The House That Wouldn't Download

An ultramodern love story.

Recently, looking to improve my station in life and provide a better future for my wife and someday children, I decided to embrace the dominant philosophy of our time and declare it my own: 

I was going to move fast, I decided, and I was going to break things.

And why not?

I would be a fool not to!

The smartest, wealthiest people in the world were moving fast and breaking things, and here I was like some middle-class schmuck, moving deliberately and trying not to cause unnecessary damage. Well, no more! Disruption! Innovation! Progress! From now on, these would be my new Gods.

And so one Monday morning, a few weeks ago, I began. I woke, brimming with excitement, hurried into the kitchen, turned on the coffee machine, put in a filter, filled it with grinds, took out a hammer and smashed the whole damned thing to bits.

My wife came racing in, just as I was taking a sledgehammer to the fridge.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she shouted.

“Innovating!” I said.

“It doesn’t look like innovating,” she said. “It looks like destroying.”

I tried to explain to her how destroying was really innovating, and how breaking was really building, and how ruining was really improving, so that while it may have seemed like I had broken the coffee machine, I had, in reality, paved the way for a new coffee machine, a better coffee machine, a sleeker coffee machine with no buttons or directions or any discernible mode of operation, a $5,000 coffee machine (retail) one would simply have to power on, download the firmware update, set up an account with the pod distributor, log in with email and password, provide a cellphone number, wait for the text with the security code, enter the security code, reset the password, contact the Support Department anytime from Monday to Tuesday, 11AM-11:30 CMT, send the machine back because the touchscreen isn’t working and enjoy a wonderful hot beverage in about 4-6 weeks.

“That,” I explained, “is progress.”

But I needn’t have bothered. You see just that morning, my wife had embraced the other dominant philosophy of the times: she was going to fake it, she had decided, until she made it.

And why not? All around the world, she explained, people were faking it until they made it. So many people were faking it that it seemed everyone was making it, even though nobody was really making it except for the people who were breaking things and then selling new things that weren’t actually as good as the old things.

And so she took a coffee cup out of the cabinet above the sink, pretended to fill it from the shattered remains of the coffee machine, and sat down at the table and began complaining about the director of the film she wasn’t really starring in, and how she going to fire the agent she didn’t actually have. Meanwhile, I set about breaking more things. I broke the oven and I broke the TV, I broke the bay window overlooking the front yard and I broke the car in the driveway – I shattered the windshield, tore out the steering wheel, slashed the tires, stuck a long cloth in the gas tank and lit it on fire.

Everything was going well until I realized that my wife had, at some point, climbed into the car and was sitting in the driver’s seat, faking being on her way to an important meeting with the Guggenheim Museum who she was faking wanted to host a retrospective of her life’s work.

The explosion took out the living room, dining room and most of the second floor, much more quickly than I could have no matter how fast I moved. Insurance rejected the claim, and now the house is a bombed-out shell of its former self.

After a lengthy stay in the hospital, my wife is finally back home, and though she is confined to a wheelchair and horribly disfigured, she is faking that the scars aren’t noticeable and that she isn’t actually paralyzed. In the evenings, we sit together in the bombed-out remains of our living room, hoping our new CyberHouse (3D printed on-site, bluetooth enabled, controlled by a proprietary app with downloadable furniture and children) arrives before the winter does.

Sometimes, in the dark of night, with no heat or electricity or protection from the elements, I wonder if progress is different from mere change, if perhaps faking it is what keeps one from making it. And so for now we hold hands beneath the blanket, faking that someday someone will disrupt all this pointless disruption and we can have our unbroken lives back. But the CyberHouse printer was delivered to the wrong address, the sender refused to pay to redeliver it, the house file wouldn’t download, the app keeps crashing, the company has no phone support, the website doesn’t accept my password and no matter what I type in the window to the Online 24-7 CyberHouse Chatbot, it just keeps responding:

“Ha-ha-ha,

ha-ha-ha,

ha-ha-ha.”

Yours in the fetal position,

S.