Your Robot Dog Will Die

by Arin Greenwood

  “Hi, sweetie,” Ellie says to the girl.

  “This is Fiona,” Wanda says to me, wryly. “My daughter. She’s a senior in college and actually a very interesting person. But don’t expect to find that out. You won’t see a lot of her while Ellie is here. Ellie takes up all of her attention. Watch—Fiona, do you want a million dollars? Can I buy you a castle in France? See, nothing.”

  A little black-and-white cat with just one eye skulks around near the stove, in view but out of reach. Obviously, this is a real cat, not a robot. You can tell by the way the cat’s tail twitches rapidly, swishing back and forth, before pausing in the shape of a question mark. Also, by having one eye and that eye looking Organic.

  My robot dog Billy takes a clear interest. I nod “no” to him, so he won’t grab the cat for me to examine. He looks annoyed. This amuses me, so I pull out my phone to press the “positive interaction” button.

  Billy touches my arm. “Don’t do that here. We aren’t aiding Mechanical Tail. In helping to eradicate the world of living things or anything else.”

  “In what?” I say. If there were a “very freaking confused” app button, I’d be pressing it repeatedly.

  “What do you actually do here?” Wolf asks. He looks profoundly uncomfortable. But still cute.

  Wanda smiles. “We model compassion,” she says.

  “But what do you do?” Wolf asks again.

  “I don’t know how else to explain it,” Wanda says. She smiles warmly. “I hope you’ll stick around a while and see for yourself.”

  “Wanda is being kind of coy with you because she’s had some, well, extremely negative interactions with a couple of hard-core Dog Islanders in the past,” Ellie says. “We rescue farm animals. The sick, the injured, the unwanted. The ones who are lucky enough to fall off a truck on the way to slaughter. We give them a home.”

  “Then,” interjects Fiona, taking a break from slobbering all over Ellie’s face and neck, “then we share their stories. Our aim of course is to make people love Hammie so much they want to make sure other pigs get treated well, too. We are very, very manipulative, when we get the opportunity!”

  “You’re part of this?” I say to Ellie.

  “I give them money. So, so much money. I can’t be more public yet because of my dad,” she says. “One day. Hopefully soon.” She smiles at Fiona. Fiona beams at her. I guess Ellie and my brother are definitely no longer a couple.

  “Why would Dog Islanders not like this?” I ask.

  “Right, exactly,” Wanda responds, giving me literally zero insight into the issue.

  I sit on the bench and lean back against the windows. The glass is cold against my arms. I wish Jack were here with us. It seems wrong for him to miss this. For us to be experiencing life without him.

  I PrivateText him to see if he’s okay.

  He doesn’t respond. It’s late. He’s probably asleep. Or at the Hot Bod after-party. Or hanging out somewhere with Mr. Chi-Chi Pants, savoring their last hours, and mourning. Or he’s angry with us for leaving.

  I hold my phone in my lap for about a minute, trying to think of a follow-up text. Finally, I just send a heart symbol. I feel sad and guilty about Mr. Chi-Chi Pants but don’t have the words to express it.

  My lap is toasty warm where Hammie’s heavy head rests. As is my side because Dave is snuggled against me. Donut lays at my feet, so my toes feel snuggly, too. Billy, my robot dog, sits near the stove, watching mechanically. Wolf and Billy—the real Billy, my robot’s namesake, my brother—are deep in conversation with Wanda. Ellie and Fiona go disappear off to somewhere. I don’t feel so angry anymore.

  I like it here. I like it here. I am confused, and I like it here.

  Wanda approaches me. She bends down so we are eye to eye. “You must be hungry,” she says.

  “Starved. I don’t want to be any trouble though.” It’s got to be midnight or one, or Tuesday, or December. I don’t remember if I ate dinner.

  “We have some stew. It’s venison,” she says.

  “Venison?”

  “Deer. I hunt one deer at the start of every winter. We eat it the rest of the year,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say. “I don’t eat animals.”

  “Your brother didn’t either when he got here,” she says. “I get it.”

  “He does now?” I ask.

  “Not much. He’s not crazy about our other options either, though. He’s sort of picky. It’s a real pain in the ass.”

  I laugh in spite of myself and quickly bite my lip.

  “Was he like that at home?” Wanda asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Always.”

  My stomach tightens as I picture Billy eating animals. This is part of an answer; this is part of the person my brother has become. This is not how we were raised. The Billy who was my brother at home would never eat a creature who’d had his or her life ripped away, violently. I guess in his old life, pre–Dog Island, this wouldn’t have been strange. My brother had a life before me, and one after me. The expression on my face must give away my feelings because Wanda smiles sadly.

  “You like Petunia?” she asks, pointing at the one-eyed cat still skulking around the room.

  “Very much,” I say. I’d run over to pet that cat if I weren’t snuggling with a pig and a chicken.

  “Petunia needs to eat animals in order to survive. She’s what’s called an ‘obligate carnivore.’ Do you know that term?”

  I shake my head no.

  “That means that Petunia will die if she doesn’t eat animals.”

  “Oh. You mean like how the pelicans and herons have to eat fish?”

  “Yeah. Like that,” Wanda says. Her eyes brighten. “Pelicans. I love pelicans. We don’t have a lot of those around here.”

  “We have tons of them on Dog Island,” I say.

  She nods. “I’ve been there, you know,” she says. “Long time ago.”

  I instinctively look toward Donut, who has tucked himself in for a nap near the stove. His white belly rises and falls. He twitches in his sleep. Petunia appears to be stalking him—she slinks up close and reaches her little paw, then pulls it back quickly when his eyes flutter open.

  “We feed the dogs fake meat on Dog Island,” I tell Wanda. “It’s specially formulated.”

  “We might not have the right mixture to be able to do that here,” she tells me.

  “Is it hard killing a deer?” I ask.

  “Hard?” she says. “I suppose. You’re a hundred yards from a majestic living thing, knowing you’ll be ending his or her life. My only other option is buying meat from someone else. I won’t do that. Only eat animals that I or my family have killed ourselves. I use my grandfather’s old gun.”

  I tear my eyes away from her. I look at the floor. “You don’t seem surprised to see us. To see a real dog. Whose tail wags.”

  Wanda doesn’t answer right away. Instead she kneels beside me. She rests her arm around my shoulder.

  “We are very happy you’re here, Nano,” she says. “We’ve been hoping you’d come. I’ve been hoping that you’d come. Maybe even that you’d stay.”

  There’s a long pause before I ask: “What’s going to happen now?”

  “I don’t know, dear,” she says. “Hopefully, something very good.”

  Eventually we all sit down to our late dinner. Billy has set the table, something he never did at home. Dave joins me on my chair, nestling behind me. Hamlet lies down next to the table, and I finally see how unbelievably gigantic she is. Stretched out, her body is as long as the table itself. Petunia hops onto my lap, curls up, and falls asleep. She purrs in her sleep.

  Wolf makes sure to sit next to me, too. I’m grateful, but curious. How does he seem so relaxed and comfortable here? Is it a boy thing? Is he braver than I am? Or is it because he doesn’t think too hard about anything? I can�
��t imagine that his brain squirms with questions like mine. I imagine that his brain is just happy that his body will be fed. Maybe he’d act weirder if Billy were his brother.

  The stew is doled out into bowls. Everyone eats it but me and Wolf. It smells really good, and I feel a little sick because of that. A big bowl is placed on the floor for Donut, who sucks the food down like it’s the first and last meal he’ll ever eat.

  We eat the spicy eggplant and chard, and fresh-baked bread—the bread is so much chewier and richer than what we get from Dog Island Sourdough Vegan Bakers, and then I feel guilty for thinking that, and I think about Dad and how hard he works to keep us fed and how I have probably completely betrayed him and Mom and Dorothy and everything I know and love by being here at all. My brother, vegetable hater, declines the veggies here, too. That makes me feel a little better. My brother is still Billy.

  When we finish eating, Billy invites me outside to help him feed the cows, and the turkeys, and the other pigs, and Carol the goat, before bed. Wanda starts clearing the table and washing dishes, using real water instead of a Dish Blower. Wolf jumps up to help. An elephant-shaped vacuum cleaner travels the floor.

  Wanda sees me noticing it all.

  “Don’t sweat it, honey,” she says. “For the last couple of years we’ve started getting more rain and snow again. There’s plenty to go around. We collect it and use it for washing dishes, flushing toilets, bathing.”

  “Can you drink it?” I ask, perhaps a little breathlessly.

  Wanda pours then hands me a glass. It’s delicious. Then she goes off to collect “more sensible clothes so you won’t freeze your tuchas off.”

  When she leaves, Billy whispers to me that a “tuchas” is a butt, and Wanda is always extremely concerned about the condition of people’s butts.

  “That’s . . . nice of her?” I say.

  “Very,” he agrees.

  She returns with a set of clothes made of a thin, stretchy material that Wanda tells me will keep you “toasty when it’s cold out and cool when it’s hot. Like magic!”

  I hear Billy telling Ellie and Fiona how much better Florida is than Maryland in “so many various and important ways, like the weather” while I slip myself into the clothes, in a drafty bathroom.

  “Oh quiet,” Ellie says to him.

  “I speak nothin’ but truth,” Billy says in some kind of weird accent.

  They talk like they’ve known each other for years. They have.

  When I come out, Wanda helps me into a big thick coat, and we walk out the door, accompanied by Ellie, Fiona, Hammie, Donut, and my robot dog Billy. (Petunia naps near the stove.) I note that the clothes really do the trick.

  Ellie points to the PlaneCab still parked in the yard and says she’s leaving to go back to New York. She says she’ll be back tomorrow after class. She kisses my brother on the cheek, then me. She kisses Fiona on the lips, then walks off, with confidence. I can’t tell if I like her as a person, but I think I admire her place in the world.

  Fiona returns inside. My brother Billy and I make the rounds, feeding the dozen rescued cows, all who are living here after escaping their expected fate: the dinner plate. There are a few donkeys, some horses, more pigs. (Hammie seems to turn her huge, long nose up at them. Billy tells me that she’s the queen of Fuzzy Mansion. She believes other pigs are beneath her, “and she’s right.”)

  We visit with the turkeys. They live in a heated indoor-outdoor enclosure near the main house. They also seem very grumpy that their dinner is coming so late—nearly time for breakfast. Billy tells me his favorite part of every week is the Fuzzy Mansion turkey dinner, which sounds alarming for a moment, until Billy reassures me that it’s when “we all cook up a big feast for them and us to share. They get to eat first.”

  “You like it here?” I ask him, while we make the rounds, accompanied by the animals and robot.

  Billy says, “I finally feel at peace.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. He doesn’t look at peace right now. He looks annoyed that I asked the question.

  When we go back into the house, Wolf takes me aside. “I got a PrivateText from Jack,” he says. He shows it to me. It’s Jack asking when we are coming home.

  “Did you answer?” I ask him, feeling a little hurt that Jack reached out to Wolf but not to me.

  “I said we’d be back eventually. We will, right?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  Billy grabs my arm. “Come here.”

  I nod. It’s a relief not to have to talk anymore about Jack, so I allow my brother to tug me into the living room. I find myself collapsing into an overstuffed couch, facing a crackling fire in the fireplace. It’s so warm in here. A feeling of exhaustion suddenly overcomes me. It must be one, two, three in the morning now.

  Billy hands me an old-school electronic tablet. As he withdraws, there’s a snap of flame, a wisp of smoke. I see that he has a joint in his mouth. The sickly sweet smell of it fills the air. He sucks in and exhales.

  “You can do that inside?” I ask, surprised.

  “Wanda’s an old hippie,” he says, handing it to me. I shake my head. “She grows it here,” he adds with a shrug, popping it back in his mouth.

  He tells me to read the document he’s opened.

  Maybe I’m getting a contact high. I’m too drowsy and spent to protest.

  Chapter 8

  November 25: On deployment with WAG to The Fun Safari in Reston, VA, to investigate cruelty by dir. Megan Zilly. Xtreme Cruelty confirmed.

  Donkey appears to have been axed into pieces. Sheep, 3, run over w/ truck. Wallaby dscvrd drownd and dead in bucket. Etc. Etc. Etc. 37 Dead in all.

  7 srvivrs. Real bad shape. Skin & bones. Sick. No water 2 drink. Took pictures and videos to give to law enforcement for prosicution. Called Dorothy re: saving some. She said no. Fllowed protocol.

  There are some more details, written in some more of Billy’s Pidgin English—I guess the Virtu-School curriculum was worse when he was my age—along with the photos of the dead and the living.

  I feel sick looking at them, more than reading the words. The twisted, mangled, worn-out, emaciated bodies of these precious creatures. I pull Donut off the floor and into my lap, and kiss each of his soft paws, his ears, his nose. He whines and complains.

  I hand the tablet back to Billy.

  “Why are you showing me this?” I ask him.

  “Did you read it?” he says.

  “You saw me,” I say. “It was only a couple lines.”

  “Do you know what this means?”

  “Some a-hole animal abuser got shut down but not soon enough,” I say.

  “Do you know what it means that I followed protocol?” he asks, slowly, carefully. Forcefully.

  “You made sure no one else would suffer?” I say.

  “It means I killed the survivors, Nano,” he says. He looks down at his hands, then looks up again, right at me. “One by one, I followed protocol. Kinderend for all.”

  “You relieved their suffering,” I say. I smile. We prevent suffering. That is what we do.

  “Nano. These animals had been tortured. Somehow, they’d survived. And then I came along, like, in theory to rescue them. But all that meant was death. I could see in their eyes. They wanted to live, kid. I knew it was wrong, even as I was doing it. I felt I had no choice. This was my job. To make sure no animals would suffer. By killing them.”

  Billy tells me about administering what he thought would be the last dose of Kinderend that day. It was to an emaciated white bunny, missing big patches of fur, her skin raw and bloody.

  As he made one more lap around this horrible roadside zoo, he saw Carol the goat. Rather, he saw her feet, her hooves, poking out of a decrepit shed.

  He walked over, expecting to discover another dead animal. Instead, he found t
his young goat alive. Her back two legs—the ones sticking out of the shed—were mangled, he doesn’t know how they got that way, just that she was badly injured. But her eyes were bright. She seemed to recognize him. She even lifted her head a little, though she must have been in tremendous pain.

  Billy lay down on the feces-and-bug-covered floor and he stroked her head.

  “Do you want me to end this for you?” he asked her, fingering the Kinderend.

  She blinked, and smiled at him. He swore it was a smile. He cried, he tells me now. There was no going back. He knew, there was no going back.

  Billy called Dorothy. He suggested with as much confidence as he could muster that Dog Island put some resources into an annex. It could be called Goat Island, for example. Dog Island II would also work. Dorothy’s Magic Palace of Rescued Animals—that was also an option. The important thing was that it would house at least some of the animals Billy was rescuing.

  He felt sure Dorothy would say yes. That she’d thank him for bringing him this good idea, this humane idea. She’d probably put him in charge of implementing it. Maybe Marky Barky would cough up the money. He tells me all of this, and it’s clear it pains him, because he believed it.

  “What did she say?” I whisper.

  “She said no.”

  “Did she tell you why?” I ask.

  He tells me that Dorothy said she’d “been down this road before” with the sanctuary in Texas, and it “doesn’t end well.” The animals were miserable. The inevitable bad publicity was miserable.

  “We have the opportunity to offer these animals peace. Eternal peace. You want to deny them this for your own selfish reasons?” Dorothy said.

  “So what did you do?” I ask, sensing that what he did was not good.

  Billy tells me that he loaded the goat into his rental truck, then brought her to a veterinarian whose clinic he’d spotted on his way to the zoo. The vet’s name was Dr. Samira King. Dr. King asked Billy how the goat had gotten so hurt, why he’d waited so long to take her for care. Billy said it wasn’t his goat. He’d just stumbled on her accidentally, he said. There was no one around, and he couldn’t bear her pain.