Rabbit Test
When I woke, I ran back to the beach house, and found Lynn on the couch. She had begun bleeding while I was gone. She was shaking, and her father was lecturing her that she shouldn’t have gone for a bike ride that morning. I packed the car while she called the doctor. The drive home seemed endless, through a downpour that so completely washed the windshield it was like driving through a storm at sea. Lynn kept repeating that the doctor had said it could very well be nothing. After she fell asleep, exhausted from nerves, I drove with the radio playing low. I could not shake the image that the term she had used, “spotting,” had left in my mind.
The next morning, I was back in the hospital waiting room, smoking cigarettes and pulling myself together. The rabbit kept trying to slip into my thoughts, but I reminded myself that I was a PhD candidate, a man of reason. I tried to explain my foolishness to this old guy sitting next to me, who was waiting while his wife had a hysterectomy. I laughed when I finished emphasizing that it was all a joke, but he came back, with a straight face, about a time when he was in California as a teenager, and frogs fell out of the sky. “Ever step on a frog in bare feet?” he asked. I shook my head. “Like stepping on a heartbeat,” he said, and I felt something scurrying down along my spine.
After that, if we were out at a restaurant or on a bus and Lynn heard a baby crying we would have to leave immediately, whether we had finished eating, whether it was our stop, or not. We could no longer go to parties where other couples might bring their children. Talk had no affect. Sex was evil. She was bitter and hated all of her friends who tried to tell her how sorry they were. I stood by like a moronic Dr. Freud, analyzing the situation for her and saying, “Everybody is counting on you to get it together. We’ve got to be strong now.” I knew I was doing more harm than good when she became obsessed with buying shoes and greeting cards. What was I left with, though, but Crouch and my pointless job, the rabbits that now actively pursued me?
I made the mistake of going to the university library one day and looking up Rabbits in relation to folklore and myth. “_Marvelous indeed is the hare_,” began one article that caught my interest. Witches often took this form in order to work their wicked deeds and could only be killed with a silver bullet. Hares were known to breed a melancholia that could easily progress to madness. They are a world wide symbol of fertility, but, at the same time, for a hare to cross the path of a pregnant woman is highly ominous. They are associated with the moon and a million ghost stories. Its sacred flesh was denied to ordinary mortals, and for the Ojibwa, it was a trickster, who through its mischief created the world.
A few days later, I learned that it was the Chinese year of the rabbit. They were everywhere, on television, in the newspaper, on billboards and t-shirts. At night, when I would take a walk across the field back by the stadium, they would dart out at me. I called Lynn’s brother and mentioned my paranoia, again making believe it was a joke. He didn’t laugh, though, thinking I was making light of his sister’s miscarriages. At work, I hooked up with a guy who sold pot, and I would buy from him every few days. I was constantly high, and the connections were made stronger than ever. The black hash he sold could make them come to me in many forms, a dozen in a day.
The winter was dark red and Lynn often worked late. Because she was so distant, I began to believe that she was having an affair with one of the doctors at work. At night, while I sat in the lonely row house by myself, waiting for her to return, I would concoct a scenario where she would leave me because I was cursed. One day when I was home, a letter came for her. It had no return address on it and her name and so forth was hand written. I held it up to the light. I felt it. I was sure it was from him. After deliberating for hours, lifting it and then putting it down, walking away and returning, I finally tore it open. Tiny scraps of fabric in all different colors poured out of it, a hundred miniscule squares. I gathered them up and threw all of it out, stuffing it way down deep in the bottom of the kitchen garbage. I never did learn what it was all about, but on Christmas Eve, we met in the bedroom and had sex.
That pregnancy was like walking on a knife blade. I was reminded of a comic book hero from when I was a kid, who, if he uttered a single word, would destroy the universe. We minced around, and seemed always to be communicating in sign language. We neither bought the book with lists of baby names, nor did we check our health insurance. On pain of death, we had promised each other not to mention it to anyone. I began reading again for my dissertation, not with any hope of ever writing it, but just to do something to take my mind away. Lynn took up a hobby of making ornamental wreaths out of Styrofoam and pieces of fabric. Although our love had been crippled by all that had happened, we held onto each other like a pair of strangers sitting side by side in a roller coaster car just beginning its free fall. The wreaths piled up in the basement and every word I read turned to smoke. When I would cross the plaza, the blowing leaves of the enormous old trees would form themselves into rabbits running in place.
