The conditions were right when the transfer opportunity came. This was a real promotion, national-level stuff—much more money and the right kind of work, at last—the type of thing Sarah had wanted for years. She could not afford to let it pass. “A chance like this,” she said, and we both knew.
After that, we started talking, quietly at first, about “making a change” or implementing “the new plan.” We worked it all out, calm and serious and sad, and then it was decided. The job led the way, but we both knew it was more than that and we were clear about what this meant when we explained it to the kids. We needed to move on and there was no pretending anymore, no fudging the truth.
“We just want you to be happy,” our oldest daughter said, and the line stuck in my ear because I’d always thought it was the kind of thing parents were supposed to tell their kids.
We kept the show running for four more months—one last school-less September through to one last all-together Christmas—and then we made the calls in the third week of January. Like everybody else, we wanted to get through Christmas before the chatter started. It was civil and transparent and even kind.
I drove her to the airport and we really did kiss and cry in a parking spot that is reserved for kissing and for crying.
“We just have to do what we have to do,” she told me.
* * *
—
I look at Gunther sometimes and I wonder if he is typical—if he is like or unlike all the others of his kind—the rest of the lagomorphs that populate this world. I wonder if he has even ever seen another rabbit or if he thinks maybe I am a rabbit, too. They are an altricial species—another word I have learned—born blind and deaf and defenseless, so he would have no memory of his siblings or his mother, no sight or sound to carry forward from that first phase of his life. If there is a moment in your existence when you cannot survive without another’s timely intervention—if you are like a hatchling bird fresh out of the shell—then you are altricial. When Gunther was born, he would have been a hairless three inches of flesh, a pink wriggling tube in the world, barely more than a mouth and a fragile circulatory system visible through his skin. There might have been eight or nine others with him in the litter. Maybe he still holds some faint feeling of them, the touch of other rabbits, all those teeming bodies pressed up against each other, huddling for heat. That’s another word I like: the verb, to teem. You hardly ever get to use it.
There is so much out there. I have scrolled the images on the Internet and read the articles and followed the diagrams, the maps that show us what really happens if we follow them down the hole, through the warren and into the complex society they build down there, three feet beneath the place where we live. The largest and most complicated colonies can twist through hundreds of meters of tunnels and switchbacks, a path no predator could ever follow. Guided only by instinct, they dig dark mazes out of the ground, building their real working routes so that they run right beside a series of faked dead ends and false starts. Then they put in dozens of different entrances and escapes, some of them real, some of them decoys. The strategy is amazing, the fact that this level of deception, such advanced trickery, is built right into the great natural plan.
Despite all of this, in the wild, a rabbit gets to live for a year, maybe two. Less than 10 percent of them ever see that second summer or winter. I guess they are born for dying, a new generation every thirty-one days. But that’s not how it is for Gunther. He is fifteen years old now, at least, and I suppose this makes him a nearly unique organism in the history of the world. From here on in, every one of his experiences will be unprecedented.
Today I decided I would try to show him something new. He has always been an indoor pet—a house rabbit—but this morning I brought him outside. There was work I’d been neglecting in the yard and it had to be done. I did not think he would run away—our fences go straight to the ground—but there are gaps that are large enough and I wanted to at least give him a choice.
I put him down on the lawn and gave him a good scratch between his ears.
“There you go,” I said, and I spread my arms wide as if I was granting the yard to him. “All yours.”
He looked up at me, less enthused than I expected, and then he just lowered his head and pulled up a mouthful of fresh clover and started munching away. He casually turned and hopped a few feet over to sniff at the base of the back porch, near the spot where we keep our compost bin and the garden hose. He did not seem to be in a rush to go anywhere.
I turned away from him and walked toward the shed. I spun the combination on the padlock, opened the door and wheeled out our dusty push lawn mower. I grabbed the snips and the hedge clippers and the sturdy old garden rake with its rectangular grin of sharp tines. I took out the wheelbarrow. For half an hour I purposefully did not look back in the direction where I had left Gunther. I wanted to leave him alone and give him a chance to sort things out for himself.
There had been so many spring Saturdays like this in our past, so many days full of lists, with things that needed to be done and put in order. I raked the dead winter leaves into a pile and I uncovered the beds and I took an initial stab at trimming back the rosebush and the other perennials that Sarah had always kept up. I tried to remember everything she had told me about how to get the angle right on your snips so that everything you cut away grows back and then grows out in the right way. Fullness was what we were always aiming for. We wanted the plants in our backyard to be full, to bloom thick and heavy. I touched each fork where the branches or the stems parted and I paused and thought about what to do. Then I eenie-meenie-miney-moed my way through the decisions before cutting one side back and letting the other side live.
I turned around just in time. There was a sound, I guess, more of a vibration in the air, but it should not have been enough. I don’t know what made me look. It was just a sigh really, a gurgling exhale, like the wheezing my own lungs made at their worst, only more shallow and quicker.
The thing I saw—the thing my eyes landed on—was a completely normal occurrence in the natural world, I guess. But at the same time, it was something shocking—something completely new and troubling—to me. A snake, much thicker and much longer than the kind of animal I believed could live beneath our porch, was spiraled around Gunther’s body. The drama was almost over and everything had already shifted to stillness. Gunther was stretched out to his full length and the sound coming from him, the vibration, was the last of his air being squeezed out of his body. The snake had wound round him four or five times and their heads, Gunther’s and the snake’s, were touching. It seemed almost like they were looking into each other’s eyes. Their tails, too, were almost even, but in between—beneath and inside the symmetry of the snake—there was this wretched contortion in Gunther’s body, a twisting that seemed to spin his neck in the opposite direction from his front paws. I felt, for sure, that all his bones had already been broken.
I have looked it up—I went immediately to the search engine when I came back to the house—and I know now that this other creature, the thing that once lived beneath our porch, was a rat snake, a nonvenomous constrictor, as local to this part of the world, perhaps even more local, than my New Zealand rabbit. I have learned that rat snakes, or corn snakes, make great pets, that they are wonderful with kids, that they are the gentle hit of the reptile show that comes to visit all the schools. Children love to feel them spiraling around their limbs, the dry, wet sensation of it. The rat snake in my backyard was not at fault, not doing anything wrong. Only taking up its assigned place and following an instinctive pattern it could not choose or change. Gunther too was where he was supposed to be, I guess. When all of this happened, I was the only thing moving out of order. But I could not stop myself from moving.
“No,” I said, and I took four or five purposeful strides toward them. Then I reached out and I picked up this strange and seething combination of whatev
er it was and I held it in my hand. I do not think I will ever touch something like this again and I do not know what I felt. It wasn’t heavy. The two of them together did not weigh as much as a bag of groceries. They were in my left hand and, with my right, I grabbed the snake just behind its head and tried to twist it away, to pry it off of Gunther, to separate them. It turned on me almost instantly, unspooling from Gunther and swiveling onto my arm. I flung both of them back on the ground. Gunther fell and did not move, but the snake immediately began to head toward the pile of leaves, sideways and forward at the same time.
But we were not done yet. I grabbed the rake and followed behind, and when my chance came, I swung the tool hard. It arched over my shoulder and cut down quickly through the air and I felt the resistance as the point of one, maybe two of the teeth penetrated the snake’s body almost in the middle. The rake descended all the way through and dug into the ground on the other side. Both ends of the snake, the top and the bottom, kept going, zigzagging furiously, but the middle was pinned down and stationary. I walked to the head, and I waited and watched the swaying. Then I timed it right and I brought my heel down as precisely as I could. I was only wearing running shoes, but I pressed hard and I felt the bones crushing, and the liquid giving way, like stepping on an orange, maybe. But after fifteen seconds, the swaying stopped, the top half of the snake first and then the bottom. I looked back to where I had been just a few seconds before and I was prepared for what I expected to see—the crumpled white pile, unbreathing—but it was not there. Instead, over to the side, maybe two feet away from where he had fallen, Gunther was up and at least partially reinflated back to his regular rounded shape. He was perfectly stationary now, still in the way that only a rabbit can be still, and he was staring at me, staring hard at this scene.
I looked at him and then down at the snake, the length of it, the stretch of its body. The things it had done and the things I had done. I did not know what any of them meant. I did not know what could or could not be justified. I only knew what had happened and that, eventually, I would have to come back here, to this spot, and clean up the mess.
I went over to Gunther and I picked him up as gently as I could, but he gave me no reaction. He was only a soft object in my hands, almost like a stuffed animal, like a kid’s toy that is supposed to stand in for a real rabbit, or for whatever a rabbit is supposed to mean. I brought him back inside, back to our house, where we are now, and I put him on the couch and knelt in front of him. I ran my fingers all along his body, like the uncaring veterinarian from years ago, but like him, I couldn’t feel anything out of place, and couldn’t tell if there was something else wrong, something broken deeper inside of him.
* * *
—
The phone rings and it is Sarah. She lives in a city where it is an hour earlier than it is here, and, for a second, I get confused about time zones and I imagine that none of this has happened to her yet.
“How you doing today?” she says.
The tone is light and easy and intimate. When conditions are right, we can fall right back into who we were. She just wants to chat about nothing, to fill in the time on an empty Saturday morning. It is quiet on both ends and I feel certain that we are both alone, at least for now.
“Well,” I say. It is hard to find the right words. “Something bad happened with Gunther just now.”
“No,” she says, and the turn comes right away, a panicked edge sharpening her voice. “What happened?” she asks. “Is it bad? I was just thinking about him and wondering about the two of you. Is he going to be okay? Are you okay?”
“It was a snake,” I say, trying to make all of this as basic as I can. “Can you believe that? Like a real snake, a pretty big one, in our yard, and it almost had him, but then he got away. I’m just not sure what’s going on with him right now. Maybe he’s in shock.”
I make the clicking noise with my tongue and I say the name, the word that once seemed so strange to me. I say “Gunther” and I wait for him to come but nothing happens.
The phone is pushed against my ear and Sarah’s breathing is there.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” she instructs. “And tell me what he looks like right now. Try to explain it to me. I need details. Maybe we need to call someone.”
“He seems alert,” I say, “but he’s not moving.”
I reach out and stroke the bridge of his nose with my index finger and I feel him nudging back a little bit, trying to meet my skin with his body.
I watch this happening—almost like an extreme close-up running in slow motion, a picture that I am in and observing at the same time—my finger on his nose and his nose against my finger. There is a pause during which nothing happens. Nothing happens and nothing happens, but it goes on for too long and the gap gets too wide. I lose track.
Sarah breaks the silence.
“David!” she shouts. “David, are you there?”
My name surprises me, like an odd noise coming from another room, something crashing, and at first I don’t know how to respond, but before I can do anything, Gunther twists his head, hard and quick, pivoting both ears toward me and the telephone. He recognizes Sarah’s voice—the sounds that only she can make—a cry coming out of this plastic receiver, cutting through. He turns and his expression, the shape of his face, the tilt of his head, rearranges into something I have never seen before, flaccid and seized in all the wrong places. But his breathing is strong and steady. I feel like he needs me, like I am the only one who can pull him through.
“I’m here,” I say into the phone, “but I can’t talk right now. I have to let you go.”
I hang up and stare at Gunther and I see myself reflected again at the red center of his eye. The surface seems cloudier than normal, and I don’t think he can process what is happening anymore, this hazy mixture of light and frequency that surrounds us—the familiar and the strange. I know he still knows me—he still knows us—and I try to look past my reflection. I imagine moving directly through the membranes and lenses of his eyes, down the nerves and all the way up into his brain. I think our shared past, our lives, are still there, held in his memory. Inside the mind of the oldest rabbit that has ever lived, we are a single thought—vivid and urgent and distinct—but then it passes and the rest is everything else.
John Edgar Wideman
Maps and Ledgers
MY FIRST YEAR TEACHING at the university my father killed a man. I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember the man’s name, though I recall the man a good buddy of my father’s and they worked for the city of Pittsburgh on a garbage truck and the man’s family knew ours and we knew some of them, my sister said. Knew them in that way black people who lived in the same neighborhood knew one another and everybody else black in a city that divided itself by keeping all people of color in the same place back then, no matter where in the city you lived.
I did not slip up, say or do the wrong thing when the call that came in to the English department, through the secretary’s phone to the chairman’s phone, finally reached me, after the secretary had knocked and escorted me down the hall to the chair’s office, where I heard my mother crying because my father in jail for killing a man and she didn’t know what to do except she had to let me know. She knew I needed to know and knew no matter how much a call would upset me I would be more upset if she didn’t call, even though calling meant, since I didn’t have a home phone yet or a direct line in my office and no cell phones, she would have to use the only number I’d given her and said to use only for emergencies, and wasn’t this an emergency, hers, mine, we had to deal with, she and I, her trying not to weep into the phone she was holding in Pittsburgh while she spoke to strangers in Philadelphia, white people strangers to make it worse, a woman’s voice then a man’s, before she reached me with the news I needed to know and none of it anybody’s business, terrible business breaking her heart to say to me even though I needed to kn
ow and would want to know despite where I was and who I was attempting to be, far away from home, surrounded by strangers, probably all of them white, which made everything worse, she didn’t need to say, because I heard it in her voice by the fifth or sixth word, her voice that didn’t belong in the chair’s office, a story not for a chairperson’s ears, but he was Southern gentleman enough as well as enough of a world-renowned Chaucer scholar to hand me the phone and excuse himself and shut the office door behind him so I could listen in peace to my mother crying softly and trying to make sense of a dead man and my father in jail for killing him, his cut-buddy I can say to myself now and almost smile at misunderstandings, bad jokes, ill will, superiority, inferiority stirred up when I switch between two languages, languages never quite mutually intelligible, one kind I talked at home when nearly always only colored folks listening, another kind spoken and written by white folks talking to no one or to one another or at us if they wanted something from us, two related-by-blood languages that throttled or erased or laughed at or disrespected each other more often than engaging in useful exchange, but I didn’t slip once in my conversation with the chair, didn’t say my goddamn daddy cut his goddamn cut-buddy, no colored talk or nigger jokes from either of us in the office when a phone call from my mom busted in and blew away my cover that second or third day of my first or second week of my first college teaching job.
* * *
—
My aunt C got my father a lawyer. Aunt C lived five doors away on our street, Copeland, when I was growing up. My family of mom, dad, five kids had moved into an upstairs three-room apartment in a row house at the end of a block where a few colored families permitted because the housing stock badly deteriorated and nobody white who could afford not to wanted to live on the busted block, after coloreds had been sneaked into a few of Copeland’s row houses or modest two-story dwellings squeezed in between, like the one Aunt C and her husband could afford to buy and fix up because he was a numbers banker, but most of us coloreds, including my mother and father, had to scrimp and scuffle just to occupy month by month, poaching till the rent man put us out in the street again, but residents long enough for their kids to benefit for a while from better schools of a neighborhood all white except for a handful of us scattered here and there down at the bottom of a couple of streets like Copeland.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 43
