When we moved in together, I learned that Mary sometimes transformed into a Golden-Age automaton. This first night, I was just falling asleep when I heard a baritone honk. The shape of her body became sharp and cold under my arm. I turned on the lamp and saw her, something vaguely brass and ceramic and filthy in a clown suit. Her painted face was marred with age like she had been stored on a shelf in someone’s basement. She made motions with her hands as if she played a violin, though there was nothing in her porcelain hands. She twirled for a moment on a circular base until she came to an abrupt stop. Something had broken inside her.
I didn’t like this. Maybe she didn’t realize I’d figure it out so quick. Or maybe just letting it happen was her way of telling me: hey, sometimes in my sleep, this happens.
I left the house and tried to sleep in the Wal-Mart parking lot. I saw normal people going in and out of the store and wondered what it must be like to have a normal life.
When I worked up the nerve to go back home, I found Mary asleep on the couch watching television. Her face and hands looked like her face and hands. She turned her body when she heard me come in, groggily, if not a little stiff. She’d made oatmeal. I had no idea what to do, whether there was anything to do.
#
I read a lot of Borges and Marquez in junior college and thought I was supposed to ignore the changes and construct some convoluted philosophy around what I’d seen, especially if I were to respect Mary’s identity and prove that I loved her no matter what. The truth is, I’d always been a little freaked out by clowns.
But mostly, I didn’t like that she’d kept this a secret from me. She had some good nights when she slept and nothing happened; those were equally bad nights for me because I didn’t know if I’d wake to the feeling of a copper ankle in my hand, the sliver of ceramic finger, the sticky thread of a rotting guitar.
I had trouble figuring out how to best approach the topic of my discomfort; she knew that I knew about the transformations, but I’d not been able to tell her how I felt. This would be the theme of my dissatisfaction over the next several months, trying to navigate the space between honesty and untruth. No one I knew had ever been comfortable enough to say if they were bitter about a circumstance involving someone they loved. I didn’t have friends that were particularly good at communicating their emotions. I’d known several daughters who’d given up everything to care for aging mothers. I’d known about parents that had raised wild, horrible children, but they never knew the language of resentment. I’d had friends that couldn’t admit to their relief after a long fight with a spouse’s illness. Did any of them ever complain about the emotional turmoil that someone else’s pain dealt? Not that I know of. There was never any space for it. I’m not sure there even is supposed to be a space for it—whether I’m a terrible person for suggesting there needs to be this kind of space.
#
One night, she transformed into a ukulele player sitting on the tip of a crescent moon. In the middle of the moon’s white crescent, there was a blushed face, the moon’s lips red. The ukelele player wore a sailor’s cap with short black hair underneath. I wasn’t sure who Mary was supposed to be: the moon or the ukulele player. The ukelele’s strings were gone, but the player slowly twitched its fingers over the frets, anyway. Its body rotated with the rhythm of silent music while its crossed legs remained static, one foot kicking. The whirring was loud at first, but then she came to a grinding pause; something was caught up inside her body. I rotated the automaton in the bed, moved her to the table, but couldn’t find a way to see inside.
I took a picture of Mary, aware that I was technically taking a picture of her in her sleep, and that maybe if she found out I was doing this, she wouldn’t be happy. I didn’t know what I’d do with the picture once I took it; my parents would think there was just a mid-sized antique ornament sitting upright on the table. They’d ask me how much I spent on it.
The lighting was good, and it was altogether a pretty good picture, except for the lifelessness in both the player and moon’s eyes. I put it down on the floor and got back in bed. In the morning, I felt Mary crawl back in bed, her breath on my neck. She said something to me, but I was trying to sleep.
#
I showed her the picture the next day. I whipped the phone out in a motion of panic. She had just come in and was running around the house, doing chores: sweeping the floors, putting up the laundry. She made me nervous when she did this. Her face was red; her arms shook. I stopped her outside the laundry room and showed her the picture I’d taken.
“That’s me,” she said.
“What does it mean, though?”
“What does what mean?”
“Is it stress? Is it something else?”
“Maybe if you helped around the house,” she said quietly, “I wouldn’t be so stressed.”
Later: an image search of Golden-Age Automatons revealed that children were popular designs, as were noble women and musicians. Circus performers seemed to also pop up; I figured it could be potentially useful to cross reference circuses of the late 1900s with the automatons of the same era, but my philosophical/theoretical fuel had burned out. I waited for Mary to come home, and we had dinner. We’d learned by now to talk out the things that bothered us, but we tried not to do it over food.
This went on for a while—her coming home, rushing around, telling me about the orders she’d had to put in, and how every day they seemed to give her more to do. I was averse to change; the thought of her putting in for a new job suggested a snowballing effect, that if something about her routine changed, I’d be uprooted as well. I tried not to mention this, but the feeling colored our conversations, and I became more distant and irritable.
When it came to the topic of automatons and sleep, I tried to stay quiet. She only brought it up rarely: “What was I last night? I had a dream I was a pontoon, and a hurricane washed me out to sea.”
“Have you ever been on a ship?”
“Nope.”
“Have you ever been to a circus?”
“Once,” she said. “I didn’t like it.”
I figured there must be some metaphor here, but I didn’t want to push that; I wasn’t a therapist. We’d seen so many horror movies where the ghosts represented past traumas, where monsters were a stand in for depression, and I didn’t want to plant that seed here. Sometimes, I figured, things just happened because they happened.
#
She sat on a small stool at the base. I had missed the transformation again—they seemed to only happen after I’d fallen asleep. Towards the top of the stool there was a slight whirring: something trying move, to sing, a gear ticking against another gear.
She wore a dress that was either yellow or white, with puffy white hair. Her skin (Ceramic? Porcelain?) was white with hints of blush. Her shoulders were crusted in pale gray shades of dust. Gunk had collected at the stool’s feet around the base.
Her fingers moved just a little bit, but the thrumming of the harp was silent. This was one of the first nights I really looked at her and didn’t feel totally afraid. I’d talk about this eventually to a therapist: my fears were superficial, had nothing to do with Mary, but maybe just the shock of seeing her changed, those first moments of a shift in routine with no explanation.
#
Her transformations didn’t happen all the time; they seemed gradual. The transformations seemed to be the result of a bunch of different factors that were not likely provable to either of us, but which Mary theorized about frequently: possible external stimulation and triggers (she’d broken her leg playing soccer when she was thirteen; her aunt had spanked her relentlessly when she babysat); fall weather, and possible genetics, though there was no indication that anyone in her family also transformed into automata; a curse set upon her at an early age, possibly by a jealous witch, perhaps something to do with her father’s infidelity; hormonal or dietary imbalances or changes in the cycles of the moon (this, according to her mother, when I confronted them with the pictures of the ukelele player and the moon).
When she was a teenager, she tried setting up a camera on her dresser one night and when she checked the next day, nothing had happened—she’d slept through the night. The best sleep she ever got, she said, was when she bothered to set up a camera.
When I asked why she didn’t still use the camera trick, she lost her cool with me.
“You want to set the camera up every night? You want to be watched all the time?”
“We don’t have to do that.”
“I’m getting slower,” she said. “I’m getting less responsive.”
“To what?”
“I’m having trouble,” she said, and I knew there was nothing I could do to help her.
#
Last night, she was a young girl sitting on a stool, hands extended as if she belonged to a larger piece, maybe a piano. Except her arms and hands didn’t move, and she was missing several of her fingers. Her papier-mâché cheek was dented as if it she’d been squeezed by a thumb. Most of the skin was covered in dark, sooty material. I wound her up and watched her hands tap over invisible keys, blank eyes tracing left to right, until she grinded to a pause. Normally, Mary’s transformations would go for a little bit and stop, but this variation was even more short-lived; the missing fingers already made her movements difficult to see, but there was a certain whir implying a working mechanism, something still moving inside her despite her absence of movement on the outside. Then all I could hear was the thrum of the air conditioner. I felt the weight of silence, the whir, in my chest.
#
I changed, accepted that maybe not everything was totally surface-level. I placed a lot of metaphorical value on the material that appeared alongside her humanoid forms. More importantly, I placed a lot of metaphorical value on the objects that should have appeared but did not. You can inherently tell when a musical instrument should have been in her hands; a circus figure balancing on a chord holding something/but/nothing against its cheek needed a violin. A cowboy sitting atop a giant ball needed a cello. I asked her about the instruments, and she swore she had no idea how to play anything.
“I had a violin for about five seconds,” she said. “I paid a hundred dollars for it. The strings on the stick thing were loose, and the wax block that was down in the carrying case had crystalized. It was old as dirt and made a screeching sound, so I was too embarrassed to ever practice.”
There were automata that had held swords and bows, but she had never even held a bow in real life. She’d tried standing on her head, once, but fell against the hearth and fractured a heel.
Sometimes an instrument would be there, but it would be broken in some way, missing parts, or just crusted in old dirt. This used, antique quality wasn’t exclusive to Mary’s props; it also extended to her figure(s) as well. We decided on the metaphor: her automata were never pristine, because she slept poorly, or she’d had a particularly rough day, or maybe she was chased by some trauma that she couldn’t name or didn’t have the words for, something that—as I’d been trying to put into words a lot, lately—language could not express.
We tried couples therapy for a little while. We were both terrified of what we may learn about one another. But in going we learned to ask one another helpful questions: “What do you need?” was a favorite. We talked about ourselves and each other and invented new ways to communicate, but I wasn’t convinced this was something I was supposed to take part in. About twelve sessions later, we called it quits. The whole time, nothing about her routine nighttime transformations ever changed.
#
She continued to believe she must have transformed into the things she dreamed about. She had plenty of dreams about going back to school, retaking tests, and a few of her automatons had taken the form of children sitting at desks. One night, she dreamed of being a fox, and the same night, she took the form of a rustic, freshly painted sculpture of a fox whose mouth dipped up and down. The head turned with a creak, its ears twitched, and inside the stump she sat on was a myriad of gears and wooden counterweights, some rusted and bent, but working.
I wondered what would happen to her if I tampered with the innards of any of the automata; the wire threads connected to the circular gear that controlled the mouth were rusted and bent in the middle when the gear reached the precipice of its rotation, which caused a high-pitched scrape. There were several components I didn’t recognize, all discolored, though turning. A rubber band connected a drum to the winding mechanism on the fox’s side. I felt around the insides, pulled one of the threads, and when my finger slipped it twanged back into place.
The next day, she asked me to feel around her back for knots. “I’m dying,” she said. “Jab them out. I can’t stand it anymore. Pinch them. Press there.”
“Like that? Am I hurting you?”
“I just need to wear out, that’s all.”
When she’d had enough, her back was red from all the rubbing and pinching.
#
I worried I’d hurt her in her sleep. I didn’t know the rules of her transformations, the consequences for tampering with Mary’s insides. I thought a lot about the story of her first transformation, the first she remembered, from when she was eight years old. She had had sleepovers before, but tonight she was particularly nervous. Her mother’s boss had a daughter in the same school as her, and because of some ritual in the culture of their small real estate agency, the girl was pushed onto Mary and told to be nice to her—they were new in town, the girl had been told, and Mary didn’t have friends.
The girls got along fine. Mary said the girl (she remembers her name, just refused to tell me because she says I’ve met her) was prettier than her, had a white bracelet, was double-jointed, and knew just about everything there was to know about snakes and lizards. They spent all day catching lizards in the woods by the house. They came home covered in mosquito bites. Mary’s mother covered their itching legs and ankles in a cream. They listened to cassette tapes for a little while before going to bed. Mary said she was so happy that the day had gone well, and that she was so exhausted that she had no trouble falling asleep.
When she awoke the next morning, she was horribly sore all over. Her shoulders and back were heavily bruised. Her friend was also missing; she’d been taken home some time in the night after calling her mother and saying that a monster had appeared in the bed with her. She’d hit the monster several times with a t-ball bat. Of course, the friend’s mother didn’t believe a word of this: she became distant with Mary’s mother, even when her mother promised that nothing was wrong, that nobody was mad at anyone, that it was just a negligible incident if anything. Everyone sleepwalks on occasion, they all agreed.
Her mother always joked that they didn’t have sleepovers anymore because “You change into creepy porcelain robots at night, and it’s pretty scary.”
#
The harlequin was a much better version of the clown. In terms of golden-aged automata, she was attractive, her head well-proportioned (still somehow lifeless), one leg splayed out in a dance pose. One hand concealed behind it a large cymbal. She wore a mask. It was unclear whether the harlequin—historically, I mean—was supposed to be a male character or female, or somewhere in between. It was undeniably French, the patterns on its outfit overwhelmingly diamond patterned. Her mask, ending at the top lip, showed black fangs.
Days had become longer. I listened to her talk about work, about her fatigue, the headaches, the knots, but I’d reached the point in my sadness where I barely responded to her; sometimes, I felt she might have been talking to herself. I stopped waking at night when transformations happened, but this one was different. There was a strong smell: I’d been dreaming of the house burning down, and woke up to this thing, which smelled like campfire smoke.
She tried to spin, but the motor caught something, which I assume was where the burning came from. I felt around the base for an opening. I used my phone’s flashlight to see.
One eye open, I looked at the gears inside: something had made a nest in there, a small mouse maybe. It was gone.
#
It was always hard to say. One day, Mary might need a shoulder to cry on. What made her cry? Any number of things: the pain she felt in her lower back that came seemingly out of nowhere, the knots, the redness. Her father’s illness (she hadn’t seen her father in over twelve years. He had never been there for her, and now that he was back in her life, he was of course dying, and he needed someone to care for him, and Mary she was an only child). Pressure at work, deadlines, emails that’d gone unanswered, passive-aggressive follow-ups.
She told me, on occasion, that what she really needed was a vacation, but she barely had any time left, and she used all her time on doctor’s appointments and her father. She needed a good sleep. On nights she didn’t transform into an automaton, she tossed and turned, and any little sound would wake her and then she wouldn’t be able to sleep again. She needed a weighted blanket and a pillow to tuck between her knees, a warm compress, a white noise machine.
She needed three weeks to herself. Three good weeks of not going to work, of drinks at the IBP, of a cappuccino made perfectly with a cushiony top that looks like it could spill over but was being held together by magic. She wanted to sit somewhere under a tree, alone in the woods.
“Where do you want to go?”
I wished she would just tell me where she wanted to go, what she wanted to do.
And no matter how much I tried, she emphasized: “I don’t need to be figured out. I just want to sleep.” And then she’d get mad at me and say, “With or without you, I just need to sleep.” And I understood that, but her anger made me angry.
We sulked like this for days. Life had become so unbearable that I couldn’t help but fantasize about being single again. And then we would be back at the beginning; she would have a good day. Her mind would be in a good place. I’d apologize. She’d apologize. I wouldn’t know who was meant to apologize, who was really the victim in all this; I had forgotten about spaces for victimhood, all those words and phrases that made me feel thoughtful.
#
This takes place in the present: we are still here. Her father called today and said he was thinking about getting some living help. I told him we would pitch in. There have been no new developments with her work, though things have gone mostly quiet.
At night the wind blows hard. It rains for a few minutes, one solid noise. A boom of thunder wakes me up.
She’s changed again. This automaton is a woman with curly red hair, a hat with a feather in it; she wears a cape. Her nose is strong, pointy, and her eyes are still, but not as lifeless as usual. She’s already gone still, maybe long before I woke. One of her extended fingers holds a tiny bird.
I shine a light on Mary; I remove the red velvet cape she’s wearing, revealing her mechanical parts, golden rods and animation plates and a large, clock-like apparatus near the base of her spine, weights and motors and wires, and a winding key beneath the red cushion she sits on.
I try to turn the key, but something sticks. I shine a light inside her again. I blow into her, blow and blow until something black dislodges, a piece of dirt like a scab, a sliver of burnt wood. I try turning the key again and it moves, but slowly, grindingly.
The bird flickers to life. The woman’s head turns; her eyes look down at the bird. I turn the gear harder, force it to move, and the bird spins; its wings lift; it looks like it’s about to take off into flight when the key snaps.
I stare at the broken part, hot in the chest, wondering what part of Mary I’ve broken.
“Hey. Please. I’m sorry,” I say.
The bird is still. The automaton slows, her insides come to a rest with a hiss.
I feel the key in my hand. There is a weight to it. It feels like the oldest thing I’ve ever touched, something I had no business holding in my hands to begin with, something maybe older than all of our grandmothers combined.