Rabbits(9)

I was almost two full sets into that U.S. Open match before I realized what I’d been doing. I yanked my hands away from my knees and took a sip of coffee.

It had been at least ten years since I’d tapped out a tennis match.

Fuck. Why was I so anxious?

Scarpio was reportedly fifty-six years old, but looked at least a decade younger. He was about five foot ten and thin, with scruffy brown hair, cool blue eyes, and a wide mischievous smile. He wore dark blue jeans, faded brown desert boots, and a white Oxford button-up shirt. He was Caucasian, with a barely perceptible accent—most likely English, or maybe Welsh.

“Did you know rhubarb grows so fast you can actually hear it?”

“Really?” I said. I had no idea.

“It’s true. I have a recording on my phone if you’re interested.”

“Oh…cool.”

“I’m just fucking with you.” He went back to eating his pie. “I mean, it’s true. Rhubarb does grow fast, and I do have a recording of it on my phone, but what the fuck do you care? You wanna know why we’re here, why I showed up at the arcade, and, more importantly, why I asked you for help.” He smiled. “Am I right?”

“You’re right—although the rhubarb thing is interesting.”

Alan Scarpio nodded. “You’re lying, but that’s okay.” He was using his fork to hunt down every crumb on his plate. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything? This pie is fucking fantastic.”

“I’m good, thanks.” I took a sip of the warmish coffee.

“Well, I’m stuffed,” he said as he leaned back in his chair and exhaled, every bit of pie now off the plate and inside the enigmatic billionaire.

I sat there in silence for as long as I could stand it.

“So,” I said, finally, “why did you show up at the arcade?”

“You’re surprised.”

“Very.”

“I get it. I’m a face you’ve seen on television or online. I saw Gary Busey once in a bar. He looked so familiar. As I walked by I smiled at him like the two of us were old friends.”

“He’s the crazy conspiracy guy?”

“I suppose maybe he is, but he was in Point Break. Classic. Two meatball subs!” Scarpio held up two fingers and yelled loud enough for the entire diner to hear. “Get me two, Utah!”

“I don’t remember that scene,” I said as the server approached our table and glared at Scarpio as if he were a small child who had just spilled a milkshake on the floor.

“Is everything all right?” She looked tired. The whites of her wide grayish-green eyes were spidered with tiny red lines, and her voice carried the earned rasp of somebody who’d poured an infinite amount of coffee into the cups of an infinite number of assholes. It had to be close to the end of her shift. She desperately wanted everything to be all right.

“Everything is perfect. I’m sorry for the outburst. We don’t actually want meatball subs. I promise it won’t happen again.” Scarpio smiled.

“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t have the energy to throw anybody else out tonight.” She smiled, added a tired wink, then topped up my coffee.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, clearly happy we weren’t going to ruin her night.

She didn’t appear to recognize Alan Scarpio. Maybe she’d look him up tomorrow when she came in for her shift and discovered she’d been given a three-hundred-dollar tip on a seven-dollar check.

Scarpio waited for her to leave, then pulled out his phone and set it on the table. “What do you know about Rabbits?”

I glanced down at his phone. I thought maybe he was recording our conversation for some reason, but I couldn’t see any voice recorder app, just the date, time, and a cute dog as wallpaper—some kind of spaniel with a light blue bandana around its neck.

“Well, I mean, I know what most people interested in the game know,” I said, trying to work out the best way to answer.

“Which is what?”

I had no idea what Scarpio was fishing for here. If he was Californiac, the alleged winner of the sixth iteration of the game, he knew a lot more than I did. And if he wasn’t Californiac, well, he was still a billionaire, and if he wanted to learn about Rabbits, all he had to do was hire an expert. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know quite a bit. Among my friends and the handful of Rabbits aficionados I know, I am considered something of an authority on the game. But Alan Scarpio could afford the best—or, at the very least, somebody a fuckload better than a perpetually underemployed gamer who’d spent the last few minutes frantically tapping out a decades-old tennis match.

“You’re not worried about the warnings surrounding the game? ‘You play, you never tell?’?” Scarpio asked, repeating a section of the Prescott Competition Manifesto that I’d played earlier in the arcade.

“Of course not,” I said, although, like anyone seriously interested in the game, I’d heard rumors about all kinds of dangerous things surrounding Rabbits, including the mysterious Wardens—potentially deadly figures whose job it was to protect and maintain the integrity of the game at all costs.

“Now onward goes,” Scarpio said.

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

“Those are the first three words of the tenth canto of Dante’s Inferno. ‘Now onward goes.’?”