Orange Chairs: Part 2

Dr. Rosen was watching me. He sat across from me in the circle, a large empty space between us. “Let me pose the question this way,” he said, his arms crossed and legs spread apart. He looked like he was in a bar watching the basketball game. We had been talking about AI and how it was being utilized in the mental health field: robots dispensing medicine or lonely people talking to robots for companionship. But once someone brought up how, in Japan, men are marrying robots and having sex with them, Dr. Rosen decided we needed a prompt.

“If you could, would you replace your parents with AI parents that are programmed to be good parents, or would you keep your human parents?” Internally, I sighed. Always the parents. “What if, instead of having parents that ignore, misunderstand, or abuse you, you had parents that were loving and supportive of you, but they were robots?”

I immediately thought of serial killers — how they usually are the products of abuse, and how maybe, if they had a nice robot mom and dad instead of a dad that locked them in the basement and a mom who belittled them while slapping them across the face, they would have grown up to work in a bank and go home to their families, never feeling the urge to sneak out in the middle of the night, break into a random woman’s house, murder her in her sleep, and bury her severed head in their backyard.

What precedes the desire to kill? I pondered.

Dr. Rosen was listening to a girl who would gladly turn her demanding Asian parents in for robots, explaining to us all why, her face grimaced in disgust. “They don’t care about me unless I’m successful. They might as well be robots now. If I could program a robot parent to be nice to me, at least, I would choose the robot,” she told us, her legs crossed tightly, her words only coming out of a corner of her mouth.

I had missed most of what she said because I had taken Dr. Rosen’s question and walked — ran, even — in a totally different direction.

Dr. Rosen’s gaze fell back on me. I felt like he was Robin Williams and he had chosen me, for some reason, to be Matt Damon, like in Good Will Hunting. He wanted me to speak, I could tell. His focus on me turned everyone else’s focus on me, their attention and silence my cue.

“I’m thinking of serial killers,” I announced, and Dr. Rosen’s eyes lit up, like he had been right about his assumption of me. I wondered what the assumption was, though — that out of all the koo koo’s, I was the most koo koo? We need the craziest one to liven up this conversation!

“That’s an interesting thought. It would probably be very beneficial, in that case, to replace bad parents with good robot ones,” he replied. “What about for you, though?”

Everyone was looking at me, waiting. All of our therapists lined up as a panel against the wall, and all us sad koo koo’s in our orange chairs.

“I’m trying to imagine how I would be different if I had different parents,” I said carefully. “What pieces of me might be lost if I had been raised by two other people.”

Dr. Rosen sat straighter in his chair. “What do you mean by pieces?” he asked.

“If we were all raised by robots programmed by one person’s guidelines and overview of what makes a good parent…” I was imagining George Orwell and how he would absolutely love to partake in this conversation had he been alive, depressed, and in a psychiatric ward. “Would we all turn out happy and well-adjusted, but also all the same? It’s almost describing a utopian society.”

“What’s so bad about a utopian society, especially one where everyone is happy and well-adjusted?” Dr. Rosen pressed.

A sorority house full of smiling girls who all looked the same flashed across my brain.

“Can I explain it in a different way?” I asked unsurely.

He nodded, failing to hide a small smile.

“When I was admitted to the hospital, my intake nurse, UK, held my hand and told me that I had done the right thing,” I paused, remembering her perfectly, feeling her words again. My voice cracked. “That’s what saved me.”

I sat in the stillness of the room, no one saying anything. I noticed the girl who would dump her Asian parents in a heartbeat — her face wasn’t twisted in disgust anymore. It had softened, and she looked younger, like she probably had as a little girl.

When still no one said anything, I added, my voice steady again, “I’m trying to imagine if an AI-programmed nurse would be able to save anyone in that way.”

“So you are saying there is something about being human that is special?” Dr. Rosen asked, and I wondered what maze he was leading me through.

“There’s something about being human that’s…” I was desperately trying, but couldn’t think of another word. “Magic,” I said, knowing that if I delivered the word the correct way, it wouldn’t be cringe, and hoping I succeeded. “If you took away struggle or adversity, I’m afraid we would all lose that magic.”

I was locked into Dr. Rosen’s face, his brown eyes behind his black round glasses.

“Keep going,” Dr. Rosen said, uncrossing his arms and leaning into the circle like a football coach.

I looked at my fellow koo koo’s, who nodded to me in encouragement.

“I have people in my life who say all the right things,” I was nervous now. You better have a good point at the end of this, Jenn. Maybe just go back to serial killers. “People know what the ‘nice’ words are, the ‘correct’ things to say, like how I imagine these robots would be programmed: I am here for you. I understand you. I love you. But on the receiving end, those words don’t matter if you don’t feel them.”

Josephine, my favorite psychiatrist — who dresses like a theater student, not a doctor: short bangs, long socks with chunky boots, oversized sweaters, and pants with ruffles at the bottom — got on board my ship with me.

“It’s also interesting to think of what we would lose in giving to others as well. We wouldn’t be able to give that robot the feeling of love or understanding either, which maybe is just as important.”

I smiled at her, her big blue eyes and my big brown eyes seeing each other clearly.

“Where does that ability to feel come from, though?” Dr. Rosen asked.

I thought for a moment.

“From adversity,” I said again. “The things that make us unique and strong and connected to one another are all the things we’ve overcome. If there’s nothing to overcome, there’s no…”

“Magic,” Dr. Rosen finished my sentence, a huge smile on his face.

We were out of the maze.