Chapter 15

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One respect in which rabbits’ lives are less complicated than those of humans is that they are not ashamed to use force.

“So how are you?” I keep finding necrotic pieces of my mind. Septic, black, grotesque, and infectious. They begin to take on identities of their own, resembling and destroying what is left of me. Like any disease that threatens the whole, they must be removed. “Fidgety.” Too much coffee maybe. I’ve been drinking up to six cups a day. But it helps keep me calm. Calmer.
“Fishy?”
“What? No. Fidgety.”
“I thought it was another of your strange analogies. So what would you like to talk about this week?” You have a box of Kleenex with pictures of squash on it and another with pictures of spices. Maybe patients find food less threatening than the happy scenes of butterflies and pretty colours that usually decorate the cardboard boxes. I pick up the box on the table next to me and hold it up for you to see.
“What,” you ask as if it weren’t obvious.
“Your Kleenex has squash on it.”
“Yes it does.”
“The zucchini is a small summer squash approximately 20cm in length. Both the green or yellow fruit and the yellow flowers are edible and can be cooked in a variety of ways including boiling, frying, and grilling.”
“Quite.”
“I don’t think the pills are working.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, on account of nothing has changed. Sometimes I can go as long as two weeks without cutting myself. But that’s really pushing it. I want to hurt myself long before that. Then for a while, I need to do it nearly everyday. But the pills don’t seem to have an effect either way.”
“It might be wise to stay on the medication for longer if your moods are on a predictable cycle. It’s like needing to have a slit longer than the wavelength of light in order to avoid diffraction.”
“I’ll stay on the pills, but I’m not holding out for any sort of relief. Happiness inevitably leads towards pain. It’s like a warning sign. I can’t control happiness any more than I can control any of my other feelings, but I least I know to prepare myself for what’s coming next.”
“Joy doesn’t always need to be followed by pain.”
“Yes it does. It’s a circle. And it repeats over and over again.”
“It’s not a circle. It’s a propagating waveform. It has predicable, regular oscillations, but the overall mood-wave follows a generally increasing path.”
“But I don’t feel any increase.”
“Then you’re stuck. All you need to do is readjust the magnetic field that is your perception so that your mood-wave moves in a linear as opposed to circular pattern.”
“The knobs are broken.”
“What knobs?”
“The ones controlling the settings.”
“Well, then, I give you new knobs. You just have to attach them to your machine.”
“Are they shiny?”
“You’ll have to put up a net to keep crows away they are so brilliant.” You tell me such beautiful stories, fairy tales, of the possibilities awaiting me. I want to believe you. You display ideologies before me and I feel like a child in a toy store who is not allowed to play with anything. But stories are no more than wordy illusions and I can only suspend my disbelief for so long, about fifty minutes to be precise. “What have you been doing this week?”
“Painting.”
“You painted your walls?”
“No. A picture. Not a picture. It wasn’t even really painting, I just mixed up a bunch of different colours of paint on a piece of canvas.”
“Do you paint often?”
“Once in a while.”
“Why have you never brought in any of your art?” I didn’t think this was a gallery. I especially didn’t think you would at all be interested in seeing what I had created.
“They’re too big. It’s awkward and inconvenient. But I guess I could bring in some pictures of my paintings if you want.” Are you actually taking an interest in me?
“I didn’t say I wanted you to, but I do think it can be a therapeutic process to talk about your art.” No, I guess not.
“If you don’t care, I don’t see the point.”
“I never said I didn’t care.” These games of rhetoric always make me laugh. It’s as if you’re trying to trick me into believing the opposite of what you’re saying, but it’s just so damn obvious.
“No. You said you didn’t say that you wanted to see it.” Apparently, judging by your laughter, you are amused as well. Only you’re probably just embarrassed you’ve been caught trying to deceive me.
“I would be interested to see your art, and I do believe there is a significant amount of therapeutic value in sharing and discussing creative activities, but the motivation has to be yours, not because I asked you to.”
“I don’t want to be a disappointment anymore.”
“You’re not a disappointment.” You don’t know me well enough obviously.
“You can’t know that.”
“What makes you think I’m lying to you?”
“If what you said was true, that would mean I am quite possibly the most magnificent person in the world. If that were true then someone would have to love me.” Since you’re the only one who talks to me, that person would have to be you. Unless it’s like algebra where x + y = z doesn’t necessarily imply that z must equal x + y.
“There are probably a lot more people out there who love you, or who would love you if you gave them the chance, then you realise.” I think that’s supposed to be a compliment. Usually, compliments coming from you make me giddy, as if they actually mean something because they came from you. But this one just makes me feel lonely.
“I didn’t see a line of people standing outside my door this morning.”
“I challenge you to do a survey this week asking people whether or not they would like to get to know you. I bet you’ll find that almost no one declines the offer.”
“They would be lying.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Nobody is going to say ‘No, I don’t really like the way you come off and I think I would do better not wasting my time discovering that I don’t like you.’”
“Then make it an anonymous survey. Post an ad on the internet.”
“I’m not going to do that.’
“Why not?”
“Because it’s pathetic. It’s one thing to need to external validation, but it’s quite another to be desperate enough to solicit compliments. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to trust the validity of the responses anyway since most men on the internet think that posting an ad is an invitation to sexually inappropriate comments.”
“How do you know that’s how people will respond? You’re fortune telling again.”
“No, I’m not.” I’ve been that desperate before.
“So you have posted an ad before?”
“Yes.”
“And how did people respond?”
“I just told you.” Please try to keep up.
“I’m sorry your experience was less than satisfying.” Not having anybody interested in me only saved me time discovering I wasn’t interested in them. Not that I did anything productive with that time. “Well, that’s all for today. Have a good week.”
“Thanks.”

……….

I had a dream about you again last night. I was early for session, very early, by about an hour. You had a patient coming in before me, but you said I could stay in the office while she was there. The woman you were seeing was young, with curly auburn hair, and was quite spirited and talkative. She sat across from you at the required distance of three feet, while I sat on a blue couch to the side. As the session progressed, I realized I was tired (it was early in the morning) so I lied down on the couch to listen to the two of you, mostly the young woman, talk. When she left, I told you that you had a great job and you seemed pleased by that.

The next thing I remember, we were both on the couch. I think you were lying down, possibly with your head in my lap. Maybe you were sitting next to me. You looked like you wanted to kiss me. You moved your face closer to mine with your lips slightly parted. Figuring I was imagining it, I made no reciprocating motion and you retreated. Fortunately, you made a second attempt. When our lips touched, there was an awkward adjustment period as we synchronized the gape of our mouths and the movement of our tongues. When we both accepted that what was happening was happening, you led me out of your office into another room. The lovemaking was unremarkable, but you were there, with me, and that assurance was fulfillment enough.

Afterwards, you took me to a dinner at your family home. The house was typical of a wealthy family – large and immaculate with a view of the ocean from high up on a cliff. The party itself was a large gathering of people. Most of the time, you ignored me, once to watch sports, which I thought was out of character.
There was a full service bar and when you bought yourself a drink, you didn’t offer to buy me one. I would have declined anyway as I don’t drink, and it was strange you were drinking, but the slight did not go unnoticed. Still, there were times when you showed me some kindness such as when you put a gentle arm around my waist.

There were children, of course, at this family affair and I was playing with a group of them, a young girl with dark curly hair in particular, having a wonderful time pretending to belong to a family to whom I was a stranger. I had never been introduced to anyone. It was simply accepted that I was there with you and was to be treated as any other member of the family.

At some point, it was daylight but I’m confident the following event occurred after the dinner scene during which it was night, we climbed to the top of a steep hill covered with patches of dry grass and bumps and holes. We were sitting, talking but I don’t remember what about, when you suddenly threw yourself down the hill, rolling as children do when they are playing, only much more violently with your head rebounding of mounds of dirt.

The dream ended before I had the chance to discover your intentions with me. You were, obviously, upset. You never told me why, but I had the impression your wife had left you. Most likely you were only using me as an immediately accessible comfort. Though, you may also have been using me as a tool of self-destruction. Whatever it was you were using me for, you pursued me knowing I would be willing. And I was, willing.


……….


There was a spider in my bathroom sink when I went to brush my teeth in the morning. A big spider. Big, black, and scary. But as he was in the sink, I wasn’t able throw a shoe at him, the only defence I had developed against arachnids. There were alternatives of course, all of them involving me leaving the house. There was a coffee shop a few blocks away where I could use a bathroom. My toothbrush was out of reach being on the other side of the eight-legged horror, so I wouldn’t have been able to brush my teeth, but there was gum in my purse. However, if I left him unsupervised and alive, when I returned home there would be no way of knowing where he would be lying in wait, his sole purpose of existence of course being to terrorize me. Also, I really wanted to brush my hair. I was like one of those girls in the movies where there’s an attack and the good guy and the bad guy are fighting while the woman cowers until she, shakily, manages to pick up the gun that fell across the floor and kills the bad guy. Only I didn’t have a gun.

But I did have a shower hose. Eventually, the creature was destroyed with high pressured hot water from where I maintained a safe three foot distance standing in the back of the bathtub. However, shower hoses at that distance are not incredibly accurate and the bathroom floor also received a fair amount of water.

Flooding aside, the objective had been reached and the spider was dead. Only now there was the problem of removing his gigantic carcass, which was too large to be washed down the drain. Dead or not, I was not about to pick him up, not with any amount of tissue for any length of time. So, reasonably, I poured a bottle of Drano onto his corpse. Apparently, if your drain becomes clogged with dead spiders, Drano will not be the best method with which to clear the pipes, because half an hour later, his black, curled body was still in the sink, completely undeteriorated.

Still unable to gather my courage to remove the body with my own hands, I left him in the sink, figuring by the end of the day the cat would discover free meat and dispose of the body for me. Though, now covered in Drano, there was a risk of poisoning the cat, but it was a risk I was willing to take.

All of the commotion and screaming (there was a lot of embarrassingly feminine high pitched shrieks during the spider adventure) must have alarmed the man upstairs because shortly after the demise of the arachnid, he knocked on my door. Shyly, afraid of declaring my frailty, but even more afraid of not being able to use my bathroom sink ever again, I sent him into the bathroom on a search and destroy mission while I waited far away outside on the steps, in the event the spider had been religiously resurrected and was now invested with a purposeful vengeance directed at me.

I heard the toilet flush and, shortly after, the man reappeared to inform me that my bathroom was once again safe for activities of personal hygiene. So I carried on with my day, in quite a pleasant mood, as if nothing had happened.