(urth) Short Story 208*: Unrequited Love

[Marc Aramini]

UNREQUITED LOVE


 “Unrequited Love” first appeared in *Subterranean Press Magazine* in their
Summer 2007 edition. It has not been collected.


 SUMMARY:

The story begins with an epigraph from Shakespeare's “Sonnet 144”: “Two
loves I have of comfort and despair”. Our narrator claims that in the hopes
of doing good, he has in fact quite innocently done wrong. “There are
millions like me in that, and most acknowledge no smallest trace of guilt …
Soon, one hopes, a great, blood-colored hand whose fingers are tipped with
claws will close about them and drag them down to Hell.”

He claims that it is results that matter, and he has brought pain to
innocent hearts.

The narrator describes how he met the robotic girl Roberta, adopted by the
Robinsons because they “could not have a child of their own, or were
unwilling to undertake the travail and expense of a real child.” One
morning as the artificial Roberta walks to school, he asks her if she likes
school and what they are studying. In addition to school topics, she
mentions, “Stranger danger.” As her next door neighbor, he assures her he
is no stranger.

He asks what she would get if black and white were mixed, and she responds,
“Grey if you mean paint. Brown if you mean people.” Proceeding to ask the
square root of 256, she answers and replies, “Only that's not fair. It's
not first-grade work.” Roberta indicates that there are more boys than
girls in school, and that she enjoys tutoring the most because it truly
helps the teacher, Mrs. Morse, though she enjoys tutoring girls more.

Later, the narrator meets Julianne, a fellow student of Roberta's. In her
mumbling, sad way, she admits that she plays with Roberta and that her
father is a cook. Upon mentioning to her parents that Roberta is going to
be getting a puppy, they agree to get her one as well. The narrator quotes
Byron's epitaph to his dog Boatswain which begins “Beauty without vanity
...” and asks which breed she will be getting. “A robot. Roberta's going to
get a border terrier, though,” she says, hoping that the dogs will play
together as the children do. The narrator is “filled with a tragic anger”
as he walks on, and the gently curving streets and the partially artificial
grass offend him. “I hated every house I saw; their fresh pain and absurd
mixture of styles more than sufficient to account for any amount of
hatred.” He reveals that his true anger is because almost none of the
houses hold two children, and most housed none, like his own.

He remarks, “My kind had built a paradise, of which I was a part. A
paradise for machines, in which the human race, though welcome, could not
and did not thrive. In and around the filthy huts of the medieval peasants,
children ran and shouted, laughed and wept, and no doubt received sturdy
buffets when they made too much noise. There the family sang around a table
we would scorn. There grandmothers recounted wild tales before the fire,
tales full of bold boys who made good and honest country maidens who
tricked evil dwarves like me. Tales that were full of life because the
children were, and full of death, too, because each child had to learn that
death is life's shadow.”

He watches the girls as a week passes, remarking upon Roberta's perfection
and the unnatural sound of Julianne's laugh, which he hears once. He sees
Roberta get her dog, and a week or two later Julianne gets hers, a larger
“caricature of a Dalmatian”. He notes that Roberta's puppy plays with it as
he might a ball or another object. He thinks of a plan and, when Roberta's
puppy penetrates the hedge that separates his house from hers, tempts it
with scraps of meat. When he returns the dog to the girls, he asks, “Have
you two ever though of trading puppies for a few days?” He makes up a story
about doing something similar as a child, and Roberta asks if Julianne
could give up Robber for a week if she relinquishes the real dog, Rover.

The next day, he sees that Julianne has the robotic Robber once again,
saying that she likes him better, offering only that he doesn't mess the
carpet. Later, he confronts the artificial girl Roberta directly, and she
reveals that both girls were crying over recess and she reveals that
“Robber thinks he's a real dog.” Her words “held a world of agony.”

Roberta says, “He's – he's a *thing,* but he thinks he's a real dog,”
before she runs into her house.

He soon sees Dan and Tamara Robinson out looking for their dog, and on a
hunch he finds out Julianne's address to find Rover, “lying quietly by the
side of the house, half hidden by shrubbery, under a window that I would
guess was that of Julianne's bedroom.”

“God forgive me! I picked him up and carried him home,” reveals the
narrator. The next day he sees that Robber has come to wait for Roberta on
her way to school. “During the weeks that followed, I say him there twice …
I have never seen him again. Julianne says they keep him chained up.”



 COMMENTARY:
As in so many of Wolfe's stories, the thing that most frightens and hurts
the human characters is symbolically akin to looking into a mirror:
Julianne doesn't like Rover because he makes a mess and has biological
flaws – she knows that her knowledge, capabilities, and even perhaps her
appearance are inferior to Roberta's. When she has Rover, it makes her
aware of her own natural shortcomings. The narrator notes that the only
time he hears her laugh, it is unnatural, and that she mumbles everything,
clearly signifying a lack of self-confidence. The same reflection pains
Roberta, in what is surely one of Wolfe's most pathos-filled scenes, as the
artificial girl condemns Robber for being a “thing” who thinks he is a real
dog, something which she herself obviously does as well. For all her
talents and charm, she will not confront the fact that she is not a “real”
girl.

The narrator himself cannot stand the artificiality of the modern world,
knowing that it is contrived and that the idyllic memories he has of real
children playing together highlights his sterile loneliness, as he
describes himself as something akin to an evil dwarf without children of
his own. While his plans are not entirely altruistic for the children, as
he was hoping to teach them a lesson about the joining of the artificial
and the real, there is no reason to believe that he actually wishes the
girls harm or has any kind of sexualized intention for them. It is the
story of a lonely old man who resents his society, but in his attempt to
make it better, he has opened up the emptiness of modern life to everyone
involved, from the live girl to the robotic dog. The dogs recognize their
potential masters quite readily on the basis of some instinct, but the
girls both shun the dogs because it reveals something about themselves they
cannot face.

The idea that humanity has favored increasingly automated systems must
concern Wolfe, yet quite clearly the anguish and pity both the girls and
both the dogs inspire do not create an impression of true authorial bias
against machines. One further irony is that the human girl imitates the
mechanical one in getting a dog, but when given the opportunity to own the
original inspiration for her desire, she shuns it. The unreturned love that
the dogs feel for those that are most like themselves shows that it is for
the most part the sentient creatures with full self-awareness who fear to
see themselves as they truly are.

Despite the quite common claims that Wolfe's fiction at times can be
sexist, the young girls come off quite sympathetically here. In addition,
the preponderance of boys in the very small class (5 to 2) might show a
cultural preference for male children as the only child in a family, and
there does seem to be an implied criticism of this bias for masculine
children (this cultural bias can easily be seen in overpopulated countries
such as China, for example, which has actually created a real gender
imbalance). There is no true textual indication of selective breeding and
engineering, however. Certainly and obviously, for natural breeding to
work, a gender balance is preferable. The small class size further
emphasizes the relative sterility of this future.



  CULTURAL AND LITERARY ALLUSIONS:


 In addition to mentioning the famous dog Lassie, the text also mentions
Grayfriars Bobby, the 19th century Skye Terrier who supposedly sat on his
master's grave for over a decade.

The text begins with the first lines of Shakespeare's Sonnet 144:


 Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.

To win me soon to hell, my female evil

Tempteth my better angel from my side,

And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,

Wooing his purity with her foul pride.

And, whether that my angel be turn’d fiend,

Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,

But being both from me both to each friend,

I guess one angel in another’s hell.

Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,

Till my bad angel fire my good one out.


 Even though the line “the better angel is a man right fair” might be
transmuted to a jingoistic attitude favoring natural humanity, the ending
scene of the robot dog longing for Roberta shows us that it, too, loves
fully and loyally, and that its love has resulted in the loss of its
freedom. The dichotomy between the artificial and natural world is also
mirrored by our narrator's claims of innocent intentions leading to
damnation and hell. His own life, a not-so-subtly disguised disappointment
full of despair, seeks to achieve contentment, but in so doing creates even
more widespread despair – it is impossible for the narrator, the
characters, and even society to recognize the reality of their situations:
“whether that my angel be turn'd fiend … but being both from me both to
each friend, I guess one angel in another's hell.” The mirror which the
narrator holds up to the dogs and the girls reveals the emptiness they all
feel in the glancing at the truth.

One final possible reference to Shakespeare's *Titus Andronicus* is in the
form of Tamara Robinson's first name . Tamara is a wrathful woman in the
play, and she allows Titus' daughter to be raped by her sons. In
retaliation, Titus kills the men, bakes them into a pie, and feeds them to
their mother Tamara. This violent, sad end to both family lines is
obviously much tempered, as this Wolfe story is devoid of violence, but for
a mother to consume her children shows an awful, unnatural end to a natural
lineage. This may bear some thematic relationship to the idea that these
family lines are being disrupted in a potentially harmful way.


 NAMES:

 Clearly robots are named as Robber and Roberta are. Dan and Tamara
Robinson have first names, and while the similarity in sound for their last
name is suggestive, they are clearly humans, as this joining of artificial
and organic is the catalyst that offends the narrator and leads him to
concoct his experiment.


 Roberta means “famed, bright, or shining.” The last name Robinson means
“son of Robin/Robert” (which also means “famed, bright, or shining”).
Having human characters with a last name implying the child of a robotic
name shows the partial subordination of humanity to the mechanized, sterile
ideal. Dan means “God is my judge.” Tamara means a “date palm tree”.
Perhaps the reference to Shakespeare's *Titus Andronicus* is implied,
discussed above.


 Julianne can mean “downy grace” and may also be a feminine form of Julian,
which means “youthful”. (Rover means “wanderer”, though it is a generic
enough name for a dog).


 CONNECTION TO OTHER WORKS:

Wolfe's sympathetic treatment of dogs is well documented, extending back
through *The Book of the New Sun* to more recent stories such as “Dog of
the Drops” or “Rattler”. The relationship between man and machines is much
less problematic in *The Book of the Long Sun*, but there is a strain of
potential tension chronicled in “Counting Cats in Zanzibar”, “All the Hues
of Hell”, and other earlier stories. This particular story is filled with
pathos for almost everyone involved, and the sympathetic young female
characters is similar to the treatment of Vivianne in “The Magic Animal”,
also published in 2007.


 RESOURCES:

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 144”. Shakespeare Online. 2014. Web. 19 March
2015. http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/144.htmlWolfe, Gene. “

Unrequited Love”. Subterranean Press Magazine (Summer 2007).
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2007/fiction_unrequited_love_by_gene_wolfe
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