It was the expected answer; we become a vapor and join all the rest. For Jason, to have such specific personalities now and one amorphous personality forever after seemed impossible. For Nikki, this loss of personality unsettled her, each person blending into one another. It seemed as though the loudest people would have their final say, talking over the quieter people in the afterlife as they had done among the living, speaking over them once again and for all eternity. 

Liquid, she said. Robot, he said. Solid, they wondered as their hands parted outside her dormitory, warmth traded for an empty pocket as he walked across campus and she climbed the steps. 

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When her husband died, his soul was punctured. He spilled into her life everywhere, bursting out of his contained body and leaving sopping stains on the carpet and in her memories every time she turned around. 

The day she left the hospital in her own car without him, liquid oozing down the steering wheel that had last held his hands. (He insisted on driving himself to the hospital as she sat in the passenger seat in terror.) A sad gray puddle where his shoes belonged in their hallway at home. She felt his chair in their house, and she knew it would be too wet to sit in, too hard to hold on to. Everything was ruined or it needed to be dried out, and she knew that this was it, the way he was leaving. He was here, and there were puddles he had left behind. They would evaporate, not to become one with the gas-filled heavens, but to be gone for good, and she would not be able to hold onto them no matter how many bottles and buckets she found to squeeze out whatever was left behind in the glove box, on his toothbrush, from his pillowcase. 

She remembered the college campus, the cold steel benches with names and matriculation dates of earlier graduates, in memory of their lives and the couples who kissed on them, argued on them, and studied on them, the two of them debating. 

Solid, liquid, gas. Solid, liquid, robot. 

Robot, robot, he refrained. But she remembered her husband, as she sat on her couch one night, watching as her cat taunted a bug. She was pained watching the bug die slowly in the hands of their cat. He laughed at her concern. It’s just a little bug, it doesn’t have a soul. 

She looked at him, confused. 

Solid, solid. What if we are equal parts solid body and solid soul? What if we are duplicates of ourselves, getting up and walking away? 

Who will be there to see where we go? Who will confirm that we know what is happening and we are still living, somewhere somehow? 

She remembered Jason’s computer screen going black as she yanked the cord from the wall. “There you go,” she said. “Something for you to look forward to.” 

He had been dismayed, more sad about her bitter words than about his lost paper. “I’m not looking forward to it!” he yelled after her. 

He plugged his computer back in and continued working, finally looking to see what the great minds before him had said about the human soul. 

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Story by Natalie Mills · Photo by Jonathan Borba

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