waitresses were visible only as hands and blue rabbit-ears.
‘Ordering a chef’s special… side of fried shrimp…’
‘I got no shrimp, shrimp finish, kaput!’ the cook screamed. Like everyone else here, he seemed unable to move anything without slamming it down, to say anything without screaming. When Roderick had first come to work here, he’d imagined that somehow the customers were causing all the noise. After all, Danton’s Doggie Dinette did cater for mainly high-class and pedigree dogs, well-known for their constant yipping and snapping. Could it be that humans were catching this canine hysteria and transmitting it to the Dinette kitchen, as a kind of psychic rabies?
Not at all. Dave the cook (in a rare quiet moment) explained: ‘Everybody yell in kitchen, in every kinda rastorunth across over world, is it were? Good kitchen, lots yell.
But Roderick never got used to the noise. Whenever there was a lull in his work, he would step out into the alley to sit on a garbage can and meditate. Sometimes he would have a quiet conversation with Allbright.
Allbright was a garrulous drunk who wandered often into this quiet alley to piss, to drink or now and then to search the garbage cans. But he was never too busy to stop and talk, as now:
‘Well well well, if it isn’t our friend, the automatic dish-washer. Still claiming to be a robot? I forget your name.’
‘Roderick Wood. And I am a robot.’
‘Yes yes well who isn’t? Chateaubriand said he realized he was only a machine for making books, we’re all poor damned machines for some purpose or other, some pathetic, useless… Even you, washing dishes for dogs. Nothing wrong with that, honourable profession as any. Don’t let ’em look down on you, kid.’
‘The dogs?’
‘Honourable profession as any, skink sexer, awning historian, salad auctioneer, you stick to it. Learn your trade. A man with a trade is going somewhere. He’s going over to the other side of town to fix some poor goddamned machine. Only he needs the bus fare.’
Roderick said nothing. Allbright appeared to doze for a few minutes, then said, ‘Anyway, I’m a poet.’
‘Anyway?’
‘And that gives me the right.’
‘What right?’
‘You name it, that gives it to me.’
‘I’ve never met a live poet before,’ Roderick said, not that Allbright looked fully alive. ‘I thought all poets were dead.’
Allbright almost looked at him. ‘No, you’re thinking of the other people. All poets are alive, and that gives them every right.’ He turned and shook his fist at the empty alley. ‘You hear, you, you bastards! Every right!’
Roderick watched him stagger off to fight shadows, and finally fall asleep in his usual corner next to an enormous metal bin full of rusty coathangers.
‘A poet.’ Roderick was impressed. Poetry! Life!
Life for Roderick was limited in most dimensions. He worked long hours at Danton’s Doggie Dinette on a ‘split shift’. Danton cursed him and kicked him and paid very poorly, but where else could he work? He was a robot without a social security card.
The Dinette was close to the bus station where he had arrived in the city, and not far from the ancient hotel where he watched TV or recharged his batteries, or read books from the rack at the local drugstore. Some nights he would turn off the light and pretend to himself that he was sleeping, but he was only watching the dim yellow rectangle of light over the door, listening to the groan of sagging floorboards in the corridor as people walked by in ones and twos all night.
Most nights he simply read one book after another; he might before dawn get through two or three like
‘Sonnenschein, initial D?’ asked the hospital receptionist, and touched her keyboard. ‘No visitors except the immediate family, it says here.’
Roderick said, ‘Well, I’m almost family.’
‘Sorry.’
‘If you’re a poet, why don’t you read me one of your poems?’
‘Oh no. Oh no, you don’t.’ Allbright waggled a dirty finger in admonition. ‘You don’t catch me that way. Read you one of my poems? For nothing?’
‘Why not?’
‘Against union rules.’
After a moment, Roderick asked how much a read poem would cost.
‘How much have you got?’
It added up to a dollar and forty-seven cents, exactly enough. Allbright read from the book of his memory:
SKINNER’S DREAM
A gold-haired man wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses had come into the alley to look into garbage cans. During
Roderick thanked Allbright. ‘That was some poem. It was real — real—’
‘Poetic,’ said the stranger. ‘You mind getting off that garbage can now?’
Roderick jumped down. The stranger took off the lid and looked in. ‘That’s better.’ He dumped in his bundle and banged on the lid. ‘Must be just about the only empty garbage can in this part of town.’
Allbright nodded. ‘I guess they recycle a lot, at the Doggie Dinette here.’
‘Interesting trend, petfood recycling,’ said the stranger. His face was long and pock-marked, but his glittering gold hair offset these imperfections. ‘Probably affects the growth potential of the entire edible foodstuffs industry, though we’d need a thoroughgoing econometric breakdown before we could apply any cogent significance test, engaging other retail foodstuff trends and of course the changing shape of pets.’
‘Yes,’ said Roderick. ‘Well, I think I hear Mr Danton yelling for me.’
‘You work here?’ said the stranger. ‘Must be fascinating. Unique opportunity to explore at first hand the full
