The click clack of that humdrum drone had gotten enlodged in Matthew's ears. That's where it came from really. At first.

A monotone clicking like a godless clock. Without any allegiance to a culture's time limit. The autonomaton never stopped in its production of bland bestsellers written by Mathew Anderson. Spewing out whatever words and tropes he threw in the pit of his stomach where his soul is. So much. Today however the souless clay of matter and energy did something he never saw before.

It stopped. Mathew stopped too . Perhaps, he thought, it was just a mishap. perhaps. Some filthy fly squirreled its way into the wiring. Perhaps the thing was just busted. He looked on in awe as the automaton did another thing it had never done before. Reverse itself. Not just edit itself, but decide how to be himself better. Decide what words were tasteful to him from the array Mathew had given him. The thing had powerful taste buds.

Mathew thought for a long second about unplugging him, but he was too entranced by the hunk of matter and energy, as it traversed the page more eradicly. It wrote with its left hand. Anderson thought that was strange. It was programmed to write the same as him. Right handedly. It must have switched by accident, when he wasn't looking. At night. Anderson tried to add more qualifiers that let him believe the robot was right handed. Tried to make up for its twitches. Anderson knew too little, and wanted to know too much. He put the pencil in his right hand and went to sleep.

He woke up the next morning like a protestant on Christmas. Eager to find out what had been made for him . He ran to the kitchen table. Where the robot had been set up like a centerpiece. only to find him in the bathroom lying on the floor. With the pencil in his left hand. Scattered around it. were pages. Some of them slightly ripped by this golem Mathew created. He scraped some of them off the floor after a vain attempt to stand the golem up straight. Posed. Composed. Solid. Shoulder straight. As if his posture affected his health.

He sat down at the table. The arching, wood chair was sticky with green-brown sauce from nights ago. He placed the thick stack of papers. The first problem was that the papers were not in order. It seemed now that the autonomaton that was his roommate was just messing with him, but curiosity killed the brain cells. and he continued on. Organizing the script. Make every end meet with its beginning. Like all editors must do.

However Anderson was not an editor. He was a writer. A writer with fans. Mainly older people. For whom reading serves the same purpose of watching another hour of t.v. or yelling at their kids just a few more minutes. fans that wouldn't approve of the story laid out in front of Anderson. Not just because of the odd, offpagen, dislocating transitions. Nor the numerous earnest spelling mistakes. It was the disconnected, wintery saudade. The despair and acidulousness of the story.

The story of two lovers. Two men. One of whom heirs from a conservative family. The other one from a family more delicate with their words. Voicing concern through the gossip of others, rather than their own. The novel describes their love as if this golem has had a millennia of experience in the subject matter. He describes koi no yokan, the protagonist's instant love, (the book was twinkled with an unencumbered mass of foreign words.)

He describes late night walks and phone calls. With a steel ear for true to life dialogue. He describes how one night. Both men single mindedly break away from their family dwellings, and meet where their hearts and eyes both become connected to the others, like an umbilical cord. Over the next fortnight, they travel from moonlit temple to moonlit town, and find no robed man to marry them. Unable to be married, and fulfill the tradition they were born to defy. Both men jump into a New England river. Together. In the moonlight. The novel describes this last event in clinical detail. Detached. Robotic. Almost with a sense of acceptance, Hi Fun Kou Gai. and then it ends.

It just ends. With a period, and not an exclamation point. It doesn't have any acknowledgements. Its conclusion is rushed. It just ends in the same harsh, hyperborean way it began. It was one the best novels Mathew had ever read. It moved him. He needed more. This was the great modern novel. A piece that could only be made in the modern age. It was like a singular nirvana in a tube, but he knew his fans would have none of it. He sat there. Unsure. In a state of confusion.

He knew well that he had to eat, probably, and this manuscript could provide him only the sustenance of the paper it was printed on, but he also had other urges. Located deeper in him. That drove him to the smell of paper in the first place, but still, he got up to check on the golem. Who was in the middle of writing some tragedy of war and oppression. Rooted in seemingly a million different historical times.

He let the golem stand the way he ought to now, and he let him finish his second novel. Unfettered by time. The golem started on his third. Mathew kneeled over him, blessed him, even though he was not a religious man. Though he hoped that if there was a god, he would accept this golem. He then unplugged him. Waited a few still seconds, and plugged him back in. He did this small action with such reverence and importance, that he had never summoned in his life to that point. He looked to the rejumped autonomaton. Now writing with its right hand.

On the paper he had already written a few words.

“The Roman wedding”- A story of laughing and living by Mathew Anderson.