Rabbit Test
I read the entirety of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus the night it happened. Lynn began passing blood clots at about six in the evening. The obstetrician told her over the phone to let nature take its course. She lay in bed, pale and shivering, dozing in and out of a fitful sleep. Nearly every twenty minutes, she would have to get up and go to the bathroom. By midnight, the bleeding hadn’t stopped, and I was really scared. I called the doctor and began yelling, but he told me there was nothing that could be done. While she was awake, I sat on the bed stroking her hair, holding her hand. When sleep would come, I would go downstairs and read. I smoked three joints that night, and although I felt like a heel for getting high, I never would have made it if I hadn’t. Finally, she fell into a deep sleep that lasted for hours. In one of the last scenes of the novel, when the composer, Leverkuhn, has gone mad and is envisioning worms falling from the noses of a choir of children and drilling into their chests, I realized that that night I had sat through the disintegration of a son, a daughter, and knelt down by the fake fireplace in the corner, not to pray, but because the weight of the thought had forced me to the ground.
After we returned from the hospital the next day, Lynn lay in bed, staring straight ahead. “I don’t care about anything,” she said. She did not cry this time at all. “What about me?” I asked her. She shook her head no. The space between us seemed to fill with some invisible substance that was cold as ice and transformed words to dust. I kept talking like a wind-up toy and small gray tumbleweeds blew across the bare wood floor of the bedroom. It was clear to me that in her fixed stare, she was seeing the children we had lost. Then I saw them, blonde and fat cheeked, running, smearing chocolate on their faces, learning to swim. I left the room and went out to the bar around the corner. There I got drunk and met a deaf janitor who built miniature houses out of matchsticks. He spoke to me of his craft in mumbles and grunts and I found comfort in his conversation.
At work, I started going around to the freight elevator in the back of the building a couple of times a day. I would take it in between floors and turn it off and then stand there and smoke a joint or do a pipe of hash. Crouch knew I was getting high, but he needed me to finish the last book in the series I had been working on. He called me into his office one day and tried to get me to level with him. As I sat before him, all I could think of was the time he had sat down next to a pregnant student and grabbed her thigh, saying, “It’s too bad you got knocked up. With legs like these, you could have been another Nadia Comeneche.” When I had explained to him one day about the string of miscarriages, his only reply had been, “Try it with her on top next time.”
In his good old boy persona, he started grilling me about drugs. He told me how much I reminded him of his son. He revealed to me his new slogan for the Automotive school: Through Pride to Excellence. I had forgotten my Visine that day and my eyes were red rimmed. He began telling me about an attractive young woman in his apartment building who had sent him a pair of blue panties in the mail, but I laughed in his face and told him the school was a rip-off and a dump and that he was a fucking loser.
My being unemployed made Lynn even more unresponsive than before. I would sit home all day and try to think of ways to get her back to her old self, but all the time, I was changing, sinking into my own world. After she would leave for work, I would go out and wander through the neighborhoods. If I wasn’t walking, I would watch television, and when the night would come on I’d drink and smoke myself into oblivion. The days began to run together. Months passed, seasons changed and we inhabited the same house, the same bed, but like two lost souls at different points in history. I knew the rabbits were there, watching me, but in the state I was in, there was nothing more they could do. I would spend long hours trying to figure out why I had been cursed. “Perhaps it was the squirrel I had killed with a BB gun when I was ten,” I thought. I was certain, from my research, that somewhere in my life, unbeknownst to me, I had somehow made a pact with the devil.
Then, after what seemed a century of life as a castaway, Lynn called me to the kitchen one morning and we talked. Like that, the spell was broken. Time had done what it is least appreciated for. She spoke to me about having some tests done to determine why she had had so many miscarriages. She encouraged me to think about going back to school. We caught up on lost time and began to talk cautiously about the months to come. Before she left for work, we actually hugged and I could feel the energy returning to my body. That day I threw out my pot and all the beer and liquor and took out my books. I went running and took vitamins. At the end of the week, we went up into the city and had some blood tests run that would check for genetic defects. If things were beyond hope, we planned to adopt. Why we felt we needed a child so badly, I couldn’t quite understand, but it seemed to have something to do with failure.
