by Louise Norlie
To me, humanity is not strictly human. I have encountered pigeon people, walrus people, and porpoise people. But rabbit people-–they are different.
I received a voicemail from a man who claimed to hold the answer to a famous academic controversy. He dropped tantalizing hints about a groundbreaking theory he had developed in secret. I supposed he was some eccentric amateur seeking to contact a renowned university professor well known in the field, someone like me.
I returned the phone call. The attitude of the stranger was not what I expected. He was diffident and suspicious, acting as if he was doing me the favor. He suggested a meeting in this run-down café called La Paloma. When we hung up I realized I forgot to ask his name.
The next morning I waited at a table beside the scratched, dirty window of La Paloma. There were no other customers, just the waitress wiping the counter with a grey cloth. I had the feeling that something was about to be stolen from me, something I didn’t know I had.
I consider myself an independent thinker in an age when every source of information is trying to feed me an agenda, a political point of view, all presenting humanity as strictly positive or negative, otherwise with a wishy-washy philosophical equivalence. For example, I was the only one who knew that the man who walked through the door was absolutely, completely, a Rabbit Man. He was a pale man, and about five foot six. You’d think Rabbit Men would be tall Easter Bunny types but he was short and pudgy, with smooth stretched skin like his outside could hardly contain what existed within him.
The Rabbit Man looked at me with his clear nervous eyes and extended a stiff paw-like hand. It was an obviously fake name, a name that couldn’t be a name, something with a C and a V (the V just like rabbit ears), like Covent or Coviner.
The Rabbit Man spread the manuscript flat on the table, gingerly smoothing its creases, and pointed to various passages and schematics. The writing spun before me. My eyes slipped from the document as though magnetized. I stared at a candy wrapper skittering across the floor from the dusty puffs of the heating vent.
I remember little about the Rabbit Man’s words, his feeble efforts at small talk. All I recall is that as I listlessly observed the shoppers on Main Street, the Rabbit Man stated, with distinct bitterness, that they were just buying things for themselves.
His large prominent ears had a delicate pink flush while his nose and shoulder twitched with a nervous tic. He didn’t blink and rarely raised his voice above a whisper. The Rabbit Man scribbled his address on an index card produced from a stack in his pocket bound by a rubber band. Our next meeting would be at his house where he kept volumes of source documentation.
After going for a long jog to clear my head, I reviewed the documentation that the Rabbit Man had provided. It was a work of genius. To say I was impressed would be an understatement. When I realized its implications, its scope and significance, I was frightened. I locked the manuscripts in my desk drawer and put the key in my pocket. I did not want anyone, not even my wife, to know about the Rabbit Man.
In the evening, as I ate dinner, my wife watched me out of the corner of her eye and laughed without making a sound. I saw the muscles of her mouth fighting the smile that broke through the carved contours of her lips. I saw the curve of her shoulders shake. I did not ask what amused her.
Before I fell asleep I recalled a girlfriend I had in college. She had large wide eyes, a limp due to a childhood accident, and was prone to frequent nosebleeds. Her eyebrows were high, as if an explosion had pushed them up. One afternoon while we lounged in the backyard of her mother’s house, her rowdy neighbors harassed us. They were barbequing what smelled like rancid meat. A boy hit baseballs over the fence, deliberately attempting to annoy us. My girlfriend rose to her feet every few minutes to throw them back. One hit her in the nose and gave her yet another nosebleed. Nevertheless, she displayed not the slightest anger. When a toddler wandered over and stared through the planks of the fence, my girlfriend tried to interact with her. She grinned broadly, saying, look at me, look at me. The little child’s eyes wandered everywhere but never at my girlfriend. Look at the bunny! my girlfriend cooed, pointing to a rabbit dashing across the grass. The spooked rabbit bolted, its body stretching like rubber. I felt nauseated, marooned in a ridiculous place. Needless to say, our relationship didn’t last.
The Rabbit Man’s house was nestled in a low-lying area next to a river. The muddy water was visible through the tangles of leafless trees. I peered into the empty car in the Rabbit Man’s driveway. A striped feather was taped to the steering wheel. Why a feather? Why striped? I still ponder this.
The house was small and decrepit, its paint peeling. I rang the doorbell and heard its sour echo resound inside. The Rabbit Man promptly let me inside. With a few clipped words, he offered snacks. He hopped into the kitchen and returned with unbelievable speed. I sat on the ugly yellow sofa, which gave off a stale odor. It was low to the ground, forcing me to sit in a demeaning crouch.
I watched the Rabbit Man eat with swift, rapid movements of the jaw. He kept his eyes on me with painful intensity. Then came what I should have suspected earlier, if only I hadn’t been so distracted by his Lapine nature. The Rabbit Man asked for a certain sum in exchange for handing over his materials. This meant I could claim his theory as my own. His voice was sharp yet fast, like he was nibbling the words out of the air.
Truth be told, I thought the amount demanded was modest and reasonable, a fair exchange. But looking at his trembling face, I found I could not agree easily, not there and then. I rubbed my chin and said I needed time. The Rabbit Man insisted on an immediate answer. Otherwise he would go to someone else. He invited me to take a walk to think it over. At the end of our walk he would require my decision. Shrunk within myself to a powerless shadow, I was compelled to follow.
We trudged down a sloping path to the river. The snow had melted and the earth was laid bare. The sky was white, one continuous cloud. Mounds of dog dung were piled on the decaying leaves. The odors of mold and urine rose like the rotten breath of the brown, naked soil. Mud caked my shoes beyond recognition.
The Rabbit Man held the manuscript, fanning the pages with his thumb. A constant reminder of our ultimate purpose. I can only guess at what made him so jittery. Perhaps fear of his impending death. He kept moving his hands in and out of his pockets. I did not know if he was going to make a run for it or spring at my throat. This tension rubbed off on me like static electricity, sending the hairs on the back of my neck on end. He lit a cigarette, his hands trembling as they held the lighter.
Suddenly my foot twisted between crevasses of loose stones. In stumbling my other foot slipped on the mud. At that moment the Rabbit Man stretched to touch me, his body pulling apart like dough, revealing the pasty, sun-hidden flesh between his shirt and pants.
We fell together, rolling down the slope of smothering mud. Rocks rattled on our heads. I heard a series of snaps and felt a burning pain across my arm. The Rabbit Man was on me, armed with a knife. We struggled. He was feverish and frantic, but weak. I would make him quiet, still at last.
From his clammy hand I grabbed the knife, and as if by chance, stabbed him in the throat. He made a choking noise and his eyes widened in fury of fear. Then he was still, blood from his throat leaching into the dead leaves, his hands grotesquely contorted. I heard a rustling noise. It was merely the wind. Almost immediately, flies speckled across the dead man’s face, a huge egg cracked underneath.
The Rabbit Man had known so much. For a brief moment he knew the secret of his own death. I thought of the secret inhabiting the substance of his body. In his blood and brain. The secret was still in tact when the body was.
I returned to the shack by the river. There I found just what I needed, a chainsaw. The murder was like the striking of a gong. Echoes persisted in all the Rabbit Man’s broken parts. There would be no silence until the fragments of the echo were too tiny to be heard. I cut the body into pieces and buried them in different places, straining to dig the loamy earth. Finally there came the point when the small clots of the Rabbit Man were something separate from the Rabbit Man himself. It was not just destroying the evidence. It was destroying the entire problem of the Rabbit Man. Or so I thought.
My clothes were half scarlet. Blood trailed throughout the woods. I flung handfuls of soaked leaves into the river and burned my bloody clothes in a fire started with the Rabbit Man’s lighter.
I bound the cut in my arm. It wasn’t as deep as I thought. Next I changed into a second set of clothes hanging in the Rabbit Man’s closet. These clothes fit me perfectly, like everything had been arranged for my convenience. Regardless, when I went home, I entered through the basement and hid the Rabbit Man’s clothes. I snuck up the stairs naked and changed before my wife arrived. That evening, she watched me out of the corner of her eye, dead serious, utterly unblinking.
At my lecture the next day I felt compelled to discuss Julio Cortázar’s story “Letters to a Young Lady in Paris” wherein a man vomits up bunnies while staying in a friend’s apartment. It can be imagined that the story had gained a stronger meaning for me. My throat constricted as I spoke. The blood rushed to my face. I also told the class about Mary Tofts, a maidservant in 18th century England who created a sensation when she claimed to have given birth to rabbits. She had, in fact, inserted dead rabbits into her vagina. The students guffawed at so ignorant an age when confusion reigned, when even the most educated were superstitious and gullible.
They would not laugh so hard if they realized, as I later did, that the proliferation of rabbits was real and defied logic.
The next time I entered the lecture hall, there he was, in the last seat on the left, quivering but in command. He wore tan khakis and a tan shirt. The Rabbit Man never sported such clean pressed clothes before. Now he wore the uniform of some furtive army.
I attempted to begin my lecture like nothing was wrong. Soon I broke out into a cold sweat. The whole class must have noticed.
You, I said, pointing at him, I’d like to have a word with you outside. The Rabbit Man sprang to his feet and dashed down the steps.
Who are you and what are you doing here? I asked, shutting the door behind me. I’m taking this course, he replied with that same intense apprehension I’d seen before. I just transferred here.
From where? I asked. He stared, his jaw dropping, as if the question was utterly unworthy of a reply. Temporarily, I felt relieved. There must be an explanation for this.
The Rabbit Man couldn’t have enrolled at the university.
Non-matriculating students have been known to sneak into dorms, make friends with impressionable youths, and masquerade as registered students. However, the Rabbit Man was too old to attempt that ruse without suspicion.
Of course, the fact that troubled me the most was that I had, to the best of my recollection, murdered the Rabbit Man.
I was reluctant to call security. I would just be giving myself away. What would I say? That the man I had murdered was alive, camouflaged as a college student? I had no choice but to continue with the lecture. In the classroom, the Rabbit Man was vocal, impervious to his strangeness. He voiced opinions and theories that resembling those of the man I killed. Was he a hallucination? No, the other students craned their necks to see him.
Their mouths gaped with wonder.
If I had committed a murder, and the victim was alive, I had nothing to hide. But what if the student and the eccentric were not the same person, but a collection of Rabbit Men assigned to disturb me?
That night, in my dreams, I slit the throat of the Rabbit Man in the woods by the river.
Was that what had happened the first time? Just a dream? No. There was a cut on my arm, now a razor thin scab. In my basement lingered a set of clothes that were not my own. I would not burn them, not yet. I needed traceable evidence.
The following day I lectured in the morning. To my infinite relief, The Rabbit Man was not there. Notably, the other students left his seat empty. I considered asking if anyone knew where he was, but decided against it.
I returned home for lunch, something I stopped doing ever since my meeting at La Paloma. As I walked up the stairs I realized to what extent the situation had spiraled out of control. The Rabbit Man was in bed with my wife. Her legs and arms were wrapped around him, pulling his body closer. I watched them through the slit of the bedroom door. Despite the energy of their movements, they were remarkably silent.
I tiptoed to the basement, stared at the second set of clothes. My cut was healing. These facts no longer held any weight. Should I go back to the muddy riverbank and do some digging? No. If I spent hours there, trying to locate each and every piece of this puzzle, I would give myself away.
Breeding like rabbits–that is the phrase. Rabbit Men forever spreading their reach. The result of all this–who knows–might be a genuine rabbit birth. When I next face the Rabbit Man’s shattering gaze, I will not interfere.
