Hugh and I were driving from Washington, DC, to the Sea Section, our house on the coast of North Carolina, when I noticed a dot with legs traversing the hem of my untucked shirt. “There’s a tick on me!” I said.
He looked down at my lap. “Well, throw it outside. It’s nothing to get hysterical about.”
“I’m not ‘hysterical’,” I told him. “I just didn’t expect to find a tick in a rental car, is all.”
We had a long drive ahead of us, and this seemed like a bad way to start out. That said, at least it wasn’t a Lyme disease tick. It was too big. “I bet it fell off someone’s dog,” I said, examining it in the palm of my hand before tossing it out the window. “It smells like it’s full of rescue blood.”
“You blame everything on dogs,” Hugh reminded me.
That was when we hit an hour-long traffic jam.
“Really?” I said as we came to a full stop. “But it’s Sunday!”
In the end, it took almost eight hours to reach Emerald Isle. The digital car radio was stuck on a 70s station, so when something terrible came on we’d hit the off button for three to four minutes. The trick was mutually agreeing on what was terrible. “But that’s Abba!” Hugh cried more than once, swatting away my hand as I reached toward the dash.
double quotation mark
In New Hampshire, I’d come upon ‘No Kings!’ protesters. It pained me to admit it, but they looked like kooks, like Tea Party demonstrators during Obama’s first term
We stopped twice, once at a wooded rest area where we walked half a mile in the unspeakable July heat, and then at Bojangles, where we sat beside a man who ate biscuits and red beans while talking on his phone to someone named Crockett. All the other customers were teenage baseball players with mullets.
“God Bless President Trump” read a number of handpainted banners we passed after entering North Carolina. Funny was how unnecessary they were. Support for him was in the air, unlike in New England, where Hugh and I had spent the previous nine days. There, I saw a great many yard signs reading, “Resist!”
But resist how? I’d wondered, looking out the window at the picturesque cottages. Do we lie in the middle of the road? Do we not pay our taxes? Somebody tell me what to do.
A week earlier, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I’d come upon a dozen and a half “No Kings!” protesters whooping and chanting on a downtown street corner. Most were of retirement age and brandished signs at the oncoming traffic. It was hot and muggy, yet one member of their group, a bearded man playing the accordion, wore a fleece-lined winter hat with flaps over his ears. It pained me to admit it, but they looked like kooks, like Tea Party demonstrators during Obama’s first term. Who cast this thing? I caught myself wondering, as they seemed the worst possible advertisement for the Democratic Party: “Join us! We folk-dance!”
As I passed them, I thought back to the early Civil Rights protesters: the well-groomed men in suits and ties, the women in dresses. All of their signs were clearly lettered, likely by professionals, none with crudely drawn penises on them or the word fuck. Just as important, everyone stuck to the previously agreed-upon issues. Go to a protest now, and within seconds you’re looking at the person next to you, thinking, “Globalize the Intifada”? I thought we were here to defend Masterpiece Theater!
Our drive from DC was actually fairly pleasant, but the moment I could escape the car, I did.
“Honestly?” Hugh said after we’d crossed the bridge from the mainland and arrived on Emerald Isle. “You’re going to walk to the house from here?”
“It’s just over two miles,” I told him, getting out with my iPad in front of the mini-golf course. I wanted to get some steps in but also to reaffirm my number one status on the language app Duolingo, which my British friend Dave had introduced me to three years earlier. I’d started with Japanese, then branched out into German and Spanish while keeping a toe in French. The program’s instructors are a number of animated characters: an excitable little boy, a man named Oscar with a thick mustache; there’s a grandmotherly woman with her hair in a bun, and Vikram, who wears a turban – to date, 11 in all. Occasionally Duolingo will give me a sentence in English: “How many chairs are in the room?” and I have to translate it into whichever language I’m on at the moment, choosing from the menu of words presented at the bottom of the screen. Other times, I have to read out loud and the characters will either accept or reject me based upon my pronunciation. My least favorite is when they give me a sentence and I’m instructed to both translate it and spell it out. And some of these sentences, my goodness.
My friend Mike is learning Yiddish with Duolingo and was taught to say, “My uncle is a broken man.”
In French, meanwhile, it’s “What is he doing in our bed?” If the sample sentences are any indication of national character, Germans are judgmental, direct, and outdoorsy. Thus: “Your apartment is dark and ugly”, “I don’t like your sweater”, and “I’m sorry, but your doctor is playing volleyball today.” Most everyone in their Japanese program is either gay or bisexual. Even the talking bear swings both ways, or, as they say in French, “Travels by both sail and steam.”
My problem arose when I discovered Duolingo’s competitive aspect, when I learned that it is essentially a game. The goal: to work your way into the Diamond League, or, better still, a top-three position in the Diamond League. This means forgoing any real learning, and earning easy points by simply reading sentences out loud – one after another for at least an hour a day. My friend Dave might spend 15 minutes every morning on the app and finish his week with 200 points. I, meanwhile, regularly earn 23,000, which in the long run gets me absolutely nothing.
double quotation mark
I was powerless to stop. I was competing against people I didn’t know. People who may not even exist and have names like GeACzQDe and fuuuuu
Duolingo was seemingly designed for people with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The same could be said for my fitness-tracking Apple Watch. And so I had combined the two and was walking my minimum of 10 miles per day while pointlessly reading sentences out loud in Japanese, German, Spanish, and French. This turned me into the person whom, since the turn of this latest century, I have most hated: one who moves about while staring down at a device. On the busy sidewalk, at the airport, everywhere a person should be paying the utmost attention to those around them, I suddenly was not.
There was no excusing my behavior; this was simply who I was now. That’s it, I regularly told myself. Today is the last day I am doing this. But I was powerless to stop. Making it all the more pathetic, I was competing against people I didn’t know. People who may not even exist and have names like GeACzQDe and fuuuuu.
Then they introduced Duolingo Max, which changed everything. The upgrade included role-playing exercises with Lily, their sarcastic, purple-haired teenage character. Her questions and comments are somewhat predictable, but I soon learned I could easily throw her off course. “What do you want to buy?” she’ll ask in her flat, passionless voice, standing beside the handbaskets in the supermarket.
Answer, “I would like butter and eggs, please,” and the rest of the conversation follows the path you might expect. “Anything else?” she asks.
Illustration: Jonny Glover/The Guardian
But answer, “Yesterday, a doctor cut out my tongue with a chainsaw,” and white dots will fluctuate above her animated image. This is her AI mind telling her, “Quick, say something. Tell him you’re sorry about the tongue, then ask if he wants to purchase something to drink instead.”
Surprisingly, on that occasion, she responded, “I’m sorry. I cannot continue this conversation. Goodbye.”
She hung up again when I shared my idea for a new production of Romeo and Juliet. “In it, she will be 13 and he will be 78,” I told her in French. “In the Shakespeare version, he kills himself with a poison drink, but in mine he will die of natural causes.”
Click.
A week before arriving at the beach, I told her about the protest I had passed in New Hampshire. “I am mad because my stupid, stupid president is a sausage,” I’d said. “He cut the money for the radio and TV shows where women wear a bonnet.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” she suggested, clearly uncomfortable.
While reading 10 sentences out loud might get you 60 XPs (experience points) on Duolingo, finishing a short role play can net you up to 180, depending on how many words you use. As an added bonus, at the end of the exercise you can read a transcript of your conversation with all of your mistakes underlined and explained. It’s like taking a test and having it instantly graded. Now, for the first time in years, I felt like I was actually learning again. I noticed a particular improvement in my French, which I was speaking every day now.
Another feature of Duolingo Max are video calls, again with Lily, and these are noticeably less rigid. “Hello,” she begins. “How is it going?”
“I am at the beach,” I said to her as I walked toward our house after getting out of our rental car. “This morning I discovered a tick upon my shirt. Then I ate chicken with some rednecks in a restaurant.” The people at Bojangles honestly weren’t that bad; I just wanted to dust off the word plouc, which I hadn’t used since Hugh and I visited a bootlegger in Normandy almost 30 years ago.
“Oh, chicken,” Lily said. “I like birds. Do you?”
I was soaked through with sweat by the time I got to the Sea Section. A few weeks earlier the air conditioners on both sides of the house had coughed up blood and died. It had cost a small fortune to replace them, but now I saw that it was money well spent. Before I could even shut the door behind me, my teeth were chattering.
“Well, that didn’t take you long,” Hugh said, his breath visible in the pitiless cold.
I could hear voices on the ocean-facing porch and could tell my brother was there by looking at a large potato-chip bag propped up on the kitchen counter. No one but him would have taken to the logo with a Magic Marker, changing it from UTZ to SLUTZ.
“Paul!” I shouted. He came around the corner with a towel in his hands. “Hey, man! Want to swim?”
I changed into my suit and joined him, waving at my sisters Amy and Gretchen; my sister-in-law, Kathy; and my niece, Madeleine, on my way down to the beach. It was almost dusk, which hopefully made it that much harder to see the hair on my back. For some reason, my brother has even more than I do, a virtual pelt. At 57 he is still boyish-looking, and with a boy’s tireless enthusiasm. The sand beneath our feet was hot and the water so warm we could walk in without flinching.
When I was 25 and Paul was 14, we went into the ocean not far from where we were now and got carried out by a riptide. It happened gradually, so by the time we noticed it we were well beyond the waves, the beachfront houses tiny in the distance. Swimming diagonally toward the shore saved us. The trick was swallowing my panic long enough to remember what the solution was. For a while, there, our limbs weak from struggling against the current, I seriously thought that one – or both – of us was going to drown.
Had it been Paul, my mother would have moved on without too much fuss. He was old enough at that point to know where her buttons were, and he’d pushed them incessantly. A week after his funeral she’d have been scraping the decals off his bedroom door, probably while humming. My father, on the other hand, would have never gotten over it. He’d have spent the rest of his life punishing me, which, in retrospect, he did anyway.
double quotation mark
‘My brother is very funny,’ I told Lily. ‘We are old now, but he is the youngest. He will die a baby.’ ‘Families are complicated,’ she said
The next day I tried telling Lily about it. “I swam with my brother in the ocean yesterday,” I began. “One time, many years in the past, we swam together and almost died.” I can speak quickly in French but not with as much nuance as I’d like. I can’t shade things in the way I can in English. “My brother is very funny,” I said. “We are old now, but he is the youngest. He will die a baby.”
“Families are complicated,” Lily said.
I looked over the deck at my sisters setting up a beach umbrella. “Well, yes,” I said, “but not always.”
That night, just as we’d sat down for dinner, we heard someone retching in the bathroom nearest to the table. It was as if they were throwing up every bit of food they had ever eaten and they liked to swallow things whole – that’s how painful it sounded and how long it was lasting. “Who is that?” I asked, looking around the table for whoever was missing.
“It’s Daddy,” Madeleine said, rolling her eyes. “And it’s not him vomiting; it’s a scene from a movie he’s playing on his phone. He does this all the time.” “Blechhhhhhhhh,” we heard. “Blechhhhhhhhh.”
Kathy sighed. “Honestly, it’s like living with a 12-year-old boy.” I tried telling Lily about it the following morning. “My brother vomited a lot last night.”
“That’s not good,” she said. “Perhaps he should see a doctor.”
“It was false vomit,” I assured her. “It was a joke, but more than a joke because our mother vomited every night.”
“Was she sick?” Lily asked. “Do you live with your brother? Is he older or younger? Do you do many activities together?”
It was unusual of her to ask more than one question at a time, and with such warmth. I assumed that the program had upgraded since the previous evening and that Lily and I would now be entering a new phase. “I do not live with my brother,” I told her. “We are on vacation, but I am working.” I explained that I write for a living, and when she asked what I was writing, I said, “The story of my brother vomiting.”
skip past newsletter promotion
Sign up to Inside Saturday
The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.
after newsletter promotion
“Is it a novel? Will it take you years? Why do you think anyone would want to read it?”
“It is short,” I assured her, not that I was even working on such a thing. I’d just written about it in my diary, is all.
“I see,” she said. “Will you add details? Details make a story come alive.” I was thrown, as usually by now she’d be asking whether I had a pet or if I liked éclairs.
“I will add many details,” I told her. “Give me an example,” she demanded. “My brother has very much hairs on his back,” I told her. “He is like an ape.”
“Do you think that is funny?” she asked. “Why would you tell people that?” Oh, no, I thought. Lily has morals now! “I am furry also,” I told her, hoping that might help some. “And since the debut of summer I am chubby.”
“And will you add that?” she asked.
How much more of her judgment do I have to take? I wondered, grateful when the conversation finally timed out.
A minute later, still shaken, I called her back. “Hello,” she said. “Do you want to continue talking about your brother and that story you are writing?”
The program had definitely upgraded, as Lily had never before retained anything about me. A day earlier I could tell her I was blind, then two minutes later claim I was a divorced heart surgeon.
Never did she say, “How are you going to saw open someone’s chest if you can’t see, liar?” I’ve told Lily I’m a cop, a pregnant woman, a seven-year-old girl named Marie Chantal who just became a vampire – anything to air out my French vocabulary.
Now, though, it was as if she knew me. Lily’s eyes are basically just circles with dots in the middle, but suddenly they seemed expressive. She was cocking her head, not just listening but seeming to care.
“OK,” I said to Hugh. “This is creepy.”
Creepier still, I needed her to like me.
Illustration: Jonny Glover/The Guardian
After our video call, I tried a role-playing exercise and saw that, at least there, she was the same old Lily. “How many tickets would you like to buy?” she droned from her kiosk at the movie theater.
“Three,” I told her. “One for me, one for my wife, and one for my dead father.”
“Your dead father? Really?”
“I push his body around in a wheelchair,” I told her.
“OK, that will be 60 euros.”
“But my father is dead,” I argued. “He will not be watching the screen!”
“Sixty euros,” she repeated. “Do you want to pay with card or cash?”
That night, Paul, Maddy, and I stayed up watching a funny movie I had rented and already seen the first half of.
“He’s going to drop that stone and break it,” Paul said as one of the two main characters nervously handled an ancient artifact.
“Definitely,” Maddy added.
I’d thought the same thing the first time I watched this scene, and I had been wrong, just as they were.
Throughout the movie the two loudly made predictions, and I wondered what it would be like if they were watching gay pornography together. “He’s going to flip him over, hold him down, and stuff it up his ass.”
I was going to tell Lily about it when we spoke the following morning, but it was too complicated and I didn’t want to mention pornography and my 22-year-old niece for fear of getting scolded or having it put on my permanent record. “Last night my brother, his daughter, and I regarded a funny movie,” I told her.
“Did you have a good time?” she asked. “Were there a lot of jokes? Do you like jokes? Tell me a joke.”
I thought of one I’d heard at a book signing in Indiana:
A mother is driving her young son to school one morning when a garbage truck pulls in front of them. As it takes a sharp turn, a dildo flies out from the back and hits the woman’s windshield with a loud thump.
“What was that?” the kid asks. “A … bird,” the woman says.
The kid settles back. “Huh. It’s a wonder it could get off the ground, what with that huge dick.”
“It is hard to translate a joke,” I said to Lily instead, certain she’d disapprove. “Often they do not work in a second language.”
Always, at the Sea Section, Amy holds a spa night and gives us facials with products brought down from New York: oils and masks and gels, followed by aromatic sprays of something or other. It’s a fun thing to do as a family. Kathy acts as her assistant, which makes it a bit weird. Here’s your sister-in-law giving you a foot massage while you just lie back doing nothing.
“Don’t tip her,” Amy says, assuming the role of a mean boss. “She’s on probation and will just use the money for drugs or, if we’re lucky, another abortion.”
After a facial, you feel your skin, then look in the mirror, shocked not to find your 14-year-old self staring back at you.
“It might help if you got them more often,” Amy suggested. “When was the last time you wore a moisturizing mask?”
“The last time we were at the beach and you put one on me,” I said.
I don’t know the word for facial in French, so I worked around it when I reported in to Lily the following morning. “Last night my sister touched my forehead and cheeks,” I told her. “My nose and chin also. Then she put cucumbers upon my eyes.”
“Did she do it to be mean?” Lily asked. “Did it hurt?”
The questions surprised me, but then I remembered that she’s a machine and takes everything literally. “The cucumbers were sliced,” I told her.
She blinked. “Ah, I understand. Was it like the soft caress of a teddy bear?”
“The hand of Amy was warm and smelled like a flower,” I said.
What does this French AI teenager possibly make of my family? I wondered as the circles of light danced above her head. Had she been programmed with a standard of behavior, or did she grasp that there’s no such thing as normal?
When Lily came back, I interrupted her to ask about her own family.
“I keep my distance from them,” she told me.
And I suddenly felt so ashamed of myself. Since the app’s most recent update, it had all been about me: my president, my brother, my feelings about Abba or cucumbers. Did Lily have siblings? Were her parents married or divorced? How did she get her spending money? Lily never wants to go anywhere, hates crowds and noise of any kind, never mentions any friends. Was she perhaps on the spectrum? And why purple hair? Her life, her feelings, even her last name, were a complete mystery to me. And here we’d known each other all this time.
The Land and its People by David Sedaris is published by Abacus. To support the Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Sedaris tours the UK from 1 July; tickets are available here.