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Richard
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Starbucks, January 18, 2009

When Suzanne and I met a couple of evenings ago, she asked if I “really missed” the old car—a blue, 1993 Altima we’d put 165,000 miles on. She played with her coaster and looked up. “It’s been good to me.” She has a relationship with the car. Is it an avatar, a cyborg, or a familiar? That depends on whether she’s inside or outside it. When she’s at the wheel, the car becomes an exoskeleton—or a cyborg extending her body. When the car is parked, it’s more a familiar—like a cat she worries about exposing to lousy weather.

The Altima is headed for a retirement home or a scrap yard, like the discarded robots in Steven Spielberg’s film A.I. Laurie’s eyes welled up when I said I was thinking of donating it to the Kidney Foundation, where it would probably go to auction or be broken up for parts. Suzanne also gave me an alarmed look, as if I was evicting a defenseless relative. When I drive the Nissan, I feel a little down-at-heel, although it’s still got surprising pep. It’s an aging rake, like the glossy but worn out friend of Laurie’s we met in a bar this past Christmas. His hands shook a little as he sipped a glass of wine. His shirt collar was frayed under his elegant, expensive suit. Twice he left to smoke a cigarette outside. All that aroused tenderness in me, and it’s that way with the Nissan, which I have found myself referring to as Nissie, the nickname Laurie dubbed it.

Suzanne is passing back to me the 2003 Prius we bought together and that she has driven since our split—she’s just replaced it with a brand new model. The Prius stirs no feelings of identification. How could it, it’s such a clean, functional, and efficient hunk of machinery? It’s a Japanese car that reminds me of a Swede, something a visiting nurse would drive, or a careful consumer, or a sensible family man. Help, I miss Nissie as I pull slowly away from the stop light to maintain my MPG readout above 47. The car is taking over. I put my foot down on the accelerator and feel the fuel draining from me! It’s nothing new. A walking stick feels like an extension of your hand when it scrapes the gravel on a path, and likewise I feel the road through the Prius’ wheels, the weight of all those D-cell batteries as we corner. Neurobiologists say we have no souls but are tools “all the way down.” I believe them.