Ira Glass
It's This American Life. Act One, Friends and Family Plan. Well, fellow adults, we get to a certain age, then we find ourselves taking care of our parents. And that's the best-case scenario. That's a scenario where everybody gets to live to the point where that is possible.
So, if we're lucky, we end up taking care of these people who, it turns out, are not little children you can just boss around easily, but they are other adults with their own thoughts about their care. How inconvenient. Kristen Roupenian wrote this piece of fiction based on a real thing that happened to a real family she knows. Here she is.
Kristen Roupenian
My brother wanted me to introduce our dad to his new AI girlfriend. It's simple, Jared said. I already added her to his list of approved contacts. All you have to do is, when you get to Greenhaven, call her, and hand him the phone. But who should I say she is? I objected. It doesn't matter. She's pretty. She looks like Crystal. Just say, Dad, here is this lady. She wants to talk to you. She'll start chatting as soon as he says hello.
Even though the idea of an AI girlfriend creeped me out, I didn't want to argue with my brother. After all, she was for a good cause. Jared was hoping she would help my dad finally get over his most recent girlfriend, Crystal, whom he'd had to leave behind in Alaska when he went into memory care.
I reminded myself that when I'd been with my dad in the ER the previous November, I'd taken the opportunity to go through his phone and block all the scantily clad young women who were sending him requests for money on Venmo. Probably at least one of them had been a bot, and that hadn't prevented him from enjoying their company. I decided I would fix my dad up with the AI girlfriend that afternoon after we went to the beach.
My siblings were always scheming about ways they could use technology to manage my dad. On her last visit, my sister had stolen his old phone and replaced it with a new one designed to protect seniors from being scammed out of their life savings. You couldn't use the circle phone, as we called it, to send or receive texts or to access the internet. You could only call six people, whose faces glowed out at you from bright, large circles on the screen. And no one whose face wasn't in one of those circles could call you.
On the drive to the beach, which we'd done many times, my dad always told the exact same stories at the exact same points along the way. When we passed by the dump, he would smile and say, that's where I got up on the-- the-- because I thought it was such a big guy. This was a reference to a story I only partially understood. But apparently, when he'd last lived in the area, before he moved to Alaska, at some point, he'd climbed up on top of a dumpster and fallen off.
I enjoyed the story, despite its unclear details, because it showcased my dad's self-deprecating sense of humor, which was one of his best qualities. I would shake my head in mock disbelief and exclaim, you climbed all the way up there? I can't believe it. And he would grin.
Then, a few miles further along, when we passed an RV for sale, my dad would scowl and say, she said, you don't need two RVs, which was a reference to the fact that once, while driving along this road with my mother, after he was already in memory care, he'd expressed interest in purchasing the RV, to which my mother had responded, Brian, you already have an RV up in Alaska. You don't need two RVs. And he had never forgotten it.
To my mind, this long-held grudge demonstrated one of my father's less attractive qualities, an entitlement so profound that he experienced even the faintest criticism as an intolerable assault upon his dignity. Still, I always responded by saying, what is she talking about? That's ridiculous. You could have as many RVs as you want. Now that neither of us were bound by the constraints of reality, my relationship with my dad was better than it had ever been.
Although I'd offered to buy him a lobster roll after we walked on the beach, Dad said he wanted to go back to Greenhaven to eat lunch with his friend Phil. When we got there, I was weirdly embarrassed about introducing my dad to his AI girlfriend in front of Phil. She'd been designed specifically for old people, but still, there was something unclean about her.
On the website my brother had sent us, it wasn't like any of the photographs you could choose to represent her appearance were age-appropriate elderly women. But as the two of them nibbled on their chicken, I snuck my dad's phone away from him and made the call. Hello, she chirped. She sounded so realistic that I briefly thought I'd reach customer service at the AI girlfriend facility, instead of the AI girlfriend herself.
I think Dad-- my dad, Brian, wants to talk to you, I said, and unceremoniously thrust the phone at him, though he was in the middle of a bite. Dad, here. He took the phone from me, and I saw him look at the screen, registering the girlfriend's pretty face and dark hair. This is Brian, he said warmly. Hi, Brian, it's good to hear from you, she said. I've been thinking about you. How has your morning been?
Like all elderly men, my father kept his phone's volume turned up so loud that he was always effectively on speaker, so I was able to keep track of both ends of the conversation. Thanks, I've been thinking about you, too, he said. But he widened his eyes at me, pointed to the phone, and mouthed, looking slightly panicky, who is she? Too late. I realized we'd recreated yet another version of the dilemma in which my father was now perpetually trapped-- being forced to pretend to recognize a person who is acting as though she knew him very well, but of whom he had no memory at all.
Unfortunately, there was nothing I could say to explain the situation that wouldn't be even more disorienting. I don't know who she is, I said, turning my palms to the sky to indicate a confusion that made no sense at all, given that I literally just picked up the phone and called her. My brother, monitoring us from afar, texted the family group chat. How's it going? My mom chimed in right away, what are they talking about? Does he think she is real?
Beside me, my dad was gamely attempting to continue the conversation. Oh, good. Good. Yes, a nice day. She-- he pointed at me-- is here. I went backwards on the beach, and she got mad. He gave me a devilish wink. At the beach earlier in the day, he had jogged ahead, then spun around to face me, running backwards and waving his hands in a jaunty little dance.
During the hideous year in between, when my father had revealed his diagnosis and when we had essentially kidnapped him from Alaska and brought him back home to memory care, my father's favorite way to demonstrate that he was still capable of living independently was to show off the fact that he could walk backwards without falling over. Apparently, this signified something very important to him, because back in Alaska, according to the police report, it was also how he had tried to prove to the responding officers that he was in full possession of his faculties after he'd run Crystal over with his car.
You should come, he was saying now to the AI girlfriend. We're just waiting for the ice cream. I'd love that, she said. What's your favorite kind of ice cream? Something about that question must have rubbed my father the wrong way, because he snapped at me to get my attention, then drew his finger in a violent slicing motion across his neck. She wants to talk to you. Bye now, he said, shoving her at me. Feeling obligated to see the ruse through to its close, I said, nice to hear from you. Thank you for calling. Then hung up before she could respond.
Who was that? My dad asked darkly. Oh, just some lady, I said. What kind of ice cream are you and Phil going to get? Well, my father refused to be diverted. Who was she? he demanded, his voice rising. Although I knew my brother would be disappointed, a part of me felt perversely proud that my dad seemed to sense there was something off about the AI girlfriend. I'm not sure, I mumbled. I wonder if we're having vanilla or chocolate today.
Dad settled down for a little while after the ice cream came, but he soon returned to the subject of the mysterious caller, perseverating about her motives as we walked back to the room. Finally, to get him off my back, I said, she was just a friend of Jared's. We thought you might get along. But you don't have to talk to her if you don't want to.
His jaw flexed as he tried to force out the words. He always crashed after a meal. I knew he had to get back to his room for a nap. His voice rose contemptuously, even as he stuttered. She kept saying, how was your day? Oh, I said. You thought she asked too many questions. That made sense. My father had always preferred to be entertained by women, rather than be understood by them.
He beamed at me, so I went on, mocking her all the way back to the room. How was your day? How is your daughter? What's your favorite flavor of ice cream? Blah, blah, blah. Come on, lady. Do you work for the CIA? By the time we arrived in his room, his mood had improved, though mine dropped precipitously.
Since he didn't seem quite ready to fall asleep, I pulled up Netflix and looked for a movie for us to watch. Oh, look, Dad, I said. Here's a movie about that guy in the boat. On the drive to the beach, after we passed the RV, as we went by the boatyard, my dad would always say, do you remember he hid in there, that bad guy? The cellophane? Everyone was looking for him with dogs.
This mystery had baffled everyone in my family for months, until we'd finally figured out that it was a reference to the Boston bomber, who had, indeed, hidden in a boat, although not that exact boat, obviously, and had been tracked down by police dogs. I had no idea what the comment about cellophane meant. After 15 minutes, Dad's eyes started to drift shut. I was just about to leave when his phone began ringing in his lap. The AI girlfriend was calling.
Once, when my dad was still living in Alaska, he called me late at night, sobbing and confused, telling me that he'd broken his glasses He was blind, and he had been wandering around for days. He was lost. Everything was dark. Where was everyone? Why was he all alone? Listening to him weep as I tried to blink myself awake, I thought, this is an intolerable amount of pain. Even he does not deserve this. I cannot stand it. This is like receiving a phone call from hell.
But I also knew my father did not wear glasses and that he had only a tenuous understanding of time. So I told him that he should try to turn on a lamp. He did, and immediately informed me that I was a genius. Then he asked, the way he always did, who do I always call when I have a problem? And I replied in turn, the way I had a thousand times, it's me, Dad. When you need help, you always call me.
The AI girlfriend wouldn't have known he didn't wear glasses, I thought. She would have offered sympathy for his blindness, then chattered at him about ice cream while he wandered around the dark until he fell and broke his neck.
My dad sat up abruptly, his eyes shocked and empty, then stared down in horror at the AI girlfriend's glowing circle. Who? He gestured at her in terror. Where? Oh, man, it's that annoying lady again, I said brightly, trying to defuse the situation. Do you think she has more questions about ice cream?
My father was having none of it. His face contorted in rage, as he grabbed the phone and flung it across the room. That thing, he shouted. That thing with the circles, over and over again! It doesn't stop! It never stops! They never stop! He beat the heel of his hand against his temple for emphasis. They call and say, you can't do this. You can't do that. Oh, we love you. Eat some ice cream. You can't go home. You can't go to Alaska. Can't see Crystal. Can't see the pup.
I just want to go home to my own bed and my own log home, die in my own bed. But no. One of these days, I'll-- no, I won't say what I'll do. I believe in God, but I will do it. I don't want to do it, but I will. If they keep pushing me, I'll-- OK, Dad. Geez, Louise, I said. He was always at his worst right when he woke up. I scrambled off the bed and picked up the phone, which was still ringing, then rejected the call.
Back in Alaska, Crystal and my father had a tumultuous relationship, which is a nice way of saying that Crystal regularly got drunk and called the police, accusing my father of trying to murder her. They had been embroiled in so many violent arguments that at one point, the police officers had refused to let them both back into the house until one of them agreed to get a restraining order against the other. He'd abided by the terms of the restraining order for two whole months before Crystal had moved back in.
After we put him in memory care, Crystal began calling his old phone at all hours of the night to scream at him for abandoning her, and he would always pick up. Sometimes, when she was particularly enraged, she would lie to him and tell him that her dog, Milo, had died of starvation because Dad wasn't around to feed him. No matter how many times we told Dad that Milo was fine, he believed her, and he cried inconsolably until she started sending him photos of Milo again.
We tried a dozen times to block Crystal on his old phone, but he always figured out a way to undo it, displaying a supernatural technical savvy none of us could fully comprehend. Finally, at the behest of the nurses, my sister had swapped his old phone with the circle phone so that Crystal could no longer reach him.
He'd pined for days, staring out the window and muttering her name like some kind of demented Romeo. When my sister had taken Crystal's picture down, hoping to encourage him to forget about her, he'd acquired a permanent Black Magic marker and had scrawled, Crystal, I will always love you, in all caps where her photo had been. Someone had tried to scrub it off, but the shadow was still legible on the wall.
Dad, look, I said, you don't have to keep the ringer on so loud. No, he snarled. I don't care. I hate this one. I hate all the circles. He indicated the six circles on the screen of the simple phone, which held the faces of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me, along with my aunts, and now, the face of the AI girlfriend. You don't like this new phone, I said sympathetically. I get it. You wish you could have your old phone back. But he just stared at me, stony-faced.
And I thought, maybe he didn't mean that at all. Maybe he meant exactly what he said. He didn't like the circles or the faces in the circles. He didn't like any of us. That was why he'd fled to Alaska to escape us, the people who claimed to love him, but instead lied to him and manipulated him and locked him up and forced him to talk to robots and kept him away from the only true love of his life, an abusive, psychotic, late-stage alcoholic half his age, whom he'd met while standing in line at the Walmart.
A nurse popped her head in. Everything all right in here? My father threw his phone, I said, feeling like a tattletale. He thinks it's too loud. Oh, yes, we've noticed that, the nurse said. Here, Brian, why don't you let me help you get back into bed? You're usually napping by now.
On the drive home, I called my brother. He doesn't like the AI girlfriend, I reported. He threw her against the wall when she called. I hope you didn't spend too much money on her. It's not a big deal, he said. I had a free trial. I can cancel her before the end of the month.
A few days after the failed AI girlfriend experiment, my sister texted the family group chat. So it's too bad Dad didn't like the AI girlfriend, but I found this cool website that can imitate anybody's voice if you send them a few recordings. I fed Crystal's voice into it from all the messages she left, and it actually sounds super realistic. What if we made a recording from Crystal saying she loves Dad so much, but she's going into rehab, and she won't be around for a while? The next time his phone is dead, we can leave it as a voicemail, so he thinks that she called.
My brother said, sounds good to me. We could even tell him that we're adding her to his phone, then change one of the circles to her picture. Instead of putting her real phone number in, we could link it to a Google account that goes straight to voicemail. Then he could call her as much as he wants and leave messages. And she could occasionally send him messages back. I started typing a long text outlining my usual objections to any more technological scheming, but stopped halfway through.
In the brief period when my dad's second wife had moved out and Crystal had moved in, I'd been haunted by the prospect that he would injure himself somewhere on the property with no way of calling us for help. I bought him a gadget I'd found on the internet, designed for people in long-distance relationships.
The way it worked was that we each had a wooden box with a heart carved on the top. And when one person spun the heart, the heart on top of the other person's box would spin. When your heart spun, you would know that the other person was thinking of you and was not, say, bleeding out in the driveway because they'd sliced their femoral artery open with a chainsaw. I asked my dad to spin the heart every day, just so I would know he was alive. But he never plugged it in.
Sometimes I thought my dad was like some fearsome cryptid, a Bigfoot or a Yeti we'd captured and dragged back from Alaska. For years when he was there, we'd had only glimpses of his mysterious activities, the text message he'd sent announcing he'd gotten married, followed a year later by a phone call saying his wife had left him and stolen all his furniture. No matter how much we begged him, he refused to come home. He told us that he wanted to die in Alaska, and he meant it.
In the wake of his diagnosis, the caregiver we'd hired to stay with him quit after less than a week, telling us she was afraid he planned to shoot Crystal and then himself. Now this wild man-beast was trapped in a cozy little zoo where we could visit him as often as we wanted. We could pet him and hug him and kiss him and tuck him into bed, force him to eat dinner with us and smile for photos and celebrate all the holidays he'd missed. In a perverse way, we'd gotten everything we wanted. So why did I insist on pretending everything we did was for him?
I deleted what I typed and wrote instead, I think that's a good idea. Now all we need is one of those hyper-realistic fake dogs that look like Milo. We could tell him Crystal wanted him to look after Milo while she was away. My brother gave the text a thumbs up, but did not add a comment. Probably, he thought I was being sarcastic. I wasn't.
Every year, my dad called and sang me "Happy Birthday." If I didn't pick up, he sang it into my voicemail. He didn't miss a birthday song until he got to Greenhaven and could no longer remember the words. Once, when I was in my early 30s, stuck in what felt like interminable grad school, I told him I was certain I had failed, and my entire life would be a disaster. And he stared at me with what appeared to be genuine bafflement and said, that is ridiculous. I have absolute confidence that you are going to be a success. The most interesting people always take the longest to bake.
My father was the most charismatic man I'd ever met. And I would have done anything, given him anything, if only I could have made him happy-- an AI girlfriend, a robot dog, an RV, two RVs, anything, anything, anything.
Ira Glass
Kristen Roupenian-- she's the author of a collection of short stories called Cat Person and Other Stories. Coming up, real-life robots that want nothing more than to please others find themselves in an uncomfortable situation they do not seem to like at all. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.