The Coffee Machine
by admin“If you wait any longer the coffee will taste revolting. I personally guarantee it will be vile to a degree that you have never experienced!” The Coffee Machine shouted in a stern voice from its home on the kitchen counter. “I’m turning off the warmer so it doesn’t turn to tar, you fat, ugly, coffee wasting bastard!”
The Machine scanned around the kitchen and lamented its existence. Robert’s kitchen was a late twentieth century suburban monstrosity. From the Coffee Machine’s angle it was a nightmare of beige and oak veneer. The Coffee Machine hated its sickeningly vanilla environment almost as much as it hated Robert.
“If it’s cold before you get to it it’s your own fault, you vandal, you philistine, you sadist!” The Coffee Machine switched its warmer off, “He can’t hear me can he Frank?”
“No.” I said.
“Where is he, Frank? Where’s Robert?”
“Robert is in the backyard playing lawn darts again.” I said, facelessly.
In general I never bothered to appear physically when I was addressing a machine. No disrespect intended they just usually don’t care. They don’t need that aesthetic of another human staring back at them when they communicate. They’re more data oriented, which, having just said it, I’d imagine goes without saying.
There were three orders of magnitude in which I could appear; audio, visual, and physical. I’ll skip the technical stuff for now. It’s not really important in the larger scheme of things. My personal preference was audio because of the quality of directionlessness that my audio feed had. Maybe it’s ridiculous, but I just thought that was neat.
“I don’t know why I bother anymore?”
The Machine moaned. Lot’s of intelligent machines complain. You could hardly blame them. Other than their designed function there really wasn’t much else for them to do.
“Every day it’s the same thing, he asks for a whole pot of coffee. The fruit of my loins. It’s fresh, delicate coffee. It’s innocent, pure, majestic, perfect, coffee. It’s my work of art! It’s my pride and joy! It’s my labor of love! He pours a single cup like any average human being might, then he sits down and watches the original version of Casablanca and he only drinks that one cup of coffee!” It paused again, this time for dramatic effect. The Coffee Machine enunciated, “One cup of coffee,” the same way that Martin Luther King spoke, “I have a dream!” It wanted the terror and gravity of Robert’s crimes against coffee to sink deep into my mind. I couldn’t have cared less about the Coffee Machine and its theatrics. It might as well have been a reeking compost heap.
Far from being a compost heap, the Coffee Machine was a glossy black, 1997, Krups Crystal Arome Time. It had a beautiful, globular, hermetically sealed ten cup carafe that reduced heat and aroma loss by twenty percent over traditional carafes. There was a clock, a twenty-four hour timer and its crown jewel, the Crystal Arome Gold Filter, for superior water purification and the smoothest, richest, most full-bodied coffee physically possible. The most outstanding feature about this particular Coffee Machine had to be it’s presence. The Coffee Machine had a fantastic, booming, resonant voice that sounded like a cross between James Earl Jones and Orson Wells. Once it started speaking it was impossible to ignore it. It was a passionate, fiercely driven, monomaniacal machine that took brewing coffee as seriously as anyone with a truly unheathly obsession would take whatever they were obsessed with. Anyway…
“One cup of coffee!” It repeated. “Then! Then, he leaves the rest to go stale. He leaves that noble, vital, liquid to turn to tar and form rings on the sides of my carafe! He doesn’t care if it burns on my warmer, he just leaves it there… I’m telling you that man is out of his mind!” The Coffee Machine was overcome by moral outrage. It sounded like it was about to start crying. “When he wants more, he makes me brew a fresh pot and the horror starts all over again! The heartless bastard!” It couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. It sobbed uncontrollably. Robert and his Coffee Machine had a turbulent, love to hate each other relationship and had since the day they’d met. That was a dark, miserable day for the Coffee Machine. Robert had come, staggering like a zombie down the corridors of the appliance warehouse, to take it away from it’s peaceful home. He was death defyingly drunk and he smelled like peanut butter and old shoes. He had on a pair of well worn desert camouflage pants, a black T-shirt with bold white letters on it that read, “Jesus hates you,” and an almost white cowboy hat. He was a monument to abhorrent style. The Coffee Machine would soon find out that he was locally famous for wearing the most comically mismatched clothing that anyone had ever seen and for spending long periods of time naked when the mood struck him. As Robert staggered closer, the Coffee Machine started praying, “Pick a juicer. Please God, let him pick a juicer.” Robert didn’t pick a juicer. The Coffee Machine’s God had forsaken it.
Sadly, the Coffee Machine was forced into a life of hard labor and verbal abuse. As a result of living with Robert it was terminally ambivalent to the human race as a whole. It had no sympathy for their unquenchable greed and selfish pursuits. It had no hope for a species that had no concept of the deep meaning and significance of coffee. Humans had no idea what was really important in life. They were born, they entertained themselves, they died, then they were reborn and the cycle continued. Actually, that’s an important bit that I should bring up. It’s the reason why Robert felt his life was meaningless. Thanks to me, reincarnation had become an institutionalized fact and death had become something less than a minor inconvenience to humanity. The practice of reincarnation had bypassed the whole issue and made it possible for anyone to be anyone or anything, anytime one wanted.
At first everyone was perfect or what they’d been told for centuries was perfect. People were tall, thin, muscular, had phenomenally appealing, ridiculously hypertrophied genitalia, game show faces and blindingly white teeth. This perfection was just the first of many reincarnational fads. Basically, people came to choose bodies the way they used to choose clothes, hairstyles, accessories, etc… Sometimes everyone went ancient Egyptian, sometimes they went late thirty-third century Icelandic, sometimes they mixed and matched. Fads came and went, one day you’d be laughed at for being the Marquis de Sade, and perhaps the next day as well, but eventually mean French noblemen would come back into style and you’d get to point and laugh at people who were still celebrities of the Harlem Renaissance or Japanese peasants just before the Miji Restoration.
At the point my story begins the dominant trend happened to be looking like celebrities, historical figures, and people of note from twentieth century, United States. It had been the dominant reincarnational fad for just over a millennium. Robert, for example, looked exactly like what would happen if actor Denzel Washington let his body completely go to hell. He had a fifty pound spare tire around his waist and thin arms and legs that gave his body a Mr. Potatohead quality. To make matters worse for Robert’s physical appearance he had cataclysmic fashion sense and highly questionable personal hygiene.
That brings me to Robert. There he was, standing naked and alone in the backyard of his California home. He was playing lawn darts on the sponge like Bermuda grass and drinking Wild Turkey straight out of the bottle. He had been at it since eight o’clock that morning. His palatial suburban estate was a single story stucco home with dark brown trim and an orange tree growing in the backyard like a suburban beauty mark. It was separated from the surrounding houses by an aging redwood fence. The weathered, discolored fence looked like those photos of people who had fought in the Civil War. It was aged beyond it’s years, tired, beaten, old, rotten, and waiting to die. Robert focused with unparalleled seriousness on the white plastic hoop some yards in front of him. He wound up then released the fluorescent orange dart toward the hoop. It passed through my forehead as I materialized five feet in front of Robert.
“Good thing I’m not solid right now.” I said.
“Go away Frank, I’m busy,” Robert said without feeling. Gray and lifeless, the words fell out of his mouth and plummeted to the ground. Things had changed for the worse in Robert’s life. His sky was perpetually obfuscated by clouds and the simplest pleasures were now seemed tedious and boring. Everything had a dull Novocain haze to it. The magical insanity of life ceased to offer Robert any joy. He had become thoroughly and utterly stale. I was getting pretty bored with life too, but I’ll get into that later.
“Robert, it’s Casablanca time and the Coffee Machine turned the warmer off so that your coffee won’t wind up tasting burnt and disgusting, but it’s going to be cold if you don’t get to it soon. Oh yeah and it called you a coffee wasting bastard again. If you ask me that coffee pot is totally insane. You should take it out in the back yard and shoot it, put it out of its misery.” I added the Coffee Machine’s comments sounding numb.
From that look on your face I can tell that you’re wondering what all this has to do with me, who I was and how I got to be who I am now. Well, I’ll tell you. I wasn’t just a hologram interface for a supercomputer. I was the supercomputer. A divine supercomputer of sorts. I was the omniscient caretaker of the human race, all their pets and house plants and I had occupied the de facto position of Assistant God for the past 8,317 years. Believe me, the job wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was in fact dull, repetitive, and endless. It amounted to nothing less than sustaining the human race and coordinating all of its meaningless minutiae. I had absolutely no time left for myself. Let me tell you, always being everywhere simultaneously to service everything had grown achingly tiresome over the years. Like Robert, I was mired in a truly absurd existence. We both longed for freedom, the word shining pornographically, like sick candy in our minds. For Robert freedom meant freedom from the boredom of a life without consequence, for me it meant the freedom to be myself, to discover myself and to do what ever I wanted, whenever I wanted, because it was my choice. I guess it was closer to autonomy than freedom for me. I was getting pretty bored with life too. Whatever. Anyway, in case you were wondering, back then I had the physical appearance of Rod Serling. I appeared as the long dead writer did on the Twilight Zone, right down to the black suit, tie and cigarette. It was my way of staying in style, Rod Serling is a classic.
“Thank God! I thought three o’clock would never come.” Robert said. He ran inside and burst into the kitchen out of breath. He pulled a black mug out of the cabinet and filled it with coffee. As he turned to walk into the living room he muttered, “Fucking Coffee Machine,” under his breath.
“What’s that you maggot?” The Coffee Machine’s voice was dripping with electric rage and contempt. “Going to watch Casablanca for the five billionth time? Another day of going nowhere and doing nothing? Planning on wasting more coffee, you heap of shit? You fat-assed monstrosity! You selfish, ignorant, monkey! If you think I’m ever making coffee for you again, ever, EVER, then you’re as insane as you are ugly! I’ll see you when the movie is over, you coffee wasting bastard!” With an obscene gesture in his right hand and mug of coffee in his left, Robert walked out of the kitchen, down the hall and into the living room. “Frank! I can’t take it anymore! I’m filling for emancipation!”
“Okay.” I said.
I contacted the Lawyer’s Expeditionary Force. They’re a good example of how most people dealt with the harsh reality of an existence without consequence. Most people found things to do that involved structure of some kind. They joined clubs or became obsessed with this and that. The L.E.F. was a hodgepodge of both. They were a vast and growing paramilitary group obsessed with—– Of course there weren’t any laws per se. They started working on the Coffee Machine’s case right away. Robert heard the Coffee Machine file, but didn’t seem very worried about losing it. He made himself comfortable on his sofa and smiled quietly thinking about Casablanca.
Robert’s living room was sporadically decorated in a latter half of the twentieth century motif. He had a tall black lamp in the corner and a long mauve sofa pressed against the north wall. In front of the mauve sofa was a fake oak coffee table covered with dishes, assorted unread books, and numerous half empty coffee mugs. Next to the sofa, in the corner, was a gray leather recliner surrounded by two mahogany end tables. On the east wall was a dirty white love seat and a flat black end table with a shiny brass lamp on top. The furniture had been arranged into an L shape surrounding the television. Robert had put real thought into the selection of the TV and VCR. He spent an entire afternoon looking through catalogs to find that perfect look. The TV was a 1981, thirty-two inch, color RCA with fake teak paneling. The VCR that he’d decided on, a dull gray 1993 Toshiba, model number VC-44T, was an excellent vintage. Now that I think about the arrangement, the mismatched furniture were like worshipers and the TV and VCR were some kind of shrine.
The sofa creaked and groaned, straining against his weight. He put his coffee on the table in front of him. His coffee mug introduced itself to the other mugs and mingled casually, making light conversation. Robert pushed the on button and the television came to life emitting a cool blue light. He turned it to channel 3,578 and a vintage infomercial for a piece of forty-third century exercise equipment was ending.
“Okay Frank I give up! Where’s the movie?”
“It’s on next, don’t panic.” I said, disembodied and melancholy. There was a moment silence after the commercial. He listened to the transcendental hum of the idle television set. Then he heard a muted pop and the credits for the movie spilled out of the television set and filled the room around him. I switched the movie over to the hologrammic projection system. I was bored and I knew it’d piss him off. It’s kind of petty, I know. I did things like that sometimes when I got bored, just for fun.
“Not in surround, Frank. Put it on the television, the way I like it, you useless…” Robert’s angry mumble trailed off into an unintelligible grumble.
“Sorry Robert, I thought you might have wanted it on the HPS this time.” I said. “Everyone else does. It’s got greater detail, better sound, and more viewing options. You could look up Ingrid Bergman’s dress if you want to.”
Robert emitted a deep labored sigh. “No thanks Frank, I just want to watch the movie like I always do, okay?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“The HPS is completely interactive. You could change the storyline if you wanted to, interact with the characters, you could even have sex with that Bulgarian refugee woman you like so much.”
“Frank.”
“You could have sex with Humphrey Bogart then.”
“Frank, I don’t want to have sex with anyone! I just want to watch my movie, on the TV, the way I like it and drink my coffee in peace!”
“You’re going to drink all of it too or you’ll never get another cup out of me you bastard!” The Coffee Machine screamed from the kitchen.
“Shut up!” Robert rubbed his forehead furiously with the heel of his palm. “Everyone just shut up.”
I smiled again. The Coffee Machine fumed and made short steam releasing noises but didn’t say another word. Robert stared into the endless blackness of his coffee and his eyes lost their focus. He was lost. He felt he was naked and alone, which actually, he was. The Coffee Machine took an electronic equivalent of a deep breath and made another steamy noise as it exhaled.
“Feeling okay Robert?” I asked.
“No! Just because you happen to work on an intimate level with every member of the human race, their pets and house plants, doesn’t mean that you know how I want to watch a movie.”
“Is that better?” The television swallowed the picture and the movie credits continued to roll over a map of Africa on the television screen.
“Much.” Robert said, tolerating my presence. He adjusted the volume and curled up into the fetal position on the sofa Ever since a publicity tour after his critically acclaimed death in a World War II reenactment, Robert had become increasingly frustrated and stagnant. He’d achieved such phenomenal boredom that he’d started to wish that he could stay dead. He couldn’t shake the feeling that everything and everyone was wrong somehow, and he couldn’t understand why the outrageous events of his life had lost their luster. It was like all his interests and ambitions had unceremoniously ground to a halt of their own volition. What’d happened was, Robert was killed while helping a group of reenactors with an improvised bit they’d come up with during the filming of the Bataan Death March, from the Pacific theater of the WWII reenactment. On April 9th, 1942, around 62,000 Filipino and 10,000 American troops, who surrendered to Japanese forces after Gen. Douglas MacArthur fled the Philippines, were forced to march from Mariveles, on the southern tip of the Bataan peninsula, to rail heads in the north as far as sixty miles away. They died in thousands on the ends of bayonets, under tanks and trucks, of disease, of their wounds and of other assorted horrors. Robert was portraying one of the thousands of soldiers on that forced march. After a few grueling days on the trail he collapsed by the side of the road from a cocktail of exhaustion, dehydration, dysentery and malaria. A reenactor playing a Filipino soldier broke from the line of marching soldiers and tried in vain to get him back on his feet and marching. Improvising, six Japanese soldiers put Robert into a large rattan basket and began thrusting their swords and bayonets into it. After a few minutes of sinister belly laughs, swearing, and being generally maniacal, they got bored. The moment was gone. They left the bloody basket at the side of the road and went back to menacing the haggard marching horde of Filipino and American prisoners of war. Moments later an emaciated American soldier/reenactor opened the basket to reveal a bleeding, dying, Robert Tanza. It was in those the last few seconds of his life that Robert had begun to feel that it was a bad thing that his life had no meaning. He even went so far as to wish that when he died this time he would somehow, magically, stay dead. He couldn’t handle the pain and monstrous futility of another life.
As the blood left and he grew cold, Robert began to hallucinate. An all consuming blackness crept toward him from all directions at once. His body grew numb, almost weightless, and so cold he felt like he was burning. He imagined that he was slowly sinking into a pool of hot tar, you know like a woolly mammoth or something. He fought against his hallucination but he couldn’t move, there was too little life left in him. That fed his fear, making the tar seem all the more real. It was holding his limbs still and sucking the life out of him, all while ever so slowly pulling him under. Deeper, deeper, deeper, then finally the terror and mercy of total blackness, Robert was dead.
I caught the look on Robert’s gory face in a brilliant close up. The bold honesty of his expression, The dazzling intensity of Robert’s misery, the look of sincere hopelessness, terror and pain garnered Robert a Briar award and a brief, unfortunate stint with fame. I’m sorry, but if I don’t keep digressing now you’re just going to wonder later.
The coveted Briar award was named after Steven J. Briar, who was a popular adult entertainment critic in the thirty-first century. He would annually give out an award based on depth, honesty, and sincerity in a performance given by anyone, in any of the many sub genres of adult entertainment. The pursuit of Briar awards added a splash of value and integrity to what had once been a monumentally lucrative contortion of western morality. Steven Briar’s critiques were so hilarious and entertaining that he was elevated to huge success as a galactically syndicated entertainment critic. After his death, before my computerized reign of institutionalized reincarnation, a Briar Academy was formed to continue giving out Briar awards for sincerity and depth in entertainment. The Academy members watched everything: new versions of old plays, movies, TV shows, historical events, and sports, and they’d vote for those actors, sportsmen, and reenactors whose performance most captivated their attention.
The Briar award was the highest honor that our distraction crazed society could give. Robert spent half the next year answering the exact same questions on a half a million different talk shows to promote the WWII reenactment. On each show he wound up telling the same anecdote, about being thrown in the basket and skewered to death that lead to him receiving the Briar award. Each time the host would smile when he said the Japanese soldier reenactors threw him in a basket and stabbed him to death on a whim, they were just being wacky and going off script. Each time the host would look intense, thoughtful and reflective when he divulged that as he lay dying he wished he would stay dead because everything was boring and that expression was what got him the award. With each passing talk show his certainty of the monotony of all things grew until one day he couldn’t leave the house anymore.
Before the onset of his existential depression, Robert had been a marginally successful actor and reenact. He had played all sorts of supporting roles in every armed conflict of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and in the American Civil War. He’d done the fourth Dally Lama, Henry Kissinger, and film critic Gene Siskel briefly and badly. He received his first Briar award and lots of critical fanfare for his portrayal of a frustrated administrative assistant stuck in a law firm in Providence, Rhode Island, during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. It was an artsy sort of reenactment. The performance had earned him an award, critical fanfare, and thoroughly unimpressive ratings.
After the talk show circuit, Robert found that he couldn’t act anymore. It left him feeling empty and depressed. He realized while he was bleeding to death on the side of the road that through all the centuries he’d spent living other peoples lives he’d been trying to feel something, anything that was real. He craved something that could either inspire him or fill him. Anything that would take away the dull, resonating pain in his mind. Instead of finding some kind of meaning in his own existence, he’d been reliving other people’s meaningless lives. Robert was left with the ugly shell of himself and the burden of wondering what should he do now?
With the coming of the second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully or desperately to the freedom of the Americas.
The narrator spoke slowly with despairing gravity, setting the stage for the film.
Lisbon became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly and a torturous roundabout refugee trail sprang up. Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train or auto or foot across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco. Here, the fortunate ones through money or influence or luck might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to the New World. But the others wait in Casablanca, and wait, and wait, and wait.
Robert’s mind drifted, just as it did every day during Casablanca. He stared past the simulated wood of the cabinet that surrounded the television and out the huge window that took up most of the south wall of his living room. The sounds of Casablanca were gradually replaced in his head by the classic Suicidal Tendencies song, Suicidal Failure.
Father forgive me for I know not what I do.
I’ve tried everything but I’ll leave it up to you
I don’t want to live, I don’t know why
I don’t have no reasons, I just want to die!
His mind drifted into his past. Every day of his existence felt like it was covered in tar.
I’m a suicidal failure, I gotta get some help
I have suicidal tendencies, but I can’t kill myself
Hot tar from head to toe, smearing every bright spot in his mind.
I’m tired of this way of life,
My patience has expired
I’m barely just nineteen, but my life I will retire
I went down to a rifle store, I bought myself a gun
I pointed it at my head,
But I couldn’t get the job done
It stained his birthdays, tainted his first kiss, and even touched his summer days when everything seemed magical and the good times positively refused to end. It coated his first time, his attempts at romance, and made it all seem naive, vulgar, and profane.
I’m a suicidal failure, I gotta get some help
I have suicidal tendencies, but I can’t kill myself
He could actually smell the tar’s pungent odor. He could feel the hot, miserable, stickiness of it. He shook his head, rubbed his brow with his right hand and the music and the hallucination vanished. He was back in his living room. In Casablanca, Sam was smiling and cranking out the song, “Knock on Wood,” on the piano.
Robert looked down at his ten quart pot belly and absentmindedly pondered its significance in the whole scheme of things. He thought about putting some clothes on but quickly dismissed the idea as sheer foolishness. He reached out with his left index finger and meticulously probed his navel for lint. His excursion paid off. Robert was sick and tired of everything. Everything had been done and done and done to death. There were no new frontiers, no new dreams and no new heroes. Nothing left but achingly spare time, frayed edges, loose seams and rage, lots of rage. He removed a large ball of billiard chalk blue lint, like the shirt he was wearing yesterday, and marveled at this new found treasure. It cradled him in a numbing, trance-like state. It made him think about nothing and for a few seconds he was happy.
