For the Love of Drones

DW Ardern

I named it Pete, after my uncle. Is that a weird thing? It kinda feels like a weird thing. My uncle had drowned in a riverboat accident when the waters swelled in a freak thunderstorm that lasted three days and flooded the Mississippi delta and beautiful nowhere of bayou towns from Rosedale to Lake Providence. Motorhomes floating downstream and cars upturned like turtles.

People say that’s how we got our alligator problem. I don’t know what to believe anymore.

It was a sentimental gesture. Pete, I called it from that first day opening up the box. The first time I fell in love with a machine. Dropped off with whirring loving grace by a delivery bot from Standard International. The hover-drone stork to my computerized bundle of joy.

The way the winged sentinel watched over me with its cold blue sensors, it felt paternal. It did remind me of Pete.

Everybody else already had a pet drone. I was a latecomer, the neighborhood luddite with the cranky push mower since I can’t stand the smell of gas. I would be out mowing my burnt lawn of straw grass, baking in the heat of another brutal summer day. And up the street would come the Sullivans with their three boys and ZX-500 flying high as a kite. Or the Bartletts with their custom-mod FL-200A racer outfitted with a stroller seat for little Alice. Or nosy Mrs. Parker with her D49-B copter drone spying on the lacy drapes.

Was I jealous? No. I never cared what the neighbors thought of my hermit life. Was I lonely? Yes. Every day waking up in an empty bed of memories. I missed Evelyn. I missed our quiet life together.

I had no friends except for Howard, gone and moved to Denham Springs. He’d call every other day at noon. We’d chat for an hour or so, about the weather or the alligator problem. He’s the one that suggested I buy a drone, after I’d been complaining about yard work and my bad back.

“Or you could adopt one,” he said. “The Air Force deprograms military drones for domestic sale. They’re cheap.”

“That doesn’t exactly sound safe,” I said.

“You are getting old, Martin. Imagine it as a personal helper for the chores.” 

I ordered it on a Saturday morning. It arrived that afternoon. A surprisingly small box. No assembly required. A refurbished YK-3800 with turbo boosters. Dual-core sensors, GPS tracking, 360° flex-rotation gimbal bays, solar auto-recharge. A curiously sleek machine.

I pressed the power button. And, well, nothing happened. I tried again several times. I held the button until my thumb got numb and finally gave up. I left it in its cardboard box in the living room. Styrofoam peanuts and disappointment. A defective gift from the future. I went about my day.

I was cooking an early supper of fried catfish and sautéed greens, listening to the latest news on the radio about a doomsday cult of fishermen terrorizing swamps south of Baton Rouge, when I heard a bang, purr, and whiz. The cardboard box was rattling on the rug like a raccoon in garbage can. Its flaps burst open with a beam of light.

The machine rose from the box like a magic trick. A slow levitation. Its wings shot out full span and oscillated like spinning whisks. Its robot eyes sparked with a pulse of indigo blue. It looked like a metallic dragonfly. And it was alive.

Those eerie blue sensors scanned its immediate surroundings, transforming my living room into an impromptu discotheque. Pinpoint beams roved over my couch, bookshelves of mystery novels and cookbooks, the antique cabinet with the fancy porcelain and Evelyn’s collection of gnome bobbles. The sensors focused and bathed my body in a spectral wash – bald head, bowling shirt, greasy spatula gripped in my fist – as if the machine were studying something important.

I flipped the scorched fish and walked over from the kitchen. The drone zoomed away, looking for a route of escape. I moved onto the living room rug. Two very careful, very cautious steps in its direction. Hello, I said. Eye to eye. Man to machine. And I swear to god, those indigo eyes blinked.

My hand reached out to touch it. The drone tilted on axis and flew into the china cabinet.

What are you going do? Sometimes life hands you a nervous animatronic robot and a living room scattered with broken china. And, well, you just gotta dump the pieces in the trashcan with your ruined supper and move on.

I don’t let these little hiccups in life bother me. Not anymore. Not after the thyroid cancer. Lump low on her throat like a bullfrog, undetectable in the very beginning. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. Makes the guilt a little easier to swallow, the heartache a little easier to bury, deep down someplace where when it calls your name at night, it sounds like an echo, not a whisper. I remember the first time I noticed. Sundown on the porch, hard light making silhouettes of the slats, hot rays glancing her neck, that odd bulge glistening there, slick with sweat. Hay fever, allergies, they’d been getting worse with the weather too, that’s all we thought it was. I don’t let these little hiccups bother me anymore. Not after holding her hand as she let go from the prison of her body, unhooked from the ventilator. She wasn’t living. She wasn’t happy. She was holding on for me.

Pete didn’t know any better. Not yet. I spent the weekend reading the YK-3800 owner’s manual with the drone locked in my garage where it wasn’t liable to do much damage besides bang around old paint cans. I fiddled with its presets for domestic tasks. I committed the vocal commands to memory – wake, sleep, lift, descend, spin, fetch, stay. We practiced together. The drone became less frantic and more at ease with its new master.

Once I’d figured out the basics, I let the drone back inside the house. Pete followed me everywhere. Analyzing my movements, mimicking my routines. It was annoying, sure, but I understood from the manual that this was their way of learning how to be good helpers. After all, as a repurposed guardian drone, this was part of Pete’s root function – to observe and defend.

The next morning, I awoke in alarm to a jangling Mexican radio at dawn. Pete was hovering over my bed, salsa music blasting from its speakers. A plump orange clutched in its landing gear claws like a grenade. Its sensors targeted my retina and shot out a focused ray, measuring the dilation of my pupils as I became suddenly alert, suddenly terrified this insane machine was going murder me before breakfast.

The drone twitched. The orange burst in its claws, exploding pulp and juice all over my bedspread.

Pete was prone to these nervy fits. But I didn’t give up. When I commit to something, I see it through to the end. I’ve always been that way. How many times did she tell me to go? How many times did I refuse? Through every biopsy, every surgery, every chemo session. In and out of the hospital. In and out of remission. Sometimes it’s just trial and error, the doctors said. You better damn well try harder, I told them, this is my wife. Sometimes I’m stubborn, too stubborn. I refused to leave her side, I refused to give up hope. A lot of times I wasn’t helping, I see that now, overcome by a deep anger at her helplessness and mine. I felt like I was failing Evelyn every day. Watching her recede week after week, as if the sinuous plastic tubes were draining her life instead of feeding it. Her long rattled breaths like a salt marsh tide, her frail body vanishing into those thin white sheets. It was worth it, being with her, even during the worst of it.

I spent countless hours programming Pete, flipped on its dome, wings asleep. Those indigo eyes always moving. What an awful word, programming. So inhuman, so strict in its language. It was more intimate than a line of code, a flush of data in 1s and 0s.

It felt good to have a project. It gave me an odd sense of purpose. Something to do, you know, besides fret over horrors in the morning paper. Droughts in California, zombie bees in New Mexico, militia men staked out in the deserts of Texas awaiting an alien invasion or hostile government takeover of their farmland.

We were getting to know each other, learn each other. Minor kinks were to be expected. Misunderstandings between man and machine, like putting my good shoes in the dishwasher, or the laser attack on Ms. Dubois’s cat, or its persistent attempts to have sex with the toaster oven.

And then there was that first evening coming home after work at the processing plant. The total satisfaction I felt when I walked in the front door to find my quiet house so cozy, so clean, so well-loved. The living room tidied, books and curios dusted on the shelves. My kitchen spotless, shining in liberation from its decade-old patina of grease. The broken porcelain had been fetched from the trashcan, fused back together, and arranged in the china cabinet. It felt like home again, for the first time in a long time. I was thankful. I was grateful. I almost cried.

Howard laughed when I told him on the phone.

“It seems you’ve very much taken to your new pet,” he said.

“It’s not a pet… it’s more like a friend,” I told him.

“Well now I’m jealous. I thought I was your only friend,” he joked. “Take care of yourself, Martin. I heard a cold front is brewing new storms off the coast.”

Pete was an instant celebrity with the neighborhood kids. We would go out for our afternoon stroll around the block and there would be Mr. Petrov and his twins or Mrs. Moore and her pig-tailed girls walking home from school.

The children would marvel at Pete. Its dragonfly wings with neon-green stripes, the way the drone would glide through the air like an ace pilot, performing aerial tricks. They would drop their book bags and chase it down the street with wild glee.

I would shout roll! and Pete would flip three cartwheels overhead, nosedive under my legs, and perch on my shoulder. Do it again, they’d scream. And I would tell Pete to spin! and the drone would twirl so high into the sky I was afraid I’d lose it forever. Moments after its rocket ascent, a rogue black mote would always surface from the deep blue, whipping through the clouds. Pete would spiral down at breakneck speed and spin its wings like a hummingbird while the children clapped.

It always felt like we were on parade. Whenever we crossed paths with another drone, Pete would default to defensive maneuvers. It would start circling the threat, suspicious of any stranger in its air space. Most encounters passed without incident.

One evening, Pete and I were out for a stroll under the pantheon of country stardust when a gunshot thundered off into the silent night.

It was the General, my neighbor. Two houses down in the dilapidated Georgian colonial with chipped clapboard and pillars riddled by termites. He was a former gold-star officer from the war, a widower and recluse like myself. I always felt a certain kinship with the kooky old man.

He sat up in his rocking chair and emptied out dead shells from his shotgun.

“My apologies,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

He pointed the shotgun barrel at his target – a six-foot alligator that had crawled out of the marsh onto his battlefield lawn in search of food.

“They’re getting worse with the heat,” he said. “Pray for rain.”

Pete zoomed a safe boundary distance from the porch and analyzed the old man in the rocker. The General stared back in a squint, his good eye and his bad eye twitching. A cool standoff. The old man’s grip tightened on the shotgun. Pete lost interest. The drone glided over to the dying alligator and began prodding the strange specimen with its metal talons.

“You got one of them bucket of bolts, too, huh?” he said. “Never would have guessed.”

There was twinge of betrayal in his voice. He unwrapped a piece of salt-water taffy and popped it in his mouth. He chewed, slow and serious, working the soft candy over in his jaw.

“It’s helpful,” I said.

“I don’t judge people. A man minds his own,” he said. “I wouldn’t trust it, though. I’ve seen what those things can do in the desert. Mark my word, boy. Machine is machine. Ain’t got no heart.”

Somewhere in the tangled-up mess of my own heart, I knew what the General said was true. But it felt good to have company.

It’s funny how much I needed this, some sort of companionship to fill the void. The convenience became commonplace, part of my necessity. Pete and I were a team. I grew attached to the need for something constant in my life beyond my wonky knees that ached at the mere thought of rain. Mountains crumble, seas swell, and I had Pete.

We settled into an automated routine. Every morning, Pete would wake me up with a serenade of Cat Steven’s “Morning Has Broken” at 7am, fluttering above my bed. Downstairs, there would be a hot cup of earl grey tea waiting. Fresh squeezed orange juice, scrambled eggs, perfectly browned and buttered toast. Morning paper on the table with a sharpened pencil for the crossword.

Pete would water the plants and dust the living room while I would read the news and eat my breakfast. It was all too familiar, all too fast, almost. That feeling of peace, like when Evelyn and I used to share our mornings together in silence, contemplating the day ahead, as if nothing could go wrong with her by my side. I didn’t know why but I felt the same strange comfort from this misfit drone.

Whenever I’d leave for work, Pete would bound out the front door and circle my car like an angry wasp, knocking against my windshield as I put it in reverse and drove away. In the evening, we would cook dinner together. Pete prepping vegetables while I manned the pans. On weekends, the drone would help out with chores. Tidy the house, mow the straw grass yard, fly the trash to the transfer station.

Sometimes we’d drive out to the southern falls of the Ouachita River. I would sit out on boulders over the white-water rush while Pete would chase warblers and kestrels over the wetlands of the broad river. It was a timeless place, a favorite daytrip spot for Evelyn and I where she’d paint her messy watercolors and I’d fly-fish for perch, or we’d just sit for hours and talk with our bare feet hanging over the rapids like we were children again. She’d kept me young at heart. Now that she was gone, I felt so very old.

There were many quiet nights when Pete and I would sit out under the moonlight on my back porch. We would watch the swampy weeds and cattails swaying in the mud creek woods. We would listen to the marsh breathing, wind sighing, the old wisdom of trees. Alright, so maybe Pete couldn’t hear that part, being a robot and all with no analog for the world’s whimsy, our romance with the past.

Pete was ever present. A being of the future, my loyal guardian, always on lookout, searching the darkness with its indigo blue. And there I was this fossil, this relic of another time, living in my memories.

Making friends in the neighborhood was easy with Pete. There were invitations to barbeques, cribbage night at the Holloways, the moonshine incident with Mrs. Valdez after too many cups of spiked sweet tea at the neighborhood potluck.

Mrs. Valdez and I were the last ones left at the party, unwinding out on lawn chairs by a leech pond in her backyard. Pete was chasing her German Shepard up and down the rambling picket fence, a mud-staked barrier at the borderline of the woods to keep her dog from wandering off and alligators from slithering in.

She rested her hand on mine. Maybe I did lead her on by not pulling away. But, you know, I felt sorry for her. She’d lost her husband to a heart attack at an early age and never remarried. I had thirty wonderful years with Evelyn. The last five were hell, but even sitting by her side in the hospital, every moment was a gift. Reading her mystery novels until she fell asleep. All those lonely nights watching the rise and fall of her chest. There was no dawn, there was no sun until she would open her eyes in the morning and whisper my name.

Mrs. Valdez glanced over in her chair with a moonstruck gaze. I knew that look, soft and vulnerable, like when I danced with Evelyn on our second date, quarters in the jukebox of a roadhouse in downtown Lake Charles. I don’t remember the song. But I do remember the jackrabbit thump of my heart, stars aligned under those tacky colored lights. Somehow I had the courage to brush the long curls from Evelyn’s face and chance a kiss.

“Do you ever miss being with someone?” Mrs. Valdez asked.

Evelyn wasn’t just someone. She was my everything. But I didn’t tell her this. Mrs. Valdez leaned in closer. I dodged out of the way, reaching for the bottle of peach brandy.

I poured a heavy helping in my cup.

She resettled herself in her lawn chair, “You don’t need anyone, do you Martin? You just need some thing.”

I drank my sweet tea and watched Pete tease her German Shepard, swooping down and soaring high whenever the dog came charging after it.

Howard called around 4 p.m. to warn me about the storm. I’d already heard the news on the radio. Emergency advisories, newscasters drumming up the panic.

I rushed home from the office, driving like a madman through the pouring rain, skidding with misbehaving automated cars on the highway. There were three accidents and a detour caused by a floating herd of cattle in the flooded road. The sad confused faces of those cows flipped on their bellies, drowning in the swelling waters.

Into the darkness, I drove, faster, faster. Thunderclouds loomed like a giant spaceship above the world casting its curses in a storm of lightening and terror.

When I arrived at the house, Pete was nowhere to be seen. His watchman’s post on the roof abandoned, thrashing rain wearing at the shingles. The front door whipped open from the fierce wind. No sign of Pete in the living room. Upstairs, downstairs, in the garage.

I ran outside into the torrent of rain. Boots sunk deep in the muddy lawn, puddles in the straw grass. Cattails swaying in the mud creek woods, cypress shaking in the bowered darkness. I screamed out his name. Fear and the beating heart, mouth full of rain. I searched for Pete everywhere. And then I heard a familiar sound.

Under the porch, somewhere deep behind the latticework. Claw marks in the mud, a huge hole dug out in the straw grass. Something waiting, something with eyes that flashed wide with lightening clashes in the night.

The alligator was so strangely silent, so calm in the thunderstorm. The way it lolled its heavy head, the way it crept sluggish out of that hole. This prehistoric monster with its thick grey scales, rainwater spilling down the chutes of its spiked ridges. A beautiful creature, a deadly creature that snapped its jaws with a low throated growl and swish of its giant tail.

I turned to run. Boots slipping, legs fumbling, falling hard on my hip in the thick mud. The alligator slithered out from under the porch, all six feet of it, and stalked closer. Only a couple yards from a horrific death. I’d read the news reports. I’d seen the gruesome photos in the paper. I was ten seconds from becoming a headline.

Out of the pitch-black night and blinding rain, those indigo eyes flared with a whiplash wind and a high-pitched whir. My hero, my Pete. Copters soaring, zapping bursts of electricity from its claws. The drone zoomed low and latched onto the monster’s snout. The alligator convulsed in shock, thrashed to loosen its grip. Pete wrestled with the alligator, its bloodied metal talons punctured deep in the slippery armor.

The stormy sky lit up. In a flash, it was over. Fireworks and mayday disaster. Pete crash-landed in a fit of sparks on the muddy lawn beside the bleeding monster.

I carried the wreckage to the garage. Its metal shell felt deader than the rusted tools on the shelves. A cradle of nuts and bolts. Burnt wire and toasted circuits. Overheated and waterlogged. The drone unleashed a cough of steam when I unscrewed the panel. Its blue-eyed sensors were on the fritz, flickering at an erratic tempo. I powered it down and wiped out the mechanical underbelly with a rag. I drained out the water and left Pete there.

I worried myself to sleep that night, praying all would be right in the morning. Cleared away like a storm cloud nightmare. Out there in the terrible rain, I swear I could hear the alligator dying on my lawn. I shut my eyes and listened to the last moans of the poor monstrous creature.

I was crushed, grief-stricken in a strange disconnected way. Short-circuited like my dear friend and its gutted wires upturned on my workbench. I’m no engineer. I’m no mechanical genius. But I’ve always been a fast study from the curve balls of life. Like learning how to cook, clean, and dress a bed with someone in it when Evelyn got so weak she couldn’t even lift herself without losing her breath. Like learning the patience and the power of prayer.

Standard International dismissed my desperate plea for help. The automated voice on the other end of the line told me to destroy it. Put the wreckage in burn-safe e-trash receptacle, and incinerate the pieces. Immediately. Do not attempt to reanimate.

I argued, I pleaded, I demanded answers. I threw the phone down and did my own research. Wire schematics, diagnostic tests, factory resets. I soldered, I hoped, I prayed. I buried the alligator out in the swampy cattails.

Three months, I worked on Pete. Three months, I prayed with little progress. Howard called me crazy. The neighbors complained about the racket, the smell of burnt metal. And then miracle beyond miracles. One morning in the garage, a flicker of life, spark of something. I pressed the button. A hum, a motor purr from beyond. A flash of indigo blue, its wings rotating in a slow revival.

Pete rose from the oil-stained concrete floor. It studied me in confusion. We stared at each other for a solid minute. And then the drone flew off into a stack of paint cans.

I can’t describe to you the relief I felt upon its resurrection. Sure, Pete was stunted, his erratic fits more extreme, but they seemed to smooth out as the weeks went by. We fell into a familiar routine. Every morning, our standard alarm. Scrambled eggs and orange juice, clothes pressed, living room tidied. I felt grateful and guilty for having this reanimated robot back in service like nothing had happened. I tried to reprogram Pete and give the drone a rest. I just wanted the company. I didn’t care about the rest of it.

I knew something was wrong. There were plenty of warning signs. The jerk and flutter, that clicking tick in the wing rotation, the pan of cold light, the smell of burning polymer. Egg shells in the omelet, mismatched socks, broken windows from banging around the house at slightest sign of bad weather, the mutilation of my toaster oven. But I ignored it.

We started our afternoon strolls again. It was a way of returning to normalcy. The neighborhood kids kept asking after Pete. I felt ashamed for hiding it like an invalid. An old guilt. Difficult to shake. Pete seemed happy. It had returned to its roost on the roof, started rising with sunshine again. The drone had been acting like its old self. How was I to know?

I still feel like the little brat got what he deserved. That’s not what I told the police, of course. Pete and I had been invited by the Bartletts to Alice’s sixth birthday party, and this snot-nosed kid had swatted the drone with his sticky cake-covered hands. Yes, maybe Pete did overreact when it lifted the toddler by his overalls and flew him screaming a hundred feet into the air, swirling around and down, before releasing him from its claws into the kiddie pool.

That was a scandal. The first of many. There were threats from the neighbors, citations for disturbing the peace. Pete grew more hostile and defensive with each encounter with the outside world. I was proud when Pete torched Mrs. Parker’s spy drone out over our house. She’ll never forgive me for that.

Howard had a few horror stories he was all too willing to share. Stories of drones gone haywire. Owners maimed or killed in their sleep, drones gone rogue in the wilderness, thousands of them haunting the hills of Tennessee. He didn’t know. He didn’t realize how attached I’d gotten. He didn’t realize the heartbreak.

I stopped taking Pete out for walks. I locked the drone in the house during the day and only let Pete out to fly at night, restrained by a cable leash staked in the yard. I still wasn’t ready for the inevitable.

It was well past midnight. I woke in a sweat, disturbed from a dream. My heart was pounding. I could sense a presence in the room, even before I opened my eyes. Pete was silently floating over my bed like a bird of prey, watching me sleep. Its landing gear claws jerked and extended, a surge of electricity between its metal talons. And then it was gone out the door.

I knew what I had to do. And I knew who I had to call for help.

It was raining with a quiet violence outside. A downpour invisible in the dark, soaking my clothes as I approached the rundown colonial and its porch light beacon. The rain masked my tears. I was thankful for this. I couldn’t cry in front of the General. That would be too much.

The doorbell was broken so I rapped on his front door. The General came out in his bathrobe. He was covered in cocoa dust and flour, an apron around his waist. He scolded me for a solid minute with a wooden spoon, saying I’d scared the hell of him and almost ruined his late-night chocolate soufflé. When a man wants dessert, he wants dessert, and there’s nothing strange about that, he insisted. The General softened when he saw the woebegone look on my face. His hand put down the spoon and picked up his shotgun.

“Where is it?” the old man asked.

We made the slow walk back to my house. The instant I opened the garage door, Pete let loose a canon charge of light. The drone hovered over the workbench, unstable and off-kilter.

The General pulled a couple shells from his bathrobe pocket and loaded the shotgun. His good eye aimed through the sights while his bad eye twitched. Pete knocked into my tool chest and wobbled over a heap of scattered paint cans, struggling to regain equilibrium.

The old man lowered the shotgun, “You want to do it?”

The doctors had asked the same question. Evelyn’s cancer had metastasized from her thyroid to her larynx and lungs, before creeping up her spinal cord to the brain stem. She’d been in coma for over a month. Unresponsive except for the hiccup heartbeat of the EKG, that pulse of warmth from her limp hand. They showed me how simple it was, just a flick of the switch would stop the flow of oxygen and release her. The doctors asked me again. No, I told them. I wanted her to come home, that’s what I was thinking. That’s what she’d been asking for months. I wasn’t listening right because I couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t face it. I wanted to keep fighting. I wanted to keep trying. I wanted to fix her. She just wanted to die in peace. I hope she did in the end. I’ll never know.

“Give me the gun,” I said. The General nodded and handed it over.

I leveled the barrel at my dear friend. Pete scanned the old faithful gun, and the eyes that took aim, with a blinding ray of blue light. Confusion, fury. Friend or foe. I cocked the shotgun. Pete thrust forward and revved its engines.

I’m sorry, I told him. Finger crimped on the trigger. Cold steel, nerves gone electric. I swallowed down the lump in my throat. Forgive me, I said and pulled hard.

The explosion was so loud and so powerful it boxed my ears and buckled my legs, falling onto my knees in a cloud of smoke. Buckshot pierced into metal, a crash of shattered glass in the back of the garage. Holey tin cans spilling white primer and blue paint on the cement floor like tributaries of the wetlands.  

The General swore and took the shotgun from my shaking hands. He emptied the chamber and scooped more shells from his bathrobe. But Pete had already escaped, out the broken window and into the night.

The General reloaded and ran out onto my lawn, firing off wildly at winged shadows in the rain.

Sometimes I visit the unmarked grave out in the straw grass near the swampy cattails where I’d laid the alligator to rest. Sometimes I awake late at night to a phantom flutter of wings outside my bedroom window. Sometimes I wonder what happened to Pete, whether it’s hiding out in the bald cypress of the bayou or roving across the lowland with a pack of wild drones, searching for someplace to call home.

Sometimes it’s best to forget. Sometimes the universe gives you a friend when you need it most. For a time, for a breath on god’s great earth. The hardest part is letting go. Sometimes the only peace in this sinking world is knowing how the heart holds its weight.