A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  “Goddammit,” he had said over the phone, though not to me. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” he whispered again and again. I didn’t know what to do, only held on the line while he whispered, and then he began to cry, a soft wheezing sound.

  “Mr. Gadsen,” I said. “Mr. Gadsen,” but I could think of nothing else to say.

  He caught a deep breath. “That’s fine. That’s just fine with me, little lady. You tell Will, Mr. Professor and rabbit professional nonesuch, that as soon as he’s ready I’ll be here. I’ll be here with fine, healthy rabbits just waiting for His Royal Highness Will Flinter’s mighty word, and then he’ll have healthy, ready rabbits again.” He hung up.

  Of the twenty rabbits we took in from that new supplier, we lost twelve in two weeks to enteritis, the sickness passing from rabbit to rabbit to rabbit, though they were never in contact with one another, each kept in its own metal cage. When we called the supplier, told him all the rabbits were dying of diarrhea, he had blamed it all on us, told us we hadn’t kept things clean enough in our lab. A lie. We kept our lab as clean as any on campus, as clean, according to an animal-use expert Will had called in to inspect our place before the university’s biannual tour, as any lab in the state.

  We’d had to call in Mr. Gadsen to help us save the last eight.

  That Thursday morning Sandra, Paige, Wendy, and I watched from the secretaries’ room window as he climbed down from the cab of his rusted-out Chevy van, slammed the door closed, and straightened out his collar. He tucked in his tails, though they hadn’t been out. He was smiling to himself, and took off his cap, ran his hand back across his bald head as if there were still hair to keep in place.

  The four of us laughed a quiet laugh, and Paige said, “I love him. He’s perfect.”

  “He is,” I said. Sandra and Wendy nodded.

  He walked into the laboratory as if he owned the place; Sandra and I had had to run from the office to the stairs down into the basement to catch up with him.

  As we went past Will’s office Sandra called out, “He’s here,” but Will didn’t make a move, too proud, I knew, to admit to choosing the wrong supplier.

  We followed Mr. Gadsen into the rabbit room—the Green Room, we called it—the walls painted a nauseating mint green some twenty years ago. The Green Room, too, because it was the waiting room for the rabbits, where they stayed before they went on to perform in the next room down, where those electrodes would be clipped on.

  He moved from cage to cage, saying nothing, merely looking, peering in at frightened, white animals, each one jammed back into the corner of its cage.

  “God bless it,” he whispered when he’d seen them all. He looked at us for the first time. His eyes were full, not with the rheumy look of old age, but with tears. He had his hands in his back pockets, and stood there, just looking at us. Then he sniffed and looked down at the cement floor, shiny with the thick coat of polyurethane that helped the rabbit handlers keep the floors as clean and germ-free as possible, the floors washed down two or three times a week.

  “That bastard ought to be taken out and shot,” he said. “The bastard who sold you these animals.” He moved one foot across the floor, then gently kicked at nothing with his old Army boot. I looked at his boots, noticed he’d shined them since the last time I’d seen him. He looked back at the cages. “Not only are these godforsaken things sick, but they’re just not healthy. They’re just not well-cared-for in the first place. You can tell by their eyes, by the look, and you can tell by the lay of the ears, whether they’re up and hearty or down and crushed, that’s what you can tell. Whether they’re sick or not, you can look at their eyes and ears and tell if they’re taken care of or not.”

  I looked back at the animals, and saw that he was right, that their ears were a little different somehow, something so small I couldn’t have seen it unless he’d pointed it out. Even then I wasn’t sure whether I was actually seeing a difference, or if it had been merely the suggestion he had placed in me that made them look different.

  It was in their eyes, too, just as he said, a cloudy look, a dead look you could only see if you stared at them long enough, let your breathing go slow while you just watched the rabbit back there in its cage, its front paws drawn up, its ears flat. That was death, I knew, death slow through the eyes, and I wondered if that was how it happened to everything: rabbits, blue jays, monkeys. People.

  Sandra, too, was peering into a cage now, and I turned to tell Mr. Gadsen Yes, I could see it, but he was already gone.

  When I got up to Will’s office, Mr. Gadsen was leaning against the edge of Will’s desk, knuckles of both hands resting on the desktop. He was shaking his head, and Will was back in his chair, his hands holding onto the edge of the desk as if to keep him from falling backward. He was looking up at Mr. Gadsen.

  Mr. Gadsen said, “All’s I can tell you is that they’re sick. That’s all. And that they came to you that way. I know about this place, know you and your people well enough so’s I can tell you your people didn’t make them sick.” He stopped, looked straight down, his knuckles still resting on the desktop. “And I’ll tell you,” he said, “that there ain’t no guarantee but I can save them.” He quickly looked up. “You’ll still lose another one or two irregardless, but you can try and save what you can.” Then he straightened up, pulled from inside his jacket a ziplock Baggie filled with yellow powder. He held it up to his face and seemed to study it under the fluorescent lights. He squeezed it a little, then dropped it on the desk.

  “Terramycin,” he said. “Mix it with their water. Tablespoon per half-gallon. Just enough. And keep it in their water until I come back. And I’ll come back, believe you me. I’ll come back with a fresh batch, and you’ll be goddamned if you ever buy from that idiot out in Worcester again.” He had a hand in his back pocket again, his index finger pointed like a gun, each hard tap another shot through the desk and into the floor. “That’s all I’ll say. Just that if you want good rabbits, you’ll come to me. That’s all.”

  He turned, and if he saw me leaning against the doorjamb he pretended he didn’t, and just brushed past me, out into the hall and through the heavy, steel double doors outside. The doors banged shut.

  I said, “Well?” I had my arms crossed.

  Will picked up the Baggie and looked at it a moment. Then he threw it at me, and I was quick enough to catch it.

  He said, “Do it,” and that was it.

  We lost, just as Mr. Gadsen had figured, two more rabbits. The ones left were dull, dim-witted, and were never successfully conditioned. They’d been sacrificed without being of any use at all. And we’d bought every rabbit since from Mr. Gadsen.

  I went downstairs to the rabbit room, to the green walls, to the shiny plastic and concrete floor. I Went to the cages, six on each unit, two rows stacked three high on a metal frame with wheels so that we could move them around for cleaning. The cages were big—about two and a half feet deep—and as always the bedding was clean, the bottles full. There were eighteen new ones, I saw, and as I leaned toward the metal cage doors to look in at each rabbit I could have sworn I could still smell on them Mr. Gadsen’s whiskey.

  The rabbits had already been sorted, each cage labeled with an index card slipped into a small metal frame fixed to the door. On the card was written either LARGE or SMALL, and then a number. Large rabbits were anything from three to four kilos; small was anything under that.

  “So,” I said into the cages, “today’s the day we start.”

  The rabbits looked at me, pink eyes open wide. They were watching me, waiting.

  Because this was the first day for this new batch, all I would have to do would be to suture them, then put them through habituation. Easy enough, and so I took a breath, picked up the pair of canvas work gloves from on top of the cages and put them on, opened up the left top cage, and reached in for Small # 1. He made little movement to escape me, and I smiled at this, the end result of Mr. Gadsen’s care. So what if they smelled a
little of whiskey? The rabbits were healthy; this one was particularly happy, it seemed, as I held it in my arms, scratched behind its ears.

  “A name,” I said. “You’re the first of the batch, so you’ll get a name.” It was something I did with each new batch, always the first rabbit, top left, that got a name. I knew it was a useless, silly thing to do, and I knew I put myself at risk each time I did it, letting in the possibility of getting a little too attached to a rabbit—a bunny—by giving it a name. Still, I did it. Just habit, part of my own habituation to a new group of rabbits. It was something no one knew about, this small secret of mine.

  I carried the rabbit across the room to the row of four boxes mounted on a metal cart. The boxes, only plywood boards nailed together to form four cubbyholes on end, were each large enough to hold one rabbit snugly. The rabbits could see what was going on above them, could, if they wished, climb halfway out, rest their forepaws on the top edge of the box and watch the world, which is what Small # 1 did as soon as I placed him inside. He seemed happy there, his ears straight up, his nose going nonstop as he took in all these new smells.

  “A name,” I said again, and it came to me. I said, “Chesterfield. Chesterfield,” and I stood back from the cart to look at him.

  He was fearless, content. I laughed, and he didn’t even blink. I said, “Chesterfield it is, then,” and I went to the cart and wheeled it over to the cages for the next three.

  Small #2—he would get no name—seemed skittish, afraid; I reached into his cage and had to chase him with my hand back and forth a couple of times before I could get hold of him. Once I had him, though, he seemed to soften, his muscles relaxed as I placed him in his bin, Chesterfield still standing there in his, watching intently. He leaned toward #2’s box, sniffed, then looked back at me.

  Large #1, the second row cage on the left, probably weighed about three and a half, and was a pushover: he merely lay there, not even crouched, his hind legs flat behind him as he waited for me to reach in. It was as if Mr. Gadsen had already conditioned the rabbits for laboratory conditioning.

  I opened the fourth door, Large #2. He was even bigger than #1, I could see; this one might be a little harder to handle than the others. He was backed into a corner, facing me, his ears laid back, his paws in front of him. His nose was moving fast, his whiskers shivering.

  I said, “Come on, bunny. Come on, big bunny,” and started to reach in.

  He jumped at me then, boxed at my hand with his paws, shooting them out at me. I could feel through the canvas gloves the force he had, too, my first two fingers throbbing just a little with that contact.

  His sudden move made me jump back, the other three rabbits having lulled me into forgetting just what it was these animals could do: break bones, pierce flesh, jump ten feet. I moved closer to the gate, still standing open. He hadn’t moved again.

  I put my hand in the cage as slowly as I could. It had been a long time since I’d had to treat some dumb rabbit as if it were a lion, but I’d seen the blood out of Sandra’s hand once, blood from a bite she’d gotten through canvas gloves just like the ones I wore. It had taken five stitches and too many shots to fix her up. So I was careful, and I went slowly.

  As I imagined might happen, the thing began to growl, the same sort of growl a cat might make: low and loud, much deeper, more resonant than what you would assume a small animal like this could put out.

  It growled, but still I reached for it. And then it jumped at me again, hit my hand again, but with my other hand I was able to grab it by the scruff of the neck, drag it from the cage. I held it at arm’s length like some sort of magician, its hind legs thrashing the air, its forepaws splayed out to either side, yet it had gone silent. It was only a rabbit now, muscles, bone, and soft white fur. I brought it to the last box.

  The other rabbits were flat in the bottom of their own boxes as I wrestled with Large #2, his legs still kicking, resounding now against the wood, claws scrabbling to dig into something. Finally he was in, and I held him down in the hole with one hand. With the other I reached to the bottom platform of the cart for one of the square wooden lids, pulled it up to the box, and let go of the rabbit. He jumped at the lid, and I could feel the backbone hit the wooden piece, but there was nothing I could do. I could only hope that he would settle down, get used to things here.

  I pushed the cart out into the hallway. Large #2 had finally stopped jumping, but still I held the lid on. If I were to lift it now, chances are it would jump. It had happened before. Everything had happened before, rabbits jumping from carts so that you had to chase them down, squatting and trying to run after a mass of fur and claws, pink and white, colors you wouldn’t think of as being vicious enough to make a fool of you.

  I wheeled them into the next room down, the running room. One whole wall was filled with ancient hardware—banks of old circuit boards, scopes, wires, tubes, all designed just to register the blink of an eye. Only that Though our laboratory was a good one, our equipment in this room was at best archaic; all these electronics when one computer, even a PC, could record digitally what we were still running out on a polygraph.

  Against another wall was a countertop, on it the Plexiglas Gormezano boxes the rabbits would be placed in for habituation, the trays of .04 sutures, a couple of needle-nose pliers, and an assortment of wires, alligator clips, and tools used to staple the wound clips into the rabbit’s fur. At the end of the counter stood the four-drawer filing cabinet in which the rabbits would be placed. Wires came from the back and ran to certain spots on the circuit wall. Other than that the cabinet seemed only a gray, university-issue filing cabinet. Ugly, big, practical.

  I took Chesterfield out first. He was still crouched down in the box, still spooked by Large #2’s growl. They fed off each other that way, knew what each other was up to, knew the fear that another had, and they could pass it on to one another so that one growl stirred up the whole bunch, made them all cower.

  I held him for a moment, stroked his ears and scratched down between his eyes and behind the ears, and then I gently placed him in one of the Gormezano boxes, a clear bin that held the rabbits down, wouldn’t allow them to move, so that none of the equipment would be jostled, mismeasuring some sudden movement of the rabbit as a blink. Chesterfield slipped into the box easily, his head protruding through a hole in the piece that held it steady; he even made the claustrophobic box seem cozy as he sat there, head out one end, just waiting. And I wondered what might happen when I got to Large #2. I glanced over at the cart. The lid was still on the fourth box, and I heard no sounds. Perhaps he’d decided to cooperate.

  Suturing came next, and I took from the tray at the end of the counter one of the green-and-white packages, no bigger than a small envelope, and pulled one end open to expose the sterilized needle and thread. I took off the gloves, and with a needle-nose pliers held the needle, the curved piece of sharpened steel like a miniature scythe. Gently I placed my index and middle fingers over Chesterfield’s left eye, then spread my fingers so that his eyelids were pulled open to expose the nictitating membrane, the thin sheet of pink skin that protected the eye, the second lid that allowed its red albino eyes to keep intact and safe. The membrane exposed, I took the needle and sank it just a breath’s depth into the skin, turned the pliers so that the tip of the suture popped out an eighth of an inch away from where it entered, and nowhere near, I knew, the eyeball itself. Chesterfield had done nothing, only winced a moment when the needle had entered.

  I pulled the needle through and tied the thread off in a small knot, a minuscule loop on the membrane to which we would connect the lead from the potentiometer after habituation. Then I snipped off the ends of the thread with a pair of scissors from the counter, and Chesterfield was ready. I pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet, and placed Chesterfield in his box inside, his head facing me and the front of the drawer, where a small speaker was mounted. Once they had been habituated—one half-hour session in the filing cabinet would be enough—we
would put the electrodes in place, hook up the potentiometer like some small mechanical saddle perched on the rabbit’s neck, and a quiet tone would come through the speaker for a moment every fifteen seconds. An instant after the tone would come the tiny shock so small—one milli-amp —that it couldn’t be felt. A shock so small that only a few nerves would react to it, only enough to signal the eye to blink. Not enough to cause pain.

  At least that was what we had always been told. Of course there was no way to know, but that was what I told myself so I wouldn’t feel any more guilty than I already did.

  It was then that what always happens happened: I began to regret my having given Chesterfield a name. There he sat, a rectangle of fur crammed into Plexiglas. He was still waiting, but only I knew what would happen. I slowly pushed the drawer closed, Chesterfield watching me, his nose going slower and slower as he disappeared into the black of the cabinet.

  I knew what would happen at the end of all this, knew that he would have to be sacrificed. Sacrificed, I thought, and thought of the quality of that word, that joy of science resonating from it: sacrificed for research, when what it meant was that he would be killed.

  The second and third rabbits went in easily, and I had them both in the cabinet within ten minutes. What was left, of course, was Large #2. I looked at the box, the lid still on. The scratching had stopped a long time ago. There were no sounds, but I knew it meant nothing at all.

  I put my gloves on and as gently, as quietly as I could I placed my hand on the lid, pulled it up.

  There sat the rabbit, his eyes open wide, the pupils, bright crimson, disappearing as they shut out the new light.

  First I touched his ears, and he did nothing. I could tell his body was stiff, ready for something to happen, but I wanted only to comfort him, to let him get used to me, to my touch, even though through thick canvas gloves. We would be seeing a lot of each other from this day on, and I wanted him used to me.