Your Robot Dog Will Die Read online

  Back in his old life. Before Mom and Dad met Dorothy at a lecture at their local library, where she was talking about her newest book—What We Owe Them: Goddamn Everything, An Animal Manifesto—and were so inspired they decided to follow her to Florida, to Dog Island. Mom was six months pregnant with me at the time. That’s how she got around the “no new human babies” Dog Island edict.

  This pre–Dog Island life Billy told me about sounded so exotic and strange, idyllic and dark at the same time. I couldn’t get enough of hearing about it. I only got to go to Wickford once, when Dad’s parents died in a car wreck. Mom’s mom was still alive at the time. She made me lunch, which Mom didn’t let me eat even though I was hungry, and told me how “cute but boyish” I looked to her, then she cried, and I didn’t know why, and she wouldn’t say. I remember that the weather was cold, it was even cold inside Mom’s house, and we didn’t stay long enough for me to really see much beyond the funeral.

  Of course things changed a little as we got older. I spent more time with Wolf and Jack and less time with my brother. Wolf and Jack and I had a lot to do on our own then, like going to the beach, kayaking, riding bikes, sitting around reading. We’d reenact scenes from our favorite TV shows and movies—which we could “stream” when our clunky Internet was working, which was not very often, or, more often, we’d get to see when someone trotted out an old television and some tapes or DVDs for a Dog Island movie night down at the beach or in the Casino. Like we all loved this stupid old show called The Bionic Woman, and Jack and Wolf always wanted me to play her in our reenactments. But I always wanted to play her bionic dog, Max, instead.

  I don’t actually know what Billy was doing then. There weren’t really any other kids his age to play with. No permanent ones, anyway. Sometimes visitors would bring their teenagers with them. Then he had a friend for a day or a week or however long they were here. I know he had an older girlfriend for a while and got an online degree in, like, business management or something like that at some point. Something Mom called “pedestrian but practical I suppose.”

  That was when the Internet was a little more reliable. He always seemed to be just a little bit adrift, always looking for something. He listened to a lot of music in his room, and there was a smell that followed him around—a smell I recognized with acute precision the first time Jack lit up some weed in front of me.

  Then, maybe five years ago, Billy got recruited to be part of Dog Island’s We Are Guardians unit, otherwise known as WAG. That’s the group that was formed to investigate and stop animal cruelty across the country. Dorothy got every governor in the country to grant her the authority to dispatch WAG into their states, when needed. To do our best to make sure that no other animals would suffer, like the dogs had.

  Billy spent most of his time, after that, traveling around the country, investigating animal abuse allegations—then that evidence could be brought to prosecutors.

  When Billy first started with We Are Guardians, WAG, he’d come back home with horrific, nightmarish tales of the things he’d seen. A family that moved out of its cockroach-filled apartment but left two cats—a mom and baby—behind. The mom had eaten most of her baby’s body before being discovered. There was a friendly pet pig set on fire by some drunk teenagers who kept screaming about how much they loved bacon. A horse bashed in the head with a golf club by the owner’s boyfriend when she threatened to leave him for another man.

  These stories inspired Billy’s work, as much as they sickened me. He stopped talking about wanting to eat hamburgers; when he was home that distinctive smell didn’t emanate from his room as often. Also when he was home, he’d say he just couldn’t wait to get back out on the road again, to “bring justice to the voiceless.”

  After a few years of this, though, something seemed to change again. We’d still go for walks together when he was around. But he stopped telling me stories about his investigations, about his heinous investigations. I’d ask him about them, and he’d give me a look that seemed both stricken and numb. He’d just say, “It can’t keep going like this.”

  “What can’t?” I’d ask. He’d shake his head, change the subject.

  I really miss him, now. One day Billy was here. I remember he was fighting with Dad about something. Mom was crying. They sent me over to Jack’s for dinner. When I got back that night Billy was still at home. But he wouldn’t talk to me, just stayed in his room listening to music. By the time I woke up the next day, he was gone. All his device trackers disabled.

  Mom and Dad told me they didn’t know where he’d gone or why. They said the police were on it; they said we should pray to Dog that Billy would be back, safe, before too long. That was a year ago now. Best I know, there’ve been no leads. We have no Billy. I’m not sure what we do have, without him.

  Billy, my robot dog, and I go inside.

  “I’m home!” I call out.

  “Oh honey, good,” I hear Mom yell from the kitchen. “Come in and help me set the table.”

  Billy and I walk through our dusty, musty, cheerful living room and into the tiled kitchen, where Mom is looking sweaty and happy stirring something over the stove. The robot vacuum cleaner is whirring around the room, cleaning up after her. It’s very cute; they made it to look like a little elephant that sucks up dirt with its trunk. This is as close as we really have to elephants anymore, since the real ones went extinct, since they were mostly hunted out of existence, and the few ones left died of starvation, their food and water gone from the drought. I never even got to see one in person, before they were gone.

  “I tried a new stew,” Mom tells me. “It’s got acorns in it. I thought it might help with my allergies.”

  “Isn’t it a little hot out for that?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Mom says. “As it turns out yes, it is a little hot out for that. But it’s made. Can you get out bowls and plates? Dad is out back grilling. Is Wolf coming for dinner?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes to setting the table. No to Wolf.”

  “Okay!” Mom says. “How about Jack?”

  “No to Jack, too,” I say.

  “I miss those boys. They used to be here every night,” Mom says. “Times change, I guess. How do you kids keep getting older while Dad and I stay our same youthful selves?”

  “It’s a real mystery,” I say, standing on my toes to collect bowls and plates from the second shelf in the cabinets. (Mom is tall, like Billy. I am not, like Dad.)

  I carry them outside. Dad is at the grill. It smells good, which sadly does not necessarily correspond to the food tasting good.

  “What are you making?” I ask.

  “Ethical Chicken patties,” Dad says. “I thought I’d make you into my guinea pig. Word on the street is they do not taste like vomit.”

  My dad being the chef of the Dog Island community cafeteria, we’re always getting samples and handouts as the lab-grown meat market expands.

  Many of the samples are, as Billy used to put it, “wicked wretched.” It tastes okay to me. I’ve only ever eaten this. It’s not like I am out there missing something else.

  “What does this one look like?” I ask Dad.

  “Don’t ask,” he says. “But it smells good, right, kitten?”

  “Fantastic,” I say, placing the plates and bowls around our glass-topped table.

  “It smells a lot like what real chicken used to smell like on the grill,” Dad says to me now. Apparently chicken is the topic that gets him going these days.

  “I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’ve spent a lot of my later life avoiding eating things that smell like this,” he continues. I love when he tells me stories about his old life. I wish he’d do it more. He and Billy were closer than he and I are. They talked more, and fought more.

  “It smells good to me,” I say. Billy’s nose is up in the air, sniffing. He looks quite pleased. “I think Billy likes it, too.
”

  “Huh,” Dad replies. I press the “positive interaction” button because it’s cute to see a robot dog seeming to enjoy the smell of food, and also it’s pleasant to see Dad engaging a little, too. He retreats to the Parents’ Room a lot more now than before, claiming he’s swamped with work. As the Dog Island chef, it’s hard to see what work he might be doing in that room, but perhaps he’s just experimenting with low-water cocktail recipes.

  The food’s done cooking. Dad puts the “chicken” onto fresh-made buns he picked up from Dog Island Sourdough Vegan Bakers earlier in the day, and Mom ladles out the hot stew and cool salad.

  Mom and Dad drink glasses of fermented coconut wine that their friends Owen and Bob make in a big vat in their backyard and then distribute to all the boozy adults in this community. Mom claims that it helps with her allergies. Dad claims he likes being tipsy. They do not allow me to partake, which seems mean, and silly. I know where they hide their stuff.

  I bite into the sandwich and immediately regret it. This food is appalling.

  “Well, I don’t think I will be serving this twice,” Dad says.

  Mom nods. “It’s repellent. Want more salad?”

  “Sure,” I say. She uses the tongs to put some greens and other veggies on my plate. It’s good to have real, grown veggies again. Not to have to eat so much stupid cactus.

  “Billy would have hated this salad,” I say. “Remember how he used to say that the only good thing about the drought was not having to eat so many vegetables?”

  Mom chuckles then reaches over and rubs my arm. “He really hated vegetables,” she agrees.

  “Hated?” I say. My heart speeds up. “Hated?”

  “Come on, kittencakes,” Mom says, quietly. Dad looks down. It’s not such a change for Dad to eat without really saying much, but Mom doesn’t stop talking in exclamation points very often. She’s “ebullient” is how I’ve heard her described. “Loudmouth,” is another description that some cattier members of the community—the Bad Bitches—have used. She puts the trait to good use as the spokesperson for Dog Island. She can, as she says, “spokes and spokes and spokes some more” when she feels like it.

  “Don’t you wonder where he is?” I ask them. I try not to ask it too often. It bothers them, to be asked, and I don’t like to be a bother. I just wish that he was with us. And that, if he wasn’t, then we could at least share the sadness and confusion about him being gone. It must hurt them as much as it hurts me. He’s their kid.

  “Of course,” Mom says. “Of course. We miss him like crazy. Dad and I both do. It seems like just yesterday he was coming out of my body. Such a perfect tiny baby. Oh, how I Ioved being pregnant with him, giving birth. And of course with you, too.”

  “Of course. Shouldn’t we be out looking for him, then?”

  “Oh, Nano-baby,” Mom says. “Hey, I have an idea! Want to come with me to feed the dogs tonight?”

  I feel two conflicting emotions: Confused, about why we can’t talk about my brother being missing, possibly dead. And thrilled, doggone thrilled, at the prospect of getting to see the dogs. Despite spending my whole life on Dog Island, I rarely get to spend any time with the dogs themselves. This is mostly because of them being very vicious and dangerous, so they don’t get much human contact to start off with. It’s especially rare for one of the kids to get to go into their enclosure. Which we call the “Ruffuge,” on account of really liking dog puns here.

  Which means I’m excited as all get-out as I scrape the leftover Ethical Chicken sandwiches into our compost bin and load up the plates and bowls into the Dish Blower; then I go into my room to get my dog suit—the formfitting garment that we all wear when going to visit the dogs. It emits special pheromones to mask our human scent (and less importantly, our appearance) so that the dogs won’t attack us.

  It’s been ages since Mom let me come with her to help feed the dogs and make sure they are all safe and accounted for. I hope I can find my suit. I hope it still fits.

  I rifle through my closet—some pants, tops, shorts, and dresses, mostly made out of that stiff perma-clean cloth that can be “washed” every once in a while with some air blowing, or, when really dirty, a laser. No dog suit. Crap, where is it? No suit, no dogs.

  I yank a big cardboard box out from the closet. It’s where I throw the things that I don’t have any current use for, but also don’t want to get rid of. I can’t imagine why it’d be in the box, but I also can’t think of where else it’d be. I start pulling out T-shirts that are too small, a broken radio that I might fix one day, an ear belonging to Snowflake, one of my first robot dogs—back then, they used to just spontaneously fall apart a lot more. An ear might fall off, or a tail. Big patches of fur might disintegrate if the robot dog was caught in some rain. I smile, remembering Snowflake. She was really a complete wreck by the time Mechanical Tail came to terminate her, to replace her with . . . How can I forget who came after Snowflake? It was either Bruno or Ninja . . .

  But still no sign of the dog suit.

  I approach the closet again, willing this dog suit to be there, taking out one garment at a time to try to track this thing down. Finally, when the small closet is totally empty, I see a little ball of silky faux fur at the back of the closet. A mask, with long floppy ears, is buried under the suit. Thank Dog. I nearly cry with gratitude.

  “Nano? Darling?”

  I ignore Mom and slip the suit on over my clothes, worried it will be too small, given that it’s been a very long time since I last wore it. Instead, oddly, it’s too big. I haven’t gotten smaller myself, so I can’t think of why this would be, but there’s really no time to think about this particular puzzle right now. Instead I race into the front room, almost tripping over the extra fabric and hoping Mom doesn’t notice.

  Mom has on her dog suit. It is quite formfitting. She holds her mask in one hand and wiggles her butt in a way that would be embarrassing if it were in public, but she’d do it anyway. “We’ve got to get a shake on, sweetheart!”

  “I’m ready,” I say, holding my mask.

  Mom and I say goodbye to Dad, who gives me a strangely long hug and kisses the top of my head, and get into a GoPod parked on the street—the self-driving golf cart–sized, solar-powered vehicles that people use to get around the parts of our sanctuary where there are roads or paths. Except for Dorothy’s, they aren’t owned, they belong to the community; anyone who has been registered can use them.

  Mom presses her thumb into the ignition button and puts the top down. It’s such a beautiful night. There’s a great big red moon in the sky and we are going to see the dogs. As we ride along, Mom rubs my fur-covered arm with one of her hands, which is covered in her dog suit so looks like a paw. I can’t sit still, I’m so excited.

  It’s about a mile to the entrance of the Ruffuge. To get there we rumble in our GoPod through more residential streets, paved in brick, and lined with little brightly colored bungalows like the one that we live in.

  We drive along the beach for a while, the big red moon hovering over the horizon, then turn onto a dark unpaved road. It smells like dirt and jungle and flowers and salt water—so feral, so delicious.

  After a couple of minutes, we approach the only gate onto the Ruffuge itself, which is about twenty-five acres, jutting out on a little peninsula surrounded by water. This one spot is the only land-based point of access.

  Mom gets out of the GoPod to check in with the night security guard, then comes back out carrying a huge box, with tonight’s rations in it.

  “George wants to say shalom,” she says. “Go on in.”

  I walk into the guard’s room hanging onto the fabric of my dog suit to try to keep the pants from dragging on the ground. George is sitting at his console in front of 25 or so screens, all showing different parts of Dog Island. I don’t know how he stays focused on these screens for so many hours at a time. I’d end up reading a bo
ok, falling asleep, going out for a wander, playing ball with my robot dog, shooting the poop with my buddies, and so on. Guess it’s a good thing George is doing this job and not me.

  “Nano!” George calls out, turning away from the screens. “It’s so wonderful to see you.”

  “Shalom, George,” I say, kissing his scratchily bearded cheek. George is one of the old-timers. He wears his long gray hair in a ponytail, matched by a long beard that is, for some reason, still brown. He always looks like he’s a little stoned, and almost never wears shoes. Like almost everyone who lives here, his arms and legs are covered in tattoos. Lots of paw prints and animal faces, among other things. (My dorky parents are two of the only grown-ups who aren’t inked all over; they sport a pair of mortifyingly corny matching tats they got in their teens: a single rose, on their ankles.)

  “Anything good to see tonight?” I ask, gesturing at the monitors.

  “Yep. Just like every night,” George says. We watch the monitors together for a couple of minutes. We can see the dogs sitting still, near where we will be feeding them soon. You could tell the time by these animals. Seeing them, still, always, makes my heart stop for a second. They are all different shapes and sizes, and they are all magnificent. Both cute and terrifying, important and goofy. At once, you can have a sort of religious feeling toward them—the thank Dogs are partly to be funny and partly dead-serious—but then you just have to see these beasties playing with a new toy, or wrestling with each other, to see how delightful they are as well. How earthly. How Organic. These animals embody the best of everything.

  Now they’re howling and yipping. “Well, you’d better get going. The dogs are getting hungry,” George says.

  I give George an awkward hug and then head back into the GoPod. The first gate opens. We drive into the holding section, where we’ll stay until the first gate closes. Then the second gate will open. My heart’s pounding. I’m going to get to see the dogs.