The Wobbit Page 2

  It was not four after all; it was five! Billy had hardly stopped wondering if kiwis were edible before all five of them were inside. Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney were the names of the first three, all sisters, and Billy was immediately both aroused by them and angry at them for existing. Loin and Groin were the second two, and oh boy, if you think their names are funny, just wait until they say something really sexual. Many a Widdle Wearth song tells of an ancient prophecy that one day, these two Little People will say the funniest, most sexual thing of all time.

  “Hello,” said Loin and Groin. That wasn’t it.

  Loin, Groin, Whorey, Slorey, Kourtney, and Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney’s camera crew all made their way to Billy’s dining room, which he had luckily just expanded into his snacking parlor so there was ample room for the growing party. “Well, at least there’s not five more of them,” thought Billy, and he was about to stride confidently away when there was a massive thud on the door. He opened it to find Dumbledalf standing there with four more Little People, one of whom was prostrate, crumpled up on the stoop.

  “See, I told you!” said Dumbledalf to the unconscious Little Person. “If you just believe and run straight at the platform, you’ll pass right through. Hello, Hairy! Let me introduce Beefer,” a shiny Little Person flexed his triceps, “Buffer,” a veiny Little Person punched Billy in the stomach, “Aaron Sorkinshield,” a self-important Little Person did a line of happy sugar, “and especially Doc!” Doc continued to be unconscious, so they left him on the stoop and joined the rest of the Little People at the table.

  The Little People had managed to find the food that Billy had carefully hidden everywhere in plain sight, and they were making a regular party out of it. Aaron Sorkinshield offered some of his special writing powder to everyone, but Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney promised him that they were already “dancin’ with Miley.” Beefer and Buffer focused on leaner meats because they knew that the simple carbs in Billy’s cake bread would make their body especially receptive to storing fats, and the kiwi located insects and simple invertebrates underground using his highly developed sense of smell. All parties present pretended not to notice the bird feeder in the corner, or the terrible stench everywhere else. Billy was completely overwhelmed, but Dumbledalf, sitting at the head of the table, was wonderfully amused.

  “Music!” he called out. “And ghosts! Where are all my ghost friends?” As he began lighting sticks of butter on fire and trying to make them float, the Little People fulfilled his first request with a traditional song of feasting:

  Show up a half hour late,

  Demand your food be gluten free!

  That’s what everybody hates,

  When you’re a guest at their party!

  Tell a bunch of inside jokes,

  That only half the people get!

  Say you’d pay but you’re too broke,

  That’ll make your poor host fret!

  So show up a half hour late,

  Because that’s what everybody hates!

  And of course they did none of these dreadful things, because they didn’t totally suck as people. Soon, however, the skies grew dark, and Doc finally wandered in from the stoop with a concussion and an acoustic guitar. Doc did kind of suck as a person, so he began to play, and everybody at the party was forced to listen to his mediocre strumming. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, the Little People made the best of it and sang a deeply meaningful song of ancient loss and profound pain:

  Because maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me,

  And after all, you’re my wonderwall.

  Said maybe (maybe),

  You’re gonna be the one that saves me (saves me).

  As they sang, the wobbit felt the magic of nineties Britpop moving through him, a plaintive and nostalgic sort of magic that bonded everyone in Widdle Wearth together. Then something Gram-ish woke up inside him, and he wished to go see the great mountains, and apply just the right filter to them, and then spend the next thirty to forty minutes trying to find enough service for the page to load so he could see whether or not people he had met once or twice were appreciating just how much he was appreciating the simple beauty of the natural world. Suddenly the microwave let out a great beep, and his nightly ground beef pie with Pop-Tart crust was ready, and very quickly he was once again plain Billy Bagboy with a rumble in his stomach and a family history of Apathetic Heart syndrome.

  “Hush,” said Dumbledalf, as Doc’s head trauma caught up to him and he began to punch the guitar with his fist. “Let Sorkinshield speak!” And this was Sorkinshield’s cold open:

  “A poet once rhymed: as if it matters how a man is toppled. And seen. Well, if you want to stand on your toes and call yourselves giants, take advantage of the first amendment. Ask yourself this: Do I have the Yahweh disease? It’s not the greatest Wearth in the world, sensei. That’s what I say. Child, this is war country. You have some of my focus—you have the least proportion, a depressing callback to the time when two great Wearths raced each other into Wspace. We reached for the ceiling, acted like people, we aspired to the opposite of stupidity, we didn’t do the opposite of enlarge it, it didn’t make us feel the opposite of ferior, as we did in the time when our looking organs looked toward the Wheavens and, with superextended phalanges, we touched the face of Buddha. Let me say a thing. You want to know a fact? You know what’s pretty neat? I am Gawd. You can’t grasp the facts. A trillion yen is pretty neat.”

  This was Sorkinshield’s veritable style. He was, if nothing else, an important Little Person. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without properly inventing any new characters since the early 2000s. But he was rudely interrupted. Poor Billy couldn’t bear it any longer, and he began to feel a shriek coming up inside him. “Sometimes there are flaws in the way you write female characters!” he called out over and over again as he wobbled to the floor; and that was all they could get out of him for a good long while indeed. They were concerned it might be a seizure, but Doc assured them that it was only a diabetic seizure, and that his professional medical opinion was to leave the wobbit well enough alone. So they rolled Billy into his diabetic seizure nook and left him well enough alone, forgetting for a moment that Doc had suffered a moderate to severe brain injury and was therefore giving his professional medical opinion based solely on context clues rather than professional medical training of any sort.

  “Excitable little fellow,” said Dumbledalf. “And why am I surrounded by tiny half-giants? Did I do centaur drugs in the Forbidden Forest again?”

  “Excitable is one word for it,” said Groin, as everyone in the room waited eagerly for his hilarious sexual punch line, “but I think it’s far more accurate to conclude that this wobbit is neither physically nor mentally fit to help us fulfill our quest.” They all leaned back, recognizing that this was a valid insight into their situation, but were still disappointed that he hadn’t mentioned genitals. “In fact, he looks more like a grocer than a burglar!”

  “I am not a groper!” Billy protested as he stumbled back into the room.

  “I said grocer.”

  “Oh. I am definitely a grocer.”

  The whole party groaned at this. “A grocer?!” howled Beefer and Buffer in disproportionate rage. “A job?!” whined Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney in genuine befuddlement. “The kiwi is nocturnal?!” is an exclamation you might make were you to study the kiwi’s sleep patterns. Finally Dumbledalf would stand it no longer.

  “Quiet!” he said, and the whole room fell silent. Slowly and solemnly, he rose from his seat and picked up the honey-honey baked ham from the middle of the table. He placed the meat on Billy’s head, then watched the confused wobbit with rapt attention. Finally someone sneezed and Dumbledalf clapped his hands in delight. “The sorting ham has spoken! We have our burglar!”

  No one could argue with this, because no one really understood what had happened. Plus, Billy had the traditional lightning-bolt mark on his door, which everyone in Widdle Wearth knew meant either Burglar looking for work or Kite-flying aficionado looking for his keys. So before Billy could get over the shock of being betrayed by a meat he had so much respect for, Dumbledalf laid out a map and Sorkinshield began laying out the entire exposition. As you can guess, this speech took many hours, and used many stirring invocations, and made everyone feel more intelligent just to have heard it and understood most of it. But in the end, it boiled down to this:

  “[Your name is Puff the Magic Dragon. You took my mountain. Prepare to die.]”

  As Sorkinshield’s speech drew to a close and the swelling violin underscoring faded out, everyone agreed that it truly felt like the end of an episode. So they each trudged, hopped, and seizured to bed, leaving for later the small matters of how to get to the Mountain with Zero Friends, and how to find the side door into it, and who would get to control the playlist on the way. For his part, Billy had begun to realize just how similar questing might be to jogging and would have slept fitfully were it not for the five pounds of fudge he had eaten over the course of Sorkinshield’s speech. As he passed out with his head in the refrigerator, he could hear Sorkinshield still humming to himself in the bedroom next to him:

  Some day you will find me,

  Caught beneath the landslide,

  In a champagne supernova,

  Champagne supernova in the sky.

  Meanwhile, in the hole next door, Billy’s extremely well-qualified burglar neighbor finally took the “I Am a Well-Qualified Burglar” sign off his door and shuffled off to bed, resigning himself to yet another season of unemployment. In the hole next to that, Saddam Hussein changed out of his dirty white T-shirt into tomorrow’s dirty white T-shirt, content with the knowledge that no one would ever find him in his underground paradise.

  * * *

  I When googling words in this book, the publishers recommend the SafeSearch preference “Stupidly Innocent.” The Harvard Lampoon is made up of upstanding, virginal college students who have worked hard to maintain both their upstandingness and their virginity.

  II I suppose YOLOs need explanation as well, but whatever. You’ll figure it out.

  III Dumbledalf’s Grindr spell usually allowed him to locate any new or slightly used blenders in the area, which he would then use to make fruit smoothies. He would be no less lonely then, but at least he would have a delicious fruit smoothie.

  IV In fact, they were brothers. Like, genetically. I promise; I checked.

  II

  /r/oastmutton

  Billy awoke from his slumber as he always did: with acute chest pain and choking on his own drool. This time, however, it was not drool being forced down Billy’s throat.

  “Drink your copyjuice, Hairy,” Dumbledalf said, squeezing a Capri Sun into Billy’s mouth. “Then we can go to summer camp and get Mom and Dad back together.”

  “My parents are dead!”I sputtered Billy.

  “I know,” whispered Dumbledalf as a somber look fell suddenly across his face. “I put them in my mirror.”

  As the deflated wizard went off to cheer himself up by folding his Capri Sun into a tiny cell phone, Billy prepared to roll himself out of his bed and into his waffle lab. What he rolled off of, however, was not a bed, and what he rolled into was certainly nothing like one of Billy’s classic pepperoni waffles.II

  “Well, look at that! The racist is finally awake,” said Drawlin, lifting Billy out of the manure and placing him atop the pony that had produced it. “Now get in touch with your privilege and show us a little canter.”

  As he took the reins, Billy struggled to keep pace with the rest of the crew. His pony seemed to be straining mightily and looked back at him every so often with the pony equivalent of exasperation. Billy misinterpreted this as hunger and, after licking the pony a few times to see if he might kill two birds with one meal, decided to ask the rest of the party. “Might we stop and get something to eat before we reach the Forest of Metaphorical Importance?” he pleaded. Beefer and Buffer laughed heartily at his suggestion. “Looks like somebody forgot his egg whites and supplemental amino acid complex this morning,” jeered Beefer, and Buffer punched Billy in the face to accentuate the point. Billy’s spirit and nose broken, he mentioned food no more for the next several minutes. “Besides,” he thought, “being hungry and miserable is what a YOLO is all about. Let me not again forget.”III

  Once the crew had thoroughly left Wobbottabad behind, they stopped in a valley with a nearby stream to rest one final time before they entered the forest. Everyone dismounted, and it was then they noticed that Dumbledalf had never come back from the game of Hide-n-Leave-for-a-Couple-Days they had played on the road to pass the time. This concerned Aaron Sorkinshield very much, especially because just before he disappeared, he had seen Dumbledalf poking an earthworm and muttering to himself that all the secrets must have gotten loose again.

  Thankfully, these worries did not faze some of the more carefree Little People. Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney, for example, stayed busy uploading selfies of themselves frolicking on the grass, and the paparazzi, springing out of the ground like dandelions, snapped pictures of the girls snapping pictures of themselves. The flashing of the camera bulbs amused Kiwi, annoyed Fili, and set Doc into an epileptic fit that everyone else laughed off. Ballin and Drawlin fell into a debate about the politics of respectability and the implications of Whorey’s relationship with their cousin Kayenne, a bona-fide hero of Southside Widdle Wearth known for his fiery outbursts. Beefer and Buffer bench-pressed the ponies while Billy closed his eyes and tried to imagine that YOLOs were no more threatening than his usual breakfast cereal: sugary and delicious grizzly bear cooked with chocolate milk and maybe a little bacon grease.IV

  Billy was jolted out of this silent reverie by the abrupt appearance of Sorkinshield next to him.

  “Have you signed the thing?”

  “The thing?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “The thing is nothing?”

  “The contract is nothing.”

  “Wait. What’s the contract?”

  “The contract’s the thing.”

  “The thing that you need me to sign?”

  “That’s the thing.”

  Sorkinshield turned off sharply to the right, and Billy found himself holding a small stack of paper in his hands. These were the conditions of his employment, and they went like this:

  All aforementioned treasure, including all Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Kids’ Choice Awards, enthusiastic Rolling Stone reviews, and any other valuables are, upon discovery, declared sole property of AARON SORKINSHIELD to be distributed at his discretion. Any withholding, burglary, or unintentional “failing to mention” of any such treasure by BILLY BAGBOY will result in immediate expulsion from the party, forfeit of any and all profit earned, and an extremely long monologue, an excerpt of which is below.

  The monologue that followed was extensive and cruel, but it was also bitingly clever with plenty of quotable material suitable for posters or GIF sets. Unfortunately, Billy was more or less illiterate, as wobbits consider being able to read a rather dangerous step on the road to being able to read nutrition facts.V He was, however, very pleased to see “Billy Bagboy” written in such big impressive letters and tore out the bits that contained his name while feeding the rest to his pony.

  After one more check of their supplies and one last holler of “Olly, olly, oxen free!” in the hopes of drawing out Dumbledalf, the crew set out to travel through the night, more than a bit discouraged by the disappearance of the one person who had any real abilities.VI The rowdy band journeyed far as the sun grew low. They passed through the Loan Lands, where the people had been crushed by massive, inescapable graduate school debt and took to eating their degrees before eating one another. They passed the Jersey Shore, Beverly Hills, and other wicked places that goodness dare not touch. They told many a joke and riddle to lighten the mood as the weather worsened and the sky grew dark. Kiwi told a particularly hilarious and clever one that had the whole group laughing for almost an hour, though the bird had intended it as a mating call.

  Alas, there was more misery than laughter that night. Kiwi accidentally pecked the neck of his pony, and the poor beast was so frightened that it jumped into the river and drowned, taking a good portion of the supplies with it.VII The rain that came down chilled the Little People and the poor wobbit so terribly that they were forced to stop their trek through the deep dark Forest of Metaphorical Importance almost immediately.VIII They set up camp near the forest’s edge, with Whorey whining about her ruined hair and Ballin accusing Sorkinshield of redlining their campsite. It was then that Fili’s keen eyes spotted a faint white-blue glow far off through the trees.

  “What could it be?” queried Sorkinshield, as he quickly began brainstorming thematic points the faint light could hammer home. All of the Little People put forward their best guesses. Perhaps it was the camp of some nonthreatening creatures, like the Orcs-Who-Don’t-Appear-in-This-Book or film critics. Perhaps it was a spotlight, destined to shine on Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney so they could film their new slow-paced reality show, Slorey and Kourtney Take a Dramamine. But Sorkinshield was sure it was a deadly enemy and did not want to risk any of them running into more trouble. That is, until he noticed the shivering wobbit standing completely stationary behind a tree.

  “Billy, my Bagboy. The time has come for you to truly YOLO,” Sorkinshield said. “I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.”

  “I get a weapon?” asked Billy.

  “Oh no, that’s just an expression. Your incredible burgling skills that you’ve shown no evidence of so far will surely suffice. Am I mistaken?” Aaron looked at the rest of his crew for support. They were called supporting actors for a reason. All nodded vigorously and added murmurs of “Oh yes, surely it is just a few film critics,” and “I’d go myself, Billy, but I have recently become blind.”