“Are you a robot?”
The question caught Royal Mutt off guard.
Royal Mutt and Elle were sitting in her old white Infiniti on top of a hill. Above them the stars twinkled in the Southern Californian sky, below them laid the city, a sea of lights next to the sea.
Royal replied with a nervous laugh, “Heh…what?”
“Do you feel anything?”
“Of course I feel things.”
“Sometimes I wonder. You’re so cold and unemotional at times, it really makes me think you’re a robot.”
“I’m not a robot!”
Just as soon as the words came out he couldn’t believe how ridiculous they sounded. He just smiled to himself and looked down.
“That’s strange…” he thought to himself.
In the moonlight his front paws looked silver. He brought them closer to his face. The flesh from the bottom of his paws had peeled off.
“What the…”
He looked closer and could clearly see that underneath the fur and the flesh, his front paws were made of metal.
“I knew it, you ARE a robot!”
Royal woke up. It was day time. He was no longer in Elle’s car. He was in the passenger’s seat of his beat-up Neon, Panda Bear in the driver’s seat. The time was 1pm, exactly.
“I don’t think you’re a robot.”
“What?!”
Royal quickly checked his paws. They were back to normal.
“You were talking in your sleep. You said ‘I’m not a robot!’ and started moving your paws. Anyways, yes I agree you’re not a robot dog, they only have those in Japan and you’re not Japanese…are you?”
Royal was silent for a moment.
“What else did I say?”
“You were mumbling and moving around a lot. That was the only line I could understand. Must’ve been a crazy dream, what were you dreaming about?”
Royal looked out the window.
“Elle.”
“Huh. What does Elle have to do with robots?”
Royal shifted uncomfortably.
Royal replied, “She called me a robot once, said I was too cold.”
Panda, clearly disappointed, said, “Now that’s less exciting. I thought maybe you were dreaming you were a robot that had gained self awareness and was trying to get accepted into the last surviving animal colony after those crazy humans blew everything up and…”
“No.”
“Oh.”
They both sat in silence.
“Did you want to talk about it?”
Royal looked outside at the highway signs.
“Looks like we’ll be home soon.”
“Yeah,” Panda replied, “We past Bakersfield about an hour ago.”
The long rolling hills and the vacant dust bowl farms made Royal feel…sad.
“I’m not sure.”
“What?” Panda replied.
“Maybe I am a robot.”
“Ok Mr. Roboto, were you made in Japan or China like me?”
“I’m serious. With Elle, it was fun, we had some good times. But I was never sure about, you know…”
“Your feelings?”
“Yeah.”
“Love?”
Panda looked over at Royal and the word hit the mutt like a bullet.
Panda, “What happened happened. You are who you are because of your past. If you’re happy with who you are, it’s all good.”
“If you’re not happy?”
“What? You’re a cool cat, if you don’t mind me saying. And you’ve got plenty of emotion. Remember that time we saw that movie about the old guy with the balloons? During the opening sequence, you were crying a river, two to be exact! Robots don’t do that, unless you install w…
“It’s not just about having any emotion. It’s about, you know… love.”
“Did you love her?”
Royal, “I don’t know. I’m not sure I even know what love is.”
“You guys seemed pretty happy together.”
“We were. But something happened. One day I realized the fire had died. But even knowing that, I pushed on and I tried to make it work.”
“Why?”
“Because I was tired and lazy.”
Panda, “Wow that sounds lazy, even to me.”
“What I mean is I was tired of chasing after this abstract feeling, after love. I was thinking to myself, what if this is it? What if this is love and this is the best it can be? So I let it linger…”
“But you knew the fire was out.”
“Yeah.”
“And it ate at you.”
“Yeah.”
Panda, “What made the fire die?”
Royal Mutt sat thinking about it.
“What happened was one day I made a dumb joke and she didn’t get it. I told her, ‘You never get my jokes.’ But the way I said that was the equivalent of saying, ‘You’re stupid.’”
Panda, “Dude that’s messed up. What was the joke?”
Royal, “That’s not the point! And I don’t even remember it. The point is that I was being an asshole. It was puppish and immature and looking back on the relationship, I could pick out points where I would do the same thing and try to undermine her.”
“Why would you do that?”
“The fire was out and even if consciously I was still in this relationship, my unconscious was doing everything it could to get out of it.”
“Sabotage?”
“Yeah, I can’t stand it but that’s what I was doing.”
Panda, “Why didn’t you just be straight up with her? Let her know what you felt, or in this case, not feel?”
Royal, “I was afraid I would hurt her.”
Panda, “Uh…”
“I know, dumb isn’t? Because I didn’t want to hurt her I hurt her more. Fuck.”
Panda looked at Royal and could tell he was hurting. Whenever Royal gets down, he’ll physically look down and start showing his teeth, as if he was getting ready to fight with himself.
Royal looked back up at Panda.
Royal, “I did learn one thing. You can’t hold it in. You can’t expect to pretend everything is ok and hope by doing so that things will become ok. The conversation we had before we broke up should’ve happened at least three months prior, but by then it was too late.”
Panda, seeing that the conversation was getting Royal down, tried to cheer him up, “Well at least you learned something. If you’re a robot at least you got good AI.”
Royal, smiling slightly, “Heh.”
Outside the midday sun caused all the shadows to take cover underneath their three dimensional counterpart. A rest stop was coming up in 5 miles.
Royal, “Do you mind if we stop at the next rest stop? I feel like driving.”
Panda, “Great, I feel like sleeping.”
They continued north.
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