11. Mechanical Servants LLC
Mechanical Servants LLC
Juan Martinez
For the past seven years, roughly at the same time every day, I’ve been receiving an eBay email alert for mid-twentieth-century vending machine novelty products from the Mechanical Servants company of Elgin, Illinois.
I live in Chicago proper, in Albany Park, not far from their headquarters.
I must have set the alert long before I moved here, long before I knew of them, but still: I want to see the place for myself, though I imagine the company to be defunct or inactive, and I don’t have a driver’s license or a car, and Uber is too expensive, and taking the bus would take too long, and my dissertation is due by the end of this week.
I’m thinking of going to the company regardless after the last two eBay alerts, which I could read only after I found my reading glasses: one alert was for a set of miniature handcuffs still in their milky plastic clamshell bubble, the other for a small and disturbingly accurate replica of my first—my only—girlfriend’s childhood home in Dade City, Florida, the miniature childhood home also encased in a milky plastic shell.
My girlfriend, Becky, passed away fourteen years ago, a year after we broke up. We had been together for two years, during the end of my first of many master’s degrees in Central Florida, and we said our goodbyes when I moved to Illinois to pursue my first doctorate.
She loved Florida; she hated the cold, so we parted ways.
It is early January right now and all Chicago is frozen shut.
Snow everywhere. In the worst of a Midwestern winter it feels like light leaks out of every bulb, like the gloom sucks it in just as the cold refuses to stay out.
I could not blame Becky for choosing the sun of Florida over the perpetual cloud cover of Illinois.
A week after my arrival in Chicago, Becky wrote to tell me she was not feeling well. She got unaccountably dizzy, her email said. Her vision blurred. Her hands trembled when she tried to make the art she’d been making since we were together.
I meant to email her back, but there was always a chapter to be written, an article to look up for the bibliography, and so it was a shock to hear from her parents a few months later with the news.
She had had a brain tumor. The surgery was not successful.
I was invited to the funeral but could not afford to go.
I was at the time still unsure if it was okay for me to travel: I’m a Colombian citizen with a Colombian passport, and I didn’t know if the passport would be enough.
(To be honest, I am always a little unsure what I can or cannot do, where I can or cannot go, even now.) It’s the same passport from my time in Florida, decades old.
Long expired. I’m supposed to go to the embassy to get it taken care of, but I haven’t.
It has become more and more difficult for me to leave my tiny apartment, my dilapidated laptop, and my half-completed chapters.
I didn’t cry, though I was expecting to.
We had broken up, we lived in different states, so maybe it was natural not to cry.
I did wake up late at night, my body covered in sweat, possibly screaming, and if so, likely screaming Becky’s name.
I still do sometimes, particularly when faced with the prospect of an unplanned, unexpected trip.
I must have set the eBay alert myself, though I have no memory of doing so, and I was not a heavy drinker at the time.
I had just started to have a glass or two of wine with dinner after a decade of sobriety.
I’m in my fifties. For a long stretch of my dissolute youth in Colombia, I was a heavy drinker, and it was actually around the same time of my initial encounter with Mechanical Servants that I took up exercise and stopped drinking altogether.
It was only when I sobered up that I realized the gravity of my situation: I had flown into the States from Colombia on a tourist visa.
I overstayed and barely managed to stay in the country on a hastily arranged F-1 student visa conjured out of thin air through the kindness of a single International Student Office director in Orlando, also since deceased.
I did not mean to keep on getting degrees, but state schools generally pay your tuition and I got a stipend—not much, enough to live on—and after every degree I had a year to work, and so I sort of fell into it. I kept waiting for someone to tell me to stop, but no one did.
This morning the eBay alert was less alarming.
I had to find a pair of reading glasses again: they were all over the room, and I kept stepping on them.
I tried always keeping them by the desk, but it always felt like the glasses were running away, heading off to a tidier, more established, less lonely apartment.
The alert was for a robot keychain you assembled yourself.
I imagined some American kid in some hotel lobby haranguing a tired parent for this particular toy, asking for a quarter.
Or else a father traveling solo and buying it unprompted for their child, who is in some other state, a gift from a lonely road trip.
It wouldn’t be me, at any rate. Not my road trip, not my child, not my robot keychain. Becky and I had both agreed that we didn’t want kids. We didn’t believe in marriage.
The very real possibility had not entered my mind that marriage would be one of the few ways for me to stay legally and indefinitely in the country.
That we loved each other enough or more than enough for it to be a real and happy solution to a problem that was now intractable and (soon) catastrophic.
The next email alert is for a set of novelty wedding rings, and the one after that is for two babies. The same milky clamshell for all items.
When Becky met me, I was fit.
Before and after our time together, I was fat.
I loved, still love, all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. I loved, still love, beer—particularly strong Belgians and imperial stouts.
If I spoke to anyone it was mostly to the other students who worked the computer labs, most of whom were computer science majors and few of whom shared any of my interests in anthropology, in the sociology of postwar 1950s America, in the odd entangled history of industrial and ephemeral films of the 1970s and the independent horror movies of the same decade.
I largely connected with people with those same interests through classes and through some specialized online forums.
No one, including Becky, ever truly knew about what happened to my parents in Colombia, or why going back was not an option, or why I didn’t care to talk about my home country, why I grew restless and silent when the topic was broached.
I am still behind on my chapter.
This morning the eBay alert is for a tiny doll dressed in the traditional black skirt and embroidered white blouse of a Colombian campesina.
I was not surprised.
By now I was used to the email alerts and their eerie, intrusive quality, and they felt as harmless and as routine as what I usually got if I clicked on anything at all, or thought about anything at all, and then saw companies advertising it on Instagram or Reddit.
I emailed my advisor to assure her I’d have the chapter in by tomorrow.
An eBay alert from Mechanical Servants arrived soon after: my own laptop as a miniature toy, encased in plastic.
Just send the envelope, I thought.
And then I said it, though I was alone. “Send it,” I said to the empty room as snow fell, heavy and gray, and winter blanketed the window. I said it more than once over the course of the day, as I typed one dead sentence after the other into the dissertation file.
“Send the envelope,” I said again. Send it. “Send the envelope. Send the envelope and I’ll come to you. I will. I promise.”
Send it.
I first found the envelope as an undergraduate, the year before I met Becky.
I was hungover, alone and living in Orlando and working the graveyard shift at the campus computer lab.
I smoked incessantly. I often couldn’t afford cigarettes, particularly near the end of the month, and I learned from a coworker in the same situation that you could smoke whatever remained on the butts that had been put out in the ashtrays right by the lab doors.
You didn’t get much of a choice: sometimes the choking menthol of a Newport or the kiddie-straw rush of a Virginia Slims. Sometimes I remembered to pass the lighter flame under and over the filter to sanitize it, and sometimes I’d forget, and that’s how I moved through the world.
I worked late, went to classes unwashed and half-asleep, went home to a lot of Natural Ice and a dinner of hot dogs and instant mashed potatoes, and then I’d pass out and wake up to start everything again at midnight.
There was this odd pocket of time between the end of work and my first class, sometimes an hour, sometimes just half, where nothing was open, and so I took to walking.
I walked everywhere. Home was twenty minutes one way, too far for the time I had.
It was easier, better, just to wander the empty campus—all of it misty with Florida fog and most of it just low, dark, solid red-brick buildings.
I knew, of course, that you could not stay forever at a university.
I was already close to thirty. I was too old to be an undergraduate.
But I could stay, I thought that night. I could stay forever. Why leave?
I must imagine myself happy back then.