by Andrew Smith
“Sounds like a reasonable way to clean up a bunch of shit,” Billy said.
“Mr. Messer likes simple solutions.”
I called my father Mr. Messer. I said, “Nobody would have gone on it after the shit thing. That’s why they built the Tennessee. No shit problems, so far.”
Actually, the Tennessee didn’t have any glitches yet because it was new and it had never carried any human passengers besides the few coders who’d gotten it online and powered up. I’d visited it one time, before it was fully operational.
Billy Hinman stretched out in the seat, extending his legs over to my side, so our feet touched. Billy Hinman was always horny. I kicked him.
He said, “Well, you’d never get me up on one of those shit things. Cruises are what old people do right before they die. Trust me. I learned that.”
Billy wasn’t entirely wrong about cruises either. When we were both ten years old, Billy and I went with his parents on an ocean cruise across the Pacific, from Los Angeles to Sydney. It was a very long cruise. Five octogenarians died before we got to Australia.
Cheepa Yeep!
A Visit to the Hotel Kenmore
I calculated that at about the same time Billy Hinman and I finished our fourth beer of the afternoon, the twenty-eighth war started.
Twenty-eight!
And it was my sixteenth birthday, too.
Like Charlie Greenwell told us, wars don’t just fight themselves.
Bonks were on the move, and this time the boys got to stay close to home. During beer four—or possibly five for Billy—the Canadian Navy sailed across Lake Erie and pounded the shores of Ohio and Pennsylvania with artillery.
Canada was really mad at us. They had their reasons, I’m sure.
Not too many people cared about it, outside of Pennsylvania and Ohio, that is, but the event did provide an opportunity for some undeployed bonks to get to work.
“We should leave this shithole,” Billy said.
We drank beer in Mr. Messer’s attic office. Well, to be honest, Billy Hinman was doing most of the drinking. I did have some beer, though, just because it was the right thing to do, us being best friends, and it being my birthday and all. Of course Rowan was in on Billy’s conspiracy—he got the beer for us—but Billy Hinman was convinced that in drinking beer I’d finally grown some balls, as he put it, and come to my senses about how useless and boring our lives were. Not that I didn’t agree with him that our lives were useless and boring. But they were about to get a lot more exciting.
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 pants 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 pants 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 Hinman hitched a thumb at me. “His dad’s Anton Messer.”
“Anton Messer?” Texas Dude was so impressed, I’m pretty sure he was getting a boner. It might have been because the screens behind Billy and me were showing the Canadians, though. Who knows for sure?
“You boys should sit down with us and watch the war, and Rabbit & Robot,” Naked Guy, who may just as well have been an elated v.4 cog, said.
I said, “I’ll tell you what. Let us go say bye to our friend Charlie Greenwell, and we’ll be right back. Okay with you?”
Texas Dude lowered his gun, grabbed his dick, and then fiddled with one of the silver arrows piercing his nipple. He nodded. “Charlie Greenwell is a hell of a rabbit.”
“The best,” I agreed.
* * *
“Do you realize you almost got us killed down there?” I said.
“Whatever, Cager.”
We rode the rickety and urine-fouled elevator up to Charlie’s floor.
It was fortunate for everyone, even the insane guys in the lobby, that we arrived at Charlie Greenwell’s apartment when we did.
We didn’t knock. Knocking scared Charlie. Walking in on whatever Charlie Greenwell was likely doing scared me, but I was not insane and heavily armed, so we just walked right in, as we always did.
Charlie was attempting to set fire to a Canadian flag that he’d draped over a sofa in his living room. There was a tipped-over can of barbecue starter fluid beside his bare right foot, and Charlie was flicking the flint wheel on a dead plastic cigarette lighter.
Charlie was in his underwear. For whatever reasons, Wozhead insane ex-bonks didn’t like to wear clothes very often. Also, like most bonks—insane and otherwise—Charlie Greenwell was covered in tattoos. One of them particularly fascinated me. It was a colorful grizzly bear on the right side of Charlie’s chest, walking upright, smiling, and carrying a tattered American flag over his shoulder. The grizzly bear was wearing a flat-brimmed straw campaign hat with a band on it that read VOTE RED OR I’LL TEAR YOUR FUCKING THROAT OUT! It was completely absurd. On the opposite side of Charlie’s chest was an octopus wearing a monocle and a derby hat and holding various unidentifiable types of firearms in each of his eight tentacles.
That tattoo made me feel inadequate, because I didn’t know what any of the guns were.
Apparently, Charlie Greenwell was a fan of hats and wildlife.
“Hi, Charlie!” I said as cheerfully and calmly as I’d ever spoken to him in my life. “I think those guys downstairs are going to get all bent out of shape if you burn the Kenmore down and kill us all.”
“Huh?” Charlie Greenwell’s eyes were completely glazed over with Woz. He put the lighter down when he realized who we were, which didn’t happen right away. “Oh. Hey, Bill. Cager. Want to get hacked?”
“Got any beer?” Billy asked.
“Sure. Come on in. I was just getting ready to do something, but I don’t remember what it was,” Charlie said.
“Put on pants?” I guessed.
Charlie looked down at his bare legs and shook his head. “No. That wasn’t it.”
* * *
The Hotel Kenmore burned to the ground that afternoon.
People naturally blamed it on burners—arson gangs—but nobody was too concerned about it. Every one of the insane ex-bonks, in various stages of undress, managed to get out. And they were all rounded up and moved to another abandoned Hollywood hotel that day—a place called the Wilshire Marquis, which had once been made famous for having been the site of a suicide from heroin overdose by one of the original actors who’d played Rabbit in my father’s program.
Everyone in Los Angeles—and this is not hyperbolic—always loved stories like that.
But now, despite his plan being in full effect, Billy Hinman was exceptionally drunk. It was the only way he’d ever get inside anything that flew.
I had no idea.
Billy and I sat in the backseat—Rowan playing the role of chauffeur, as usual—and I watched the blurry, barren landscape of the abandoned and pointless California desert smear past us as we sped out toward Mojave Field.
The Woz was particularly strong.
“So where, exactly, are we going now?” I asked.
“You’ll see. It’s a birthday surprise,” Billy said.
Rowan, who never lied, shifted in the front seat and cleared his throat.
“I need to pee again. Maybe Rowan can just pull over for a minute,” I said.
“We’re almost there. You can pee when we get there. Trust me,” Billy said.
Maybe it was one of my infinite flaws, but I always did trust Billy Hinman.
Getting On Board
I’d read something about how people used to complain a long time ago about all the procedures they’d have to go through before being permitted to board an airplane. Whatever. The stuff we had to do to get on a transpod—one that my father owned, no less—for a flight into space was as regimented and absurd as Maoist reeducation.
And although I was out of it on booze and Woz that day, I still suspected something was not right.
“I don’t understand why we have to take showers and put on entirely different sets of clothes, just to visit Tennessee,” I said.
I have a foggy memory of Rowan and Billy telling me something about taking a train to Tennessee. I had never been to Tennessee. I didn’t actually want to go to Tennessee, but I trusted Rowan and I loved Billy, so I would do anything with him, especially because whenever I’d fall into one of my depressed moods, I would generally find myself trying to calculate all the normal human experiences I would never be permitted to have.
“It’s a Tennessee thing. A custom. Trust me,” Billy told me. “It’ll be worth it. I hear they have great food.”
On Woz, I wasn’t much of an eater, but Woz makes everyone so compliant and malleable.
I countered, “I already took a shower today, and my clothes are nicer than this stupid orange suit.”
Ever since the incident with all the shit on the Kansas, passengers on Mr. Messer’s R & R G G cruises had to go through medical examinations, take disinfecting showers, and put on specially sealed, full-body suits made from recycled paper. Passengers were not allowed to bring anything with them from Earth, not even the clothes they wore into the terminal.
Besides, everything anyone could possibly need was already waiting on the Tennessee. Clothes, food, recreation—all managed by my father’s company. It only took a quick scan of our eyes—mine, Billy’s, and Rowan’s—and the v.4 cog at the Mojave Field terminal whisked us through our medical scans and into the changing rooms.
A Messer could write his own ticket anywhere on Rabbit & Robot Grosvenor Galactic.
I still thought we were in a train station, about to go to Nashville.
Embarra
ssing.
My father’s transpods looked ridiculous—all painted in the clown-suit colors of his television program, with caricatures of Rabbit, the bonk, on one side, and Mooney, the robot, on the other.
The process of preparing to board the transpod was a little personal and awkward for us. Billy felt it was necessary to stay with me so I wouldn’t do anything weird, like getting lost or passing out and drowning in the chemical showers. I’d been to space plenty of times—on the Tennessee when it was in the final stages of construction, and a couple times on the Kansas before the shit thing (I was also lucky that the sewage system on board the Kansas worked just fine when I sailed on it)—so I knew the routine.
But I believed Billy Hinman when he told me that nothing out of the ordinary was going on.
Woz.
We completely stripped out of all our clothes and left them in sealed locker vaults. Then we had to endure a medical examination from a depressed male nurse orderly v.4 cog who stared and sighed and put his grabby, poking hands on a little too much of me for my comfort, even if he was a cog—a sad one, at that.
After our exams, the nurse led Billy and me, naked, into a decontamination shower cubicle.
Together.
Yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Billy kept saying, “Isn’t this train station great?”
“But we’re naked,” I pointed out.
“So what?” Billy said.
In all honesty, Billy Hinman had seen me naked plenty of times in our lives. I had seen Billy Hinman, who was thoroughly comfortable without clothes, naked just about every day I’d known him. When we were babies, Rowan, or sometimes Hilda, used to give us baths together.
“We haven’t taken a bath together in . . . forever,” I said.
“It’s almost like we’re four years old again,” Billy said.
I looked down at my bare legs, like I couldn’t believe my pants were missing. I patted my thighs as though trying to convince myself my pockets were actually no longer there. I was a mess. “Where are my clothes? When can I get them back? I left a lot of money in my pants.”
