Bunny, page 19
A voice that sounds like it inhabits the same vessel Rose is viewing from whispers like ash: ‘Visit me I visit you visit me I visit you.’
The porthole leans in close and sinks into the centre of young Bunny’s chest. It pushes against the skin of Bunny’s sternum, then moves past it. There’s a brief glimpse of bone and meat, like an express train rushing past a station without stopping. It’s nauseating and cruelly thrilling. The porthole moves through, and past her, leaping into a storm of multicoloured light that dances like a fire made out of the Northern Lights. The light recedes away from the porthole like a tide, and Rose feels the vessel she’s riding expand to fill the empty space.
‘Aunt Bunny?’ a young boy’s voice asks.
The porthole rushes to a space that feels impossibly far away as it speeds through its own mass. There’s that feeling of the train zooming by the station again as it re-enters bone and meat. The porthole flashes and Rose sees a view through what she knows to be Bunny’s eyes. She feels Bunny’s hand still pinching the thin metal of the crucifix. Bunny’s porthole eyes turn towards the hall where a little boy stands at the top of the stairs, his green eyes half shaded by the yellow hood of a cape – no, a yellow ducky towel that he wears. It’s grimy, like he’s run through dirt and mud with it.
Like a lens being changed, Rose then sees him the way the owner of the whispering ash voice sees him; a glowing ball of sparks and dancing lights, much brighter and clearer than Bunny’s.
CRACK!
Rose shuts her eyes. Lightning bolt pain tears through her as she’s dragged to another vantage point. Her eyes flutter open. She’s still in the house, but now she’s floating near the ceiling, moored there by an unseen anchor, but free now to see with her own eyes and look where she will. Below is Silas in the hallway, still at the top of the stairs in his yellow ducky hood. There are two Bunnys – one stands in the doorway impassively, and Rose instinctively knows that this is the one her porthole was seeing out of before. The other Bunny lies on the floor, staring at Silas, screaming in terror with her arms outstretched. Rose can’t figure out if the outstretched arms are beckoning him or warning him away.
CRACK!
This time the lightning bolt feels like it didn’t just rattle something inside her, but snap it.
It’s cold now. Rose feels the gentle motion of being suspended under water. She’s back in another vessel. She wonders if this is what it must feel like to be a baby inside a womb; floating within yourself but encased in the alien folds of another being. Her eyes open. She floats in the dark water. Her new porthole sways gently as she peeps out of it, just above the surface facing the shore.
There, almost at the water’s edge, stands Silas.
She screams, ‘Silas! Silaaaas! SILAS! SILAS!’
Silas’s hands and arms are painted in blood. He looks tired. So pale the light of a candle could shine right through him. Goober stands beside him, blood dripping from his snout after a great fight. The little dog looks straight at the porthole, and through the porthole, not at the thing she is encased in, but at Rose.
‘Goob, Goober, get Daddy; get help, Goober. Goober, get help!’
She is crying, in the portal; she imagines her face resembles that of Bunny on the floor – screaming and unheard.
Goober sees her, he hears her there and is sad – confused – scared. He turns to Silas and barks frantically (but Silas doesn’t hear him in this soundless place). He turns to the water and barks, and then turns to her to bark. The little dog hangs his head without taking his eyes away from her. His eyes seem bigger, clearer, more alive. His gaze warms her, but the expression in them makes her feel cut off and alone.
A single pinecone sails out of the woods and lands on the stones near Silas. He turns to look at it. A second lands and rolls past him. A third lands. He turns to look at the trees as a sound like a growing wind roars out of them.
Through the porthole she sees a wall of pinecones break through the tree line like a thick wave of disturbed black flies. They don’t follow a normal arc, but fly straight towards Silas and Goober. Silas stands to face them, awestruck by the growing roar, but Goober ignores them, gazing through the porthole at Rose with those clear, deep eyes. The cones speed up as they cover the short distance between the tree line and the shore.
For a millisecond Rose sees Goober and Silas silhouetted against the pinecone cloud rushing towards them, and thinks of Christina’s World. They saw the painting at MoMA the year before last; the fragile girl sprawled in the dry, barren field, turned away from view, holding herself up on her arms and gazing at the desolate farmhouse and barn that, through disinterested kismet, is her world. Rose did not like the painting. All she could see was the back of the girl’s head and she had been bothered by what she would see if Christina turned it towards her. Pain? Fear? Madness? It made her feel heavy and stuck, and she left Silas staring at it while she carried on. Twenty minutes later she found him still staring at the painting with his shoulders slumped forward. Haunted.
Now, from her porthole, she wonders – if Silas turns from the pinecones and looks at her, what will she see?
The wall of cones reaches the two silhouettes, and for just an instant, appears to gently fold around them before both figures pinwheel into a red mist as the cones swirl around them, twisting and tearing their bodies apart.
The porthole Rose looks out of dives into the dark water. She feels a serpentine motion as the vessel swims down into the increasingly black depths. It grows darker and darker until it crosses a Rubicon. A cold, dead, yellow light gently paints the world in a faint glow. Rose sees titanic cliffs on both sides of her as she travels along the bottom of a great flooded canyon. Dead white tree trunks litter the silty bottom like the scrambled ribs of some dead, world-eating creature.
A far-off speck floats suspended in the water ahead of them. She feels the vessel carrying her whip its tails faster – accelerating at nauseating speed. An undulating cloud floats around the dot like electrons around an atom. As she gets closer, she sees that the thing in the middle is her, back arched, eyes closed. The atoms are not atoms, but eels swimming in restless orbit around her as her hand clasps the pinecone wreath.
The vessel swims towards her. The eels shuck away from her like a shoal of startled fish as the vessel breaks their cloud.
Back on the rock face, ripples of water begin to spill out of the crevice in icy rivulets that trickle down onto Rose’s paralysed body. A faint glow – the same pallid yellow as the one in the watery canyon – begins to pulse out of the crack, waxing and waning in a breath-like cycle as it shines onto Rose’s closed eyes. A bloody tear creeps down her face like an errant pallbearer. The icy rivulets swell into braided trickles that merge into a pulsing rush of water.
The vessel has no interest in the retreating eels; they are moths to a glowing bulb, flies to a swollen corpse belly, scattered by the owl and hyena. She watches from her porthole as the vessel powers through the eels, closing on her body, so gently suspended in the glowing water. It rushes towards the hand clasping the wreath. From within the vessel she feels a great simian mouth yawning below the porthole. It growls. The writhing stone bowels of a black universe unfurl as it strikes.
CRACK!
Rose catapults back into her body on the rock face like broken mirror shards hurled into an empty steel dustbin. Her face contorts as she feels her hand crushed in the stone. Water explodes out of the crevice in a foaming avalanche. She folds her legs up and under her, bracing them against the rock, before attempting to wrench her arm out of the crevice. Her shoulder pops and grates as ligaments tear like wet newspaper. Her hand comes free from the crevice as she sails out into space before landing on the ground below in a wet, shuddering heap.
And as she gasps – sound roars back into the world.
The first thing that registers are Goober’s panicked yips as he fusses over her. Her eyes are still closed. She reaches for him, pulling his warm body into her throbbing arms, before she breaks down and sobs. Her lungs drag in breath after breath. It feels as if she’s been held under water until the final stage of drowning – she opened the seal of her lips and throat, inhaling water in a final attempt to breathe. As she gasps in air, the feeling slowly passes like an exhaled shadow.
When her breathing eases, she feels she may be able to open her eyes, which are still welded shut. She inhales, locks the breath in her chest and forces them to open. For an instant all she sees is the pale yellow light bouncing off the underwater cliffs. The nightmare corona fades as she blinks it away, replaced by the familiar light of the natural world as it returns to her. She shivers from cold and fright’s memory. The water that soaked her clothes smells like standing water in a swamp – all sulphur and base decay.
Goober’s body feels beautifully warm, a loving hot coal in her arms, bleeding life back into her body. He lies pressed against her, his tail taut and still, as if he knows. Which he does.
She can’t bring her eyes to look at her hand yet. Her injured shoulder hums with a deep pain that demands a shift in weight. She looks around in disbelief – a shallow puddle of acrid water now rests at the base of the stone. Dead spinach leaves float like empty, burned-out lifeboats on the surface. The water cascades over the chalky soil like mercury, the dead soil seemingly unwilling to absorb it; it either collects listlessly in shallow impressions or retreats towards the edges of the clearing where it disappears into the dark groundcover of the living forest.
Her eyes brush over the rock face again, afraid to linger on any one spot for too long. Telltale drips of water continue to slide down its surface, but the crevice is simply no longer there. The rock is flat and featureless.
As it stares dumbly down at her, the rational part of her mind seizes on the possibility that there is a normal explanation for what she has experienced. She gratefully accepts the notion as fact for several seconds, giving her just enough time to look down at her injured hand. The thought shimmers away like a mirage in a desert of reality. Whatever she was riding in . . . whatever had cracked her mind, and split Bunny . . . whatever had lunged for her in the watery yellow canyon had left its mark on her hand in this world as well.
The wreckage begins in the soft webbing between her ring and middle finger, running up her hand, over her wrist and curving halfway up her forearm. It’s her forearm that alarms her most. Her eyes trace the deep red impressions of teeth – not quite sharp like an animal, not quite flat like a human, but some place in between.
She tells herself to get up. What she doesn’t realise is that she has. She’s already stood up, turned and run screaming from the outcrop. She just hasn’t registered that her body is moving yet.
Goober follows behind her as she runs down the path. Every footfall ripples pain up into her hanging shoulder, and she wraps her other arm around it to protect it. She’s already sprinting when she takes a curve in the path too fast. Her foot searches for the ground but finds a root instead.
The stumble might not have ended so badly if she’d had the use of her arms to break her fall, but when she topples, she hugs her arms tighter instead of flinging them out in front of her. As she sails into the air and off to the side of the path, her head parts a leafy branch and a tree trunk rushes towards her face, hungry for a kiss. All she can do is tuck in her chin like a child avoiding sloppy kisses from a forceful great-aunt as her head slams into it. Her body shudders and turns limp as she slides to the base of the tree.
Goober picks his way through the brush and gently presses his nose against her cheek like he does when he’s saying good morning. On those mornings she wraps her arms around him and pulls him into the warm cotton bed sheets.
But today she lies still. He misses her. He licks the blood away from her eyes as it slides down her face from somewhere in her hairline. He smells the shallow, ragged breaths that dart in and out of her nostrils. She’s still there, he knows . . . But so distant.
He nuzzles her cheek again and whimpers, as if making a promise to her.
Goober walks back out onto the path with feet that feel heavy with purpose. The clearing can still be seen through the trees. Rose lies less than a hundred yards from its border – he could do it. He must.
He stands protectively in the space between Rose’s body and the clearing.
I love MomDad . . . Goober’s thought drifts into the darkening woods like a lonely bird aware that it is the last of its kind. He stares into the middle distance, scanning terrain that only the heart can see.
STRAIGHT TO VOICEMAIL
‘Hi, please leave a message and I’ll –’
Rose’s voice flies away as Silas pulls the phone from his ear, hanging up for the fifth time in a row. She’s out walking and left her phone. No, she’s taking a nap and it’s on silent. Either way, she’s fine. She’s safe. She’s fine, he thinks as he tucks his phone back into his pocket.
He stands over a crack in the pavement outside Hamner Animal Control and Veterinary Services and peers through the glass door and into the dark interior beyond.
They waited for a call from Dr Singh, and one o’clock had come and gone, leaving him stranded in a lacklustre lunch booth with Lou Lou and Bunny. Finally, he escaped the ‘lunch’ at Surley’s Bar & Grill – which had devolved into Lou Lou ferrying multiple rounds to Bunny, who sat slumped in the booth like a melted wax statue. He was hoping to see Euge at the Animal Control office and have a normal conversation – maybe hear what the vet had found up at Long Lake – but the place is shut, with a small pile of uncollected mail huddled on the interior doormat, white envelopes glowing through the glass door.
He turns away and looks up and down the road. It looks like a film set for a terrible post-apocalyptic movie starring some artiste who was busy transitioning from reality-show enfant terrible to movie star. All you needed was to tip two dustbins over, remove the half-dozen late-model pickups, and have the square-jawed idiot walk himself and his show-pony abs down the median, carrying a plastic gun that never fired.
‘Fuck, I hate this place.’ He isn’t sure if he just means Hamner, or the culture it’s welded onto like the beat-up wing mirror on an exhausted, Detroit-made Ford.
He checks his watch: 15:42. The doc had said to expect a call around one.
As he walks back to the clinic, he crests the gentle rise in the main road, watching how the incline slices the view of the town into two down-sloping halves. At the end of the slope he spots a white official-looking van parked outside the clinic.
‘Finally.’ He quickens his pace.
As he arrives, he notes with relief that Lou Lou can be heard in the clinic doorway, which is dutifully held ajar by an orderly/van-driver.
‘Now, you get well and I’ll see you soon,’ Lou Lou says with a liquid shimmer in her voice that hints at their sodden lunch.
He stops short of the doorway to let them exit. Lou Lou gently leads Bunny out towards the van and Silas suddenly remembers that his mother has the ability to be extremely caring if an audience to play to is around. He also notes that Bunny possesses that bizarre ability alcoholics develop where they can appear almost sober despite drinking extraordinary amounts – the flip side of which is that when the rubber finally meets the road, they earn their drunkenness back with interest and a binary switch – skipping ‘tipsy’ and clicking straight into crying-fat-naked-uncle-at-a-twenty-first-birthday-party kind of drunk.
With less amusement than he’d expect to feel, he witnesses Bunny’s switch click as she steps out of the doorway and into the afternoon sunlight. Her knees soften and her legs threaten to buckle as the orderly-cum-van-driver props her up with expert dispassion – he actually says, ‘Whoopsie daisy,’ as his arms leave the door and swoop under her armpits like he’s a trained dancer.
Bunny’s ruddy hand gropes for Lou Lou’s shoulder as she drunkenly shout-says, ‘God bless you, my sister. I will see you soon.’ The words bubble out sounding more like ‘Gobblesh shishter, eye shee ewe shoon.’
The orderly slides the van door open as Lou Lou fights back tears. She helps Bunny into a passenger seat and buckles her in. Silas feels a brief pang of maddening guilt. He swats it away with a cold rationale that makes him feel less like his mother is a puppy that he’s about to kick; this needs to be done, not just for him and Rose, but for Lou Lou, and even Bunny.
There. Much better.
He catches the van driver’s eye and nods wordlessly that he’ll close the door once the goodbyes are done. The man delivers a social worker’s smile before getting into the driver’s seat.
Lou Lou drags Bunny’s suitcases to the back of the van.
‘I’ll do it,’ Silas offers.
‘No,’ Lou Lou says, with a shadow of you’ve done enough dancing behind the word.
He turns to Bunny, who’s slumped in her seat like a forlorn, drunken toddler. Dr Singh says a momentary, ‘Hello, good to see you’re off,’ before retreating back into the clinic vestibule at the behest of an assistant.
Lou Lou continues martyring herself at the back of the van. The driver is on a phone call. Only Silas sees Bunny slip off her mask. She slowly turns to him, the inebriated cloud in her eyes parting like a backstage curtain as she speaks.
‘I’m going to get much stronger.’
He doesn’t miss a beat.
‘Stay there as long as you need.’ It sounds remarkably like go fuck yourself.
Instead of reacting to him, Bunny cranes her neck, searching the surrounds behind him.
