Fantastic Metropolis

I didn’t remember until that morning when I was lying on the pull out couch in the living room, my eyes closed, listening to the rain. Lynn had just spent two weeks on that couch, nervous and distant, staring, without so much as a word, at the summer Olympics on the television. I was pretending to still be asleep, but she knew I wasn’t.

“I’m not pregnant anymore,” she said, “I can tell. I can feel it.” Her voice broke and she was crying. The sound of it came into me and ripped whatever is there where the chest ends and the stomach begins. I rolled over and put my arm around her, put my head against hers.

As I held her, it came back to me as clear as a movie. The sun was bright and it was stifling hot for mid-May. We walked up a path to the door of the obstetrician’s office. I was feeling so light, I had almost missed it, but there was a tiny brown rabbit, crouched down against the bricks of the building. It was panting in the heat, and even though I leaned over to see it more closely, it did not bolt. That memory vanished, and as it did, I thought of a part of a novel by Knut Hamsun I had once read where a woman is cursed in childbirth when another woman sends her a hare.

Later that afternoon, in the hospital waiting room, while all trace of the child I had daydreamed about was being scraped away, the two headed memory returned and I smoked three cigarettes over it before pulling myself together. Lynn cried for days after and yelled at me because I didn’t. She had no idea about the times late at night when I stood in the basement, behind the oil burner, with my forehead against the wall.

We put it behind us. Lynn returned to work and I continued studying for my degree. “It happens,” they told us. “There’ll be plenty of opportunities,” they said, and we believed them, because we were new at it and they were old with children who had children. So many people told us stories about themselves and loved ones having similar problems that we assumed it was all part of the deal. Our attitude became, “Well, we’ve gotten that over with.” The geranium in our bedroom produced an enormous pink blossom that year. Then summer ended and by the time the first snow came, we had cast the incident deep inside ourselves where certain chemicals cocoon great sorrow.

In spring, I got off the subway one day and started walking across Marconi plaza in the rain. The field was deep with water, and it sloshed in over the tops of my shoes. A figure came toward me across the deserted field, holding a black umbrella. It was Lynn. Steam came from her mouth as she told me the news. Right there, I decided to give up my studies so that I could get a job and be a better provider. For some reason, I believed self-sacrifice was called for, that my obvious commitment would favorably impress Fate. I figured that once the baby was a few years old, I could return to school and finish. In the meantime, while working, I would study, at night, the Faust myth I had given so many hours to already. She was happy with my decision. After dinner, we lay in bed and made intricate plans that stretched far into the future. I remember hearing the two a.m. trolley rattle by out on Johnston.

I took a job writing automotive manuals for a business school that was going to add Automotive Technician to its list of degrees. The place was totally illegitimate and run by a three hundred pound man named Crouch, whose head was so much flesh and who walked with a metal cane. I had no idea what I was doing, but the pay was 18,000 a year, which I thought was marvelous. Crouch, a native of Indiana, would tell me in his farting-into-a-kazoo twang that my work was “slicker than snot on a door knob, finer than frog’s hair.” It was obvious from the first day that the owners of the school wanted the project to fail so they could keep the government funding. I could have cared less. I thought about Lynn and the baby not yet born and continued to write chapters with titles like “Identification of Component Parts For Disassembled Head.”

In July, we went to visit Lynn’s parents at their beach house one weekend to take a break and make our announcement. I had had a few beers and was lying on the beach on an overcast Sunday afternoon, when I had a curious dream. I dreamt of my dead Grandmother’s house, empty and darkened. The shell collection, the antique painting with its wan, big-eyed children playing piggy-back in a room of long white drapes, the cedar attic where she kept that doll that was so old it had turned black. Then I heard her voice, slipping out of the back room and down the hall, twined with the creak of a rocker, reciting from memory some poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I saw the moon and suddenly was aware of a rabbit, slipping through a hole in the screen of the back porch.

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.

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.

I was in the kitchen, cleaning the window that looked out on the small concrete back yard of the row house one morning. The place had really been neglected and with all my time, I had begun a campaign to get it in shape. As I was looking out the window at the broken down gate that led to the alley, I saw something working its way through the hole at the bottom. It was black and white, and at first I thought it was a cocker spaniel. I went out the back door to check it out. It turned out to be the biggest rabbit I had ever seen in my life. This thing was the size of a small dog and had ears that dragged along the ground. My legs went weak and my fear was the kind that can easily make you contemplate the end of the world by meteor storm or a sudden vanishing of gravity.

I swear, I thought the creature was going to talk to me. “No fucking way,” I said. “No way.” The whole thing was so absurd. A huge rabbit running around amidst a bunch of row houses in South Philly? I barely kept it together. I ran inside and called the ASPCA. They asked me if it was hurt, and I told them no. “There’s nothing that can be done,” they said. I hung the phone up and went back outside to see if maybe it had disappeared, but it was still there.

I was so screwed up, I decided it was an emissary from the rabbit world and that I had better treat it well. After fetching some celery and carrots out of the refrigerator, I approached it. It just sat there, staring at me. “Hi,” I said and leaned down, holding out the longest celery stalk. It took a slow, lumbering hop toward me, and I jumped back, shaking.

The way I skipped and ran around the yard that afternoon, trying to feed it and avoid it at the same time, you would have thought it was a rabid badger. Slowly, I grew accustomed to it and let it come over to me. I petted it and spoke to it and it rubbed itself like a dog against my leg. When I held it, I could tell it had not come on a mission of malice. I decided that it had come to make peace with me. I asked it, “Why?” but it just sat there, fat and inscrutable. It scarfed down all the vegetables I had in the fridge.

About an hour before Lynn was due home from work, a kid came walking down the alley. He saw me holding the rabbit, petting it, and said, “Ziggy, what are you doing there?” Apparently, Ziggy was a Belgian long haired rabbit that had escaped from its hutch up the alley two days earlier. The kid thanked me for feeding it and took it home to its owner.

We sat in front of the doctor and she explained Lynn’s genetic translocation. She was young and beautiful with long blonde hair, but she had these wrinkled hands that looked like the hands of an old man. It was as if she, herself, was some kind of mutant. I tried not to stare at them as she told us how a piece of the number twelve gene had switched places with a piece of the number two gene. She had diagrams and actual photographs of Lynn’s genes. I didn’t fully grasp her explanation, but what it came down to was that about forty percent of pregnancies would self-abort because of the anomaly. “Your genetics makes you special,” she said to Lynn with a smile. “I realize all you have been through, but I have to tell you that it is more than possible that you can conceive.” “But why does it happen?” I asked. She reached over and put one of those old hands on my shoulder. “There�s no answer,” she said. “It just happens.”

The rabbits had no hold on me after that. We eventually had a baby, a boy with remarkable, almond shaped eyes and skin as smooth as an eggshell. It still took us years to get the loss out of our systems, but eventually it worked itself to the surface like the imbedded shrapnel of a grenade. Now, plunged in the years again, I do not have much time to think about those children we lost, but occasionally, late at night, when the wind is blowing, the house is sleeping, and I am standing in the backdoor, smoking a last cigarette, I search the shadows for them. Minutes later, I come awake, my arms wrapped around myself, staring at the moon.

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“Rabbit Test” originally appeared in somewhat altered form in New Myths, 1995, II:2/III:1.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of five novels, the most recent being The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, and his shorter fiction has garnered wide critical acclaim as well as several awards (his novelette “The Empire of Ice Cream” is currently nominated for a World Fantasy and a Hugo). A new novel, The Shadow Year, and a short story collection are in the works.