The Rabbit Hutch

“What year is it?” I asked. I truly couldn’t remember.

They ignored me. “Some guy’s building a family of AI—that’s what he called it, the Family—and he wants me to model,” said Malik, smirking.

Model. God. I had to take another pull.

“Can you believe?” continued Malik. “He’s trying to get the body language down. The expressions, the voices. So he throws these sensors all over you, plugs you into shit, gives you prompts.”

“Guy from here?” asked Todd.

“Born and raised. But once he’s done, he’s going to take the Family to some convention in San Francisco. He says all the CEOs and the geniuses will bid on it there. He’ll make millions. We get a cut.”

“What’s the point of them?” asked Todd.

“What?”

“The robots.”

“What’s the point of you?” retorted Malik.

“Do they scrub your toilet?” asked Todd. “Walk your dog? Suck your dick?”

Malik paused. “He hasn’t told us yet.”

“What are the prompts like?” Todd asked. I resented him for feeding Malik’s ego like this. “Be happy, be mad?”

“I don’t know,” Malik replied. “I start next week. But in the auditions, I got scripts. Scenarios. Here, let me read some to you. They emailed them to us . . .” He scrolled through his phone. “Okay, here’s one: you’re holding your baby for the first time, counting his eyelashes. Some shit. Or here’s another: after working your way up to the top of your company, you get fired. You’re nine, and you just learned that your big sister released your hamster into the wild. You’re fifteen, and you just walked in on your parents having sex. You’re eighty, recently diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, and you’re telling the doctors you don’t want treatment. Your favorite baseball team just won the World Series. You’re waiting in line at the DMV.” Malik put down his phone, looking smug and famous already. “E-T-C.”

Todd had finished his radishes, so he was gnawing on his backup vegetables: celery, carrots, and peppers. All raw. He’d fish out a vegetable from one plastic bag, then deposit the inedible parts in another, precise as a factory.

“So you’re going to shape America forever,” concluded Todd.

“That’s right,” said Malik. “Probably the whole world, actually. I mean, this guy has some big ambitions. He really shoots for the stars. And he has a ton of interest already—like, all this money people have invested. Angel investors is what they’re called. So they think that the robots from here on out will take after the Family. Seriously. That’s what he told us. Which means that they’ll take after—”

“You,” said Todd.

“Right.” Malik grinned. I swear he used whitening strips on his teeth. “Me.”

Todd looked at me, then at Malik. “Cool,” he said.

That night in question—Wednesday, July seventeenth—the sun was starting to set, but you couldn’t tell because it had been hazy all day. It smelled like rubber smoke, which made me think of war. I was pretty gone by this point, neurologically speaking. Sweating hard. A storm began to rumble outside. Since March, we’d killed a few more mice, plus some rabbits. A pigeon, once. Without discussing anything explicitly, we made a kind of ceremony out of it. Usually, we did it on Wednesday nights because none of us had to work, and Blandine was never around. We always got plastered beforehand. Found some bongos. Did this thing with the candle where we had to hold our fingers above the flame and whoever pulled away first had to do the killing. Do you need to know more? Honestly, I’d rather not go into details. Is that all right with you? I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Just please don’t make me describe it.

Anyway, we hadn’t sacrificed an animal in weeks, and I was starting to get that feeling—that feeling you get when you haven’t, you know, done it in a while, and you feel like you’re lunging out of your body. I think it’s safe to say Todd and Malik felt the same way. When you need to rub one out, your target is obvious. What was strange about this case was that I couldn’t say what I was lunging toward. I remember feeling hotter than I thought possible. But that was just the temperature.

“It was really competitive,” said Malik. “There were four rounds. They made me sign an NDA, but now I can tell people I’m doing it. I can’t tell you any more specifics, though, so don’t ask. They only chose four of us, and there were like two hundred applicants. Maybe three hundred.”

There was a takeout menu on the floor beside Todd’s mattress, and he’d made a list on the back. I examined his small handwriting. Perfect, like a font. To shut up Malik, I started to read it out loud: it was a list of all the major American fires that had occurred in the last year. Place, duration, damage, cause. Halfway through, I began reading it in a Scottish accent, just to keep myself entertained. That’s how long it was.

“This is good,” said Malik. He aimed his phone at me, filming. “This is good content. You’re actually decent at accents, Jack. I could give you some pointers if you want.”

“No thanks,” I said through gritted teeth. I crumpled the list and threw it at Todd’s pale head. “What’s the matter with you?” I demanded, anger clawing at me. Todd was so small, so breakable. Suddenly, I wanted to shatter him like a Christmas ornament. “Why can’t you be normal?”

Todd looked at me with an unreadable expression. He could’ve been asleep, for all I knew.

“Keeping track,” he said.

His tiny handwriting matched his tiny hands. Freckled rodent hands. When he picked up the paper, his face broke into sadness, which canceled my anger. In Todd’s psychotically clean bedroom, facing a plastic fan that churned summer through the window, I wanted all the extremes at once: I wanted to die, kill, fuck, find my parents and bring them back to life and then kill them, then bury them and yell and yell. For the first and probably last time in my life, I envied women for being able to give birth. I wanted to fuse myself to somebody else. I wanted to know what it would take for me to give a damn.

I thought of Blandine. There had been a moment between us in Pinky’s loft. I was sure of it at the time. But as the day went on, I doubted it more and more, and by evening, I figured I had imagined it. She was just using me. What for? I don’t know. Like a week before all this happened, she overheard me telling Todd and Malik that I got a job walking Pinky’s dogs. That’s when she took an interest in me for the very first time.

She waited for Todd and Malik to the leave the apartment, and then she approached me. “Can I join you someday?” she asked, her eyes all twinkly and fake. I asked her why, but as she explained it, all I could think was: I wish Malik and Todd were here to see this. I started fantasizing about all the embellishments I would report back to them. I’d say that the strap of her tank top fell. I’d say that she touched my arm. I’d say that she put on perfume before stepping out of her bedroom. I was so preoccupied with my version of events I could barely hear her.

“I just love animals,” Blandine was saying when I finally tuned back in.

Later, I told Malik and Todd that Blandine wanted to spend some time with me. “One on one, away from all this.” Then I winked and shimmied. Malik hurled the ball of rubber bands at me, but he was smiling. Like he was proud of me.

Sitting there in Todd’s room some hours later, I thought of that moment in Pinky’s loft, the first time Blandine and I had ever talked long enough to disagree on something, her face blushing like I’ve never seen, her body moving across the loft and standing too close to mine. At the time, I thought she was going to kiss me or was waiting for me to kiss her. But then she started petting the dogs, and I knew she was just a tease.

The booze and the weed deconstructed Todd’s room, rebuilt it into some kind of boat. I swayed. Blandine appeared to me briefly, clear as a photograph, dressed in a tuxedo. I knew then that I’d never touch her. The worst part was that I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything at all.

“Something’s on my mind,” Malik announced with authority. He could be very federal. “That benzene groundwater poisoning in the sixties?”

He waited dramatically.

“Okay?” prompted Todd.

“It wasn’t Zorn.”

“Come on,” said Todd. “That’s the only thing we know for sure.”

“What I want to know,” I said, “is what they gave the people who went loopy and dumb from it.”

“From what?”

“The benzene. Sometimes I think that’s why all the adults we ever knew were such big idiots.”

“Nobody could prove that,” said Todd. I could tell that he was trying to seem unaffected by my comment earlier, trying to play it cool, which made it all worse. I’d made him feel bad for no reason. “Zorn would say it wasn’t their fault you were dumb.”

“There has to be a way to test it.”

“Would suck if you went through the trouble and found out it wasn’t their fault.”

“None of it was Zorn’s fault,” said Malik. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

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