nmb

The rain was sidelong and clever, flying at us upside-down and zig-zag, wetting places you didn’t think about, making you wish for the dryness of a bath. I hadn’t believed it was true, at first. It certainly wasn’t possible. Writing articles about nachos shaped like the Virgin Mary, everyone joked: that’s what you’ll be doing next. It seemed like a gag.

The driest place on earth, that’s tedious, but measurable. A place that’s inside isn’t even in the running. Most places it doesn’t rain inside, not proper-like. Conversation of raining inside, and you expect you’re talking to someone without a proper understanding of sprinkler systems, or of “inside”. That’s what I thought.

A color piece. A crazy eccentric. That’s what I expected. UFOs and folk art, a leaky pipe and a cracked ceiling. I pictured: everything painted blue.

The rain in Trevor Wheelock’s apartment was like nothing you’ve ever seen. Everything covered in tarps and sealed in zip-log bags and garbage bags or dissolving into the floor. Plastic furniture. It was raining when they built the house, Trevor said, and it hadn’t stopped since.

A while ago it had stopped raining on the second floor, Trevor said, which was just uncanny. I thought I saw a fish, out of the corner of my eye. It might have been Doris.

65.

There were three bears roaming the streets, but they weren�t the ones to watch out for.� It was the turkeys who were instrumental in looting the bank.� They seemed harmless, and besides, everyone was worrying about the bears.� No one thought to stop the turkeys, or ask what their business was.� They just gobble gobble gobbled into the bank, waltzing out with a sweet haul.
43.

He shakes his head a little, squinting.� Someone asks how is he.� Right as rain, he replies.� There�s, like, a genial pause as whoever asked this�s parsing the statement, or thinking something else.� The sun�s blood red.� Someone says, �this rain ain�t right.�

59.

The cardboard boxes, sagging at the edges and poorly labeled, littered the warehouse floor, like islands. The Old Man had said, �it�s in one of the boxes�: spoken from his death bed, mid-death. Those present pretty well knew it to be a reference to his uncounted millions. Going through the boxes seemed simple enough, until the first one exploded.

46.

Right as the creature let out a horrid scream didn�t Mae go and complicate matters by pretending like she empathized with the thing.� It was grotesque, to see this display.� More grotesque, knowing Mae.� No one ever found out if it was a zombie or what.

They came and asked questions, asked before the paint was even dry. Which, it was oil-based and as such taking like decades to dry itself out, but nonetheless: it wasn’t like they had to ask the questions.

The painting was large and gruesome, veiled after-the-fact in some thick nondescript curtain of rough material. It sat in the center of an empty room, what could have been a living room, or sitting room, or whatever you’d prefer to call it. The room surrounded the painting, saluted it. Hundreds of square feet of empty space stared blankly at the painting and, when it was covered, at the sheet.

The claim was that people don’t simply disappear, which was quite obviously a lie, flat and outright.

I told them, magicians do it all the time.

The train ride was short and insignificant. I met no mysterious strangers. No crimes were committed. The weary rested their heads with no ill effects.

Fish falling from the sky you read about in those Unexplained books, that series from Time Magazine or whatever; you read about fish falling from the sky in anecdotal morsels, not really translating the thought into meaningful expectation. Like: sure, fish fell from the sky in 1863 in Nowheresville, ND, but the idiots probably knocked over a ladder that had a pail of fish on it and didn’t know any better. Like, “Oh, fish rain!” But then it happens to you.

AN OLDER WOMAN IN A LIGHT PINK RAINCOAT fell backwards out of the bus with her toy poodle clutched against her, coins scattering across the street as she screamed a horrid little yelp; Magnus, ignoring the scene and drawing on a cigarette instead, asked, “where the hell’d you come from, Mr. Fleming?” The dog let out a shrill growl that almost sounded like far-away laughter. You didn’t pity the thing so much as wish it would stop. Magnus offered me a courtesy smoke, but I declined politely, making some offhandedly vague comment about my own private religion. It was supposed to be funny, but became somehow mangled between my brain and my mouth. Magnus retracted the offer and glanced awkwardly away from me. It was 3:54pm.

“So you got what, like, a sixth sense in the matter or what?” Magnus asked, inquiring as to my truth-discerning ability.
I was understandably nervous, but the most surprising thing was probably that I’d agreed to talk to Magnus at all.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said.
“Well do you or don’t you?”
“I don’t want to give you the wrong impression; I don’t want to start off with the idea that it’s an absolute thing, me knowing when people are lying or not.”
“So give me a figure,” Magnus said. “A percentage. Fraction. Something. What, would you say, eight outta ten?”
I gave it some thought.
“With, like, factual statements?”
“Sure.”
“Not, you know, expressions of opinion or feeling or whatever?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I gave it some more thought.

It was surprising, really, how many people the pink-coated old woman managed to take down with her on her way to the ground: three people who’d been waiting to get on the bus (two of whom’d been arguing vehemently about something prior to their being taken down), a courier on bike (who was definitely at the wrong place at a not-very-good time), and the bus driver, who’d inopportunely taken it upon himself to help the old woman down to the sidewalk, obviously not knowing what that would entail. I watched this, distracted, for as long as several minutes, until the point at which Magnus finally said, “look, are you going to buy a paper or what?” and “What can you tell me?”
“Ninety-five out of one-hundred?” I guessed, shrugging unemphatically.
Magnus balked.
“Plus or minus,” I said.

Time distends, becomes bloated and awful. Your head hurts and the dashboard clock doesn’t make any sense as you step on the gas and have no idea of anything, the world seeming to flash by you at astronomic speeds though there’s a possibility you’re not moving at all. Time becomes a physical entity, a sickness. Time wretches. Your scroll of events unravels, ink bleeding through the parchment, important marginal notations becoming lost, sequence become anything but relevant. “I can see the bullet in my head, following it backwards but only to the muzzle of the gun and no further.” The amnesiac says, ‘you’re not 33 forever’ but can’t really guess what his own age is. Not accurately, anyway. Sequence. The amnesiac says, I can tell you the last thing I remembered, but I can’t tell you who killed that woman. “I know she’s dead now, and I know that before, she was alive, but I can’t tell you what happened in-between, though I know that something surely must have transpired.”

Mr. Throop—Havilah—was the one up front playing the piano badly. But at the very least he did it with style, which was far more than you could have said for Rylee. Rylee (whose last name no one was entirely sure of) wore a kind of warped mask of death when she’d played, her face contorting in unseemly ways as she got the instrument to produce sounds that no instrument was ever intended to produce. You quickly got the sense, listening to her, that she’d stumbled onto something brilliantly awful. You got the sense that she was channeling the spirit of Rezsô Seress, or one-upping him, beating out that Hungarian suicide song with a song to drive everyone mad. It wasn’t that anyone had ever asked her to play, or even implied, vaguely, that perhaps she might play; more often than not it was an impossibly sudden thing, with her one minute not playing the piano and the next sitting maddened on the bench, producing unbearable noise from the device. People cut her off when they saw her headed there—they’d step in her way, spill things on her, trip her, even employ minor incendiary devices. Nothing seemed out of the question. But somehow she managed, every so often, to appear at the machine. With her at the helm a piano ceased to be an instrument and became a machine, bloodthirsty and without remorse, the emotion drained out of it. You could never tell when she was coming and going. Sometimes you’d be a place where you didn’t even know there was a piano—a park, a swimming pool, a friend’s house—and then all of a sudden this noise would lurch out of nowhere and you’d spin around, and there Rylee would be, hunched over a piano. Always out of nowhere. And then she was simply gone. Always just like that.

Except for that last time, when the police in riot gear broke through the doors and dragged her out, her what they call kicking and screaming all the way.

Maybe it was how they carried her, or their stealth and speed, but no one really believed they were police.

—think nothing of is how offhandedly he seems to switch conversational gears, talking one minute about what did you think of that sitcom everybody watched and the next about how long do you think we could last, it looks to be a long hard winter. It seems minor, particularly in light of all else. But you’re not even able to assess it as being minor, because you think absolutely nothing of it: the thought doesn’t even cross your mind. Maybe it’s standing there, waiting for the right moment, but as of this very moment (check your watch) the thought hasn’t trampled any gray matter.

“I’m sorry,” he said, obviously embarrassed, “but I’ve already forgotten your name, you’ll have to tell me again.”

At which point you clearly enunciate once more your given name, state it for the informal record and, in hopes of giving it some permanence in his apparently faulty memory banks, explain that mnemonic device that sometimes helps.

It might help, you say, to think of a treasure chest. And then you say, “I’ve never been ransomed before. This is so exciting.”

Because, as a matter-of-fact, it is.

All things considered, the inability to maintain a straight line of thought isn’t so much an imposition on you as it is a minor oddity. The fact of your not really knowing who’s going to be able to pay this ransom of your ransomer being the more interesting—and definitely more puzzling—question. Because, let’s face it, who has that kind of money who cares about me? is what you think. (Thinking this, you note that it might be a cleverly self-deprecating line for the memoir you expect to write after this whole ordeal is over. “Because, let’s face it, who has that kind of money who cares about me?” Maybe replace the second who with and. Maybe not. At this point, it’s up in the air, you think.)

He’s awfully, what’s the word, flighty. Excessively flighty for someone in such a tight spot, you think. You wouldn’t really expect someone so flighty to actually go through with it, actually plan and orchestrate and plot out an actual kidnapping like this, but here the both of you are. Maybe it’s not so much flighty as distracted. Distracted makes sense. Of course you’d be distracted; there would obviously be other things on your mind beyond the immediate situation.

You can’t think of a single color to describe his jacket. Thinking of colors, you can’t even think of a color that doesn’t describe his jacket. It’s not that his jacket is indescribable, it’s merely that you can’t think of any colors.

Fulvous. Barium yellow. Carmine. These are names that will flock to your head later on. Literally flock. Thousands of words, the meanings of which you’ve completely ignored up until that point, figuring you’d never really need them. Right now you’re hard-pressed to think past blue, red, and yellow.

Oh, right: and green. For a split-second you think maybe green’s a primary color. This is how flummoxed you are. Being ransomed takes it out of you, is what you decide.

“What’s the plan?” you ask.
“Plan?” he asks.
“For my ransoming.”
“Ransoming?” he asks.
“You’ve kidnapped me…”
“I have?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”

You point out the salient details: the both of you being out in what’s practically the middle of nowhere; the [gunmetal gray] gun he has strategically pointed at your head; the makeshift [read: duct tape] cuffs he’s got wrapped around your wrists so tightly it’s undoubtedly cutting off circulation, possibly doing what might be irreparable damage to your nerves; the cell-phone (”Is it untraceable?” you ask, pointing at the cell phone. “Untraceable?” he asks. “Why?” “So they can’t trace you,” you say. “Who’s they?” he asks.); the crates of bottled water and canned condensed soup, preparations for a long hold-out; and the blindfold, which up until twenty minutes ago had been wrapped haphazardly around your head.

“Well,” he asks, “how much am I asking for you?”
“The ransom, you mean?”
“Right, the ransom.”
“Forty thousand.”
“Forty thousand what?”
“Dollars.”
“Forty thousand dollars?”

It probably had to do with that nasty spill over the embankment. The embankment wasn’t entirely threatening, was your sense of things—just too steep to not fall down once you got started. And it could’ve been worse. There could’ve been raspberries. Although raspberries might’ve stopped your fall. You were blindfolded then, so you couldn’t really see what was going on, though it was painfully (literally painfully) obvious that you were falling; by the grunts and shouts it sounded like someone else was falling along with you. What with being blindfolded, it was hard to say exactly how often or how soundly your would-be captor’s head impacted with granite outcroppings and old logs and other various hard objects.

“Are you sure it’s not the other way around?” he asks, and you say—

It started out as being an incredibly decent thing, what Magahet did for all of us. We were mostly strangers to one another, and it wasn’t like we were about to go out of our ways in making introducciones and what-have-you, getting to know each other or anything like that. It wasn’t that we didn’t care, really, just that we didn’t have an in. We didn’t know where to start. Magahet knew everybody, which is what made it so convenient for him. The dinner was to be a kind of casual thing, “drop by if you want, not if you don’t” was essentially what he told everybody, of course tailoring the invitation to people’s personal tastes and so forth.

The general sense of things was, dinner at 8, entertainment afterwards. It wasn’t clear what kind of entertainment, but no one worried about a pitiful minor detail like that; we figured Magahet’d have something up his sleeve. I won’t say I exactly anticipated the dinner with bated breath, but I didn’t dread it, either. Walking home the night before I calculated in my head the exact sequence of events prior to the dinner, figuring out to the second what moment I’d like to arrive at the manor; figuring that 8:00pm on the nose would be too exactingly precise, as would 7:59:00 and 8:01:00 and even 8:05:00. I eventually settled on 8:02:45 as an ideal entry-time, not too late, not too precise, and probably not too early.

But my whole schedule was thrown into disarray when I got distracted watching a spider spinning a web in the lowlands, only beginning to realize what time it was as the sun set, reddening the capillaries in my face. Intentional lateness I didn’t mind as much as accidental lateness, which, whether anyone knew it or not, was going to be the spirit of my own late entry.

But no sense in not going.

Running and stumbling up the walkway to Magahet’s place, I realized how truly late I was, and how everyone else (doubtless) had already arrived. What was fortunate was that there was one seat left for me. Not the seat I’d had in mind, but an empty seat and so I took it. I was situated across the table from Yserone, whose name I didn’t know was Yserone until picking up on some cross-talk, intersecting conversations that sallied up and down the table.

I apologized for being late (to everyone in general but to Magahet in particular), and then commended Magahet for doing such an incredibly decent thing, having this dinner. Everyone agreed, yes, it was an incredibly decent thing of him to do. We didn’t quite do three cheers or anything, but did probably the equivalent for our group, all of us agreeing how decent it was of Magahet.

My major ulterior motive in this, naturally, was to distract from my lateness by introducing something so ostensibly selfless. My other ulterior motive being to make a positive impression on Yserone, who I’d immediately taken a liking to. She maybe wasn’t anything particularly special as looks went, but had an uncannily lambent expression. I thought: this is a face you can read by; this is a face you can use to look for things under sofas and tables. She was quiet, mostly, but had a deft way of using her fork to point at whomever she happened to be talking to, when she happened to be talking, rotating the utensil without any obvious effort (or even movement on her own part). One time she splattered Oubastet with a bit of sauce, but mostly she kept her indications clean.

What everybody else knew but which took a while for me to realize was that Yserone had no legs. More accurately, she’d had legs at one point in time but lost them, though not in the simple unemotional matter that you might lose, say, a pair of keys. This I didn’t initially know, but as details went it was a relatively minor one in my mind, Yserone’s lack of legs not mattering much to me.

“By the way, Havelock,” Magahet said down the table in my direction, “did you know that Yserone has no legs?”

I admitted that I did not, though I couldn’t see why he’d singled me out in particular.

“Well,” Magahet said, “everyone else was here when Yserone came in. They saw her wheeled in here, disfigured and legless.”

I couldn’t see what the big deal was, I said.

“Well,” Magahet said, maybe well on his way to becoming besotted though who could say, “don’t you think it’s funny?”

Silence broke out like the plague. People set down their silverware and turned uneasily to face Magahet. It was an awkward moment. One person managed a forced laugh, cutting it off when she realize that no one else was going to jump on and make it any less awkward. Which only made things more awkward generally.

“No,” I said, taking issue with Magahet’s treatment of the matter.

All of a sudden—it certainly wasn’t gradual—Magahut’s act of graciousness dissolved away into a cheap spectacle, and for no reason in particular. It was disheartening: the food was without question very good; the company was decent, every one more or less pleased to be making acquaintance with the various strangers around the table; and the table-setting, if not exactly out of this world, was at least competent and, taking the stuffed armadillo into account, at least mildly humorous—all of this and yet Magahet breaks the magic by taking a quick jab at one of his guests, at her expense. The least he could have done, you figured, was refer to Yserone indirectly via a supposedly anonymous anecdote so that everyone could go on pretending it didn’t pertain to anyone present at the table.

And here’s Magahet, saying don’t you think it’s funny that Yserone doesn’t have any legs?

There was simply no salvaging the night. We all left. Because it seemed like the right thing to do—on many different levels—I wheeled Yserone to her house, both of us silent for most of the walk.

“I’m sorry about that back there,” I offered.
“That’s okay,” she shrugged mildly. “There’s something, I feel like maybe I should tell you. Not because it matters, really, but I just feel like it’s something— well, something I should tell you. I don’t even know why.”
“Okay.”
“It’s about my legs.”
“You don’t have to say this now, if you don’t want to.”
“No, I think I should.”
“Okay, then.”
“I lost my legs in an accident,” she said.

“At an amusement park,” she said, looking down at the ground bashfully.
“Really?”
“It’s… It’s not something I tell most people.”

“It was two months ago. But—” she trailed off, giving off a faint but definitely discernible glow from her face, readily apparent under the suffocating blanket of the night sky.
“Yes?”
“It’s not the first time.”
“Not the first time what?”
“It’s not the first time I lost my legs.”

“They grow back, you see.”

“The problem is, I’m forever losing them.”

“I always forget they’re there, when I have them.”

“And I do stupid things with them.”
“I see.”
“So.”
“But…”
“Yes?”
“They’ll grow back?”
“Yes.”
“Does that bother you?”
“For some reason, not as much as it should.”
“Good.”
“Well then.”

…is gone. Sorry, and thanks for playing.

(If you’re just now jumping in, here are links to the other four parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

Read on.

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Pages: 1 2 3 4

PASTANO:

I picture myself walking into a police station, trying to explain my unique situation to a field of guffawing faces; trying to explain how, no, I wasn’t threatened, not exactly. Them saying, didn’t your parents ever teach you not to talk to strangers? Me: “Well, this guy, Clovis…” Them: “Clovis?” Me: “Yeah, Clovis.” He was tall. Ish. Tallish. White.

Real wonderful description, Pastano. Brilliant, they’d say. Franck, she’d go absolutely ballistic, probably say I should take the next flight out of the country and completely erase my identity or whatever, never mind the business of who exactly this Boots fellow is. Franck would probably tell me in nervous run-together sentences how I’d have to hide out at her place and then dye my hair or change my clothes or wear some kind of uniform and take six different taxis just to get to the airport, take two taxis just to get from her room to the street. This is why I neglect to tell Franck about how I’m taking the place of a major underworld figure for a night.

“Hey, Franck,” I make a phone call in the morning.
“Yeah, morning Pastano. What’s up?”
“I think I’m going to miss breakfast.”
“What?”
“I’m going to have to skip our breakfast together, just this morning.”
“Why?”

In the back of my head, the scene’s playing over and over again, me talking to the befuddled detectives. What I tell them is, Clovis, he says I look like this guy, Boots. And wants me to go to this movie in Boots’ place. I’m reviewing, in my head, what I’d say to the police, even though I don’t think I’m actually going to go. After all, a free movie’s a free movie’s a free movie, right?

“Why?” Franck asks again, and I realize I’m daydreaming.
“I’ve got… an appointment.”
“An appointment?”

I probably wouldn’t even recognize Clovis, not in a crowded restaurant or in a deserted alleyway. I think he was tall. I distinctly remember he wasn’t abnormally stunted in growth.

“Well, I’ve got to prepare for an appointment.”
“What kind of appointment?”
“Don’t worry about it… I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah, okay, fine.”

Boots. What kind of name is Boots? Boots.

“Clovis,” I say into the phone.
“Who’s Clovis?”
“He wants me to be a body double of a major crime figure.”

tbc

CLOVIS:

Well, contrary to what Pastano would have you believe, it’s not like that at all. Pastano’s a lying brigand, and when I say that, I’m being too kind. Pastano’s a liar and a crook. Fact being, I didn’t “recognize” him at all. Fact being, I didn’t think he looked the least bit like my close friend and colleague, Sam “Boots” Gammon, not that I would’ve approached him if I thought he did. Me, I’m taking a morning stroll through the park. A nice relaxing start to the morning, is what I’d hoped it would be. Walking through the park, minding my own business and keeping to myself, and this guy—Pastano, whose name I honestly didn’t know until he’d introduced himself—who’s sitting at a bench, drinking from some kind of bottle, God knows what’s in it, calls out to me. Says, “hey, you, a word?”

“What, me?” I ask, looking around to establish that I’m the target of this entreaty.

“Yeah, you,” he says, real casual and offhanded like. “You a friend of Boots?” he asks.
“What if I am?”
“Just askin,” he shrugs. “Are you?”
“Yeah. Boots and I are friends, sure. Why?”
“Curious.”
“I see.”
“What I’m thinking is this,” he says, then pauses, leaning forward and crossing his arms on his knees, looking down at the ground like he’s real stiff and then looking up at me. “Well, first a little context to what I’m about to say, to help you understand everything.”
“Okay.”
“People tell me all the time, they say I look like Boots.”
“Really?”
“All the time. People come up to me, people I don’t even know, they approach me, say, ‘you know Boots,’ though of course sometimes they call him other things like Sam and Mr. Gammon and such, and I’ll say sure I know of the guy. Then they’ll say how much I resemble him. I bear a great likeness is what people often say.”
“I don’t see it.”
He shrugs. “It’s what people tell me, and I’m not inclined to offer my personal opinion regarding the matter. What I know is, most people think we look a lot a like. Boots and me.”
“Right, well, whatever. People are people.”
“Yeah, real stupid, I know. Anyway, my name’s Pastano, by the way,” he says, shaking my hand. Instantly I get this chill or something, from his hand; I get this bad feeling, a sense that this Pastano character’s certainly not aboveboard, if you know what I mean.

What he says next is, he hears Boots is gonna have a real night on the town, movie and dinner, the whole deal. What he says is, he thinks maybe Boots oughta take a trip out of town, for his own good. Pastano says, he thinks maybe he could ‘fill in’ for Boots, just this one night. For Boots’ safety, he says, smiling his sinister empty smile.

“You’ll pass the message on to him, won’t you?” he asks, though obviously the way he says it it’s not really a request so much as a demand, not far-removed from a threat.

I’m gonna go to that movie for Boots, he says as I walk away. My whole morning—my whole week—ruined.

tbc

PASTANO:

The first thing that hits me in the face in the morning isn’t the realization that I’d agreed on no uncertain terms to portray someone else with the intent of deceiving unknown third parties (and for money, at that). It’s not a sweltering wave of guilt that hits me, either. What I think, first thing in the morning when my alarm clock shudders, is, I wonder if the movie’s going to be any good. Stumbling over my shoes and across the fuzzy hotel-room carpet toward the curtains, I’m mulling the fact that Clovis probably has no idea of my taste in movies. I didn’t even bother to tell Franck about the deal, figuring she’d blow the whole thing completely and grotesquely out of proportion; it seemed like the kind of thing she’d do, nurse a proxy anxiety for me, worry about my blood splattered all over the sidewalk, come up with all kinds of speculatively horrible outcomes for me—develop a worst-case-scenario, wildly intensified. I did mention something to Horace, but only because I knew he’d think nothing of it and more than anything else probably forget I ever told him. “I’ve got to do a favor for these guys,” I told him, “so I’ll be busy tomorrow night, probably.” He’d shrugged, okay, fine by him. Horace had other things to do, he said, referring to himself in the third-person. Clovis had said how I could take as many of my friends as I wanted along for the ride on this favor, but it seemed (was implied) that it was the sort of thing best done alone.

tbc

PASTANO:

It’s like this:

Clovis, whose name I obviously didn’t know was Clovis until he’d introduced himself, walks up to me and says, “you remind me of someone I know. You look like him.” Says this while I’m sitting—lounging, really—on a park-type bench, sitting and reading the morning paper and drinking from one of those little glass bottles of orange juice.

I look up at him and say, “really?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“A friend of yours?”
“Could say that.”
“That’s, um, interesting.”

I go back to reading my paper, assuming his comment is just the sort of passing amicable comment you toss out to a perfect stranger who may or may not actually remind you of someone you want to know; a kind of breed of small-talk, relating similarities.

“Yeah. My name’s Clovis,” he says, sitting down on the bench beside me. I look at him, noting that he’s not the kind of person you expect to randomly go up to you and initiate a conversation.
“Pastano,” I say, and I reach across my paper, setting down the orange juice, to shake hands with Clovis.
“Pleasure to meet you,” he says, his massive, meaty palm enveloping mine.
“Sure,” I say, shaking his hand. It’s not the tight, viselike grip you might expect, but I get a sneaky suspicion that he could, if he wanted to, squeeze my hand into a runny pulp. Maybe even squeeze so hard there’s no pulp left, it’s all smooth and runny liquid hand.

Clovis relates how his friend’s in need of a favor. Maybe a favor that I could provide, seeing as I’m in the unique position of resembling him physically. My response is that I’m just in town to visit some friends, I don’t really have business in town or know much about the place or see, really, how I could do any favors for anyone. “Meaning no disrespect to you or this friend of yours,” I say.
“None taken. It would be just a day of your time, no more. Not even a day.”
“I’m only in the area for another three days.”
“Seven hours is all he’d need, really.”
“This friend of yours got a name?”
“Boots, but that’s not important.”
“Boots?” I ask. A joke about a puss seems like it would likely be ill-advised, if somewhat comical.
“Yeah, Boots. Six hours would do, really,” Clovis says, leaning back in the bench, arms crossed as he gazes speculatively across the pond.
“What’s this favor you’re asking?”
“I need you to go to a movie. Though it’s not so much what I need as what my friend needs, you understand. I’m only acting as an intermediary.”
“Go to a movie?”
“I’ll give you a ticket. Two tickets, you can take a friend. As many tickets as you want—”
“You want me to go to a movie?”
“—within reason, of course. I can only give you so many tickets, you realize.”
“Any movie in particular?”
“I get to pick the movie. You’ll like it, though, I’m sure. It’s a very likeable movie. Well-made. Tasteful.”
“Okay, what’s the catch?”
“After the movie, you go out to dinner.”
“That doesn’t sound like a catch.”
“It’s not, really.”
“At like a restaurant, you mean? Dinner?”
“Yeah. And I get to pick the restaurant. Well, Boots picks.”
“Okay…”
“But you won’t have to pay, if you’re wondering. It’ll all be covered.”

I say, Clovis, what’s the catch? Nothing, he says, no catches. Is it like a game show gimmick or something? Hardly, he grins a big, clam-like grin.

tbc

I thought long and hard about Eleanora Pearline Tomasa Billy-Lea as Osvaldo and I sat working away at our fool-proof way of outsing the rabbits out of this life and into the next, makin the world a safe place for civilization and so forth. Me thinking and wondering not a little bit maybe why I was the one had to instigate the whole thing—getting rid of the rabbits, who hadn’t really done me any particular harm. Me wondering not a little bit why Ellie wanted me to do the thing, being as her and I weren’t exactly like Bonnie and Clyde or anything. I knew her name and, to hear Cloyd (since I couldn’t ever right understand what she said, her not speaking English), she knew mine; beyond that, us not really having much interaction day-to-day, now least of all with her off in some bed-n-breakfast waiting for me to exact her wishes.

Osvaldo and I sat on the ground outside his hut, books and magazines piled up in minor mountain ranges of paper around us, a sea of crumpled papers in front of us, sketchy ideas we’d thought through and then discarded as impossible or improbable or unfeasible—sketchy ideas—and a large glossy photo of a rabbit propped up against a tree, just so O. and I didn’t forget what it was we were dealing with, didn’t get distracted by specifics. Was best we could easily call to mind the face of evil, long-eared and doe-eyed. (Rabbit-eyed, sure, you wanna split hairs.) All around us the night began to come out, stars peaking through the dimming fabric of sky and crickets slowly yawning and crawling out of bed and whirring to life, telling us how it’s about 72° Fahrenheit (what with them not knowing Celcius real particularly well). I’m thinking, maybe we need a candle. A flashlight.

The plan we’re working on goes like this: Osvaldo and I construct a gigantic, faux-garden. Rich, lucious California carrots (or whatever it is it the grocer says rabbits like best, when we get to the grocery store), magnificent heads of cabbage, and so forth. The most delightful feast a rabbit’s ever laid eyes on, is what the plan is. Us then going about ‘planting’ these delicacies in a neat patch of ground. But not just any patch of ground. What we’ll do first is, we’ll lay a giant, humongous square of burlap out on the ground (burlap because it’s most like soil, least likely to be recognized by the rabbits as alien, assuming for the time being that they’d care anyway, what with the most amazing feast a rabbit’s ever set its rabbit eyes on), tying each of the four ends to like a metal cable or something, four cables which we’ll then real subversively knot together at their far terminus, what knot we’ll then hook to a well-concealed crane. The plan is that the rabbits will come in one hopping horde to devour the goodies, enter the burlap garden, and be hauled into a giant gunny-sack by the crane.

Which honestly is as far as our plan’s gotten. We’re thinking that we’ll either toss the sack over a cliff or into a lake or something: into a non-rabbit-friendly environment, in short.

Osvaldo says it will take care of like (he’s estimating) 18,000 rabbits or so, his margin of error something like 3%. The rest of the rabbits, he says, we’ll take care of when the time comes.

Lots of people aren’t going to be happy at this, which is why I’m thinking long and hard about Ellie and why she wants me to go about doing this job. Wondering if it’s going to be worth the harassment by my fellow neighbors who don’t bear any real what you’d call animosity towards the rabbits all around them.

Osvaldo and I’d just about worked out all the glitches in our plan and I said, I’d meet him at the grocery store, there were some things I had to do. He nodded at me, grinning silly, and I walked back down the lane into town.

My plan was, I wanted to visit Ellie’s house, perhaps have a good-nature chat with Cloyd, voicing my doubts and whatnot. And as I walk through town, I realize I’m humming, like I’m happy or something, and as I’m walking, I realize that everyone’s coming out of their little houses to watch me. They’re coming out in their nightgowns and robes and glaring at me. Sulking on their front lawns. Ellie’s house looming out in front, a beacon in the midst of a metaphorical fog; a fog of people not being able to understand how’s we’ll be so much better off with all these rabbits gone. Ellie’s voice echoing in my head even though I can’t really understand much of what she’s saying. Can’t understand anything, really.

As I’m walking down the street, it occurs to me how Osvaldo wrote out everything he wanted to tell me. He’d talk too, but I couldn’t really understand him, is what I’m realizing. His voice, as I think about it, sounding more and more like the garbled noise of Ellie.

Distracted, I nearly trip over a rock that’s inexplicably on the sidewalk. Like, who’d leave a rock on the sidewalk? A little dazed from my stumble, I realize that my shoe went flying off into the darkness. Everyone standing all around me, watching, glaring, their robes and nightgowns and boxers and pajamas rustling slightly in the breeze, like leaves. I sit on the curb of the sidewalk to put my shoe back on (after I find it) and realize: I’m putting the shoe, which isn’t so much a shoe as it is a cloth bootie, onto a rabbit’s foot, that rabbit’s foot being mine. And as I scratch my head, I realize: I’m scratching my head with my foot.

Counting people as I look around, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Counting, 11,023, 11,024, 11,025. Counting, 22,453, 22,454, 22,455. Counting, 27,833, 27,834, 27,835.

I look at Ellie’s house and realize it isn’t so much far away as it is tall, enormous.

Me remembering how, when I rode around in the car with Winston, I was like a little kid in the seat next to him; me remembering how gigantic everything was around me, how the seat-belt just dangled, lifeless and useless behind me.

There are whispers all around me.
Do you think he realizes?

I sit there on the sidewalk, winking, blinking, twitching. Realizing.

The door opens on Ellie’s house, and Cloyd stands there, looking around with a flashlight. He shouts out something, but it doesn’t make much sense, it’s hard to understand. Me realizing, I’m the one who doesn’t speak English proper.

I let out a mad squeal and a cheer goes out, everyone realizing that I understand, and we surge forward, a giant, seething mass of rabbits that tramples, claws, and bites Cloyd, the combined weight and fury of twenty-some-thousand rabbits utterly and completely destroying him, a limp mangled body all that’s left behind, gigantic and sticky and sick-smelling.

After that it’s Winston. Then we go back for Osvaldo. We track down Ellie and catch her while she’s sleeping.

Then we push onward, towards human towns and housing developments and cities, me telling everyone, Now we know how they think, now we can use their wisdom against them.

Us leaving a wide swath of sick-smelling desolation in our wake.

Chain reaction was the idea Osvaldo had, rabbits being somewhat apt to a communal existence (as was his understanding). Easier than going around and, one by one, lopping off the rabbits’ heads—which, among other things, would be especially gory and likely to rouse something of an outcry in the neighborhood, never mind how much the people liked or didn’t like rabbits (Eleanora excluded)—we’d start with one rabbit and, through the magic of physics or something like it, have that rabbit become so much as the downfall of the entire rabbit culture.

Fire was one of a large subset of possibilities that Osvaldo presented to me. He’d never seen it done in like movies or read it in books or anything, but it didn’t seem impossible; we’d be all Prometheus-like and give an unsuspecting rabbit fire, via maybe a specially-constructed rabbit-scale torch or something, that rabbit then going on to spread the flame (literally and so to speak), burning all of rabbitdom to the ground. He’d (or she’d) carry the torch (literally, again), all the rabbits so entranced and fascinated and in wonderment of the dancing orange tongue that they’d be entirely oblivious to its real-life ramifications, e.g., it burning their warren to crisp blackness and decimating them most impolitely. Was one idea he had along this theme of lettin the rabbits do the work for us.

Another idea was something of like germ warfare. Contaminate one rabbit, have it spread the dread disease amongst its kind. Problem being that neither Osvaldo nor me really had much in the way of epidemiology. Which isn’t to say that we didn’t have a copy of that gorgeous Scientific American paperback, Investigating Disease Patterns, on our respective coffee tables, or that we hadn’t read Hot Zone, etc., but neither of these books quite read like a how-to manual on rabbit decimation, which is really what we were looking for. And look at Australia. My reasoning was, if something like rabbitpox could be real effective-like on a massive population of rabbits, Australia wouldn’t've had such a problem as it did. Excluding for a moment the possibility of Osvaldo’s sheer and utter brilliance above and beyond any other human being ever to walk the face (or crawl under the surface) of the Mother Goddess Gaia.

“I read in a book once,” said Osvaldo, thinking, “how these people spread this disease to their target by like infected blankets or somethin. Could work.”

I pointed out—remaining of course affable and deferential to Osvaldo’s presumed genius in his limited field of expertise—that, far as I knew, rabbits didn’t have much need for anything like blankets, not in the real world outside of, e.g., Beatrix Potter and so forth. They don’t even wear shoes, is what I said.

“Besides,” I added, “what’s to say we wouldn’t create a rabbit-human-virus hybrid, a supervirus so virulent that it might as easily wipe out six billion persons as twenty-thousand rabbits, no difference one way or the other to it.”

Osvaldo’s eyes lit up, but he agreed it didn’t seem so plausible for this particular task.

Poison, of course, was another outlet. But again, it wasn’t something either of us’d had much experience in. Not with rabbits, anyway.

What about specially-trained parasites, Osvaldo asked.
What about prescription drugs, he asked. We could get them addicted, he said (meaning the rabbits).
What about we give them rock-n-roll and get them to die young?
What about we introduce them to the thrill and excitement of interstate highways?

No doubt about it: the man was brilliant. Too brilliant, almost. But anyway, I knew Ellie wouldn’t have to wait much longer fore she could come back and enjoy a de-rabbited neighborhood, clean and safe and luxurious and even (maybe) a wee bit bucolic. Perfection.

Cloyd had called ahead and told Osvaldo that I was coming, is what he meant. Didn’t know why or how or much of anything, other than that I was to show up sooner or later, which I did as was pretty obvious to everyone present. Said, did I want to come inside and discuss the situation? Saying ’situation’ like that and making it seem so improbably gargantuan a task so as to be practically impossible, or at least befitting of a righteous historical figure of larger stature than my own. I said, no, I didn’t mind standing outside and talking it over. “Though I wouldn’t call it a situation, is all,” I clarified.

I more or less clarified how Ellie (”Eleanora Pearline Tomasa Billy-Lea”, I said for the benefit of Osvaldo, who wasn’t exactly known for his abundant socialization in amongst the rest of the neighborhood) had this maybe vaguely morbid or psychiatric fixation on the lagomorphs that dwelt in and around her house—how she wanted them dead being the gist of the situation. Though I wouldn’t call it a situation, I re-clarified.

I told Osvaldo I was wondering if he might have some kind of scheme for ridding the twitch-nosey mammals. He gave it some thought, standing there and hmming and hawing and hewing, scratching his chin thoughtfully and maybe once or twice digging wax out of his ear, and then said, sure, he didn’t see it would be a big problem. How many were there, anyway?

And I said, twenty-thousand, give or take.

Osvaldo? His eyes lit up like tiny lights, bright and deranged.

We set to work on his plans at once.

First casualty of the battle wasn’t so much a rabbit as it was one of their sympathizers, 8-year-old Awilda Rowe who keeled over in a dead faint when she heard about the massive plans in the works to clean out the rabbit-scum of the neighborhood. She literally had to be dragged away across the front lawn of her house and into its somnolent enclosure, dark and away from the soon-to-be smell of blood in the air. Her mother apologized, Barry dragging the girl away, said, she didn’t know how the girl got these ideas in her head, me wanting to exterminate the placid creatures, ridiculous! I said sorry but it’s true and Mrs. Rowe nearabout keeled over too, limping wordlessly back into her abode. It’s for Ellie, I shouted before she slammed the oak door shut. Ellie, I murmured. Wondering, why the hell’d she have to pick me for the job?

I went back to Ellie’s house, wanting to set things straight and just about willing to lay down my soul on behalf of the rabbits, which I didn’t so much love or hate as was indifferent towards. I knocked on the door and Cloyd answered. ‘fore I even got so much as a syllable in edgewise, he divulged how Ellie’d gone and booked a room at some cottagey bed-n-breakfast off in the hills somewhere and wasn’t coming back till all the rabbits were dead’n gone. Was the short of it, anyways. So I asked, could he help me figure out how we were going to accomplish this task? ’s your task, he said, shrugging. Cloyd was never a terribly ambitious man, and wasn’t one to tread on someone else’s job, never mind if that job was putting out the fire on his own house. “Complacent” was the word some people used. The words “lifeless” and “unindustrious” weren’t unknown in descriptions of Cloyd’s disposition toward things.

Having exhausted that avenue and not exactly having much in the way of ideas, I treaded, trepidant, onward to the residence of a known rapscallion, Osvaldo. Osvaldo I didn’t much like, but I thought he’d enjoy the job, figuring out how to rid the rabbits. I walked up the bramble-lined lane rather quickly, eventually making my way over the pretty insubstantial hump of Mt. Arnick and approaching the quasi-gothic ranch house in which Osvaldo was known to live. Name on his mailbox said, OSVALDO BLANKENSHIP; white lettering on a plain black mailbox. The door opened before I had a chance to even contemplate knocking on it.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Osvaldo said slyly, whole herds of shivers traveling down my spine.