7 hours ago
10
In the middle of the night I feel the warm breath of a creature stirring my hair. It’s too dark to see anything, but I know from experience that the dog is standing by the bed, chin resting on the mattress next to my head, gently exhaling into my face.
The point is this: to wake me up without waking my wife.
“What?” I whisper, even though I know what.
Every night I go to bed to find the dog already there, in my place, head on my pillow. Every night I shoo the dog off, and the dog obediently retreats to its own bed, and falls asleep. That used to be the routine, until I started waking up in the dark with the dog staring at me.
The dog wants to be allowed to climb back up on to the bed. I will relent – if not yet, then eventually – but if my wife wakes up at any point during the dog’s campaign, all bets are off.
“No,” I say. “Go back to your own bed.” The dog retreats. Half an hour later, I feel the same breath in my face.
“All right,” I whisper. “But be quiet.”
The dog takes a step back and prepares to leap. I tighten my stomach muscles in anticipation, knowing that at least one of four paws is about to land on me. The dog then manages to take up a huge amount of bed without disturbing my wife in any way, because that would be a disaster for both of us.
All of which is basically me saying: I don’t get much sleep these days. So when the noise starts at 4am, I’m minded to ignore it. But it’s too loud to ignore.
“What the fuck is that?” my wife says.
“I don’t know,” I say, sitting up. Whatever it is, it has the characteristics of an emergency. The dog – which would happily rise to bark at a fox sneezing four streets away – doesn’t even wake up. It’s asleep across my shins, pinning me to the mattress.
“Get off!” I say. Meanwhile, the noise – which is both piercingly shrill and deeply resonant, like a wasp operating an angle grinder – carries on.
It’s hard to tell where the noise is coming from. At first it seems as if it’s in the room with us, but it definitely gets louder when I open the bedroom door. It sounds like a faulty washing machine shaking itself apart, or someone drilling through the ceiling, or an iron gate being dragged across a concrete warehouse floor. None of these things make any sense.
I trace the noise to the bathroom, where it surrounds me – the tiles and tub are humming along to the frequency of it. I wonder if the pipes are about to explode, and in a bid to do something – anything – I turn the taps on and off a couple of times. The noise continues.
I lean over to feel the wall, in case the noise is coming from next door. Then I touch the little shelf above the sink, and the sound is suddenly muted. I pull my finger away, and it resumes at full volume.
“What is it?” my wife shouts, over the noise.
“I have absolutely no … Oh wait.”
My wife’s electric toothbrush, sitting in a ceramic jar on the shelf, appears to be running. I turn it off, and the noise stops.
“The jar amplified the vibrations, and I guess it set off the shelf, and then the tiles,” I say. “Weird.”
“But why did it start in the first place?” my wife says.
“Dunno,” I say. “Did you set it to brush your teeth at four in the morning?”
“It doesn’t set,” she says. “It’s a toothbrush.”
The mystery is solved, at least until the next night, when the toothbrush turns itself on at exactly the same time.
“Is this it now?” I say. “We just live like this?”
“I don’t know what to do about it,” my wife says. “I guess it’ll run out of charge eventually.”
“In, like, three weeks,” I say.
“In the meantime, I’ve taken it out of the jar,” she says.
“Is someone using the internet to seize control of our appliances?”
“My toothbrush is not connected to the internet.”
“Do you know that for a fact?” I say.
“Go to sleep.”
The light goes out. It occurs to me that when the machines take over this is exactly the sort of thing they will get up to. But I, for one, will refuse to be controlled, I think, lying in the dark with the dog’s nose an inch from mine.
