Artificial Intelligence

by Kathleen Reeves

My colleagues were emailing about AI-generated fiction. I replied to the chain, saying that I planned to discuss artificial intelligence on the first day of my Renaissance to the present summer class, when I asked students “What is culture?” and “What is art?” I wanted to tell students that generative AI couldn’t make good art because it didn’t understand juxtaposition or context. A philosophy professor who had been anxiously emailing about AI over the last few days, sometimes in the middle of the night, replied immediately, accusing me of misunderstanding normative aesthetics, which was about creation and appreciation rather than evaluation. This professor emailed the list often to discuss ideas and was surly and earnest in a way that I appreciated. I had occasionally replied to him off-list, to thank him, for example, for reading all the bills in the Texas legislature and summarizing bills of interest. He had never replied to any of my emails, and after this chastisement about normative aesthetics, I wondered if I had done something to offend him. He and I had been in a training seminar in which we discussed “great books,” and I had said something about the limits of Plato, and all ancient philosophy, because there were no women involved. He hadn’t understood my point, and I hadn’t read much Plato but was paraphrasing Luce Irigaray. Maybe when he saw my name in his emails, he saw Plato’s face, harassed, maligned, and distraught. 

I did not want to ignore Plato’s contributions or cancel his thought; I wanted to see the world and people surrounding this intelligence and outside it. What was beyond the forms of his thought? It was hard to make anyone understand me in a world that had been organized into components, over and over, until those components became more real than the matter of which they were composed. 

. . . . .

Fredi’s band was playing at a fundraiser for a musicians’ mental health organization. When I arrived at the venue, a short, thin woman was energetically yelling at the bouncer that everyone working at the bar was a liar and that they sold drugs that killed people. She said that her son had died of a fentanyl overdose and that she’d just found a bag of fentanyl in the parking lot. The person taking tickets said that the woman had found an empty plastic bag in the parking lot and had started yelling about fentanyl. She could not be calmed, and the bouncer called the police.

After Fredi’s band played, Heather and I went to a far corner of the yard and sat at a picnic table. It was a large yard, so we were far from the stage, and we could hear insects over the music. I told Heather about a recent date with a man who worked in tech and talked about “deprogramming” toxicity he absorbed in the military. He told a story about one of his military friends trying to pick up a “big” woman in a 7-Eleven, and he said that he didn’t understand why men in the military got married young, just to deploy overseas. “The wife gets stressed, gains weight, he comes home to a different person,” he said. He identified as a socialist, but he had become offended when I’d suggested that the government should pay people a guaranteed basic income. I told Heather that I’d noticed that men who talked about overcoming toxic masculinity tended to exhibit toxic masculinity. I had become suspicious of the phrase itself, as if it was a Trojan Horse in which the speaker’s bad behavior could hide, disguised as a gift.

Heather made abstract and spiky ink drawings that seemed to be conscious. She had created them, but they were now alive, with an intelligence of their own. She talked about making drawings to go along with her friend Lucy’s poems. I had heard Lucy read once, and I liked her poems immediately. I remembered one line, years later: “It’s not a shed, it’s a cathedral.” I told Heather the line I remembered, and she said that she had just illustrated that poem. Instead of depicting the shed/cathedral itself, she drew what someone might see standing in its doorway: the medieval-arched doorframe, natural forms suggesting trees or bushes, and in the center of the drawing, a diamond with flames coming out of it. She had made a few attempts until she got the diamond and flames as she wanted. “I didn’t want it to suggest apocalypse or a Christian hell,” she said, “because when you leave the cathedral, you’re entering a better world. Not a utopia, but something different. The flames are flames of inspiration.”

“Like the tongues of fire at Pentecost,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“But not Christian,” I added.

“A different kind of inspiration.”

We went back to the stage, where a psychedelic Latin fusion band was playing. The songs rolled along like a giant sea creature, ancient and perfectly coordinated. Three guys who looked to be in their twenties stood to my left. They weren’t sending out unhinged or aggressive energy; the area around them was psychically clear. The one farthest from me, blond and tall with a young face, looked over at me. There was something familiar about him but also very unfamiliar, even alien. When the band finished, I started talking to them. Though I was usually shy with strangers, this felt easy, like I was following an existing groove in the universe. Two of them, including the blond one, were nurses, and the third, who seemed a bit left out, was a physical therapist. I told him I’d been to many physical therapists over the years. “What for?” he asked, brightening.

I moved closer to the blond nurse, but I realized he was almost definitely gay, and I felt the particular shame of hitting on a gay man: something about being intrusive, heteronormative, and desperate. The next band had started and I gave the men some space; they sat at a picnic table nearby. When I glanced at them, the man I’d been talking to nodded at me and patted the bench next to him. Maybe not gay? I sensed that my elder millennial imprintings were getting in the way. His name was Cody, and he asked me if I wanted some molly. I said it was too late in the evening. He asked me to dance, which I didn’t understand in the context of the band, but he took my hand and spun me around. “Now spin me,” he said. I asked him to dip me, like at the end of a two-step, but he didn’t know what that meant. He told me he was moving to Albuquerque soon.

Everyone was leaving, and Cody got ready to leave too. We exchanged numbers and he left with his friends, but then he was standing next to me again. Cody and Heather and I talked about the desert. Heather had lived in west Texas for three months, and she claimed that those months had been the most spiritually and emotionally efficient of her life. Cody asked what she meant by “spiritually and emotionally efficient.” Heather said that spiritual things are more visible in the desert. “Otherwordly things, too,” she said. “It makes sense for people to see aliens there.” I thought that this accounted for my mixed feelings about the desert: when I was there, I had the sense that everything around me—earth, plants, mountains, rocks, and air—was especially meaningful, and that if I paid attention, I would receive the gift of revelation. But this was tiring and left me feeling exposed; I always looked forward to returning to the places where plants grew over each other, muffling the psychic frequencies of the past and present. Cody said that his travel nursing job in Albuquerque was for three months but that he wanted to extend it to six or nine. “I want to get lost in the desert,” he said.

Heather left and Cody and I were the only ones standing there in the yard of the Far Out Lounge. “I guess I’ll head home too,” he said tentatively. I asked him if he wanted to come over. He raised his eyebrows nervously, almost like he might cry. 

In the Lyft, he took my hand and when we were halfway home he kissed me. The energy between us was powerful but I didn’t want to make our driver uncomfortable. I didn’t realize that we had arrived at my apartment complex until the driver asked about the gate. I reached into my purse for the gate fob. Every time I drove up to these gates, fumbling in my purse for my keys, I felt that the gate exemplified a set of fears and desires at the heart of America: a fear of other people, of the public; an obsession with guarding property; the desire for an object that promised defense but did nothing at all. When my friends visited, they waited at the gate for not more than a minute before someone came in or out. But when the power went out, we were trapped inside until the apartment complex staff remembered how to open the gates manually.

I asked him to pick out a record, and he chose Physical Graffiti. I told him about one of my happiest memories, driving through the Cascade Mountains in Washington listening to that album on CD. I was on my way to a show at the Gorge, and the clouds around the highway parted from time to time to reveal mountains, rock, evergreen. The rushing creeks for which the mountains were named passed under the road. Clouds parted at the beginning of “In the Light.” The clouds made the mountain invisible again during “Ten Years Gone.” A mountain loomed up at “Kashmir.” As always in the mountains, I felt that I was simultaneously in the past and moving into the future, while somehow still being in the present. An escape? A shelter, maybe, but one that had to do with imagination. It was as if the mountains existed on another plane, one that most of us forgot about most of the time. 

‘It was hard to make anyone understand me in a world that had been organized into components, over and over, until those components became more real than the matter of which they were composed.’

Cody said that while he worked in the hospice wing of the hospital, he had been present at an elaborate death ritual during which a song from this album was played. 

“When I say ‘elaborate,’ I really mean it,” he said. “I’ve seen all sorts of death rituals; families are more intentional in hospice. They have time to think about it, and sometimes the patient has requested something specific. But this was more than the usual. First, someone did Reiki on the patient. Then the family members and friends read things—but not what you’d expect, like short poems or reflections. What they read was very experimental: each person read a single word, and then there was a long pause, maybe two minutes, before the next word was read.” 

We were sitting on the floor next to the record player, and he was drinking tequila out of a jar.

“They were mostly friends, not family. Maybe one sister. She didn’t have a partner or kids, I don’t think. Then three shamanic workers put their hands on her body for a long time. Over half an hour. They shifted around a bit, but they never lost contact with her body.”

“Where were the shamanic workers?” I asked. I pictured them entering at the precise moment they were needed, emerging soundlessly from the hospital corridor. I liked how he had said “shamanic workers” instead of “healers” or “shamans.”

“They were there for the whole ritual,” he said. “And her friends sat just beyond the shamanic workers. A couple of them stood up, actually. And then—” He paused. “The last part of the ritual was that they put on the song.” I had forgotten that his story had started with Physical Graffiti. 

“Which song?” I asked, though I already knew.

“In My Time of Dying,” he said. 

“Huh,” I said, trying to picture this. “What did that feel like? And were you there for this entire ritual?”

“I was. It was the end of my shift, so I stayed. One of her friends asked me to stay.” He paused. “At first, I wasn’t sure about the song. How it fit with everything else that had happened. And was it too…”

“On the nose?” I said. We both laughed.

“But as the song went on, watching her face, imagining her hearing the song… it made a kind of perfect sense.”

I was thinking about the long instrumental second half of the song, the frantic guitar solos, and the part when guitar, drums, and bass suddenly come into unison and play the same line four times. 

“And you know how the song ends,” he said.

“Yes, the cough,” I said. I smiled. Someone in the band coughs, and Robert Plant sings “cough” instead of “day,” as the last word of the song, and the band starts jesting about how that’ll be the take they use. 

“In conclusion,” he said, “it was a little ridiculous, like life. Something that was interesting about this woman is that there were almost no women there, except the sister. All her friends were men.”

“That is unusual,” I said. 

“It made me wonder.”

“And then she filled the time of her death with the sound of a bunch of men playing music,” I said. 

We started kissing, and he slapped my ass. He was directing everything now, and everything was perfectly coordinated but spontaneous, like it was happening on another planet and being delivered to us here. He was on top of me, on my yoga mat next to the couch, and he moved his hand from my breasts to my neck. I inhaled sharply and he pressed harder, his thumb and index finger at once kind and punishing in their “V” around my neck. “It feels so good,” I said. “You like that?” he said.

We stopped to drink water, and he commented on how many books I had.

“What kind of books do you like?” I asked. 

“I like books about cowboys, books about aliens, and how-to books,” he said. 

Later, I took my nighttime supplements, saying their names out loud as I took each one out of the bottle. When I came back to bed, he seemed to be asleep already, and I walked around to the other side of the bed, trying not to disturb him. He stirred. “I’m sleeping over here where I won’t disturb you,” I said.

He pulled me close to him and held me in a way that felt more serious than how I had ever been held before, at least by a non-parent. His arms were slender but strong, and every so often he shifted a bit and his arms crossed over me in a new way. As I half-slept, I had an image of steel bars on a gate—the antithesis of the apartment complex gate. A life-giving gate. 

In the morning, I asked him about the ring that he wore around his neck. He said that it was his confirmation ring. He unfastened the chain and handed it to me, and I looked at it while he was in the bathroom: a primitive, folk Jesus on the cross, which was hard to make out at first, as if both Jesus and the cross were fading into the background. The ring gave me a sense of starting over—Christianity as a new idea—which made me think it was Lutheran. When he returned, he told me it was a copy of Luther’s ring. I asked him if he was still Christian and he said he wasn’t sure, but that he always wore the ring because it reminded him of his past. 

I drove him home, and he told me that he’d recently cut his hair, which had been long, down to his chest. His father had reacted strongly to the haircut, saying, “You’re a boy again!” He told his dad that he had always been a boy. He asked what my novel was about, and I said that it was about making art and dating men. He said that I could write about him if I wanted to. I said it might be a nice way to end the novel, then I wasn’t sure why I’d said that. 

A few days later, we went swimming at Barton Springs. He was leaving the next morning for Albuquerque; we met just after sunset. The sky was dramatic pink over the highway as I drove there and the light was fading as I sat on the grass and watched him walk up the hill towards me. As we walked to the edge of the pool, he took my hand and we jumped in, letting go when we hit the water. I had never done that before. We went back to my apartment and sat on the balcony, smoking pot that I had bought three years earlier. He asked me if I was going to visit him in Albuquerque. I felt nervous, since I wanted to see him again but was afraid it would never happen. I said I would if he wanted me to, and he said he’d scout out things for us to do.

He asked me my last name, and I asked his. His was Irish, and he asked what mine was. “Welsh,” I said.

“What?”

“Welsh.”

“What is that?”

“It’s what my last name is,” I said.

“But what is Welsh?”

“You know what Welsh is,” I said.

“I do not,” he said. “I need you to explain it to me.”

“Wales is a country,” I said.

“I know about Wales,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “It’s near England.”

“Welsh is the adjective associated with that country. If you’re from Wales, you’re Welsh.” I felt that these gaps in his knowledge did nothing to alter his basic genius.

“You will have to explain a lot of things to me,” he said.

He said that this was good pot. “Why would you name something Trainwreck? The culture of marijuana is so strange.” 

I said that I never smoked pot anymore but sometimes ate one-quarter of a gummy. He told a story of the highest he had ever been, when he had hallucinated an alien. “My friend gave me a chocolate bar and said, Don’t eat the whole thing. Of course, I ate the whole thing. As I was driving to my friend’s house, I felt that I was driving ‘on a bubble.’ So then I got to my friend’s house, and I sat on the couch. A portal opened up in front of me, and a gray alien spoke to me.” I asked him what the alien looked like. “He was a tall, slender, big-eyed, gray alien,” he said. “He observed me and then spoke gibberish. It was a spiral portal,” he added. I asked him to pause his story and I went inside to get a small yellow legal pad and a pen.

He told another story of hanging out with a close friend who played obscure records for him, including “tribal sounds.” He said that he had always suspected that this friend was a vampire, and now, listening to the strange records, the feeling was too strong to ignore. “So I left,” he said. “I was convinced that one of my closest friends was a vampire.”

“When was this, in relation to the alien?”

“This was all the same night!” he said.

“What?”

“If you met this friend, you would know what I mean,” he said. “Anyway, I listened to some of the best music of my life that night.”

He asked why I had written down his story. Feeling ashamed, I said that I wanted to remember it. But the truth was that I wanted to put it in my novel.

. . . . .

At 4 am, I woke up and moved closer to him, and he put his arm around me, but it was light now, more draped than holding. When I turned to him, I was surprised to see that he was fully clothed: striped shirt, black skinny jeans. “You’re dressed,” I said plaintively.

“See you later,” he said.

I said that I was glad we had met. He said, “I’ll see you again,” as if chiding me for speaking in the past tense. He got out of bed and I looked up at him, standing in the doorway. He came back and kissed me one more time. “I’ll see you later,” he said, closing the door behind him.

‘ So my life would grow in this other way, and the twisted twin of my life, the fiction, would feed back into the real thing.’

A man alone in a place he imagined was empty: the desert, whose emptiness was full. The emptiness of outer space congealing into forms, specks that became beings that could think, feel, and build powerful machines. I had asked him what drew him to aliens. “They can make things that we can’t imagine,” he said. “We have trouble imagining that there are things we can’t imagine.” He added, “We can’t even imagine it.” I agreed, and we laughed at all the “imagine”s. Later, when he was holding me down, softly asking—but it wasn’t really a question—“You like that?” I pictured him issuing commands: Imagine the alien you can’t imagine. Not the hallucinated one but the one beyond your mind. Imagine the space between this alien and another one. Imagine the space around the alien. Imagine the man you can’t imagine.

I texted Cody twice, but his replies were brief and vague. He was getting lost in the desert. When we had been sitting on my couch the second time we saw each other, he’d picked up the small under-inflated ball I used for myofascial release on my upper back and head, the places where I felt the most pain, and I told him what it was for. 

“The long-forgotten fascia,” he said. “People look at the thing itself, but not the connective tissue. The connective tissue is the thing itself.” I agreed, and I mentally repeated this phrase, the long-forgotten fascia, a few times so that I wouldn’t forget it.

Was it wrong, even a little evil, to be so focused on how I’d write something down while life was happening? Was this what Shakespeare was getting at when Prospero breaks his wand at the end of The Tempest? But what else did I have? What was I supposed to hang onto when these men took their leave: made polite excuses, faded out, or just ceased, as if they were dead? Without the self-expansion that comes from sex and love, I would have to expand in another way. I would have to duplicate my life, slightly skewed. It was hungry and grasping, but so were all the ways that people lived—in their houses with their partners and children; going on vacations; starting businesses. My life was not growing in space—I didn’t buy things, I had not reproduced, there was no reason for me to live anywhere other than in my small apartment. So my life would grow in this other way, and the twisted twin of my life, the fiction, would feed back into the real thing. And I could do it at home, wearing old cotton shorts and a gray t-shirt. I felt proud of the plainness of my clothes, as if the plainer they were, the more interesting my writing would become. My apartment had a pleasing blankness, reminding me of Florida in the ’90s: thick carpet, old furniture, ceiling fans, the sound of night insects. Pool shimmering in the moonlight. I remembered that my grandparents had rarely turned on the air conditioner in their condo in Florida, and the vertical blinds had swayed and banged in the breeze, and I heard the sprinklers come on as I slept on the couch in the TV room with the pocket door. I didn’t have trouble sleeping back then; I was a child. I didn’t worry about getting old. I cried, now, thinking about how we could sleep with the windows open in Florida back then. Sometimes I’d even had to pull the blanket over me: the pink blanket that my Aunt Mary had woven. 

. . . . .

I went to Barton Springs and nodded at the spot where Cody and I had jumped in holding hands. Underwater, I opened my eyes into the blue-green and thought, I am moving forward. When I returned to my towel on the grass, there was a woman down the hill from me with long, straight, dirty-blond hair, wearing a navy-blue baseball cap and reading a book. She was alone. From behind, she looked very familiar, and when she turned her head so that I could see part of her face, I gasped. The nose, the small chin, the practical clothes and undramatic face, like a Dutch peasant: she was me. I tried to see what book she was reading, but I couldn’t make out the title. I looked away, but I kept looking back. I began to feel that she should notice me looking, so that we could experience this strange thing together. But she wasn’t me, exactly: she was a younger me. A ten-years-ago me. I recognized her, therefore, but she might not recognize me. But I kept looking, feeling that I had something important to tell her.