Rabbit and Robot. Andrew Smith

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      I had no idea.

      “You mean we should get out of Los Angeles?” I asked. “It is kind of a shithole, isn’t it?”

      Billy nodded and burped quietly. I was lagging behind him in the number of empty cans I contributed to our pile on the office floor. It tasted awful, but I was already feeling a bit dizzy and energized.

      “I’m drunk,” I announced.

      “Good,” Billy said.

      “And now I want some Woz,” I said.

      Billy said, “You practically OD’d in Rowan’s backseat last night.”

      “Oh.”

      “But if you want, I’ll ask Rowan to take us over to Charlie Greenwell’s so you can hook some up. Then let’s go somewhere and have fun.”

      “Where?”

      “Oh, I don’t know,” Billy lied. “Somewhere.”

      This would be fun, right?

      Charlie Greenwell’s place was a deranged lunatic circus.

      Charlie lived in an old hotel in the east end of Hollywood that had been converted to a kind of rehab home for bonks who’d come back from their various wars with holes in their brains. The news about Canada had really cheered up the residents at Charlie Greenwell’s complex. The place reeked of Woz smoke. Guns and flags were everywhere.

      As we walked into the lobby, Billy Hinman said, “I wonder if Charlie and the other ex-bonks are getting turned on, thinking about killing Canadian rabbits.”

      He was a little drunk, and he said it a little too loud.

      “Rabbits” was what bonks called other bonks.

      It was weird, but it was one of those slang words that nobody who wasn’t a bonk was ever allowed to use. The unwritten social code: Only bonks can call bonks rabbits. Charlie Greenwell didn’t mind if Billy or I used the word around him, but then again, Charlie Greenwell’s ability to care about shit had been blasted out of his head four or five wars ago. And “Rabbit” was even in the title of—and the main character in—my father’s television program, which was all about getting kids to embrace their inner bonks and coders. Or, at least, that’s what I knew about the program, despite never actually having watched it.

      Well, to be honest, never is an exaggeration. How could anyone not catch a glimpse of Rabbit & Robot here and there, a few seconds at a time, even if it’s just out of the corner of an eye? The show was on almost constantly, in virtually every country of the world, even in most of the twenty-eight we were at war with.

      In fact, my father’s show was playing on one of the wall screens in the lobby of the Hotel Kenmore when Billy Hinman and I walked in, which was when Billy asked, a little too loudly, a rhetorical question about Canadian rabbits and horny bonks.

      The other wall screens in the lobby were playing muted coverage of Canadian rabbits on the rampage in Ohio.

      Unfortunately for Billy and me, there were two ex-bonks sitting together in a pair of vinyl reclining chairs watching Rabbit & Robot when he said it. One of them—he was shirtless and wore thick eyeglasses with one of the lenses blacked out so you couldn’t see the vacated eye socket that was inevitably behind it—stood up right away and puffed out his hairless, tattooed chest. His nipples were pierced with silver barbs that looked like hunting arrows, and he was also holding some type of machine gun.

      I have to admit that I felt so nonmasculine for my lack of nipple piercings, as well as my inability to recognize specific models of firearms. It seemed like every boy in America—future coders and bonks alike, thanks to Rabbit & Robot—knew the precise make, caliber, and specs of every gun in existence, even if none of our boys could accurately point out more than two or three countries on a map of the world.

      Grosvenor was an outstanding school system.

       Cheepa Yeep!

      “Hey!” The old ex-bonk with a missing eye and a tattoo of the state of Texas on his belly jabbed a finger at us. “What did you just say, little fucking Canadian queer boy?”

      All bonks were trained to—or at least pretended to— hate homosexuals. It was so fifty-years-ago, but clinging to the past was what armies are good at, right?

      And now they hated Canadians, too.

      Billy Hinman wasn’t exactly queer, though. Billy would have sex with anyone if he liked them well enough. Most people I knew were like that, which made me feel rather odd and isolated. And Billy wasn’t Canadian, either. So, kind of wrong on both assumptions.

      “Um, your friend doesn’t have trousers on,” Billy Hinman pointed out.

      Billy was right. In the tension of our drunken entrance, I hadn’t noticed that the other insane ex-bonk who’d been watching Rabbit & Robot beside the guy with Texas on his stomach was completely naked except for his old army-issue corporal’s shirt and cap. He did have boots on, though.

      This was life in the Hotel Kenmore. We’d been there enough times before that seeing such things wasn’t ever surprising to Billy and me.

      I put my hands up as a conciliatory gesture, and also because everyone knows that putting your hands up when a pair of half-naked insane people are pointing machine guns at you has a generally soothing effect.

      “Wait, wait, wait. Billy didn’t mean any offense, guys. In fact, he’s just on his way down to the recruiter’s and stopped by here to say good-bye to our pal Charlie Greenwell before going off to kill Canadians.”

      “What the fuck are you talking about?” Billy said.

      In his defense, Billy Hinman was a bit drunk, so his stupidity was somewhat excusable. He went on, “I thought I told you we were going to do something fun.”

      I persisted in trying to defuse the situation. “Are you guys watching Rabbit & Robot? This is my favorite episode!”

      I still held my hands in the air. Billy stared at me. The insane ex-bonk with no trousers softened a bit and lowered his machine gun so it was pointing at our knees instead of our faces.

      “This is my favorite episode too,” the naked guy said. “But I wish that fucker Mooney would shut up and die.”

      Mooney, the “robot” in my father’s program, was a v.4 cog who sang ridiculous, overly repetitive songs that helped kids memorize code sequences for school. Mooney was also a cog that was stuck on the emotion of “outrage.” For some reason, an awful lot of v.4 cogs were either outraged or elated, both of which are highly unattractive attitudes. Some v.4s were horny, which was extremely awkward. They picked up their emotional tracks from the coders who put them online. I guess some coders, if they weren’t outraged or elated, were horny, even on the job.

      Whatever.

      But it was understandable to me that the naked guy wanted Mooney to die. As far as I could tell, nobody liked Mooney, and he died at one point or another in most episodes.

      Billy СКАЧАТЬ