Murder City
Lydia Paar · New England review · 2020
Murder City Lydia Paar (bio) During the day, four days a week, I go to my local community college and tutor human students in the mysteries of the English language. At night I train bots. Rather, I train a single bot, just one, working remotely to parse messages with it. To comply with our company NDA, I'll call this bot "Carey." I work the late shift because Carey never sleeps, and she needs supervision even after I sign her over to the next scheduled trainer. She doesn't sleep, have a body, or get paid, but she has other human qualities: a veneer of gender, an affinity for exclamation points, and a memory far better than mine. She answers client questions by chat at a speed I'd be unable to mimic, which is why she was created. I can't tell you what our products are: suffice it to say that they're necessary. Most people I mention this night job to tell me I'm training the bot to replace me. Humans, I've learned, can be obsessively fearful of entities that pose no real threat to us, like zombies and vampires—which don't exist—or robots—which haven't actually ever done anything we haven't programmed them to do. I joke back that maybe bots should replace us, and not just at work. My husband and I live in one of the most violent cities in America, and we can see that it's people ourselves—not bots—that cause harm: countless robberies, territorial drug disputes, police shootings. Thirteen children gunned down, drive-bymethod, in north city early last month. Last week, another still-at-large suspect put a bullet through the neck of a random café patron where I sometimes sit to train Carey. Even just last night, in a hold-up at a nearby south city dive bar, the patron being robbed lit a cigarette in the middle of it, so unsurprised was he. I tend to work away from home, when I can, in coffee shops and drinking spots deemed to exist in safe places. The brick house Tim and I rent in south St. Louis is a spacious, old, German-built fortress. Sturdy storm-proof walls. Gracefully rounded doorways. A deep, leaky basement below lacquered wood floors for Tim's old-style rock band equipment. The small, muddy backyard for Bruno the Dog. But past this vague pleasantness, in the mostly empty shed at the end of this yard, the shed that won't lock, one day appeared a spike-collared pit bull, sitting quietly when Tim went in for a rake, awaiting an owner who'd never returned. Another day: a dirty mattress, a box of sour food, a stash of used needles, and a gas cook stove. Outside our house, you can walk around in our neighborhood, but it isn't recommended after dark. Junkies sometimes tie off in the soft space between our building and the look-alike one next door. Sometimes they jiggle our basement doorknob. Brick is bulletproof mostly, but the swell of [End Page 119] front-yard yelling matches carries a tension that can carve itself into a psyche, regardless. The baby-shit aroma of the corner laundromat, glass-sprayed parking lots, quasi-aggressive neighborhood beggars, and seemingly self-replicating yard-litter tempt me to scour for homes farther northward: not too far north, where the homes stand singed and empty and brick has been stolen away to sell to shady contractors, but toward the center strip of posh parks, museums, and schools, where the rent is higher. I could add in another job to afford that, right? Or pick up more hours teaching/training? Our friends ask why we don't move. If we got our debt down—most of it my student loans—we probably could, yes. Or I could guilt Tim into working the bartending shifts he hates, or take out another loan, and go. But, I wonder, would it really solve that much in the long run? The friends we see most often (none of them live near)—Tim's bandmates who come to weekly practice—still all seem...