Each Life Has Its Place
"You goin'
down to the cemetery, meatbag?"
Of course I am - he knows what day it is. But I indulge him a small smile. “Yes, I am.”
There’s a little note of concern in his voice. “You’re too
old to go by yourself. Bring Leena. Or Peter.”
“My grandchildren have better things to do on a day like
this.”
“They know it’s pointless.” he puffed on his cigar. “He can’t hear you. Dead meat don’t care
how you remember it.”
Typical Bender - brusque but truthful. “Do you want to come with me or not?”
He shuffles toward the door.
“Yeah, yeah.”
***
I sometimes look at him and taste a
bitterness at the back of my throat.
It’s a deadness that I cannot clear away, like a piece of meat rotting
between teeth, festering away.
Bender doesn’t age.
It’s a logical fact of his existence, and I still look at him and feel a
sort of unnamable fury. I’m a doddering
woman - my knees ache, my hair is white, my eyes are failing - and he’s still
as annoyingly sharp as he was when I was a spry twenty. Robots are forever young - a never-ending continuum. And so I envy the youth of a machine as I
face what’s probably my last year on this miserable planet.
God. I used to be so interested in protecting New New York
Now I can’t even call up fondness as I see a young couple necking
on a park bench - they’re in my way, staining the landscape of perfect white arounds us.
Bender chuckled at the sight of humans lost in their mating
ritual, his commentary an unusually silent and sophisticated one.
“How far are we from the cemetery?” he asks.
“Let me check your GPS unit.”
“No thanks. I still
feel violated from the last time.”
The post-ash-storm silence of New Central Park calms my
nerves. When we pass the dripping
cluster of trees near a fenced-in right corner, I remember my left, continuing
on until I saw the iron gates at last.
“You wanna go alone?” he asked.
“You said you’d come with me.”
“I told you - I don’t gotta talk
to dead things. They’re still dead.”
He’s an affront to everything I need to stay sane. “Fine. Stay behind.”
The groundskeepers have been on strike for a year - grass
pokes up through the ash, little threads of golden green on the winter
landscape. I remember the way there -
two steps forward, three rows in, under the
I bless the long-dead Professor for his foresight in buying
a triple plot of land. On his deathbed,
he had hoped loudly that Fry and Cubert might join
him in the ground. Fry wanted to be buried
in Orbiting Meadows, or shot out into space like a clown from a canon, but
showed no interest in sleeping among his ancestors. Cubert, only
fifteen, had everything but death on his mind at the time. Now they’re both dead, and neither received
the tribute they wanted. I tried for Fry.
First I couldn’t obtain the right permits for Orbiting Meadows. Then they denied him entrance completely,
despite his genetic ties to Philip J. Fry the Second. He was denied a spot among the stars due to
the demands of the winter season that marked his passing. Too many meteor showers. Too many clogged fairways.
I kneel beside him - the way I never would in life. A dozen meaningless affairs flash through my
mind, but no man - not even Shaun - stands as tall as he does in my mind. I rail away the old regrets. It never would have worked between us.
His death was torturous - a simple bee sting, an allergic
reaction - a haze of choking, silent screams.
I’ve seen a thousand men die in my time, but nothing affected me like
his expiration. His life had been
depressingly brief - almost as sad as Cubert’s
leaving us at sixteen, drunkenly plowing his first hover car into
a bridge. But I remember him as he was
and I love him for who he could have been, and between the two I somehow find a
justice in it. The graveyard is as old-fashioned
as Fry could be - it fit, after all.
I brush the ash out of the name carved into ageless stone
and press my lips to the chill. “Hello,
Fry,” I manage, when I can speak. “Happy birthday.”
The End