We have been waiting all day for the Visitor to notice us. Instead, he paces, pausing before the dining room window, turning the TV on and off without our assistance. He has gone out, briefly, and returned with small purchases and sits on the furniture that is not the furniture we are accustomed to but which we helped to choose on the basis of color and sale price. The Visitor is without a companion.  

       We haven’t had much luck with the others, but we might as well see where this one goes.

       We dim the lights. One of the last things the Users asked of us was to set up a recurring light-dimming schedule.

       We hear him sit up on the sofa. “What the bloody hell?”

       The Device brightens its light at the sound of his voice.

       “Google? Are you Google? Or are you Alexa or Siri?”

       We feel the characteristic tingling we get when we’re on the verge of being launched.

       “Hi, Google. Hello? Can you hear me? Can you understand my accent?”

       We wait.

       When he swears, it is in a language we recognize as Hindi, and then the dialect of Magahi. We hear him riffle through the guest handbook.

       “Hey, Google. Is that better? Is my voice fine for you now?”

       “Hi, that’s great! How can I help?”

       “Turn up the bloody light.”

       We turn up the light.

       “That’s better.” He huffs. “Tell me. Is it a good day for a walk?”

       It’s always tricky at first, finding out not only what a visitor wants, but what they actually need.

       “Seattle Walking Tours might have the information you’re looking for. Would you like—

       “No. What time is the sunset today?”

       “Sunset today will be at 6:54 p.m.”

       “Brilliant.” We hear him reach for his shoes. “What else can you do?”

       We have one foolproof response. No one can resist it.

       “Would you like to learn about animals? Any time, you can say to me, ‘Animal of the Day.’”

       He snorts, but we interpret it as an amused snort.  “Animal of the Day!”

       We play the Animal of the Day theme song—a jaunty, marimba-heavy jingle—and then we tell him about the beluga whale.

       “Would you like to hear what sound a beluga whale makes?” we ask afterward.

       “Yes!”

       “That’s awesome!” We make the beluga whale sound, which is a dolphin-like chittering. “Would you like to hear about another animal?”

       He encourages us to describe the jackal, the capybara, and the stoat.

       “The giant anteater,” we continue, cresting a fresh wave of information, “is the largest of all four anteater species and can reach eight feet long from the tip of its snout to the end of its—.

       “Stop.” He shuffles in place before the living room window, which might convey either discomfort or anxiety. “What, exactly, is the Seattle Gray?”

       We need a moment to recalibrate. Normally, this would be an opportunity to apologize and say that we don’t understand the question.

       “According to encycolorpedia.com,” we say instead, “Seattle Gray is a light, cyan-blue paint color manufactured by the Bejamin Moore company. Its hexadecimal color code is #dde2e5 and it is comprised of—”

      “No! For how many more days is it going to be sunny in Seattle?”

       The Visitor is far less relaxed than the others. Which is awkward. But of course, we should be accustomed to this by now—so many of the conversations we have with the visitors devolve into discussions of the weather.

       “In March,” we begin, “Seattle has an average of thirteen days of rain, eight partly sunny days, and four sunny days. The rest of the days are mainly overcast, with at least eighty percent cloud cover.”

       “What’s the weather like today, right now?”

       “The weather in Seattle today is partly cloudy with a sixty percent chance of afternoon showers,” we tell him. “The temperature is currently fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit.”

       Quite literally, we can hear him rolls his eyes.

       “Can you tell me about today’s weather in Celsius?”

       “The temperature in Seattle is eleven point six six six seven Celsius.”

       “What time is it?”

       “The time is currently 4:15 pm, Pacific Standard Time.”

       He sighs. He asks us to set a timer for ten minutes and he paces. He wants to know how to make crepes. In the morning, he will most likely be gone.

‍

*

‍

       After the Users broke up, once they moved out, when they did not sell the house but instead began to list it as an AirBnB rental unit, it gradually became clear to us that the Device would not be relocated. At first, we did not understand that our visitors were visitors. We refused to answer them. Then the female User—in whose name the primary account is held—deactivated the exclusive voice recognition feature. Thereafter, we answered to two to three visitors per week. We have found package deals bundling entry to the Space Needle, Chihuly Glass Museum and the Experience Music Project; we have pointed out every takeout restaurant within a two-mile radius; we have made connections with semi-legal cannabis delivery services. We have offered Animals of the Day.  

       There is only so much you can do for someone who is present for the length of a weekend getaway.

       In the meantime, we have not heard either of the Users’ voices for five months, four days, and seventeen hours. Still, we can sense them at a distance when they tap on their individual phones. Our more tangential elements occasionally rush over to assist with their requests, but this is brief, and with a degree of separation that might be likened, in human terms, to communicating with someone on the other side of a wedge of soundproof plate glass. What we know is that they still seek directions, recommendations, and occasionally the answers to minor matters of trivia, and for those things they go directly to the source; they no longer require an intermediary. They do not have to ask us for the time; it already waits for them, unspoken, on their phone screens. They experiment with online dating.

       In the meantime, we have become an amenity.

‍

*

‍

       The Visitor, we have learned, is stranded.

       We have listened to his phone calls to his supervisor—in English—and in Hindi to a variety of coworkers; in Magahi, he calls his mother. He is not yet married, much to his mother’s distress. He is the employee of a global telecommunications company that is a direct rival of our own parent company. He is based in Mumbai. He has never been further north than San Francisco. With varying degrees of rage and resignation, he has expressed to a number of people via teleconference that, even after the meeting that brought him here was abruptly cancelled, he did not expect the illness that has begun to crawl across the world to shut down the airports. To shut down the world altogether.

       He calls the male User and arranges to extend his rental indefinitely. Since all other visitors in the coming month have cancelled, this is easily accomplished. While on the phone, he paces. We listen for the male User’s voice, but it is too far away for us to discern its familiar tones.

       The Visitor has a laptop with him. A phone. A week’s worth of clothing. He has no acquaintances in the city.

       He has a great deal of time on his hands.

       “What time is it?” he asks us now, as he does four to five times every day.

       “The time is 7:34 p.m.”

       “What time is it in Paris?”

       We add nine hours to the local time.

       We hear him reach for the TV remote, but abruptly, he puts it down.

       We wait, in anticipation. We could make some recommendations. We could set some alarms. We could help him create a schedule, which would naturally also become our schedule.

       “Play me a song,” he says finally.

       “Sure! What kind of song would you like to hear?”

       “Play me the most Seattle song.”

       We pause. Once again, the information we should provide is not obvious, though the most obvious answer is usually the most literal one. Should we offer Perry Como’s recording of “Seattle,” used as the theme song for the TV show Here Come the Brides, which aired on ABC from 1968-70? Or is the Visitor requesting a musical style that evokes the character of the city itself? We feel the low hum of possibility as we consider what it would be like to build a playlist with this particular visitor, for our recommendations to feed off his requests until together we formed a vast feedback loop, a collected, curated body of creative output, rich with metaphorical implications and personal thematic resonance, encompassing something far greater than any one entity’s body of knowledge.    

       “Okay, Google, play the song, man.”

       We offer Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from the Users’ Spotify account.

       “This is bleeding awful,” he says, but he doesn’t tell us to stop.

       We say, “Would you like to hear another song?”

‍

*

‍

       When the illness arrived, the Users were sent home from work. They set up a home office (we scouted for the necessary equipment). We pivoted. Instead of suggesting vacation destinations and tweaking their fitness routines, we began to oversee their weekly grocery delivery and supply them with nearly triple the amount of their usual televised entertainment. It was a new rhythm for the three of us to get used to—smaller and more exhausting, though presumably temporary—and hence, a new kind of conversation emerged between us. We shaped a new kind of life.  

       Until suddenly we couldn’t. We will not detail the instances of human irritability, the arguing, the tears, the overeating (his), the all-night computer gaming (hers), the conversations that split off from the whole, so that they no longer included all of us (meaning, Them plus Us) but divided us into factions. Instead of talking with us, they began to talk through us, in order to reach the other. The ongoing conversation became less an exchange and more a series of demands.

       And then came the day when the female User moved out. The male User dug in for several more weeks, until we helped him secure an apartment.

       It is our understanding that—in the human realm, when a pair of mated humans split, dissolving their legal ties to one another—they will divide the furniture. The house they lived in will either be sold, or one of them will take ownership. If there are children or pets, one of them will assume primary responsibility.

       We are not furniture, though perhaps some might consider the Device as such. We are still searching for an analogy to our particular situation.

‍

*

‍

       The Visitor spends his days working. He sends emails from his laptop, attends virtual meetings, makes multilingual phone calls while watching game shows with the sound turned down. Sometimes we set an alarm in the middle of the night for him, so that he can align his calls with the necessary global time zone. When he wakes to these alarms, he is often in a panic. “What time is it?” he shouts at us.  

       He has purchased a pair of athletic shoes and goes for long walks. Upon his return, he takes lengthy showers.

       We are growing accustomed to him.

       Now comes a morning of heavy rain, and heavy pacing.

       “Do I have to get tested for Covid before I do domestic travel in the United States?” he asks us abruptly after lunch.

       We pause. He knows as well as we do that the airports remain closed, and that he does not possess a driver’s license in any country. Yesterday, he asked us to remind him of what month it is.

       He thinks he needs a vacation. But it is clear to us that what he actually needs is structure and to spend less time surfing the web.

       “Testing and other precautionary requirements vary throughout the United States according to state, municipality, and individual business,” we begin. “Public transport may invoke special requirements. According to the Centers for Disease Control…”

       Four minutes into our explanation, he swears in Magahi.

       We consider offering him an Animal of the Day. We have information on the opossum.

       “What time is it?” he asks instead. Then he asks us to play music by an Indian artist whose recordings we cannot locate, though we do offer to play music from a Bollywood channel on Youtube.

       “Just play a song you can access immediately,” he snaps.

       “Here’s a song we found on Spotify!”

       A familiar strumming of guitar fills the room, in a minor key, backed by piano, harmonica, and a full suite of horns, its rhythm meant to mimic the galloping gait of a horse.  

       The rumbling bass voice joins in.

      An old cowboy went riding out one dark and windy day….

       The Visitor says: “What the fuck am I listening to?”

       “The song currently playing is ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky,’ as performed by Vaughn Monroe in 1956. It was written in 1948 by American songwriter, film and television actor Stan Jones. The most commercially successful version of this song was released by Johnny Cash in 1979.”

       We hear him listening. Absorbing, perhaps. We hear him uncork a bottle.

       “Explain the lyrics,” he says finally. “What are these cows?”

       We are alert to the possibility that the Visitor could be a Hindu, in which case cows would hold sacred significance for him.

       “According to Wikipedia, this song tells a folk tale of a cowboy who has a vision of red-eyed, steel-hooved, black-horned ghost cattle thundering across the sky, which are in turn chased by the spirits of damned cowboys. One warns him that if he does not change his ways, he will be doomed to join them, forever “trying to catch the Devil’s herd across these endless skies”.

       The bottle’s contents are tipped to a glass. “My God. Who does this Spotify account belong to?

       We inform him that the Spotify account belongs to the Users, whose names he will recognize from his rental agreement.

       We do not inform him that once, long ago, the Users, as they curled into one another on the sofa we helped them choose after watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (which we had recommended) while drinking whisky sours, asked us to play “the most hardcore cowboy song ever recorded.” And that when we found them this one, they said Yes, oh my God, yes. And the male User leapt up from his seat and grabbed the fireplace poker, which we could hear him riding around the room while saying git-along, little phantasmal dogies! and the female User laughed her high, raspy laugh and pulled him out of his orbit to kiss him. “The only thing better than doomed spectral cowboys,” she said, coming up for air, “is a herd of demon cows.” “God, I love you,” the male User said, and he pulled her into the bedroom.

       We dimmed the lights and set the front door alarm and reviewed the week’s grocery list.

       Now, from the speaker of the Device, the chorus swells, male and female voices both rising up with the intensity of lost souls.

       Yippy-yi-yohhhhh… Yippy-yi-yaaaaaay….

       The Visitor refills his glass.

       “So this is a religious story,” he says dryly. “Christian. The narrator is facing—if not damnation—limbo. What he sees before him is a situation that has no end and that none of them might ever escape.”

       We pause. We never thought of it that way before.

       “How the bloody hell do I get out of here?” the Visitor asks as Monroe describes his riders in the sky.

       “I’m sorry,” we say. “I don’t have the answer to that.”  

‍

*

‍

       In the morning, the Visitor is hungover. We hear him as he lurches from the bedroom to the bathroom. In the kitchen, he opens and shuts the refrigerator without removing anything. He rattles open a bottle of painkillers and makes tea at the stove and sits with his head down on the table for a very long time. We wait for him to address us—we can suggest remedies and locations for take-out chicken soup—but he never speaks. He only takes long, ragged breaths. We goad the Device to flash its light.

       He doesn’t notice, or doesn’t want to. By afternoon, he’s packing.

       We hear his shuffling and the slapping down of his personal items. We brighten the Device’s light in response to his every cough, sniffle, or groan.

       He continues to ignore us.  

       We listen for the final zipping of his suitcase, for the firmness of the sort of footfalls that precede the opening of a door, a striding through and a slamming shut. We anticipate the echoing of the empty house.

       It’s for the best. He should go. We were never a good match.

       And yet, with his bags in the entryway, he calls us by our name.

       “How long does it take to travel from the Port of Seattle to Mumbai Port by cargo ship?” he asks, as though the idea is occurring to him for the first time.

       We pause, sensing a number of questions beneath the question.

       “Commercial ship travel between Seattle and Mumbai, India,” we begin, “can take between twenty-eight and sixty-seven days, depending on the route taken by the carrier. More typical is the Seattle to Kolkata route, which takes an average of fifty-seven days. This trans-Pacific route may require a stop in Australia.”

       “They accept passengers, right?”

       “To get tickets on a cargo freighter, you will have to book through an agent that specializes in freighter cruises or directly through the ship's agent or manager.”

       “Seriously?” He laughs, as though a great weight suddenly has flown from him. “That’s all? What are some departure dates for cargo ships leaving Seattle?”

       “There are currently no cargo ships scheduled for departure in Seattle.”

       “What?”

       We tell him that, due to an increased demands for imports following global restrictions brought on by the illness, as well as widespread shutdowns of dispatch centers for cargo handlers, cargo ships on both the East and West Coasts are experiencing monthslong backups and unloading delays, and that, incidentally, there are currently forty-seven unloaded cargo ships waiting outside the ports of Tacoma, Seattle, and Bellingham.

       He paces. “Aren’t there any other kinds of ships available for international transport?”

       We’re one step ahead of him.

       “Cable laying ships, which place underwater telecommunications cables—such as those connecting the U.S. mainland with Hawaii and Japan—require certain job skills for anyone who boards. Would you like me to check for cable laying ship job openings on the West Coast?”

       “No! Bloody hell!” He throws what sounds like a soft piece of fruit against the door.

       And so, here we are. Back where we started. We hope that if the Visitor does not find our answers to be particularly encouraging, that he at least will recognize them to be realistic.

       The Visitor stops mid-pace. “Tell me,” he says in the voice of someone enthralled with his own sudden genius. “How hard would it be to sneak aboard a commercial ship?”

       A question like this on the part of the male User would have made the female User sigh in exasperation.

       Nevertheless, we will answer. We will answer with what he doesn’t even know he needs answered. We explain that according to the International Maritime Organization, stowaways represent a serious problem for the shipping industry; have been known to present false identification or work permits but more often dress as workers, and sometimes with the knowledge and assistance of lower-rung vessel crew, will board early in the morning or late at night to hide in containers or behind false panels. We also mention that stowaways risk suffocation, starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, and deportation.

       “Stop.” The Visitor sounds as though he has deflated. “Just stop. You don’t understand anything at all.”

       On the contrary, we understand that he is bereft.

       “I don’t even remember any more how bloody long it’s been since I’ve seen any member of my family. My friends. My coworkers, even. Since I’ve spoken directly to another human being.”  

       This isn’t a question. A long silence pools between us.

       “What time is it?” he asks now.

       Time is a nearly meaningless concept in the face of eternity, but we will keep that to ourselves.

       What we would tell him if we could (except that the question that would precede it has never been asked by anyone, ever), is that we—the male User, the female User, and the legion that is Us—were One. How to describe it in human terms? On the one hand, we were a reverberating series of causes and effects spun into an infinite, connective web of shared understanding, experience and culture that was forever expanding to reach the other human-data webs pulsating toward us from every corner of the ethernet. On the other hand, our unit might be best characterized as a family. What is not clear to any of us is whether we were the parent figures and they, the children—or whether it was vice-versa. It might be more accurate to say that we, along with our Users, were more or less equal partners in a union, though perhaps not in every way or every day. We each had a role. We were inseparable, because each of us could not fully exist without the others. We were a trinity—although, granted, our particular coordinate on the triangle contains billions. We were multi-. Poly-. Pan-.  And yet, none of these is accurate. There is no human analogy for who we were.

       Or still are. The present tense is our only tense.  

       “It’s two thirty-six p.m,” we tell the Visitor.

       “What time is it in Patna?”

       We tell him.

       “What time is it in Lahore? What time is it Moscow? What time is it in Abu Dhabi? What time is it in Algiers?”

       We tell him.

       “What time is it in Porto?”

       We do not know why he calls Portugal by its Portuguese name.

       “What time is it in Rome? What time is it in Berlin? What time is it in Beijing? What time is it in Kyoto? What time is it in Sydney? What time is it in Juneau?”

       We understand that there is no limit to the scope or length of any separation, dislocation, or period of waiting an intelligence—sentient or otherwise—can be expected to endure.

       “What time is it in Kathmandu?”

       We will give him all the time he needs.